earlaps near Berardelli’s body, which he picked up and turned over to
his superintendent. The next day, the latter gave the cap to Jeremiah
F. Gallivan, Braintree’s police chief, who kept it under the seat of
his car for ten days before delivering it to Brockton’s Captain John
Scott. The only other evidence found at the scene were some empty
cartridges which littered Pearl Street. Berardelli’s Harrington &
Richardson revolver, which he had been carrying that day, was missing.
Two days later, the Buick was discovered by two horsemen in
Bridgewater’s Manley Woods, some five miles west of the Matfield
Crossing. Leading away from the abandoned vehicle were the tiretracks
of a smaller car. Although the black sedan’s license tags had been
removed, plates with the number which Louis Pelser had jotted down
two days before had been pilfered from another car early in 1920. The
Buick itself had been reported as stolen by its owner, a Dr. Francis J.
Murphy, on November 23, 1919. The isinglass rear window was pushed out
and there was a bullet hole in the car’s right rear interior. It was
later identified by almost every eyewitness as similar to the one they
had seen on the day of the robbery.
Bridgewater’s Police Chief Michael E. Stewart was convinced that the
crime had been committed by a resident Italian who owned a car. Mike
Boda, who boarded with a radical named Coacci in a shack near the
Manley Woods, was interviewed by Stewart three days after the South
Braintree murders. He told the police officer that his car, a small
Overland, was stored in Simon Johnson’s garage in West Bridgewater.
Stewart called on Johnson and told him to notify the police if anyone
called for Boda’s car.
On the evening of May 5th, Nicola Sacco, a Stoughton shoe worker,
Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a Plymouth fish peddler, Boda, and a mutual
friend named Ricardo Orciani, started out from the former’s house for
West Bridgewater to pick up the Overland. Sacco and Vanzetti took the
trolley while the other two men rode on Orciani’s motorcycle. When
Boda and Orciani arrived at the garage, they found it locked. They
then walked over to Johnson’s house where they were soon joined by
Sacco and Vanzetti. Boda rang the bell and, when the garage owner’s
wife opened the door, told her that he had come for the Overland. While
the four men waited, Mrs. Johnson went over to a neighbor’s house and
telephoned to Chief Stewart. Meanwhile her husband had convinced Boda
that, since the Overland did not have 1920 plates, it would be better
to leave it in the garage. Boda apparently took his advice and drove
off on the motorcycle with Orciani.
Sacco and Vanzetti left the Johnson house and boarded the North Elm
Street trolley for Brockton. When the car was passing through the
Campello section of Brockton, it was boarded by a policeman who
immediately arrested the two men. The officer found a .38-caliber
Harrington & Richardson revolver (which was not Berardelli’s) and some
shotgun shells in Vanzetti’s coat pocket. Sacco denied that he was
carrying a gun and “a slight going over” did not reveal any weapon
on his person. Later that evening, at the Brockton police station,
“an automatic .32 Colt revolver” was found in his belt as well as
thirty-two cartridges of various makes.
Four weeks later, Vanzetti was indicted for an attempted holdup that
had taken place at Bridgewater on the morning of December 24, 1919, in
which several “foreigners” had tried to hijack a truck containing the
payroll of the White Shoe Company. According to eyewitnesses, two men
had parked their automobile so that it blocked off Broad Street, the
road leading to the shoe company. Guards in the payroll truck had fired
at the holdup men who had retreated to their car and driven away. One
of the thwarted bandits, who was armed with a shotgun, had discharged
his weapon harmlessly at the guards before turning tail.
The trial of this indictment began at Plymouth on June 22, 1920, before
Judge Webster Thayer and a jury of twelve men, one of whom was the
foreman at the Plymouth Cordage Company from which Vanzetti had been
discharged in 1916 for participating in a strike. The charges against
the fish peddler were assault with intent to rob and assault with
intent to murder. Sacco was not indicted because the records of the 3-K
Shoe Factory in Stoughton indicated that he had been at work on the day
of the crime.
Frederick G. Katzmann, the District Attorney of Suffolk and Plymouth
Counties, took the position that the 1920 Buick which had been found in
the Manley Woods on April 17th had also been used in the Bridgewater
assault. He had three witnesses--the two guards who had been in the
payroll truck and a shoe company employee--who identified Vanzetti as
the man who had fired the shotgun. A Mrs. Georgina F. Brooks, who had
been walking near the Bridgewater railroad station, said that she had
seen Vanzetti driving an automobile in the vicinity just after the
shooting. Maynard Freeman Shaw, a newsboy, swore that he had seen the
defendant that morning running up Broad Street with a gun in his hand.
He knew he “was a foreigner, I could tell by the way he ran.” Most of
the witnesses described the bandits’ automobile as a “dark touring car.”
The prosecution rested on June 28th and Vanzetti’s attorneys, J. P.
Vahey and J. M. Graham, put sixteen Italians on the stand to prove
that the defendant had an alibi for the day of the crime. His landlady
said that she had seen Vanzetti preparing his fish on the evening of
December 23rd and that she had awakened him early the next morning.
Other Plymouth residents swore that they had purchased eels from him
during the day. John DiCarli bought some shortly after seven a.m. and
Mrs. Terese Malaquci an hour later. Between nine and ten, Beltrando
Brini, a thirteen-year-old boy who worked for Vanzetti, delivered some
fish to Mrs. Adeladi Bonjionanni and to her neighbor, Mrs. Margaretta
Fiochi. All told, some seven people testified that Vanzetti or young
Brini had filled orders for them on the morning of the twenty-fourth.
Upon the recommendation of his lawyers, who were afraid that his
radical opinions and activities would be brought out, Vanzetti did not
take the stand.
The jury retired at 10:50 on the morning of July 1st and returned a
verdict of guilty on both assault charges a little more than five hours
later. In the middle of August, Judge Thayer sentenced the defendant
to twelve to fifteen years in prison. As the verdicts were announced,
Vanzetti turned to his many friends in the courtroom and said,
“Corragio.” Although a notice of appeal was duly filed with the Supreme
Judicial Court, it was never perfected because of the subsequent murder
conviction.
On September 11th, both Sacco and Vanzetti were indicted for the South
Braintree murders by “beating and shooting ... against the peace of
said Commonwealth.” However, it was not until May 31, 1921 that their
joint trial began in Dedham, a Boston suburb, before the ubiquitous
Judge Thayer. It took more than four days and seven hundred Norfolk
County veniremen before George A. Gerard, the last juror, was sworn
in at 1:35 a.m. on June 9th. Thayer appointed Walter R. Ripley, a
stock-keeper and former Quincy police chief, as foreman and it was at
last time for Katzmann to put in his case against the two immigrant
defendants.
After Vanzetti’s conviction on the assault charges, the Sacco-Vanzetti
Defense Committee, headed by Aldino Felicani, the editor of _La
Notizia_, an Italian-language newspaper, retained Frederick H. Moore
and William J. Callahan, for Sacco, and two brothers, Jeremiah J. and
Thomas F. McAnarney, for Vanzetti. Moore, a member of the California
Bar, was named chief counsel for both men despite strenuous pre-trial
efforts by Mrs. Sacco to have him withdraw in favor of William G.
Thompson, a Boston attorney. The Commonwealth was again represented by
Mr. Katzmann who was aided by Assistant District Attorney Harold P.
Williams.
After the physicians who had conducted the autopsies on the two
murdered men had described their wounds and identified the bullets
taken from their bodies, Shelley Neal told the jury about the black
sedan he had seen in South Braintree on the day of the crime. He was
positive that it was the same car that had been found in the Manley
Woods two days later. But, outside of remembering that there had been a
slender man with light hair standing next to the Buick when he had seen
it parked in front of Hampton House on the morning of the holdup, he
was unable to describe any of the vehicle’s occupants.
Neal wasn’t the only prosecution witness who couldn’t identify the
defendants. Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, had observed two
“light complexioned fellows” sitting on the fence near Rice & Hutchins
just before the shooting. But he was unable to describe them with any
certainty because “they were all covered up.” After the murders, he had
seen the Buick heading for the Pearl Street crossing. When it passed
him, “the back curtains were drawn and flopping around back and forth,
and I think there were about five of them in there ... and as that
passed me by there was some one on the back there beckoning with a gun
or shotgun.” Because he hadn’t gotten a good look at any of the men in
the car, he couldn’t say that Sacco or Vanzetti had been riding in it.
Jim Bostock had been taken to see the defendants shortly after their
arrest and asked whether they were the men he had seen on Pearl Street
that afternoon. Like Behrsin, he “could not tell whether or not they
was, no, sir.” Lewis Wade could not “say for sure” if Sacco was the
man who had shot Berardelli. Even though he had told Katzmann at the
Brockton Police Station that the defendant was the man he had seen, he
now thought he had been “a little mite mistaken.” The reason he was no
longer sure of his identification was that just before the trial he had
seen a man in a barber shop who resembled the murderer.
Foreman Langlois, who had watched two “young men” firing at the
guard and the paymaster, remembered only that they had been “short
and dark complexioned, curly or wavy hair, about five feet, eight or
nine inches, about 140 or 145 pounds.” He was sure that he could not
identify either man if he saw them again. Mark Carrigan had seen the
car race over the crossing but had not been able to recognize anyone in
it because it had been going so fast. Louis DeBeradinis, the proprietor
of a shoe repair shop at the corner of Railroad Avenue and Pearl
Street, had been frightened by a man with “a long face ... and light
hair” who had leaned out of the car and pointed a gun at him. Although,
he thought that dark-haired Sacco looked like the man with the gun, he
insisted that the latter had been “a light-haired man.”
But Katzmann was not wanting for more definite eyewitnesses. He had
five who claimed to have seen Vanzetti near South Braintree on April
15th. John Faulkner said he had observed him, bushy mustache and
all, on the Boston train that morning. But he was unable to remember
anything about the man sitting to his immediate right who had asked
him, supposedly at Vanzetti’s request, whether the next station was
East Braintree. He admitted that he had seen a picture of the defendant
in a newspaper before he was taken to the jail to identify him. The
conductor on the train later testified that he, too, had seen such a
man get off at East Braintree on several occasions long after April
15th, but he was certain that he was not Vanzetti.
Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, who swore that he had noticed Vanzetti
among a group of “foreigners” sitting in the back of a car before noon
on the day of the shootings, couldn’t identify any of the other men.
Although gate tender Levangie was sure that Vanzetti was the “dark
complected man” who had frightened him with a pistol at the Pearl
Street crossing, he couldn’t remember whether Mr. McAnarney had visited
him at his shanty barely two weeks before the trial started. Alexander
G. Victorson, the railroad’s freight clerk, later testified that
Levangie had said, minutes after the shooting, that he didn’t think
he could identify the men he had seen in the car as it sped over the
tracks.
An hour later, the gate tender told Henry McCarthy, a locomotive
fireman, that he had “ducked in the shanty” when he saw the guns
pointed at him. “I asked him if he knew them,” McCarthy said, “He said
no, he did not. I asked him if he would know them again if he saw them.
He said ‘No,’ he said all he could see was the gun and he ducked.”
Shortly afterward, Levangie informed Timothy J. Collins, a _Boston
Globe_ reporter, that he had not seen anyone in the car, while, at
4:30, he told Slater & Morrill’s Edward Carter that its driver had been
“a light-haired man.”
Austin T. Reed, the gate tender at the Matfield Crossing in West
Bridgewater, identified Vanzetti as the man sitting next to the driver
of a “five-passenger car” which had roared toward his intersection at
4:15. The automobile had screeched to a stop when Reed lowered his
gates because of an approaching train. When the train had passed,
the car crossed the tracks and pulled up alongside Reed’s shanty.
Vanzetti, he said, had shouted, “What to hell did you hold us up for?”
in “English that was unmistakable and clear.” The vehicle then drove
off to the east, circled around, and finally recrossed the tracks,
disappearing in the direction of West Bridgewater. Like Faulkner, Reed
had gone voluntarily to Brockton and “asked to see the two defendants
that were there.” He had listened to Vanzetti speak to an officer at
the police station in “the same gruff tone that he used in speaking to
me.”
Austin C. Cole was the conductor of the street car on which Sacco and
Vanzetti were arrested. He was sure that they were the same two men he
had seen on his car on either April 14th or 15th. According to him,
they had boarded the trolley at Sunset Avenue, some two miles from
West Bridgewater’s Elm Square. He particularly remembered Vanzetti
because he had first thought that the latter was a friend of his
named Tony. When the defense showed him a side view photograph of one
Joseph Scavitto, a man who bore a striking resemblance to Vanzetti,
the witness was unable to say that it was a picture of the man who had
boarded his car because he had never seen his profile.
The prosecution had seven witnesses who identified Sacco. Lola Andrews
insisted that he was the man she had seen working under the car near
Slater & Morrill Factory No. 2. When Katzmann asked her to look around
the courtroom, she pointed to the steel cage in which both defendants
were seated and said, “That man there.” Sacco sprang to his feet and
shouted, “I am the man? Do you mean me? Take a good look!” Yes, she was
sure that the man who had just yelled at her was the same dark man who
had told her how to get to Rice & Hutchins.
Mrs. Andrews claimed that she had picked out Sacco in the Dedham Jail
in February. After she had been taken through the prison, she had
accidentally seen the defendant in one of the cells. She couldn’t
remember whether he had been alone or not but she had watched him
for at least fifteen minutes. No one had told her to look into that
particular room. “The room I was in,” she said, “was--I don’t know just
how to explain it, but it had kind of an opening back here, like there
was a room underneath that you could look from the room I am in down
into this room underneath.”
When Mr. Moore showed her some snapshots and asked her whether she
had looked at them before at his request, she stated that “I don’t
recognize any of those photographs at all.” The next day, Mrs. Andrews
collapsed on the stand when Mr. McAnarney tried to pin her down as to
just what pictures she had seen. Later in the trial, Mrs. Campbell,
who had accompanied Mrs. Andrews to South Braintree on April 15th,
swore that the man under the car had “never looked up at all” and that
neither she nor her friend had spoken to him.
But Mrs. Campbell wasn’t the only witness to contradict the practical
nurse. George W. Fay, a Quincy policeman, said that she had told him
in February that she had not seen any man’s face that day. She had
also told Alfred N. LaBreque, the secretary of the Quincy Chamber of
Commerce, the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor whose shop was
near Mrs. Andrew’s house, remembered a conversation he had had with
her when she returned from the Dedham Jail. “The Government took me
down and want me to recognize those men,” she had complained to him,
“and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I
can’t recognize them.” A former landlady, who readily admitted that she
didn’t like her and “wouldn’t have her in my house again,” said that
she had a “bad name” in the community.
Real estate broker Tracy, who had told the police that he had seen
Sacco standing near a Pearl Street drugstore at noon on the day of the
murders, had identified him in jail ten months later. However, he was
not prepared now to say that he was “positively” the man. “To the best
of my opinion he is the man,” he testified. While he was “quite sure”
that he was right, he was willing to “suppose the best of people could
make a mistake.”
Q. Then you feel you could not be mistaken in the identity of this man?
A. I said I would not positively say he was the man; but I wouldn’t
positively say so.
William J. Heron, the railroad detective, claimed that he had seen
Sacco handcuffed to a policeman near the Quincy Courthouse some six
weeks after having observed him in the South Braintree station. He was
“pretty sure” that the defendant was the same “nervous Italian” he had
watched in the waiting room. He readily admitted that he had refused to
talk to defense investigators when they came to see him before trial.
His reluctance, he said, had been due to the fact that he didn’t want
to become involved. Besides he didn’t think that his information would
be helpful to the defense. McAnarney’s face purpled with anger.
Q. You took it on yourself to determine the fact that your evidence
would hurt these defendants, didn’t you? Did you?
A. Yes, sir.
The man whom Lewis Pelser had seen shoot Berardelli had been wearing a
“dark green pair of pants and an army shirt, tucked up.” He would not
swear that Sacco was the gunman but insisted that “he is the dead image
of the man I seen.” He had written down the Buick’s license number but
he had not seen anyone in the car. “I was too anxious to get away,” he
said, “I was kind of scared myself.”
When Moore took over, he asked the witness whether he had been
interviewed by a Mr. Reid on March 26th. Yes, he had, but he hadn’t
told him everything he knew because “I didn’t know him well enough.”
He admitted that he had told the investigator that he hadn’t seen the
murderer because he had ducked under his workbench when the shooting
started. But he insisted that he “didn’t exactly lie to Mr. Reid.” In
fact, he hadn’t even told the District Attorney what he had seen that
day until he took the stand. Moore’s voice was heavy with disbelief.
Q. You never talked to a living soul and told them what you intended
to say on the witness stand today, and told them the truth, until you
got on the witness stand.
A. Yes, sir.
Later, William Brenner, Peter McCullum and Dominic Constantino, who
had been working with Pelser on the first floor of the Rice & Hutchins
factory, testified for the defense that they had not seen the latter
at the window when the shooting took place. According to the three
men, everyone on the first floor had ducked under his bench when the
gunshots had shattered the air. Constantino was sure that Pelser had
not stood up until after the murders had occurred. He remembered that
Pelser had told him that he had not been able to see any of the killers.
Mary Splaine, the Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who had picked Sacco
out in the Brockton police station as the man she had seen leaning out
of the Buick just after it roared across the Pearl Street crossing,
identified him again. “He was a man,” she claimed, “that I should say
was slightly taller than I am ... he was an active-looking man. I noted
particularly the left hand was a good-sized hand, a hand that denoted
strength.... He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt ... and the face
was what we could call clear-cut, clean-cut face. The forehead was
high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two
inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows,
but the complexion was a white, peculiar white that looked greenish.”
Evidently, years of poring over account books hadn’t interfered with
the witness’ eyesight because this detailed observation had been the
result of a three-second glance “from a distance of from 60 to 80 feet.”
When Moore reminded her that, at the preliminary examination at Quincy,
she had said that she was not sure that Sacco was the man she had seen,
Miss Splaine denied that she had ever made that statement. The next
day, however, she indicated that perhaps she had indeed said that.
Q. Do you wish to change any part of your testimony that you made
yesterday?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. What part of your testimony would you like to change at the present
time?
A. That question and answer where you asked me if I possibly
identified the man, and in Quincy I said I didn’t feel I would
positively identify him. I said I didn’t say that yesterday, but on
reflection that was the answer in Quincy.
In addition, she admitted that, after the shooting, she had identified
a photograph which the police had shown her as the man she had
observed leaning out of the car. She later learned that the man in the
photograph had been in New York’s Sing Sing Prison on April 15th.
When Mr. McAnarney took over from Moore, he asked the witness whether
she was sure that she had had enough time on the day of the murders to
get a good look at the defendant. “Yes, sir, I think I did,” was her
answer. The lawyer shook his head. Hadn’t she testified in Quincy that
“I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the
man.”? Yes, she had made that statement. But now, she was “positive he
is the man, certain he is the man. I admit the possibility of an error,
but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” McAnarney pressed her.
Q. What did you mean when you said you didn’t have sufficient
opportunity to observe him?
A. Well, he was passing on the street.
Q. That is the only opportunity you had?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. You have had no other opportunity but that fleeting glance?
A. The remembrance of that.
She hadn’t seen Sacco since the Quincy hearing on May 26, 1920, but,
even without “any further examination of him,” she had changed her mind
and now believed that he was the man.
Frances J. Devlin, another Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who worked in
the same room with Miss Splaine, had seen a man in the back of the
Buick fire into the crowd that had developed around Parmenter and
Berardelli. “He was a dark man,” she recalled, “and his forehead, the
hair seemed to grow away from the temples, and it was brown-black
and he had clear features, rather clear features, and rather good
looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thick-set man, I
should say.” She had identified Sacco at the Brockton Police Station
as looking “very much like the man that stood up in the back seat
shooting.” She was far more definite when Katzmann asked her to look
around the courtroom and “see if you see that man.” She pointed to the
steel cage in which the two defendants were sitting and said, “The man
on the inner side as you go out.”
Q. The man who is smiling?
A. Yes, sir.
Q. That man you know is Sacco?
A. Yes, sir.
No, there had never been any doubt in her mind “at any time” that the
defendant was the man she had seen.
Yet, a year earlier she had testified in Quincy that she couldn’t say
“positively” that Sacco was the gunman she had witnessed. But she had
a ready answer for the seeming conflict in her testimony. “At the time
there I had in my own mind that he was the man, but on account of the
immensity of the crime and everything, I hated to say right out and
out. I knew he was the man and still I didn’t want to say knowing as I
knew it would be a deliberate lie, according to my own mind, but still
I hated to say right out and out, so I just put it that way.” She had
also sworn in Quincy that short, stocky Sacco was “a man who seemed as
though he was a big man to me.”