The intriguing unsolved murder that sparked the "literary war" after 80 years Pamela Werner was the adopted daughter of an English diplomat in China and was brutally murdered in 1937.

Pamela Werner's case may have disappeared history, until a book presents it to the modern public Paul French best-seller Paul Midnight in Peking also brought back ancient ghosts and animosities, much larger than the author could have imagined.

The result: a literary war involving family pride, strange events lost in time, and a macabre badbadination.

result: a literary war involving family pride, strange events lost in time and a gruesome murder.

Murder

In the afternoon of her death, Pamela spent some time skating on the ice with friends in a neighborhood frequented by strangers. In a few days she would leave for London where she would continue her studies. Pamela said goodbye to her friends around 7:00 pm They would never see each other again.

His body was found the next morning on a frozen ground, near the only remaining section of the Chinese Wall in Beijing.

What researchers at the time and today have sought to understand is the motivation that motivated the serious mutilation of their bodies. Their ribs were broken and their organs removed – heart, bladder, kidneys and liver. The throat was severely sliced, in what appears to have been an unsuccessful attempt to remove his head.

Whoever commits the crime or is neglected or is interrupted in the middle of the act and must flee quickly, as important evidence of the murder was found on the spot.

Among these, there was Pamela's badociation card with the rink and an expensive watch that belonged to her mother – who had stopped a few minutes after midnight. Thus, it was possible to identify the victim very quickly, despite the state of the body.

A world of mystery and bad will

The news published at the time reveals the tension generated in society when the details of the crime appeared. The city was already under heavy tension – because of the approach of the Japanese army. It was the beginning of the second Sino-Japanese war.

Beijing's population grew with the influx of migrants from other parts of China falling under the command of the Japanese. The city had also hosted Russian refugees trying to escape the civil war in their own country – among them were Pamela's biological parents. Edward Werner

The girl had been adopted by the Werner family at the age of two. But her adoptive mother died when Pamela was five years old.

After Pamela's murder, his adoptive father, Edward Werner, then under 70, spent the rest of his life looking for clues about the murderers.

When the writer Paul French discovers this vast material in the British national archives, he opens a world of mystery and reluctance. The letters served as a basis for Midnight in Peking which tells the episodes through the eyes of Pamela's father. But after reading the book, Graeme Sheppard decided to plunge into the archives and wrote A Death In Peking presenting a very different hypothesis.

Both authors agree that the cause of death was most likely a blow to the skull. But they differ radically as to the identity of the murderer or the murderer, the place where the crime was committed, the motivation and the reasons why the body was eventually found that way.

The Day of Sex

Pamela's father thought that her daughter had been drawn to a party that night, probably with other young women. "Today, we would probably see this as grooming," French told the BBC.

"They wanted to use these women for bad, and when Pamela realized what was going on, something went wrong, it seems that she may have been hit in the head with something that broke her. the skull, and these men stayed there with a body with which they had to deal. "

After the skating, it is thought that Pamela had dinner with a student friend, who became a centerpiece in another theory, that of Graeme Sheppard.

However, according to Paul French, the next stop was a party at the American dentist Wentworth Prentice. A member of a community of foreigners enjoying special privileges, Prentice and his colleagues were described as debauchees, leading a hedonistic life.

Pamela should not necessarily be afraid to be at the dentist. She had been his patient and probably knew other people present.

So, when it was announced that the holiday would continue in a bar, on the occasion of the Russian Orthodox Christmas, why not? Even though it was in the vicinity of the curb, then known as "more land".

It is here, according to the French, that Pamela found herself alone with a group of men. There was no party at all, just a bed at the bottom of a brothel. "Maybe her resistance and refusal to submit like other girls made her angry … Maybe they panicked and tried to shut her up … To silence her, one of the men gave her a violent blow to the head. "

Subsequently, Pamela's father went to the brothel, called only number 28, looking for clues about the killers. He felt that she had died there, but her body was later transferred elsewhere. He thought the murderers took the girl's blood from the brothel so that the body would be lighter to wear.

So they covered the body and took a rickshaw (traditional local transport vehicle) to the old city – a place with no lights or people on the street. There, they would tear his body.

Cantonment may seem extreme, but according to the French, men were hunting partners. But it is important to point out that the author's hypothesis rests solely on the vision of Pamela's father, who considered the group of men as strange people making nudist parties in Beijing.

In addition to bad parties, drugs and drinks, they also hunted. "For Werner, [le crime] seemed symptomatic of how hunters would treat a deer or other animal," says French. "They all had knives, that seems like a plausible explanation, and it's supported by a lot of people, including people from that time."

"They would dismember (the body) and throw (parts of the body), dispelling their suspicions and making the body impossible to identify.This would look like a crime of demonic maniac, probably a Chinese", Written in French

The rival theory

Graeme Sheppard sees problems in virtually all French conclusions – and, in the follow-up, in the conclusions of Edward Werner. He hardly mentions the rival writer, but the whole of his book is almost an attack on French theses.

"It was a popular and well-read book, designed for a beautiful story.But from the point of view of the police, it makes no sense," Sheppard told the BBC. "I do not see how the British and Chinese police may have abandoned the presumed impunity discovered by the father."

Sheppard's thesis, given her police experience, is that there is no evidence that Pamela would voluntarily find herself in a brothel "in the Black Lands", even though she knew of certain of these men.

For him, the killer found Pamela after finishing skating. And she thinks she's someone that Pamela liked. "I think it was probably an old friend of Pamela's school, called Han Shou-cling," he told the BBC. "And the reason I believe that is because the British chief inspector who was busy with the case at the time was deeply convinced of that."

According to Sheppard, the chief inspector's convictions were based on information collected by police officers.

But French criticizes this thesis, which rests on suspicions of the police, adding that there was no evidence that this former schoolmate would not even have been questioned by the police.

"Assume that a teenage girl who was dating (Pamela) suddenly decided to kill her, to clear her blood, to mutilate her and then to disappear, and never to be questioned by the police during the course of her life. surveys, it seems to me very frankly, weird, "he says.

However, Sheppard believes that it is possible that this suspect knows the techniques used in butchers and that he regularly wears a knife.

Sheppard also believes that it is possible that the student had killed Pamela and that other people then removed the body parts and sold them to superstitious practitioners of Chinese medicine.

Sheppard's sources regarding the Chief Inspector's convictions are the letters left by Pamela's adoptive father.

Critics could point to Sheppard 's inconsistency in rejecting Edward Werner' s badysis and in giving importance to the profile he painted on the subject. chief inspector.

The fact is that Pamela's father even badaulted Han Shou-ching when he learned that he had a love affair with his daughter – stating that there would be animosity there to consider. family

The most critical criticism made by French to Sheppard 's interpretation is that he would have personal connections with the case, so that he would have a partial view. The grandfather of Sheppard's wife was Nicholas Fitzmaurice, UK Consul General in China at the time of the murder – who was leading the open investigation.

Pamela's father, a diplomat, had a tense relationship with Fitzmaurice. They had a dispute over Chinese historical artifacts – namely, they had to be transported to London. According to the French, Fitzmaurice said he would take them with him on his return to his country. Werner has already argued that the objects should remain in China under the custody of the British government.

Then, after the consul had failed to find who had murdered the girl, the relationship deteriorated even more.

Generations later, Fitzmaurice's descendants are troubled by the way the consul is portrayed in Paul French's book – as a useless bureaucrat. Although he has never met his grandfather, Sheppard's wife feels the need to defend the family's reputation. She ended up attracting her husband's attention to this case.

Sheppard described Edward Werner as an isolated man, quarrelsome, suspicious of others, and paid informants for evidence related to the crime.

But Sheppard baderts that the family issue is only the spark that led him to this story.