Telephone Murder

Product Description

The Wallace Case is one of the most notorious murder cases of all time. The issue of whether Wallace was guilty or innocent of his wifes brutal murder has been the subject of conjecture among lawyers criminologists & writers for years. Eighty years on the case remains unsolved. For several commentators the murder of Julia Wallace was the perfect murder. William Wallace was a mild-mannered insurance agent who lived in apparent harmony with his wife Julia. One evening he attended his chess club to be informed of a telephone message requiring him to visit the caller the next day on a matter of insurance business. Wallace knew neither the address nor the name which the caller had given but set out the following day to keep the appointment. After a long & fruitless search for the house during which he enquired of nine people two of whom told him that there was no such address Wallace returned home to find his wife had been brutally murdered by a series of violent blows to the head from an instrument that was never found. Exhaustive police enquiries drew a complete blank. Detectives came to the view that Wallace himself had made the phone call using a disguised voice. The phone call they believed had been used to create an alibi for the murder which he had committed before he left home. Despite his protestations of innocence Wallace was duly arrested & charged with the murder of his wife. At the trial notwithstanding a favourable summing up by the judge the jury found Wallace guilty. However on his appeal the Court of Criminal Appeal reversed the guilty verdict & the case against him was dismissed. Wallace subsequently wrote about this ordeal naming for the first time another suspect. He died in 1953 & was buried next to his deceased wife. In The Telephone Murder Ronald Bartle brings alive this dramatic & challenging case whilst carefully considering the points both assisting the prosecution & those in favour of the defence.