You're listening to the second and final pard of Unexplained, Season nine, episode fifteen, Red Dust. A haze of smoke filled the harshly lit air of the interrogation room. Harold Pinfold sat alone as he chained smoked one three, five after another. He fidgeted with the packet. He picked at a scab on his arm. He bit at his nails. The man was clearly nervous and quite possibly in the
early stages of opium withdrawn. Nineteen year old Pamela Werner had been dead for over a week, and Pinfold was the first real suspect Inspectors Hans shir Cheung and Richard Dennis had had to work with. Having made little progress up till then Inspector Hahn's sweep of Beijing's infamous den of iniquity, the ominous bad Land Zone, had finally borne fruit.
During door to door inquiries. A Russian landlady, clearly rattled by the discovery of Pamela's body, wasted little time in informing the attending officer that she just recently found a blood stained dagger, shoes and cloth in the room of a tenant of hers. The man was on further investigation revealed to be a Canadian called Harold Pinfld. Pinfold was a deserter from the Canadian Army who'd acquired a criminal record in the United States before fleeing to China, where
he scratched a living working various low paid jobs. He was quickly apprehended and taken into custody for questioning. One officer at the Beijing police station recognized him immediately as one of the rubberneckers that he'd seen at the crime stone see the day they found the body. For hours, Pinfold refused to answer Inspectors Hahn and Dennis's questions what was he doing at the crime scene? They asked what did number twenty seven on a street in the bad
Lands named chan Ban mean to him? The place was a known brothel, they'd found a business card for it among Pinfold's possessions, and what was the newdest retreat. Harold Pinfold feigned ignorance of it all, but they'd already spoken
to Joseph Nuf, the manager of Number twenty seven. It was Nuf who told them that Pinfold was a regular customer at the brothel and at the establishment next door to number twenty eight, and it was Nouf who told them that Pinfold had a side hustle working as a security guard for what he described as a newdest retreat. Nuf claimed not to know too much about it, only that it took place in the Western Hills, a secluded area of wooded mountainous terrain on the western side of
the city. Eventually, under sustained questioning and probably when he'd run out of cigarettes, Pinfold finally dropped his guard Harold Pinfld admitted to having worked security once or twice at the so called nudest retreats, and that on occasions he'd even been paid to recruit women to dance naked for the attendees there. Inspectors Hahn and Dennis had good reason to suspect that these women were recruited for a little more than just dancing. Was Pamela one of these dancers,
they asked. Pinfald said he couldn't tell them because he'd never heard of Pamela before her body was found. He also claimed that he'd only been at the crime scene because he happened to be passing the area at the time and was just curious to know what was going on, And as for the blood on his possessions, it wasn't human, he told them, so they needn't concern themselves with that either. According to Pinfald, he sometimes went hunting in the woods
whenever he worked at the Newdest Retreat. The blood, he said, was from his latest kill. Inspectors Hahn and Denis wanted to know more about these newdest Retreats, as Pinfald and Nouf called them, but Pinfald refused to be drawn any further into it, other than to say if they really wanted to know what went on there, they should speak to Wentworth Prentice. Pinfald had apparently met him at the brothel next door to twenty seven number twenty eight twan Ban,
but declined to say any more. As it happened, the pathology report on the bloody knife seemed to confirm Pinfold's story, and the man was released. They should have known that he would go to round immediately, but it didn't matter. By then they had everything they needed. Wentworth Apprentice was a debonair, mustachioed American dentist whose patients were mostly wealthy expats and diplomats. Although on first impressions he seemed to
be entirely respectable. A little digging revealed something darker lurking underneath the facade. He first came to China with his wife in nineteen seventeen after graduating from Harvard's dental School. The pair had children while living in Beijing, and by all accounts, planned to make a permanent base there. That was until June nineteen twenty six, when Prentice's wife left the country abruptly, taking the children with her. They would
never go back. A strange note on his file at the US Consulate suggested that at some point there had been concerned for the safety of one Apprentice's children, without specifying why. Since he was a foreign national of some local repute, it failed to inspect a Denis to interview him, which he did alongside legation Court of Police Commissioner Edward
Howard at the commissioner's own home. The dentist presented himself as an upstanding member of the expat community, unlike Pinfalt, claimed never to have heard of Pamela before, but more to the point, he'd been at the cinema on the evening she disappeared, so couldn't have had anything to do with her. Murder. Inspector Dennis had little choice but to
take him at his word for the time being. But it hadn't gone unnoticed that Wentworth Prentice just so happened to live right next door to the French Club's new ice rink, where Pamela had last been seen. The day after Wentworth Prentice was interviewed by the police, an article appeared in Beijing's English language newspaper written by an Irish
reporter named George Gorman. In it, Gorman criticized the authorities for considering Prentice a possible suspect and unfairly tarnishing his reputation. The real killers were Chinese, not Westerners, Gorman insisted. Many had already begun to speculate that the reason Pamela's organs had been removed was so they could be sold for medical purposes on the Chinese black market, which were tracked
with Gorman's assessment. Intriguingly, George Gorman did know Pamela Werner, as Inspector Dennis found out when he went to speak with him shortly after the article was published. It was Gorman's wife that told Dennis that Pamela had even been to their house visiting their daughter only the night before her murder. The potential connections demanded to be followed up, but time was running out for the two detectives. Inspector Dennis had only been given enough leave to stay until
February seventh, just before Chinese New Year. It wasn't nearly long enough. Not only had they failed to find any verifiable suspects, they hadn't even established where Pamela was murdered in the first place. The inquest into Pamela's death was
held on January twenty ninth. After hearing testimony from Pamela's friends and some of the investigating officers, the coroner, Nicholas Fitzmorris, a British consul, concluded rather redundantly that Pamela's death was an unlawful killing, but that it would be up to a later hearing to decide who might have committed the crime. The following day, much to the dismay of Inspectors Hans and Dennis, details of the autopsy were published in the papers,
having been secretly leaked to the press. It was an unmitigated disaster that also led to Fitzmorris's demotion. Now with so much key information in the public domain the culprit or culprits could use it to stay a step ahead of the investigators, but by then it would have made little difference in any case, because Inspectors Hahn and Dennis
had reached the end of the road. As the raucous celebrations of Chinese New Year began, many in Beijing were convinced it would be the last such holiday for them and their city for some time. Inspector Dennis was forced to return to Tianjin, while Inspector Hahn was moved on to other cases. After all, there were far more pressing concerns now than an unsolved murder, not least of all
the impending invasion of the city. By March nineteen thirty seven, the Japanese government was becoming increasingly bold with their military provocations. They began driving tanks through parts of the city and flying their fighter planes overhead at low altitudes, feeling out the Chinese government's appetite for pushing back. Meanwhile, the Japanese army's presence outside the city grew ever bigger and more threatening. It was only a matter of time before they mounted
a full scale occupation. On the night of July seventh, nineteen thirty seven, near the Marco Polo Bridge just outside of Beijing, Japanese and Chinese Nationalist Army troops clashed during what had begun as a routine military exercise. When a Japanese soldier was reported missing, demand's weight to search the nearby town of Wuanping, which were refused by the Chinese Army,
shots were fired. What followed became the opening act of a wider war, as reinforcements poured into North China and the fragile balance that had been in place since the Boxer rebellion finally gave way. Beijing fell with little sustained resistance. By the end of July, it was completely occupied by the Japanese military. The old order gave way to something far harsher and more uncertain. Any lingering hope that the truth behind Pamela Werner's death might be uncovered quietly slipped away.
There was only one man left to keep investigating Pamela's murder. Her dogged and heartbroken father, Edward Werner, had been extremely disappointed with the lack of progress on his daughter's case. British authorities in Beijing had offered a reward of one thousand Chinese silver dollars roughly ten times what the average Chinese family would spend in a year for information that would help resolve the case. But the reward fliers had
only been printed in English. Werner's plea for them to be printed in Mandarin too, fell on deaf ears, since many Chinese citizens distrusted their own authorities those of foreign countries. Werner also argued unsuccessfully to allow useful informant to claim the money anonymously, and when he finally got the Beijing police to return Pamela's clothes and to other personal effects, it appeared the items had not been properly stored or
even checked for fingerprints. Convinced that the authorities weren't doing enough, Werner decided to hold a press conference on the steps of the British legation headquarters. He criticized the decision to let Canadian suspect Harold Pinfold go, despite the fact he clearly had some crucial information that they failed to follow up on. He also drew on his considerable knowledge of Chinese culture to dispute any suggestion that his daughter's organs
had been harvested for traditional practices. Werner firmly believed that his daughter's killer or killers were Westerners, and offered an extra five thousand Chinese gold dollars, three times what an average Chinese family could earn in their lifetimes and a sum that constituted most of his life savings for any
vital information, But still no informant came forward. Months after the official inquest Edward Werner was still living in his courtyard house, but due to the Japanese occupation, was no longer free to roam around the city as he had once been. Nonetheless, he stubbornly kept up the search to find his daughter's killer, repeatedly pleading with the Foreign Office to reopen the case. He also used his considerable financial resources to encourage former Beijing police officers to share whatever
they knew with him. Like the two inspectors before him, Werner's investigations led him to the brothels at twenty seven and twenty eight chuan Ban, although by then their owners appeared to have closed the establishishments and fled the city. Werner became fixated with number twenty eight, especially where it seemed dentist Wentworth Prentice was a regular, and where he was introduced to Harold Pinforlt, and potentially many of the other men whom Werner discovered also attended his secret nudest
retreats in the Western Hills. But there was far more
to come. When Edward Werner went through his daughter's diary, he claimed to find evidence which detectives Hahn and Dennis had overlooked, namely entries his daughter had apparently written about how she'd gone on a weekend visit to the Western Hills with the Irish reporter George Gorman and his family six months before her murder, and that while on that trip, Gorman had made sexual overtures to her, which she'd rebuffed, this, of course, being the same George Gorman who had so
stoutly defended the reputation of his friend Wentworth Apprentice in the newspaper the day after he was taken in for questioning.
Was Gorman also a regular at number twenty eight. It was around this time that Werner apparently heard of rumor that Canadian suspect Harold Pinflt, on his release from questioning, had gone straight to the city of Tianjin, where he was heard asking someone if Prentice had been arrested yet, and that wasn't all that Werner had on Wentworth Prentice when he was interviewed back at the start of the year.
Prentice claimed never to have met Pamela before, but this wasn't true, as Werner tried to impress upon anyone that would listen to him, Pamela had actually once been a patient apprentices and he had the receipt to prove it, which he said was dated from only five weeks before the murder and in case it had gone unnoticed. Though it wasn't Prentice that Pamela had seen the morning before she disappeared, she had been to the dentist that day.
Could that have been linked to anything at all? At some point Edward Werner learned that a rickshaw puller had been brought in for questioning after he was seen washing a bloody seat cushion near to where Pamela's body was found not long after she was killed. At the time, he told Inspector Hahn that the blood was the result of a fight between a Russian expat and an American marine. Werner hired agents to track down the ritual puller so
he could speak to him himself. The man allegedly told Werner a very different story to the one he gave to Inspector Hahn. According to Werner, the rickshaw puller claimed that on the night Pamela went missing, he was called to the Barcum brothel at number twenty eight Juan Ban. There he picked up two men and what appeared to be a young European woman wrapped in a white sheet who wasn't moving. It was her blood that had got
on the rickshaw cushion, he said. Werner again took his findings to British diplomats, pleading with them to reopen the case, but the rickshaw puller, who Werner likely paid some considerable money for his apparent confession, was not regarded as a credible witness. Throughout nineteen thirty eight and into nineteen thirty nine, Werner continued investigating, but all his efforts to get British
officials to reopen the case failed. In fact, they became so annoyed with him he was eventually banned from entering the Legation quarter. So keen were they to draw a line under it all, but Werner would not be deterred. Eventually, he also discovered that Joseph Nuf, who had turned out round the brothels at twenty seven and twenty eight. Juan Ban, despite what he told police back in nineteen thirty seven, had in fact not only known more about the Western
Hill's nudest weekends, he was a regular participant. It was all becoming glaringly obvious to Werner that Wentworth, Apprentice and all his fellow frequenters of Number twenty eight knew far more about his daughter and possibly what had happened to her, than they were letting on. Werner's own theory was this, over a period of months, Pamela had been essentially groomed
by Prentice and his associates. Then, possibly under the pretext of a Christmas party, they had finally made their move and invited her to meet them at Number twenty eight. Perhaps she'd even met one of them first for a secret dinner, which would explain the food that was later found in her stomach. Werner surmised that the men planned to have sex with his daughter that night, but having realized the truth about why she'd been invited out, Pamela
refused their advances and a struggle ensued. During that struggle, Pameler was likely struck with a chair. Werner had in fact spotted a wooden chair with a broken leg when he visited the brothel as part of his own investigations. Having been killed in sight, Werner surmised that the assailants had then taken Pamela's body to the Fox Tower because
it was unlit and unpatrolled. There, the men, some of whom, if Werner's theory was to be believed, were hunters and medical professionals, mutilated the corpse with a combination of crude stabs and cuts, as well as clinical incisions to remove her organs, but nobody else bought it, or at least didn't want to know about it. Despite it all, Werner continued pursuing the case, and was still doing so in late nineteen forty one when the Japanese Air Force attacked
Pearl Harbor. With Japan now formerly at war with many of the nations represented in the Legation Quarter, things only became even more intense for expats in Beijing and across China. Edward Werner was forced to flee his home and move into the relative safety of the Quarter, whose right to diplomatic and legal immunity was getting more and more fragile
by the day. All the while he continued to write long requests to the Foreign Office to have the killers he'd singled out brought to justice, all of which was in vain. In March nineteen forty three, the Japanese government finally took over the Legation Quarter and removed all its remaining European residents, including Edward Werner and Wentworth Apprentice. All were marched to the train station and sent to an interment camp in Shandong, two hundred fifty miles away to
the south. Ironically, Edward Werner would spend the rest of the war as a prisoner of the Shandong interment camp, alongside many of the men he believed had been involved with Pamela's death. Wentworth Prentice even became the camp's de facto dentist, earning a measure of respect from fellow inmates, something that could only have deepened Werner's sense of grievance toward him. Survivors of the camp later said that the by then seventy five year old Werner periodically confronted Prentice,
yelling you killed her. I know you killed Pamela. You did it. When the war ended, Edward Werner remained in China. It had, after all, been his home for most of his life, but more than that, it was where he felt closest to his daughter. To leave would have felt like abandoning her and giving up on her. Case. Old age and ill health finally convinced him to return to
England in nineteen fifty one. On his death three years later, the British Times newspaper published a lengthy obituary containing only a brief mention of Pamela's murder. It would be several decades before the mysterious unsolved case would surface in print again. One rainy day in London in the early two thousands, a writer named Paul French sat at a desk in
the National Archives. French had studied Chinese at the University of London and had become interested in the career of a journalist who had been working in Beijing just prior to the Second World War, a woman by the name of Helen Foster Snow. The dismal wet weather that day led to French staying a little longer at his desk than normal, and as he read on a footnote in
Snow's biography, suddenly caught his attention. In the note, Snow alluded to her fears in the wake of Pamela Werner's murder that it was her and not the young woman who'd been the intended target. French was intrigued. When he woke the next morning, he had to find out more about the story. His curiosity led him back to the archives, where he searched a box of nineteen forties records from the British embassy in China for any mention of the killing.
He was not disappointed. There were numerous documents on the case, including a one hundred and fifty page letter from Edward Werner setting out his own private efforts to solve the case, concluding with the accusation that Wentworth, Prentice and his fellow nudists had been the killers. French wrote a book about the case called Midnight in p King, in which he concurred with Werner's theory. The book became a best seller and won many awards, but like the original investigations, French's
conclusions were dogged by counterclaims and controversy. Several critics, including two descendants of individuals who featured in the case, cast doubt on French's presentation of Werner's conclusions. They posted photographs of many original documents referred to in the book, which true Werner's reliability into question Edward Werner was not a credible source, the critics said, claiming that French had downplayed
the man's violent temper. They drew attention to an incident in nineteen thirteen while Werner was the British consul in Fujo, when he struck a customs official with a whip, an incident which led to Werner being forcibly retired from the diplomatic service. The critics also said that Werner's assertions were hard to substantiate and not mentioned in any other accounts of the investigation in Foreign office correspondence or newspaper articles.
They also showed that the receipt for the dental work that Prentice had carried out on Pamela was in fact dated six years before her death, not five weeks as her father had claimed, and that the time of the cinema performance that Princess said he'd been at the night Pamela was murdered was backed up by newspaper records from the time. French's reconstructions relied too heavily on warness letters, they said, while it was likely that more accurate police
records had not survived the war. In twenty eighteen, a death in p King Who Killed Pamela Werner was published. Its author, Graham Shephard, openly admitted that he was not a fan of true crime books or writing, but he'd become intrigued by the case after reading Poor French's book, partly because his wife's grandfather was Nicholas Fitzmorris, who'd presided over the inquiry into Pamela's death, but also because he was a retired British police officer with over thirty years
on them. For the former detective, Pamela Werner's killing presented an intriguing cold case. Using his policing skills, Shepherd methodically drew up a full list of possible suspects, which included not just Wentworth, Prentice and his fellow nudists, but Chinese and Japanese agents and some previously unexamined suspects and leads. Shepherd found the gory nature of the murder especially curious. Why had her chest been opened and her heart taken out?
For one? At first, Shepherd didn't discount the possibility that Edward Werner himself might have murdered his daughter Indeed, he considered the father, with his history of violence and controlling, insecure nature, to be a stronger candidate than many of the other suspects. Shepherd noted how Werner seemed aware of every detail of Pamela's movements on the day that she died. He was known to have disapproved of her boyfriends and
to have had an explosive temper. Not only that he turned up at the crime scene the following morning, as offenders are often known to do, but in his final analysis, Shepherd came to believe that Werner didn't kill his only child. He felt, from his policing perspective that there was someone else much more likely to have been the murderer. Han Shao Ching, Pamela's classmate who had been so brutally beaten off by her father when he attempted to call on
Pamela's home a week before she died. Shepherd's conclusion was that the loss of face, so important in Chinese culture, prompted the young man to exact an extreme form of revenge, of which the removal of Pamela's heart was its symbolic climax. The former detective noted that the crime scene was just around the corner from Pamela's home on her route there from the ice rink, which to him was highly suggest festive of a lone offender, full of obsessive resentment, lust
and rejection, determined to exact revenge on Pamela's father. According to Edward Werner, Hans Shu Ching was murdered by Japanese military police sometime in the nineteen forties. As for Inspector Richard Dennis, he was relieved of his position as police chief in Tianjin when the Japanese military took over and immediately put in prison, where he was subjected to months of solitary confinement and torture. He was only released after he signed a forced confession to crimes he didn't commit.
Returning to China after the war, he assisted with the war crimes trials of some of the very people who'd imprisoned him, before returning to England, where he lived until his death in nineteen seventy seven. The fate of Inspector Hahn shir Chong, who was also forced out by the Japanese occupying forces, is unknown. As for Pamela Werner, she was laid to rest in what at the time was Beijing's English Cemetery. Today it lies under the pavement of
Beijing's second largest ring road. There is a walking tour there which retraces Pamela's steps the night she went missing. The Werner's home, which she left mid afternoon on that fateful day, is now a print shop. The Fox Tower, or dong Biyan Men, as it's known locally, where Pamela's mutilated body was found, is today home to a contemporary Chinese art space. As Beijing's traffic thunders over her remains
in a case as cold as the city's winters. It seems the identity of Pamela Werner's killer or killer's will very likely remain forever unexplained. This episode was written by Diane Hope and Richard McLain Smith. Thank you as ever for listening Unexplained. As an Avy Club production, the podcast created by Richard McLain Smith. All other elements of the podcast, including the music, are also produced by me Richard McLain Smith. Unexplained. The book and audiobook is now available to buy worldwide.
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