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Tragedy in Dedham

Chapter 14: FOOTNOTES:
By Francis Russell
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About This Book

This account traces the arrests, trials, appeals, forensic testing, and political fallout surrounding the prosecution and execution of two men accused of a payroll robbery and murder in Massachusetts. It reconstructs the investigation and courtroom proceedings, examines ballistic evidence and expert testimony, and follows successive motions, committee reviews, demonstrations, and international reactions that transformed the case into a polarizing social symbol. The narrative weighs competing interpretations of the evidence, details post-conviction inquiries and confessions, and situates the controversy within broader debates about due process, political fear, and the role of public opinion in the administration of justice.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] Like Sacco a native of Torremaggiore, Mucci had spent some time in America and had been one of the defending counsel in the Ettor-Giovannitti trial at Lawrence.

[6] Shields would end up a Communist. Minor, already one, visualized even that early the propaganda possibilities in Sacco and Vanzetti. He became a cartoonist for the Daily Worker and later its editor. By the time of the Bridgewater crime he had written a savage attack on anarchism in which he defended the recent suppression of the Russian anarchists by the Bolsheviks.

[7] Francis J. Squires was clerk of the district court in Dedham; Percy, a lawyer, was Fred Katzmann’s brother.

[8] Four years after the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, Angelina DeFalco appeared in the Suffolk Superior Court in Boston, accused of the theft of fifteen hundred fifty dollars from Mrs. Giovanino Voce on the promise of bringing about the release of the latter’s brother, then serving a ten-year sentence in state prison. Found guilty of grand larceny, Mrs. DeFalco received a six-month jail sentence. She was still living in Dedham in 1961. When I telephoned her and mentioned the Sacco-Vanzetti case, she hung up. A few weeks before Francis Squires died in 1960, I found him unwilling to discuss the DeFalco incident.