“Good-bye, my darling mother and brothers. On this, the last night of my life, I want to tell you that I love you all more than ever. Do not fear for to-morrow, for I know God will be with me. Try to forgive 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. His firmness or obstinacy—it has been called indifferently either—has been criticised as suggesting a curious nature. But Ross and his conduct are only inscrutable if one starts with the assumption that he was a guilty man. Concede that he was innocent, and everything that he did, or said, or failed to say, not merely ceases to be inscrutable, but becomes quite natural. It is that, amongst other things, which has caused the widespread feeling that his life has been “sworn away by desperate people.”
IS THE MYSTERY SOLVED?
If Ross is innocent, the mystery of the death of Alma Tirtschke remains. It was, however, no part of Ross’s duty to solve it. In this connection it is doubtful whether sufficient attention has been ever paid to the evidence tendered by Joseph Thomas Graham. He is a cab driver by occupation, middle-aged, respectable, intelligent, and thoroughly level-headed. On Friday afternoon, December 30, at about half-past 3, he was in Little Collins Street, nearly opposite the Adam and Eve lodging-house, when his attention was arrested by a series of heartrending screams coming apparently from a young girl. They became higher in pitch as they succeeded one another, to the number of five or six, and then they died away. They were so noticeable that Graham and a man on the opposite side of the street both stopped and listened, but as the screams faded out each man went about his business. On or about Saturday, January 7, Graham saw a notice in the paper saying that, as the girl had been throttled, she was probably throttled to stop her screams, and asking anyone who had heard screams to communicate with the Detective Office. He went on the Monday to the Detective Office and reported what he had heard, but his reception does not appear to have been sympathetic. Graham was never called at the inquest. The police explanation is that he was not sure whether it was Thursday or Friday that he heard the screams, and that, in any case, he placed them as coming from higher up Little Collins Street. Neither explanation can be accepted, for Graham was absolutely definite as to his every movement on the Friday, and absolutely definite as to time and place. An absurd story was told by Detective Brophy about making inquiries in the neighbourhood, and learning of some child that had a reputation for screaming, as though an intelligent man could not tell the difference between the bad-tempered screaming of a naughty child and the agonised death screams of an adolescent girl. When Ross was condemned Graham went to his solicitor and repeated his story. That was the first the defence knew of it. The Full Court heard his evidence, but it declined to allow a jury to hear it.
Whether it would have had any effect on the jury can now be only a matter of conjecture. There is this to be said of it, however, that it fits in with the medical evidence, for it suggests a struggle, and the medical evidence of the abrasions suggests a struggle. It fits in, also, with all we know of Alma Tirtschke’s nature. The fact must be faced that, if the Matthews confession is true, the girl was not what her relatives believed her. She boldly went to Ross, and boldly remained in Ross’s saloon for three hours, like a pert and forward youngster, not to put it any further. If it comes to a choice, most people will prefer to think of the child as good and innocent and retiring, rather than to accept anything to the contrary which comes unsupported from the lips of Ivy Matthews. If the Harding confession is accepted the matter is very little better, for you then have the girl walking deliberately back into the Arcade after she was seen in Little Collins Street by the Youngs, accepting the invitation of a stranger to come into his wine saloon, and taking wine at his hands—wine of which no trace could be found when the stomach was opened less than eighteen hours afterwards. 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. If anyone would like to see one other improbability in connection with the Crown case against Ross, he should visit the Little Collins Street entrance of the Arcade by night, and ask himself whether it is likely that any man would carry the dead body of a murdered child such a long distance up a brilliantly lighted thoroughfare even at 1 o’clock in the morning.
