This crime caught the public attention and horrified people
all over Melbourne, Victoria and the nation.
The
trial of the man who would be hanged for this crime, Collin Campbell Ross, was
a first in many different ways. It was the first and only time in centuries
that a man would be executed based almost entirely on three contradictory
hearsay confessions. It would be the first time the Australian High Court heard
a criminal appeal regarding a death sentence. It would be the first time
scientific evidence comparing hair samples was used in court to such a degree
and correspondingly, it may be the first time that scientific evidence overstated
its own strength, provided certainty where none was to be had and as such, condemned
an innocent man to death.
The case is a champion case against the death penalty. The
way Mr Ross was hanged together with the idea that he was almost certainly
innocent provide fertile grounds for anyone seeking to oppose capital
punishment. The incompetence of the hangman meant that the noose did not
tighten enough so as to knock the prisoner unconscious, yet had the knot have
worked properly, it would have decapitated the prisoner given the drop greatly
exceeded the maximum eight feet as dictated by the Home Office. This meant the
prisoner suffocated to death, taking anywhere up to twenty minutes to die.
Mr Ross was almost certainly innocent. The crime was
calculated and smart; leaving no clues, witnesses or evidence behind. Mr Ross
was generally a hot-tempered and emotive thug, known to police for threatening
his former girlfriend with a gun if she didn’t marry him and setting up the
violent robberies of drunken customers. He was not the calculating and
refrained type. The real killer was.
The scientific evidence was, like it is today, an
overstatement of the abilities of scientists to explain events. Hair samples
pulled from two blankets at the prisoner’s home were identified under oath as
belonging to the victim. No such correlation ought to have been found. Re-examination
of this evidence in 1999 found that the hair samples do not belong to the victim.
Yet in court, this evidence convinced a jury of an infallibility of the Crown’s
case and British Justice in general. As it is still today, expert witnesses
presenting scientific evidence mislead a jury by failing to admit their own
inadequacies.
The main evidence of the Crown in convicting Mr Ross was the
testimony of three career criminals, the main one of which had a previous
hostile relationship with the accused. Two of the three testimonies give
detailed accounts of a confession from Mr Ross, the third partially
corroborates it. Mr Ross went to the gallows pleading his innocence. 86 years
later, his name has been officially pardoned of any wrongdoing in the rape and
murder.
The detailed accounts of this case, firstly by defence
barrister TC Brennan in 1922 and more recently by Morgan (2005) identify many
problems with the case that should have lead to many, many reasonable doubts
about Mr Ross’s guilt. Morgan, in
interviewing family, goes on to identify the then husband of the vicitm’s
cousin at the time potentially attacking Alma’s sister Viola and theorises that
this man is both clever and capable of the crime. Little is known of him, but
he does seem to fit the bill as one who ought to have been questioned had it
not been for the police dogmatically thinking that they had their man.
This story may well be incorrect too. After more than 90
years, it is hard to prove too much and the culprit, like Alma and Mr Ross,
would now certainly be dead. It presents an interesting conundrum though. On
the one hand, if you believe Morgan’s account, or similar, you have to accept
that this rape and murder essentially happened inside the sanctity of the
family: the one true security that we all pretend to have. The victim’s sister Viola recalls having
nightmares about her cousin’s then husband seeking her out during the night and
laments that these are not dreams, they are memories. Many witnesses to the
last hours of the victim’s life recall her looking scared and over her shoulder
and being followed suspiciously too closely by a man. Viola also tells of
speaking with her grandmother about it, only to be disbelieved and silenced
about it. So this, or a similar story like it is one idea.
On the other hand is the story that the courts and the jury
accepted as the truth. Ivy Matthews, a disgruntled former employee of Mr Ross’s
who was suing him and his brother for lost income and partnership in their
business gave an account to the police, the Coronial Inquest and to the Supreme
Court about Mr Ross confessing to her and of her directly witnessing the victim
being given drinks and accommodation in Mr Ross’s wine saloon. The other testimony,
from Sydney John Harding tells the story of Mr Ross apparently confessing and
telling the whole story to him while they were both in prison. It is now known,
and more than likely was known at the time, that Ms Matthews lied about her
age, name, marital status, occupation and history to police, the Coronial
Inquest and the Supreme Court. Mr
Harding had a long history of criminal activity including theft, robbery and
fraud. It is a true point to state that the only things that these two accounts
agree on regard information that the police already had known from external
sources. On times, places and sequences of events, these two testimonies
contradict each other in most other detail.
The one exception to this is that they partially agree on,
is the actions of the victim leading up to her rape and murder. Both claim to
have seen the victim being liquored up by Mr Ross in his wine saloon. Mr
Harding’s recounting of Mr Ross’s supposed confession claims an unbelievable
slander on the victim, painting the twelve year old schoolgirl as an alcoholic
slut. Tales of the victim being of an age to want the attention of men
and approaching Mr Ross, requesting an alcoholic drink underpin the stories of
both Ms Matthews and Mr Harding. It is the victim’s wish to be a part of the
goings on of a wine saloon and to draw the attention and affection of the men
inside this saloon necessarily underpin of the story that executed Mr Ross. The
victim is painted as, at the least in part, being responsible for her own
undoing. This is a stark contrast to the opinions of her family, friends and
teachers who all paint her as a polite, quiet and smart young girl.
In the testimony of Mr Ross at his trial for murder, the
jury were told a third viewpoint: that he was being framed by the police who
were angry with him for not being able to pin a shooting and robbery on him
previously. While the investigating officers in the murder case had not been a
part of the robbery investigation, in Mr Ross’s point of view, the police all
acted together as one, corrupt and vindictive entity.
The point of all of this is that the jury were left with the
decision between understanding that the accused had been set up, framed to hang
for a crime he did not commit; at the very least, that a portion of the
evidence was tampered or helped by police and the alternative; that the victim
was brutally and viciously attacked, from within her own family without warning,
rhyme or reason.
How much of a factor in Mr Ross’s conviction was the point
that for him to be guilty, so must the victim? At least to some degree, the
victim allowed herself to be in Mr Ross’s company, and that of his wine saloon’s
clientele. This paints the picture of a society where we can keep our pure and
sweet young children safe from harm’s way. It is only when they voluntarily put
themselves in harm’s way, by a certain moral dubiousness, that bad things happen.
The members of the jury were able to compartmentalise the horror of what
happened by externalising themselves and society from what happened. They put
this event behind a locked door, of which, the guilty do not have a key.
Then there is the point of view of the trial judge, who ought
to have been a lot more battle hardened from the horrors of the world from his
days on the bench. He ought to have realised that a jury could not convict Mr
Ross of murder on the testimony of Ms Matthews and Mr Harding as, given both
retold a story of accidental death, it could not have been constructed as willful murder.
There is one story about a twelve year old girl who
approaches a stranger in order to get a drink and/or be noticed by men. The
other story tells of a girl who is raped and murdered by a family member in the
situation where the family ought to have known due to the accusations of the
victim’s sister about her cousin’s husband. At the very least, with twenty-twenty
hindsight, there ought to have been a raised concern about a potential risk
that faced the girls. Is it the case that the jury chose the story that held
the wolves at bay? The story where the wolves were behind the gate, and it was
the victim, in crossing that gate who created an extraordinary event. This is
so much more calming than the idea that there isn’t a gate and the wolves own
the whole place. People will not only die for this convenient fiction, it
appears they will kill for it too.
