The recent arrest of a man who spent almost four decades in a Canadian prison for strangling a Victoria woman stems from an incident where he allegedly pulled out a knife and threatened to stab a woman and her three teenage daughters who live with him, according to a police report.
Tommy Ross Jr., 60, was arrested in Sacramento, California, on Sunday.
One of the girls held a three-month-old infant in her arms during an argument that became physical, according to statements in the report from the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Department.
The woman, her three daughters and the baby live with Ross and his 86-year-old mother in a house, the report said.
Ross was convicted of the 1978 murder of Janice Forbes at her Queens Avenue apartment in Victoria and sentenced to life in prison. In November 2016, Ross was released on full parole and deported to the U.S., where he was immediately arrested at the border and returned to Clallam County to face a charge of killing 20-year-old Janet Bowcutt in Port Angeles in 1978 — a few weeks before Forbes was killed.
Ross was released from custody in Oregon in November 2018, after a Clallam County judge dismissed the first-degree murder charge on the grounds that his right to a speedy trial was violated. He went to Sacramento to live with his mother.
The Clallam County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office filed an appeal of the decision to dismiss the first-degree murder charge in the Port Angeles case. On Tuesday, prosecutor John Troberg, who has worked on the case for years, said arguments had been made and the office is waiting for a decision on the appeal.
Meantime, police were called to the house about 3:30 p.m. on Sunday after a child called 911, saying: “Tommy had a knife.”
The call was incomplete, said the police report. But police received another call from the house that Ross had a knife. He slapped one of the children and threatened them with the knife, the sheriff’s report said.
Six police officers who went to the scene ordered everyone out of the house. The woman and the three girls were separated while police took their statements.
One girl told police that Ross had confronted her mother because one of her sisters had borrowed $100 from him and hadn’t paid it back. The 16-year-old said he started yelling at her mother.
“I was standing next to my mother holding the baby when Uncle Tommy pulled a knife out from his back pocket and made threats to stab all of us in the house. Uncle Tommy pushed my sister away and showed us the knife and said he will stab us. We were all scared and ran away from him … I was scared for my life. I thought he would stab all of us,” the girl told police.
Ross’s mother, Wilma Colemon, told police she was asleep at the time of the incident. “I don’t know nothing about no knife. This is crazy. What are they saying? Whatever they are saying is a lie,” Colemon is quoted as saying in the police report.
Ross has been charged with endangering the life or health of a child, threatening to commit a crime resulting in grievous bodily injury or death, battery, threatening with a weapon and destroying wireless communications to prevent a call for assistance. His bail has been set at $50,000.
Ross is also considered a suspect in the strangulation murder of 36-year-old Bethel Wooldridge in Los Angeles in November 1977.
On Tuesday, when Wooldridge’s daughter Feryne Wooldridge, now 56, found out about Ross’s arrest, she called the Sacramento prosecutor’s office to warn them who they were dealing with. “I’m just trying to find a way to keep this animal in his cage,” said Wooldridge, who called the Times Colonist from her home in Vancouver, Washington.
She said she had just turned 15 when she came home and found her mother’s body in the bathtub. “Now he’s back in jail, the prosecutor really needs to pay attention to who she has there. I told them: ‘You let this guy walk, somebody’s going to get hurt. Beyond getting hurt, somebody’s going to die.’ ”
Wooldridge has also been trying to contact cold-case detectives in Los Angeles investigating her mother’s murder.
“I want his face out there. I don’t want another woman to let him in and be another one of his victims,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion.
