XTHE DEDHAM TRIAL
Sacco and Vanzetti were found guilty of committing a $15,776 payroll robbery and murdering Frederick Parmenter, paymaster, and Alexander Berardelli, payroll guard, at South Braintree, Mass., on April 15, 1920. Parmenter and Berardelli were employees of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company.
Both defendants were tried before Superior Judge Webster Thayer at Dedham in June and July 1921, the trial extending seven weeks, and were convicted of first degree murder by a jury which the defense attorneys contend was irregularly and illegally selected. The verdict carries a penalty of death in the electric chair.
The crime was committed at 3.05 p. m. on Pearl street, in front of the four-story Rice and Hutchins shoe factory. This building was filled with workers. Four rows of windows looked out upon the scene of the shooting. While the glass in them was opaque, as soon as the shots were heard, many windows were thrown open.
Many other workers saw the crime from the windows of the Slater and Morrill shoe factory a short distance west of the Rice and Hutchins plant. And directly opposite was an excavation where numerous laborers were at work.
Just before the shooting a train had come in letting off passengers at the nearby railroad station. Numerous persons were on the street as the bandits fled, their number swelled quickly by the sound of the shots and the wave of excitement that traveled like the wind through the small town. Westward on Pearl Street the bandit-automobile sped, crossing the New Haven tracks increasing in speed as it proceeded, and continuing the main streets of the town.
This was but one of a series of payroll robberies in Eastern Massachusetts, of which the perpetrators had invariably escaped. These bandits too, got away. The authorities were on the defensive; public indignation was high. Search for the bandits was participated in by the state police and local police, with the active co-operation of the Department of Justice and various agencies employed by the allied manufacturing and banking interests. These included the Pinkerton Detective Agency, acting in the behalf of the Travelers’ Insurance Company, which insured the Slater and Morrill payroll. Investigation by these forces continued from April 15, 1920 to May 31, 1921, when Sacco and Vanzetti were brought to trial.
Of the scores who saw the crime and escape, and with so many powerful agencies co-operating in the search, how many witnesses were brought against Sacco and Vanzetti? A trifling number, as will appear in this analysis; while a very much larger number of those who saw the crime are positive that neither Sacco nor Vanzetti were the bandits.
Several important witnesses for the prosecution were seriously discredited, while various responsible persons who saw the events connected with the crime and who declared that the arrested men were not the bandits, were pushed aside by the state after it interviewed them.
Here follows a careful analysis of the actual testimony for Sacco and Vanzetti. This analysis is the result of a searching study of the 3,900 pages of official transcript. Every statementset down here, unless otherwise specified, is borne out by the court record.
The mass of evidence which went toward the setting of the crime but which had no bearing on the guilt or innocence of the accused is eliminated, while evidence introduced piecemeal and in haphazard order is assembled and arranged under appropriate heads.
The testimony relating only to Vanzetti is presented first because it is the shorter and thus more easily disentangled from the mass of detail under which its inadequacy was hidden. Such an arrangement throws into bold relief the injustice of the court’s refusal to separate the trials of the two men. A request for the separation was entered by the defense at the opening and again at the close of the trial. “Where is there anything prejudicial to Vanzetti,” asked the judge, “if proper instructions are given to the jury?” But juries, despite formal instruction to count this fact against Defendant No. 1 and that fact against Defendant No. 2, inevitably tend to count all facts against both when they are tried together. The human mind is not a mechanical instrument which functions according to judicial instructions.
Then the case against Sacco is treated in full, and finally the evidence applicable to both men is analyzed.
In weighing the testimony against Vanzetti, it should be borne in mind that the prosecution admitted it had no evidence that Vanzetti took any part in the shooting. He was never given a preliminary examination on the South Braintree crime and did not know on what ground he would be linked with that crime until he heard it at the trial.
The prosecution sought to connect him with the murder by producing one witness—solitary, uncorroborated and conceded by the prosecution to be “mistaken” in one part of his observations—who claimed fourteen months after the event, to “identify” Vanzetti as among the bandits; two detached witnesses who claimed to have seen him on the morning of the crime in or nearBraintree; one other who claims to have seen him in the bandit-car some miles distant after the crime; one witness who claimed to have seen him in a trolley car in another town on the evening before or following the crime, and by an attempt to show that a revolver found in Vanzetti’s possession belonged to Berardelli, one of the men murdered, but this fizzled completely.
The defense countered by introducing impeaching evidence of all the so-called “identifications” and by bringing strong alibi witnesses.
Of the score of witnesses for both sides who described some portion of the murder scene, 35 claimed to have gotten a sufficiently good view to describe the face of one or more of the bandits. The only one of these who identified Vanzetti was Michael Levangie, gate tender for the N. Y., N. H. & H. railroad at South Braintree. This man was in his shanty on the west side of the tracks when the shooting occurred. He had lowered the gates for an oncoming train; then he saw an automobile coming from the east.
In that car sitting beside the driver, Levangie said, a man waved a revolver at him, motioning him to raise the gates, and the car sped across. The man with the pistol snapped the trigger at the gateman as the automobile passed. Levangie declared the driver was dark complexioned, with black hair, heavy brown moustache, cheek-bones sticking out, slouch hat, army coat. He identified the driver as Vanzetti.
The District Attorney in his closing argument admitted that Vanzetti could not have been at the wheel, as the testimony was overwhelming that the driver was a light, consumptive looking man. The defense brought four witnesses who absolutely impeached Levangie’s assertions in toto:
Henry McCarthy, fireman on the New Haven, talked with Levangie a few minutes after the shooting. Levangie told him he didn’t get a look at the bandits, and was so scared he ran for cover. McCarthy volunteered to testify for the defense after reading Levangie’s assertions in the newspapers.
Edward Carter, shoe-worker for Slater and Morrill, testified that Levangie told him at 4:15 P. M. that day, the driver was light-complexioned.
Alexander Victorson, a freight clerk at South Braintree, heard Levangie say immediately after the shooting, “it would be hard to identify those men.”
John L. Sullivan, gate tender who takes shifts with Levangie, was told by Levangie, about two weeks before the trial that he had been interviewed by J. J. McAnarney, counsel for the defense, and that he had told him he was unable to identify anyone. Under cross-examination, Levangie first acknowledged that he remembered this interview. Later he declared, “I don’t remember anything about it,” and denied having ever told anyone that he was unable to identify the bandits. Asked if he had ever described the driver as a “light-complexioned, Swedish or Norwegian type of person,” he answered, “No, sir.”
Levangie was a loose-jointed fellow, with a shifty eye and a look of cunning in his face. He appeared wholly unabashed at the contradictions brought out during his cross-examination. Rather he had the manner of regarding the whole proceedings as a joke. It would be difficult to imagine a witness less entitled to carry weight. Yet his “identification” was the sole evidence of Vanzetti’s presence at the murder scene.
The other identification witnesses of Vanzetti referred to times and places other than those of the crime. They were Faulkner, Dolbeare, Reed, and by a stretch of liberality also Cole.
John W. Faulkner averred that he left Cohasset on the 9:23 a. m. train on April 15. At three stations he was asked by a man across the aisle if this was East Braintree. The inquirer said that a man behind him wanted to know. Faulkner identified Vanzetti as the man in back. This man alighted at East Braintree.
The improbability that any man on his way to commit murder should attract attention to himself and to the point at which he was to meet his companions in crime, is heightened if applied to Vanzetti who is a man of superior intelligence and who had made frequent journeys on that railroad line.
The morning after the murder, when the news of the crime was published, it occurred to Faulkner that perhaps the Italian on the train might be mixed up with the affair. Then came thearrest and the publication of Sacco’s and Vanzetti’s pictures. But Faulkner, with the episode fresh in his mind, did nothing. Two months later he was taken to make an identification. At Dedham he testified positively, “He is the man,” indicating Vanzetti in the cage opposite to him.
At one point defense counsel McAnarney suddenly requested a certain man in the audience to step forward, a dark man with a big moustache like Vanzetti’s, and Faulkner was asked:
“Isn’t this the man you saw on the train?”
“I don’t know. He might be.”
But the dark man bore little resemblance to Vanzetti, except for the big moustache. His name, Joseph Scavitto.
In contradiction of Faulkner’s claim, the defense put on the stand the conductor of the train, who certified that no ticket had been collected from Plymouth to East Braintree or to Braintree on that day, and that no cash fare had been paid; and it put on the stand the ticket agents of Plymouth, of Seaside, first station out of Plymouth, and Kingston, the second station out of Plymouth, all of whom testified that no ticket had been sold to either of the above points.
While the jury was being drawn, Harry Dolbeare, piano tuner from South Braintree, was excused from service after a whispered conversation with the judge. Summoned later as a prosecution witness, he testified that he asked to be excused because he recognized Vanzetti in court as a man he saw in South Braintree on April 15,fourteen months before he testified.
Dolbeare asserted that on that uneventful morning he saw an automobile moving along the street with five men in it, and he noticed particularly the middle man of the three in the rear seat. This man was leaning forward talking with somebody in the front. Dolbeare got only a profile view of him against the background of the black curtain.
“What was it about them that attracted your attention?” asked Attorney McAnarney.
“The appearance of the whole five attracted me. They were strangers to me, and appeared to be foreigners.”
“What else?”
“Well, that carload was a tough-looking bunch.”
Dolbeare agreed that he had seen many cars containing three, five or seven foreigners coming from the Fore River shipyards.
“Give me some description of the men on the front seat,” said McAnarney.
“I wouldn’t like to be on record, for my impression isn’t firm enough. The men on the front seat impressed me hardly any.”
He thought they wore old clothes, but he didn’t know whether they wore overalls and jumpers, nor whether they were clean or grimy.
“Give me some description of the other men on the back seat,” demanded McAnarney.
But Dolbeare couldn’t give a single detail except that they were a “tough-looking bunch.” All the excitement attendant upon the murders in Braintree that day didn’t impel him to inform the authorities that he had seen a tough-looking bunch in an automobile, nor did he go to Brockton police station with the big delegation which went from Braintree after Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested. Even the photographs of Vanzetti published broadcast then did not move him to any action.
At 4:15 P. M. on the crime-date, Austin T. Reed, gate tender at the Matfield Crossing, some miles distant from South Braintree put the gates down for a passing train and brought a big touring car to a stand. “A dark complexioned man” with “kind of hollow cheeks, high cheek bones—stubbed moustache” wearing a slouch hat, called out in “clear and unmistakable” English, “What in hell are you holding us up for?”
Three weeks later, when Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and many persons were being taken to the Brockton jail to look them over, Reed went to Brockton, “looked for an Italian,” as he testified under cross-examination, an Italian with a moustache, and Vanzetti filled the bill. He recognized not only the appearance, but the voice, which speaking in the jail in a conversational tone and in Italian, recalled to the witness “that same gruff voice” in which the Italian had hollered at him from the automobile. This witness was certain of his “identification,”although Vanzetti’s moustache is the opposite of “stubbed” and his accent is noticeably foreign.
It is to be noted that Reed placed the moustached man with whom he “identified” Vanzetti, on the front seat beside the driver, the location in which almost every other witness had placed the bandit with whom it was sought to identify Sacco.
One other witness, Austin C. Cole, conductor on the trolley car into Brockton on which Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested on the evening of May 5th following the crime, testified that these same men had ridden on his car at the same hour on either April 14th or 15th. If this testimony is accepted as to the 14th, it discredits Faulkner’s testimony as to the passenger on the train from Cohasset the following morning. And if it is accepted as to the 15th, then it claims that two red-handed murderers, one of whom had been in the limelight before scores of spectators, left their high power automobile to board a trolley several hours later in a town not far from the scene of their crime.
Under cross-examination Cole admitted that when the two men boarded the car in April he thought at first the larger man was “Tony the Portuguese,” whom he had known in Campello for a dozen years.
Defense Counsel McAnarney showed Cole a profile photograph of a man with a large dark moustache.
Q. Do you recognize that picture?
A. It looks like Vanzetti. (Cole, of course was sitting where he could see Vanzetti plainly as he answered.)
Q. That is a picture of Vanzetti?
A. That is what I would call it.
Q. And not a picture of your friend Tony? A. No.
At this juncture a man was brought into the courtroom.
Q. Do you know this man? A. I have met him, yes.
Q. Who is he? A. Tony.
McAnarney showed the picture to Cole again.
Q. Is that a picture of Vanzetti?
A. It looks like it.
But actually it was a photograph of another Italian, wholly unlike Vanzetti except that he has a big moustache.
The foregoing is the whole case against Vanzetti in the way of identification.
It was the theory of the government that the Harrison & Richardson revolver which Vanzetti carried when arrested had been taken from Berardelli’s dead body by the bandit who shot him. No one had seen this done. Prosecutor Katzmann based the theory on evidence that Berardelli was known to have carried a revolver (whether of similar make is unknown), which had been seen in Berardelli’s possession and handled by a prosecution witness, James F. Bostock, the Saturday previous to the shooting, and that no weapon was found on Berardelli after his death.
Three weeks before the murders, however, Berardelli took his revolver to the Iver Johnson Company in Boston for repairs, according to testimony given by his widow, Mrs. Sarah Berardelli. She accompanied him on the trip. The gun had a broken spring.
Berardelli had obtained the revolver originally from his superior, Parmenter, and he gave the repair check to Parmenter so that the latter could take the gun out after it was repaired, the widow stated. “I don’t know whether the revolver ever came back.... Mr. Parmenter let him have another revolver, with a black handle like the first.”
Mrs. Berardelli did not identify the Vanzetti revolver as her husband’s.
Lincoln Wadsworth, in charge of gun repairing at the Iver Johnson Company, testified that the company’s records show that Berardelli brought in a 38-calibre Harrington and Richardson revolver for repairs on March 20. But Geo. Fitzmeyer, gunsmith for that firm, testified that a revolver on Repair Job No. 94765 was a 32-calibre gun. The company’s records, according to the testimony of James H. Jones, manager of the firearms department, do not show whether the revolver repaired on Job No. 94765 was ever delivered.
When Fitzmeyer was testifying, he was asked to examine the Vanzetti pistol, and he declared that a new hammer had recently been put into that gun. But he found no indications that any new spring had lately been put into it.
Of important, almost conclusive, bearing upon the state theory is the testimony of Mrs. Aldeah Florence, the friend with whom Mrs. Berardelli made her home after her husband’s death. She testified that the day following the funeral, while in conversation with the widow she had lamented “Oh, dear, if he had taken my advice and taken the revolver out of the shop, maybe he wouldn’t be in the same condition he is today.” The government might have called Mrs. Berardelli to the witness stand to contradict this evidence had it believed it to be untrue, but did not do so. If Mrs. Florence’s testimony stands, and the government did not challenge it, then the rest of the voluminous testimony relative to the pistol is irrelevant.
Vanzetti’s gun was traced from owner to owner until no doubt remained as to its identity.
If the evidence against Vanzetti was slight, there was nevertheless the fact, never referred to, but in everybody’s mind, which cannot fail to have been counted as evidence, that upon his arrest he had been at first charged, not with complicity in the South Braintree crime, but as principal in the attempted holdup at Bridgewater.
Under the forms of legal procedure, there was no chance to put in the plea that the earlier trial for the Bridgewater crime was believed by those who had studied the transcript of evidence to have been an almost grotesque travesty of justice. The Bridgewater crime stalked behind and overshadowed all the evidence introduced against Vanzetti at Dedham.
The failure on the part of Judge Webster Thayer to separate the two trials made it inevitable that this shadow (and no amount of instructions could remove it) also covered Sacco.
Bartolomeo Vanzetti declared on the witness stand that he was in Plymouth, 35 miles from South Braintree all day on April 15. He gave names of persons to whom he sold fish; told of buying a piece of suiting from Joseph Rosen, a woolen peddler; and of talking with Melvin Corl, a fisherman, while Corl was painting a boat by the sea.
Vanzetti’s alibi was supported by eleven undiscredited witnesses.
Mrs. Alphonsine Brini testified that Vanzetti brought fishto her home in Cherry Court, Plymouth, about 10 a. m. April 15. He came back about noon with Rosen, and asked her to examine and pass upon the quality of cloth he had bought for a suit. Mrs. Brini fixed the date by the fact that she had been home a week from the hospital, and that her husband telephoned that day to Dr. Shurtleff for a nurse.
Miss Lefevre Brini, 15, stated that Vanzetti delivered fish at the Brini home about 10 o’clock on April 15. She had remained home from work that day to care for her mother, who was ill.
Miss Gertrude Mathews, nurse in medical department of Plymouth Cordage Company, recalled telephone conversation with Dr. Shurtleff regarding the matter of attending Mrs. Brini. Was at Brini home to attend her from April 15 to April 20, inclusive.
Mrs. Ella Urquhart, another nurse at the cordage plant, recalled the same message from Dr. Shurtleff.
Joseph Rosen, woolen peddler, testified that he met Vanzetti in Suosso’s Lane, Plymouth, shortly before noon on April 15. Vanzetti was pushing his fish-cart. They were acquainted. Rosen had sold him cloth before. Sold him a piece of suiting now with a hole in it, “at a bargain”; went with Vanzetti to Brini home to show goods to Mrs. Brini.
Several other persons in Plymouth bought cloth from him that day, Rosen averred. Rosen was actually one of the strongest witnesses in Vanzetti’s defense. The prosecution never attempted to disprove his story of his presence in Plymouth on the day of the crime. If that story had not been true, it would have been easy for the commonwealth to have discredited Rosen by producing the various persons to whom he said he made sales. One of these was the wife of the police chief of Plymouth.
But the prosecution did not produce any of these persons as witnesses, and Rosen’s story stands unshaken in every detail.
That evening Rosen went by train to Whitman, a small town near Brockton. There he read in the Brockton papers about the payroll murders at South Braintree, and he heard many people there talking about the crime. He stayed that night at a small hotel in Whitman. Next day he returned to Boston.Three weeks later he read of the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti. Remembering Vanzetti well, he fixed the date by his memory that when he had reached Whitman, all the town was talking about the South Braintree murders.
He also fixed that date as April 15 with reference to a receipt for taxes, paid by his wife on that date, and about which he had spoken to her before leaving home. The receipt was produced in court.
Miss Lillian Schuler, waitress in hotel at Whitman, testified that she rented a room to a man on the night of April 15. Register simply shows that a man occupied the room, and gives no name.
Melvin Corl, Plymouth fisherman, testified that he was painting a boat on the afternoon of April 15. Vanzetti came down to the shore and talked with him for an hour. Corl fixed the date by reference to his wife’s birthday which fell on April 17th, on which date he launched the boat and made a trip to Duxbury to tow a boat back, for which he received $5.00.
Angelo Giadobone of Plymouth bought fish of Vanzetti on April 15. Remembered date with relation to April 19, when he was operated on for appendicitis. Giadobone said he still owed Vanzetti for the fish.
Antonio Carbone of Plymouth attested that he sold fish to Vanzetti on April 15.
The government sought to establish Sacco as the dark man “needing a shave” who leaned against the fence below the Rice & Hutchins factory, shot Berardelli, jumped into the automobile and leaning out shot right and left as the car fled through the town. Towards that end, it brought into court four alleged eyewitnesses of the crime and escape who “identified” Sacco. These four were Miss Splaine, Miss Devlin, Pelser and Goodridge. Two others called for the same purpose, Wade and De Berardinis, disappointed the prosecution by their failure to identify.
Mary Eva Splaine, bookkeeper for Slater and Morrill, gave a remarkably complete description of one of the bandits in thefleeing car, considering that she was in a second-story window a minimum distance of 80 feet from the car, and saw the bandit only in the brief time required for an automobile to travel 35 feet at 18 miles an hour—which is one and one-fifth seconds. She saw the car first from an east window; then switched to a window facing south. As she stepped to the south window, a man leaned out from behind the front seat.
“He was slightly taller than I,” she testified; “weighed about 140 to 145 pounds, had dark hair, dark eyebrows, thin cheeks, and clean-shaven face of a peculiar greenish-white. His forehead was high. His hair was brushed back, and it was, I should think, between two and two and a half inches long. His shoulders were straight out, square. He wore no hat.... His face was clear-cut, clean-cut. He wore a gray shirt. He was a muscular, active looking man, and had a strong left hand, a powerful hand.”
She said he was leaning half out of the car, just behind the front seat, and that his left hand was on the back of that seat, presumably at arm’s length from his face.
“He was in my view from the middle of the distance between the railroad tracks and the cobbler shop, a distance probably 60 to 70 feet, and half distance would be 30 to 35 feet. My view was cut off by the cobbler shop.”
Miss Splaine declared positively that Sacco was the bandit who leaned from the car. Defense Counsel Fred H. Moore confronted her with the record of the preliminary hearing in the Sacco case, which shows that at that time, a year before the trial and a few weeks after the crime and after she had looked Sacco over to her complete satisfaction on three different days, she admitted under oath that she “could not swear positively that Sacco was the bandit.”
“That is not true,” she now asserted. “I never said it.”
But next day she came into court and announced that she wished to change her testimony, and admitted she had said at the preliminary hearing that she could not swear positively Sacco was the bandit. (Page 416, official transcript.) She added that her present certainty of Sacco’s being the bandit came from “reflection.” The transcript of the preliminarytestimony (Page 56) showed that she had said in police court: “I do not think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.”
In the preliminary hearing she remembered a revolver in the right hand. At the trial she recalled nothing about the right hand or this revolver.
Finally she admitted that when she visited state police headquarters in Boston shortly after the crime, she was shown a rogues’ gallery photograph of a certain man. Of him she said: “He bears a striking resemblance to the bandit.”
Later she learned that this man was in Sing Sing prison on April 15.
Frances J. Devlin, also a bookkeeper for Slater and Morrill, gave testimony similar to that of Miss Splaine. She saw the escaping car from the same observation point, a window in the second story of the Hampton House, at least 80 feet from the car. She said she saw a man in the right rear seat of the automobile lean out and fire at the crowd.
This bandit, she said, was fairly thick-set, dark, pale, rather good looking, with clear features. His hair grew away from his temples, and was blown back. She “positively identified” Sacco as the bandit.
Under cross-examination Miss Devlin admitted she had testified in the preliminary hearing that the bandit was tall and well-built, while Sacco is only 5 feet 6 inches tall. She admitted she said then: “I don’t say positively he is the man.”
The Quincy police court record shows she said at the preliminary hearing that she got a better view of the chauffeur’s face than of the other bandit’s. This was manifestly impossible as the car was covered and had a left hand drive. But at the trial she declared that she never said that; and now said that she did not see the chauffeur’s face.
She admitted that Sacco was made to assume postures like that of the bandit for her in Brockton police station.
Answering questions by Prosecutor Harold Williams, Miss Devlin explained she had testified in the lower court that she couldn’t say positively that Sacco was the bandit “because of theimmensity of the crime. I felt sure in my own mind, but I hated to say so, out and out.”
In spite of the seemingly impossible detail of the descriptions of these two young women, considering their position and the extreme brevity of the period of observation, in spite of the manner in which doubt at the preliminary hearings changed into certainty in the final trial, they were the strongest witnesses against Sacco.
The third of these witnesses, Louis Pelser, went to pieces on the stand. He was a shoe-cutter in the Rice and Hutchins factory, working on the first floor above the raised basement. Pelser asserted that through the crack of an opened window he saw a man sinking on the pavement, that he opened a window, and that he stood up amid flying bullets and did two things—he wrote down the number of the approaching bandit-automobile and he made a mental note of one bandit who was shooting at the fallen Berardelli. This witness declared that he noticed even the pin in the bandit’s collar.
“I wouldn’t say it was him,” Pelser said, “but Sacco is a dead image of him.”
Then Pelser proceeded to tangle himself up in lie after lie. He admitted he had lied to Robert Reid, defense investigator, “to avoid being a witness,” and that he had told Reid he didn’t see anything because he got scared and ducked under a bench. Next he denied ever discussing the case with any one previous to Reid’s interview with him, but later admitted he had talked with a state detective previous to that time.
Cross examination revealed that Pelser had been out of work for some time after the tragedy, and had been re-employed by Rice and Hutchins two months before the trial. Subsequently he told his foreman he had testimony to give. On the morning of the day Pelser appeared in court, he talked with Prosecutor Williams, was shown Sacco’s picture and was taken to identify him. Fourteen months had elapsed between the crime-date and the day on which Pelser purported to identify Sacco on the witness stand at Dedham.
Pelser was noticeably embarrassed on the stand, mopping his forehead continually, shifting his weight from foot to foot,and unable to understand the simplest questions. Further his testimony was contradicted by three fellow workers:
William Brenner declared it was he and not Pelser whose station was near the partly open window, and that it was McCollum who opened the window fully. He said that McCollum shouted: “They are shooting; duck!” and that they all dropped down behind the bench. When the shots sounded farther away, they got up again, looked out, somebody got the automobile number and wrote it on the work-bench. By that time the car was near the railroad tracks.
Peter McCollum declared that it was he and not Pelser who threw open the window and shut it again instantly, then dropped down behind the work-bench with his fellows. He was the only one who looked out of the open window during the shooting, he swore. Opaque glass was in all the windows in the work room.
Dominic Costantino confirmed Brenner’s and McCollum’s testimony. He saw Pelser get under the bench along with the rest. He heard him say afterward that he didn’t see anyone. He volunteered as a witness after reading Pelser’s testimony in the Globe.
The last of the crime-scene witnesses against Sacco, Carlos E. Goodridge, is a phonograph salesman. He testified that he was in a poolroom on Pearl street a few doors west of the Hampton House. He heard shots, stepped out, saw the bandit-automobile coming; when it was 20 or 25 feet away a man pointed a gun at him; he went back into the poolroom. Man with gun was dark, smooth-shaven, bareheaded, pointed face, dark suit. Goodridge identified Sacco as that man.
Four witnesses including the proprietor of the poolroom gave the lie to this witness:
Peter Magazu, the poolroom proprietor, declared that when Goodridge came back into the poolroom he said the bandit he saw was light-haired; and he had said: “This job wasn’t pulled by any foreign people.”
Harry Arrigoni, barber, related that Goodridge said a week after the shooting that he couldn’t identify any of the bandits.
Nicola D’Amato, another barber, said Goodridge told him onApril 15 he was in the poolroom when the bandit-car passed and did not see anybody in the automobile.
Andrew Mangano, music store owner and former employer of Goodridge, testified that he had urged him to go to see if he could identify the suspects in jail, and that Goodridge told him it was useless; he couldn’t identify the bandits. Mangano declared that Goodridge’s reputation for truth and veracity was bad.
With the jury absent, the defense endeavored to introduce testimony to show that when Goodridge first identified Sacco in September, 1920 (when Vanzetti was in this same courtroom in Dedham for a hearing), Goodridge was in court to answer a charge of absconding with funds belonging to his employer. Judge Thayer barred that evidence on the ground that no final judgment was entered in the Goodridge case. Goodridge simply pleaded guilty to the theft, and the case was “filed.”
Lewis L. Wade was a disappointment to the prosecution, as he was one of those upon whose testimony the indictment of Sacco was based. He was an employee of Slater and Morrill, and was in the street when the crime occurred, saw Berardelli shot from a distance of 72 paces. Just then a car came up; the man at the wheel was pale, 30 to 35 years old, looked sick. The assailant threw a cash box into the car and jumped in.
This man was described by Wade as short, bareheaded, 26 or 27, weighed about 140, hair blown back, needed shave, hair cut with “feather edge” in back. Wore gray shirt.
“Have you seen the man who shot Berardelli since?” asked Prosecutor Williams.
“I thought I saw him in Brockton police station,” Wade answered. “I thought then it was Sacco.”
But Wade declared now that he wasn’t sure. He had felt “a little mite of doubt” when he had testified in the preliminary hearing at Quincy. “I might be mistaken,” he had then testified. His doubt deepened about four weeks before he took the witness stand. “I was in a barber shop, and a man came in. His face looked familiar. The more I looked at that man and the more I thought about him the more I thought he resembled the man who killed Berardelli.”
Another heavy setback awaited the prosecution in the testimony of Louis De Berardinis, cobbler, who it was claimed had “identified” at Brockton. His shop is on Pearl Street with the Hampton building behind, a grass plot being between. He heard shots, ran out of shop, saw bandit-car coming across tracks, man jumping in. Man leaned out of the car with gun in hand, came opposite, pointed gun at him, pulled trigger; no explosion.
“That bandit was pale, had a long face, awful white,” said De Berardinis, “and he had light hair. A thin fellow, light weight. Not like Sacco. The one I saw was light. Sacco is dark.”
This is the complete identification case against Sacco so far as the murder scene is concerned. As has been shown, Pelser is discredited by his self-contradictions on the stand, and both his testimony and Goodridge’s is refuted by several undiscredited witnesses. The two bookkeepers were at a disadvantage in their location for purposes of identification, and they were positive fourteen months after the crime, whereas only a few weeks after it, they had expressed some uncertainty.
In addition to the above six, the government put five witnesses on the stand who got a sufficiently good view of bandit with whom it was sought to identify Sacco to describe his appearance; namely, Carrigan, Bostock, McGlone, Langlois, and Behrsin. None of them were able to make an identification. It is of prime importance that their locations were such as to make their testimony applicable to the same bandit whom the four “positive witnesses” identify as Sacco.
Mark E. Carrigan, shoe-worker employed by Slater and Morrill on the third floor of the Hampton House related that he saw Parmenter and Berardelli proceeding from the offices to the main factory with the payroll money, and that he presently heard shooting and saw the bandit-automobile coming east on Pearl street past the Hampton House. He saw a dark Italian-looking man in the car with a revolver.
But he could not identify either defendant as being in that car. Carrigan’s testimony has a large bearing upon the credibility of Miss Splaine and Miss Devlin, who from a window one floor below where Carrigan was, claimed to identify Sacco as aman who was leaning out of the escaping automobile. Eight feet below Carrigan, the two women were no more than a foot closer to the bandits than he.
James F. Bostock, machine installer of Brockton, had been doing work for Slater and Morrill. Shortly before the shooting, he came out of the Slater factory and walked west on Pearl street. He passed two men, who were leaning against a fence arguing. It is not disputed that one of these was the man who shot Berardelli.
Immediately afterward he met Parmenter and Berardelli coming down the road with the payroll boxes. Bostock was a close friend of Parmenter. They exchanged words in a momentary meeting. Just after Bostock had left the paymaster, he heard shots, turned, and saw Parmenter and Berardelli fall. The men he had seen at the fence were shooting. They grabbed the money-boxes and jumped into an oncoming automobile.
Bostock ran around the corner of a high board fence along the New Haven track. The bandit-car passed so close, he said, that he could have touched it with his hand.
He said he could not identify either of the defendants as the highwaymen.
James E. McGlone, teamster, helped lower Parmenter to the ground after the fatal shot. McGlone had been working in the excavation. When the shooting started he ran forward, and saw the bandits at close range. The commonwealth didn’t ask him if he could identify. Defendants’ counsel had not interviewed him. They asked him in court if he could identify the defendants, and he said he could not.
Edgar C. Langlois, foreman of Rice and Hutchins, was on the second floor (from the street level) of that factory, facing on the crime-scene. He could make no identification. The only description he could give was that the highwaymen he saw were “stout, thick-chested—that is, full-chested,” a description which fits neither Sacco nor Vanzetti.
Langlois’ testimony is highly significant because he was in a central window immediately above the window from which another prosecution witness, Pelser, claimed he observed Sacco. This witness occupies a responsible position in Rice and Hutchins.
Hans Behrsin, chauffeur for Mr. Slater of the robbed shoe company, testified for the prosecution. He was sitting in a stationary sedan on the right-hand side of Pearl street, a little beyond the poolroom.
Five men were in the automobile, Behrsin said. They passed him within ten feet. One man was leaning out. The car was going 16 to 18 miles an hour. He could not identify either defendant as being one of the bandits. A few moments earlier he had noticed the two bandits just before they opened fire, and he described them as light-complexioned.
The government contends further that the bandits had lingered about South Braintree during the morning. Precisely as against Vanzetti, three witnesses uncorroborated—unless impeachment be an inverted kind of corroboration—were brought forward in support of the contention that Sacco had been seen in the town that morning.
William S. Tracy, elderly real estate dealer, testified that about 11:45 he saw two men leaning against the window of a drugstore building he owned. They were “clean-shaven, smoothfaced, respectably dressed.” He entered the drug store, came out, and drove away in his automobile. Returning a few minutes later, he found the men still there, talking. Again he went away and again he came back, and they still were propped against the window.
Tracy identified Sacco as one of these men: “I would not be positive,” he said, “but to the best of my recollection he is the same man.”
His statement that the two men were “respectably dressed” contrasts with that of various prosecution witnesses who swore the bandits were rough-looking and needed a shave.
In cross-examination it developed that in February, 1921, Tracy was taken to the Dedham jail and escorted through various departments, and was shown large groups of prisoners, and that finally he was taken over to “the pit,” where Sacco was all alone; then he made his “identification.”
Tracy’s testimony is open to wide question. He stands out in stark isolation from the scores or even hundreds of personswho must have stood upon or passed that corner in that noonhour, for it is the principal intersection of South Braintree, where innumerable people wait daily for electric cars.
Consider, too, that this corner is only a few hundred feet from the scene of the crime, that Sacco had worked at Rice and Hutchins’, and was known presumably by sight to various workers in South Braintree. The defense argues that it is unreasonable to suppose that Sacco, had he been intending to commit robbery and wanton murder in that town within three hours would have lingered on that corner.
William J. Heron, railroad police officer, testified that he saw two men in the New Haven station at South Braintree on April 15. One was 5 feet 6, the other 5 feet 11. He identified Sacco as the smaller man. He noticed the two men he said, “because they acted nervous and ... they were smoking cigarettes, one of them.” (Page 884, official transcript.)
Q. Which one was smoking? A. The tallest one.
Q. Did you pay much attention to the men when you first came in? A. Not much, only I saw them smoking.
Heron, too, said that the man he saw wore a hat and was respectably dressed, which conflicts with descriptions of the murderer.
Neither man had any outstanding physical characteristics, according to Heron. He admitted he didn’t see Sacco to identify him until six weeks later.
After Police Chief Stewart of Bridgewater and State Policeman Brouillard had lined up Heron as a witness for the prosecution, the defense sent an investigator, Robert Reid, to interrogate Heron. He refused to give the defense any information. When asked in cross-examination why he refused to talk to Reid he gave a curious answer for a man who had been a police officer six years.
“Because I didn’t want to be brought into it.”
This man’s testimony was attacked by the defense from the same angle that Tracy’s story was attacked. Defense counsel asked: Is it reasonable to suppose that Sacco, if intending to rob and kill three hours later in that town where he had worked,would have lingered in places where many persons would have opportunity to observe him?
Mrs. Lola Andrews, a lady of miscellaneous avocations, attested that on the morning of the crime-date she and Mrs. Julia Campbell went from Quincy to South Braintree to seek work in the shoe factories. They arrived between 11:00 and 11:30. Mrs. Andrews said that she saw an automobile in front of the Slater and Morrill plant, and a man working around the hood.
When they came out of the Slater factory, this man was under the car fixing something. She called him from beneath the car, she asserted, and asked him how to get into the Rice and Hutchins’ factory. She identified this man as Sacco.
But at that moment, according to her own statements, another man was standing near that automobile—a light-complexioned emaciated Swedish-looking man. Mrs. Andrews’ testimony does not explain why she addressed her inquiry to the man under the automobile instead of asking the man standing near.
While Mrs. Andrews was being cross-examined by Defense Attorney Moore, and when he was showing her some photographs she fainted, and was carried out. Prosecutor Katzmann left the room, returned, scanned the faces of the audience, then conferred in whispers with the court. Judge Thayer ordered the courtroom doors closed, and various spectators were searched.
When the witness took the stand again, she asserted that she fainted because she saw a man in court whom she thought was the person who assaulted her in February, 1920, in a toilet in the Quincy lodging house where she had rooms.
Her testimony was impeached by five defense witnesses. The most important of these was Mrs. Julia Campbell, who accompanied Mrs. Andrews to South Braintree that day, and gave testimony directly opposite.
An elderly but active woman, Mrs. Campbell had come from Maine to testify for the defense after a state detective had told her she needn’t go to Massachusetts to testify; that she didn’t know anything of importance; and that it would cost too much to have her make the trip.
She submitted to an eyesight test in court at the hands of District Attorney Katzmann, and proved that she was able to distinguish objects and colors at long distance; one instance was her specifying the color of a hat picked at random among the audience. And she had been working in the shoe factories as a stitcher, at a task which requires unerring vision.
“Neither of us spoke to the man under the automobile,” declared Mrs. Campbell. “Mrs. Andrews did not speak to either man. It was I who addressed the inquiry about how to get into the Rice and Hutchins’ factory. But I spoke to the man standing in the rear of the car, not to the man underneath.”
Why did Mrs. Andrews faint in court? Harry Kurlansky, a Quincy tailor, testified that she told him she fainted because the defense was digging into her past history, and that she was afraid the lawyers would “bring out the trouble she had with Mr. Landers.” Landers was a naval officer, Kurlansky said.
She told him also, Kurlansky stated, that she couldn’t identify the men at Braintree. The police wanted her to identify some one in Dedham jail as one of the men she saw in Braintree, but she couldn’t because she didn’t get a good look at the faces of those men. Kurlansky volunteered to testify for the defense after reading in newspapers of the “identification” she swore to in court.
Policeman George Fay of Quincy testified that he interviewed Mrs. Andrews in February, 1920, in connection with the alleged assault upon her. Did she suppose that attack had anything to do with the South Braintree affair? She answered that she could not identify the men she saw in Braintree as she didn’t get a good look at them.
Alfred La Brecque, Quincy reporter and secretary of the Chamber of Commerce there, said she told him the same thing.
Miss Lena Allen, rooming house proprietor, testified that Mrs. Andrews’ reputation for truth and veracity was bad, and that she would never want her in her house again.
At the end of the trial the Government put Mrs. Mary Gaines upon the stand to support the testimony of Mrs. Andrews and to contradict that of Mrs. Campbell. Mrs. Gaines declared that a few weeks after the crime she had heard Mrs. Andrewssay in Mrs. Campbell’s presence that she had spoken to the man under the automobile, and that Mrs. Campbell did not contradict her.
Fred Loring, shoe-worker for Slater and Morrill, stated that he found a dark brown cap near Berardelli’s body; it was offered as an exhibit by the commonwealth. When tried on by Sacco on the witness stand this cap seemed too small; whereas a cap of his own, tried on immediately afterwards fitted with nicety.
The “bandit cap” was fur-lined and had ear-laps, which accounts for its being smaller although the same size numerically as Sacco’s. Sacco never owned a cap of this character. George Kelley, superintendent of the Three K Factory where Sacco worked, said the cap he had seen daily behind Sacco’s bench, as he remembered, was a pepper-and-salt cloth, which he believed was different from the one produced by the commonwealth. A cap like the one described by Kelley was found in the house at the time of Sacco’s arrest.
Of the four bullets found in Berardelli’s dead body, three were admittedly from a Savage pistol. The other one, however, was from some other kind of revolver, the make of which is in dispute. It is the prosecution’s contention that the leaden pellet designated as Bullet No. 3 which inflicted the fatal wound upon Berardelli, was from a Colt automatic found on Sacco when he was arrested three weeks after the murders. The bullet was a Winchester of an obsolete make.
The testimony upon this point by experts put upon the stand by both the government and the defense was voluminous and highly technical. The disagreement was sharp.
Captain Charles Van Amburgh, of the Remington Arms Works, testified for the prosecution: “I believe the bullet was fired from a Colt automatic pistol.... I am inclined to believe it was fired from this Colt automatic.” He based this belief, he said, on a mark he found on the bullet, visible only under a microscope, and on similar marks noted on three bullets which he had fired from the revolver. These bullets were all Winchesters of a modern make. On three Peters bullets fired at the same time no such marks were visible. The Peters bullet, hesaid, are a trifle smaller than Winchesters, and therefore under less pressure. Under cross-examination, Van Amburg acknowledged that pitting such as was present in the Sacco pistol was generally caused by rust or fouling and that to the best of his judgment, in the pistol before them, it was so caused.
Captain William H. Proctor, head of the state police.
He said that bullet No. 3 was consistent with being fired from Sacco’s revolver. “That bullet was fired from a 32 Colt automatic,” Proctor asserted. “It has a left twist and a .060 of an inch groove. No other revolver except the Colt has a left twist.”
“Don’t you know,” asked Defense Counsel McAnarney, “that at least two other kinds of revolvers make a left twist marking?”
“No, I don’t,” replied Proctor.
“Do you know that the Spear and the Sauer guns both make a left twist marking?”
Proctor didn’t know. He had never seen either kind of gun, never heard of them before. Both are German makes, it appears, and occasionally one of them bobs up in a pawnshop.
Although this witness had said he had been a gun expert in a hundred cases, he was unable to take a Colt automatic revolver apart in court. Proctor struggled with it vainly until his face grew crimson, dropped it on the floor in his awkwardness, and then the court suggested that some one else try. Another expert took the weapon apart in a moment.
“And what is the part of the gun through which the firing pin protrudes,” asked Attorney McAnarney.
“I do not know as I can tell you all the scientific parts of the gun,” answered Proctor.
Proctor said he received the Colt pistol and some 32-calibre cartridges from another officer at Brockton police station.
Q. Will you look at this envelope of cartridges and see if you can identify them?
A. That is the same envelope, and it looks like the same amount of cartridges. I can tell by counting them.
Neither revolver nor the bullets were ever impounded before the trial. They were in the hands of police officers, and most of the time in Captain Proctor’s possession. Prosecutor Katzmannrefused to permit the defense to examine any of the exhibits until they were produced in court.
To meet the testimony of Proctor and Van Amburgh, the defense put on two gun experts of long standing—James E. Burns, noted rifleman, champion pistol shot, and head of a department of the United States Cartridge Company; and James H. Fitzgerald, superintendent of the testing department of the Colt Automatic Pistol Company. Burns declared that Bullet No. 3 might have been fired from either a Colt or a Bayard revolver. The latter is a Belgian gun; many have been brought here since the war. Burns declared positively that the bullet did not come from Sacco’s revolver. He fired 8 bullets through it, and all came through clean and without any markings.
Fitzgerald testified that Bullet No. 3 did not come from the Sacco gun; that there was no condition existent in that gun to cause the peculiar marking on the bullet.
Expert Burns fired U. S. bullets, for the reason that, as stated above, the “fatal” bullet was of an obsolete make, and he had found it impossible to secure an exact duplicate in spite of having made great effort to do so. He considered that the U. S. bullets which he used corresponded more nearly with the “fatal” bullet than did the newer make of Winchester used by Captain Van Amburgh.
To the minds of many who followed this gun testimony, the claim of the government regarding a certain gun seemed farcical. The fact that two of the bullets said to have been fired through the so-called Sacco gun did bear microscopic marks faintly resembling that on the “fatal bullet” seems to have carried weight with some members of the jury; that is indicated by the circumstance that the microscope was called for while the verdict was under consideration. The question was so involved, the chances of error so great, the opinion of experts so conflicting, that it would seem as if a layman could hardly have made a final judgment on the matter.
Then came up the testimony about Sacco’s reputation.
From 1910 to 1917 he worked in the Milford Shoe Factory. The foreman during four years of this time, John J. Millick, a responsible looking person of the English operative type, testifiedof Sacco, “a steady workman, never lost a day.” Asked as to his reputation as a peaceful and law-abiding citizen, he answered “good.”
Michael F. Kelley, the senior partner in the Three K Factory at Stoughton where Sacco was employed the 18 months previous to his arrest, and his son George Kelley, superintendent and part owner, bore testimony as to Sacco’s character similar to that of Mr. Millick.
Both of the Kelleys gave testimony which dovetailed in with that of others in establishing Sacco’s alibi. Late in March, Sacco had told both Michael and George Kelley that he had received letters from Italy announcing his mother’s death, and that he must go home as soon as possible to see his father. With George Kelley he had arranged to break in another man to do his work and that he should be free to start for Italy as soon as his place was satisfactorily filled.
On Monday or Tuesday of the week of April 15th, Sacco told George Kelley he would like a day off that week, to make a trip to Boston and get the passport. On Wednesday, April 14th, Sacco told him that he was well ahead of his work and would go to Boston the following day. He was absent the following day, Thursday, April 15th (the fateful day of the South Braintree murder), in Boston; so Sacco claimed and so George Kelley believed. The day following that, April 16th, Sacco was at work at the usual hour. This day, the 15th of April, was the only day of absence which George Kelley recalled. And he believed he would have remembered had Sacco been absent on any other day as his was “a one-man job,” and if “he was out, the work was blocked.”
It was not controverted that Sacco had been to Boston about his passport at approximately the date he claimed. Whether he had really gone to Boston on April 15th as he claimed, or to South Braintree to commit murder as the Government claimed, was the issue of the trial. Ten witnesses supported the alibi. The truthfulness of their testimony was not impeached, although efforts were made to impeach the reliability of their memory. However, it appears that they certainly saw Sacco in various parts of Boston some day that week. And since Thursday wasthe only day it was shown that Sacco was not at work, the conclusion is obvious.
Mrs. Sacco, when upon the witness stand, unwittingly to herself buttressed her husband’s alibi claim. She fixed the date he had gone for the passport by the visit she received from a friend who had come with his wife from Milford the day her husband was absent, and who had stayed to dinner. The friend she said was Enrico Iacovelli whom her husband had sent for to see Mr. Kelley and arrange to be broken into Sacco’s work.
Henry Iacovelli, the shoe-worker who took Sacco’s place in the Kelley factory, testified that he received a letter from Mr. Kelley offering him Sacco’s job as an edge-trimmer, a highly important function in the factory mechanism. He replied that he could go and talk with Kelley on April 15; went to see him that day; called at the Sacco home to see Sacco; Mrs. Sacco informed him that her husband was in Boston arranging for passports.
The original correspondence exchanged between Kelley and Iacovelli was introduced as evidence by the defense.
Sacco declared under oath that he took the 8:56 o’clock train from South Stoughton to Boston on April 15, to arrange for passports to Italy. South Stoughton is 19 miles from Boston.
In Boston, Sacco said, he had lunch with friends at Boni’s restaurant in North Square, then went to the Italian consulate to see about the passports. A photograph of his wife, his son Dante and himself which he brought was too large for consular purposes; there was considerable conversation about that; he was instructed to furnish a smaller picture.
On the streets he met and talked with certain persons. Going again to North Square, he spent some time in Giordano’s coffee-house; then went to East Boston, where he paid a bill for groceries, and finally returned to Stoughton on a train about 4:20 p. m.
Prof. Felice Guadagni, journalist and lecturer, testified that he had lunch at Boni’s on April 15 with Sacco and Albert Bosco, editor ofLa Notizia. While they ate, John D. Williams, an advertising agent, entered and joined them. Sacco told them about his intention to visit the consulate. They discussed thebanquet given that day by Italians to Mr. Williams of theBoston Transcriptwho had been decorated by the King of Italy for the stand his paper had taken in the war—a memorable occasion among Boston Italians.
Later that afternoon Guadagni met Sacco again in Giordano’s coffee-house. And after the arrest of the defendants, Guadagni said he visited the consulate and talked with Giuseppe Adrower, clerk there, establishing the fact that Sacco had applied for a passport on April 15 and had been sent away because the photograph he brought was too large.
Prof. Antonio Dentamaro, Manager of the Foreign Department of the Haymarket National Bank in Boston, testified in court that he met Sacco in Giordano’s coffee-house on April 15, between 2 and 3 p. m. Remembered date because he went to the Coffee-House directly from the banquet to Mr. Williams which he had attended.
He especially remembered meeting Sacco because he had sent a message by him to Leone Mucci, a member of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy.
They had talked about Sacco’s prospective return to Italy. Sacco had said he had come to Boston to get his passport.
Albert Bosco, editor ofLa Notizia, conservative Italian daily newspaper in Boston, testified likewise as to the presence of Sacco and the others in Boni’s on that day.
Carlo Affè, East Boston grocer, testified that between 3 and 4 o’clock on April 15 he was paid by Sacco for an order of groceries purchased at an earlier date. He exhibited a notebook record of the transaction.
Giuseppe Adrower, clerk in the Italian consulate at Boston for 6 years, and now in Italy, testified in a deposition sworn to before the American consul general at Rome. He identified the photograph of Sacco, Mrs. Sacco and their son as a picture Sacco brought to the consulate on April 15. He corroborated Sacco’s statements regarding his difficulties over passports.
Adrower remembered telling Sacco that the picture was too large, and that he laughed with others in the consulate over the big photograph, and his eye happened to catch the date on the calendar while so doing. Sacco left the consulate a few minutesbefore the office was closed for the day; it is regularly open from 10 to 3. Very few persons were there that afternoon.... Adrower went to Italy May 20, for his health, but Guadagni testified that he talked with Adrower about Sacco and the photograph shortly after Sacco’s arrest.
One alibi witness who was brought forward late in the trial and by the merest chance offered what would seem to be incontrovertible evidence. It appeared that Sacco one day had noticed a face in the audience at the courtroom which arrested his attention. He called for Mr. McAnarney and asked him to find out if that man was on the train coming from Boston to Stoughton in the evening of April 15, 1920. Mr. McAnarney called the man into the lobby and inquired. “I don’t know,” answered the stranger, “but will see if I can find out.”
It developed that he was a contractor who kept his own time in his business books, by the hour; and from his books put in evidence and from a check dated April 15th, and used to buy supplies in Boston upon the date in question as well as by the bills for these supplies, he was able to locate himself on that very train. He did not know Sacco and had no recollection of having ever seen him until he dropped in as a spectator at the trial. His name is James M. Hayes; his residence and place of business, Stoughton, Mass.
The District Attorney, attempting to demolish Sacco’s alibi in his closing argument, was silent as to the evidence offered by Hayes.
The discussion of the testimony against Vanzetti and against Sacco must be supplemented with a number of other considerations. In the first place, there were 22 persons on the stand for the defense on the issue of identifications, who had at least as good an opportunity to see the crime and the criminals as the several state witnesses, and who said positively that these were not the bandits.
In the second place, 13 witnesses put on the stand by theprosecution for the purpose of establishing some facts of the crime, of whom several were excellently placed to make identifications, and certainly seemed anxious to apprehend the guilty persons, could not identify either of the defendants.
Thirdly, the government sought to bolster its testimony by evolving a far-fetched and intangible theory of “consciousness of guilt” at the time of arrest, which in turn brought into the limelight the circumstances of the arrest and the defendants’ unpopular social views. There are also a number of other points which consumed much time, clouded the issues, and really had no bearing upon the case.
Testimony contradicting that of Mary Eva Splaine and Frances Devlin was given by Frank Burke, lecturer, who observed the bandits escape from a much better vantage point than either woman. He was on Pearl street near the New Haven tracks and in the immediate path of the escaping car.
He stood within ten feet of the automobile. He saw two men in it, both dark. The bandit leaning out of the rear seat pointed an automatic pistol at him and pulled the trigger, but there was no explosion. Burke got a full view of the man who the prosecution claimed was Sacco. He described him as very full-faced—flat, and a broad, heavy jaw; needed a shave badly, “dark complexioned, looked rather a desperate type of man.”
But Burke declared that neither bandit was Sacco nor Vanzetti. He had an unobstructed view of the car as it fled, while the view of Miss Splaine and Miss Devlin was cut off by the cobbler shop. From a distance of ten feet instead of 80 as in the case of Misses Splaine and Devlin he described the man on the right side front seat who the government claims was Sacco.
Winfred Pierce and Laurence Ferguson, shoe-workers on third floor of Hampton House, saw bandit-car escape from a window directly above where Miss Splaine and Miss Devlin observed the car. Pierce saw one bandit shoot at his friend, Carl Knipps. Both described the bandit leaning out of the car and shooting, but declared neither Sacco nor Vanzetti was that man.
Barbara Liscomb, a woman of about thirty, of good personality, employed as a heeler, on the third floor of the Rice andHutchins factory. She looked from a window directly above the room in which Pelser worked. She had heard shots, ran to the window; saw two men lying on the ground; a dark man with a pistol in hand standing over Berardelli. He wheeled around and pointed the pistol at her. She fainted, but in the instant of observation, she declared the image of the bandit was firmly implanted in her mind. “I shall remember that face all my life. That man was neither of the defendants. Of that I am positive.”
Mrs. Jennie Novelli, trained nurse, saw a big touring car drive slowly up the street shortly before the murder occurred and took particular notice of the chauffeur and the man beside him, whom she thought at first she recognized. Asked if either of these men were Sacco or Vanzetti she answered, “No, they were not.”
Albert Frantello, worker in Slater and Morrill plant. Passed from one factory building to another at 2:55 p. m. Saw two men leaning on fence in front of Rice and Hutchins factory. Was close enough to touch them. Frantello, who is American of Italian descent, is certain Sacco and Vanzetti are not those two men. Was interviewed by state police officers, and was not summoned by prosecution.
One of the men whom Frantello described was the bandit with whom it was sought to identify Sacco.
Daniel J. O’Neil, 19 years old, a business school graduate, got off the train from Boston and was sitting in a taxi-cab with a Mr. Gilman when he heard the shooting. He got a distinct impression of at least one of the bandits at a distance of 155 to 170 feet from the automobile. He said positively that neither of the defendants was the man he saw.
Five among 22 defense witnesses were laborers shoveling in an excavation across the street from the shooting. They were foreigners who had to speak through interpreters. In cross-examination it was sought to show that they had been too scared or too far from the scene of action to see anything. Their testimony was not broken down, but presumably was accorded little weight. One of them, a Spaniard by the name of Pedro Iscorla, was 40 or 50 feet from crime-action; had gone to get a drink of water. Says man who shot policeman (that is Berardelli)was high and thin, slim. Light complexion, 5 feet 8 or 9. Man who shot paymaster was a little shorter and dark.