THE FINDING OF THE SERGE.
The finding of some pieces of serge on the Footscray Road, on the 26th or 27th day of January, was also relied on strongly by the Crown. Mrs. Violet May Sullivan was on the Footscray Road on January 26, and she saw certain strips of serge on the left-hand side going to Kensington. She didn’t pick them up. On the next day she read, in the alleged confession to Harding, that Ross had said that he had strewn the serge of the girl’s dress on the Footscray Road, and Mrs. Sullivan went back to the road, and on the opposite side to where she had seen it on the previous day she saw a roll of serge. She picked it up and handed it to the local police. One piece she left at home. The serge was produced in court. One piece was fairly large, in no sense a strip, looked quite new and fresh, and bore no signs, as Mr. Justice Isaacs indicated in his High Court judgment, of having lain on a dusty and busy road for nearly four weeks. Of the rest, one was a strip of a quite different texture, and looked much older than the piece. There were also a couple of other fragments. None of them appeared to have been four weeks in the dust. The serge that she had seen on the first day, Mrs. Sullivan said, resembled the fragments, but were not like the larger piece, so that, whether it was the same bundle she saw on both days does not appear. When Mrs. Murdoch, the girl’s aunt, was in the box, the serge was handed to her for identification, and she was asked to say what she had to say about it. “It is very similar to the serge she had on on that day,” said the witness. “All of it?” she was asked. “That has nothing to do with it, I should say,” said the witness, discarding the larger piece. The three other pieces, she said, were “very similar” to the material of which the girl’s dress was composed. When asked further, she said she recognised a row of stitching on two of the pieces. “Do you recognise it as a row of stitching you did yourself?” she was asked, and she answered: “No; I fancy the stitching there is from the old stuff I made up. I believe that is the stitching. It did have stitching on.” She remembered the old stitching, because she had had some difficulty in ironing it out. She made the dress out of old material. It was box-pleated, and the stuff she had in her hand looked to be box-pleated, but there was a portion missing.
Summarised, then, Mrs. Murdoch’s identification amounted to this, that she remembered there was some stitching on the dress that she had made up, and there was also a little bit of stitching on two of the three pieces handed to her which she “fancied” was the same stitching, while the fourth piece handed to her, which was part of the same bundle, “had nothing to do with it.” It was on such “evidence” that Colin Ross was hanged!
It will be remembered that Harding’s account of what Ross said was that he “tore the clothing into strips and bits, and distributed them along the road.” Yet we are asked to believe that, by some operation of the laws of cohesion peculiar to the Footscray Road, four or more of them had rolled themselves together by the 26th, and that they had succeeded by the next day in crossing the road and joining up with another and dissimilar piece of blue serge.
On January 23 the police knew that Ross was supposed to have said that he scattered the fragments of the girl’s dress along the Footscray Road. If this could have been verified it would have clinched the case against Ross, for it would have established beyond question the fact of some confession. Every effort should have been directed to clearing up this point. The road Ross said he took was clearly indicated—so clearly that it showed beyond question that Harding knew the locality well. If that is doubted, let anyone who does not know the locality try to describe Ross’s alleged route after reading the description once. If one knows the locality, he has a mental picture, as the words are spoken, which he can reproduce. If he does not, the words are words merely, and cannot be repeated without rehearsal. But the point is that, on getting this alleged confession, the detectives should have got half a dozen men to take the road, or the two roads if necessary, in a face in order to discover the serge. It was so plain, Mrs. Sullivan said, that “it could not be missed.” The local police did not find it, the detective’s agents did not find it, but a casual wayfarer stumbles across it twice, because “you could not miss it.” Piggott’s answers to questions were that, on learning of the confession, “we took certain steps,” and “gave certain directions”; and his explanation of the failure to find the serge was that his men searched the wrong road! One would have liked to have heard the comments of, say, the late Mr. Justice Hodges, on this extraordinary admission.