TWELVE-YEAR-OLD Alma Tirtschke lived in the nearby suburb of Jolimont with her 74-year-old grandmother. Alma’s aunt Maie Murdoch was paying the household a visit on the morning of Friday 30 December 1921, when old Mrs Tirtschke called Alma into the room—she was to collect a parcel from the butchers in Swanston Street, where Maie’s husband John worked as secretary. Every Friday afternoon the Murdochs collected a parcel of smallgoods from the butchers, but that day neither Maie nor her son Gordon could do the errand.
Maie gave the young girl instructions: ‘Ask Miss McAdam at the desk and give her this letter to be handed to Uncle John … take [the parcel] back to our flat at Masonic Chambers [31 Collins Street] … then come straight back to Grandma’s here—don’t wait for me.’ Then she gave Alma the tram fare for the errand. The schoolgirl had taken messages into the city on previous occasions and knew where the butcher’s shop was located, but because she attended school she hadn’t previously been sent on this errand. Now, however, it was school holidays.
Since Alma was going into the city, she would need to look presentable. Her school uniform, that of the Hawthorn West Central School, was the neatest and handiest set of clothes: a white cambric blouse with blue polka dots; a navy-blue serge box-pleated overall dress; long black knitted socks; black lace-up shoes; and her white straw school hat with a ribbon around its crown.
Alma left at 12.30pm, choosing to save her tram fare by walking the 1.5 kilometres into the city. She headed west through the Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens.
‘She came into the shop at about a quarter past one,’ remembered Alice McAdam, cashier at the butchers, Bennet and Woolcock’s. ‘She went upstairs to see if her uncle was in; but he was out. She … handed me a letter from her auntie … then asked me if the auntie’s parcel was ready.’ Alice McAdam told her that it would be a 20-minute wait. ‘The little girl waited for the parcel and after the lapse of about a quarter of an hour I gave it to her. That would be about half-past one …’
Smallgoods butcher Cyril Castles had prepared the brown paper parcel: ‘… 31.2 pounds of cooked corned beef, 2 pounds of Epping sausages, half a pound pork lunch and two bundles of frankfurts … The total weight … would be 8 to 9 pounds …’
‘[A]fter that we lost all trace of [Alma] …’ her uncle John Murdoch told the Herald. When she didn’t arrive as expected at the Murdochs’ flat in Collins Street, they thought she had gone home to her grandmother. When they discovered she was not there either, they searched for her and ‘… not being successful, we informed the police shortly after tea’.
The first policeman to whom Murdoch had spoken, on duty near the Treasury buildings in the city, suggested the girl might have gone down to one of the beaches on the tram, as it was a fine day. Murdoch knew that Alma didn’t have enough money for the tram ride all the way to the beach. He headed to the nearest police station—at the intersection of Little Bourke and Liverpool streets—where the official in charge phoned several hospitals inquiring about the missing child, but without success. The policeman advised the distraught relatives to go back to the flat, in case their niece had returned during their absence.
But there was no further news at Collins Street. Murdoch then went to the Russell Street police headquarters with Mrs Alice Scott, another of Alma’s aunts. They arrived between 7 and 8pm and were interviewed by an officer who, according to the family, treated the matter in ‘a casual and desultory way, as if he were on a frivolous inquiry’. He advised the anxious pair to return home and not to worry.
Murdoch told the officer that Alma was such a reliable young girl—that her disappearance indicated something serious had happened. Constable Ramsay, in charge of the Russell Street switchboard that evening, began another round of phone inquiries to the hospitals. He also promised that a description of the missing girl would be sent to all police stations immediately.
Returning home to Collins Street, the family, including Mrs Tirtschke, maintained an all-night vigil. Soon after midnight, while Mrs Tirtschke was sitting in the parlour with the light burning and the door open, two constables entered. ‘Have you found my girl?’ she inquired. They looked puzzled and said they had come in because it was their duty to investigate where doors were open late at night and premises lighted. These constables were on beat duty in the section through which the girl should have passed on her way to Masonic Chambers, yet in four and a half hours the report of Alma’s disappearance had not reached them.
Alma lies on a draining slab in a room of whitewashed walls. So extreme is the trauma of her death that blood vessels in her eyes have burst, staining them with blood. She is cold and rigor mortis has set in. The autopsy is performed by Crawford Henry Mollison, Coroner’s Surgeon since 1893, Lecturer in Forensic Medicine at the University of Melbourne and Pathologist to the Melbourne and Women’s hospitals. He notes for his report that the skin over the girl’s right eye is very black, probably from a blow. Her face is swollen, her eyelids congested. Her height is ‘4 feet, 10 inches’. Her weight will subsequently be given as ‘about 5 stone’. The hair of her head is loose and red in colour. Though her breasts are undeveloped, the child is approaching the age of puberty and there is fine down on her pubes.
‘In cases of asphyxiation, the lividity [congestion of blood vessels after death] is usually well-marked,’ Mollison wrote in his Lectures on Forensic Medicine (1921). ‘Lividity occurs in whichever portion of the body is dependent after death … As a general rule, if a body is found on its back and lividity is present on the front, the body has been interfered with after death.’
There is lividity on the right side of Alma’s face and the front of her chest, which additionally shows small haemorrhages on the skin. Because her body was found on its back but with post-mortem lividity on the front, Mollison knows she has been turned from lying on her front, probably during the time her body was lying in the lane.
Her fingernails are also livid, and he makes an examination of the gaps between the nails and flesh. He discovers nothing: she did not apparently scratch anything that might give a clue. With a magnifying lens Mollison also examines the external injuries to the girl’s throat. ‘In cases of throttling, you sometimes find fingermarks on the neck, scratches or abrasions, and sometimes little pieces of skin are found to have been taken out of the victim’s throat by the nails of the perpetrator.’ He notes the abrasions on the front and left side of the neck, the largest measuring 6.4 centimetres in length by 1.1 centimetres in width at its widest part. It extends across the midline from the left side. Below this mark is another 3.5 millimetres in width while above it, along the lower jaw, there is an abrasion 25.4 millimetres in length by 7 millimetres in width. He notes too, that there are some small bruises on the right side of the neck.
‘In cases of strangulation where a ligature has been used, the mark on the neck will be evident completely round the neck and there will commonly be ecchymoses, or signs of extravasation of blood into the tissues in the immediate neighbourhood of the mark, that is to say: bruising.’ Mollison notes that lower down on the girl’s throat there is a narrow pale mark which extends completely round her neck and measures 4.5 millimetres in width. ‘Sometimes suspicious looking marks on the neck may lead to an erroneous opinion that strangulation has occurred by means of a ligature.’ In his Lectures, Mollison warned specifically against misinterpreting marks caused after death by the pressure of a fold of skin or a tight collar. The test is to determine whether there is any bruising. With his blade, Mollison nicks the mark but finds only a watery secretion, no blood. He notes: ‘There is no bruising beneath this mark.’
Mollison inspects the thoracic organs and finds the lungs distended with dark fluid blood, consistent with asphyxiation. ‘In cases where death has been rapid and violent, you will probably find haemorrhage in the lungs and patches of air bubbles under the pleura from rupture of some of the air cells …’ He sees the spots of haemorrhage on the surfaces of her lungs, the bubbles of effused air.
He also notes that the girl’s hymen shows a recent tear in its lower margin, penetrating the wall of her vagina. He finds blood and mucus there and takes a sample for analysis. He notes the girl’s uterus is undeveloped. The wall of her bladder, he finds, is much thickened, suggesting that in life it would be a very irritable bladder.
In 1921 testing for alcohol was not an automatic procedure in post-mortems. Mollison had been given no directive that he should test for it, but when he opened the girl’s stomach, he noted there was ‘no abnormal or alcoholic odour about [its contents]’.
Mollison later tells detectives that the child had been dead for 12–16 hours, placing the time of death somewhere close to—or between—the hours of 6–10pm on the Friday night. When, as part of his report, Mollison states that he has found no evidence of semen, it is postulated by the detectives that some care has been taken to wash the girl: they had noticed a watery stain running down the girl’s thigh. Mollison agreed that some washing of the private parts seems likely: he is of the belief there should have been much greater evidence of blood loss from the genital injuries.