Who Killed Pamela?

On January 8 1937 the body of a young foreign girl was found brutally mutilated at the foot of Beijing’s city wall. The murder was never solved and all but forgotten until author Paul French opened a box of archival material at The National Archives in Kew, England in the early 2000s.

Paul French used the murder case as the inspiration for his international bestseller “Midnight in Peking”, a fascinating portrait of 1930s Beijing on the verge of Japanese occupation.

Beijing Postcards has taken a fresh look at the Pamela Werner murder case. We have discovered material related to the murder not mentioned in French’s book, including a hitherto unpublished 150-page Chinese police report. 

In this talk we will revisit what was arguably Old Beijing’s most infamous murder, examine the new evidence and attempt to decide who really killed Pamela Werner. 

2 hours