On the morning of 8 January 1937, the severely mutilated body of Pamela Werner (believed born 7 February 1917) was found near the Fox Tower in Beijing, China, just outside the city's Legation Quarter. The only child of sinologist and retired British diplomat E. T. C. Werner, Pamela had last been seen by acquaintances just before leaving a skating rink the previous night. No one was ever charged in the case.
Though British and Chinese officials cooperated in the investigation, it was hampered by official resistance and the city's general chaos: Beijing at the time was crowded with war refugees, there was upheaval elsewhere in China and Europe, and Japanese troops were on the verge of occupying the city. Investigators focused on some members of the city's expatriate community, but the case was officially closed with the finding that the mutilation suggested a Chinese killer, before they could be sure of any suspects; the Japanese occupation foreclosed any further efforts to reopen it. Some British diplomatic records pertaining to the case were later weeded; Werner, whose chequered career with the Diplomatic Service in China had alienated many of his former colleagues who oversaw the investigation, later used his own resources to identify American dentist Wentworth Prentice as the likely killer.
A subject of considerable media attention at the time, the case drifted into obscurity with the ensuing outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, which soon enveloped into World War II, and the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China a short time afterwards. Interest in the case was revived with the 2011 publication of Paul French's bestseller Midnight in Peking, which endorsed Werner's conclusions and won several awards. However, a website set up by some of Prentice's descendants argues that documentary evidence from the time contradicts that conclusion and casts doubt on many of French's assertions.
Background
Beijing in the late 1930s
At the start of 1937, Beijing (then referred to in Western languages as Peking) and its 1.5 million residents, both Chinese and foreign, knew that they were living in the end of an era. While the city was the third richest in the Republic of China, it was no longer the country's capital. Despite the success of the Northern Expedition, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek had retreated to Nanjing. Originally his aim was to better consolidate his political power and military position against Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army (PLA), which sought to establish a communist state; but after the December 1936 Xi'an incident, where Zhang Xueliang had held him hostage for two weeks, he had agreed to Zhang's demand that he seek an alliance with the PLA to better defend China against the Japanese empire.
Chiang had left General Song Zheyuan in charge of Peking, to do what he could to hold off both the northern warlords who still remained and, increasingly, the Japanese, who were camped within a few miles of the onetime Chinese imperial palace, the Forbidden City, and controlled almost all the routes in and out of the city. Planning to use Peking as a base for their eventual conquest of China, the Japanese were working to undermine the city's resistance. They covertly encouraged the drug trade and staged regular military provocations. Chinese residents of the city believed that Chiang was prepared to abandon it to the Japanese if he could just be assured of retaining all of China south of the Yangzi River. "The end was coming," Paul French wrote in 2011, "it was just a question of when." Many residents assumed that that end would be death at Japanese hands, either by starvation as they besieged the city, or by being massacred afterward.
Peking's population had swelled as refugees flocked to the city. Many were Chinese, fleeing the wars and disruption elsewhere in the country. But a sizable portion had come from Europe, primarily Russian Whites, left stateless by the communist victory in the Russian Civil War and subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. Others were Jews, leaving behind the worsening conditions in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe, joined by those who also felt at risk from the advancing tide of fascism. They were joined by military deserters evading capture, fugitives from justice in their homelands, and travelers who had either been stranded in China or decided to stay. Most of the European refugees had come to China penniless and worked menial jobs, or sometimes engaged in criminal activity, to get by.
