OLIVE MADDOX TESTED.
Olive Maddox’s testimony is also worthy of a few lines of examination. She said that, having seen the girl in the beaded room, two men also being in it, she came out and said to Ross: “That is a young kid to be drinking there.” The room in which the child was alleged to be was only 7ft. by 6ft. 7in. The girl, therefore, must have been within three or four feet of the men. Ivy Matthews, in her evidence at the Morgue, said it was no unusual thing, when respectable women came into the place for a drink with a child, to show them into the little room. Olive Maddox, a daily visitor to the place in Matthews’ time, must have known of this practice. Therefore, even if she did see the child in the same little room with two men, there was not the slightest thing about the circumstance to suggest that she was not with one of the men, and everything to suggest that she was. At the worst, she had an empty lemonade glass in front of her, and that, combined with the fact that she was with two men, would never have prompted Maddox to say anything about “a young kid” drinking.
When it is remembered that Matthews and Maddox were old and close acquaintances, and that Maddox admitted that it was after consultation with Matthews that she decided to speak to the police, and when it is remembered that this consultation was just at the time that Matthews was trying to enlist the services of Halliwell, which will be referred to later, and when it is remembered that just at this time the reward had been increased to £1250 (including £250 offered by the “Herald”), it does not seem hard to suggest what may have happened. Matthews says that she saw a drink being brought into the cubicle to the child at 3 o’clock. It was suggested in the Appeal Courts that Maddox was to say that she saw the child in that room at 5 o’clock, with an empty glass before her; that Maddox was a stupid girl—according to her own testimony, barely able to read; that she blundered in the simple task assigned to her by the master mind, and put the child in the wrong room. The rooms at that time had no distinguishing names. It was not until the trial that they became known as the “cubicle” and the “beaded” room. Matthews did not know at the inquest of this blunder, but on the trial she tried to repair it by telling the absurd story of how Ross got the girl to go into the beaded room, and kept her there by some form of mesmerism for over an hour, while he entertained Gladys Wain in the cubicle.
Maddox herself says that when she saw the girl in the beaded room there were three girls and two men in the adjoining parlour, and there were two men in the little room with her. It was a busy afternoon, the eve of the closing of the wine saloon, and almost the eve of the New Year. 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. Of this reward, Ivy Matthews has received £437/10/-, and Olive Maddox £214/5/-. If we know all the services rendered by each, the positions should have been reversed, for it was Olive Maddox who first gave the information which put the police on what they, no doubt, still honestly believe was the right trail. But do we know all? It will be shown later that, at the time Colin Ross’s doom was sealed, we did not.