The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross

By T. C. Brennan

The title of the book explains it all - for this is in an account of what was called The Gun Alley Murder. The incident is precipitated by the rape and murder of 12-year-old Alma Tirtschke in Melbourne, Australia, in 1921. She was a schoolgirl who attended Hawthorn West High School and had last been seen alive close to a drinking establishment, the Australian Wine Saloon; under these circumstances her murder caused a sensation. In the 2000s, the case has become well known as a miscarriage of justice, since Colin Campbell Eadie Ross, the Australian wine-bar owner convicted of the murder of a child was executed despite evidence of his innocence - a perspective that this book's author concurs with, even though it was published in 1922.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Good Press
• Release date: Nov 5, 2021
• ISBN: 4066338081926

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T. C. Brennan

The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross

Published by Good Press, 2022

[e-mail]

EAN 4066338081926

Table of Contents

PREFACE.

PART I. ⸻ INTRODUCTORY.

THE APPELLATE COURTS.

WHY THE JURY MISJUDGED.

PART II. ⸻ THE CROWN CASE.

ROSS INTERVIEWED.

THE TRIAL.

THE BLOODY BOTTLE.

OLIVE MADDOX’S EVIDENCE.

THE MATTHEWS CONFESSION.

HARDING’S STORY.

DUNSTAN’S CORROBORATION.

ROSS’S MOVEMENTS.

THE SHEEN OF GOLDEN HAIRS.

THE FINDING OF THE SERGE.

THE MEDICAL EVIDENCE.

DETECTIVE BROPHY’S BLUNDER.

PART III. ⸻ ANALYSIS OF THE EVIDENCE.

WHY CONFESS TO MATTHEWS.

CHANGES IN MATTHEWS’S EVIDENCE.

POWERS OF INVENTIVENESS.

OLIVE MADDOX TESTED.

HARDING’S COCK-AND-BULL STORY.

CONFLICTS IN THE CONFESSIONS.

A MODEL LODGING-HOUSE KEEPER.

CONFESSIONS COMPARED.

WAS THERE INSIDE KNOWLEDGE?

AN EXPERT ON HAIR.

A MISSING LINK.

THE GIRL’S ATTIRE.

THE LIGHT IN THE SALOON.

POINTS THE JURY MISSED.

PART IV. ⸻ FRESH FACTS.

HALLIWELL’S STRANGE STORY.

MADDOX IN THE SALOON.

OTHER NEW WITNESSES.

THE CROWN’S NEW EVIDENCE.

PART V. ⸻ THE DEFENCE.

ROSS IN THE BOX.

STRONG CORROBORATION.

AN UNBROKEN PHALANX.

ROSS’S FIRMNESS.

ROSS AND HIS FAMILY.

IS THE MYSTERY SOLVED?

APPENDIX.

PREFACE.

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No trial in Australian history has created such a public sensation as did the trial in Melbourne of Colin Campbell Ross for the murder of the little girl, Alma Tirtschke, on the afternoon of December 30th, 1921. It was presided over by Mr. Justice Schutt and lasted for more than five days. Mr. H. C. G. Macindoe conducted the case for the Crown and Mr. G. A. Maxwell appeared, with Mr. T. C. Brennan as junior, for the defence. For many reasons, it is desirable that the proceedings at the trial should be placed on record. It is not merely that the story itself—a veritable page out of real life—makes tragically interesting reading. The nature of the evidence was so unusual, and the character of the chief Crown witnesses was so remarkable, that it is entirely in the interests of justice that the whole proceedings should be reviewed in the calm light of day.

While the trial was on, and for weeks before it was on, anything in the nature of a dispassionate review was impossible. Public opinion was inflamed as it has not been inflamed within the memory of this generation. Ross was tried for his life in an atmosphere charged and overcharged with suspicion. Whether guilty or innocent, he entered the dock in circumstances under which few men are compelled to enter it. As everyone in Australia knows, he was condemned almost entirely on the strength of two confessions he was alleged to have made. It would probably be admitted that, in the absence of those alleged confessions—which he strenuously denied ever having made—no jury could have convicted him. It is doubtful, indeed, if without them there was a case for the jury. But did he actually say what either the woman Ivy Matthews or the man Harding declared he said? The verdict of the jury does not supply an answer. The question remains unanswered, and the doubt in regard to it constitutes the enduring mystery of the Ross trial.

All students of criminology—and all friends of truth—are under a debt of gratitude to Mr. Brennan for the cool, precise and perfectly dispassionate manner in which he has, inter alia, analysed the statements of these two people, Harding and Matthews. He has placed the salient features side by side. There seems no escape from the irresistible logic of his conclusion—that Matthews and Harding, knowing certain facts about Ross from an outside source, were compelled to fill in the gaps in their own way. They could not have been drawing from the one alleged source when they differed so absolutely as to the essential circumstances of the crime.

As Mr. Brennan points out, he is not undertaking to prove that Ross was innocent of the Gun Alley murder. Anyone who reads his closely reasoned pages can have little doubt that such is his opinion. But his task is simpler. It is to show that Ross should not have been convicted on the evidence, that the evidence for the Crown was, to a large extent, contradictory—far more so than in the heat and passion of the trial was allowed to appear. He is able to go even further than that, and to show that a great part of it, so far from being cumulative on other parts, as the jury may have naturally believed, was really destructive of those other parts.

He has performed his task with care and discretion. No one who reads Mr. Brennan’s review of the case can doubt that he has thrown off the role of advocate—ably as he sustained it at the trial and on the two appeals—and is only anxious to arrive at the truth. There should be no other desire in the minds of any reader; and the people of Australia, who cannot possibly have followed the case with the care that Mr. Brennan has followed it, will appreciate both the value of his work and the deep interest of the story that he tells. Whether they think the mystery of the Gun Alley murder was cleared up by the jury’s verdict, or whether it remains a mystery is for them to say.

A. J. BUCHANAN.

Selborne Chambers, Melbourne.

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PART I.

⸻

INTRODUCTORY.

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On the early morning of the last day of the year 1921 the dead body of a little girl of 12, named Alma Tirtschke, was found by a bottle-gatherer in an L-shaped right-of-way off Little Collins Street. She had been violated and strangled, and her nude body had been placed in Gun Alley.

On the morning of Saturday, February 25th, 1922, Colin Campbell Ross, a young man of 28, was found guilty of her murder, and on the morning of April 24th he was executed in the Melbourne Gaol. Face to face with his Maker, as he himself put it, he asserted his innocence on the scaffold in terms of such peculiar solemnity as to intensify the feeling, already widely prevalent, that an innocent man had been done to death.

In the eyes of officialdom the mystery had been cleared up. Detectives walk the streets with the consciousness that they are the men who cleared it up and brought the murderer to the gallows. The list of persons who shared in the reward offered by the Government, with the amounts allotted to each, has been published.[1] It does nothing to allay the sense of public uneasiness to reflect that by far the greater part of the reward has gone to men and women whose society would be shunned by every decent person. That in itself should be sufficient to raise doubt. But there are graver reasons for thinking that justice may have miscarried in this extraordinary case. The purpose of this short review is to show how strong are the grounds for the prevalent feeling of uneasiness, and how much reason there is for believing that the life of Colin Campbell Ross was, as he himself asserted as he went to the cells with the death sentence ringing in his ears, Sworn away by desperate people.

Why, it may be asked, rake over dying embers and fan again into flame a fire that is dying down? Is it not better that the Ross case should sink, with Ross, into oblivion? Even if he were now proved innocent, it may be said, he cannot be recalled to life, and no good purpose can be served by reviving the case. But in the first place, there are hundreds of people in whom the memory of the case is still quite fresh. With them it is not a question of reviving, but of discussing. And even though Ross be dead, death is not the end of all things. In Ross’s case it is a small matter compared to the dishonor associated with it. Ross has left behind him a mother and brothers who bear his name, and for a generation to come the name of a Ross will never be mentioned without recalling that particular bearer of it who died an ignominious death for a revolting murder. If all the truth has not come out, the community owes it to those of his blood left behind him that it shall be brought out. It is largely at the solicitation of those bearers of the name that this review is being written. But the interests of abstract justice also require something. Ross was condemned on evidence of a kind which puts the case in a class by itself. It has no parallel in the annals of British criminal jurisprudence. A perusal of this review, whether or not it satisfies the reader of the innocence of Ross, will, at least, satisfy him of the need for a close scrutiny of evidence of this kind; and future juries will be reminded of the necessity of never being stampeded by newspaper or popular clamor into preconceived ideas of the guilt of any man, and of ever being on their guard against perjury and conspiracy, even though they are not satisfied that either were present in this case.

THE APPELLATE COURTS.

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At the outset it is desirable to correct a wrong impression which, very widely felt, has tended to allay the feeling of uneasiness in the public mind. Ross, as is well known, appealed to the Full Court of Victoria, which dismissed the appeal. Thence he carried his case to the High Court of Australia, which refused, one learned Judge dissenting, to interfere with the decision of the Supreme Court. From this fact it has been assumed that two Appellate Courts, consisting of three Judges and five Judges respectively, have endorsed the verdict of the jury. Nothing could be further from the facts. Substantially what the Appellate Courts were asked to say was (1) that there was no evidence on which a jury could rightly convict Ross; (2) that the Judge had failed to direct the jury properly on various points enumerated. To take the second point first, the Courts both declined to say that there was any non-direction, though Mr. Justice Isaacs, in the High Court, held that on one point the Judge had failed to direct the jury properly.

As to the first point, the position is this: An Appellate Court will not interfere with the finding of a jury if there is any evidence on which a jury could find as it did. It will not weigh the evidence to see on which side the balance lies. That is the function of the jury, and the Court will not usurp that function.

That position was made quite clear in the judgments of both Courts. In the Supreme Courts the Chief Justice of Victoria said: There was abundance of evidence, if the jury believed it, as the jury apparently did believe it, to support their finding, and we need add nothing more upon that point. In the High Court, the Chief Justice of Australia, speaking for the majority of their Honours, dealt with the same point thus: As we have before indicated, there was, in our opinion, abundant evidence, if the jury believed it, to sustain their verdict. But we desire to add that, if there be evidence on which reasonable men could find a verdict of guilty, the determination of the guilt or innocence of the prisoner is a matter for the jury, and for them alone. And with their decision, based on such evidence, no Court or Judge has any right or power to interfere. It is of the highest importance that the grave responsibility which rests on jurors in this respect should be thoroughly understood and always maintained. Even Mr. Justice Isaacs, who dissented from the majority on a point not material to this review, was quite at one with his learned brothers on this matter. The ground upon which, said his Honour, I agree to a rejection of all the other grounds brought forward by Mr. Brennan is that, however powerful the considerations he advanced, however tainted and discrepant and improbable any of the facts relied on by the Crown might be, that was all matter for the jury alone, and I have no right to express or to form any opinion about them in favour of the prisoner.

No Court and no Judge has, therefore, ever pronounced judgment on the correctness or incorrectness of the jury’s verdict. All that they have said is that there was some evidence on which the jury could find as it did, and that that being so, the responsibility for the verdict must rest with the tribunal which the law has set up to pronounce upon