UNREAL city. Melbourne. For a moment poised between the worlds of dark and light.
Above the rise of Eastern Hill, first light peaks; extends a blade that glows along the steel of tram tracks on the neighbouring rise of Batman’s Hill; makes visible the drifting smoke of early fires. It is 5 am, 31 December 1921.
A father and daughter make their way through dust and shadow. Sometimes, like figments, they vanish altogether in the darker recess of a lane or doorway, emerging into light again like apparitions with an elemental chink of glass. They are bottle-ohs, each with a hessian sack, out hunting.
Fragments of light begin to penetrate their search. Father and daughter, slowly becoming possessed of shadows as the sun rises above the fences and rooftops. Their course is listing easterly; south-easterly. It takes them through the transverse streets and little streets, as gradually they ascend the northwestern slope of Eastern Hill.
On some despairing days of cold and blight, racked by the jim-jams, by the shakes, and losing track of time, it has seemed to Henry Errington that this would be his lot forever. That this journey was some kind of punishment enforced on him by things he’d done or not done in the past and that he, as though he were a prisoner in his own life, would have to walk these back streets and the lanes without remission always; and with his daughter Eva, straggling ever just behind. There were times when, turning the next corner or entering the next right of way, it would not have surprised him to see his own ghost and that of his daughter coming toward him like images in a mirror, as though his life or his daughter’s life or the very times themselves were a matter for such reflection.
At this juncture, as he winds his way through city lanes with his daughter, Errington is spatially and temporally fixed by documents recording the imminent event awaiting him; an event he will, like a needle bearing the resonance of his name, etch into the city’s record. For he will bring the city news of itself beyond its capacity to anticipate or imagine, imparting to Melbourne such a vision of its streets as the streets hardly understand.
A stenographer will later smooth his enunciation:
At 6 am on the 31st December 1921 I was in Gun Alley and I saw the body of a dead child. The body was lying quite nude on its back on the stones. That was in an easement off Gun Alley … I had my eldest daughter with me and she was just coming into the lane at the time I saw the body. I put up my hand to stop her coming any further. I brought her back to Little Collins Street and I went down to the intersection of Collins Street and Russell Street to see if I could see any police. I could not see any, so I went to Watkins’ Butcher Shop and got them to phone headquarters.
No case delivered more lasting notoriety than Piggott’s investigation of the rape and murder of schoolgirl Alma Tirtschke, whose body was found in Gun Alley on the morning of New Year’s Eve 1921. The most serious investigation of its time, it publicly tested the Lawson government’s resolve to fight crime and risked exposing decades of government neglect of police resources. ‘The detectives and police force of Melbourne are on their trial,’ editorialised The Argus, ‘and no matter how exacting they may find the ordeal they must realise that the public will not tolerate failure on their part.’
Alma Tirtschke, twelve, the Gun Alley murder victim.
Backed by a £1250 reward for information, Piggott located two witnesses willing to testify that a saloonkeeper, Colin Campbell Ross, had confessed the crime to them. Ross was arrested on 12 January 1922. Government analyst Charles Price matched hair found by Piggott on Ross’s blankets with a sample of Tirtschke’s hair. At Ross’s trial, Price stated that the two sets of hairs were ‘derived from the scalp of one and the same person’. The alleged confessional evidence was inconsistent and contradictory, but the evidence of the hair independently and objectively confirmed for the jury that Alma Tirtschke had been in the presence of Colin Campbell Ross. On 25 February—forty-five days after his arrest—Ross was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death. His applications for leave to appeal were dismissed. Although Ross consistently denied making any confession, denied any association with Tirtschke, and strenuously protested his innocence, he was hanged on 24 April 1922, fifty-seven days after his conviction.
Piggott’s forethought in taking a sample of Tirtschke’s hair prior to her burial, and his subsequent observation of the hairs on Ross’s blankets, showed a breathtaking application of foresight and detection ability. It was the first time comparisons of hair obtained a conviction in an Australian court and subsequently gave an impetus to the presentation of scientific evidence generally, conferring on it a previously unrealised legitimacy and credibility. To this day the case of the King v Colin Campbell Ross is widely regarded as the foundation case for the development of Australian forensic medicine.
‘A most intelligent detective’, the now-Superintendent Bannon wrote on Piggott’s service record. ‘Did great service to the country for the way he handled the Ross case.’
‘A capable man,’ wrote Superintendent Potter, ‘deserving of special promotion.’