T. C. Brennan

“ On the morning of February 25th he was found guilty of murder. Asked if he had anything to say why the death sentence should not be pronounced, he stood forward, and, without a quiver on his lip or in his voice, he answered: “Yes, sir; I still maintain that I am an innocent man, and that my evidence is correct. If I am hanged, I will be hanged an innocent man. My life has been sworn away by desperate people.” ”

“ Then Harding inquired, still curbing his curiosity: “Did you tell the detectives that you saw her?” And Ross replied: “Yes; but I told them that she had black boots”—a little touch not borne out by Ross’s written statement, but clearly designed to furnish corroboration of Harding’s story that Ross had confessed. Then a little later on we have Harding interposing with the unreal inquiry: “What time was this?” as if time were, at that stage of the inquiry, either important or interesting. There are many other questions equally unreal. The purpose of all of them is quite clear. ”

“ I will for ever, at all hazards, assert the dignity, independence and integrity of the English bar, without which impartial justice, the most valuable part of the British Constitution, can have no existence. From the moment that any advocate can be permitted to say that he will or will not stand between the Crown and the subject arraigned in the court where he daily sits to practice, from that moment the liberties of England are at an end. If the advocate refuses to defend from what he may think of the charge or of the defence, he assumes the character of the judge ”

“ It is remarkable that it is of very rare occurrence for evidence of a confession to be given when the proof of the prisoner’s guilt is otherwise clear and satisfactory, but, when it is not, the prisoner is not infrequently alleged to have been seized with the desire, born of penitence and remorse, to supplement it with a confession—a desire which vanishes as soon as he appears in a court of justice. ”

“ The attractive feature of Graham’s evidence, if the screams he heard were connected with Alma Tirtschke, is that it allows us to think of the little girl as we would all like to think of her—pure, innocent, and modest. That little girl met her death, in all human probability, within a few minutes of the time she was last seen alive by the Youngs, she met it in some place which was much handier to Gun Alley than Ross’s wine saloon, and she met it in a house provided with a fireplace or other conveniences for disposing of incriminating evidence. ”

“ It is doubtful, indeed, if without them there was a case for the jury. But did he actually say what either the woman Ivy Matthews or the man Harding declared he said? The verdict of the jury does not supply an answer. The question remains unanswered, and the doubt in regard to it constitutes the enduring mystery of the Ross trial.
All students of criminology—and all friends of truth—are under a debt of gratitude to Mr. Brennan for the cool, precise and perfectly dispassionate manner in which he has, inter alia, analysed the statements of these two people, Harding and Matthews. ”

“ Colin C. Ross,
“Melbourne Gaol.
“You have been condemned for a crime which you have never committed, and are to suffer for another’s fault. Since your conviction you have, no doubt, wondered what manner of man the real murderer is who could not only encompass the girl’s death, but allow you to suffer in his stead. ”

“ But we desire to add that, if there be evidence on which reasonable men could find a verdict of guilty, the determination of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner is a matter for the jury, and for them alone. ”

“ My dear Ross, if it is any satisfaction for you to know it, believe me that you die but once, but he will continue to die for the rest of his life. Honoured and fawned upon by those who know him, the smile upon his lips but hides the canker eating into his soul. Day and night [Pg 142] his life is a hell without the hope of reprieve. Gladly would he take your place on Monday next if he had himself alone to consider. His reason, then, briefly stated, is this: A devoted and loving mother is ill—a shock would be fatal. ”

“ If that girl were in the wine shop from 3 until 5 or 6 she would have been seen by anything from fifty to a hundred people. It is incredible that all these people were degenerates, who would connive at a dastardly outrage, by whomsoever committed. Yet the simple fact remains that the only persons who came forward, in response to earnest and widely-published appeals for information about the girl, were the prostitute, Olive Maddox, and her mysterious friend, with the inscrutable past, Ivy Matthews. And neither of them came forward until a handsome reward was offered for the information. ”

“ Cowards, who have sought to steel their consciences against the effects of Ross’s dying speech, have circulated the story that Ross’s brother begged him, whatever he did, not to make a confession on the scaffold. It is part of the same policy of easing the public conscience as the base and baseless statements about the letters written to Harding before his execution and to Matthews before his trial. ”

“ Piggott replied: “Well, you won’t know. I never divulge where I get my information. Why are you so anxious to know?” “Because,” said Ross, “I will warm them up,” and he went so far as to tell Piggott that he did not believe anyone had told him. Piggott himself gave this in evidence. It was all very foolish and impudent on Ross’s part, no doubt. It was characteristic of his quite fearless and “cheeky” attitude throughout. But a guilty man, who had just escaped from an eight-hour ordeal with the detectives, might surely be expected to keep as far away from Russell Street as possible. ”

“ Try to forgive [Pg 137] my enemies—let God deal with them. I want you, dear mother, and Ronald, to thank all the friends who have been so kind to you and me during our trouble. I have received nothing but kindness since I have been in gaol. Say good-bye to Gladdie for me, and I wish for her a happy life. Dear ones, do not fret too much for me. The day is coming when my innocence will be proved. Good-bye, all my dear ones. Some day you will meet again your loving son and brother.
“COLIN, x x x x x x x x x x”
Ross has been described as inscrutable, and his conduct as puzzling. ”

“ The gates would be locked long before this, and Ross had no key. The stories, therefore, fail hopelessly to fit in the one with the other. The mark [Pg 84] of truth is that it must fit in with every other truth, while the mark of falsehood is that it can only be made, by whatever ingenuity, to fit in with a limited number of truths. If the Ellis evidence is true, the Harding and Matthews evidence on this point cannot be true. It may be true in the limited sense of being a true narration of what Ross said, but it cannot be true in the important sense of being a true recital of what Ross did. ”

“ There should be no other desire in the minds of any reader; and the people of Australia, who cannot possibly have followed the case with the care that Mr. Brennan has followed it, will appreciate both the value of his work and the deep interest of the story that he tells. Whether they think the mystery of the Gun Alley murder was cleared up by the jury’s verdict, or whether it remains a mystery is for them to say. ”

“ A man describing the appearance of a conventionally-dressed school-girl has not room to go far astray. The one thing he would not be likely to remember, or to carry in the mind’s eye, was whether she had on boots or shoes—especially if her stockings were black. But if Ross had stripped the body, that is the one thing that he would have been clear about, for by the hypothesis he took the boots off, and he could hardly have forgotten the gruesome task of unlacing them. ”

“ Never in the history of serious crimes in Victoria, or, indeed, in the British Empire, it may be safely said, has a man been convicted on such a jumbled mass of contradictions as served to convict Ross. ”

“ The first thing to notice is that Piggott was wrong when he said: “You told me that Detectives Saker and Lee had put a woman out.” What Ross said, according to Piggott’s own account of what took place on the 5th, was that “Detective Lee” ordered her out. Saker’s name was not mentioned. But if Ross had been a guilty man, his answers would have been all ready prepared, and his candid admission, “I must have been making a mistake; it must have been the Thursday,” points to his candour rather than to his cunning. ”

“ Some sticklers for accuracy, who have never made a public speech, and who, it may be hoped, will not have to make a start with a hangman’s rope around their neck, and the gallows for a platform, have fastened on to the words, “I never saw the girl,” as being the assertion of an untruth. Ross signed a statement that he saw a girl answering the description of Alma Tirtschke; he went into the witness box and swore that he had seen such a girl. ”

“ Apart from that, however, it is simply incredible that a man who was engaged in the gruesome task of washing away the bloodstains of a murdered victim, and who would have the deepest interest in keeping his presence in the Arcade at an unwonted hour a close secret, should have gone out deliberately to ask a passer-by for a lead pencil, which could be of no imaginable service to him. ”

“ No possible theory can be advanced why Ross should have done all these things; no possible theory can be advanced why, if he had done them, he should have given the [Pg 60] details of them to Matthews. But if we assume Matthews’s knowledge of Maddox’s evidence, and Upton’s evidence, and her knowledge that Gladys Wain was in the cubicle from 9.15 until after 10.30—all of which we are entitled to assume—then we are in possession of ample material for explaining why Matthews should have invented the details. ”

“ The walking round the block to see if there was anybody about is equally incredible, for there might be nobody about when Ross walked around the block on one occasion, and several about when he came out with the body two or three minutes later. The purpose of that unreal inquiry, and the others that follow was to get answers fitting in with the story told by the vigilant lodging-house keeper, Ellis. But Ellis, with all his vigilance, strangely enough never saw Ross enter the Arcade with a bicycle. ”

“ A girl could scarcely breathe in that cubicle without its being noticed by a man squeezing in and out at the end of the bar counter. Everything, according to Harding, took place in the cubicle, and the girl never left it from the time she went in at 3 o’clock until she was carried out, dead and nude, between 1 and 2 o’clock next morning. There are none of the perambulations by the child when alive, or by Ross when the child was dead, backwards and forwards with the body to and from the cubicle of which Matthews speaks. ”

“ On the trial, evidence for the defence was given that Mrs. Tom Ross and her sister, Miss Alice Ballantyne, had gone into the cubicle on the Wednesday before the murder, and had “done” their hair in it, each letting her hair down and combing it. Alice Ballantyne’s hair bore the strongest resemblance to Alma Tirtschke’s, and leaving out the improbability of the hairs remaining on the blanket for a fortnight, it was far more likely that 27 hairs would come out under the operation of combing than that they would come out from a girl simply lying on the blanket. ”

“ Innocent actions may thus be misinterpreted, innocent words misunderstood, and as men readily believe what they anxiously desire, facts the most harmless may be construed into strong confirmation of preconceived opinions. It is not here asserted that this is frequently the case, nor is it intended to disparage the police. The feelings by which they are actuated are common to all persons who first assume that a fact or system is true, and then seek for arguments to support and prove its truth. ”

“ For all he knows to the contrary, the pith of all hairs may be identical. He made one admission in the course of his cross-examination which absolutely destroyed the probative force of his evidence. In his post-factum observations he had examined hairs from several auburn heads, and he admitted that he had found some hair as like Alma Tirtschke’s as the hairs from the blankets. The “proof,” therefore, resulting from Mr. Price’s evidence may be reduced to an elementary syllogism as follows:— [Pg 92]
This hair is like Alma’s. All hair like Alma’s is not Alma’s. ”

“ Piggott himself admitted that the press were giving them “a pretty rough time” about their failure to effect an arrest. How “rough” it was may be gauged from one editorial in “The Argus” about three days before Ross’s arrest, which said: “As each day passes the grievous disappointment of the public at the failure of the police to track down the murderer of the child, Alma Tirtschke, grows more profound.... Even among citizens less given to displays of anger the sense of disgust is acute. ”

“ Again, on the 12th, the day he was arrested, Ross answered: “That’s a lie,” “That’s a lie,” to each new allegation made against him. On the following day he was brought before the Police Court. He was undefended, and was asked if he had any objection to a remand. “Yes,” he said, “I don’t require a remand. There is no reason why I should be here. I can prove my whereabouts on that night. I strongly object to a remand. ”

“ A perusal of this review, whether or not it satisfies the reader of the innocence of Ross, will, at least, satisfy him of the need for a close scrutiny of evidence of this kind; and future juries will be reminded of the necessity of never being stampeded by newspaper or popular clamor into preconceived ideas of the guilt of any man, and of ever being on their guard against perjury and conspiracy, even though they are not satisfied that either were present in this case. ”