Tragedy in Dedham

The convictions made the Friday headlines of all the Boston papers, but by mid-August references to Sacco and Vanzetti had disappeared from even the back pages. Theirs had been just another Massachusetts murder trial, longer than most, but finished now in every sense. So it seemed to J. Weston Allen, the Attorney General, when he sent a letter of congratulation to District Attorney Katzmann. So it seemed to Chief Justice Aiken, who wrote to his colleague and fellow Dartmouth alumnus Webster Thayer that “Your management of the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti entitles you to the highest degree summa cum laude.” Whatever undercurrents of radical protest might still persist, they remained well below the surface of middle-class complacency.

But while in the United States the storm centered in Massachusetts subsided, overseas there were increasing rumblings broken by occasional flashes of lightning. As early as August 6, 1921, the Executive Committee of the Chamber of Labor Unions in Rome sent a telegram to President Harding expressing the hope that “the crime of the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti will not be recorded.” Eugene Lyons in his six months in Italy had done a skillful publicity job, for by the time of the trial, Italians were generally convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. The Latin anarchists in the United States had written voluminously to their comrades in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, laying the groundwork for the later agitation. Frank Lopez, through his contacts with the more important South American newspapers, had managed to appeal to the widespread anti-gringo feeling there.

Although American consulates and embassies overseas had begun to receive letters of protest in September, the real force of the agitation did not strike until October, when large Communist-organized demonstrations took place in many cities. For all their tenacity, the anarchists were no longer a mass organization and, so far as European developments were concerned, the East German historian Johannes Zelt is undoubtedly right in claiming that “from the beginning the Communists stood at the head of the Sacco-Vanzetti campaign.” In a tactic foreshadowing the Popular Front of the thirties, the Communist International called on all Communists, socialists, anarchists, and trade unionists to unite for the rescue of Sacco and Vanzetti—while, at the same time, the anarchists in the Soviet Union were being liquidated en masse. The organized protest, as it spread across Europe, would include men of good will of all beliefs and persuasions, but control of the movement stayed in the hands of the Communist International and, later, the subsidiary International Red Aid, founded by the Cheka chief, Dzerzhinsky.

For the Communists, Sacco and Vanzetti were pawns in the class struggle, convenient symbols to be exploited in a drive for power where the blood of even anarchist martyrs might become the seed of the Party. However the anarchists were to feel about the Communists taking over—and in time they would feel bitter indeed—the Party had the tight organization, the mass control, and the finances that made quick action easy. On September 20 the Central Committee for Action of the French Communist Party began making plans for a monster demonstration before the American Embassy. According to the resolution then drawn up, “Only direct and clearly revolutionary action can save the Italian liberators Sacco and Vanzetti from the death penalty to which they have been condemned.” The Communist daily L’Humanité opened a subscription fund for the two men and proclaimed: “There is an American Embassy in Paris. We owe it a visit!”

Rank-and-file demonstrators had scarcely heard the names of the two Italians when they received orders to take to the streets, but in their militancy they responded, just as they had for other issues and would again when some central committee pressed a different propaganda button.

The October demonstrations were centered in France and Italy, with echoes in Switzerland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, and Scandinavia. Concerned for the moment with other matters, the German Communist Party did not participate. In Paris, even before the end of September various committees for action had met. Eight thousand militants filled the Salle Wagram and, on leaving, sang the “Internationale” while from a doorway someone lobbed a grenade at the drawn-up police, wounding several of them. The American Embassy was deluged with letters and telegrams. On October 19 a grenade, wrapped with sinister humor in a copy of the Royalist Action Française, was sent through the mail to the new American ambassador, Myron T. Herrick. The valet who opened the package set off the fuse but managed to throw it into a bathroom, where it went off, wounding him slightly and demolishing the room. On the twenty-fourth, ten thousand police and eighteen thousand troops had to be called out to hold back the vast crowd demonstrating before the American Embassy.

The wave spread across Europe. In Switzerland the Communists organized demonstrations in Zurich, Basle, and Geneva. In St. Gall a letter to the American Consulate protesting the judicial murder of “Sachi” and Vanzetti was signed by Communists, syndicalists, socialists, and trade unionists. Amsterdam workers held a protest meeting, as did the Dutch Free Thinkers. Communists marched in the streets of The Hague, Brussels, Liége, Stockholm, and Copenhagen. The American ambassador in Madrid was threatened with assassination. In Lisbon a bomb was exploded in the vestibule of the consulate-general shortly after a letter had been placed under the door demanding the release of the “Brockton anarchists.” Medical students of Portugal’s National College struck for a day to show their sympathy. Although a demonstration by English Communists before the American Embassy fizzled out in a London rain, the Party’s Tooting branch forwarded its objections in a letter to the ambassador. A polite communication was sent to Washington by the Communist Party of Ireland.

When November found the Massachusetts prisoners still alive and no date set for their execution, the Communist International turned off the spigot and the European agitation dried up, but a new wave of agitation now began in Central and South America. The Latin American movement was less well organized, less literate, and, as might be expected, more violent. Anarchists of Guadalajara, Mexico, paraded behind red and black banners reading: “Yankee bourgeoisie, if you assassinate our comrades, Sacco and Vanzetti, your lives and your interests will pay the penalty.” La Junta Federal of Santiago, Chile, announced that “the day the Communists of the world learn that Sacco and Vanzetti have been shot, the residences of all American ambassadors which exist in various countries will be destroyed by a tremendous charge of dynamite.” In Havana, anarchist circulars warned that “in Cuba, Yankee tyrants are not lacking in whom to let fall the vengeful dagger.” A bomb was found in the embassy garden in Rio de Janeiro. The American consul in Mexico City received anonymous threats from “the comrades of Saco and Banzet.” There were demonstrations in front of the United States embassies and consulates in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Panama.

In Massachusetts the overseas disturbances, recorded with increasing frequency in the local papers, stirred up feelings of apprehension. Moore was dismayed, and said so. “I cannot conceive,” he wrote, “how any intelligent and sane person sincerely interested in obtaining ultimate justice for these two men could hope that this sort of thing could benefit them.” The bombings, he tried to make out, were the work either of enemies or insane people. Prompted by Moore, and aware of the hardening of community opinion, the Defense Committee issued a disclaimer, maintaining that

the lurid plots and threats attributed to mythical individuals referred to as Sacco-Vanzetti sympathizers are so thoroughly harmful to the effort being made to save the two men from the electric chair that they could not have originated in the minds of friends. Either they were planned by persons desirous of putting the case of the two prisoners in disrepute or they are lies pure and simple.

Two days after the trial’s end the defense lawyers filed the customary motion for a new trial on the grounds that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence. This motion was scheduled to be argued before Judge Thayer in Dedham on Saturday, October 29. On the twenty-eighth the Boston papers spread a sensational story that groups of Italians were coming to the hearing from New York dressed in army uniforms and carrying automatics. Extra police were at once stationed throughout the city, and the Post Office and the Federal Building placed under guard. At the South Station plain-clothes men watched each incoming train. That night the Dedham jail was surrounded with searchlights.

Saturday morning the courthouse was more heavily guarded than at any time during the trial. State troopers, mounted and on motorcycles, patrolled the streets, and portly Colonel Foote, the Commissioner of Public Safety, came over from the State House in person. Plain-clothes men in all their obviousness tramped up and down the High Street. The Boston riot squad appeared, loaned for the day by the Boston police commissioner. The public was banned from the courthouse. Reporters who were admitted were patted for weapons.

When Sacco and Vanzetti were brought in and their handcuffs taken off, there were fewer than fifty persons in the courtroom. Three months had done much to alter the two men. In July, overwhelmed by the verdict, they had felt isolated. Now the news from overseas had given them the satisfaction of knowing that there were workers the world over who were not going to stand by while the courts of Massachusetts sent their comrades to the electric chair. Newly confident, Sacco and Vanzetti were also full of resentment, particularly against the debonair district attorney whom they once more faced.

Both Moore and Jerry McAnarney well knew there was no chance that Judge Thayer would overrule the jury’s verdict, but the motion was a legal step always taken in murder cases. The arguments and counterarguments lasted all that Saturday and the following Saturday, Moore appealing particularly to the fact that the jury had given no consideration to the alibi witnesses. While Katzmann was delivering his arguments defending the verdict, the men in the cage kept interrupting and contradicting him. When he told of taking a witness to the Dedham jail who picked out Sacco from a group of prisoners, Sacco jumped up in the cage and accused the district attorney of having prompted the witness. “Yes,” he shouted to Judge Thayer, who motioned to a deputy, “that man he said, ‘There’s Sacco.’ That’s the way he know!” The deputy grabbed Sacco by the arm. “Go easy!” Sacco cried out, trying to brush him off. Vanzetti now broke in savagely: “You bring every crook in Massachusetts to testify against us! You and every man of sense know it.” Judge Thayer observed acidly that the defendants ought not to interrupt. When they continued to shout and gesticulate, he again signaled to the deputies to quiet them. He too had been hearing of the turmoil in Europe, and had been receiving letters and telegrams daily—some of them threatening—demanding a new trial. His house in Worcester was now under guard, and he was simmeringly aware that last summer’s court session and verdict had by no means ended the case. “These cases,” he announced with controlled but still obvious anger as he looked sourly at the cage, “seem to have assumed a state, national and international interest. Overseas a statement was published that the presiding justice said to the jury that these men must be convicted because they were Italians and radicals. That statement was absolutely false.”

He and Moore continued their verbal dueling, carrying it over to the concluding arguments on Saturday, November 5. When Moore tried to explain how the issue of radicalism had injured his clients, Judge Thayer pointed out his trial ruling that “No evidence of the defendants’ radical activities or opinions would be allowed until the defense released such matter themselves.” Moore characterized the ruling as a Greek gift, the Virgilian reference escaping Judge Thayer.

Following this formal and predetermined motion the defense filed five supplementary motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the Gould-Pelser motion, the Goodridge motion, the Andrews motion, and the Hamilton-Proctor motion.

A month or so after the trial Jerry McAnarney had met the jury foreman, Walter Ripley—whom he had known for years—on the street in Quincy. They stopped on the corner to talk, and Jerry learned for the first time about the three cartridges that Ripley had casually brought to court in his vest pocket and during the trial compared with the five cartridges found in Vanzetti’s revolver. Ripley thought nothing of the matter, but for Jerry it was the first crack in the verdict. He now interviewed nine of the other jurors and obtained affidavits from several of them. Wallace Hersey and Frank McNamara admitted they had seen the Ripley bullets, Frank Marden and Seward Parker that they had heard about them. Ripley himself had died of a heart attack on October 10, before McAnarney could get an affidavit from him. His widow signed an affidavit that her husband had had the bullets with him during the trial. This admitted fact was the basis of the first supplementary motion, a lengthy document that claimed in substance that “if during the trial Ripley made a comparison between these three cartridges and the five cartridges taken from Vanzetti’s revolver, then the defendants are entitled to a new trial as a matter of right.” The Ripley motion with its accompanying affidavits was filed on November 8. Judge Thayer announced that he would set a hearing date satisfactory to both sides.

On the afternoon before Christmas, 1921, exactly two years after the Bridgewater crime, in a gray, nearly empty courtroom, the wintry-faced Thayer denied the October motion for a new trial. “I cannot,” he intoned, “as I must if I disturb these verdicts—announce to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor, judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust reposed in them by the law as well as by the Court. And all for what purpose? To take away the lives of two human beings created by their own God. The human frailties of man, his tender regard and love for human life and his profound sympathy for his fellow-men, when charged with the gravest offence known to the law, repudiates the suggestion.”

Three days after this denial Fred Moore wrote to a friend:

The one hope for these boys now rests in the hope that we may be able to unearth new facts. This means endless investigations. It means that every clue as to the real bandits must be followed up expertly and carefully. As you know this means money.

Thus, briefly, Moore stated his problems for the next three years, and the last problem would always be the most harassing, the one that would seem to be squatting like a dollar sign on the doorstep of Rollins Place each time he returned. For him money was a wretched commodity, something that arrived in the morning and went out in the afternoon, a means merely through which he might obtain more publicity, wider investigations. His restless and inventive mind never stopped thinking of new angles to explore. One week would find him at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta on a tip that two inmates there were connected with the gang that, it was rumored, had really pulled off the Bridgewater job. The next week might find him uncovering the bigamous career of a prosecution witness. Pressed constantly for funds, he wrote countless dunning letters, cajoled his old radical friends and associates from coast to coast, unabashedly appealed to prominent strangers, cultivated sympathetic old women. Given enough money, he was sure he could win.

The trial had been over for half a year, the sentencing of the two men lay somewhere in the months ahead. General interest dwindled. Only the most faithful sympathizers still sent in contributions.

The Defense Committee had moved from Battery Street to the more central Hanover Street, where most of the North End Italian shops were located. Eugene Lyons, returned from Italy, now replaced Art Shields. The new headquarters at number 256 was on the third floor, a large garret anteroom leading into a small inner office. Every Thursday night the committee members would climb the warped, narrow stairs to listen to a repetition of what had been said the week before. Three or four times a year there would be a meeting of several hundred sympathizers at Paine Memorial Hall in the South End, most of them Italian comrades, with a sprinkling of Back Bay dissidents, members of the Civil Liberties Committee, and the more radical trade-union officials.

It was [Lyons wrote] a motley and colorful and rather high-pitched company that gathered around the defense at this stage. Some were moved by an undiluted urge to save the two innocent men, others were interested primarily in the propagandist value of the case, still others got an emotional kick out of the battle. At one extreme were hot-headed and desperate Italians distrustful of all law, bitterly sarcastic about the hocus-pocus of motions and affidavits, and often refusing in principle to cooperate with their own lawyers. At the other extreme were men and women of old New England stock chiefly concerned with saving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from the stigma of an ugly miscarriage of justice. I can recall vital meetings in which a snarling, red-headed Italian exponent of direct action argued some question of policy with a benign pacifist like Mrs. Evans. It was Moore’s delicate job to reconcile these people and placate their idiosyncrasies.

The money that Moore needed in floods came in dribbles—$18.30 from an Italian picnic in Connecticut, an anonymous dollar bill posted in Seattle, $38.65 from the Pietro Gori Group of Nokomis, Illinois, the occasional windfall of five hundred dollars collected by the Workers’ Defense Union at a New York meeting in Beethoven Hall, a small but steady flow from Moore’s friends in the United Mine Workers. Moore knew that what was required was a full-time treasurer to coordinate finances and fund-raising. He wanted Felicani to quit La Notizia and devote all his time to the job at a regular salary. Felicani would not hear of it. He was willing to work until midnight each night on the committee accounts, or on propaganda, or whatever else needed doing, but those pathetically small sums that kept dribbling in for the defense of his friends—he could not bear to pay himself from that money. He insisted on keeping a record of every amount received, no matter how small, and of every cent paid out.

Moore did not see the point of such finical accounting. To him it was foolish to waste time on columns of figures when two men’s lives were at stake. He and Felicani were always at odds about money. To Felicani it seemed that no matter how much he provided, Moore always needed more. It was as if the lawyer had a hole in his hand. For Moore it was both ridiculous and humiliating that he, the general counsel of the I.W.W., whose name struck sparks from coast to coast, who had taken this case out of the gutter and made it a world issue, should have to appear hat in hand before a printer-nobody to beg for money—and often not get it! Time and again Moore saw what he considered promising investigations shut off by the anarchists. Later he was to ask himself if some deeper motive than a financial one lay behind their refusals. On October 20, 1922, the doctrinaire Frank Lopez, who had become secretary of the Defense Committee, wrote Moore:

I warn you to keep your hands off of many things that in order to obey or please other persons you had been trying to do for many months past.

To supplement such part-time detectives as Robert Reid, Moore hired two permanent investigators, Tommy Doyle and Albert Carpenter. Doyle, a pious Catholic, was still young enough to think of himself as a sleuth, so intrigued at playing Sherlock Holmes that he did not care whether he was investigating thieves, anarchists, or Republicans.

Carpenter was an older man, more self-contained, oriented to radical reform. He and Moore had first meet in San Diego, during the free-speech fight of 1911. Together they had tracked down and exposed the perjurer, Frank Oxman, in the Mooney-Billings case. In Everett, Washington, in 1915, after a dockside clash in which five I.W.W.’s and two sheriffs were killed and seventy-four Wobblies later indicted for first-degree murder—a national record—Carpenter acted as Moore’s chief investigator. In Chicago during the 1917 I.W.W. trials, after Moore had been framed by the police and was on the run, it was Carpenter who kept track of him through Lola Darroch, then Moore’s secretary. Once Moore had settled down in Rollins Place, it seemed only natural for him to send for his old reliable friend.

Moore had early become convinced that the South Braintree holdup was the work of a gang of professionals. Also, his legal sixth sense warned him there were unexplored depths to such equivocal witnesses as Louis Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Carlos Goodridge. It seemed a pity to him to have the money problem overshadowing all the others.

On May 4, 1922, Moore filed the second supplementary motion, the Gould-Pelser motion. Roy Gould was the razor-paste salesman who on the day of the South Braintree murders had stood near the crossing and been fired at from the getaway car, the bullet passing through his overcoat lapel. No one, not even Jimmy Bostock or Frank Burke, had been so close to the moving car or had such a clear view of its occupants. Immediately after the shooting Gould gave his name and address to a Braintree policemen, John Heaney. Soon afterward he left town to follow the summer carnivals and country fairs across New England with his razor paste.

Moore first learned about Gould and his experience from Frank Burke, who had known him for some time. No one, however, seemed to know what had become of Gould. Moore sent Reid all over New England inquiring at every carnival he could trace, without success. Finally on November 3, while Burke was in Portland, Maine, on business, he noticed Gould’s name on the register of his hotel. Burke was almost too astonished to believe his eyes. When the two met, Gould said he had gone to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island shortly after the murder, and had not read much about the trial.

Moore came to Portland on the next train and found Gould perfectly willing to tell his story about South Braintree. The man who had fired at him that day, Gould said, was someone he could never forget. Moore paid Gould’s way to Boston and there showed him photographs of Sacco and Vanzetti. Gould was positive that neither was the man who had fired at him. Later Moore took him to the Dedham jail where they talked with Sacco. After watching Sacco for about ten minutes Gould said he was certain that this was not the gunman and he was willing to sign an affidavit to that effect.

It was Moore’s claim that Gould’s affidavit was “new and independent testimony,” that the Commonwealth had known about him and yet made no effort to call him as a witness, and that his identification would have been sufficient to warrant a different verdict.

Louis Pelser was the next witness on Moore’s retribution list. All Moore could learn of him at first was that after the trial he had lost his job and left his parents’ flat in Jamaica Plain. Tommy Doyle finally tracked him to a derelict South End rooming house. Pelser was in an abject alcoholic state, red-eyed and maudlin. When he said he had not eaten anything all day, Doyle bought him a meal, then gave him seventy cents and paid his carfare to Moore’s Pemberton Square office.

Doyle had telephoned ahead and Moore was waiting there with Lyons, Reid, and a stenographer. Pelser sobered up when he saw them. As always, when faced with authority, he began to doubt himself, what he had seen, what he had previously said. Moore tried to reassure him, patting him on the back and telling him “You look like a regular fellow.” Pelser said that the day he arrived at Dedham District Attorney Williams had taken him to a little upstairs room in the courthouse and shown him several pictures of Sacco, asking if he was the man he had seen below the factory window. “No,” Pelser had told him, “I don’t think that’s the man I seen. I just got a glance of everything. I could not identify if you brought me a hundred pictures here.” Williams insisted that he, Pelser, knew “right well” Sacco was the man.

Now, in the Pemberton Square office, Pelser said he “did not get a good enough view to see any man.” How the “dead image stuff” had come up in court he could not tell.

“Now why in God’s world did you testify as you did?” Moore bellowed at the cowering sour-breathed Pelser.

“I must have been forced,” the other replied lamely. He still maintained that he had seen a man with a gun, but he could in no way describe him. The “dead image,” he admitted, had been a mistake.

Moore asked if he would go on the stand again and take back what he had said. Pelser hesitated. Moore bore down on him: “You can tell anything that is the truth. If it’s not true that he is the dead image, then you owe it to yourself and your conscience to tell it. If it is the truth, for God’s sake stick to your story. It might come to the point when in order to save a couple of men’s lives it is going to be necessary—you have got the stuff to come through if it is necessary, that right?”

Pelser gulped out an abject “Yes.”

It took the stenographer twenty minutes to prepare the transcript. After Pelser signed it Moore slapped him on the back again, gave him a couple of cigars, and Lyons offered to take him and his girl to the Westminster Winter Garden. Pelser refused. Afterward, when he thought of what he had signed, he felt sick. Two days later, at his parents’ flat, he wrote to the district attorney:

287 Centre St.
Jamiaca Plaine
Feb. 6, 1922.

Mr. Katzmann,

Dear Sir:—Saturday afternoon a man called for me in regards the Sacco Case. He did not say which side he represented.

He asked me if I could give a little information on the case.

I was drinking pretty heavy that day. He said I want to show a couple of pictures and got me on the way in town gave me some money bought a dinner cigars & cigarettes we went into some office in Pemberton Sq. he introduced me to Mr. Moore then he sat me down and locked the door Moore said to me you look like a white man.

He patted me on the back & gave me a Cigar & said give me a little dope on the Sacco Case he handed me a couple of pictures & asked me if I ever saw them. I said “no”, he showed me some more. One word led to another, he got around me some way & I didn’t know what I was up against. He had 3 or 4 men in his office & a girl stenographer. He asked me one question & other and finally had my whole story contradicted what I had said at the Dedham Court. I am worried at the way they have framed me & got me in to trouble. When it was over one of the men asked me if I would not have a drink & invited me to a big dinner & dance at the West Minster Hotel. Some how I refused to go because I felt it was another trap to get me to say more.

When I came to my Senses the next day & had a little talk with my folks they told me to get in touch with you as soon as I could I tried to get you on the phone and then decided I had better write you.

Hoping you will give this your immediate attention and favor me with an early reply.

Respectfully,
Louis Pelser

P.S. I forgot to mention that I also signed two papers of some kind.

As soon as Assistant District Attorney Williams read the letter, forwarded to him by Katzmann, he had Pelser up on the courthouse carpet. Williams asked him if he did not remember looking at Sacco’s picture and saying “That looks like the man,” of seeing Sacco and exclaiming “By George! If he isn’t the man he is a dead image for him.” Pelser now maintained that what he had said on the stand was the truth as he believed it, and that nothing had since happened to change his mind. The fact was that when he had talked to Moore in Boston he was in no condition to know what he was saying.

However spineless Pelser seemed in other respects, the “dead image” term still troubled him. When Williams asked him again if he had meant those words, he insisted “I didn’t mean them in that way. I don’t know how I happened to use that word ‘dead image.’”

In his new motion Moore claimed that the affidavit Pelser had signed in his office was “tantamount and equivalent to a repudiation of the testimony given by the said Louis Pelser on the trial of this case” and that his testimony was “not entitled to be considered by the jury as trustworthy and reliable.”

Eleven weeks later Moore filed the third supplementary motion, based on what he had learned about Carlos Goodridge, the pool-playing Victrola salesman who had so unhesitantly picked out Sacco as the gunman he had seen in the getaway car. During the trial the defense had discovered nothing more about Goodridge than that he was married and lived in Cambridge and that in September 1920 he had pleaded guilty to a charge of grand larceny in the Dedham court and had been placed on probation. What Moore had since learned about Goodridge was enough to destroy him.

Goodridge turned out to be Erastus Corning Whitney, a shiftless bigamist from upper New York State, an arsonist, a passer of bad checks who had served two terms in jail for petty larceny, a man who had passed most of his adult life escaping from old misdemeanors and importunate females. Tommy Doyle spent three months and more than ten thousand dollars collecting documents, pictures, letters, and affidavits that made all this plain.

Armed with the evidence, Moore started off for Vassalboro, Maine, where Goodridge was now living. Stopping in Augusta, he picked up Ethel Lee, a deputy sheriff, and her sister-in-law, Marjorie, a stenographer. It was twilight by the time they reached Goodridge’s Vassalboro farm. His third wife, Margaret Rose, said her husband was down the road at a church meeting. Moore found him in the white clapboard building, called him out in the middle of a hymn, and asked him to get into the car. There he displayed Doyle’s documents and asked Goodridge if he was not Erastus Corning Whitney, under indictment for larceny in Livingston County, New York. Goodridge admitted that he was. He did not dispute any of the facts that Doyle had dredged up. “Well, the game is up,” he said wearily, “and I suppose I will have to go back to New York.” He was not aware of the woman in the back seat taking shorthand notes, nor did he recognize his questioner until he said “My name is Moore.”

“Glad to meet you,” Goodridge said, trying to cover up his fear with cordiality. “I’ve heard of you from San Francisco to Maine.”

Moore said flatly that he was not interested in what Goodridge had or had not done in New York. All he wanted was the full story of how he had come to testify in the Dedham court, and what influence the district attorney’s office had brought to bear on him. Of course if Goodridge did not want to talk, there was the deputy sheriff in the back seat and an indictment waiting in New York.

Goodridge agreed to tell his tale. He had first recognized Sacco’s picture, he said, in a newspaper. He had then shown it to a girl he knew, Lottie Packard, who worked at Rice & Hutchins. “I says to Lottie, ‘Whose picture is that?’ and she called him by name. I had the paper folded so that she couldn’t see nothing but the picture. ‘I used to work with him in a factory.’ I says, ‘That’s the fellow that was in the gang down here.’ I told Lottie never to say anything about it. I never told anyone but my wife.”

Williams and Brouillard and Stewart had been after him in the autumn of 1920 to come to the Dedham jail with them, Goodridge continued, but he had always refused, telling them it was no use to take him there, that he had seen nothing and “didn’t know anything about the deal.” When he himself was arraigned in Dedham he had recognized Sacco as soon as the latter was brought into the courtroom, but he never told anyone about this. He had lied to the district attorney’s people and to the police because he did not want to get mixed up in the case.

Moore came back again and again to his central question: Why had Goodridge refused to talk from September to July, and then suddenly gone on the stand and identified Sacco? Goodridge did not have any explanation.

“I think I testified to the truth to the best of my ability,” he complained, “and it’s a pretty hard proposition.”

The lawyer asked him sharply if he thought a man should die on his statement. No, Goodridge did not think so. But when he had testified he thought he had been right. No one had forced him, no inducements had been offered. It was just that Sacco was the man he thought he had seen. “But afterwards a good many times since I have thought that I am not positive,” he went on. “I am not positive that if I would have to swear that that man was the one, I could positively identify him as the man.” As Moore continued to batter him with questions, Goodridge began to cry.

Moore insisted that the assistant district attorney had badgered Goodridge into taking the stand. Goodridge no longer denied it. “You know just how those things is yourself,” he told the lawyer pleadingly. “He talked to me so much I was just about dead, I guess.”

The stenographer now interrupted to say she had run out of paper. The four drove back to the farm. On the way Moore urged Goodridge to sign an affidavit. He refused. Finally Moore turned to the sheriff. “I think, Mrs. Lee,” he said sternly, “that it is your duty to take this man back to Augusta and notify the New York authorities.”

While Goodridge changed his clothes, Moore spent twenty minutes talking, with his wife, reducing her, too, to tears. Goodridge then quietly got in the car and they headed for Augusta. Just before they reached the city Moore made a final effort: “Whitney, what I would like to know is what inducement was held out to you to testify at this trial. You did not testify at this trial willingly unless you benefited by it some way or another; that is what I want to know and if you will tell me you will save yourself the trouble of going back to New York.” Goodridge still would not say.

Moore took him first to the county jail. There the warden refused to admit him without a warrant. With the help of Deputy Sheriff Lee, Moore managed to have him locked up in police headquarters as a fugitive. “I will come back later,” Moore told the police chief, “as I want this fellow to come clean and he is holding back things that he ought to tell us.” Mrs. Lee then telegraphed the district attorney of Livingston County that they were holding Erastus Corning Whitney for him. Moore telephoned the clerk of courts in Genesee and asked if Whitney was still wanted. The clerk said he did not think so, but he would ask the sheriff. The sheriff expressed no interest in the eleven-year-old indictment.

Goodridge remained the night at police headquarters. When next day he was brought before Judge Robert Cony and the judge learned that the indictment was dated November 24, 1911, he announced angrily from the bench: “They will never bother you on it, and unless I hear from them tonight I will let you go in the morning, and I do not intend to have his office used by any lawyer to build up any cases for the State of Massachusetts or any other state, and the best thing you can do is not to see Mr. Moore again.”

Goodridge was released next morning. There was nothing more Moore could do about him.

On September 11 Moore presented a fourth supplementary motion, requesting a new trial because of additional facts discovered about the witness Lola Andrews, “a person whose testimony should not constitute the basis of a verdict of guilty on a charge of murder.”

Six months before the trial, when Moore had interviewed her in the Alhambra Block in Quincy and shown her pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she had been unable to identify them and had made a statement exonerating the defendants. On the witness stand she had claimed that this statement had been untruthfully reported. Now Moore, as he wrote to Upton Sinclair, had “wilted” her. She had signed an affidavit for him repudiating her court testimony and admitting that she had lied because the district attorney knew “many chapters of her private life that she could ill afford to have revealed.”

Her affidavit stated that some time before the trial Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail, shown her Sacco, and asked if he was the man she had seen on April 15. She said she did not know. Later Assistant District Attorney Williams put the same question to her. She said she could not be positive. Williams then shook his finger in her face and told her, “You can put it stronger than that. I know you can.”

Her testimony in court had been “false and untrue.... She had never ... at any time or place or under any conditions and specifically on April 15, 1920, at South Braintree, seen said Nicola Sacco until she saw him in the Dedham County Jail.” Her false statements “were made under the intimidating influences of Michael E. Stewart, Albert L. Brouillard, Harold Williams and Frederick G. Katzmann.”

Like Pelser, Lola Andrews found herself overborne by any determined person who talked with her. In addition she had much to conceal. Her life in Quincy was in part known to the police. Recently there had been some business about a naval officer named Landers in her room, hushed up for the time but still rumor-heavy. When Moore found out that she had originally come from Gardiner, Maine, he sent Bert Carpenter there to see what he could learn. What Carpenter learned would have ruined her in any court.

She had been born Rachel Andrews, the by-product of an encounter between a Yankee farmer’s daughter and an itinerant Italian. A tow-path child brought up in a shanty settlement on the outskirts of the trim Kennebec town, she had scarcely passed adolescence when she married an ex-soldier returned from the Philippines, Mayhew Hassam, an alcoholic who used her cruelly. She had borne him one son. After the marriage ended she had stayed on in Gardiner across the street from the Soldiers’ Home, available and accommodating. In Augusta she had been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct. Moving on to Massachusetts, she had left her son behind, sending money back for his board. At the time she testified in Dedham he was eighteen years old. What her life had been she did not ever want him to know. The boy was her weak spot—a spot Moore did not hesitate to exploit. He had been hard on Pelser, hard on Goodridge, he would be hard on her. A lawyer, to his mind, could not be delicate when men’s lives were at stake.

Lola Darroch brought young Hassam from Maine, hired a room for him in the seedy Hotel Essex opposite the South Station, and sent for the mother. The boy, though an unkempt rustic, had proved tractable and intelligent, accepting Moore’s version of the case and agreeing to try to persuade his mother to repudiate her courtroom testimony. Lola Andrews, brought in from Quincy, confronted her son while Moore told her that she had lied in Dedham and that it was now up to her to tell the truth. She wilted at once and began to cry. Moore spent the evening drafting an affidavit. When it was handed to her, her son begged her to sign. Moore showed her certain affidavits that Carpenter had collected in Gardiner, without, however, allowing her to read them. She signed.

Moore could indeed browbeat such witnesses as Pelser, Goodridge, and Lola Andrews. The difficulty was that when they were alone again they had second thoughts that generally took the form of a disclaiming letter to the district attorney. On January 9, 1923, Lola signed a counteraffidavit for District Attorney Katzmann and Assistant District Attorney Williams in which she claimed that Moore had used her boy to trap her and that she had not read the nine pages of the affidavit. She had not wanted to sign it.

I told them that if I put my name to that paper that they had already drawn up for me ... I could see it meant a terrible disgrace for me. They told me no, that I was doing the grandest thing a woman could do, and that by doing what they wanted me to do I would gain the respect and friendship of everyone, and that my boy would not be ashamed to look upon me as his mother, and the evidence they had brought with them from Maine would not be submitted to the court or to the eyes of anyone, not even to my son.... Mr. Moore took me over to a small desk and laid the paper in front of me and told me to sign it. I told him I would not, for I did not realize what I was doing.... They dipped the pen in the ink and tried to pass it into my hand.... All the time I was crying and asking them not to force me to sign it. My son then said, “Mother, I want you to sign that paper, for it means a whole lot to me.” I do not seem to remember much what happened after that, only that someone put the pen in my hand and told me to sign it, and asked my boy to come over to me and help me. My boy came over and put his arm around me and said, “Mother, sign this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not recognize these men”—meaning Sacco and Vanzetti—“and you will only be doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.”

“I was like I was in a trance,” she later told Katzmann.

Perhaps the most crucial testimony offered in the trial, the deciding factor—if John Dever is to be believed—was the evidence of the guns and the bullets. If, as Moore was well aware, it could be proved beyond a doubt that the mortal bullet found in Berardelli’s body had not been fired from Sacco’s automatic, the keystone of the Commonwealth’s case would be demolished. In February 1923, with this in mind, he engaged Dr. Albert Hamilton, a New York expert who had testified in 165 homicide cases, to prepare the fifth supplementary motion, the Hamilton-Proctor motion.

Hamilton came into the case through Frank Sibley, who happened to meet him while riding on the train from Portland, Maine, to Boston. Hamilton, an authoritative little man with a convincing air, told Sibley that if he had been a witness at Dedham he could have proved quickly and conclusively whether or not Sacco’s pistol had fired the mortal bullet. Once back in Boston Sibley recommended Hamilton enthusiastically to Moore. The lawyer immediately wrote Hamilton to ask what he would charge for coming to Boston. Without bothering to reply, Hamilton confidently took the next train. In their first interview Moore told Hamilton he was vitally concerned in learning the answers to four fundamental questions: Had the hammer of the Vanzetti revolver been replaced by a new hammer? Were one or more of the shells that Fraher had picked up fired in the Sacco pistol? Had Bullet III been fired from the Sacco pistol? Was the mortal bullet discharged from a cartridge of the same date of manufacture as any of the cartridges found on Sacco when he was arrested? Hamilton agreed to make the investigation and determine the four answers.

Hamilton was an unlucky choice. Moore did not suspect that his doctorate was self-awarded. By trade a druggist and concocter of patent medicines in Auburn, New York, Hamilton had developed expertness as a second career, advertising himself as a “micro-chemical investigator.” His avocation became his calling. In 1908, in a publicity pamphlet entitled “That Man from Auburn,” he described himself as a qualified expert in chemistry, microscopy, handwriting, ink analysis, typewriting, photography, fingerprints, toxicology, gunshot wounds, guns and cartridges, bullet identification, gunpowder, nitroglycerine, dynamite, high explosives, blood and other stains, causes of death, embalming, and anatomy. Unknown to Moore, he had earlier written to Judge Thayer claiming that he knew a method of examining the Sacco-Vanzetti ballistics exhibit that would reveal the truth. He had received no reply. Men who had worked with Hamilton in the past did not recommend him. The Auburn coroner said that his reputation for truth was bad. The assistant district attorney of Monroe County considered him “a professional expert ... whose testimony should not be accepted in any court of record, and should receive no credence at the hands of a judge or jury.”

Much of Hamilton’s clouded reputation in New York stemmed from the murder trial of Charles Stielow who, in 1915, was accused of shooting Charles Phelps and his housekeeper in West Shelby. Hamilton had appeared for the prosecution. After tests and a minute examination of Stielow’s revolver and of the three bullets taken from Phelps’ body and the one from that of his housekeeper, he testified that only Stielow’s revolver could have fired the bullets. Principally because of this testimony Stielow was found guilty and sentenced to death. Later he was proved to be innocent and pardoned. In a post-trial review of the evidence Max Poser, an expert in applied optics with the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, demonstrated that the bullets taken from the bodies had not come from the Stielow revolver. “The opinion expressed by the expert Hamilton in his evidence at the trial,” Poser concluded, “was worthless.” The setback, however, did not seem to hamper Hamilton’s career.

It did not take Hamilton long, after inspecting the Sacco-Vanzetti exhibits, to come to his conclusions. In the motion, filed on April 30, 1923, he claimed that by using a Bausch & Lomb compound microscope he was able to ascertain discrepancies between the markings on the test bullets from Sacco’s pistol and the markings on Bullet III. According to his measurements the land and groove widths in the barrel of Sacco’s Colt agreed with the land and groove widths on the test bullets but not with the mortal bullet. He also found that a microscopic examination of the Fraher shells eliminated the possibility of any one of them having been fired in the Colt. Because of a difference in the cannelures, he contended that Bullet III was not manufactured at the same time as the six Winchester cartridges found on Sacco. Augustus Gill, Professor of Technical Chemical Analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been engaged to assist Hamilton. His tabulations, made under different conditions, varied somewhat from Hamilton’s. Nevertheless, he was convinced from his own measurements “that the so-called mortal bullet never passed through the Sacco gun.” As for Vanzetti’s revolver, Hamilton maintained that it had not been fitted with a new hammer, because an essential screw did not show marks of having been removed.

Captain Van Amburgh, in an affidavit for the Commonwealth, became much more positive than he had been at the trial. He now used a more powerful microscope and in addition he had had comparative photographs taken of Bullet III and one of the test bullets. He offered twelve pictures of each bullet in which the lands and grooves were separately photographed so that the enlarged pictures could be compared. “The facts which I have found from my entire investigation,” he asserted, “are so clear that, in my opinion, they amount to proof. I am absolutely certain that the Fraher Shell W was fired in the Sacco pistol. I am also positive that the mortal bullet was fired in the Sacco pistol.” His findings were confirmed by Merton Robinson, a ballistics engineer for the Winchester Arms Company. Robinson not only maintained that Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s pistol, but rejected Hamilton’s argument that the mortal bullet and those found on Sacco were of a different date of manufacture. As for Hamilton’s photographic evidence to prove that the hammer in Vanzetti’s revolver had not been replaced, it would have been quite possible, Robinson asserted, for an expert repairman to have inserted a new screw, or to have removed and replaced the old one, without leaving marks on the screw head.

On March 8, 1923, after much persuasion on the part of the McAnarney brothers, William Thompson agreed to enter the case for the limited purpose of arguing the motions for a new trial. He had been hesitant about becoming involved, but, ironically enough, it was Katzmann’s attack on the integrity and qualifications of Dr. Hamilton that finally persuaded him.

Thompson knew that his entering this by-now notorious case would arouse a great deal of hostility in State Street legal circles, and he persuaded his friend of many years, Arthur Dehon Hill, to come in with him so that, as he explained, he would have an associate he could talk with more frankly than he could with Moore. Hill, a lawyer who had once been corporation counsel of the City of Boston, was a more integral State Street figure than Thompson, who—like Judge Thayer—had been brought up in Worcester and was a Bostonian merely by attrition. Although fortuitously born in Paris, Hill was an inbred Bostonian whose perspective was limited by the familiar triangle of Beacon Hill, the Harvard Yard, and the North Shore. Like so many Boston lawyers who moved securely in their dimly lit world of irrevocable trusts, he was cadaverous—as if his blood stream had by some subtle osmosis absorbed the dried leather of a century’s Massachusetts Reports. Even as a Harvard undergraduate he looked as if he had never been young. Yet this secure, aloof lawyer who appeared so typical of his caste was not wholly typical. There was something more to him, a quality of fiat justitia that went beyond Beacon Hill. In the 1912 Bull Moose campaign he had come out for Theodore Roosevelt, a rejection of the Boston norm. When Thompson first asked him to enter the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he was reluctant. Although he had a poor opinion of the garrulous Thayer he thought well of Katzmann, whom he had known for a number of years.

Hill joined the defense on March 15 feeling, as he later explained, “What do I care about these draft-dodgers who were skulking in Mexico when their countrymen were fighting for the very life of the land? But I do care for the honor of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.” Thompson would in time come to consider the cause of Sacco and Vanzetti as his own. For Hill, who would appear as counsel in the last tumultuous weeks, it was a case and not a cause, and he the advocate rather than the partisan.