Who Killed Pamela?

New clues in the Pamela Werner murder case

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 till Paul French opened a box of archival material at the Kew archives in England. 

Undertaking a police investigation is also a kind of historical research. Suddenly a sharp light is directed against small details, habits and routines, providing you with information that is often difficult to obtain from other historical archives. The Pamela Werner murder case is no exception. 

Examining a murder investigation is an amazing driver for exploring the past. It captivates people and gives the narrative a clear direction, whilst also revealing much about the world in which the crime took place. You could say that Beijing Postcards cares less about who actually killed Pamela Werner than exploring the society she lived in. 

Pamela Werner died at a time when most Westerners in China had lost their extraterritoriality. The bubble where, in the words of Edgar Snow, Americans and Europeans had their own little “Never Never Land” in Beijing was about to burst. The Japanese were coming ever closer, and the capital had been moved to Nanjing. Pamela Werner’s death exposed the workings of this very fragile society. 

Our project has from the get go sought to bring Chinese sources into the research into the murder. Alongside the English language materials that are used in Paul French’s international bestseller Midnight In Peking and the newly published A Death in Peking by Graeme Sheppard, we have been able to dig up Chinese written police reports and articles to provide new insights into this notable incident.