had come to an agreement not to bring up the subject of radicalism
during the trial. Katzmann had also offered to agree “that no
particular bullet came from any particular gun” and refrain with
the defense from trying to prove one way or the other whether the
murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s automatic or Vanzetti’s
revolver. Moore had refused, exclaiming melodramatically that he was
being asked to turn his sword into a shield, and insisting on being
free to have the bullets and guns examined by experts. Officially
Moore, assisted by William Callahan—the lawyer engaged for Sacco
and Vanzetti in the Brockton police court—represented Sacco, and
officially the McAnarney brothers represented Vanzetti, but this was
merely a maneuver to give both Jerry McAnarney and Moore the right to
argue before the jury and to cross-examine. In reality Moore was as
completely in charge as if he had been captain of a ship.
The contention of the Commonwealth, Assistant District Attorney
Williams said in his explanatory statement,
_is that this crime was committed by five men; that use was made
of this stolen Buick car which after its theft from Dr. Murphy of
Natick had been kept in the curtained shed of the Coacci house in
West Bridgewater; that on the morning of the murder it was taken
from the Coacci house and was driven to South Braintree; that they
picked up Vanzetti at the East Braintree station; that the men who
guided and drove that car were very familiar with the localities of
West Bridgewater and the roads leading to and from that section; that
they went down to the railroad crossing after the shooting, and made
that hairpin turn to throw their pursuers off the scent ... that they
proceeded by those back roads, Oak Street and Chestnut Street, until
they got to the old turnpike, which, though a rough road, furnished
a direct means of access to the West Bridgewater locality; and they
tore down there and either started to take Vanzetti over to Plymouth
and for that reason went over the Matfield crossing or went over
there with the idea of perhaps disposing of something in the Matfield
River ... found it inadvisable to do that which they intended to do,
came back over the Matfield crossing and subsequently abandoned their
car in the region adjacent to the Coacci house._
Williams claimed he would later show that Mike Boda was seen driving
a Buick touring car during the winter of 1920. Reminding the Jurymen
of Puffer’s Place, the house they had seen the day before, he gave an
unsubstantiated account of the police visiting the shed and finding
traces of a hole recently dug in the dirt floor as well as tire marks
to the left of the boards on which Boda had kept his Overland.
Although Judge Thayer later excluded references to the shed, and
although no evidence was brought forward connecting Coacci, Boda,
or Orciani with the South Braintree crime, Williams in his opening
nevertheless managed to link them with it by innuendo.
The first witness to take the stand was Boston photographer John
Farley, who had photographed the various buildings, places, and
objects covered in the case and whose pictures were now offered to
the jury as exhibits. Moore objected to the angles at which several
of the pictures had been taken and there followed an inconclusive
wrangle with the prosecution, to the visible annoyance of Judge
Thayer.
During the noon recess, while Sacco and Vanzetti were marched back
to the jail for their meal, Judge Thayer walked down the street to
the Dedham Inn. Whenever he was in Dedham he took his midday meal
there, as did the newspapermen and most of those connected with the
courthouse. Returning from the inn, Thayer could not conceal his
scorn at the sight of the coatless Moore taking a nap on the grass
plot in front of the courthouse. Moore was always doing things
like that, offending the New England sense of decorum without even
realizing he had offended. Once in court on a hot afternoon he took
off his shoes and stepped before the bench to make an exception
in his stocking feet. Jerry McAnarney, watching Judge Thayer’s
bottled-up indignation as it approached the uncorking point, was
fearful as well as dismayed. “For God’s sake,” he warned Moore, “keep
your coat and vest on in the courtroom, can’t you?”
Ripley, the dodderer with the tobacco-stained mustache, had been
appointed foreman of the jury, possibly because at sixty-nine he was
the oldest of the twelve. When on that first day he returned to the
courtroom from lunch, he paused with self-conscious rectitude and—to
the embarrassment of the others—saluted the American flag that stood
beside the jury box.
The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who
had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that
hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began,
the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove
the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury
followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to
Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones,
who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr.
Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the
Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by
Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies
and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner
in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in
Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues,
and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There
was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even
Moore had no questions to ask him.
Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer,
irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer
bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the
printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness
of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants
get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked
a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case
in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people
could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went
out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait
till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking
his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief
regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens
so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the
first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty.
Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express
agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand.
Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court
the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery,
the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of
the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing
after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or
Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the
paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes
and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three
o’clock.
Mark Carrigan, the shoe-cutter, was next. From his window on the
third floor of the Hampton House he had watched the paymaster and
the guard go down the street; then he had heard the shots and seen
the car cross the tracks with the gunman crouched in the front seat.
But from that glimpse Carrigan had not been able to identify the
defendants in the Brockton police station and he was not now able to
identify them in the courtroom.
So far the trial was going in the routine manner that Katzmann had
planned. These early witnesses were not expected to identify anyone.
They were there merely to set the scene. Something more, however,
was expected of Jimmy Bostock, the repairman, who had talked with
Parmenter and Berardelli at the crossing, had seen the two men fall,
and afterward had held the dying guard in his arms. The getaway car
with the Italian-looking man who was leaning out shouting had passed
so close to Bostock on Pearl Street that he could have reached out
and touched it. Nevertheless, when asked in the Brockton station if
he could tell whether Sacco and Vanzetti were the bandits he had
answered, “No sir, I could not tell whether or not they was, no sir.”
On the stand Bostock testified that Berardelli usually carried a
38-caliber revolver. He had seen it several times, the last time the
Saturday before the murder. He had joked with Berardelli about it and
asked him if he carried it to shoot rats. The mention of the revolver
seemed irrelevant—especially as nobody had seen it on April 15—and
Moore objected. Judge Thayer held a conference at the bench. There
Assistant District Attorney Williams revealed for the first time the
Commonwealth’s contention that the revolver found on Vanzetti had
been taken from Berardelli’s body by the man who shot him.
When Lewis Wade was taken by Katzmann to the Brockton station he had
pointed out Sacco as the wavy-haired man he had seen standing over
Berardelli. At the preliminary hearing in the Quincy court three
weeks later he was not quite as certain. “I don’t want to make a
mistake,” he had said, looking at Sacco. “This is too damn serious,
but he looks like the man.” Since then Katzmann had given Wade a
pep talk and was now counting on him for a positive identification.
Williams, leading the witness along, became stutteringly disconcerted
when Wade balked, maintaining that although Sacco looked to him
somewhat like the man who did the shooting, he “had a doubt.” Several
weeks ago, Wade explained, he had seen a man in Damato’s barbershop
who looked just like the man who had shot Berardelli. Since that
time he had decided that Sacco was not the man. Williams managed to
recover his composure, but though he did his forensic best, he could
get no further in persuading the intractable Wade.
As Wade left the stand one of the police officers at the door called
him a piker and another muttered: “We’re not through with you yet.”
It was a remark borne out a few weeks later when Wade was dismissed
from his job at Slater & Morrill. He had it coming to him. That was
the way people felt in South Braintree.
John Dever, in the first row of the jury box, glancing from time to
time at the defendants in the cage, was so far not impressed by the
Commonwealth’s case. Sometimes he felt frightened at having to decide
whether two men should live or die. Sacco and Vanzetti, he thought,
_did not look like criminals. Sacco appeared to be an alert, bright,
and rather clean-cut young fellow. Every time I looked at Vanzetti he
seemed to be thinking with an impassive look on his face or listening
intently to whatever was taking place at the time.... My sympathies
were with the men on trial and I was hoping that the evidence would
not be sufficient to establish their guilt “beyond a reasonable
doubt.”_
The reasonable doubt became more shadowy after the spinsterish
Hampton House bookkeepers, Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin, appeared.
Both pointed to Sacco as the man they had seen leaning out of the
murder car. Mary Splaine told how, after they had heard the shots,
she and Frances Devlin had gone first to the front window, then to
the one looking out on Pearl Street, just in time to catch the car as
it careered across the railroad tracks. From sixty feet away she had
watched the bareheaded bandit for the three seconds the car took to
pass. “He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt—had a grayish, like
navy color, and the face was what we would call clear-cut, clean-cut
face ... a little narrow, just a little narrow. 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 white, peculiar white that looked
greenish.” She had particularly noticed his left hand resting on
the back of the front seat. It was “a good-sized hand that denoted
strength.”
Dever thought Mary Splaine seemed honest, but he did not see how
anyone could have remembered all those details from such a distant
glimpse, and he decided that she must have refreshed her memory on
her visits to the Brockton police station. At the Quincy hearing
the year before, when her memory was greener, Mary Splaine had
not been so certain of her identification. There she had said of
Sacco: “I am almost sure I saw him at Braintree, but I saw him at
the Brockton police station afterward.” When Moore, with the Quincy
transcript in his hand, pressed her about her negative answers then,
she belligerently denied making them but was finally forced to admit
that she had said: “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the
right to say he is the man.” This she now qualified by saying that
her observation of him for several hours in the Quincy court had
convinced her that Sacco was the man in the car. “I am positive,
certain he is the man,” she concluded, her voice ringing and
determined. “I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain
I am not making a mistake.” As she said this Sacco thrust his head
forward, smiling at her with fixed bitterness.
Frances Devlin’s story was almost the same as her friend’s, although
not so detailed. She had seen the car spurt over the hill with a man
leaning out firing at the crowd. She described him as “a dark man,
and his forehead, the hair seemed to be grown away from the temple,
and it was blown back and he had clear features, and rather good
looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thickset man, I
should say.” Sacco was that man. She was positive. Like Mary Splaine,
in the Quincy court she had been less positive. There, the most she
had said of Sacco was: “He looks very much like the man that stood up
in the back seat shooting.”
McGlone, the young teamster who had caught the staggering Parmenter,
was another disappointing witness for the Commonwealth. A
ferret-faced, stubborn man, he said that the two bandits he had seen
were Italians, but that was all he would say about them. Assistant
District Attorney Williams could not bring him to say that Sacco and
Vanzetti were the gunmen, any more than Moore could bring him to say
that they were not. “Well,” McGlone kept on telling them, “I did not
get a good look at them to see what they did look like.”
Edgar Langlois, the Rice & Hutchins foreman who had looked down from
the second-floor window at the two gunmen below him, described them
in court as short and dark-complexioned, full-chested, clean-shaven,
with curly or wavy hair. He had not been able to identify either
Sacco or Vanzetti at Brockton as the men he had seen from the window,
nor was he now willing to identify them in court.
The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such
identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had
been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing
shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked
out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting
at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the
court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman
had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark
green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into
the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked
him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but
that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in
his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he
“looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want
or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney,
Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man,
but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had
thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the
gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street.
The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year.
Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid
that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the
jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to
bring them fans.
Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not
overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some
months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded
Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had
denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was
at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and
that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid
because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving
him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked
under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the
Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he
had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not
shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway
car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South
Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.
William Brenner, Peter McCullum, and Dominic Constantino, all of
whom worked at the front benches with Pelser, were brought in as
defense witnesses to contradict Pelser’s story, but their effect was
lessened by the tidy mechanics of legal procedure that postpones
the appearance of rebuttal witnesses until the prosecution has
finished its case. So it was not until two weeks later, when the
details of Pelser’s testimony were overlaid by that of a score of
other witnesses, that Brenner took the stand. He too, after he had
heard shots, looked through the partially opened center window and
saw a man “sinking—sinking.” Pelser had not been near the window.
After McCullum had raised the sash he had slammed it down again and
yelled “Duck!” and they had all got down behind the benches. Under
cross-examination Brenner admitted he really did not know where
Pelser was when he himself was looking through the window.
McCullum, following Brenner, was not sure where Pelser was either,
but Constantino was certain that when the shooting started Pelser
was “right down under the bench.” Afterward Pelser had told them:
“I did not see any of the men but I got the number of the car.”
Constantino admitted he had not given any thought to where Pelser was
until he had read the latter’s testimony in the newspaper two weeks
before. Then he had gone to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and
volunteered his information. At first he maintained that Pelser was
at his workbench three windows down when McCullum had thrown up the
sash, but Katzmann finally forced him to admit that he really did not
know where Pelser was or whether he might have opened another window.
The appearance of Hans Behrsin, the Slater chauffeur, was
unsatisfactory to the prosecution. All he could say was that the two
men he had seen sitting on the Rice & Hutchins fence as he drove past
in the Marmon “seemed to be pretty well light-complexioned fellows.”
He had not noticed their features, and the district attorney did not
even bother to ask him to identify the defendants.
It was generally agreed by the newspapermen covering the trial that
Lola Andrews was the prosecution’s star witness, since she was the
only one who had actually talked with any of the gunmen. She was an
unpredictable woman. When Moore and two assistants had gone to Quincy
on January 14 with a stenographer to interview her as a prospective
defense witness, he found her calm and pleasant. According to the
stenographer’s record she told Moore that she could not identify the
two men she had seen near the car in front of the Rice & Hutchins
factory. When she was shown pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she said
they were not the men. Although she did not mention it to Moore
on January 14, she later claimed that two evenings before, a dark
one-eyed man in a sailor’s reefer had appeared at her door, spoken
incomprehensibly about the South Braintree crime, and then, when
she refused to listen to him, followed her into the hall toilet and
assaulted her.
The evening before Lola appeared in court, Jerry McAnarney had gone
to see her in Quincy, and she had told him that she could not and
would not identify Sacco or Vanzetti as the men she had seen near the
automobile in front of Slater & Morrill. Moore had even considered
using her as one of his own witnesses and was surprised when she took
the stand for the Commonwealth. She wore a stiff-crowned hat with a
flat brim that shadowed her face. It was a coarse apprehensive face
which, though faded, still managed to preserve a physical appeal.
Again she told her story of walking down Pearl Street to the Slater
& Morrill factory, of seeing the pale man and the dark man by the
touring car, of asking directions from the dark man on the way back.
“He told me—he asked me,” she said, looking at the defendants in the
cage, “which factory I wanted, the Slater? I said ‘No, sir, the Rice
and Hutchins.’ He said to go in the driveway and told me which door
to go in, it would lead me to the factory office.”
Williams then asked her dramatically if she had seen the man since.
She replied that she had seen him in the courtroom. It was the climax
to which the assistant district attorney had been building. “Do you
see him in the courtroom now?” he asked. She paused, raised a bare,
fleshy forearm, and pointed to Sacco.
“I think I do. Yes, sir. That man, there.” Sacco jumped to his feet
in the cage, his eyes flashing. “I am the man?” he demanded in his
thick accent. “Do you mean me? Take a good look!”
Moore in his cross-examination went back at once to the January
evening when he had shown her a selection of photographs including
one of Sacco holding a derby in his hand. According to the
stenographer’s record she had said that the man with the derby was
not the one she had talked with in South Braintree. Now, on the
stand, she denied that she had said any such thing, claiming on the
contrary that she had then identified the man in Moore’s picture as
the man who had got up from under the car.
Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in
February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail.
There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower
level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man
pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked
with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she
was told, was Nicola Sacco.
At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end.
Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into
Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in
his determination he overlooked the one question that should have
occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given
detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English
easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not
have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times
almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at
Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and
accent of the man who had directed her.
Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from
the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told
them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss
this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you
haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard
the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds
open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally
cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of
this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly
possible for any man’s mind to be.”