Great Unsolved Crimes

by Rodney Castleden

  When the British commission investigated the Titanic disaster in 1912, they heard evidence that the flooding of bunkers on the outside of longitudinal bulkheads along a significant proportion of the ship’s length could exaggerate listing when they became flooded. This conclusion was reached after the Lusitania was built, after the Titanic had sunk, but three years before the Lusitania was sunk. What was predicted about the effect of longitudinal bulkheads in 1912 is exactly what happened in 1915, and with the predicted disastrous effect: the Lusitania developed an exaggerated list which made it almost impossible to lower the lifeboats on the upturned side because the hull was in the way.

  The sinking of the ship turned many Americans from being confirmed neutrals keen to stay out of the European war to being strongly anti-German. It marked a significant step towards bringing the United States into the First World War two years later, which in itself was a major step towards the Allied victory.

  The Germans regarded the Lusitania as a legitimate target when they torpedoed it. The British and Americans presented the vessel as a harmless merchant vessel but to an extent the Germans were right. The Lusitania had been built to Admiralty specifications, so that her decks were structurally strong enough to support deck guns if required. The Lusitania may not have been a warship at the time when she sank but her design meant that she could be requisitioned and quickly converted into an Armed Merchant Cruiser. On the other hand, the Lusitania had not been so requisitioned, for economic and practical reasons. She was a big ship, used far too much coal compared with a custom-built cruiser and would have put too many crewmen at risk. As a result the British government were more interested in converting small liners into AMCs. The large ships were either left unrequisitioned or used for troop transport or used as hospital ships. The Mauretania became a troop transport. The Britannic became a hospital ship. The Lusitania conspicuously remained a transatlantic passenger liner.

  On 4 February 1915, Germany declared that the seas surrounding the British Isles (ie Britain and Ireland) a war zone. From 18 February onwards any Allied ships would be sunk without warning. This meant that British ships might be sunk, though not American, because the Americans were still neutral. The British Admiralty issued the captain of the Lusitania with instructions on how to avoid submarines when the ship arrived in Liverpool on 6 March. The seriousness of the danger to the Lusitania was fully understood at the Admiralty, and two destroyers were sent to escort her, HMS Louis and HMS Laverlock; the Q ship HMS Lyons patrolled Liverpool Bay. Unfortunately Captain Dow did not know he was getting a naval escort, thought the destroyers might be German vessels and took evading action. He nevertheless arrived safely in Liverpool.

  The Lusitania left Liverpool on 17 April and arrived in New York on 24 April. Some German-Americans planning to return to the United States were unsure about travelling on the Lusitania because of the possibility of U-boat attack and consulted the German embassy. The advice from the German embassy was not to travel on the Lusitania. The German authorities were once again clearly signalling that they saw the ship as a military target, well before her final sailing. That final departure, from Pier 54 in New York, came on 1 May 1915. Before she sailed, a newspaper warning was published next to the advertisement for the ship’s never-to-be return voyage, advising people not to travel because of the danger of U-boat attack. This was a reminder of the warning issued by the German Embassy in Washington on 22 April.

  The Lusitania’s fifty-eight year old captain, Bill Turner, made light of the danger. He told one passenger the Lusitania was ‘safer than the trolley cars in New York City’. Shortly after embarkation, three German spies were discovered on board. They were arrested and detained.

  As the Lusitania approached British waters, the British Admiralty tracked the movements of the German U-boat U-20 by picking up its wireless signals. The U-20, captained by Walther Schwieger, was off the west coast of Ireland and moving south, as if to intercept the Lusitania. On 5 and 6 May the U-20 sank three ships near the Fastnet Rock. The Royal Navy sent a warning to all British ships, ‘Submarines active off the south coast of Ireland.’ Captain Turner was given this message twice on the evening of 6 May. Turner responded by closing the watertight doors in the bulkheads, doubled the lookouts, ordered a blackout at night and had the lifeboats swung out on their davits so that if they were torpedoed the boats could be lowered at speed.

  At eleven o’clock in the morning on 7 May Turner responded to another radio warning by altering course to the north-east. He assumed U-boats would be more likely to patrol the open seas, less likely to come close inshore. The Lusitania, he thought, would be safer steaming close to the Irish coast. Captain Schwieger was about to take the U-20 off duty. The submarine was low on fuel and he needed to take her home. He was taking the U-20 at top speed on the surface when, at one o’clock, he saw a ship on the horizon. This is his diary entry;

  Ahead and to starboard four funnels and two masts of a steamer with course perpendicular to us come into sight (coming from SSW it steered towards Galley Head). Ship is made out to be large passenger steamer.

  It was too good an opportunity for a conscientious U-boat captain to miss. He ordered his crew to take up battle stations and took the submarine down to thirty-six feet.

  The Lusitania was heading for the port of Queenstown when she crossed right in front of the U-boat at ten past two. It was an ambush by chance. When his U-boat was just 700 yards away from the Lusitania, Schwieger gave the order to fire one torpedo, which hit the Lusitania right under the bridge and blew a hole in the side of the ship. Then there was a much bigger second explosion, which blew out the starboard bow. The two explosions have puzzled historians for a long time. There were definitely two explosions, but Schwieger’s log shows that he only fired one torpedo. Some have argued that, in the wake of the international condemnation that followed the sinking, the German government doctored Schwieger’s log to make it look as if he only fired once. Firing twice might have made it look like a massacre, especially since the ship sank so fast. On the other hand, the accounts of U-20 crew members agree with Schwieger’s log entry: only one torpedo was fired. In fact it now looks as if the torpedo explosion on its own would have sunk the ship; the off-centre large-scale flooding would have caused the ship to capsize. All the ships’ portholes were open, for ventilation, and that too would have speeded the sinking as the ship heeled over.

  The wireless operator sent out an SOS straight away. Captain Turner gave the order to abandon ship, though this was difficult. The torpedo damage had made the ship list sharply and the damage caused by the second explosion made the bow sink under the water; at the same time, the ship was still moving forward at some speed. Launching the lifeboats under these conditions was difficult and dangerous. The lifeboats on the starboard side were swinging well away from the ship, making it difficult for passengers to step onto them. On the other side of the ship it was possible to get into the lifeboats quite easily, but hard to lower them. The hull plates were fastened together with big rivets and as the port side lifeboats were lowered they caught on the knobbly rivets and were in danger of being broken apart by them.

  Some of the lifeboats overturned before they reached the water, spilling passengers into the sea. Some reached the water and were then overturned by the convulsing motion of the ship. Some, as a result of the incompetence of the crew, crashed onto the deck and killed passengers. Following the Titanic disaster, there were more than enough lifeboats for the number of people on the ship, but of the forty-eight lifeboats on the Lusitania only six reached the water and stayed afloat.

  Captain Turner saw that land was in sight – in fact a six-year-old boy watched the entire tragedy unfold from the Old Head of Kinsale, eight miles away – and tried to take the ship towards the coast to beach her. All around him there was panic and chaos. Captain Schwieger watched this through his periscope. It seems not to have occurred to him to go to the aid of the passengers and crew of the Lusitania. Perhaps he regarded them as fo
ols for sailing in the first place, in the face of all the warnings from Germany. At twenty-five minutes past two, he decided he had watched enough of the sinking of the Lusitania, dropped his periscope and headed for the open sea. In his war diary he implies only that he regretted being unable to fire a second torpedo.

  Since it seemed as if the steamer would keep above water only a short time, we dived to a depth of twenty-four metres and ran out to sea. It would have been impossible for me, anyway, to fire a second torpedo into this crowd of people struggling to save their lives.

  Captain Turner stayed on the bridge until it dipped under the water. He saved himself by grabbing a floating chair. The ship was sinking bow-first in shallow water. Her bow hit the seabed and she turned right over onto her side before sinking. The boilers blew up, one of the explosions causing the third funnel to collapse; the other three funnels snapped off one by one. The liner sank at twenty-eight minutes past two, sucking people, debris and water down with her. She hit the bottom and two minutes later there was a great upwelling of water, debris and people. In the event, 1,198 people died, including nearly a hundred children.

  The second explosion was responsible for the ship sinking so fast, and therefore raising the death toll. One theory is that the Lusitania was carrying arms, which not only caused the second explosion but justified the German view that the ship was participating in the war effort. On the other hand there is only evidence from the wreck site of small arms ammunition (15,000 bullets), which could not have caused the explosion. Schwieger himself noted a possible cause in his war diary.

  Torpedo hits starboard side right behind the bridge. An unusually heavy explosion takes place with a very strong explosion cloud (cloud reaches far beyond front funnel). The explosion of the torpedo must have been followed by a second one (boiler or coal or powder?).

  The huge force of the first explosion may have stirred up a lot of coal dust in what must have been largely empty coal bunkers along the outside of the longitudinal bulkhead. It is well known that a mixture of coal dust and air makes a highly explosive gas. This, exploding on the outside of the longitudinal bulkhead could have blown a big hole in the ship’s starboard bow.

  Others believe this was almost impossible because the initial torpedo explosion would have sent huge quantities of seawater sideways into the coal bunkers. The coal dust would have been instantly saturated. A likelier alternative is an explosion in the steam-generating plant, as immediately after the second explosion the forward boiler room filled with steam and the steam pressure dropped dramatically.

  There was outrage in Britain and the United States. The US government was indignant because 128 Americans had been killed by an act of hostility at a time when their country was neutral. In Britain, there was a hope that the United States would abandon neutrality and declare war on Germany. Some conspiracy theorists have even proposed that the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, set it all up. He arranged to sabotage the Lusitania specifically in order to force the Americans into the war. But there is no evidence whatever to support this.

  President Woodrow Wilson still did not want to take that step, not least because many Americans were of German origin. Instead he sent a formal verbal protest, for which he was branded a coward in Britain. In fact Wilson’s restraint was remarkable in view of the wave of anti-German anger in America. The American reaction was so strong that the German government decided to impose a ban on U-boat attacks against large passenger vessels; the Germans did not want to goad the Americans into becoming a British military ally.

  In Munich, in August 1915, the metalworker Karl Goetz struck a commemorative medal to satirize Cunard’s greed. The German view of the Lusitania was that she was smuggling contraband under the cover of American neutrality. The medal carries the critically incorrect date of 5 May. British intelligence got hold of a copy and saw a way of turning its propaganda value upside down. The wrong date, possibly just a mistake, was made to imply that the sinking of the Lusitania was a premeditated crime, a crime in cold blood. Selfridge’s were commissioned to make a quarter of a million exact copies of the medal, but with English lettering. They were sold in aid of the British Red Cross. Goetz realized too late that he had made a terrible mistake and issued a corrected medal bearing the date 7 May. After the war he admitted to having made the worst propaganda blunder of all time.

  It is impossible now to find out what Schwieger thought he was doing – possibly, like so many other officers in wartime, just carrying out orders – as he died not long after the sinking. He was killed two years later when his submarine, the U-88, struck a mine. In the wake of the sinking of the Lusitania, he was branded a war criminal in Britain and the United States. But did he really commit a crime? While it might be argued that the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese was unprovoked, an act of undeclared war, the same could not be said of the attack on the Lusitania. The Lusitania was a British ship; most of the personnel on board were British; Germany and Britain were formally at war; Germany had declared the waters round Britain to be a war zone; Germany had given several very explicit warnings that U-boats would attack British shipping, including a specific warning to those thinking of sailing on the Lusitania on its last voyage.

  In the end, the British authorities believed they could get away with sending the Lusitania through seas patrolled by U-boats because she was so much faster than they were. She could outrun them. Why the Admiralty did not pause to consider the possibility that a U-boat might simply lie in wait off the Old Head of Kinsale, perhaps even stationary, and fire a torpedo into the side of the Lusitania as she passed, is beyond comprehension. There is the question of escorting vessels. The Admiralty for some reason took the precaution of sending a naval escort to accompany the Lusitania from the Irish Sea into Liverpool on an earlier voyage, but not to help her through the far more dangerous waters off the southern coast of Ireland. It could be argued that the Admiralty showed criminal negligence in failing to provide a very obvious target for German submarines with an escort.

  But, even if the firing of the torpedo was not a crime, and even if the sinking of the Lusitania was not a crime, Captain Schwieger remains open to criticism. As he lowered his periscope, having seen enough, he knew that a thousand people were struggling for their lives in the water. He made no attempt to help them. It is also questionable whether he just happened to be in the right place at the right time by chance. Given that the sailing time of the Lusitania was public knowledge in New York, that her route was publicized, and that there were both a German embassy and German spies in New York, the German naval command would have known almost to the minute when to expect the Lusitania’s arrival in Queenstown. I firmly believe the U-20 was directed there, to wait for the Lusitania. In the wake of the tremendous wave of angry condemnation, this cold, calculated and premeditated ambush had to be presented as a U-boat captain’s lucky break.

  The Man From the Pru: The Murder of Julia Wallace

  At some time between half past six and a quarter to nine in the evening on 20 January 1931, Julia Wallace was bludgeoned to death in her own home in Liverpool. It became known as the perfect murder. James Agate thought so; the crime writer Raymond Chandler thought so, too. The chief suspect was her husband. If he killed Julia, then the fact that he was released on appeal means that he succeeded in evading the death penalty and escaped justice. If someone else killed her, they were even more successful in that they succeeded in evading suspicion. One peculiarity of the case is that there was no conceivable motive. If, as most people believed at the time, Julia’s husband William Wallace did it, what possible reason could he have had? The couple had lived together in what seemed to be perfect married harmony, if rather muted and in a minor key, for seventeen years.

  William and Julia Wallace were an ordinary, lower middle-class couple living in a small drab house in the Anfield district of Liverpool. They were a quiet, childless and rather sad pair. He was a cold, dull man with a mournful drooping moustache. He had been m
aking a living for sixteen years as a life insurance agent for the Prudential; she was quite cultured, fastidious and rather more aspiring, hoping for something more from life. They lived in a small Victorian terraced house, No 29 Wolverton Street, which Julia had worked hard to make a genteel, middle-class home.

  On the night before Julia Wallace died, her husband received a telephone message at the City Cafe in North John Street, the cafe he regularly visited because it was the venue of his Chess Club. The mysterious caller who was to change the lives of both of the Wallaces so melodramatically spoke to the club’s captain, Samuel Beattie. He identified himself as Mr R. M. Qualtrough. He left a message asking Wallace to call and see him, apparently about an insurance policy, at 25 Menlove Gardens East at half past seven the next evening, 20 January 1931.

  The next evening, Wallace accordingly set off to meet the mysterious Mr Qualtrough, who has never to this day been identified, leaving his house in Wolverton Street, as he later told the police, at a quarter to seven. It is known from an independent witness that William Wallace boarded a tram about three miles away in Lodge Lane at ten past seven, so the time that Wallace gave in his police statement is probably correct. Rather oddly, on the tram, Wallace kept reminding the conductor of his destination. This was later to be interpreted by the police as an effort on Wallace’s part to collect witnesses for his journey; he was setting up his alibi. But it may be that Wallace was merely over-anxious about keeping the appointment. After getting off the tram at Menlove Gardens West, he went on a futile search for Qualtrough’s house; it turned out in the end that the address Qualtrough had given him was false; it just did not exist. During the search for 25 Menlove Gardens East he called at a newsagent, 25 Menlove Gardens West, and asked a policeman as well, making a point of asking people the time.