The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell RossBrennan, T. C. (Thomas Cornelius)
History
The Gun Alley Tragedy: Record of the Trial of Colin Campbell Ross
Brennan, T. C. (Thomas Cornelius)
Ross, Colin Campbell, 1892-1922 -- Trials, litigation, etc.; Trials (Murder) -- Australia -- Victoria -- Melbourne
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.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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