Marshal of South San Francisco, who said that he had found a suitcase
containing forty sticks of dynamite on the state highway leading to San
Bruno on June 10th. Apparently, Fickert wasn’t above some titillating
irrelevancies to soften up a jury. Kneese was followed by Dr. David E.
Stafford, the physician who had performed the autopsies on Hetta Knapp
and the seven other persons killed in the July 22nd blast. Dr. Stafford
stated that he had removed small pieces of .22- and .32-caliber shells
and particles of iron pipe from their bodies. After Will George M.
Hon, the foreman of the Cadillac Garage, testified that, when Billings
was discharged from his mechanic’s job in June, he had owned a brown
suitcase, Captain Matheson and Lieutenant Bunner described the scene at
Steuart and Market Streets following the blast
Earl R. Moore, a policeman, was the first witness to place any of the
defendants on Market Street before the explosion. He had been ordered
to clear the parade route of all traffic. Shortly after one p.m., he
had noticed an old Ford jitney with a broken horn and a torn rear
cushion parked in front of 721 Market Street, a two-story building
directly across the street from the offices of the Preparedness Day
Parade Committee. While he was standing near the automobile, waiting
for its owner to show up, he had observed a man loitering on the
sidewalk a few feet away. When Moore asked him if he knew who owned the
vehicle, the man had answered, “Oh, he’ll be here in a minute.” The
policeman “went on down toward 4th Street and I came back in about ten
minutes again and the machine was gone.” Four days later, he identified
Billings as the man who had spoken to him that afternoon.
Herbert C. Wade, the principal of a Hawaiian school, had been in no
mood to watch the Preparedness Day Parade. Bothered by a bad toothache,
he had been heading for his dentist’s office in 721 Market Street. As
he walked toward the entrance to the building, Billings passed him
“and went up the steps into the dental office. He had a suitcase or
something of the sort with him.” A few minutes later, the witness saw a
man and woman but he was unable to say that they had been Mr. and Mrs.
Mooney. “It was somewhere around one o’clock when I saw Billings,” he
told the jurors, “ten minutes to one or ten minutes after.”
The dentist’s receptionist, Estelle G. Smith, had been waiting for the
parade to start when Billings entered the office. He had a suitcase in
his hand and told her that he was a motion picture cameraman for the
_San Francisco Chronicle_. When he asked for permission to photograph
the parade from the roof, she told him that he would have to wait until
the dentist returned from lunch. Because she thought he was “sick from
the heat,” she had decided to let him go up to the roof at once. She
had asked a friend, Louis Rominger to “Please show this man to the
roof” while she returned to the window to watch the parade, which had
just started. When Mayor Rolph passed by in the street below, she had
waved a towel at him and shouted, “Hello, Mayor Rolph!” According to
photographs taken by the International Film Company, the Mayor had
passed 721 Market Street at 1:50 P.M.
At “half after one or so,” a tall “very repulsive looking man, long
mustache,” who looked like “a Russian Jew,” burst into the dental
office and attempted to push by Miss Smith who was standing in front of
the stairway. When she threatened to call the police, a woman ran up
the first-floor steps and persuaded the man to leave the building. Five
minutes later, a “very agitated” Billings came down from the roof and,
after thanking the receptionist for her kindness, hurriedly departed.
She was sure that the woman had been Rena Mooney.
Alice Kidwell, Miss Smith’s mother, had been seated at the window in
the dentist’s reception room when she saw the Mooneys talking to two
men on the sidewalk outside the building. Mrs. Mooney left the group
for a moment and, when she returned, “I saw her with her hand waving
it up this way, beckoning to someone on the roof.” A few minutes
later, the young man who had been taking pictures on the roof left the
building. Mrs. Kidwell remembered saying, “Good gracious, he couldn’t
have taken very many because he was up there just a short time.” She
last saw the Mooneys walking west on Market Street.
A tramp waiter by the name of John McDonald was the only witness before
the Grand Jury who testified to seeing both Mooney and Billings at
Steuart and Market Streets. He had been standing on the east side of
Steuart, some fifteen feet south of Market, when he noticed a “young
fellow coming down carrying a grip in his hand.” Because the man
appeared so nervous, McDonald kept his eye on him as he walked down
Steuart Street. Just before he reached the corner, he “transferred the
suitcase over to his left hand and set it down near the wall.” Then,
the young man walked to a saloon at the comer of Steuart and Market
where he was joined by another man who had been inside. He identified
the youth who had been carrying the suitcase as Billings and the man
who had emerged from the bar as Mooney.
McDonald watched the two men talk together for a few minutes and then
he saw Mooney take out a pocket watch and check it with the clock in
the Ferry Building tower. Seconds later, Billings “took a cut right
through the parade toward the other side of Market Street as though he
were going back to the Ferry Building.” After waiting a few minutes,
Mooney also crossed Market Street “as though he was going across to
Drum Street,” one block west of the Embarcadero. By this time, the
witness had lost interest in both men and decided to walk up Market
Street. He had reached the Alameda Cafe, some 150 feet from where he
had been standing, when the explosion occurred.
Mrs. Mooney, who was known professionally as Rena Herman, had been
teaching music in a fifth-floor studio in the Eilers Building at 975
Market Street for almost eight years. On the day of the parade, she had
watched the spectacle from the roof of her building with her husband
and two relatives. When they arrived on the roof, “the parade hadn’t
started then. Everybody was yelling it was starting. We hurried to get
up there. We didn’t leave the roof until after the parade passed.”
Neither she nor Tom had been at 721 Market Street on July 22nd; in
fact, they hadn’t left the Eilers Building until five o’clock that
evening.
Although Mooney, Billings and Nolan refused to testify because they had
not been permitted to talk to their lawyers, Weinberg stated that “I am
willing to answer every question you wish to ask me.” He denied that
his taxi had been parked in front of 721 Market Street on the afternoon
of the explosion or that he had been in the vicinity of Steuart and
Market around two o’clock. Although he swore that his jitney was in
perfect working condition, he admitted that “the machine in the back is
torn, the thread.” At one p.m. on the 22nd, he was driving a passenger
to Fillmore and Sutter. Then he had gone to the office of the gas
company and paid his bill which was two months overdue. Because the
parade was disrupting all traffic, he had decided to call it a day and
go home. “I went to the butcher shop,” he said, “and got some meat and
went home about three or a little after three.” He had remained home
until “five or a little after.”
When Mooney was arrested on the San Francisco train, the police who
searched him found the key to Nolan’s basement apartment at 82 Angelica
Street in his pocket. Officer Peter J. Hughes, who had been a member
of the squad which ransacked the apartment, testified that he had
found plaster of Paris, a box containing saltpetre and another bag
that contained what “looked like black powder.” A motorcycle belonging
to Mooney, twenty pounds of epsom salts, a bag of flour, and a small
quantity of flashlight powder were also uncovered. According to Hughes,
“We asked him [Nolan] several times before we went down in the basement
if there was anything in the basement. He said ‘no.’”
On August 2nd, the Grand Jury returned a true bill, charging all five
suspects with the murders of the eight people who had been killed in
the explosion. Fickert, whose first act after having been elected
District Attorney in 1909 had been to obtain the dismissal of graft
indictments against officers of the United Railroads, looked forward
to the Mooney trial with a relish that was undisguisable. However, he
decided that it might be more expedient to try second offender Billings
first and the latter’s trial began on September 11, 1916, in the
Superior Court of San Francisco, before Judge Frank H. Dunne.
The prosecution called most of the witnesses who had testified before
the Grand Jury. McDonald repeated his story of seeing Billings at
Steuart and Market just before the explosion. “As near as I can
remember it must have been eight or ten minutes to two when I first
discovered him.” After describing the meeting of Billings and Mooney
in front of the saloon, the witness said that he “went down to the
restaurant on the Embarcadero, 34 was the number, and got a glass of
buttermilk.” It was while he was there and not, as he had told the
Grand Jury, in front of the Alameda Cafe, that the explosion took
place. Also, he now said that he had lost both men in the crowd after
their meeting at the corner of Market and Steuart.
Fickert had found a new witness to support McDonald’s story. John
M. Crowley was an automobile mechanic who worked on the corner of
Steuart and Mission. He was positive that he had seen Billings at 1:55,
“standing about three feet from where I was.” He saw him again at the
same place immediately after the explosion and he remembered that the
defendant had refused to take off his hat when the band was playing
“The Colors.” But he was certain that Billings had not been carrying
anything in his hands at either time.
Estelle Smith and Herbert Wade swore that they had seen Billings at 721
Market Street at approximately one p.m. on July 22nd. Peter Vidovich,
an eccentric patient who had decided not to wait for the tardy dentist,
was just descending the steps to the street when he saw Billings
struggling up the narrow stairway with a suitcase. “I backed up and
stood behind the banister on the top of the stairway and give him a
chance to come up.” The suitcase was, he remembered, “kind of pale
color like, rather deeper that the ordinary suitcase ... pale color of
chocolate or wine color. It was a kind of funny suitcase, it was kind
of different.”
Mellie Edeau and her daughter, Sadie, had come from Oakland to see the
parade. Although neither woman had been called before the Grand Jury,
they both swore that they had seen Billings on the roof of 721 Market
Street. Shortly before one p.m., they had been standing in front of the
Kamm Building which was next door to 721. Sadie Edeau testified that
“when I first saw Billings he was on the roof of 721 Market, leaning
over the edge of the building. He had a suitcase in his hand.” Her
mother said she had noticed him “on top of the roof ... with a suitcase
and he was talking to someone on the street below him.”
According to four employees of Uhl Brothers, there had been a cameraman
with a suitcase on the roof of 721 Market Street on Parade Day.
Alphonse De Caccia had seen a young man with “a kodak, a kodak grip--a
black grip about two feet long and a foot wide” sitting in a corner.
This man, he said, had been there when DeCaccia left “about 4:15.”
Tracy F. Barrett had observed a “man sitting in the west corner [with
a] camera very similar to a newspaper reporter’s camera,” while William
B. Crump was sure that this man was still there at “about ten minutes
after two” when the witness left the roof. Henry Pincus had seen a man
“sitting on the firewall” when he arrived on the roof just as Crump was
leaving.
On the day of the blast, Billings had left his house at 1:30 p.m. As
he headed for Market and Kearney, he had noticed “a large battleship
gray Hudson automobile” on Union Square Avenue. He ended up at Market
and Sixth where he “bought an extra with an account of the explosion.”
Then he had helped a friend of his who was running a jitney bus between
the Ferry and uptown. At no time during the day had he been “at Steuart
and Market or 721 Market. I didn’t see Mrs. Kidwell, Estelle Smith, or
Rominger, and I had no suitcase.”
On September 23rd, the young machinist was convicted of murder in the
first degree, but the jury fixed his punishment at life imprisonment.
Now, with Billings on his way back to Folsom, Fickert could concentrate
on the man whom he had once described as “a direct action anarchist.”
On January 3, 1917, Mooney’s trial began before Judge Franklin A.
Griffin and twelve Bay area citizens. Fickert, who had let one of his
assistants handle the Billings prosecution, had had enough of the
sidelines and showed up with Edward A. Cunha and James M. Brennan, two
stalwarts from his office. Mooney was defended by W. Bourke Cockran,
Maxwell McNutt and John Lawlor. It took two weeks to select a jury
from the 177 talesman who were called and sworn and it was not until
January 18th that Ed Cunha was able to begin the state’s campaign to
convince Foreman William V. MacNevin and his eleven San Francisco
County colleagues that the bombing had been the opening gambit in a
Wobbly-inspired campaign to overthrow the State of California.
After six physicians had testified to the wounds and causes of
death, Fickert called a whole battery of witnesses who described the
cartridges, pieces of metal, ball-bearings and bits of imitation
leather that were scattered all over the area after the explosion. Then
Frederick H. Colburn, Captain Matheson and Lieutenant Bunner were put
through their paces as to what they had seen and done after the blast.
With these preliminaries behind him, Fickert finally got around to his
star witness, talkative John McDonald, who had already told the Grand
Jury and the Billings panel that he had seen Mooney and Billings at the
corner of Market and Steuart Streets just before the bomb went off.
McDonald had been found wandering around the Hall of Justice two days
after the explosion, claiming that he had seen the men who planted the
lethal suitcase. Prior to his sudden prominence, he had been a waiter
at a number of cheap San Francisco restaurants. Just a week before
the parade, he had been released from the hospital where he had spent
several months recuperating from a serious stomach operation. The
doctors had told him that he would not be able to work for some time
and he had just about run through his meager savings when he walked
into Fickert’s office with his story. By July 24th, rewards totalling
more than $14,000.00 had been reported by the _Chronicle_ “for the
arrest and conviction of the criminals who perpetrated the bomb outrage
on Saturday.”
It had been “about 1:40” when the witness arrived at the corner of
Steuart and Market. He had gone to Steuart Street “because I thought
there would not be such a crowd there.” After watching the parade for a
few minutes, he had “moved up ten or fifteen feet on Steuart.” When he
first saw Billings, the machinist was coming down Steuart Street from
the direction of Mission Street. He had had a suitcase in his hand.
Q. Would you describe more in detail to the jury his actions when you
saw him coming walking along Steuart Street with a suitcase?
A. Well, he was carrying the suitcase, and his head was working
on a pivot, and he looked all excited as if he was worrying about
something. That is what called my attention to him first.
Q. You at that time then noticed the cellar doors, the iron doors
there?
A. Yes.
Q. Did he put the suitcase down before he got to the iron doors or
afterwards?
A. No, before he got to the iron doors.
Q. He put it against the wall?
A. Let it down by the side of the wall.
Then he had watched Billings walk to the saloon at the corner of
Steuart and Market where, just as he pushed the swinging door open,
“right on the second, that man there, Mooney, he came out of the
saloon.” As the two men were talking, Mooney kept checking his watch
with the clock on the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero Plaza. When the
brief conversation ended, Billings “started out in the crowd and I lost
sight of him and my attention was drawn to this other man.”
Q. Thomas J. Mooney?
A. Yes.
Q. What did he do?
A. He took his watch out again and looked down toward the dock in the
Ferry building and after he put his watch back in his pocket he drew
his shoulders up and put his hand to his face like he was studying and
looked alongside the building.
Q. What did he do?
A. He turned around and went through the crowd and I lost sight of him.
McDonald described the suitcase as being “kind of jersey, brownish
color,” nineteen inches long, fourteen inches deep and seven inches
thick. He was “just as positive as I am sitting in this chair” that
Billings and Mooney were the men he had watched that July day. As
far as the time was concerned, he thought that he had seen Billings
walking up Steuart Street “about five minutes” after he himself had
arrived at the corner at 1:40.
Cockran, who had been thumbing through the transcript of McDonald’s
testimony at the Billings trial, could hardly wait for Cunha to finish
with the witness. He didn’t waste any time getting down to bedrock.
Q. Didn’t you say at the Billings trial that when you saw Billings
place that suitcase there it was about two o’clock?
A. Yes, but Mr. Cockran--
Q. Explain your answer. I understood you to say at the last trial
... it was two o’clock, and now you want to add something to your
testimony. Am I right?
A. I know that is also the way I also testified in Judge--
Q. Can’t you answer that? Did you say at the last trial it was two
o’clock when you saw Billings place that suitcase near those trap
doors?
A. Yes, but I also said in Judge Dunne’s court it was eight or ten
minutes of two when Billings came at the time with the suitcase.
Q. You repeat now it was eight to ten minutes of two and it wasn’t two
o’clock when he put it down?
A. No, sir, I don’t say it was two o’clock when he put it down.
Q. You said it then, didn’t you?
A. Yes.
After Cockran had brought out that it would have been difficult for
McDonald, who was standing more than one hundred feet away, to see the
five-foot-four Billings through the crowd, the defense attorney came
back to the all-important time element.
Q. Wasn’t the parade between you and Billings?
A. They were standing 50 feet off or more on Steuart Street.
Q. They were on the move at the time?
A. No, sir.
Q. Do you mean to say they were not moving at two?
A. I wasn’t there at two.
Q. Where were you at two?
A. Down towards the Alameda Cafe on Market Street or close to it.
Q. Then you were not there looking at him place it there at about two
o’clock?
A. I mean about as near as I can tell to two o’clock.
Q. You don’t want to qualify it now?
A. I don’t change it.
In his testimony before the Grand Jury, McDonald had said that, after
losing sight of Mooney, he had “started down Market Street and I got as
far as the Alameda Cafe when the explosion occurred.” He had repeated
this statement, almost word for word, at the Billings trial. Cockran
decided to put the question to him once more.
Q. How far did you get when the explosion occurred?
A. Well, I had been standing down in front of the Alameda Cafe looking
at the parade go by, and the parade had gone by, and I still stood
there awhile and I seen the people pushing up toward Steuart and
Market and I thought they were, that it was the units coming out of
Steuart Street, and I was standing in front of the Alameda Cafe when
the explosion occurred. When I did hear the report, I thought it was a
signal for the units to come out of Steuart Street.
If McDonald could be believed (and it was obvious that Cockran was not
prepared to accept this thesis), he had walked some 150 feet up Market
Street after watching the Mooney-Billings tableau before he heard the
blast. Since he had testified that he had first seen Billings at “eight
or ten minutes to two,” some “25 to 50 feet” away from the corner,
that the machinist had placed the suitcase against the building wall
“about two o’clock,” and that he himself had started up Market Street
in the direction of the cafe before two, it had taken him more than
six minutes to cover the half-block. But the witness had an answer for
this: “... when I started down Market I just took my time and walked
along slowly. I didn’t walk any faster than a snail crawls almost. It
took me a little time to get down to the coffee house.” Didn’t Mr.
Cockran realize that he was still a very weak man?
McDonald was followed on the stand by Frank C. Oxman, a cattle dealer
from Durkee, Oregon, who had replaced the syphilitic, wife-beating
Crowley as a corroborative witness. It seems that he, too, had been on
the corner of Market and Steuart Streets just before the explosion. He
had pulled into town from Portland “between 12 and 1 o’clock,” and
checked into the Terminal Hotel which was directly across Market Street
from the Alameda Cafe. Then “I went to two or three restaurants and
they were crowded and I couldn’t get a seat and I went over and bought
some fruit and was at the corner of the street and was expecting to
cross the street when the automobile drove up.”
Q. Where did it come from?
A. I call it down Market Street. It was going toward the Ferry
Building.
Q. What was it attracted your attention to that machine?
A. This defendant was in the front seat holding a suitcase on the
outside with his hands, on the running board.
Q. The defendant on trial, Thomas J. Mooney?
A. Yes.
He described the car as “an old Ford” and identified Israel Weinberg
as its driver. He had seen Mrs. Mooney and Billings, whom he depicted
as “the little auburn-haired boy,” in the vehicle’s rear seat. When
Weinberg stopped the car near the saloon at the corner of Market and
Steuart, “the little auburn-haired boy jumped out of the hind seat,
very excitedly and very rapidly, and took the suitcase from the other
gentleman that was holding it on the front of the machine.” Another
man, who had been sitting in the Ford’s back seat, a man who “had a
stubby mustache and looked like a working man,” got out of the car and
relieved Billings of the suitcase. Then the two men had walked rapidly
down Steuart Street just beyond some metal cellar stairs where Billings
“took the suitcase from the other man and ... set it down by some
doors.”
While all this was going on, Mooney had left the car and was standing
on the curb, “right out near where I was,” watching Billings and his
mustached companion walk down Steuart Street.
Q. Then what happened?
A. Then they came on back where Mr. Mooney was standing near the post
and seemed to be looking for somebody, I don’t know--I think they went
in the door of the building there, I won’t be sure whether all of them
or not, and directly came out.
Oxman was near enough to hear Mooney tell Billings, “Give it to him
and let him go; we must get away from here; the bulls will be after
us.” The latter then handed something “to the other gentleman that
carried the suitcase part of the way.”
Q. What happened?
A. He went across the street ... the other gentleman, I don’t know who
he was.
After another brief conversation between Mooney and Billings, the
machinist “went first toward the car and Mr. Mooney looked at his watch
and looked at his watch and looked at the tower clock also at the same
time. He glanced over to where the suitcase was after Mr. Billings left
him and then he proceeded to go to the car also.” When he last saw the
Ford, it had “turned into Steuart and went up Steuart.”
Oxman was certain that all of this had taken place at least twenty
minutes before the explosion because he had returned to the hotel to
wait for a telephone call.
Q. Now, when you got over to the hotel, did you notice anything about
the time?
A. Yes.
Q. What would you say the time was when you arrived there?
A. It was 15 minutes to two o’clock.
Q. Around fifteen minutes to two?
A. Yes, because my telephone call was at two o’clock.
When Cockran took over, he wanted to know why Oxman had been so
intensely interested in three men and a suitcase with a mammoth parade
going by right under his nose. The witness had a ready answer to this
oblique reflection on his credibility. “I thought these people were
a set of thieves,” he said. “I took more than one glance at them. I
thought they had stolen this suitcase and were caching it out, that was
the reason I took close observation of them.” Besides, despite the fact
that the cattleman weighed two hundred pounds, “Billings pushed me out
of the way so he could go past.” A fat man would remember a thing like
that.