Reflecting on My Conversations With The Mysterious Woman Who Stole Alan Turing's Belongings From England
Julia Turing is in the news again as U.S. authorities return items to England that they recovered in a search of her Colorado home.
Always try sending a letter as a last attempt.
That’s a tactic that’s come through for me a few times during my journalism career. While most reporters give up on trying to reach a source after multiple emails, texts, and voicemails fail to produce a response, sometimes it’s sending ink on paper through the good ole’ USPS that does the trick.
That was what finally put me in touch with a woman in Colorado who’d been accused by the U.S. Attorney’s Office of stealing artifacts in England belonging to famed mathematician Alan Turing—the subject of the 2014 biopic The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.
Specifically, it was a letter I sent to a P.O. Box listed on some court documents that led to me getting a call from the suspect. The story she subsequently shared was among the strangest I’ve ever pieced together: one that began with an aimless foster child becoming obsessed with a deceased math genius she’d never met, before taking turn after unpredictable turn into a saga involving an overseas theft of historic items, murky correspondence with a boarding school administrator, Olympic track and field ambitions, a skeptical university archivist, and a Colorado sting operation.
It's all way too bizarre and complicated to spell out here, so I’ll just link to my 2021 cover story for Denver’s alt-weekly, Westword, if you want all the details. But the woman at the center of everything, Julia Turing (no actual relation to Alan Turing; she changed her name to match his), has been on my mind recently. Last month, some of the artifacts recovered from her Colorado home during a 2018 police search were finally returned to their original home: a boarding school in England that Alan Turing had attended as a boy. The items included Turing’s Princeton PhD diploma, a letter from King George VI, and a miniature OBE medal (equivalent to the U.S.’s Presidential Medal of Freedom). The BBC was on hand to cover the repatriation ceremony on August 22, and both national outlets in the U.S. and Colorado publications (a couple of which kindly linked to my feature) covered the items’ return to England.
But once again, as happened when the U.S.’s case against Julia was initially reported on, I noticed that her voice was not a part of the recent coverage. I wonder how she’s doing, because we’re no longer in touch. Journalists far smarter than me—looking at you, Janet Malcolm—have written tomes on the complicated nature of the journalist-source relationship. Every source has a reason for talking to a reporter, and that’s especially true when there’s accusations of crimes involved. My reporting experience with Julia proved as complicated as any Malcolm might point to as a case study—although both Julia and I agreed from the start that her missing perspective in existing news reports made those articles and television pieces lacking in context. Still, I could tell during my conversations with Julia in 2021 that our particular relationship might become fraught; over our numerous phone calls, I discovered that she was being selective with the information she was giving me, only admitting to key details (like stealing certain items from a library in England) once I had unearthed evidence of it elsewhere or heard about it from other sources. This did not bode well, especially when I found myself weighing conflicting accounts. And while I felt all along that I honored my only stated promise to Julia—to tell her side of the story for the first time—I also followed the reporting where it led, and laid out all the pieces for readers to consider on their own. The truth, as usual, was more gray than black and white.
Simply put: some of the items she had in her possession, and had apparently hidden in secret compartments in her Colorado home, were not hers to have. Other items she seemed to have obtained permission over the years to keep, which I noted in the piece. Still, conversations we had once my article was published in June 2021 did not go well. Some of Julia’s strongest gripes were over the artwork on the cover—she said she doesn’t wear nail polish as the illustration suggested. My editor had to step in. Westword made no corrections to the article.
So, the outcome with Julia was unfortunate, because I’d also tried to capture the parts of her life story that are inspiring and moving. But once feedback came in from readers, I was glad to see that some of them understood that, at its core, this really was a love story. It’s about a woman finding her soulmate, only one who happened to live before her time. That didn’t prevent Julia from feeling that Turing had, as she put it, saved her life and become “like a husband.” From beyond the grave, the 20th century genius managed to inspire her (including into an impressive track and field career) even before she came to possess some of his mementos in 1984 through dubious means. Now that the Turing artifacts have been returned to England, I’m sure Julia misses them. But I hope she’s doing okay, including during this recent round of news coverage. Or maybe, she’s already moved on from her fight with the U.S. Government over possession of the Turing items, which ended with a settlement in May 2021. But I know she’ll never move on from the man himself; after hearing her story, it’s clear that nothing could diminish her spiritual connection to the memory and idea of Alan Turing. I only wish they could have met.