jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They
talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was
worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had
been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a _Geographic_
when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone
wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a
joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the
basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over
an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and
forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of
his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister
had sent him.
Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore
repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had
spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over
he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men,
the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions.
So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,”
the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying
to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of
rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on
Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the
Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already
been exhausted.”
Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning
he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she
had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl
Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her
identification of Sacco.
Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long
the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what
they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s
shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia
Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said
he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down
there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job,
he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and
Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s
efforts to defend himself.
At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over
the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that
Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then
there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far
the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing
this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she
fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She
did not take the stand again until the following morning.
In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted
because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had
assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the
corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver.
Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a
permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’
fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates
closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they
opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was
another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in
possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled
eggs that he had brought for his lunch.
When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by
Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt
sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing
Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.
Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was
added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the
photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now
maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding
a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed
stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney
claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time
of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had
said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less
so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”
Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression
her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in
five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter,
had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she
had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into
the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not
seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy
policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing.
Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told
of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of
tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of
me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What
have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and
want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing
about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”
Judge Thayer looked down sourly at the little Polish Jew. “Mr.
Witness,” he rasped, “I would like to ask one question. Did you
attempt to find out who this person was who represented the
Government who was trying to get her to take and state that which
was false?” Kurlansky, already bewildered by the courtroom
atmosphere, was almost speechless at the thought of turning himself
into a private detective. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t come into my
mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t——” Only later, with Jerry
McAnarney to encourage him, was he finally able to say that he didn’t
see why he should bother about it.
Moore sprang a surprise on Katzmann when he produced the aged but
peppery Julia Campbell, whom he had brought down from Maine. Mrs.
Campbell addressed Katzmann as “dear man,” and when he tried to
confuse her with a litany of dates, she sent a titter round the
courtroom by exclaiming “Oh, chestnuts!” She swore that Lola Andrews
had never spoken to the man under the car but to the man standing
by it. As for the two defendants in the cage, she did not think she
“ever saw them men in the world.”
Lena Allen, who ran a lodging house in Quincy, was the last refuting
witness. She said that Lola Andrews had roomed at her house until the
other roomers had threatened to leave if she didn’t get rid of her.
Lola Andrews had a bad reputation and was untruthful, according to
Lena Allen—who admitted she disliked her.
* * * * *
Five witnesses identified Vanzetti in one way or another, but only
one of them, Mike Levangie, the Pearl Street gate-tender, placed
him at the scene of the murders. Almost all the other witnesses
had described the driver of the getaway car as pale, fair, sickly.
Levangie, at the inquest two days after the crime, had asserted the
man was dark, with a dark brown mustache. Now he pointed to Vanzetti
in the cage as the man, the only man he had seen.
Katzmann in his summing-up admitted that the driver of the car was
indisputably a pale blond man, but he explained that Levangie’s
identification was still valid as he must have glimpsed Vanzetti
leaning over from the back seat and in the excitement thought he was
the driver.
Although Levangie was the only witness to place Vanzetti in the
Buick, two others placed him in South Braintree on that day.
Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, had been summoned to Dedham as
a prospective juror. While waiting in the courtroom he had seen
the defendants being led by. Suddenly he had recalled the carload
of tough tickets he had seen on Hancock Street the morning of the
South Braintree crime. The man with the mustache, handcuffed to
the sheriff, looked just like one of those men in the back seat.
Having gone to the district attorney’s office with his story, he now
found himself appearing as a witness. Dolbeare had no particular
recollection of the other four men in the car except for the general
impression of their toughness, but the middle man in the back seat
was Vanzetti. “I had the same view of him in the courtroom as I
had in the car, a profile view,” he told the court. He had “not a
particle of doubt” about Vanzetti being the man.
John Faulkner, another surprise witness, picked out Vanzetti as a man
who had ridden with him in the smoking car of the train from Plymouth
to Boston on the morning of April 15. Faulkner, a patternmaker at
the Watertown Arsenal, was an unhesitating witness. Each day he was
accustomed to take the train from Cohasset and he always rode in the
smoking car. On the morning of the fifteenth as the train was pulling
into East Weymouth a man across the aisle had said someone in back
wanted to know if the stop was East Braintree. Faulkner turned and
saw a foreign-looking man sitting in the single seat next to the
toilet. He had a black mustache, high cheekbones, and was wearing
old clothes. At Weymouth Heights the man again leaned forward and
asked if the stop was East Braintree. When the train stopped at
East Braintree the man had picked up an old leather Boston bag and
got off. “That is the man,” Faulkner said, identifying Vanzetti.
He was sure. However, when asked by Moore if he could remember the
man across the aisle who had first spoken to him, Faulkner had no
recollection of him at all. He remembered the date because it was the
time when he had been injured and had gone in on the late train to
the hospital. The next day he read about the murders and wondered if
the foreigner he had seen had had anything to do with them.
In refutation Moore brought in Henry McNaught, the conductor of
the train, who said that no cash fares had been collected that day
from Plymouth to Braintree. The station agents of Plymouth, North
Plymouth, and Kingston testified in addition that no tickets had been
sold from their stations to the Braintrees. However, Katzmann made
them admit that they did not know if any such tickets had been sold
the day before or how many might have been sold to Quincy or Boston.
Edward Brooks, the ticket agent at East Braintree, recalled that
about the time of the murders and several times since he had seen a
tall dark man carrying a black bag get off the morning train and walk
from the station toward Quincy Avenue. He had seen the man perhaps
half a dozen times. Vanzetti was not the man.
The other two who identified Vanzetti were Austin Cole, the streetcar
conductor, and Austin Reed, the gate-tender at the Matfield
crossing. Cole told the same story he had told at the Plymouth trial.
The two men who boarded his car at Sunset Avenue on May 5 and had
been taken off by the police in Brockton had also got on at the same
stop the night of April 14 or 15. Sacco and Vanzetti were the men.
Reed, a man in his early twenties, told of the car that had swirled
up to his crossing just as the train was coming and how he had gone
out into the road with the stop sign in his hand. A man with a
“stubbed” mustache and high cheekbones had leaned out of the car and
asked loudly what the hell he was holding him up for. When Reed read
of the South Braintree holdup the next day he had been sure those
men were the bandits, and after he heard of the arrests on May 5 he
had gone of his own accord to the Brockton police station to have a
look at the suspects. The man with the mustache, Vanzetti, was the
same man who had shouted at him from the car. He was sure of it in
Brockton, he was sure of it now. There was no doubt in his mind.
Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was
doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he
now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car,
what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the
last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had
spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that
the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore
did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’
testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents.
His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police
station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.
The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply
on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped
the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s
men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of
South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box,
there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that
had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal
game with its inherited rules.
For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of
the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front
pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of
Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and
several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls
and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been
arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of
Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old
Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a
French name, facing disbarment.
* * * * *
It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial
without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti
the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants
ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs,
police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were
guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling
pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters,
covering the trial for the Boston _Globe_, did not like it.
As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He
had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but
notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so
obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware
of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession
of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the
room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being
said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell
out of here! Who called you up here?”
Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not
discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by
Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several
times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer
announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.
A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin
Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a
quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were
not getting a fair trial.
* * * * *
The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the
owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron,
and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing
pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing
by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was
Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my
recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out
of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite
sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”
Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree
station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered
them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking
sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the
men he had seen.
Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the
bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was
“the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.
“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a
criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer
broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s
record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been
convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury
sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the
clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were
arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his
employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled
against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been
filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge,
even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.
Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily
for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a
barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair
cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the
car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.”
Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s
conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months.
Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the
poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.
Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait
on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition.
After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen
anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a
gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with
light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t
pulled off by any foreign people.’”
Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that
Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did
one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the
gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not
possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity,
Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.
After the identifications there followed a string of residual
witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were
for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind
told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore
engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not
the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner,
testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen
license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill,
the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent
fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage
and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet
hole in the right rear door.
Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the
stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man
Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to
us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he
was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw
the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car
concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda,
by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco,
Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”
Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to
connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda
driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could
hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not,
however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular
Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded
Ensher’s testimony.
Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting
the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at
the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings,
but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the
Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The
deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly
continued.
Following Connolly, Parmenter’s widow gave brief, pathetic, and
largely inconsequent testimony. Fred Loring told of picking up the
cap near Berardelli’s body. George Kelley, Sacco’s neighbor, refused
to identify the cap as Sacco’s. The most Williams could get him to
say was that the cap was similar in color to the cap Sacco wore
and that at the Three-K factory Sacco hung his cap on a nail each
morning. Williams asked whether he knew of anything happening to
the cap because it was hung on a nail. Kelley said he did not. Then
Williams asked what he noticed about the condition of the cap lining
he was examining on the stand. “Torn,” Kelley replied. As he went
on, he did his best to put in a good word for Sacco. His feeling of
friendship was obvious. However, he was obliged to admit that Sacco
had not worked during the Christmas week of 1919—an admission later
corroborated by his sister Margaret, the Three-K paymistress.
Mrs. Glendower Evans had become such an assiduous note-taker that
the sheriff finally provided a small table for her. Even from behind
the table she managed to display a vast assurance and a well-bred
disapproval of the proceedings. Judge Thayer took for granted the
enmity of radicals and of anarchists (_arnuchists_, he pronounced it)
but he expected something different from these Boston women of old
families who seemed to form a phalanx at the trial and who, he felt,
were people of his own class. One day, as the court adjourned, he
asked Mrs. Rantoul to step into his chambers. She found him alone,
waiting in his black robe. At once he asked her how she thought the
trial was going. “I told him,” she said later in an affidavit, “that
I had not yet heard sufficient evidence to convince me that the
defendants were guilty. He expressed dissatisfaction both by words,
gestures, tone of voice, and manner. He said that after hearing both
arguments and his charge I would certainly feel differently.”
The Commonwealth rested its case on the first day of summer.
CHAPTER TEN
THE TRIAL: II
Of the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body, plus the one
removed from Parmenter in the Quincy hospital and the one found in
his jacket, five had been fired from a 32-caliber pistol or pistols.
The type was determined by measuring the lands (ridges) and the
grooves impressed on the bullets by their passage through the barrel.
In addition, the rifling had a right-hand twist that also left its
mark.
The sixth bullet—the mortal one that Dr. Magrath had cut from
Berardelli and marked with three needle scratches—had been fired from
a 32-caliber automatic with a left-hand twist. Only the Colt among
American automatics had such a twist. The question that four experts
debated for several days was simply whether or not this bullet had
been fired from the Colt found on Sacco.
For the jury, the experts’ testimony was the most tedious part of the
trial—“a wilderness of lands and grooves,” as the Boston Post put it.
Through the long sticky days the jurymen fidgeted, fanning themselves
as the voices droned on.