Tragedy in Dedham

The Commonwealth rested its case on the first day of summer.

Of the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body, plus the one removed from Parmenter in the Quincy hospital and the one found in his jacket, five had been fired from a 32-caliber pistol or pistols. The type was determined by measuring the lands (ridges) and the grooves impressed on the bullets by their passage through the barrel. In addition, the rifling had a right-hand twist that also left its mark.

The sixth bullet—the mortal one that Dr. Magrath had cut from Berardelli and marked with three needle scratches—had been fired from a 32-caliber automatic with a left-hand twist. Only the Colt among American automatics had such a twist. The question that four experts debated for several days was simply whether or not this bullet had been fired from the Colt found on Sacco.

For the jury, the experts’ testimony was the most tedious part of the trial—“a wilderness of lands and grooves,” as the Boston Post put it. Through the long sticky days the jurymen fidgeted, fanning themselves as the voices droned on.

Captain Proctor of the State Police led off for the prosecution. From the time he had arrived at South Braintree the night of the murders until Katzmann appointed Chief Stewart, he had been in charge of the investigation. At the very beginning he felt that the holdup with its careful timing was a professional job, and after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti he told Katzmann that Stewart had got hold of the wrong men. He still felt so. It was not, however, about his theories but as a ballistics expert that the white-haired Proctor now testified. Only three days before taking the stand he and his colleague Charles Van Amburgh and the defense expert James Burns had fired fourteen test bullets through Sacco’s automatic into a box of oiled sawdust. The recovered bullets were compared with the mortal Bullet III. That bullet had a milled groove around it (known as a cannelure) that had been discontinued in more recent Winchester bullets of the same caliber. Burns was unable to obtain any of the older Winchesters corresponding to Bullet III, so used U.S. bullets as most closely resembling the obsolete type.[9]

To John Dever, Proctor seemed a reluctant witness. The captain first explained that he was accustomed to testing 38- and 32-caliber revolvers by pushing bullets through the barrel manually. When in his demonstration he showed himself unable to strip the Sacco pistol, Dever was not impressed. Proctor then told the jury that the five right-twist bullets had come from a Savage automatic. When the assistant district attorney asked him if he was sure, he replied: “I can be as certain of that as I can of anything.” However, when Williams asked his opinion as to whether Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, Proctor phrased his answer in a much more measured manner. “My opinion is,” he told Williams, “that it is consistent with being fired by that pistol.” In the casual moment the ambiguity of the answer escaped Moore. Thomas McAnarney spotted it at once and nudged his brother, but wise in the ways of the police, he feared a trap. If he should now ask Proctor what he meant by consistent, Proctor might reply that he meant that the bullet had gone through the gun—and this would be so much the worse for the defendants. Thomas therefore said nothing.

As for the four shells Bostock had picked up from the gravel walk, Proctor explained that Shell W—with the identifying Winchester W on it—had been fired in one pistol, the other three in another. He compared the indentation made by the firing pin on Shell W with the indentations on the test shells fired in Sacco’s pistol. The marks on both, he said, were consistent—again he used the word—with their being fired in the same weapon.

The Commonwealth’s second expert was Charles Van Amburgh of the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Before going to Remington, he had spent nine years at the Springfield Arsenal, and then periods at the Westinghouse and Colt Firearms companies. His evidence was a corroboration of Proctor’s. He, too, had compared Bullet III with those recovered from the sawdust. By measuring the lands, he had determined that the bullet had been fired from a 32-caliber Colt. As to whether he thought it had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, he replied circumspectly, “I am inclined to believe that it was fired, Number III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.” He went on to say that there was a rough rust track at the bottom of the pistol barrel, and that corresponding marks could be traced on the bullet. Under cross-examination he admitted that it was common for Colts to rust at that particular place. Like Proctor, he thought that the other five bullets had come from a Savage and had been fired from the same weapon.

Burns, the first of the defense’s experts to testify, had spent thirty years as a ballistics engineer with the U.S. Cartridge Company. He agreed that Bullet III could have been fired from a Colt but felt that it could also have been fired from a Bayard, a foreign make. Whatever pistol it had come from, the rifling had been fouled and corroded. The other bullets, he testified, could have been fired from a Savage, a Steyr, or a Walther. Burns produced six of the eight bullets he had fired from Sacco’s Colt—the other two, he explained, he had lost. He pointed out that the lands and grooves were regular and clean. To the question whether Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s pistol his answer was: “In my opinion, no. It doesn’t compare at all.”

J. Henry Fitzgerald, the second defense expert, backed him up. Fitzgerald had been twenty-eight years in the weapon business and was now in charge of the testing room at the Colt Patent Firearms Company. “Number III bullet was not fired from the Sacco pistol,” he told the court. “I can see no pitting or marks on bullet Number III that would correspond with a bullet coming from this gun.”

With these paired contradictions the bullet testimony ended.

Berardelli had owned a 38-caliber Harrison & Richardson revolver. After his death it could not be found. It was Katzmann’s contention, underlined in his summing-up, that the revolver found on Vanzetti the night of his arrest had been lifted by Sacco from the dying detective.

In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months, and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said this, it was not so.

Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he had never fired it or taken it apart.

For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington & Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small side-strap.

Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold, and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion. Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer finally rapped out: “Answer the question!”

“I am not,” he admitted.

Eldridge Atwater, Slater’s brother-in-law, took the stand to say that eight years before he had often borrowed his father-in-law’s Harrington & Richardson to shoot at bottles and cans. After Mogridge’s death, his widow had taken the revolver with her when she went to Norwood to visit her daughter and that was the last Atwater had ever seen of it. He could not quite bring himself to say that the revolver exhibited in court was the same one he had fired seventy-five or a hundred times in Maine. The closest he would come to it was to say that “as far as those two markings, that is the revolver Mr. Mogridge had eight years ago.” He had never paid any attention to the revolver’s serial number.

The missing link in the ownership chain was Orciani. Some months before the trial he had given up his foundry job to become Moore’s chauffeur. The fact that he was never called as a witness was not missed by the jurors. Katzmann in his summing-up made the most of it. “Why didn’t you bring Orciani into this courtroom?” he demanded rhetorically. “He has been within the control of this defense. He has been outside the courtroom, and he is not produced. What is the reason?”

While there was no one in South Braintree who could say with certainty that Berardelli had his revolver with him on the day of his death, his widow testified that he generally carried it. Margaret Mahoney and the other girls in the Slater & Morrill office had seen the revolver at various times, and he had even showed it to Jimmy Bostock the Saturday before the robbery. Bostock knew that it was nickel-plated and that the guard carried it in his hip pocket, but what kind it was he did not know. No one had seen the bandits take anything from Berardelli’s body. Lewis Wade saw the guard reach for his hip pocket as he was falling, and Peter McCullum saw one of the bandits holding a “white” revolver in his left hand.

Sarah Berardelli, a sad, illiterate Jewish woman, told what she knew of her husband’s revolver. It was like Vanzetti’s. Three weeks before the murder her husband had taken it to Boston to be repaired—it had a “spring broke.” Sarah had accompanied her husband and they had gone to a store on Washington Street which—with prompting from the district attorney—she remembered: the Iver Johnson Company. Berardelli had been given a claim check. This he turned over to Parmenter, who then let him take another gun that looked just like the first. Whether anyone had picked up the gun at Iver Johnson’s, whether it had come back into her husband’s possession, Sarah Berardelli did not know.

Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s, said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington & Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920, to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer, the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it “H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning, neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had repaired.

Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart, ought to know what he was talking about.

According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that this revolver had been delivered.

If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point, as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.

To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess, when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.

While Ripley was downstairs examining his bullets, Thomas McAnarney in the upstairs corridor happened to run into Captain Proctor and the Commissioner of Public Safety, Colonel Alfred Foote, and they chatted together before court resumed. McAnarney never forgot Proctor’s parting remark to the commissioner: “These are not the right men. Oh, no, you haven’t got the right men.”

On Wednesday, June 22, the short opening statement for the defense was made by William Callahan, who, although he had been dropped as Vanzetti’s counsel in the Plymouth trial, still remained associated with Sacco’s defense. Whatever his capacities, he kept the confidence of both defendants to the end. Moore wanted him, as a local lawyer, to present the case, and this was one of the few times he emerged from his background role. Callahan first reminded the jurors that the defendants were presumed innocent. Then he promised that the defense would show what Vanzetti was doing on April 15 and would prove that Sacco was in Boston getting a passport. In addition, the defense would offer witnesses to show that the men in the South Braintree bandit car were not Sacco and Vanzetti.

Moore intended to swamp the prosecution with witnesses. After a protracted exposition by Charles Breed, a civil engineer who had made maps and photographs of the Pearl Street area for the defense, Moore produced Edward Carter, a cutter at the lower Slater & Morrill factory. As the first shots were fired Carter had looked out a window and up the street to what, until he saw a man drop, he thought was a bunch of boys fooling. From his distance of eighty yards and with the sun in his eyes the men had been indistinct. He was unable to say whether or not the defendants were the men he had seen.

Frank Burke remembered the man in the front seat who had thrust a pistol in his face as the Buick passed the cobbler’s shop. That man was “very dark complected and needed a shave very badly.” Burke also noticed a man with a “short cropped mustache” in the back seat. But when Callahan asked him if the defendants were the men he had seen ten feet away in the car, the most he could get Burke to say was: “I would say they were not.” John Dever was not favorably impressed. Burke seemed to him to be “altogether too anxious at times to volunteer information and at other times evasive and vacillating.”

Katzmann wanted to know how Burke knew the car was a Buick. Because, Burke said, it was like the car belonging to lawyer Callahan in which he had ridden to court this morning. His powers of observation were at a discount when it turned out that Callahan’s car was a Hudson.

Albert Frantello, who had run into Parmenter and Berardelli as they left the Hampton House, recalled that on his way up from the lower factory he had met two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins pipe fence. He particularly remembered the dark one in a dark cap who needed a shave, for he had passed so close he could have touched him. The other man had a lighter complexion. They were talking to each other in “the American language,” and he was sure that neither of them was either of the men in the cage.

As part of his cross-examination Katzmann led Frantello to the jury box, asked him to observe two jurors, then turn away and describe them. Although both jurors were clean-shaven, Frantello described one of them as having a mustache as well as a nonexistent watchchain. Immediately after the murders he had told Brouillard that the dark man by the fence was “a regular wop”; now he denied that the man was an Italian. Whether or not he had told Brouillard that he did not know the language the men were speaking he could not recall, but whatever he might have said then, he now insisted that they were speaking “American.”

Wilfred Pierce and Lawrence Ferguson, shoe-cutters who had been working with Mark Carrigan on the third floor of the Hampton House, were no more satisfactory witnesses for the defense than Carrigan had been for the prosecution. Both had heard the shots and looked out the window as the touring car crossed the tracks. Both had seen a dark man climb from the rear seat to the front. Pierce saw him fire a shot. When asked if the man was either of the defendants, he would say no more than “I don’t think it was, but I am not positive.” Ferguson was equally uncertain: “It may or it may not have been. I don’t know positively.” The most that their testimony seemed to show—and this by contrast—was the extraordinary vision and tenacious memory of Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine.

Through the last of June the hot spell was unrelenting. To speed up the trial Judge Thayer agreed to extend the session from 9 A.M. until 6 P.M., but he rejected the jurors’ suggestion for evening sessions. The days followed each other torpidly. Sacco and Vanzetti sat upright in the cage, occasionally whispering to one another; the jurymen sat fanning themselves. The succession of witnesses accelerated and the spectators thinned out. Mrs. Evans, the “angel for the radicals” as the Post called her, continued to write voluminously at her desk. Her hats changed frequently, her attitude did not.

With June fading, Moore found the defense again in the familiar position of running short of money. The fifty thousand dollars collected over the past year was gone, used up in investigations and fees and a hundred other unavoidable expenses. Judge Thayer offered to allow the defense to proceed in forma pauperis with some of their costs home by the Commonwealth, but this humiliation Moore refused to accept. On June 29 with the defense lacking funds even to pay witnesses, Mrs. Evans produced $1500 to tide them over for the week. At the end of the week she added to this all her available income, $2950, plus $600 contributed by her friends. Mrs. Cerise Jack handed over $100.

The sixteen-man crew that had been digging the excavation across the street from Rice & Hutchins and that Mrs. Nichols saw cut and run when the shooting started could scarcely be considered the most reliable of witnesses, but Moore with his weight-of-numbers tactics how brought in five of them, of whom only one could speak English.

William Foley, the driver of a dump truck, had just left the excavation with a load when the shots rang out and the Buick swayed up Pearl Street. Foley, headed in the other direction, saw only the driver clearly and his description of him was unique: “eyeglasses, short mustache, soft hat, high cheekbones, sallow complexion.” He also had a glimpse of another man in a cap sitting in the rear seat. At this point he could not recall the men’s faces, but they were not the men in the cage. Katzmann, weaving back to Boda, asked Foley several times if the driver was not wearing a velour hat. Foley remembered it as a soft hat, but was positive it was not velour. He admitted that he could not tell whether or not the man in the back seat was one of the defendants.

Emilio Falcone, who had been shoveling dirt into Foley’s truck just before the shooting, testified through the court interpreter, Joseph Ross, who also acted as Judge Thayer’s chauffeur. Falcone thought that he had been forty or fifty feet away from the shooting, near enough at least so that he heard Parmenter groan as he dropped. The man who shot him was “kind of pale, light, pale.” Another man had picked up the money-box. Under Callahan’s rather fussy questioning as to whether the two men in the cage resembled the men in the car, Falcone said they did not. Callahan’s reiterations, doubly tedious through translation, made Falcone lose his temper. “Well, for God’s sake,” he replied, “why do you ask me again?”

Three Spaniards who had been working next to Falcone testified through an interpreter of their own. Pedro Iscorla, on his way to get a drink of water, had seen a “high, thin, slim, light fellow” shoot Parmenter and a dark man shoot Berardelli. These men were not the defendants. Henry Cerro had seen a light gunman who resembled neither of the defendants. Like Iscorla, Sibriano Guidierris had seen a light man and a little dark man with a dark cap. Each shot a different man. Neither gunman resembled the men in the cage.

Moore now brought in eight of the railroad workers who had seen the Buick pass. They had all noticed the meager light-complexioned driver and four of them had seen the dark man next to him. All were positive that the defendants had not been in the car. Nicola Gatti, one of the workers, had known Sacco in Milford eight years earlier—the only witness of the crime who had previously known either of the defendants. In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver, the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun. Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti.

One of the track workers, Joseph Cellucci, testified in English. He had recently joined the Navy and appeared on the stand in uniform. As soon as he had heard the shots he had thrown down his shovel. Ricci, the foreman, had tried to stop him, but he had ducked away and was only about five feet from the Buick as it passed. A dark bristly man half-kneeling between the front and back seats had leveled a revolver and fired at him, the shot winging so close to his ear that he was deaf for three days. Cellucci had only a glimpse of the driver but it was enough to convince him that neither of the prisoners had been in the getaway car.

Barbara Liscomb, who had looked directly down at the bareheaded gunman, was considered the star witness for the defense. The contorted face of the dark man with the pistol who stared up at her as she stood at a second-floor window of Rice & Hutchins, had made an imprint in her mind she could never forget. “I would always remember that face,” she told the court. She was “positively sure” it was not the face of Sacco or Vanzetti.

Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man. Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man.

Hellyer himself would take the stand almost at the end of the trial and testify that when he interviewed Mrs. Novelli on April 17, 1920, she had described the man beside the driver as “twenty-seven years, five feet seven inches tall, slim build, black hair, black eyes, dark complexion, thin features, wide mouth, smooth-shaven, but appeared to be a man who could grow a heavy beard from the dark stubble on his face.” Hellyer’s Pinkerton report, which was not produced in evidence, recorded a markedly different description of the man: “27 years, 5 feet eight inches, medium build, light brown hair, fair complexion and smooth shaven, wore a cap but cannot recollect what else he wore.”

Mrs. Novelli was followed by minor witnesses whose fleeting glimpses, although not enough to establish much about the other passengers in the Buick, at least corroborated the now-undisputed fact that the driver was a pale, fair man. Elmer Chase, who had been loading his truck in front of the Co-operative Society as the Buick passed, had looked down at the driver and the bareheaded man next to him. He was positive that neither of the men he saw that day were the men in the cage. Walter Desmond, the tobacco salesman who had met and passed the Buick on his way from Randolph, had seen the pale-faced driver but scarcely noticed the man next to him. All he could say in court was that the driver was not one of the defendants. Wilson Dorr, working in the sandpit with John Lloyd on the Stoughton Post Road, had seen four “light complected,” men in the Buick as it passed within twenty-five feet of him. All had looked directly at him. None of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti.

It was to be Vanzetti’s claim that he had spent April 15 in North Plymouth going his usual rounds with his pushcart. Before he himself took the stand to make this claim, the defense introduced witnesses to corroborate it. The first was Joseph Rosen, a thirty-three-year-old cloth peddler from Dorchester.

On the fifteenth Rosen arrived in Plymouth at ten minutes to eight. After eating breakfast at Ventura’s Restaurant on Court Street, he had taken the streetcar to North Plymouth, carrying a valise of men’s suiting and some swatches. He met Vanzetti near Cherry Street and showed him a piece of blue serge that was enough for a suit. He offered it cheap because it had a couple of small holes in it. Vanzetti wanted to let Alfonsina Brini see the cloth. Together Rosen and Vanzetti walked several blocks to Cherry Court, where the Brinis had recently moved. Alfonsina knew cloth because she had once worked in a woolen mill. She felt the material and said it was a good buy. Vanzetti paid Rosen $12.25, then gave him another fifty cents when he complained he was losing money. It must have been about twelve o’clock when they left the Brinis’, for as they came out the whistles were blowing and people were hurrying home from the Cordage for lunch.

That afternoon Rosen had gone back to the center of Plymouth, peddled more cloth, stopped in again at Ventura’s, and finally left on the last train at 6:10. He had got off at Whitman, about halfway between Plymouth and Braintree, and spent the night in a dollar room at Littlefield’s Rooming House. The next day he had continued to peddle his goods in Whitman.

Katzmann spent an afternoon cross-examining Rosen, using the old legal trick known as taking the witness over the hurdles. Where, the district attorney asked Rosen, had he been on May 15, 1920; June 15, 1920; April 15, 1921; May 15, 1921, June 15, 1921?

Rosen could not say, but he maintained he had particular reasons for remembering April 15, 1920. In the morning his wife had paid his delinquent 1918 poll tax and when he returned home next day she had given him the dated and receipted bill he now produced in court. Also, the evening of the fifteenth “it was all boiling” in Whitman about the South Braintree murders. Lillian Shuler, who ran Littlefield’s Rooming House, later corroborated Rosen by producing a record of having rented him a room the night of the fifteenth.

When Vanzetti’s picture was published in the papers after his arrest and Rosen saw it and the words “fish peddler,” it reminded him of the day he sold the piece of blue cloth to the Italian in North Plymouth. He went to ask Alfonsina Brini about the matter the next time he happened to be in Plymouth, and it was through her that he came into the case.

Alfonsina herself again appeared to testify for her old friend. Katzman had agreed not to refer to the Plymouth trial in return for the defense’s renouncing any evidence as to the peaceful and law-abiding reputation of the defendants. Regardless, in his summing-up he called Alfonsina “a stock, convenient and ready witness as well as friend who ... in another case when another date was alleged, testified to the whereabouts of this same Vanzetti on that other date there involved.”

Alfonsina told much the same story that Rosen had told of the two men coming in to show her the damaged cloth. She recalled the date as the fifteenth because she had been ailing at the time and Dr. Shurtleff had come from Plymouth to see her on the fourteenth and sixteenth. In between those visits the Cordage nurse had called.

Gertrude Matthews, a nurse at the Plymouth Cordage Company, said she had visited Alfonsina between the fifteenth and the twenty-fifth but could not recall the exact dates. LeFavre Brini, Alfonsina’s daughter, told of Vanzetti’s coming to their house at about ten o’clock the morning of the fifteenth with some fish which he had left in the sink. He had come back about noon with a peddler and she saw him hand a length of cloth to her mother. She recalled the date because her mother had been in the hospital and it was just a week after she had had to quit her own job at the Gorton-Pew Fisheries to care for her.

Angelo Guidobone, a rug-weaver who lived in Suosso’s Lane, told through an interpreter of buying some codfish from Vanzetti during the lunch hour. He remembered it was Thursday the fifteenth because on the nineteenth he had had his appendix removed. When Katzmann asked him if he could not have bought his fish on the thirteenth or the fourteenth, Guidobone said that he bought fish fresh on Thursday to eat on Friday. “Do you think I keep fish in the house for a week?” he asked the district attorney indignantly.

Melvin Corl, a Plymouth fisherman from whom Vanzetti some times bought his supplies, recalled April 15 as the day he had been painting his boat at Jesse’s Boatyard. About two o’clock Vanzetti had come down to the water’s edge and stopped to talk with him, saying that the fish business was so bad he was thinking of looking for another job. Corl remembered the date because he had planned to put his boat in the water the next day; however, he had not managed to finish it until two days later—the seventeenth, his wife’s birthday. On that same day, the seventeenth, he had towed a boat belonging to Joseph Morey from Duxbury to Plymouth.

Frank Jesse, the boatyard owner, remembered seeing Corl painting his boat and Vanzetti standing talking to him, but he could not recall the date. Joseph Morey testified that Corl had towed his boat on the seventeenth; he remembered the date because it was two days before Patriot’s Day. Under cross-examination he admitted that he and Mrs. Corl had talked it over and finally decided that the seventeenth must have been the date. Katzmann finally edged him into admitting that neither he nor Corl was completely sure.

John Dever was not sure either. Corl at first had seemed convincing, but Dever now felt that if these people could not be certain about a date, they could not be certain about anything.

For several days Jerry McAnarney had noticed among the courtroom spectators a man with a high forehead, long nose, and drooping mustache so combined that he could have served as Vanzetti’s double. He turned out to be an unemployed Italian named Joseph Scavitto who had known Sacco slightly, and who, having nothing else to do, was spending his days at the trial. Jerry sent him, with a borrowed hat that intensified his resemblance to Vanzetti, to have some photographs made. If witnesses like Austin Cole could be persuaded to identify Scavitto from a photograph as the man they had seen, it might do much to establish Vanzetti’s alibi.

Nothing came of the idea, but Scavitto’s appearance in court resulted in a comic interlude. Asked on the stand what his business was, he replied that he was in the mosaic business. Asked where his place of business was, he answered: “I ain’t got no business.” From the flat pages of the record it is hard to determine just why his appearance and his explanation caused so much amusement, but according to the Herald, when he told of picking up someone else’s hat “the court filled with laughter.”

It would have been logical for Vanzetti to have followed his alibi witnesses to the stand. However, they had concluded on Friday, July 1, and with the Fourth coming on Monday, Moore did not want to have Vanzetti’s testimony interrupted by the holiday week end. In his place several witnesses were introduced to account for Sacco’s whereabouts on the day of the murders.

The first, John Williams, a mild-looking advertising agent, said that he had met Sacco in Boston on April 15 between 1:15 and 1:30 at Boni’s Restaurant in North Square. He had gone into Boni’s for lunch and had seen an acquaintance, Professor Guadagni, sitting at a table with a stranger whom he introduced as Nick Sacco. Guadagni had finished his meal and was smoking a cigar. As the three talked together, Sacco said he planned to go back to Italy and was going to get his passport that afternoon.

Williams, who sold advertising space in several foreign-language newspapers, including La Notizia, was well known in Boston. It was not so well known that he was a left-wing socialist and had been an associate of Trotsky and Bukharin in New York in 1917. Every Thursday he made the rounds of the small North End factories soliciting help-wanted ads for the Saturday editions. On April 15, according to his advertising book, he had taken an order from the Washington Knitting Mills. Later in the afternoon he had gone uptown to see his doctor, Howard Gibbs, who was treating him for asthma.

After the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Felicani asked Williams if he remembered seeing Professor Guadagni and Sacco at Boni’s. Williams said he did. Felicani then asked him if he realized this was the date of the South Braintree crime. Williams had not thought of it, but checking back in his advertising book to the Washington Knitting Mills order, he found it was so. Felicani and Williams felt that this fixed Sacco in Boston instead of in South Braintree. As Williams explained it in court: “The fact that I secured this order and the fact that I met this young man down there, and the fact that he was said to be going for his passport; all of those things brought a sequence of events back to me, and I recalled the incident very easily.”

Under Katzmann’s cross-examination Williams could not remember the dates of other visits to his doctor, or any advertisements he had taken on April 14, or any other occasions when he had met Guadagni. However, Dr. Gibbs testified that although he treated Williams regularly, he had seen him only once in April and that was on the fifteenth.

Albert Bosco, one of the editors of La Notizia, was another witness who claimed to have seen Sacco in the restaurant. Bosco was already at Boni’s with a man named Reffi when Guadagni came in with Sacco and introduced him as “the man that is going to Italy.” Then Guadagni talked about the banquet that the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street were giving at their priory that same day in honor of James T. Williams, Jr., editor of the Boston Transcript, whom the Italian government had just made a Commandante in recognition of his war work. The next day Bosco published an account of the banquet in La Notizia—and also ran a story about the South Braintree killings. When Guadagni spoke to him after the arrests about his meeting with Sacco, Bosco went to the newspaper files and found that the banquet they had discussed in Boni’s restaurant had been held on April 15.

Another witness, a contractor named Angelo Monello, had known Sacco for several months before his arrest. On April 15, just before noon, they had run into each other on Hanover Street. Monello had the date fixed in his mind because on Sunday the eighteenth he had tickets for Madame X, playing at the Tremont Theatre with the great Italian artist Mimi Aguglia. Both he and Sacco were amateur actors and belonged to dramatic clubs, and they had talked about the play. Katzmann at once took Monello over the hurdles, asking if he had talked with anyone about the play on April 16, 17, 13, 12, 19, 21, 28. All Monello could say was that he did not remember.

Michael Kelley and his son Leon appeared willingly as witnesses for Sacco, but because of the agreement of counsel they were not allowed—as they had intended—to testify as to his character. Katzmann hovered over any such mention with an instant objection. Michael Kelley managed to say, however, that he trusted Sacco with the keys to the Three-K factory and that every night the place had been in his hands. Early in the spring Sacco had shown Michael Kelley a black-bordered letter saying that his mother had died. The letter, from Sacco’s father, begging him to come home, was then translated to the jury.

District Attorney Williams now read a deposition by Giuseppe Adrower, made in Rome. In April 1920, Adrower was a clerk in the Italian consulate in Boston. Sacco, he deposed, had appeared early in April about a passport and had been told to come back with two photographs. On April 15 he had returned with an oversize family photograph. Adrower remembered the date because it was “a very quiet day in the Royal Italian Consulate and since such a large photograph had never before been presented for use on a passport I took it in and showed it to the Secretary of the Consulate. We laughed and talked over the incident. I remember observing the date in the office of the Secretary on a large pad calendar while we were discussing the photograph. The hour was around two or a quarter after two, as I remember about a half an hour later I locked the door of the office for the day.” When Professor Guadagni came to the consulate the week after the arrests to ask about the incident, Adrower could not remember Sacco, but after Guadagni showed him the oversize photograph he remembered both it and the date and had no doubt about either.

The written cross-interrogatory contained the by-now-familiar Katzmann hurdles. Adrower had stated that between a hundred fifty and two hundred people a day came to the consulate to inquire about passports. He was asked to give the name of each person he talked with on April 17, 19, 21, 24, 29, and May 2, 3, and 4. He could not remember their names. He was then asked to describe every person with whom he talked on those days. “I cannot describe them in detail,” he admitted. In the defense’s redirect interrogatory, Adrower stated that although many people appeared at the consulate with family group photographs, none had ever brought in such a large one as Sacco produced.

Friday’s last new witness was Dominic Ricci, a carpenter living in a boarding house in South Stoughton, not far from Sacco’s bungalow. He had known Sacco several years. The morning of April 15, he said, he had seen Sacco on the Stoughton railroad platform at about half-past seven and Sacco had told him he was going to Boston to get a passport. Next day, seeing Sacco in the Three-K factory at eight o’clock, Ricci had talked with him about the newspaper accounts of the South Braintree murders.

Katzmann, with deceiving gentleness, asked Ricci if he had worked on the eighteenth. Ricci said he had. Katzmann asked him about the twenty-fifth, May 2, May 9, 16, 23, 30, and June 6, consulting a pocket diary each time he asked. A titter spread through the courtroom as the realization came that each of these dates was a Sunday. The realization did not come as quickly to the embarrassed Ricci. Katzmann continued leading him on a trail of Sundays through the rest of the year, finally closing his diary with mock weariness and smiling ironically at the bewildered Italian. “I have got to the end of my calendar. You worked every Sunday, didn’t you, from then on? That is all.”

George Kelley now reappeared briefly to say that on April 16 he had got to the factory at seven in the morning and Sacco had already been working there three-quarters of an hour.

Friday evening about ten o’clock, long after the courthouse gate had been bolted and the jury locked in for the night, John Drummond, the courthouse janitor, heard a noise in the library and found Jerry McAnarney lying collapsed on the center table. One of the deputy sheriffs drove him back to Quincy. Actually, Jerry was malingering to give Moore an extra day he claimed he needed for tracking down a new witness. Next morning Thomas McAnarney told Judge Thayer that his brother was under a doctor’s care and asked for a postponement. Thayer adjourned the court until Tuesday, July 5.

The prospect of the long week end dismayed the jurors, most of whom had hoped to be back with their families by the Fourth. However, they felt somewhat more cheerful after Judge Thayer told the sheriff to see that they were taken on an outing over the holiday. When John Dever heard that after a month of sitting still they were going to the beach, he felt the way he used to when the circus came to town.

The rest of Saturday the jurors spent as usual—playing cards, talking, reading the cut-up remains of the newspapers, and going out to meals. Sunday afternoon they went on their usual ride, this time through Wellesley and the Newtons.

Monday morning, after breakfast at the Dedham Inn, they went by bus to the wooden-turreted Cliff House at North Scituate. There they sat in rocking chairs on the wide veranda, looking out over the sea and enjoying the breeze until their shore dinner was ready. Dever long remembered that meal—clams and lobsters and more lobsters. George Gerard, the Stoughton photographer, had a Graflex with him. He had been born in Paris, and the others kidded him at the table, telling him it was too bad he couldn’t go down on the beach and take French pictures of the girls. During the afternoon Sheriff Capen produced a fishpole for each man and they sat on the rocks in the sun, joking and fishing.

It was almost dark by the time they got back to the courthouse. Dever felt contented even though his face and arms were red and the skin tingled on the back of his neck. As he went up the courthouse steps he noticed fireflies zigzagging about.