WHY CONFESS TO MATTHEWS.
Let us take first the evidence of Ivy Matthews. Suppose Ross were guilty, why should he have made a confession to this woman? They were at daggers drawn. He had cast her out of his employment with terms of the deepest insult. They had fought bitterly, through their lawyers, almost up to the date of the tragedy. They had not seen one another, much less spoken to one another, between the date she was turned out of his employment and the 31st of December. Yet on the 31st of December, according to the Matthews evidence, we have them addressing one another as “Ive” and “Colin,” and we have Ross handing his life over to the unsafe keeping of this “woman scorned.”
The strongest appeals were made through the press for anyone who saw the child to inform the police. But Ivy Matthews, if her evidence is true, not only saw the child in the saloon on the Friday, but on the Saturday she had a full confession from Ross. Yet she remained silent, according to herself and the detectives, until she gave her evidence at the inquest. She gave no reason for keeping silence, and she gave two reasons for eventually speaking. At the inquest she said: “I pledged my word to Ross I would not give evidence against him,” but even if he had not been arrested, she said: “Perhaps my conscience might have made me tell.” “If some other man had been put in the dock on this charge,” she added, “I would have come up and said Ross is the guilty man.” On the trial, when asked why, if she had given her word, she had not kept it, she answered: “Would you expect me, a woman, to keep the secret?” But the fact is that she did keep the “secret” for over three weeks. At the inquest she said that the circumstance that the £1000 reward was offered should not be put to her, for, she said, “money and those sort of things hold no interest for me. I do not suppose I will get anything, and I do not want it.” But, again, the fact is that now she has been allotted £350 out of the £1000 Government reward offered, and £87/10/- out of the £250 offered by the “Herald.” This is not a negligible inducement for a lady who had done no work between November and the end of February.