The Werner Letters

An investigation conducted by a troubled mind

In an unlabelled box at the Kew archives in London you can find the Werner Letters. A seemingly ever-flowing cascade of words typed onto hundreds of now yellowed pages, these writings are the main source material used by Paul French for his book Midnight in Peking. It was these privately made investigative reports that kept the murder case of Pamela Werner active for years, but the letters are in many ways a deeply problematic source.

E.T.C Werner was 73 years old when Pamela died in 1937, but despite his old age he would relentlessly throw himself into the investigation of his daughter’s murder. Werner suspected that Chinese and foreign authorities were guilty of a cover up, because the case implicated people of high standing in the foreign community by describing how they attended sex parties and took advantage of young girls.

When you read the letters it feels like entering the mind of a troubled man. It is very difficult to decide what to make of them. What can be trusted and what is pure speculation? Werner repeats the same allegations again and again, in a way that creates a picture of a man walking on a thin line in terms of his own sanity.

Sometimes the allegations feel almost comically unjustified, like when he blames the police commissioner Han Shi Qing for the lack of street lights around the area where the body of Pamela was found, saying that the lights almost certainly would have saved the life of his daughter. At other times it is possible to find more substance in his findings.

When we worked through the letters we came up with a way of filtering through the content. If Werner was either speculating or referring to information he had gotten from others then we would discard it, but if he was actually referring to something where he had been present himself, then we would apply much more significance to it.

We applied this method when considering  Werner’s encounter with Joe Knauff, an ex-marine who owned a bar where Pamela had supposedly gone the night that she was killed. Something that supports the claims made in this part of the letters is the amount of specific detail he is able to include. Werner describes how Joe Knauff would get so agitated by his snooping around his bar, that he eventually took Werner to the British legation and told the consul to get Werner off his back. At the legation, Joe Knauff would repeatedly emphasize that he was a friend of a dentist named Prentice, as if mentioning this very name to people in high places could almost magically get him out of trouble.

Prentice is interesting because his name pops up everywhere in the letters. Werner believes that this American dentist was one way or another guilty of the murder. His bias against Prentice is so strong that in most cases it  almost discredits his investigative efforts. Nevertheless, we can see when cross checking with Chinese police reports and Chinese newspaper clippings that Werner was not the only one to point the finger at Prentice. The dentist was however apparently never officially questioned, something that Werner felt was only further proof of a broad conspiracy.