the time he had arrived at South Braintree the night of the murders
until Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart, he had been in charge of the
investigation. At the very beginning he felt that the holdup with its
careful timing was a professional job, and after the arrest of Sacco
and Vanzetti he told Katzmann that Stewart had got hold of the wrong
men. He still felt so. It was not, however, about his theories but
as a ballistics expert that the white-haired Proctor now testified.
Only three days before taking the stand he and his colleague Charles
Van Amburgh and the defense expert James Burns had fired fourteen
test bullets through Sacco’s automatic into a box of oiled sawdust.
The recovered bullets were compared with the mortal Bullet III. That
bullet had a milled groove around it (known as a cannelure) that
had been discontinued in more recent Winchester bullets of the same
caliber. Burns was unable to obtain any of the older Winchesters
corresponding to Bullet III, so used U.S. bullets as most closely
resembling the obsolete type.[9]
To John Dever, Proctor seemed a reluctant witness. The captain first
explained that he was accustomed to testing 38- and 32-caliber
revolvers by pushing bullets through the barrel manually. When
in his demonstration he showed himself unable to strip the Sacco
pistol, Dever was not impressed. Proctor then told the jury that the
five right-twist bullets had come from a Savage automatic. When the
assistant district attorney asked him if he was sure, he replied:
“I can be as certain of that as I can of anything.” However, when
Williams asked his opinion as to whether Bullet III had been fired
from Sacco’s Colt, Proctor phrased his answer in a much more measured
manner. “My opinion is,” he told Williams, “that it is consistent
with being fired by that pistol.” In the casual moment the ambiguity
of the answer escaped Moore. Thomas McAnarney spotted it at once and
nudged his brother, but wise in the ways of the police, he feared
a trap. If he should now ask Proctor what he meant by consistent,
Proctor might reply that he meant that the bullet had gone through
the gun—and this would be so much the worse for the defendants.
Thomas therefore said nothing.
As for the four shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel walk,
Proctor explained that Shell W—with the identifying Winchester W
on it—had been fired in one pistol, the other three in another. He
compared the indentation made by the firing pin on Shell W with the
indentations on the test shells fired in Sacco’s pistol. The marks
on both, he said, were consistent—again he used the word—with their
being fired in the same weapon.
The Commonwealth’s second expert was Charles Van Amburgh of
the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport,
Connecticut. Before going to Remington, he had spent nine years
at the Springfield Arsenal, and then periods at the Westinghouse
and Colt Firearms companies. His evidence was a corroboration of
Proctor’s. He, too, had compared Bullet III with those recovered
from the sawdust. By measuring the lands, he had determined
that the bullet had been fired from a 32-caliber Colt. As to
whether he thought it had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, he replied
circumspectly, “I am inclined to believe that it was fired, Number
III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.” He went on
to say that there was a rough rust track at the bottom of the pistol
barrel, and that corresponding marks could be traced on the bullet.
Under cross-examination he admitted that it was common for Colts to
rust at that particular place. Like Proctor, he thought that the
other five bullets had come from a Savage and had been fired from the
same weapon.
Burns, the first of the defense’s experts to testify, had spent
thirty years as a ballistics engineer with the U.S. Cartridge
Company. He agreed that Bullet III could have been fired from a Colt
but felt that it could also have been fired from a Bayard, a foreign
make. Whatever pistol it had come from, the rifling had been fouled
and corroded. The other bullets, he testified, could have been fired
from a Savage, a Steyr, or a Walther. Burns produced six of the eight
bullets he had fired from Sacco’s Colt—the other two, he explained,
he had lost. He pointed out that the lands and grooves were regular
and clean. To the question whether Bullet III had been fired from
Sacco’s pistol his answer was: “In my opinion, no. It doesn’t compare
at all.”
J. Henry Fitzgerald, the second defense expert, backed him up.
Fitzgerald had been twenty-eight years in the weapon business and
was now in charge of the testing room at the Colt Patent Firearms
Company. “Number III bullet was not fired from the Sacco pistol,” he
told the court. “I can see no pitting or marks on bullet Number III
that would correspond with a bullet coming from this gun.”
With these paired contradictions the bullet testimony ended.
Berardelli had owned a 38-caliber Harrison & Richardson revolver.
After his death it could not be found. It was Katzmann’s contention,
underlined in his summing-up, that the revolver found on Vanzetti the
night of his arrest had been lifted by Sacco from the dying detective.
In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver
than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the
stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted
to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first
story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen
dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months,
and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble
cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo
Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid
five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were
there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect
himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a
hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many
crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling
Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that
he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said
this, it was not so.
Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as
his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard
that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he
had never fired it or taken it apart.
For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater
from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in
the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington &
Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who
happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He
had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold
it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel
plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The
holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also
recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small
side-strap.
Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if
another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions
might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could
ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence
began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just
guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that
had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold,
and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion.
Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is
the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer
finally rapped out: “Answer the question!”
“I am not,” he admitted.
Eldridge Atwater, Slater’s brother-in-law, took the stand to say
that eight years before he had often borrowed his father-in-law’s
Harrington & Richardson to shoot at bottles and cans. After
Mogridge’s death, his widow had taken the revolver with her when
she went to Norwood to visit her daughter and that was the last
Atwater had ever seen of it. He could not quite bring himself to say
that the revolver exhibited in court was the same one he had fired
seventy-five or a hundred times in Maine. The closest he would come
to it was to say that “as far as those two markings, that is the
revolver Mr. Mogridge had eight years ago.” He had never paid any
attention to the revolver’s serial number.
The missing link in the ownership chain was Orciani. Some months
before the trial he had given up his foundry job to become Moore’s
chauffeur. The fact that he was never called as a witness was not
missed by the jurors. Katzmann in his summing-up made the most of
it. “Why didn’t you bring Orciani into this courtroom?” he demanded
rhetorically. “He has been within the control of this defense. He
has been outside the courtroom, and he is not produced. What is the
reason?”
While there was no one in South Braintree who could say with
certainty that Berardelli had his revolver with him on the day of his
death, his widow testified that he generally carried it. Margaret
Mahoney and the other girls in the Slater & Morrill office had seen
the revolver at various times, and he had even showed it to Jimmy
Bostock the Saturday before the robbery. Bostock knew that it was
nickel-plated and that the guard carried it in his hip pocket, but
what kind it was he did not know. No one had seen the bandits take
anything from Berardelli’s body. Lewis Wade saw the guard reach for
his hip pocket as he was falling, and Peter McCullum saw one of the
bandits holding a “white” revolver in his left hand.
Sarah Berardelli, a sad, illiterate Jewish woman, told what she knew
of her husband’s revolver. It was like Vanzetti’s. Three weeks before
the murder her husband had taken it to Boston to be repaired—it
had a “spring broke.” Sarah had accompanied her husband and they
had gone to a store on Washington Street which—with prompting from
the district attorney—she remembered: the Iver Johnson Company.
Berardelli had been given a claim check. This he turned over to
Parmenter, who then let him take another gun that looked just like
the first. Whether anyone had picked up the gun at Iver Johnson’s,
whether it had come back into her husband’s possession, Sarah
Berardelli did not know.
Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s,
said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington
& Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920,
to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer,
the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a
revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth
and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it
“H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired
twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the
caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he
said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not
show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning,
neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had
repaired.
Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the
defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that
to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of
the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication
of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this
revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any
other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that
Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart,
ought to know what he was talking about.
According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms
department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered
because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not
called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away
until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was
then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no
record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of
delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that
this revolver had been delivered.
If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when
it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether
or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point,
as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a
will-o’-the-wisp.
To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the
Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used
it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found
three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them
in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess,
when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets
and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and
McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.
While Ripley was downstairs examining his bullets, Thomas McAnarney
in the upstairs corridor happened to run into Captain Proctor and the
Commissioner of Public Safety, Colonel Alfred Foote, and they chatted
together before court resumed. McAnarney never forgot Proctor’s
parting remark to the commissioner: “These are not the right men. Oh,
no, you haven’t got the right men.”
On Wednesday, June 22, the short opening statement for the defense
was made by William Callahan, who, although he had been dropped as
Vanzetti’s counsel in the Plymouth trial, still remained associated
with Sacco’s defense. Whatever his capacities, he kept the confidence
of both defendants to the end. Moore wanted him, as a local lawyer,
to present the case, and this was one of the few times he emerged
from his background role. Callahan first reminded the jurors that the
defendants were presumed innocent. Then he promised that the defense
would show what Vanzetti was doing on April 15 and would prove that
Sacco was in Boston getting a passport. In addition, the defense
would offer witnesses to show that the men in the South Braintree
bandit car were not Sacco and Vanzetti.
Moore intended to swamp the prosecution with witnesses. After a
protracted exposition by Charles Breed, a civil engineer who had
made maps and photographs of the Pearl Street area for the defense,
Moore produced Edward Carter, a cutter at the lower Slater & Morrill
factory. As the first shots were fired Carter had looked out a window
and up the street to what, until he saw a man drop, he thought was
a bunch of boys fooling. From his distance of eighty yards and with
the sun in his eyes the men had been indistinct. He was unable to say
whether or not the defendants were the men he had seen.
Frank Burke remembered the man in the front seat who had thrust a
pistol in his face as the Buick passed the cobbler’s shop. That man
was “very dark complected and needed a shave very badly.” Burke also
noticed a man with a “short cropped mustache” in the back seat. But
when Callahan asked him if the defendants were the men he had seen
ten feet away in the car, the most he could get Burke to say was: “I
would say they were not.” John Dever was not favorably impressed.
Burke seemed to him to be “altogether too anxious at times to
volunteer information and at other times evasive and vacillating.”
Katzmann wanted to know how Burke knew the car was a Buick. Because,
Burke said, it was like the car belonging to lawyer Callahan in which
he had ridden to court this morning. His powers of observation were
at a discount when it turned out that Callahan’s car was a Hudson.
Albert Frantello, who had run into Parmenter and Berardelli as they
left the Hampton House, recalled that on his way up from the lower
factory he had met two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins pipe
fence. He particularly remembered the dark one in a dark cap who
needed a shave, for he had passed so close he could have touched him.
The other man had a lighter complexion. They were talking to each
other in “the American language,” and he was sure that neither of
them was either of the men in the cage.
As part of his cross-examination Katzmann led Frantello to the jury
box, asked him to observe two jurors, then turn away and describe
them. Although both jurors were clean-shaven, Frantello described one
of them as having a mustache as well as a nonexistent watchchain.
Immediately after the murders he had told Brouillard that the dark
man by the fence was “a regular wop”; now he denied that the man was
an Italian. Whether or not he had told Brouillard that he did not
know the language the men were speaking he could not recall, but
whatever he might have said then, he now insisted that they were
speaking “American.”
Wilfred Pierce and Lawrence Ferguson, shoe-cutters who had been
working with Mark Carrigan on the third floor of the Hampton House,
were no more satisfactory witnesses for the defense than Carrigan
had been for the prosecution. Both had heard the shots and looked
out the window as the touring car crossed the tracks. Both had seen
a dark man climb from the rear seat to the front. Pierce saw him
fire a shot. When asked if the man was either of the defendants, he
would say no more than “I don’t think it was, but I am not positive.”
Ferguson was equally uncertain: “It may or it may not have been.
I don’t know positively.” The most that their testimony seemed to
show—and this by contrast—was the extraordinary vision and tenacious
memory of Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine.
* * * * *
Through the last of June the hot spell was unrelenting. To speed up
the trial Judge Thayer agreed to extend the session from 9 A.M. until
6 P.M., but he rejected the jurors’ suggestion for evening sessions.
The days followed each other torpidly. Sacco and Vanzetti sat upright
in the cage, occasionally whispering to one another; the jurymen sat
fanning themselves. The succession of witnesses accelerated and the
spectators thinned out. Mrs. Evans, the “angel for the radicals” as
the _Post_ called her, continued to write voluminously at her desk.
Her hats changed frequently, her attitude did not.
With June fading, Moore found the defense again in the familiar
position of running short of money. The fifty thousand dollars
collected over the past year was gone, used up in investigations and
fees and a hundred other unavoidable expenses. Judge Thayer offered
to allow the defense to proceed _in forma pauperis_ with some of
their costs home by the Commonwealth, but this humiliation Moore
refused to accept. On June 29 with the defense lacking funds even
to pay witnesses, Mrs. Evans produced $1500 to tide them over for
the week. At the end of the week she added to this all her available
income, $2950, plus $600 contributed by her friends. Mrs. Cerise Jack
handed over $100.
The sixteen-man crew that had been digging the excavation across
the street from Rice & Hutchins and that Mrs. Nichols saw cut and
run when the shooting started could scarcely be considered the most
reliable of witnesses, but Moore with his weight-of-numbers tactics
how brought in five of them, of whom only one could speak English.
William Foley, the driver of a dump truck, had just left the
excavation with a load when the shots rang out and the Buick swayed
up Pearl Street. Foley, headed in the other direction, saw only the
driver clearly and his description of him was unique: “eyeglasses,
short mustache, soft hat, high cheekbones, sallow complexion.” He
also had a glimpse of another man in a cap sitting in the rear seat.
At this point he could not recall the men’s faces, but they were not
the men in the cage. Katzmann, weaving back to Boda, asked Foley
several times if the driver was not wearing a velour hat. Foley
remembered it as a soft hat, but was positive it was not velour. He
admitted that he could not tell whether or not the man in the back
seat was one of the defendants.
Emilio Falcone, who had been shoveling dirt into Foley’s truck just
before the shooting, testified through the court interpreter, Joseph
Ross, who also acted as Judge Thayer’s chauffeur. Falcone thought
that he had been forty or fifty feet away from the shooting, near
enough at least so that he heard Parmenter groan as he dropped. The
man who shot him was “kind of pale, light, pale.” Another man had
picked up the money-box. Under Callahan’s rather fussy questioning
as to whether the two men in the cage resembled the men in the car,
Falcone said they did not. Callahan’s reiterations, doubly tedious
through translation, made Falcone lose his temper. “Well, for God’s
sake,” he replied, “why do you ask me again?”
Three Spaniards who had been working next to Falcone testified
through an interpreter of their own. Pedro Iscorla, on his way to get
a drink of water, had seen a “high, thin, slim, light fellow” shoot
Parmenter and a dark man shoot Berardelli. These men were not the
defendants. Henry Cerro had seen a light gunman who resembled neither
of the defendants. Like Iscorla, Sibriano Guidierris had seen a light
man and a little dark man with a dark cap. Each shot a different man.
Neither gunman resembled the men in the cage.
Moore now brought in eight of the railroad workers who had seen
the Buick pass. They had all noticed the meager light-complexioned
driver and four of them had seen the dark man next to him. All
were positive that the defendants had not been in the car. Nicola
Gatti, one of the workers, had known Sacco in Milford eight years
earlier—the only witness of the crime who had previously known either
of the defendants. In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he
had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the
Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been
that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver,
the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun.
Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti.
One of the track workers, Joseph Cellucci, testified in English. He
had recently joined the Navy and appeared on the stand in uniform. As
soon as he had heard the shots he had thrown down his shovel. Ricci,
the foreman, had tried to stop him, but he had ducked away and was
only about five feet from the Buick as it passed. A dark bristly man
half-kneeling between the front and back seats had leveled a revolver
and fired at him, the shot winging so close to his ear that he was
deaf for three days. Cellucci had only a glimpse of the driver but it
was enough to convince him that neither of the prisoners had been in
the getaway car.
Barbara Liscomb, who had looked directly down at the bareheaded
gunman, was considered the star witness for the defense. The
contorted face of the dark man with the pistol who stared up at her
as she stood at a second-floor window of Rice & Hutchins, had made an
imprint in her mind she could never forget. “I would always remember
that face,” she told the court. She was “positively sure” it was not
the face of Sacco or Vanzetti.
Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so
much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like
a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man.
Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton
operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said
it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever
making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man.