On June 28 Thompson, Ehrmann, Ranney, and Ferrari and Fleming of the state police spent the day at Dedham interviewing the convicted Portuguese. Madeiros was brought to the sheriff’s office in his blue prison denims, his rheumy eyes full of challenge.
As he had before, but in more detail, he told of taking part in the South Braintree holdup. He still declined to give the real names of the men who had been in the car with him, but he admitted that he had known them in Providence and said they had been in a lot of jobs there robbing freight cars. When Thompson showed him photographs of Joe, Patsy, and Fred Morelli he refused “for private reasons” to say whether he recognized them. He also refused to identify Bibber Barone and Jimmy Weeks, although finally he picked out the latter, saying “It doesn’t make much difference. It is Weeks, I guess.”
He stuck to his story that the payroll money had been in a black bag. There should, he thought, have been over four thousand dollars apiece in the division of the payroll, but he would not say directly whether he had considered himself double-crossed. Indirectly, he agreed that he did not feel he had been used right. He admitted that he had known Steve the Pole, but would not say whether he had ever mentioned the South Braintree holdup to him. He also admitted that he had confronted Bibber Barone in the yard of the Bluebird Inn when they quarreled about Tessie. However, he refused to tell where he had met Bibber or if Bibber had ever double-crossed him.
Ranney, cross-examining, asked Madeiros if it was true, as his mother had sworn, that when she visited him he had told her: “You think I am tough because I am in this case, but there is a man in here for five years who killed two men.” Madeiros could not remember saying any such thing. It was Ranney’s contention that Madeiros had made up his confession out of whole cloth after reading the Defense Committee’s financial report, that he was hoping to tap some of this money for his own defense and that he knew nothing about the South Braintree crime beyond the casual gossip he had picked up. The assistant district attorney kept trying to pin Madeiros down. What kind of a place was South Braintree? Had he seen any factories? Was there a water tank? A railroad crossing? Madeiros did not recall any of these things, nor any stores or excavations. All he remembered was the car going up the slope after the shooting and that “there were houses there. I don’t know how thickly populated it was. It was not country.” He did not deny that the money he used on his Mexican jaunt came from the South Braintree loot, but to any queries about the details he gave the set reply: “I ain’t saying anything about it.”
After the holdup, he said, he and his gang had changed from the Buick to the Hudson in the Randolph Woods and from there driven over the back roads to Providence. Yet an hour and a quarter had elapsed from the time the getaway car left South Braintree until Reed saw it at the Matfield crossing. Desperate men in a high-powered car would certainly not have taken so long to cover twenty-two miles. Even allowing the car a modest average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, there was still a time-lag of nineteen minutes. The question remained whether the lag occurred in the Randolph Woods, as in Madeiros’ story, or in the Manley Woods a dozen miles south where the Buick was found.
The getaway car was seen at 3:12, before it reached the Randolph Woods, by the tobacco salesman, Walter Desmond. Seven or eight minutes later the Farmers spotted it on the other side of the woods moving at about twenty miles an hour. Although the distance between these points was less than two miles, there would not have been time enough for the bandits to drive a hundred yards into the underbrush, change cars and license plates, transfer the payroll boxes, and drive out again.
When the car passed Clark, the bakeryman, twenty minutes after the Farmers had seen it, he noticed the first two digits of the license plate 49783 that had been identified at South Braintree. Julia Kelliher, going home from school at Brockton Heights, had missed the first digit but scratched the last four in the sand by the road. If, as Madeiros claimed, the bandits had switched cars in Randolph, then they must have taken the license plates from the holdup car and attached them to the second car that Clark and Julia Kelliher noted.
From Brockton Heights to where the abandoned Buick was found is 3.2 miles, and it is 5.3 miles further to the Matfield crossing. When the Kelliher girl saw the oncoming car at 3:45, its speed of fifty miles an hour scared her. Half an hour later it arrived at the crossing. Yet even if the driver had slowed down to forty he should have made the distance in twelve minutes or less. By any reckoning there was a lag of almost twenty minutes in the running time of the getaway car between Brockton Heights and the Matfield crossing. It was a lag easily accounted for if the car shift had taken place in the Manley Woods. Nor was it merely a matter of time. Even the trail to the woods ran directly off the route that the driver must have taken to get to Matfield.
Madeiros’ confession just did not fit into the time sequence. His claim that the gang had driven back and forth twice from Providence to Boston before the holdup seemed as unlikely as his account of the getaway, for if the gang had spent so much time driving, no one in South Braintree would have had a glimpse of them or their cars that morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Certain other leads, neglected at the time, are tantalizing in their possibilities. One such concerns a professional car thief, William Dodson, who worked in a Needham garage from 1917 to 1919 and who in February 1921 was arrested in Providence after stealing Judge Thayer’s car in Worcester. When, a year later, Dodson’s wife sued him for divorce, she testified that in the spring of 1920 he had given her eight hundred of the thousand dollars he had received for driving the bandit car in South Braintree. Another concerns the Randolph Savings Bank holdup of November 17, 1919. Although the bandits were never identified, the robbery was apparently planned by four men and a woman in a Brockton lodging house. Afterward a phial of cocaine was found in their empty room. The plates of the car they used had been stolen from Hassam’s Garage in Needham. According to the Brockton Enterprise of five days after the South Braintree holdup, “Thomas Finnegan of Braintree picked up a small bottle said to have been thrown from the murder car as it sped away. This leads police to believe that dope played a part in the crime?” Needham again crops up in the suspicion that the never-traced South Braintree payroll money may have been hidden there. Two days after the holdup, Fred Lyons passed a car that had stopped in the middle of an isolated road near the Working Boys’ Home. A short, slightly built man was walking up and down beside the car as Lyons drove by. Then, as Lyons continued, the other car started up and followed him a mile to his home. There it turned around and drove away. Next morning Lyons notified the police. They found a freshly dug hole about two feet deep in a clump of brush not far from where the strange car had stopped. After digging down three more feet they struck rock. Several weeks later it was discovered that someone had dug the hole several feet deeper, removing two boulders to uncover a shelf of rock with a pocket scooped out under it large enough to hold a suitcase.
[16] It may have been the mother rather than the son who saw the car go by, but Driver then had a good position with United Fruit Company and obviously did not want to become involved in a notorious case, especially after his family’s embarrassing experience with Weeks.
[17] In his book The Untried Case Ehrmann maintained that there was no link between Sacco and Vanzetti and the South Braintree holdup except for the negligible one that Sacco had worked a week at Rice & Hutchins in 1917. He was apparently not aware that their friend Coacci was working at Slater & Morrill until early in April 1920.
[18] Years later Ehrmann happened to meet his old classmate in the Pemberton Square Courthouse, and for some reason Ranney began to talk about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, speculating as to how he would have felt if he had been on the jury. “I think,” he told Ehrmann finally, “I should have considered the Commonwealth’s case not proven.”
[19] Kelley, in his affidavit, denied that any such conversation had taken place.
[20] Boda’s gun, examined by Chief Stewart at Coacci’s house, was a Spanish-type automatic. Stewart did not report the make.
[21] Joe had been moved from the Atlanta penitentiary after tipping off the Atlanta warden to an inmates’ drug-smuggling ring—for which he received a letter of commendation.