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

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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.”