Tragedy in Dedham

Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had asked to be excused because he did not believe in capital punishment. “Do you set your opinion above the law?” the judge asked caustically. “Have you done anything to get the law changed? Have you seen your local representative about it?” The man did not know who his representative was.

From the look of the odd-lot prospective jurors who were passing through the courtroom on this first morning of the trial it seemed as if most of the able men of Norfolk County had managed to sneak their names off the jury list. The apologetic line filed by the bench—fogies long past the statutory age, invalids, men who had been deaf for years, whose wives were dying and who had certificates to prove it, who were just about to sail for Europe, and finally the objectionable objectors.

Of course there were the occasional better prospects, but every time a man came along who looked educated or respectable, as if he might be somebody, Moore seemed bound to challenge him. That was the way it struck Jerry McAnarney. If Jerry had been going on trial for murder he knew he would rather take his chances with a businessman than with some fellow who dug sewers. But not Fred Moore; he wanted the sewer-digger every time. There was a young fellow Jerry had spotted in the line, a good clean-cut college type; as soon as Moore found out he worked for Page & Company, that finished him. Then there was someone McAnarney recognized from the New England Trust Company, the sort of man any defense lawyer ought to get down on his knees to have on a jury. He told Moore so, but Moore would not have him.

For thirty years Jerry McAnarney had been going in and out of the Dedham courthouse, but he had never seen anything like this morning. State troopers in khaki, some mounted, were deployed all around the courthouse. Other troopers with motorcycles and sidecars swept up and down the High Street, the pop of their exhausts sounding like machine-gun fire. And inside there were police and deputies at the doors, parading up and down the corridors, on the stairs.

When Jerry and Tom arrived at the courthouse just before ten they found the front door locked. The side door was also locked. When they knocked, a guard looked through the glass and waved them off. Finally a court officer recognized them and let them in. Inside, a trooper patted them over for weapons. Then a flashy policeman stopped them at the foot of the stairs, and on the landing they were stopped again. The way the place was guarded, Jerry told his brother, it looked as if Sheriff Capen was getting ready to try the Kaiser.

Entering the courtroom, the brothers glimpsed the backs of the defendants in the waist-high prisoners’ cage. Rosina Sacco, with seven-month-old Ines in her arms, sat close behind her husband, the only ordinary spectator allowed in the courtroom that day. The others present were either reporters or deputies. Fred Katzmann, tanned and glowing from a long week end at golf, spotted the McAnarneys in the doorway and waved to them with casual friendliness. Moore was behind the bar talking with Judge Thayer. The judge’s face seemed frozen. Just before the McAnarneys went in, a deputy sheriff said under his breath: “Tom, I like to see you boys win your cases, but I hope to God you lose this case. These men are no good.”

At the opening Moore filed a motion for severance and a separate trial for Sacco on the grounds that his association with Vanzetti would be prejudiced because of the latter’s conviction for the Bridgewater crime. Similarly, the McAnarneys requested a separate trial for Vanzetti, since his defense was to be “separate and distinct.” Both motions were denied.

During the whole morning not a single juror was picked. By lunchtime it was obvious that the Yankee judge was taking a poor view of the Western lawyer. The McAnarneys could tell that merely by the way Thayer glared at Moore, the lines at each side of his mouth etching into his cheeks before he replied to one of Moore’s objections. Even Rosina Sacco, with her imperfect knowledge of English, sensed it. Moore kept on needling Thayer, objecting to each triviality, challenging each likely juror. The class-conscious Westerner demanded that prospective jurors be asked if they were opposed to organized labor, if they belonged to a union, or if they hired union help. These questions Judge Thayer disallowed. At the noon recess he remarked angrily and audibly as he left the courthouse that no long-haired radical from California was going to tell him how to run his court.

It was midafternoon before the first juror, Wallace Hersey, a real estate dealer from Weymouth, was picked. By the end of the afternoon only two more had been selected: John Ganley, a grocer, and a machinist, Frank Waugh. Each defendant was allowed forty-four challenges, and that day the defense used up twenty-one. Judge Thayer, exasperated by the delays, held an evening session until ten, when he had to leave to catch the last train back to Boston. It took ten hours and 175 veniremen to get the initial three jurymen.

There was, as there usually is in even the most ponderously sustained trial, an occasional lighter moment. At one point a plump sugar dealer from Braintree had the idea of getting himself excused by pretending he was deaf. The courtroom echoed with laughter as Judge Thayer pounced on him. Sacco laughed so hard that tears rolled down his cheeks. Then the courtroom settled down again, the hivelike humming broken only by the squeak of Sheriff Capen’s boots as he walked gingerly across the floor to the upright mace. Behind the judge’s dais the triple-cylindered pendulum of the marble-faced clock ticked away the formal minutes.

From time to time the sallow-faced defendants in the cage whispered to one another. Sacco had aged in the year of his arrest. His hair was thinning. That morning was the first time he and Vanzetti had seen each other in eight months. When they met before court opened, they had kissed each other gravely on the cheek.

The McAnarney brothers, seated inside the bar enclosure, saw the unhappy pattern of the morning repeated all through the afternoon and evening. It was clear by now to Jerry McAnarney that Moore, for all his reputation, was doing nobody any good, least of all the men in the cage. Jerry was as convinced as ever that the two men were innocent. He had even brought his wife to the jail after the Decoration Day parade to let her talk with Sacco and get her opinion, and she had felt the same way he did. But now, even before the jury had been picked, he had the feeling of the sands slipping from under his feet, of being beyond his depth. The Italians were never going to get a square deal with Moore running things. Jerry could hear Thayer’s edged voice: “Mr. Moore, that may be the way they practice law out West, but not in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts!”

At the close of the evening session the brothers drove to John McAnarney’s house in Quincy and told him of what was blowing up between Moore and Judge Thayer. They wanted John to get rid of Moore and take charge. John thought it over, and then, even though it was midnight, telephoned William G. Thompson. Thompson was an old Yankee, a lawyer’s lawyer, a lecturer at the Harvard Law School, and whatever he said carried weight in Massachusetts.

In his Chestnut Hill home, Thompson listened to John McAnarney explain the difficulties his brothers were facing at the beginning of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. John begged him to come to Dedham in the morning, insisting that the lives of two men were at stake, and that in his opinion the men were innocent. Thompson agreed to look in.

As Thompson got off the train in Dedham and walked up from the station past the spent lilac hedges of the High Street, the brim of his Panama flopping with each step, the Phi Beta Kappa key and the Institute of 1770 charm jingling on his heavy watchchain, he looked the very model of a proper Boston lawyer. Even the loose way he held his pipe in his mouth reinforced his assurance. He found John McAnarney, much upset, waiting for him in front of the closed courthouse gates.

They went in through a side door. In the lower corridor the two lawyers found Moore arguing with Rosina Sacco in the center of a group of gesticulating Italians. Thompson could hear Rosina’s voice shrill to the edge of breaking, demanding of Moore by what right he represented her husband. She didn’t want him, she shouted, she didn’t believe in him. She wanted a good lawyer.

Rosina’s outburst was the culmination of months of bitterness. She had neither liked nor approved of Moore from the beginning. Her thrifty peasant nature was affronted by his manner of life, his Beacon Hill house and car with chauffeur—all paid for by poor Italians. Now she was telling him in effect: Get out! And he was refusing.

Thompson and John and Jerry McAnarney talked the matter over in one of the anterooms. “I want either you or John to replace Moore,” Jerry told Thompson. Thompson said it was too late. The next day at latest the jury would be empaneled. “You have got to make the best of it,” he told the brothers.

When Moore joined them in the anteroom, Jerry McAnarney offered to turn back his first payment of two thousand dollars and go on with the case for nothing if Moore would only retire. Moore refused to consider it. He had hired the McAnarneys as subordinates, not to give him orders. With their narrow conservatism, he considered them incapable of the larger view the case demanded.

During the rest of the morning Thompson sat with the McAnarneys watching the resumed parade of prospective jurors. A new lot of 160 veniremen had been brought in, but the selection was going no faster than it had the day before. Moore was again needling Judge Thayer. He could not seem to help it, even though he must have sensed the tensing of the atmosphere. It was a morning Thompson was to remember in all its immediacy years later. “Katzmann would say something,” he recalled to the Lowell Committee in 1927, “and Moore would object to it. He was jumping up all the time. He would make objection after objection. Judge Thayer would sit there and look at Moore with the fiercest expression on his face, moving his head a little. Moore would say ‘I object to that’ and Judge Thayer ... would sit back in his chair and say ‘Objection overruled.’ It wasn’t what he said, it was his manner of saying it. It looked perfectly straight on the record; he was too clever to do otherwise. I sat there for a while and I told John McAnarney ‘Your goose is cooked. You will never in this world get these men acquitted. The judge is going to convict these two men and see that nothing gets into the record; he is going to keep his records straight and you have no chance.’”

When John Dever, a Filene’s clothing salesman, received a post card ordering him to report at the Norfolk county courthouse for jury duty, he had expected he might serve on some civil case. Not until the Decoration Day week end did he learn that his summons might be for the South Braintree murder case. Of that case he had only a blurred recollection, something he had read in the papers the year before. It gave him a queer feeling to think he might find himself on a murder jury. His supervisor at Filene’s told him he was lucky—it would be like having time off, with Filene’s paying his salary.

Although Dever was twenty-seven, he could have passed for twenty-one. He had been a poor Irish-Catholic boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in the quarry city of Barre, Vermont. As he grew up he had played with many of the children of the Italian immigrant stoneworkers. Some of these workers had been anarchists, or at least radicals. Dever, though a pious adolescent, had had no particular feeling against the local anarchists in their clapboard hall. He was used to them.

At fifteen he had left Barre for Boston, where he first worked as a bellboy in the Parker House. He had volunteered for the Army in 1917 but had not been sent overseas. In 1919 he had gone to work at Filene’s. Unmarried, he lived in a brick rooming house on upper Beacon Street, Brookline.

Inconspicuous as this slight, fair-haired young man may have seemed when he was shepherded into the courtroom with the other veniremen, he was in one respect unique. In the course of the day he would be one of three accepted for the jury, and of the final twelve he alone would write about the trial. His memoirs, although fragmentary and redundant, remain the sole record of the case as seen from the jury box. As a result of the trial Dever became so interested in the judicial process that he enrolled in an evening course at the Suffolk Law School and eventually passed his bar examinations. During the last ten years of his life he prepared his Memoirs of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case and at his death in 1956 the manuscript had reached several thousand pages. Interspersed among the tedious legalities are telling casual incidents, still bright over the years: how the jurors were picked, where they slept, where and what they ate, what they did in their spare time, and how they felt about the case.

This was the first time Dever had ever been to Dedham. As he walked from the railroad station through the square he kept thinking what a pleasant town it was. Above the masking elms he could see a white dome with round windows in it like portholes. That, he supposed, was the courthouse. He wandered up and down several of the side streets before heading for the domed building.

Never before had he been inside a court, and the neoclassic building with its marble-tiled floors and marble stairs and marble-paneled walls awed him. With the other veniremen he was taken to the courthouse, where Judge Thayer first explained the procedure and then exhorted them to perform their disagreeable duties as patriotically as the American soldier boy in France.

“What, gentlemen, does the law seek to accomplish?” he concluded. “It seeks to select twelve jurors who will stand between these parties, the Commonwealth on the one hand and these defendants on the other, with an unyielding impartiality and absolute fairness and unflinching courage in order that truth and justice shall prevail, for, gentlemen, verdicts must rest upon truth and justice in order that the life, the liberties, and the properties of the people of the Commonwealth, including the defendants, shall be secure and protected.”

John Dever was impressed not only by the rhetoric but by the whole formalized proceedings. To him Judge Thayer seemed “a sincere, honest, absolutely fair and impartial man.” Dever was not called during the morning. At one o’clock he ate a sandwich and a piece of pie at Gilbert’s Lunch, a one-arm in the square. When he returned to the courthouse it was still too early for the afternoon session. He sat on the back grass plot with some of the other men. Dever said he hoped he would not be picked, because he might lose his two weeks’ vacation. “Don’t worry,” a man wearing a Red Men’s badge told him. “You’ll be challenged. You’re too young. Besides they don’t want any of you fellows on this jury.” He pointed to the ex-serviceman’s pin in Dever’s buttonhole. “They’ll show you right out the front door,” he concluded.

Afterward Dever could not remember much about the afternoon. One by one the names were called, one by one the veniremen disappeared. No jurymen had been picked during the morning and only two after lunch: Frank Marden, a mason from Weymouth; and a slightly deaf, slightly senile retired farmer with a handlebar mustache, Walter Ripley, who raised bulldogs and called himself a stockkeeper. For all his challenging, Moore did not spot the fact that Ripley had once been chief of the police and fire departments in Quincy. It was not until eight o’clock that Dever’s name was finally called. He was led into the courtroom. Thayer asked him a few questions and then announced, “The juror stands indifferent.”

I looked in front of me [Dever recalled] and saw a whole battery of attorneys, eight or nine in all, I should say. Before I had a chance to orient myself a man whom I was to know as District Attorney Katzmann stood on his feet and said “the Commonwealth accepts the juror.” Well, I thought to myself, the defense will now challenge me. I looked at the defense table and saw four attorneys looking at a very large book. They would look in the book, then look hard at me; and then whisper to each other. That went on for what seemed to be six or seven minutes. I began to feel I was on trial. I turned in the witness stand getting ready to leave, Judge Thayer glanced at me and said, “Stay right where you are, young man, we are waiting for these gentlemen,” and looked at the defense table. After about two more looks at me, Mr. Jeremiah McAnarney stood up and said, “If your Honor please, both defendants accept the juror.”

Dever was the sixth juror accepted. A few minutes later the court adjourned. The six jurors were taken to the ground floor room of the Court of Probate and Insolvency, where twelve iron cots from the county jail had been set up. There they were locked in for the night.

When Dever woke the next morning, he thought at first he was in a lecture hall. Then he remembered. He got up, washed, and fixed his hair with the brush and comb the sheriff had given each juror. He was not given a razor. At eight o’clock a deputy appeared and took them to breakfast.

Almost at the beginning of the morning session the seventh juror, Lewis McHardy, an elderly quiet-mannered mill worker from Milton, was selected. Seventeen more veniremen filed past the bench. Then the sheriff informed the judge that his list of five hundred was exhausted.

According to the General Laws of Massachusetts, if such a situation occurs in a murder case after seven jurors have been chosen, “the Court shall cause jurors to be returned from the bystanders or from the county at large to complete the panel.” Judge Thayer cited the statute and ordered Sheriff Capen to have two hundred more men present by ten the next morning. The sheriff was doubtful. “They will jump,” he remarked, “when they see me coming.” He was right. The news got round, and almost before the afternoon session closed, the streets of Dedham and the adjoining towns were deserted.

Capen spread his deputies that evening through Brookline, Needham, Dedham, Norwood, Millis, Medway, Stoughton, and Quincy. They struck at random, ringing doorbells when they saw lights in windows, sometimes summonsing luckless veniremen from their beds. They consulted assessors’ lists, voting lists, any list they could get their hands on. In Needham nine unsuspecting men were picked up coming out of a Masonic meeting. Deputy Allen Loring broke up a band concert at Hollis Field, Braintree. Norman Gardenier of Quincy was whisked away from his wedding supper. In spite of all this, Capen managed to seine in only 175 indignant additions. He hoped they would suffice. The defense still had twenty-nine challenges left.

Judge Thayer decided to remain in session until the jury was finally chosen, no matter what the hour. Not until after midnight was the selection finished. The five additional jurors were Harry King of Millis, a shoemaker; George Gerard, a Stoughton photographer; Alfred Atwood, a Norwood real estate dealer; Frank McNamara, a Stoughton farmer; and Seward Parker, a Quincy machinist. By the time Parker’s name was called the defense had used up all its challenges. Katzmann affably offered to challenge Parker if Moore had any objection to him, but Moore declined.

No sooner had the left-over veniremen been excused than Moore objected to the five new jurors of the completed panel on the grounds that none of them were bystanders, according to the meaning of the statute. In the clammy courtroom the attendants and deputies yawned and the district attorney fiddled with a blotter while Moore developed his lengthy quibble. Judge Thayer overruled Moore on every point. At 1:20 A.M. he ordered the jurymen brought in and sworn. “The jury is in bed,” a deputy sheriff told him.

Thayer’s voice rose two notes. “Who allowed them to go to bed? Bring them in!”

A few minutes later, bleary-eyed and bristly, the twelve trudged in to take their seats in the box. Several of them were collarless, their shirts open. Two wore felt slippers. Thayer gave them the conventional warning. He also advised them to get plenty of exercise. In conclusion he told them that they must “see to it that a trial is held according to American law and according to American justice and nothing must be done by anybody to mar or impair a fair, honest trial.” The jurors then took their oath and the court adjourned until Monday morning at ten o’clock.

The jurors slept late on Saturday, June 4, took a walk by the Charles River in the afternoon accompanied by a squad of deputies, and in the evening read the Boston papers. All references to the trial had been snipped out, and they made the unhappy discovery that most of the sports news had been on the back of what was cut.

The twelve soon formed their habit patterns. Dever found himself going to bed at nine and waking at five. He spent a lot of time reading old National Geographics. The older jurors usually played cards; Dever preferred listening to the Victrola. There were a lot of records that he liked: Van and Schenk, and the All-Star Trio; songs like “Dardenella,” “Whispering,” “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles.” After he had cranked the Victrola a few times, though, the card-players would begin to look over at him as if to say “Don’t you think you’ve played enough for tonight?” Then he would go back to the Geographics.

On their first Sunday they just sat around their made-over courtroom. Since they all had to stay together and could go only to one church, they decided not to go to any. They had breakfast at the Dedham Inn on Court Street beyond the Episcopal church and dinner at the Haven House just across the way; in the afternoon they went for a bus ride.

Monday was hot, a blue clear prelude to summer. The jury, after being polled in the courtroom, spent the rest of the day viewing the various locations connected with the South Braintree crime. A cavalcade of eight cars drove from place to place, carrying not only the jury but also the judge, the district attorney, and two carloads of newspaper reporters.

The jurors arrived at their first stop, South Braintree, just as the noon whistles were blowing, and at once the cars were surrounded by curious factory workers. Katzmann had to order a retreat to Braintree for lunch. When the cavalcade returned, the factory windows were filled with faces but Pearl Street itself was free. From the railroad crossing the procession followed the route of the bandit car along the side roads through Randolph and Stoughton and Brockton to West Bridgewater. The dust churned, covering the men in the cars, coating their faces like masks. The jurors were shown Simon Johnson’s house, the Elm Square Garage, the house where Coacci and Boda had lived, and then the Manley Woods. A motorcycle was parked beside the bridle path, and as the assorted jurors, lawyers, police, and newspapermen made their way to where the Buick had been found, they surprised the cyclist and his girl making love under a bush. Their last stop was the gate-tender’s shanty at the Matfield crossing. At the end of the day they had covered ninety-one miles, and Dever thought each of them had absorbed about a pint of dust. There was no place for the jurors to get a bath, either—he noted ruefully—after they got back to the courthouse.

Tuesday morning, June 7, when Assistant District Attorney Williams made the opening statement for the Commonwealth, set the pattern for the month to follow. Sacco and Vanzetti, handcuffed to each other and to a deputy, with three blue-uniformed policemen in front, three to the rear, and two on either side, were marched from the jail down Village Street past the cemetery, then up Court Street to the courthouse. A trooper, with a bandolier of a hundred rounds slung across his shoulder and a rifle in his saddle boot, rode sternly ahead of them, while a second mounted trooper followed as a rear guard. At the midday recess the prisoners were marched back to the jail. This martial procession took place four times a day.

Once in the courtroom the defendants were placed in the cage and their handcuffs removed. Then followed a pause of some minutes until the diminutive judge in his built-up heels strode through the door, his black silk gown billowing behind him. At his appearance Clerk Worthington rapped with his gavel and gave the peremptory command “Court!” Everyone stood up. For the first time the public was allowed in the courtroom. Among the spectators were Mrs. Glendower Evans, representing the New League for Democratic Control; Cerise Carman Jack, the wife of a Harvard professor, representing the New England Civil Liberties Committee; and Lois Rantoul of the Federated Churches of Greater Boston, a relative of Harvard’s President Lowell. Felicani was present, as were most of the members of the Defense Committee and the Italian consul, the aloof pince-nezed Marquis Ferrante di Ruffano, on instructions from his government.

In informal preliminary discussions the prosecution and the defense had come to an agreement not to bring up the subject of radicalism during the trial. Katzmann had also offered to agree “that no particular bullet came from any particular gun” and refrain with the defense from trying to prove one way or the other whether the murder bullets had been fired from Sacco’s automatic or Vanzetti’s revolver. Moore had refused, exclaiming melodramatically that he was being asked to turn his sword into a shield, and insisting on being free to have the bullets and guns examined by experts. Officially Moore, assisted by William Callahan—the lawyer engaged for Sacco and Vanzetti in the Brockton police court—represented Sacco, and officially the McAnarney brothers represented Vanzetti, but this was merely a maneuver to give both Jerry McAnarney and Moore the right to argue before the jury and to cross-examine. In reality Moore was as completely in charge as if he had been captain of a ship.

The contention of the Commonwealth, Assistant District Attorney Williams said in his explanatory statement,

is that this crime was committed by five men; that use was made of this stolen Buick car which after its theft from Dr. Murphy of Natick had been kept in the curtained shed of the Coacci house in West Bridgewater; that on the morning of the murder it was taken from the Coacci house and was driven to South Braintree; that they picked up Vanzetti at the East Braintree station; that the men who guided and drove that car were very familiar with the localities of West Bridgewater and the roads leading to and from that section; that they went down to the railroad crossing after the shooting, and made that hairpin turn to throw their pursuers off the scent ... that they proceeded by those back roads, Oak Street and Chestnut Street, until they got to the old turnpike, which, though a rough road, furnished a direct means of access to the West Bridgewater locality; and they tore down there and either started to take Vanzetti over to Plymouth and for that reason went over the Matfield crossing or went over there with the idea of perhaps disposing of something in the Matfield River ... found it inadvisable to do that which they intended to do, came back over the Matfield crossing and subsequently abandoned their car in the region adjacent to the Coacci house.

Williams claimed he would later show that Mike Boda was seen driving a Buick touring car during the winter of 1920. Reminding the Jurymen of Puffer’s Place, the house they had seen the day before, he gave an unsubstantiated account of the police visiting the shed and finding traces of a hole recently dug in the dirt floor as well as tire marks to the left of the boards on which Boda had kept his Overland.

Although Judge Thayer later excluded references to the shed, and although no evidence was brought forward connecting Coacci, Boda, or Orciani with the South Braintree crime, Williams in his opening nevertheless managed to link them with it by innuendo.

The first witness to take the stand was Boston photographer John Farley, who had photographed the various buildings, places, and objects covered in the case and whose pictures were now offered to the jury as exhibits. Moore objected to the angles at which several of the pictures had been taken and there followed an inconclusive wrangle with the prosecution, to the visible annoyance of Judge Thayer.

During the noon recess, while Sacco and Vanzetti were marched back to the jail for their meal, Judge Thayer walked down the street to the Dedham Inn. Whenever he was in Dedham he took his midday meal there, as did the newspapermen and most of those connected with the courthouse. Returning from the inn, Thayer could not conceal his scorn at the sight of the coatless Moore taking a nap on the grass plot in front of the courthouse. Moore was always doing things like that, offending the New England sense of decorum without even realizing he had offended. Once in court on a hot afternoon he took off his shoes and stepped before the bench to make an exception in his stocking feet. Jerry McAnarney, watching Judge Thayer’s bottled-up indignation as it approached the uncorking point, was fearful as well as dismayed. “For God’s sake,” he warned Moore, “keep your coat and vest on in the courtroom, can’t you?”

Ripley, the dodderer with the tobacco-stained mustache, had been appointed foreman of the jury, possibly because at sixty-nine he was the oldest of the twelve. When on that first day he returned to the courtroom from lunch, he paused with self-conscious rectitude and—to the embarrassment of the others—saluted the American flag that stood beside the jury box.

The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began, the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones, who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr. Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues, and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even Moore had no questions to ask him.

Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer, irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty.

Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand. Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery, the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three o’clock.

Mark Carrigan, the shoe-cutter, was next. From his window on the third floor of the Hampton House he had watched the paymaster and the guard go down the street; then he had heard the shots and seen the car cross the tracks with the gunman crouched in the front seat. But from that glimpse Carrigan had not been able to identify the defendants in the Brockton police station and he was not now able to identify them in the courtroom.

So far the trial was going in the routine manner that Katzmann had planned. These early witnesses were not expected to identify anyone. They were there merely to set the scene. Something more, however, was expected of Jimmy Bostock, the repairman, who had talked with Parmenter and Berardelli at the crossing, had seen the two men fall, and afterward had held the dying guard in his arms. The getaway car with the Italian-looking man who was leaning out shouting had passed so close to Bostock on Pearl Street that he could have reached out and touched it. Nevertheless, when asked in the Brockton station if he could tell whether Sacco and Vanzetti were the bandits he had answered, “No sir, I could not tell whether or not they was, no sir.” On the stand Bostock testified that Berardelli usually carried a 38-caliber revolver. He had seen it several times, the last time the Saturday before the murder. He had joked with Berardelli about it and asked him if he carried it to shoot rats. The mention of the revolver seemed irrelevant—especially as nobody had seen it on April 15—and Moore objected. Judge Thayer held a conference at the bench. There Assistant District Attorney Williams revealed for the first time the Commonwealth’s contention that the revolver found on Vanzetti had been taken from Berardelli’s body by the man who shot him.

When Lewis Wade was taken by Katzmann to the Brockton station he had pointed out Sacco as the wavy-haired man he had seen standing over Berardelli. At the preliminary hearing in the Quincy court three weeks later he was not quite as certain. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he had said, looking at Sacco. “This is too damn serious, but he looks like the man.” Since then Katzmann had given Wade a pep talk and was now counting on him for a positive identification. Williams, leading the witness along, became stutteringly disconcerted when Wade balked, maintaining that although Sacco looked to him somewhat like the man who did the shooting, he “had a doubt.” Several weeks ago, Wade explained, he had seen a man in Damato’s barbershop who looked just like the man who had shot Berardelli. Since that time he had decided that Sacco was not the man. Williams managed to recover his composure, but though he did his forensic best, he could get no further in persuading the intractable Wade.

As Wade left the stand one of the police officers at the door called him a piker and another muttered: “We’re not through with you yet.” It was a remark borne out a few weeks later when Wade was dismissed from his job at Slater & Morrill. He had it coming to him. That was the way people felt in South Braintree.

John Dever, in the first row of the jury box, glancing from time to time at the defendants in the cage, was so far not impressed by the Commonwealth’s case. Sometimes he felt frightened at having to decide whether two men should live or die. Sacco and Vanzetti, he thought,

did not look like criminals. Sacco appeared to be an alert, bright, and rather clean-cut young fellow. Every time I looked at Vanzetti he seemed to be thinking with an impassive look on his face or listening intently to whatever was taking place at the time.... My sympathies were with the men on trial and I was hoping that the evidence would not be sufficient to establish their guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

The reasonable doubt became more shadowy after the spinsterish Hampton House bookkeepers, Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin, appeared. Both pointed to Sacco as the man they had seen leaning out of the murder car. Mary Splaine told how, after they had heard the shots, she and Frances Devlin had gone first to the front window, then to the one looking out on Pearl Street, just in time to catch the car as it careered across the railroad tracks. From sixty feet away she had watched the bareheaded bandit for the three seconds the car took to pass. “He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt—had a grayish, like navy color, and the face was what we would call clear-cut, clean-cut face ... a little narrow, just a little narrow. 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 white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” She had particularly noticed his left hand resting on the back of the front seat. It was “a good-sized hand that denoted strength.”

Dever thought Mary Splaine seemed honest, but he did not see how anyone could have remembered all those details from such a distant glimpse, and he decided that she must have refreshed her memory on her visits to the Brockton police station. At the Quincy hearing the year before, when her memory was greener, Mary Splaine had not been so certain of her identification. There she had said of Sacco: “I am almost sure I saw him at Braintree, but I saw him at the Brockton police station afterward.” When Moore, with the Quincy transcript in his hand, pressed her about her negative answers then, she belligerently denied making them but was finally forced to admit that she had said: “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.” This she now qualified by saying that her observation of him for several hours in the Quincy court had convinced her that Sacco was the man in the car. “I am positive, certain he is the man,” she concluded, her voice ringing and determined. “I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” As she said this Sacco thrust his head forward, smiling at her with fixed bitterness.

Frances Devlin’s story was almost the same as her friend’s, although not so detailed. She had seen the car spurt over the hill with a man leaning out firing at the crowd. She described him as “a dark man, and his forehead, the hair seemed to be grown away from the temple, and it was blown back and he had clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thickset man, I should say.” Sacco was that man. She was positive. Like Mary Splaine, in the Quincy court she had been less positive. There, the most she had said of Sacco was: “He looks very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.”

McGlone, the young teamster who had caught the staggering Parmenter, was another disappointing witness for the Commonwealth. A ferret-faced, stubborn man, he said that the two bandits he had seen were Italians, but that was all he would say about them. Assistant District Attorney Williams could not bring him to say that Sacco and Vanzetti were the gunmen, any more than Moore could bring him to say that they were not. “Well,” McGlone kept on telling them, “I did not get a good look at them to see what they did look like.”

Edgar Langlois, the Rice & Hutchins foreman who had looked down from the second-floor window at the two gunmen below him, described them in court as short and dark-complexioned, full-chested, clean-shaven, with curly or wavy hair. He had not been able to identify either Sacco or Vanzetti at Brockton as the men he had seen from the window, nor was he now willing to identify them in court.

The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he “looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney, Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man, but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street.

The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year. Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to bring them fans.

Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.

William Brenner, Peter McCullum, and Dominic Constantino, all of whom worked at the front benches with Pelser, were brought in as defense witnesses to contradict Pelser’s story, but their effect was lessened by the tidy mechanics of legal procedure that postpones the appearance of rebuttal witnesses until the prosecution has finished its case. So it was not until two weeks later, when the details of Pelser’s testimony were overlaid by that of a score of other witnesses, that Brenner took the stand. He too, after he had heard shots, looked through the partially opened center window and saw a man “sinking—sinking.” Pelser had not been near the window. After McCullum had raised the sash he had slammed it down again and yelled “Duck!” and they had all got down behind the benches. Under cross-examination Brenner admitted he really did not know where Pelser was when he himself was looking through the window.

McCullum, following Brenner, was not sure where Pelser was either, but Constantino was certain that when the shooting started Pelser was “right down under the bench.” Afterward Pelser had told them: “I did not see any of the men but I got the number of the car.” Constantino admitted he had not given any thought to where Pelser was until he had read the latter’s testimony in the newspaper two weeks before. Then he had gone to the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee and volunteered his information. At first he maintained that Pelser was at his workbench three windows down when McCullum had thrown up the sash, but Katzmann finally forced him to admit that he really did not know where Pelser was or whether he might have opened another window.

The appearance of Hans Behrsin, the Slater chauffeur, was unsatisfactory to the prosecution. All he could say was that the two men he had seen sitting on the Rice & Hutchins fence as he drove past in the Marmon “seemed to be pretty well light-complexioned fellows.” He had not noticed their features, and the district attorney did not even bother to ask him to identify the defendants.

It was generally agreed by the newspapermen covering the trial that Lola Andrews was the prosecution’s star witness, since she was the only one who had actually talked with any of the gunmen. She was an unpredictable woman. When Moore and two assistants had gone to Quincy on January 14 with a stenographer to interview her as a prospective defense witness, he found her calm and pleasant. According to the stenographer’s record she told Moore that she could not identify the two men she had seen near the car in front of the Rice & Hutchins factory. When she was shown pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she said they were not the men. Although she did not mention it to Moore on January 14, she later claimed that two evenings before, a dark one-eyed man in a sailor’s reefer had appeared at her door, spoken incomprehensibly about the South Braintree crime, and then, when she refused to listen to him, followed her into the hall toilet and assaulted her.

The evening before Lola appeared in court, Jerry McAnarney had gone to see her in Quincy, and she had told him that she could not and would not identify Sacco or Vanzetti as the men she had seen near the automobile in front of Slater & Morrill. Moore had even considered using her as one of his own witnesses and was surprised when she took the stand for the Commonwealth. She wore a stiff-crowned hat with a flat brim that shadowed her face. It was a coarse apprehensive face which, though faded, still managed to preserve a physical appeal.

Again she told her story of walking down Pearl Street to the Slater & Morrill factory, of seeing the pale man and the dark man by the touring car, of asking directions from the dark man on the way back. “He told me—he asked me,” she said, looking at the defendants in the cage, “which factory I wanted, the Slater? I said ‘No, sir, the Rice and Hutchins.’ He said to go in the driveway and told me which door to go in, it would lead me to the factory office.”

Williams then asked her dramatically if she had seen the man since. She replied that she had seen him in the courtroom. It was the climax to which the assistant district attorney had been building. “Do you see him in the courtroom now?” he asked. She paused, raised a bare, fleshy forearm, and pointed to Sacco.

“I think I do. Yes, sir. That man, there.” Sacco jumped to his feet in the cage, his eyes flashing. “I am the man?” he demanded in his thick accent. “Do you mean me? Take a good look!”

Moore in his cross-examination went back at once to the January evening when he had shown her a selection of photographs including one of Sacco holding a derby in his hand. According to the stenographer’s record she had said that the man with the derby was not the one she had talked with in South Braintree. Now, on the stand, she denied that she had said any such thing, claiming on the contrary that she had then identified the man in Moore’s picture as the man who had got up from under the car.

Though Moore could not shake her story he brought out that in February Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail. There she had looked through a grating at a cell tier on a lower level. For about ten minutes she had watched a dark muscular man pacing up and down, the man—she finally decided—whom she had talked with in front of the factory on the day of the murder. That man, she was told, was Nicola Sacco.

At one o’clock Judge Thayer suspended the session for the week end. Lola Andrews’ cross-examination would continue Monday and into Tuesday. Moore was determined to drive her to the wall. But in his determination he overlooked the one question that should have occurred to any trained legal mind. Lola Andrews had been given detailed directions to Rice & Hutchins by a man who spoke English easily. Sacco’s command of English was so slight that he would not have been capable of such fluent talk. His heavy accent was at times almost incomprehensible. Yet Moore in his two days of hammering at Lola Andrews never once brought up the question of the speech and accent of the man who had directed her.

Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly possible for any man’s mind to be.”

The trial was now beginning to look like a long one, and most of the jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a Geographic when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister had sent him.

Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men, the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions. So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,” the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already been exhausted.”

Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her identification of Sacco.

Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job, he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s efforts to defend himself.

At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She did not take the stand again until the following morning.

In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver. Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’ fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled eggs that he had brought for his lunch.

When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.

Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”

Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter, had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”

Judge Thayer looked down sourly at the little Polish Jew. “Mr. Witness,” he rasped, “I would like to ask one question. Did you attempt to find out who this person was who represented the Government who was trying to get her to take and state that which was false?” Kurlansky, already bewildered by the courtroom atmosphere, was almost speechless at the thought of turning himself into a private detective. “Well,” he said, “it didn’t come into my mind. I wasn’t sure, you know. It didn’t——” Only later, with Jerry McAnarney to encourage him, was he finally able to say that he didn’t see why he should bother about it.

Moore sprang a surprise on Katzmann when he produced the aged but peppery Julia Campbell, whom he had brought down from Maine. Mrs. Campbell addressed Katzmann as “dear man,” and when he tried to confuse her with a litany of dates, she sent a titter round the courtroom by exclaiming “Oh, chestnuts!” She swore that Lola Andrews had never spoken to the man under the car but to the man standing by it. As for the two defendants in the cage, she did not think she “ever saw them men in the world.”

Lena Allen, who ran a lodging house in Quincy, was the last refuting witness. She said that Lola Andrews had roomed at her house until the other roomers had threatened to leave if she didn’t get rid of her. Lola Andrews had a bad reputation and was untruthful, according to Lena Allen—who admitted she disliked her.

Five witnesses identified Vanzetti in one way or another, but only one of them, Mike Levangie, the Pearl Street gate-tender, placed him at the scene of the murders. Almost all the other witnesses had described the driver of the getaway car as pale, fair, sickly. Levangie, at the inquest two days after the crime, had asserted the man was dark, with a dark brown mustache. Now he pointed to Vanzetti in the cage as the man, the only man he had seen.

Katzmann in his summing-up admitted that the driver of the car was indisputably a pale blond man, but he explained that Levangie’s identification was still valid as he must have glimpsed Vanzetti leaning over from the back seat and in the excitement thought he was the driver.

Although Levangie was the only witness to place Vanzetti in the Buick, two others placed him in South Braintree on that day. Harry Dolbeare, the piano tuner, had been summoned to Dedham as a prospective juror. While waiting in the courtroom he had seen the defendants being led by. Suddenly he had recalled the carload of tough tickets he had seen on Hancock Street the morning of the South Braintree crime. The man with the mustache, handcuffed to the sheriff, looked just like one of those men in the back seat. Having gone to the district attorney’s office with his story, he now found himself appearing as a witness. Dolbeare had no particular recollection of the other four men in the car except for the general impression of their toughness, but the middle man in the back seat was Vanzetti. “I had the same view of him in the courtroom as I had in the car, a profile view,” he told the court. He had “not a particle of doubt” about Vanzetti being the man.

John Faulkner, another surprise witness, picked out Vanzetti as a man who had ridden with him in the smoking car of the train from Plymouth to Boston on the morning of April 15. Faulkner, a patternmaker at the Watertown Arsenal, was an unhesitating witness. Each day he was accustomed to take the train from Cohasset and he always rode in the smoking car. On the morning of the fifteenth as the train was pulling into East Weymouth a man across the aisle had said someone in back wanted to know if the stop was East Braintree. Faulkner turned and saw a foreign-looking man sitting in the single seat next to the toilet. He had a black mustache, high cheekbones, and was wearing old clothes. At Weymouth Heights the man again leaned forward and asked if the stop was East Braintree. When the train stopped at East Braintree the man had picked up an old leather Boston bag and got off. “That is the man,” Faulkner said, identifying Vanzetti. He was sure. However, when asked by Moore if he could remember the man across the aisle who had first spoken to him, Faulkner had no recollection of him at all. He remembered the date because it was the time when he had been injured and had gone in on the late train to the hospital. The next day he read about the murders and wondered if the foreigner he had seen had had anything to do with them.

In refutation Moore brought in Henry McNaught, the conductor of the train, who said that no cash fares had been collected that day from Plymouth to Braintree. The station agents of Plymouth, North Plymouth, and Kingston testified in addition that no tickets had been sold from their stations to the Braintrees. However, Katzmann made them admit that they did not know if any such tickets had been sold the day before or how many might have been sold to Quincy or Boston. Edward Brooks, the ticket agent at East Braintree, recalled that about the time of the murders and several times since he had seen a tall dark man carrying a black bag get off the morning train and walk from the station toward Quincy Avenue. He had seen the man perhaps half a dozen times. Vanzetti was not the man.

The other two who identified Vanzetti were Austin Cole, the streetcar conductor, and Austin Reed, the gate-tender at the Matfield crossing. Cole told the same story he had told at the Plymouth trial. The two men who boarded his car at Sunset Avenue on May 5 and had been taken off by the police in Brockton had also got on at the same stop the night of April 14 or 15. Sacco and Vanzetti were the men. Reed, a man in his early twenties, told of the car that had swirled up to his crossing just as the train was coming and how he had gone out into the road with the stop sign in his hand. A man with a “stubbed” mustache and high cheekbones had leaned out of the car and asked loudly what the hell he was holding him up for. When Reed read of the South Braintree holdup the next day he had been sure those men were the bandits, and after he heard of the arrests on May 5 he had gone of his own accord to the Brockton police station to have a look at the suspects. The man with the mustache, Vanzetti, was the same man who had shouted at him from the car. He was sure of it in Brockton, he was sure of it now. There was no doubt in his mind.

Jerry McAnarney cross-examined Reed at random, asking what he was doing before the car appeared, how often the trains ran, where he now worked, how much dust was on the faces of the men in the car, what sort of hats they were wearing. Then Moore took over and at the last came close to the vital question when he asked if the man had spoken “in a loud bold voice.” Reed admitted that he had and that the quality of the English was “unmistakable and clear.” But Moore did not pursue the matter. As with Faulkner’s and Lola Andrews’ testimony, Moore overlooked the matter of the defendants’ accents. His jibes at Reed’s youth and at his going on his own to the police station aroused John Dever’s sympathy for the witness.

The weather continued oppressive; the motionless air bore down damply on the marble wainscotting. The routine of the court so enveloped the jurymen, the spectators, and even the lawyers and the sheriff’s men, that the outside world became unreal. Though the enlarged map of South Braintree still hung on the wall to the right of the jury box, there seemed no organic connection between the act of violence that had taken place there fifteen months before and this decorous legal game with its inherited rules.

For the newspapers the case lost its novelty, and the accounts of the trial often slipped to an inside page. What blackened the front pages now was the scandal of Mishawum Manor, a roadhouse north of Boston where, at a booze party a few years before, Adolph Zukor and several other film executives had been framed with naked call girls and shaken down for a hundred thousand dollars. The affair had been arranged through the office of District Attorney Nathan Tufts of Middlesex County. Only now was it coming to light, with Tufts, an old Yankee, and District Attorney Joseph Pelletier, an Irishman with a French name, facing disbarment.

It is almost impossible for anyone to sit through a murder trial without taking sides emotionally. With respect to Sacco and Vanzetti the sides had for the most part been taken before the defendants ever appeared in court. In the eyes of the court officers, sheriffs, police, janitors, stenographers, and the rest the two Italians were guilty, otherwise they would not be sitting in the cage. The feeling pervaded Dedham, and Frank Sibley, the dean of the local reporters, covering the trial for the Boston Globe, did not like it.

As the weeks passed there were other things Sibley did not like. He had not liked the squads of state troopers. He could not help but notice the antagonism between Moore and Thayer. Perhaps it was not so obvious to the jury, but as an old crime reporter he had been aware of it at once. Thanks to Moore’s objections, there was a succession of lawyers’ conferences at the bench with the jury sent from the room. Once when the stenographer went up to record what was being said in the buzzing cluster, Sibley heard Thayer snap, “Get the hell out of here! Who called you up here?”

Sibley, who remembered that old Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw would not discuss a current case even with his own family, was shocked by Thayer’s fondness for talking about the case to newspapermen. Several times on his way to lunch at the Dedham Inn Sibley had heard Thayer announce explosively that the defendants’ counsel were damn fools.

A gauntly impressive figure who wore a Windsor tie and a Latin Quarter hat and could be recognized on any Boston street a quarter-mile away, Sibley decided early that Sacco and Vanzetti were not getting a fair trial.

The last three witnesses to identify Sacco were William Tracey, the owner of the Tracey Building, the railroad detective William Heron, and Carlos Goodridge, who had heard the shooting as he was playing pool with Peter Magazu. Of the two men Tracey had noticed standing by the drugstore on the morning of the murders, one, he felt, was Sacco. “While I wouldn’t be positive, I would say to the best of my recollection that was the man,” was the most Katzmann could get out of him. When he was cross-examined he maintained that he felt quite sure he was right, but “would not positively say Sacco was the man.”

Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the men he had seen.

Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was “the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.

“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge, even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.

Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.” Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months. Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.

Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition. After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t pulled off by any foreign people.’”

Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity, Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.

After the identifications there followed a string of residual witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner, testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill, the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet hole in the right rear door.

Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda, by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco, Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”

Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not, however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded Ensher’s testimony.

Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings, but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly continued.

Following Connolly, Parmenter’s widow gave brief, pathetic, and largely inconsequent testimony. Fred Loring told of picking up the cap near Berardelli’s body. George Kelley, Sacco’s neighbor, refused to identify the cap as Sacco’s. The most Williams could get him to say was that the cap was similar in color to the cap Sacco wore and that at the Three-K factory Sacco hung his cap on a nail each morning. Williams asked whether he knew of anything happening to the cap because it was hung on a nail. Kelley said he did not. Then Williams asked what he noticed about the condition of the cap lining he was examining on the stand. “Torn,” Kelley replied. As he went on, he did his best to put in a good word for Sacco. His feeling of friendship was obvious. However, he was obliged to admit that Sacco had not worked during the Christmas week of 1919—an admission later corroborated by his sister Margaret, the Three-K paymistress.

Mrs. Glendower Evans had become such an assiduous note-taker that the sheriff finally provided a small table for her. Even from behind the table she managed to display a vast assurance and a well-bred disapproval of the proceedings. Judge Thayer took for granted the enmity of radicals and of anarchists (arnuchists, he pronounced it) but he expected something different from these Boston women of old families who seemed to form a phalanx at the trial and who, he felt, were people of his own class. One day, as the court adjourned, he asked Mrs. Rantoul to step into his chambers. She found him alone, waiting in his black robe. At once he asked her how she thought the trial was going. “I told him,” she said later in an affidavit, “that I had not yet heard sufficient evidence to convince me that the defendants were guilty. He expressed dissatisfaction both by words, gestures, tone of voice, and manner. He said that after hearing both arguments and his charge I would certainly feel differently.”