Chapter V: Preface: XI (4)

Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, who had been looking out on Pearl Street from a third-floor window squarely in the middle of the Rice & Hutchins building, said she saw “two men lying on the ground and one man, a short dark man, standing on the ground facing me with his head up, holding a revolver in his hands.” She was only at the window “about two seconds,” having collapsed when the man waved the gun at her, and she did not see the automobile traveling down Pearl Street. As she later put it, “I sort of fainted away.”

Mary E. Splaine, a Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, was working in her corner office on the second floor of Hampton House that afternoon. Just after three o’clock, she had watched Parmenter and Berardelli walk up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2, and had returned to her desk when they passed out of her line of vision. When she heard the shots, which she first thought were automobile backfires, she returned to the windows which opened on Pearl Street. She saw a black automobile driving slowly in the direction of the railroad tracks. It crossed the tracks and, as it passed under her window, she saw one of its passengers leaning out of the car, a man she later described as “an active looking man.”

Miss Splaine did not see the actual shooting but twenty-two-year-old Lewis Pelser, a Rice & Hutchins employee, claimed that he did. He was working on the main floor of the factory building when he heard the first shots. He had rushed to the window, looked out and, as he put it, “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow. It was the last shot. He put four bullets into him.” The killer “had wavy hair pushed back, very strong hair, wiry hair, very dark.” Pelser also jotted down the license number of the car, noticing as he did so that the rear window of the vehicle had been removed and that a rifle or shotgun barrel protruded from this opening. Edgar C. Langlois, his foreman, had watched the shooting from the floor above Pelser. According to him, the murderers had been “stout ... thick-chested young men.”

Winifred H. Pierce, a Slater & Morrill shoemaker, had run to a window on the Pearl Street side of Hampton House as soon as the gunplay started. He saw two men in a black car, one of whom was climbing into the front seat from the rear. Lawrence D. Ferguson, a co-worker who was standing next to Pierce at the window, corroborated his story. But Daniel J. O’Neil, a South Braintree school boy, had a different version. According to him, the man in the car’s back seat had “walked along [its] running board and before the car had got over the other side of the crossing that man was sitting in the front seat.” The man he had seen “was a man [with] dark hair, cleanly shaven, broad shoulders light complexion.... He wore a blue suit and no hat ... of and his hair was thick but light and combed back straight over his head.”

As Parmenter and Berardelli walked up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2, they had been followed by Roy E. Gould, a razor sharpening paste peddler, who hoped to sell his product to the Slater & Morrill employees after they were paid. He was running in order to get to the factory before the paymaster did, so that he could set up his display stand. Before he could catch up with the two men, the hold-up occurred. As the Buick passed within ten feet of him on its way toward the railroad crossing, one of the gunmen fired at him, the bullet piercing the pocket of his overcoat without injuring him. Gould gave his name to a Braintree policeman and indicated that he would be available for questioning if needed. His observations apparently failed to titillate the police and he was never questioned by them.

Frank J. Burke, an itinerant glassblower who had arrived in South Braintree at 2:30 that afternoon to give a demonstration of his art at a local school, claimed that the hold-up car had passed within ten feet of him after the shooting. When he first saw it, the sedan was moving slowly down Pearl Street toward the railroad crossing. He watched two men jump on the running board and climb into the back seat. As the car approached the crossing, one of these men crawled into the front seat next to the driver. Seconds later, Burke heard a gunshot in the car, and the man who had climbed over into the front seat pointed a revolver at him and shouted, “Get out of the way, you son of a bitch!” He saw “a dark man with a short cropped mustache” in the rear of the car.

Mark Carrigan watched the car drive over the Pearl Street crossing but it was going too fast for him to recognize anyone in it. One of its occupants, “had black hair and looked, possibly, like an Italian.” Louis De Beradinis, who owned a shoe repair shop at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Pearl Street, noticed a man with a gun standing on the vehicle’s running board. “This man pointed a revolver to my face” and had “a long face, and awful white, and light hair combed in the back. It was a thin fellow I saw.”

Carlos E. Goodridge, a Victrola salesman, who was whiling away a slow day in Magazu’s poolroom which was a block west of Hampton House on the north side of Pearl Street, rushed out when he heard the excitement. He saw the black sedan cross the New Haven tracks and watched, with idle curiosity, as it approached Magazu’s. Suddenly, he noticed that one of its occupants--“a dark complexioned fellow, with dark hair, a peculiar face that came down pointed”--was pointing a gun at him, and he jumped back into the poolroom and hid under one of the tables.

Michael Levangie, the gate tender at the Pearl Street crossing, had lowered his gates for an approaching train when the Buick came toward him. He was startled to see that one of the passengers in the car was pointing a revolver at his head. He was ordered by this man to raise his gates. He remembered that the person who shouted at him spoke with a decided foreign accent although it was Burke’s recollection that the man who had ordered him out of the way had used good English. As Levangie later testified, “I looked back at the train to see if I had a chance to let them go. I saw that there was a chance to let them go and I let them, and I put my gates back where they belonged.” He was able to describe only one of the vehicle’s occupants, the driver, who, he said, was “a dark complected man with cheek bones sticking out, black hair, heavy brown mustache, slouch hat and army coat.”

The Buick continued down Pearl Street and turned left on Hancock Street. As it crossed the New Haven tracks, it was seen by eight railroad workers, most of whom described the driver as “kind of light-complexioned” and the man sitting alongside of him on the front seat as “big and dark.” Shelley Neal saw it make the turn when he ran out of his office upon hearing the shots. As it passed the drug store on the corner of Pearl and Hancock, its passengers scattered rubber-headed tacks along the road. It took more than a week before South Braintree could count a day without at least one blowout on Hancock Street. Daniel Buckley, a railroad employee, was the last person in South Braintree to see the car as it headed out of town on South Street.

Several people remembered spotting it later that afternoon as it headed south through Randolph, Canton, Stoughton, Brockton and West Bridgewater. At four, sixteen-year-old Julie Kelliher, a student at Brockton’s Hancock School, saw a black sedan hurtling through that town at such a high rate of speed that she reported it to the police. It was next seen by Austin Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing just outside of West Bridgewater, at 4:15. Reed waved his warning sign at the oncoming automobile because a train was expected momentarily. One of the men in the car pointed his finger at the startled gate tender and snarled, “What to hell you hold us up for?” The man he saw was “a dark complected man, kind of hollow cheeks, with high cheek bones, had a stubby mustache. His hair was black.”

Meanwhile, back in South Braintree, the horror-struck bystanders, who had been scattered momentarily by some shots from the rear window of the disappearing Buick, regathered around the two wounded men. Berardelli was lying in the street with his head next to the curbing. He was almost dead. According to Jim Bostock, the first man to reach him, “he laid in a kind of crouched position and I helped lay him down and every time he breathed, blood flowed and was coming out of his mouth.” The two men were taken to the home of Horace A. Colbert, a railroad tower man who lived just east of the restaurant excavation, where Berardelli died. Parmenter lived until five o’clock the next morning.

Fred L. Loring, a Slater & Morrill shoe worker, noticed a cap with earlaps near Berardelli’s body, which he picked up and turned over to his superintendent. The next day, the latter gave the cap to Jeremiah F. Gallivan, Braintree’s police chief, who kept it under the seat of his car for ten days before delivering it to Brockton’s Captain John Scott. The only other evidence found at the scene were some empty cartridges which littered Pearl Street. Berardelli’s Harrington & Richardson revolver, which he had been carrying that day, was missing.

Two days later, the Buick was discovered by two horsemen in Bridgewater’s Manley Woods, some five miles west of the Matfield Crossing. Leading away from the abandoned vehicle were the tiretracks of a smaller car. Although the black sedan’s license tags had been removed, plates with the number which Louis Pelser had jotted down two days before had been pilfered from another car early in 1920. The Buick itself had been reported as stolen by its owner, a Dr. Francis J. Murphy, on November 23, 1919. The isinglass rear window was pushed out and there was a bullet hole in the car’s right rear interior. It was later identified by almost every eyewitness as similar to the one they had seen on the day of the robbery.

Bridgewater’s Police Chief Michael E. Stewart was convinced that the crime had been committed by a resident Italian who owned a car. Mike Boda, who boarded with a radical named Coacci in a shack near the Manley Woods, was interviewed by Stewart three days after the South Braintree murders. He told the police officer that his car, a small Overland, was stored in Simon Johnson’s garage in West Bridgewater. Stewart called on Johnson and told him to notify the police if anyone called for Boda’s car.

On the evening of May 5th, Nicola Sacco, a Stoughton shoe worker, Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a Plymouth fish peddler, Boda, and a mutual friend named Ricardo Orciani, started out from the former’s house for West Bridgewater to pick up the Overland. Sacco and Vanzetti took the trolley while the other two men rode on Orciani’s motorcycle. When Boda and Orciani arrived at the garage, they found it locked. They then walked over to Johnson’s house where they were soon joined by Sacco and Vanzetti. Boda rang the bell and, when the garage owner’s wife opened the door, told her that he had come for the Overland. While the four men waited, Mrs. Johnson went over to a neighbor’s house and telephoned to Chief Stewart. Meanwhile her husband had convinced Boda that, since the Overland did not have 1920 plates, it would be better to leave it in the garage. Boda apparently took his advice and drove off on the motorcycle with Orciani.

Sacco and Vanzetti left the Johnson house and boarded the North Elm Street trolley for Brockton. When the car was passing through the Campello section of Brockton, it was boarded by a policeman who immediately arrested the two men. The officer found a .38-caliber Harrington & Richardson revolver (which was not Berardelli’s) and some shotgun shells in Vanzetti’s coat pocket. Sacco denied that he was carrying a gun and “a slight going over” did not reveal any weapon on his person. Later that evening, at the Brockton police station, “an automatic .32 Colt revolver” was found in his belt as well as thirty-two cartridges of various makes.

Four weeks later, Vanzetti was indicted for an attempted holdup that had taken place at Bridgewater on the morning of December 24, 1919, in which several “foreigners” had tried to hijack a truck containing the payroll of the White Shoe Company. According to eyewitnesses, two men had parked their automobile so that it blocked off Broad Street, the road leading to the shoe company. Guards in the payroll truck had fired at the holdup men who had retreated to their car and driven away. One of the thwarted bandits, who was armed with a shotgun, had discharged his weapon harmlessly at the guards before turning tail.

The trial of this indictment began at Plymouth on June 22, 1920, before Judge Webster Thayer and a jury of twelve men, one of whom was the foreman at the Plymouth Cordage Company from which Vanzetti had been discharged in 1916 for participating in a strike. The charges against the fish peddler were assault with intent to rob and assault with intent to murder. Sacco was not indicted because the records of the 3-K Shoe Factory in Stoughton indicated that he had been at work on the day of the crime.

Frederick G. Katzmann, the District Attorney of Suffolk and Plymouth Counties, took the position that the 1920 Buick which had been found in the Manley Woods on April 17th had also been used in the Bridgewater assault. He had three witnesses--the two guards who had been in the payroll truck and a shoe company employee--who identified Vanzetti as the man who had fired the shotgun. A Mrs. Georgina F. Brooks, who had been walking near the Bridgewater railroad station, said that she had seen Vanzetti driving an automobile in the vicinity just after the shooting. Maynard Freeman Shaw, a newsboy, swore that he had seen the defendant that morning running up Broad Street with a gun in his hand. He knew he “was a foreigner, I could tell by the way he ran.” Most of the witnesses described the bandits’ automobile as a “dark touring car.”

The prosecution rested on June 28th and Vanzetti’s attorneys, J. P. Vahey and J. M. Graham, put sixteen Italians on the stand to prove that the defendant had an alibi for the day of the crime. His landlady said that she had seen Vanzetti preparing his fish on the evening of December 23rd and that she had awakened him early the next morning. Other Plymouth residents swore that they had purchased eels from him during the day. John DiCarli bought some shortly after seven a.m. and Mrs. Terese Malaquci an hour later. Between nine and ten, Beltrando Brini, a thirteen-year-old boy who worked for Vanzetti, delivered some fish to Mrs. Adeladi Bonjionanni and to her neighbor, Mrs. Margaretta Fiochi. All told, some seven people testified that Vanzetti or young Brini had filled orders for them on the morning of the twenty-fourth. Upon the recommendation of his lawyers, who were afraid that his radical opinions and activities would be brought out, Vanzetti did not take the stand.

The jury retired at 10:50 on the morning of July 1st and returned a verdict of guilty on both assault charges a little more than five hours later. In the middle of August, Judge Thayer sentenced the defendant to twelve to fifteen years in prison. As the verdicts were announced, Vanzetti turned to his many friends in the courtroom and said, “Corragio.” Although a notice of appeal was duly filed with the Supreme Judicial Court, it was never perfected because of the subsequent murder conviction.

On September 11th, both Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted for the South Braintree murders by “beating and shooting ... against the peace of said Commonwealth.” However, it was not until May 31, 1921 that their joint trial began in Dedham, a Boston suburb, before the ubiquitous Judge Thayer. It took more than four days and seven hundred Norfolk County veniremen before George A. Gerard, the last juror, was sworn in at 1:35 a.m. on June 9th. Thayer appointed Walter R. Ripley, a stock-keeper and former Quincy police chief, as foreman and it was at last time for Katzmann to put in his case against the two immigrant defendants.

After Vanzetti’s conviction on the assault charges, the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, headed by Aldino Felicani, the editor of _La Notizia_, an Italian-language newspaper, retained Frederick H. Moore and William J. Callahan, for Sacco, and two brothers, Jeremiah J. and Thomas F. McAnarney, for Vanzetti. Moore, a member of the California Bar, was named chief counsel for both men despite strenuous pre-trial efforts by Mrs. Sacco to have him withdraw in favor of William G. Thompson, a Boston attorney. The Commonwealth was again represented by Mr. Katzmann who was aided by Assistant District Attorney Harold P. Williams.

After the physicians who had conducted the autopsies on the two murdered men had described their wounds and identified the bullets taken from their bodies, Shelley Neal told the jury about the black sedan he had seen in South Braintree on the day of the crime. He was positive that it was the same car that had been found in the Manley Woods two days later. But, outside of remembering that there had been a slender man with light hair standing next to the Buick when he had seen it parked in front of Hampton House on the morning of the holdup, he was unable to describe any of the vehicle’s occupants.

Neal wasn’t the only prosecution witness who couldn’t identify the defendants. Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, had observed two “light complexioned fellows” sitting on the fence near Rice & Hutchins just before the shooting. But he was unable to describe them with any certainty because “they were all covered up.” After the murders, he had seen the Buick heading for the Pearl Street crossing. When it passed him, “the back curtains were drawn and flopping around back and forth, and I think there were about five of them in there ... and as that passed me by there was some one on the back there beckoning with a gun or shotgun.” Because he hadn’t gotten a good look at any of the men in the car, he couldn’t say that Sacco or Vanzetti had been riding in it.

Jim Bostock had been taken to see the defendants shortly after their arrest and asked whether they were the men he had seen on Pearl Street that afternoon. Like Behrsin, he “could not tell whether or not they was, no, sir.” Lewis Wade could not “say for sure” if Sacco was the man who had shot Berardelli. Even though he had told Katzmann at the Brockton Police Station that the defendant was the man he had seen, he now thought he had been “a little mite mistaken.” The reason he was no longer sure of his identification was that just before the trial he had seen a man in a barber shop who resembled the murderer.

Foreman Langlois, who had watched two “young men” firing at the guard and the paymaster, remembered only that they had been “short and dark complexioned, curly or wavy hair, about five feet, eight or nine inches, about 140 or 145 pounds.” He was sure that he could not identify either man if he saw them again. Mark Carrigan had seen the car race over the crossing but had not been able to recognize anyone in it because it had been going so fast. Louis DeBeradinis, the proprietor of a shoe repair shop at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Pearl Street, had been frightened by a man with “a long face ... and light hair” who had leaned out of the car and pointed a gun at him. Although, he thought that dark-haired Sacco looked like the man with the gun, he insisted that the latter had been “a light-haired man.”

But Katzmann was not wanting for more definite eyewitnesses. He had five who claimed to have seen Vanzetti near South Braintree on April 15th. John Faulkner said he had observed him, bushy mustache and all, on the Boston train that morning. But he was unable to remember anything about the man sitting to his immediate right who had asked him, supposedly at Vanzetti’s request, whether the next station was East Braintree. He admitted that he had seen a picture of the defendant in a newspaper before he was taken to the jail to identify him. The conductor on the train later testified that he, too, had seen such a man get off at East Braintree on several occasions long after April 15th, but he was certain that he was not Vanzetti.

Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, who swore that he had noticed Vanzetti among a group of “foreigners” sitting in the back of a car before noon on the day of the shootings, couldn’t identify any of the other men. Although gate tender Levangie was sure that Vanzetti was the “dark complected man” who had frightened him with a pistol at the Pearl Street crossing, he couldn’t remember whether Mr. McAnarney had visited him at his shanty barely two weeks before the trial started. Alexander G. Victorson, the railroad’s freight clerk, later testified that Levangie had said, minutes after the shooting, that he didn’t think he could identify the men he had seen in the car as it sped over the tracks.

An hour later, the gate tender told Henry McCarthy, a locomotive fireman, that he had “ducked in the shanty” when he saw the guns pointed at him. “I asked him if he knew them,” McCarthy said, “He said no, he did not. I asked him if he would know them again if he saw them. He said ‘No,’ he said all he could see was the gun and he ducked.” Shortly afterward, Levangie informed Timothy J. Collins, a _Boston Globe_ reporter, that he had not seen anyone in the car, while, at 4:30, he told Slater & Morrill’s Edward Carter that its driver had been “a light-haired man.”

Austin T. Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing in West Bridgewater, identified Vanzetti as the man sitting next to the driver of a “five-passenger car” which had roared toward his intersection at 4:15. The automobile had screeched to a stop when Reed lowered his gates because of an approaching train. When the train had passed, the car crossed the tracks and pulled up alongside Reed’s shanty. Vanzetti, he said, had shouted, “What to hell did you hold us up for?” in “English that was unmistakable and clear.” The vehicle then drove off to the east, circled around, and finally recrossed the tracks, disappearing in the direction of West Bridgewater. Like Faulkner, Reed had gone voluntarily to Brockton and “asked to see the two defendants that were there.” He had listened to Vanzetti speak to an officer at the police station in “the same gruff tone that he used in speaking to me.”

Austin C. Cole was the conductor of the street car on which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. He was sure that they were the same two men he had seen on his car on either April 14th or 15th. According to him, they had boarded the trolley at Sunset Avenue, some two miles from West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. He particularly remembered Vanzetti because he had first thought that the latter was a friend of his named Tony. When the defense showed him a side view photograph of one Joseph Scavitto, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Vanzetti, the witness was unable to say that it was a picture of the man who had boarded his car because he had never seen his profile.

The prosecution had seven witnesses who identified Sacco. Lola Andrews insisted that he was the man she had seen working under the car near Slater & Morrill Factory No. 2. When Katzmann asked her to look around the courtroom, she pointed to the steel cage in which both defendants were seated and said, “That man there.” Sacco sprang to his feet and shouted, “I am the man? Do you mean me? Take a good look!” Yes, she was sure that the man who had just yelled at her was the same dark man who had told her how to get to Rice & Hutchins.

Mrs. Andrews claimed that she had picked out Sacco in the Dedham Jail in February. After she had been taken through the prison, she had accidentally seen the defendant in one of the cells. She couldn’t remember whether he had been alone or not but she had watched him for at least fifteen minutes. No one had told her to look into that particular room. “The room I was in,” she said, “was--I don’t know just how to explain it, but it had kind of an opening back here, like there was a room underneath that you could look from the room I am in down into this room underneath.”

When Mr. Moore showed her some snapshots and asked her whether she had looked at them before at his request, she stated that “I don’t recognize any of those photographs at all.” The next day, Mrs. Andrews collapsed on the stand when Mr. McAnarney tried to pin her down as to just what pictures she had seen. Later in the trial, Mrs. Campbell, who had accompanied Mrs. Andrews to South Braintree on April 15th, swore that the man under the car had “never looked up at all” and that neither she nor her friend had spoken to him.

But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t the only witness to contradict the practical nurse. George W. Fay, a Quincy policeman, said that she had told him in February that she had not seen any man’s face that day. She had also told Alfred N. LaBreque, the secretary of the Quincy Chamber of Commerce, the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor whose shop was near Mrs. Andrew’s house, remembered a conversation he had had with her when she returned from the Dedham Jail. “The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,” she had complained to him, “and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them.” A former landlady, who readily admitted that she didn’t like her and “wouldn’t have her in my house again,” said that she had a “bad name” in the community.

Real estate broker Tracy, who had told the police that he had seen Sacco standing near a Pearl Street drugstore at noon on the day of the murders, had identified him in jail ten months later. However, he was not prepared now to say that he was “positively” the man. “To the best of my opinion he is the man,” he testified. While he was “quite sure” that he was right, he was willing to “suppose the best of people could make a mistake.”

Q. Then you feel you could not be mistaken in the identity of this man?

A. I said I would not positively say he was the man; but I wouldn’t positively say so.

William J. Heron, the railroad detective, claimed that he had seen Sacco handcuffed to a policeman near the Quincy Courthouse some six weeks after having observed him in the South Braintree station. He was “pretty sure” that the defendant was the same “nervous Italian” he had watched in the waiting room. He readily admitted that he had refused to talk to defense investigators when they came to see him before trial. His reluctance, he said, had been due to the fact that he didn’t want to become involved. Besides he didn’t think that his information would be helpful to the defense. McAnarney’s face purpled with anger.

Q. You took it on yourself to determine the fact that your evidence would hurt these defendants, didn’t you? Did you?

A. Yes, sir.

The man whom Lewis Pelser had seen shoot Berardelli had been wearing a “dark green pair of pants and an army shirt, tucked up.” He would not swear that Sacco was the gunman but insisted that “he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He had written down the Buick’s license number but he had not seen anyone in the car. “I was too anxious to get away,” he said, “I was kind of scared myself.”

When Moore took over, he asked the witness whether he had been interviewed by a Mr. Reid on March 26th. Yes, he had, but he hadn’t told him everything he knew because “I didn’t know him well enough.” He admitted that he had told the investigator that he hadn’t seen the murderer because he had ducked under his workbench when the shooting started. But he insisted that he “didn’t exactly lie to Mr. Reid.” In fact, he hadn’t even told the District Attorney what he had seen that day until he took the stand. Moore’s voice was heavy with disbelief.

Q. You never talked to a living soul and told them what you intended to say on the witness stand today, and told them the truth, until you got on the witness stand.

A. Yes, sir.

Later, William Brenner, Peter McCullum and Dominic Constantino, who had been working with Pelser on the first floor of the Rice & Hutchins factory, testified for the defense that they had not seen the latter at the window when the shooting took place. According to the three men, everyone on the first floor had ducked under his bench when the gunshots had shattered the air. Constantino was sure that Pelser had not stood up until after the murders had occurred. He remembered that Pelser had told him that he had not been able to see any of the killers.

Mary Splaine, the Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who had picked Sacco out in the Brockton police station as the man she had seen leaning out of the Buick just after it roared across the Pearl Street crossing, identified him again. “He was a man,” she claimed, “that I should say was slightly taller than I am ... he was an active-looking man. I noted particularly the left hand was a good-sized hand, a hand that denoted strength.... He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt ... and the face was what we could call clear-cut, clean-cut face. The forehead was high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows, but the complexion was a white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” Evidently, years of poring over account books hadn’t interfered with the witness’ eyesight because this detailed observation had been the result of a three-second glance “from a distance of from 60 to 80 feet.”

When Moore reminded her that, at the preliminary examination at Quincy, she had said that she was not sure that Sacco was the man she had seen, Miss Splaine denied that she had ever made that statement. The next day, however, she indicated that perhaps she had indeed said that.

Q. Do you wish to change any part of your testimony that you made yesterday?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What part of your testimony would you like to change at the present time?

A. That question and answer where you asked me if I possibly identified the man, and in Quincy I said I didn’t feel I would positively identify him. I said I didn’t say that yesterday, but on reflection that was the answer in Quincy.

In addition, she admitted that, after the shooting, she had identified a photograph which the police had shown her as the man she had observed leaning out of the car. She later learned that the man in the photograph had been in New York’s Sing Sing Prison on April 15th.

When Mr. McAnarney took over from Moore, he asked the witness whether she was sure that she had had enough time on the day of the murders to get a good look at the defendant. “Yes, sir, I think I did,” was her answer. The lawyer shook his head. Hadn’t she testified in Quincy that “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.”? Yes, she had made that statement. But now, she was “positive he is the man, certain he is the man. I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” McAnarney pressed her.

Q. What did you mean when you said you didn’t have sufficient opportunity to observe him?

A. Well, he was passing on the street.

Q. That is the only opportunity you had?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. You have had no other opportunity but that fleeting glance?

A. The remembrance of that.

She hadn’t seen Sacco since the Quincy hearing on May 26, 1920, but, even without “any further examination of him,” she had changed her mind and now believed that he was the man.

Frances J. Devlin, another Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who worked in the same room with Miss Splaine, had seen a man in the back of the Buick fire into the crowd that had developed around Parmenter and Berardelli. “He was a dark man,” she recalled, “and his forehead, the hair seemed to grow away from the temples, and it was brown-black and he had clear features, rather clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thick-set man, I should say.” She had identified Sacco at the Brockton Police Station as looking “very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.” She was far more definite when Katzmann asked her to look around the courtroom and “see if you see that man.” She pointed to the steel cage in which the two defendants were sitting and said, “The man on the inner side as you go out.”

Q. The man who is smiling?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. That man you know is Sacco?

A. Yes, sir.

No, there had never been any doubt in her mind “at any time” that the defendant was the man she had seen.

Yet, a year earlier she had testified in Quincy that she couldn’t say “positively” that Sacco was the gunman she had witnessed. But she had a ready answer for the seeming conflict in her testimony. “At the time there I had in my own mind that he was the man, but on account of the immensity of the crime and everything, I hated to say right out and out. I knew he was the man and still I didn’t want to say knowing as I knew it would be a deliberate lie, according to my own mind, but still I hated to say right out and out, so I just put it that way.” She had also sworn in Quincy that short, stocky Sacco was “a man who seemed as though he was a big man to me.”

Victrola salesman Carlos E. Goodridge was certain that Sacco was the man who had waved a gun at him when the black Buick raced by Magazu’s pool parlor on lower Pearl Street. He remembered the defendant as “a dark complexioned fellow with dark hair and he had ... a kind of peculiar face, that came down pointed.” When McAnarney tried to find out whether Goodridge wasn’t having his own problems with the law, Judge Thayer intervened. “You can’t attack any witness’ credibility,” he observed, “except by showing a record of conviction.” The jury was never to learn that the salesman had recently pleaded guilty to larceny and had been placed on probation.

Goodridge’s testimony conflicted sharply with that of Harry Arrogani, a South Braintree barber. Five or six days after the murders, Goodridge had told the barber that he had seen “a man in the car but if I have got to say who the man was, I can’t say.” Peter Magazu, the owner of the pool room, said that Goodridge had described the man who had pointed the gun at him as a “young man with light hair, light complexion.” Andrew Manganio, Goodridge’s sales manager, later testified that his pool-playing employee had refused to identify the defendants in jail because he had been so frightened by the gun that “he could not possibly remember the faces.”

Drs. George B. Magrath and Nathaniel S. Hunting had conducted the autopsies on the two murdered men. Four bullets were found in Berardelli’s body and two in Parmenter’s. As each bullet was removed, the physicians had scratched a Roman numeral in its base. The one which had caused Berardelli’s death, a .32-caliber Winchester, was marked No. III. At the trial, Captain William H. Proctor, the ballistics expert for the Massachusetts State Police, testified that all but the No. III shell had been fired through a Savage automatic pistol.

When Sacco was searched at the Brockton police station, a “.32 Colt automatic,” which was to become Katzmann’s Exhibit 28, was found in his belt. Proctor said that he had conducted tests on the fatal bullet and the defendant’s gun. As a result of his investigation, he was prepared to say that No. III was “consistent with being fired by that pistol.” As for the other five bullets, his opinion was that they had not been fired from Sacco’s Colt.

Captain Proctor’s opinion was shared by Charles Van Amburgh, an assistant in the ballistics department of the Remington Arms Company. He also had examined the fatal bullet and Sacco’s pistol.

Q. Have you formed an opinion ... as to whether or not No. III bullet was fired from that particular Colt automatic?

A. I have an opinion.

Q. And what is your opinion?

A. I am inclined to believe that it was fired, No. III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.

He had reached this conclusion after comparing the No. III bullet with six test shots which he and Captain Proctor had fired into oiled sawdust at Lowell, Massachusetts. “My measurement of rifling marks on No. III bullet as compared with the width of the impressions which I have taken of No. III or of this particular barrel,” he explained, “together with the measurements of the width or dimension of rifling marks in bullets recovered ... in Lowell, inclines me to the belief.” In addition, he had observed marks on No. III which he thought were caused by pitting in the groove of Sacco’s Colt.

James E. Burns, an expert marksman who had been employed by the United States Cartridge Company for more than thirty years, contradicted the prosecution’s experts. He, too, had examined the fatal bullet, and he was convinced that it had not been fired from Sacco’s gun.

Q. ... on what do you base that opinion?

A. On the 11 bullets that I examined that were fired from the Sacco gun. It doesn’t compare with them at all.

The Colt’s barrel had shown “a clean-cut lead all the way through.” There wasn’t a particle of doubt in his mind that No. III had not been fired “from a gun that had a clean lead.”

J. Henry Fitzgerald, the director of the testing room at the Colt Firearms Company, agreed with Burns that No. III “was not fired from the pistol given to me as Exhibit 28.” He had examined three bullets which had been fired by Mr. Van Amburgh at Lowell and, “the land marks of the No. III bullet do not correspond, in my best judgment, to bullets I have seen fired from this pistol.” Like Burns, he had been unable to find any distinctive pittings in the groove of Sacco’s gun.

The cap which Fred L. Loring had found lying near Berardelli’s body had been turned over to Thomas F. Fraher, Slater & Morrill’s superintendent. Katzmann called George T. Kelley, Sacco’s foreman at the 3-K Shoe Factory, who testified that the defendant often wore a cap to work. “There were times that he wore a cap,” Kelley said, “There was other times he wore a hat.” As to the former, he could remember only that it had been “a dark cap ... of a salt and pepper design.” He was unable to recall whether the cap he had seen hanging on a nail near Sacco’s workbench had earlaps or not.

When the defense objected to the introduction of the cap on the ground that it had not been sufficiently identified as belonging to Sacco, Judge Thayer ordered Mr. Williams to ask Kelley whether “that cap ... is like the one that was worn by the defendant Sacco?” “In color only.” the witness replied.

THAYER: That is not responsive to the question. I wish you would answer it, if you can.

KELLEY: I can’t answer it when I don’t know right down in my heart that that is the cap.

THAYER: In its general appearance, is it the same?

KELLEY: Yes, sir.

Thayer promptly admitted the cap into evidence as the Commonwealth’s Exhibit 29.

After Sacco’s arrest, Lieutenant Daniel T. Guerin had visited his home and found another cap in the kitchen. Later in the trial, when Kelley was recalled as a witness for the defense, he was shown this second cap. He said that he thought that the cap the policeman had found looked more like the one he had seen the defendant wearing than did Exhibit 29. On cross-examination, Katzmann asked him if he hadn’t told the police when they interviewed him about the cap that “I have an opinion ... but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.” Kelley admitted that he “might have said it when they drove off, but not at the time when they showed me the cap.”

Q. Was that in reference to the cap?

A. Yes.

Later in the trial, when Katzmann cross-examined Sacco, he asked him to put Exhibit 29 on his head. According to the _Boston Herald_, “It stuck on the top of his head and he turned with a satisfied air to let the jury see.” He then explained to the District Attorney that the cap was “too tight” to fit properly.

Q. You are sure of that?

A. I am pretty sure. I can feel it.

He denied that the cap was his and his wife subsequently testified that her husband “never wore caps with anything around for his ears, never, because he never liked it and because, besides that, never, he never wore them because he don’t look good in them, positively.”

Mrs. Simon Johnson said that, after her husband had gone to bed on May 5th, Boda had knocked on her front door and asked her whether he could pick up his Overland car. When she awakened her husband, he had told her to go next door to Mrs. Bartlett’s and telephone the police. She had walked over to her neighbor’s house and called Chief Stewart. Although there was no street light near her home, the area had been illuminated by the headlight of a motorcycle which she noticed was parked in the street. Two strange men who were standing in the vicinity of the vehicle, seemed to follow her when she left to make her call. Ten minutes later, when she was walking back from Mrs. Bartlett’s, she saw the same men who appeared to be “walking along” with her. She was sure that Sacco was one of the men who had tailed her that night.

When she had testified in the earlier trial of Vanzetti at Plymouth, Mrs. Johnson had not been so confident of her identification of the men who had followed her. Then she had been certain that she “did not know who they were or whether they were the same men or not.” Now, she was prepared to say that “one of them” was the same man.

Q. ... do you want to say that you recognized Sacco before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. I would know him if I saw him again.

Q. I submit it is not an answer to the question.

THE COURT. Can you answer it, Mrs. Johnson, by Yes or No?

A. Yes.

Q. Then by that I assume that you mean you did recognize him before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. Before I did, yes.

The witness’ husband told a somewhat different story. At no time, had either of the strange men been illuminated by the beams of the motorcycle’s light. While he had not watched his wife walk over to the Bartlett’s, he had seen her on the return trip. At that time, he was sure that, with the exception of Boda, all the strangers were standing near the cycle. He had told Boda that he couldn’t have the car that night because “there were no 1920 number plates on it.” The latter had replied that “I will send somebody for it tomorrow,” but no one had ever called for the car.

Michael J. Connolly and Earl J. Vaughan, two Brockton policemen, had arrested the defendants on the North Elm Street trolley later that evening. Connolly was the first officer to board the car. “... I went down through the car,” he said, “and when I got opposite the seat I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said, ‘We went down to see a friend of mine.’ I said, ‘Who is your friend?’ He said ‘A man by the ---- they call him ‘Poppy.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want you, you are under arrest.’”

According to Connolly, Vanzetti, who had been sitting on the seat nearest the window, put his hand in his hip pocket. The policeman had shouted, “Keep your hands out on your lap, or you will be sorry!” When the two defendants asked him why they were being arrested, he had told them that they were “suspicious characters.” Vaughan then boarded the car and Connolly ordered Vanzetti to stand up so that the latter could “fish” him. He himself gave Sacco “a slight going over ... did not go into his pockets.”

Q. Was anything found on either man at that time?

A. There was a revolver found on Vanzetti.

The two suspects were then transferred to a police car which was waiting alongside the tracks. Connolly “put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back seat ... and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.” During the trip to the Brockton station house, Connolly noticed that Sacco “reached his hand to put under his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes and on his lap.” When he asked the defendant, “Have you got a gun there?,” the latter had replied, “No, I ain’t got no gun.” Merle A. Spear, the driver of the car, swore that he had heard this conversation and that Sacco had answered, “You need not be afraid of me.” Later that evening, a Colt revolver had been found in Sacco’s pocket.

Chief Stewart had arrived at the police station shortly after eleven o’clock that night. The two prisoners told him much the same story that they had related to Connolly. They insisted that they had gone to West Bridgewater to see a friend named Poppy but denied any knowledge of Boda or Orciani’s motorcycle. Sacco thought that they had left his house at 6:30 that day while Vanzetti was sure that they had started out three hours earlier. Sacco claimed that he had purchased his Colt in Hanover Street in Boston many months before his arrest.

On June 22nd, after fifty-nine witnesses had testified for the prosecution, Katzmann informed Judge Thayer that “We believe we have nothing further to offer ... the Commonwealth rests, if your Honor please.” Following Callahan’s opening statement, the defense promptly called Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had watched the Buick race over the Pearl Street crossing after the murders. He had gotten a good look at its passengers and he was certain that neither defendant had been in the car. “I would say they were not,” he said. But on cross-examination, Katzmann succeeded in showing that the witness had such poor eyes that he had thought that Mr. Callahan’s Hudson in which he had been driven to the courthouse that very morning was a Buick.

Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, the Rice & Hutchins employee who had fainted when one of the gunmen pointed his pistol at her, “would always remember his face.” When she had been taken to the Brockton police station, she had been unable to identify either defendant.

Q. And you have looked at these men in the dock?

A. I have.

Q. Are either of the men in the dock the man you saw pointing the revolver at your window?

A. No, sir.

She was “positively sure” that she had never seen either Sacco or Vanzetti before.

Jennie Novelli, a nurse, who, some ten minutes before the shooting, had seen the Buick proceeding slowly up Pearl Street in the direction of the Rice & Hutchins plant, said the man who had been sitting next to the driver was not Sacco although she had previously told a detective that a photograph of the defendant “resembled” the man she had seen in the car. Albert Frantello insisted that the defendants were not the men he had noticed leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence before the murders. None of the laborers at the restaurant excavation or the railroad employees who had been repairing tracks at the Pearl Street crossing could say that they had seen Sacco or Vanzetti in the vicinity of the crime. In all, some two dozen eyewitnesses testified that they had not seen either defendant in South Braintree on April 15, 1920.

Vanzetti was the first of the two defendants to take the stand. As far as the day of the murder was concerned, he insisted, in broken English, that he had not left Plymouth. In the morning, he had been “selling fish from a cart” on Castle and Cherry Streets. Some time during the morning, he had asked Joseph Rosen, a peddler, to accompany him to the home of Mrs. Alphonsine Brini so that she could look at a piece of cloth which Rosen wanted to sell to him. Vanzetti thought that this had taken place “near one o’clock, about half past eleven, something like that, half past twelve, about one o’clock.”

After he had sold all his fish, the defendant had visited Melvin Corl, a friend of his, who was painting his boat. He had had a long conversation with Corl--about an hour and a half--during which time he had also talked to a boat builder by the name of Frank Jesse. Then he had gone home, changed his clothes, and eaten his supper. He could not remember what he had done after finishing his dinner.

On May 5th, he had accompanied Boda to the Johnson home in order to pick up the latter’s car which was to be used in collecting radical literature from the homes of some of his friends “in five or six places, five or six towns.” The mysterious death in New York, on May 3rd, of Andrea Salsedo, a radical with whom he had been associated for many years, had convinced him that he should “get the books and literature to put at some place and hide not to find by the police or the state.” He had not told the police about his plans for that night “because in that time there, there was the deportation and the reaction was more vivid than now and more mad than now.”

He readily admitted that he had lied to Stewart when the police chief had questioned him after his arrest. “I was afraid,” he said, “he went into the house of the people that they named and found some literature or paper and arrested the men ... I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends as I knew that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers in their house by which the authorities take a reason for arresting them and deport them.” His fears had been aggravated by the fact that Officers Connolly and Vaughan had refused to tell him why he was being taken into custody.

Q. What did they say what you were arrested for?

A. They say, ‘Oh, you know, you know why.’ And when I try to sleep in the cell, there is no blanket, only the wood. Then we called for the blanket, because it was rather cool. They say, ‘Never mind, you catch warm by and by, and tomorrow morning we put you in a line in the hall between the chairs and we shoot you.’

In fact, during the night, one of his jailers had spit in his face and threatened him with a revolver.