After Pelser signed it Moore slapped him on the back again, gave him
a couple of cigars, and Lyons offered to take him and his girl to the
Westminster Winter Garden. Pelser refused. Afterward, when he thought
of what he had signed, he felt sick. Two days later, at his parents’
flat, he wrote to the district attorney:
_287 Centre St.
Jamiaca Plaine
Feb. 6, 1922._
_Mr. Katzmann_,
_Dear Sir:—Saturday afternoon a man called for me in regards the
Sacco Case. He did not say which side he represented._
_He asked me if I could give a little information on the case._
_I was drinking pretty heavy that day. He said I want to show a
couple of pictures and got me on the way in town gave me some money
bought a dinner cigars & cigarettes we went into some office in
Pemberton Sq. he introduced me to Mr. Moore then he sat me down and
locked the door Moore said to me you look like a white man._
_He patted me on the back & gave me a Cigar & said give me a little
dope on the Sacco Case he handed me a couple of pictures & asked me
if I ever saw them. I said “no”, he showed me some more. One word
led to another, he got around me some way & I didn’t know what I was
up against. He had 3 or 4 men in his office & a girl stenographer.
He asked me one question & other and finally had my whole story
contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court. I am worried at the
way they have framed me & got me in to trouble. When it was over one
of the men asked me if I would not have a drink & invited me to a big
dinner & dance at the West Minster Hotel. Some how I refused to go
because I felt it was another trap to get me to say more._
_When I came to my Senses the next day & had a little talk with my
folks they told me to get in touch with you as soon as I could I
tried to get you on the phone and then decided I had better write
you._
_Hoping you will give this your immediate attention and favor me with
an early reply._
_Respectfully,
Louis Pelser_
_P.S. I forgot to mention that I also signed two papers of some kind._
As soon as Assistant District Attorney Williams read the letter,
forwarded to him by Katzmann, he had Pelser up on the courthouse
carpet. Williams asked him if he did not remember looking at Sacco’s
picture and saying “That looks like the man,” of seeing Sacco and
exclaiming “By George! If he isn’t the man he is a dead image for
him.” Pelser now maintained that what he had said on the stand was
the truth as he believed it, and that nothing had since happened to
change his mind. The fact was that when he had talked to Moore in
Boston he was in no condition to know what he was saying.
However spineless Pelser seemed in other respects, the “dead image”
term still troubled him. When Williams asked him again if he had
meant those words, he insisted “I didn’t mean them in that way. I
don’t know how I happened to use that word ‘dead image.’”
In his new motion Moore claimed that the affidavit Pelser had signed
in his office was “tantamount and equivalent to a repudiation of the
testimony given by the said Louis Pelser on the trial of this case”
and that his testimony was “not entitled to be considered by the jury
as trustworthy and reliable.”
* * * * *
Eleven weeks later Moore filed the third supplementary motion, based
on what he had learned about Carlos Goodridge, the pool-playing
Victrola salesman who had so unhesitantly picked out Sacco as the
gunman he had seen in the getaway car. During the trial the defense
had discovered nothing more about Goodridge than that he was married
and lived in Cambridge and that in September 1920 he had pleaded
guilty to a charge of grand larceny in the Dedham court and had been
placed on probation. What Moore had since learned about Goodridge was
enough to destroy him.
Goodridge turned out to be Erastus Corning Whitney, a shiftless
bigamist from upper New York State, an arsonist, a passer of bad
checks who had served two terms in jail for petty larceny, a man who
had passed most of his adult life escaping from old misdemeanors and
importunate females. Tommy Doyle spent three months and more than
ten thousand dollars collecting documents, pictures, letters, and
affidavits that made all this plain.
Armed with the evidence, Moore started off for Vassalboro, Maine,
where Goodridge was now living. Stopping in Augusta, he picked up
Ethel Lee, a deputy sheriff, and her sister-in-law, Marjorie, a
stenographer. It was twilight by the time they reached Goodridge’s
Vassalboro farm. His third wife, Margaret Rose, said her husband
was down the road at a church meeting. Moore found him in the white
clapboard building, called him out in the middle of a hymn, and
asked him to get into the car. There he displayed Doyle’s documents
and asked Goodridge if he was not Erastus Corning Whitney, under
indictment for larceny in Livingston County, New York. Goodridge
admitted that he was. He did not dispute any of the facts that Doyle
had dredged up. “Well, the game is up,” he said wearily, “and I
suppose I will have to go back to New York.” He was not aware of the
woman in the back seat taking shorthand notes, nor did he recognize
his questioner until he said “My name is Moore.”
“Glad to meet you,” Goodridge said, trying to cover up his fear with
cordiality. “I’ve heard of you from San Francisco to Maine.”
Moore said flatly that he was not interested in what Goodridge had
or had not done in New York. All he wanted was the full story of how
he had come to testify in the Dedham court, and what influence the
district attorney’s office had brought to bear on him. Of course if
Goodridge did not want to talk, there was the deputy sheriff in the
back seat and an indictment waiting in New York.
Goodridge agreed to tell his tale. He had first recognized Sacco’s
picture, he said, in a newspaper. He had then shown it to a girl
he knew, Lottie Packard, who worked at Rice & Hutchins. “I says to
Lottie, ‘Whose picture is that?’ and she called him by name. I had
the paper folded so that she couldn’t see nothing but the picture. ‘I
used to work with him in a factory.’ I says, ‘That’s the fellow that
was in the gang down here.’ I told Lottie never to say anything about
it. I never told anyone but my wife.”
Williams and Brouillard and Stewart had been after him in the autumn
of 1920 to come to the Dedham jail with them, Goodridge continued,
but he had always refused, telling them it was no use to take him
there, that he had seen nothing and “didn’t know anything about the
deal.” When he himself was arraigned in Dedham he had recognized
Sacco as soon as the latter was brought into the courtroom, but he
never told anyone about this. He had lied to the district attorney’s
people and to the police because he did not want to get mixed up in
the case.
Moore came back again and again to his central question: Why had
Goodridge refused to talk from September to July, and then suddenly
gone on the stand and identified Sacco? Goodridge did not have any
explanation.
“I think I testified to the truth to the best of my ability,” he
complained, “and it’s a pretty hard proposition.”
The lawyer asked him sharply if he thought a man should die on his
statement. No, Goodridge did not think so. But when he had testified
he thought he had been right. No one had forced him, no inducements
had been offered. It was just that Sacco was the man he thought he
had seen. “But afterwards a good many times since I have thought that
I am not positive,” he went on. “I am not positive that if I would
have to swear that that man was the one, I could positively identify
him as the man.” As Moore continued to batter him with questions,
Goodridge began to cry.
Moore insisted that the assistant district attorney had badgered
Goodridge into taking the stand. Goodridge no longer denied it.
“You know just how those things is yourself,” he told the lawyer
pleadingly. “He talked to me so much I was just about dead, I guess.”
The stenographer now interrupted to say she had run out of paper. The
four drove back to the farm. On the way Moore urged Goodridge to
sign an affidavit. He refused. Finally Moore turned to the sheriff.
“I think, Mrs. Lee,” he said sternly, “that it is your duty to take
this man back to Augusta and notify the New York authorities.”
While Goodridge changed his clothes, Moore spent twenty minutes
talking, with his wife, reducing her, too, to tears. Goodridge then
quietly got in the car and they headed for Augusta. Just before they
reached the city Moore made a final effort: “Whitney, what I would
like to know is what inducement was held out to you to testify at
this trial. You did not testify at this trial willingly unless you
benefited by it some way or another; that is what I want to know and
if you will tell me you will save yourself the trouble of going back
to New York.” Goodridge still would not say.
Moore took him first to the county jail. There the warden refused to
admit him without a warrant. With the help of Deputy Sheriff Lee,
Moore managed to have him locked up in police headquarters as a
fugitive. “I will come back later,” Moore told the police chief, “as
I want this fellow to come clean and he is holding back things that
he ought to tell us.” Mrs. Lee then telegraphed the district attorney
of Livingston County that they were holding Erastus Corning Whitney
for him. Moore telephoned the clerk of courts in Genesee and asked
if Whitney was still wanted. The clerk said he did not think so, but
he would ask the sheriff. The sheriff expressed no interest in the
eleven-year-old indictment.
Goodridge remained the night at police headquarters. When next day he
was brought before Judge Robert Cony and the judge learned that the
indictment was dated November 24, 1911, he announced angrily from the
bench: “They will never bother you on it, and unless I hear from them
tonight I will let you go in the morning, and I do not intend to have
his office used by any lawyer to build up any cases for the State of
Massachusetts or any other state, and the best thing you can do is
not to see Mr. Moore again.”
Goodridge was released next morning. There was nothing more Moore
could do about him.
* * * * *
On September 11 Moore presented a fourth supplementary motion,
requesting a new trial because of additional facts discovered about
the witness Lola Andrews, “a person whose testimony should not
constitute the basis of a verdict of guilty on a charge of murder.”
Six months before the trial, when Moore had interviewed her in
the Alhambra Block in Quincy and shown her pictures of Sacco and
Vanzetti, she had been unable to identify them and had made a
statement exonerating the defendants. On the witness stand she had
claimed that this statement had been untruthfully reported. Now
Moore, as he wrote to Upton Sinclair, had “wilted” her. She had
signed an affidavit for him repudiating her court testimony and
admitting that she had lied because the district attorney knew “many
chapters of her private life that she could ill afford to have
revealed.”
Her affidavit stated that some time before the trial Stewart and
Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail, shown her Sacco, and
asked if he was the man she had seen on April 15. She said she did
not know. Later Assistant District Attorney Williams put the same
question to her. She said she could not be positive. Williams then
shook his finger in her face and told her, “You can put it stronger
than that. I know you can.”
Her testimony in court had been “false and untrue.... She had never
... at any time or place or under any conditions and specifically on
April 15, 1920, at South Braintree, seen said Nicola Sacco until she
saw him in the Dedham County Jail.” Her false statements “were made
under the intimidating influences of Michael E. Stewart, Albert L.
Brouillard, Harold Williams and Frederick G. Katzmann.”
Like Pelser, Lola Andrews found herself overborne by any determined
person who talked with her. In addition she had much to conceal.
Her life in Quincy was in part known to the police. Recently there
had been some business about a naval officer named Landers in her
room, hushed up for the time but still rumor-heavy. When Moore found
out that she had originally come from Gardiner, Maine, he sent Bert
Carpenter there to see what he could learn. What Carpenter learned
would have ruined her in any court.
She had been born Rachel Andrews, the by-product of an encounter
between a Yankee farmer’s daughter and an itinerant Italian. A
tow-path child brought up in a shanty settlement on the outskirts of
the trim Kennebec town, she had scarcely passed adolescence when she
married an ex-soldier returned from the Philippines, Mayhew Hassam,
an alcoholic who used her cruelly. She had borne him one son. After
the marriage ended she had stayed on in Gardiner across the street
from the Soldiers’ Home, available and accommodating. In Augusta
she had been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct. Moving on to
Massachusetts, she had left her son behind, sending money back for
his board. At the time she testified in Dedham he was eighteen years
old. What her life had been she did not ever want him to know. The
boy was her weak spot—a spot Moore did not hesitate to exploit. He
had been hard on Pelser, hard on Goodridge, he would be hard on her.
A lawyer, to his mind, could not be delicate when men’s lives were at
stake.
Lola Darroch brought young Hassam from Maine, hired a room for him
in the seedy Hotel Essex opposite the South Station, and sent for
the mother. The boy, though an unkempt rustic, had proved tractable
and intelligent, accepting Moore’s version of the case and agreeing
to try to persuade his mother to repudiate her courtroom testimony.
Lola Andrews, brought in from Quincy, confronted her son while Moore
told her that she had lied in Dedham and that it was now up to her
to tell the truth. She wilted at once and began to cry. Moore spent
the evening drafting an affidavit. When it was handed to her, her
son begged her to sign. Moore showed her certain affidavits that
Carpenter had collected in Gardiner, without, however, allowing her
to read them. She signed.
Moore could indeed browbeat such witnesses as Pelser, Goodridge, and
Lola Andrews. The difficulty was that when they were alone again they
had second thoughts that generally took the form of a disclaiming
letter to the district attorney. On January 9, 1923, Lola signed
a counteraffidavit for District Attorney Katzmann and Assistant
District Attorney Williams in which she claimed that Moore had used
her boy to trap her and that she had not read the nine pages of the
affidavit. She had not wanted to sign it.
_I told them that if I put my name to that paper that they had
already drawn up for me ... I could see it meant a terrible disgrace
for me. They told me no, that I was doing the grandest thing a woman
could do, and that by doing what they wanted me to do I would gain
the respect and friendship of everyone, and that my boy would not
be ashamed to look upon me as his mother, and the evidence they had
brought with them from Maine would not be submitted to the court
or to the eyes of anyone, not even to my son.... Mr. Moore took me
over to a small desk and laid the paper in front of me and told me
to sign it. I told him I would not, for I did not realize what I was
doing.... They dipped the pen in the ink and tried to pass it into my
hand.... All the time I was crying and asking them not to force me to
sign it. My son then said, “Mother, I want you to sign that paper,
for it means a whole lot to me.” I do not seem to remember much what
happened after that, only that someone put the pen in my hand and
told me to sign it, and asked my boy to come over to me and help me.
My boy came over and put his arm around me and said, “Mother, sign
this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not
recognize these men”—meaning Sacco and Vanzetti—“and you will only be
doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.”_
“I was like I was in a trance,” she later told Katzmann.
* * * * *
Perhaps the most crucial testimony offered in the trial, the deciding
factor—if John Dever is to be believed—was the evidence of the guns
and the bullets. If, as Moore was well aware, it could be proved
beyond a doubt that the mortal bullet found in Berardelli’s body
had not been fired from Sacco’s automatic, the keystone of the
Commonwealth’s case would be demolished. In February 1923, with this
in mind, he engaged Dr. Albert Hamilton, a New York expert who had
testified in 165 homicide cases, to prepare the fifth supplementary
motion, the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
Hamilton came into the case through Frank Sibley, who happened to
meet him while riding on the train from Portland, Maine, to Boston.
Hamilton, an authoritative little man with a convincing air, told
Sibley that if he had been a witness at Dedham he could have proved
quickly and conclusively whether or not Sacco’s pistol had fired
the mortal bullet. Once back in Boston Sibley recommended Hamilton
enthusiastically to Moore. The lawyer immediately wrote Hamilton to
ask what he would charge for coming to Boston. Without bothering
to reply, Hamilton confidently took the next train. In their first
interview Moore told Hamilton he was vitally concerned in learning
the answers to four fundamental questions: Had the hammer of the
Vanzetti revolver been replaced by a new hammer? Were one or more of
the shells that Fraher had picked up fired in the Sacco pistol? Had
Bullet III been fired from the Sacco pistol? Was the mortal bullet
discharged from a cartridge of the same date of manufacture as any of
the cartridges found on Sacco when he was arrested? Hamilton agreed
to make the investigation and determine the four answers.
Hamilton was an unlucky choice. Moore did not suspect that
his doctorate was self-awarded. By trade a druggist and
concocter of patent medicines in Auburn, New York, Hamilton had
developed expertness as a second career, advertising himself
as a “micro-chemical investigator.” His avocation became his
calling. In 1908, in a publicity pamphlet entitled “That Man from
Auburn,” he described himself as a qualified expert in chemistry,
microscopy, handwriting, ink analysis, typewriting, photography,
fingerprints, toxicology, gunshot wounds, guns and cartridges,
bullet identification, gunpowder, nitroglycerine, dynamite, high
explosives, blood and other stains, causes of death, embalming, and
anatomy. Unknown to Moore, he had earlier written to Judge Thayer
claiming that he knew a method of examining the Sacco-Vanzetti
ballistics exhibit that would reveal the truth. He had received no
reply. Men who had worked with Hamilton in the past did not recommend
him. The Auburn coroner said that his reputation for truth was bad.
The assistant district attorney of Monroe County considered him “a
professional expert ... whose testimony should not be accepted in any
court of record, and should receive no credence at the hands of a
judge or jury.”
Much of Hamilton’s clouded reputation in New York stemmed from the
murder trial of Charles Stielow who, in 1915, was accused of shooting
Charles Phelps and his housekeeper in West Shelby. Hamilton had
appeared for the prosecution. After tests and a minute examination
of Stielow’s revolver and of the three bullets taken from Phelps’
body and the one from that of his housekeeper, he testified that only
Stielow’s revolver could have fired the bullets. Principally because
of this testimony Stielow was found guilty and sentenced to death.
Later he was proved to be innocent and pardoned. In a post-trial
review of the evidence Max Poser, an expert in applied optics with
the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, demonstrated that the bullets
taken from the bodies had not come from the Stielow revolver. “The
opinion expressed by the expert Hamilton in his evidence at the
trial,” Poser concluded, “was worthless.” The setback, however, did
not seem to hamper Hamilton’s career.
It did not take Hamilton long, after inspecting the Sacco-Vanzetti
exhibits, to come to his conclusions. In the motion, filed on
April 30, 1923, he claimed that by using a Bausch & Lomb compound
microscope he was able to ascertain discrepancies between the
markings on the test bullets from Sacco’s pistol and the markings on
Bullet III. According to his measurements the land and groove widths
in the barrel of Sacco’s Colt agreed with the land and groove widths
on the test bullets but not with the mortal bullet. He also found
that a microscopic examination of the Fraher shells eliminated the
possibility of any one of them having been fired in the Colt. Because
of a difference in the cannelures, he contended that Bullet III was
not manufactured at the same time as the six Winchester cartridges
found on Sacco. Augustus Gill, Professor of Technical Chemical
Analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been
engaged to assist Hamilton. His tabulations, made under different
conditions, varied somewhat from Hamilton’s. Nevertheless, he was
convinced from his own measurements “that the so-called mortal bullet
never passed through the Sacco gun.” As for Vanzetti’s revolver,
Hamilton maintained that it had not been fitted with a new hammer,
because an essential screw did not show marks of having been removed.
Captain Van Amburgh, in an affidavit for the Commonwealth, became
much more positive than he had been at the trial. He now used a
more powerful microscope and in addition he had had comparative
photographs taken of Bullet III and one of the test bullets. He
offered twelve pictures of each bullet in which the lands and
grooves were separately photographed so that the enlarged pictures
could be compared. “The facts which I have found from my entire
investigation,” he asserted, “are so clear that, in my opinion, they
amount to proof. I am absolutely certain that the Fraher Shell W
was fired in the Sacco pistol. I am also positive that the mortal
bullet was fired in the Sacco pistol.” His findings were confirmed
by Merton Robinson, a ballistics engineer for the Winchester Arms
Company. Robinson not only maintained that Bullet III had been fired
from Sacco’s pistol, but rejected Hamilton’s argument that the
mortal bullet and those found on Sacco were of a different date of
manufacture. As for Hamilton’s photographic evidence to prove that
the hammer in Vanzetti’s revolver had not been replaced, it would
have been quite possible, Robinson asserted, for an expert repairman
to have inserted a new screw, or to have removed and replaced the old
one, without leaving marks on the screw head.
* * * * *
On March 8, 1923, after much persuasion on the part of the McAnarney
brothers, William Thompson agreed to enter the case for the limited
purpose of arguing the motions for a new trial. He had been hesitant
about becoming involved, but, ironically enough, it was Katzmann’s
attack on the integrity and qualifications of Dr. Hamilton that
finally persuaded him.