THE SHEEN OF GOLDEN HAIRS.
Two other pieces of evidence, of still another class, were used against Ross. One was that hairs, which it was claimed were identified as Alma Tirtschke’s, were found on blankets taken from Ross’s house at Footscray on January 12; the other was that pieces of serge, which it was claimed were identified as being part of the child’s dress, were found on January 27 on the Footscray road, thus confirming the supposed confession to Harding.
The story of the hair is one of the most remarkable and one of the most unsatisfactory, in a case every feature of which is unsatisfactory. On January 3, the day Alma Tirtschke was buried, Constable Portingale went to the house where the body was lying, and with a pair of scissors he cut a lock of hair from the left side of her head, just over the ear, “and about six inches from her head.” When the detectives went to Colin Ross’s house to arrest him on January 12, nearly a fortnight after the tragedy, they took two blankets from a sofa in a vestibule. “Brophy and I,” said Piggott, “opened one of the brown blankets which were folded up. I turned the blanket back, and I could see the sheen of what appeared to be some golden coloured hair. I said to all present: ‘Fold those blankets, and carefully place them in the car; they must go to the Government Analyst.’” They did go to the Government Analyst next day. Where they were kept in the meantime was not disclosed on the trial, except that Ross, at about 2 o’clock on the afternoon of his arrest, saw them lying across the back of a chair in the clerk’s room of the Detective Office. The detectives, in the room of the Government Analyst (Mr. Price), next day, spread the “reddish brown blanket” over a wooden screen, and removed from it in his presence twenty-two hairs. Five hairs were taken from the other blanket by Mr. Price himself. Mr. Price then took ten or twelve hairs from the envelope containing Alma’s hair. They had an average length, he said, of 6½ inches, the longest of them being 9 inches. Let it be remembered that these were cut 6 inches from the girl’s head. He then took the twenty-two hairs, and found they, too, averaged 6½ inches, but the longest of them were 15, 12, 10, 9 inches, down to 2½ inches.
“They were not identical in colour with the hairs in the envelope,” said Mr. Price; “they were of a light auburn colour. They were not a deep red; they were of a light red colour. They were not cut-off hairs; they had fallen out, or had been taken from the scalp somehow or other. They did not appear to have been forcibly removed. One had a bulb root, but the others did not show the presence of any bulbous portion or root, as they would if dragged direct from the scalp. I came to the conclusion that they were hairs about to be cast off in the ordinary process of nature.”
“If hairs were cast off,” Mr. Price was asked, “would there be any distinction in their colour as compared with hair that was actually growing?” “Well, I cannot say that directly,” he replied, “but the conclusion I formed, as regards the hairs I found on the blanket, was that they did not come from the frontal portion; that they had not been exposed much to the light; that they came from the back portion of the head, and that that is the reason why their colour was not as deep as those on the front portion.” The two sets of hair, he said, were “very similar.” Microscopically, they agreed, because there was a kind of coarseness about them, and when treated with caustic soda it tended to bring out the pith portion of the hair, “and that pith was identical with the hairs on the blanket.” The five hairs from the grey blanket, Mr. Price said, were “similar in colour” to the hairs on the reddish brown blanket, but that was all he had to say about them. When being re-examined, he said that his reason for thinking the front and back of the hair would differ was that in one head he had tested “the frontal portion was quite red, and the hair from the back of the head quite dark.”
On cross-examination, Mr. Price admitted that it was “several years” since he had last made an examination of hairs from any woman’s head. “It does not often come under my notice,” he added. He had made very few such examinations in his life. Not only did the hairs from the child’s head and the hairs from the blankets differ in colour, he said, but they differed in diameter, and it was possible, but not probable, that the hairs on the blankets may have come from another head. He had examined many hairs since he had conducted this particular examination, and he had, in the course of his examination, found some hairs that were as like Alma Tirtschke’s as the hairs on the blankets.
It will be shown later that Mr. Price might, on the facts which he deposed to, have been called as a powerful witness for the defence. Yet in the atmosphere that prevailed, it seemed to be assumed that his evidence advanced the case for the prosecution.