Keith Andrews (criminologist)

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For other persons of the same name, see Keith Andrews.

Keith Andrews (born in Liverpool, England, June 3, 1940) is a British criminologist.

In 2001, Liverpool Echo columnist and author Tom Slemen and criminologist Keith Andrews, LLB, solved the Julia Wallace murder of 1931, and are now credited with doing so in Arabella McIntyre Brown's book, Liverpool: The First 1000 years. Slemen and Andrews were given full access to the records of the 1931 Wallace Murder Case at Merseyside Police's Headquarters at Canning Place, and they were also given access to the full transcripts of the court case. Other historians and crime fiction writers such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers and Raymond Chandler, believed the case to be an impossible one to solve. Various armchair criminologists have traditionally blamed Richard Gordon Parry, a friend of the Wallaces who hadn't visited their home in the 2 years before the murder. Parry has living descendants in Britain who dispute his alleged involvement in the murder. William Wallace - the husband of murder victim Julia - has also been 'named' as another culprit in many books and programmes on the case. Again, the descendants of William Wallace are bitterly upset over these unfounded views. A radio storyteller said he actually met the 14-year-old milk-delivery boy Alan Croxton Close 'many years after the murder' when in fact Alan Close died at the controls of a Blenheim Night Fighter in 1940, and was posthumously honoured as a war hero. The Close family were enraged when the storyteller stated that he had met Alan Close years after his heroic death. Alan Close had called at 29 Wolverton Street, Anfield, Liverpool, the scene of the murder, at 6.40-6.45pm, minutes before Mr Wallace (a Prudential Insurance agent) left the house on his quest for a mysterious potential insurance client named R. M. Qualtrough, who had, via a telephone call, told Samuel Beattie (an associate of Wallace) to send William Wallace to his home to open an insurance policy for his daughter at the (non-existent) address of 25 Menlove Gardens East in the Mossley Hill area of Liverpool. William Wallace could not find Qualtrough's address and returned home at 8.45 pm to find that his wife had been brutally murdered. There was no forced entry, and only a few pounds were missing from the house. Police quickly suspected Wallace of inventing the story of Qualtrough to give himself an alibi for the time of his wife's death, which took place between 6.45 and 8.45pm - when Wallace was out of the house. However, Alan Close's testimony - that he had talked to Julia Wallace at 6.45pm as he delivered her milk - therefore presented the prosecution (led by the formidable Edward Hemmerde KC) with the problem of explaining how Wallace could have murdered his wife, faked a break in, taken a bath to wash off bloodstains, and how he could have disposed of the murder weapon (which was never found), before racing to the nearest tramstop, within nine minutes. The evidence against Wallace was weak, but the Jury apparently did not understand the way the judge was directing them away from a Guilty verdict, and returned a verdict of Guilty. There was an appeal, and as a result, the death sentence pronounced upon Wallace was sensationally quashed, and he was set free. This was unprecedented in British Law. Tom Slemen and Keith Andrews presented a talk on the case at St George's Hall in 2001 which was attended by 1,500 people. Their ingenious solution to the Wallace case had never before been proposed in the seventy-year analysis of the murder by the world's renowned criminologists.

He is currently writing a feature on a crime historian's past, and an in-depth article on a failed one-book 'pulp crime writer' who writes nothing but anonymous emails to famous people. Watch this space. Keith is also working with a television screenwriter on a script about the Cameo Murders, based on the landmark book by Barry Shortall.