Part 9

A. Yes, sir.

The man whom Lewis Pelser had seen shoot Berardelli had been wearing a “dark green pair of pants and an army shirt, tucked up.” He would not swear that Sacco was the gunman but insisted that “he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He had written down the Buick’s license number but he had not seen anyone in the car. “I was too anxious to get away,” he said, “I was kind of scared myself.”

When Moore took over, he asked the witness whether he had been interviewed by a Mr. Reid on March 26th. Yes, he had, but he hadn’t told him everything he knew because “I didn’t know him well enough.” He admitted that he had told the investigator that he hadn’t seen the murderer because he had ducked under his workbench when the shooting started. But he insisted that he “didn’t exactly lie to Mr. Reid.” In fact, he hadn’t even told the District Attorney what he had seen that day until he took the stand. Moore’s voice was heavy with disbelief.

Q. You never talked to a living soul and told them what you intended to say on the witness stand today, and told them the truth, until you got on the witness stand.

A. Yes, sir.

Later, William Brenner, Peter McCullum and Dominic Constantino, who had been working with Pelser on the first floor of the Rice & Hutchins factory, testified for the defense that they had not seen the latter at the window when the shooting took place. According to the three men, everyone on the first floor had ducked under his bench when the gunshots had shattered the air. Constantino was sure that Pelser had not stood up until after the murders had occurred. He remembered that Pelser had told him that he had not been able to see any of the killers.

Mary Splaine, the Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who had picked Sacco out in the Brockton police station as the man she had seen leaning out of the Buick just after it roared across the Pearl Street crossing, identified him again. “He was a man,” she claimed, “that I should say was slightly taller than I am ... he was an active-looking man. I noted particularly the left hand was a good-sized hand, a hand that denoted strength.... He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt ... and the face was what we could call clear-cut, clean-cut face. The forehead was high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows, but the complexion was a white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” Evidently, years of poring over account books hadn’t interfered with the witness’ eyesight because this detailed observation had been the result of a three-second glance “from a distance of from 60 to 80 feet.”

When Moore reminded her that, at the preliminary examination at Quincy, she had said that she was not sure that Sacco was the man she had seen, Miss Splaine denied that she had ever made that statement. The next day, however, she indicated that perhaps she had indeed said that.

Q. Do you wish to change any part of your testimony that you made yesterday?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. What part of your testimony would you like to change at the present time?

A. That question and answer where you asked me if I possibly identified the man, and in Quincy I said I didn’t feel I would positively identify him. I said I didn’t say that yesterday, but on reflection that was the answer in Quincy.

In addition, she admitted that, after the shooting, she had identified a photograph which the police had shown her as the man she had observed leaning out of the car. She later learned that the man in the photograph had been in New York’s Sing Sing Prison on April 15th.

When Mr. McAnarney took over from Moore, he asked the witness whether she was sure that she had had enough time on the day of the murders to get a good look at the defendant. “Yes, sir, I think I did,” was her answer. The lawyer shook his head. Hadn’t she testified in Quincy that “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.”? Yes, she had made that statement. But now, she was “positive he is the man, certain he is the man. I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” McAnarney pressed her.

Q. What did you mean when you said you didn’t have sufficient opportunity to observe him?

A. Well, he was passing on the street.

Q. That is the only opportunity you had?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. You have had no other opportunity but that fleeting glance?

A. The remembrance of that.

She hadn’t seen Sacco since the Quincy hearing on May 26, 1920, but, even without “any further examination of him,” she had changed her mind and now believed that he was the man.

Frances J. Devlin, another Slater & Morrill bookkeeper, who worked in the same room with Miss Splaine, had seen a man in the back of the Buick fire into the crowd that had developed around Parmenter and Berardelli. “He was a dark man,” she recalled, “and his forehead, the hair seemed to grow away from the temples, and it was brown-black and he had clear features, rather clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thick-set man, I should say.” She had identified Sacco at the Brockton Police Station as looking “very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.” She was far more definite when Katzmann asked her to look around the courtroom and “see if you see that man.” She pointed to the steel cage in which the two defendants were sitting and said, “The man on the inner side as you go out.”

Q. The man who is smiling?

A. Yes, sir.

Q. That man you know is Sacco?

A. Yes, sir.

No, there had never been any doubt in her mind “at any time” that the defendant was the man she had seen.

Yet, a year earlier she had testified in Quincy that she couldn’t say “positively” that Sacco was the gunman she had witnessed. But she had a ready answer for the seeming conflict in her testimony. “At the time there I had in my own mind that he was the man, but on account of the immensity of the crime and everything, I hated to say right out and out. I knew he was the man and still I didn’t want to say knowing as I knew it would be a deliberate lie, according to my own mind, but still I hated to say right out and out, so I just put it that way.” She had also sworn in Quincy that short, stocky Sacco was “a man who seemed as though he was a big man to me.”

Victrola salesman Carlos E. Goodridge was certain that Sacco was the man who had waved a gun at him when the black Buick raced by Magazu’s pool parlor on lower Pearl Street. He remembered the defendant as “a dark complexioned fellow with dark hair and he had ... a kind of peculiar face, that came down pointed.” When McAnarney tried to find out whether Goodridge wasn’t having his own problems with the law, Judge Thayer intervened. “You can’t attack any witness’ credibility,” he observed, “except by showing a record of conviction.” The jury was never to learn that the salesman had recently pleaded guilty to larceny and had been placed on probation.

Goodridge’s testimony conflicted sharply with that of Harry Arrogani, a South Braintree barber. Five or six days after the murders, Goodridge had told the barber that he had seen “a man in the car but if I have got to say who the man was, I can’t say.” Peter Magazu, the owner of the pool room, said that Goodridge had described the man who had pointed the gun at him as a “young man with light hair, light complexion.” Andrew Manganio, Goodridge’s sales manager, later testified that his pool-playing employee had refused to identify the defendants in jail because he had been so frightened by the gun that “he could not possibly remember the faces.”

Drs. George B. Magrath and Nathaniel S. Hunting had conducted the autopsies on the two murdered men. Four bullets were found in Berardelli’s body and two in Parmenter’s. As each bullet was removed, the physicians had scratched a Roman numeral in its base. The one which had caused Berardelli’s death, a .32-caliber Winchester, was marked No. III. At the trial, Captain William H. Proctor, the ballistics expert for the Massachusetts State Police, testified that all but the No. III shell had been fired through a Savage automatic pistol.

When Sacco was searched at the Brockton police station, a “.32 Colt automatic,” which was to become Katzmann’s Exhibit 28, was found in his belt. Proctor said that he had conducted tests on the fatal bullet and the defendant’s gun. As a result of his investigation, he was prepared to say that No. III was “consistent with being fired by that pistol.” As for the other five bullets, his opinion was that they had not been fired from Sacco’s Colt.

Captain Proctor’s opinion was shared by Charles Van Amburgh, an assistant in the ballistics department of the Remington Arms Company. He also had examined the fatal bullet and Sacco’s pistol.

Q. Have you formed an opinion ... as to whether or not No. III bullet was fired from that particular Colt automatic?

A. I have an opinion.

Q. And what is your opinion?

A. I am inclined to believe that it was fired, No. III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.

He had reached this conclusion after comparing the No. III bullet with six test shots which he and Captain Proctor had fired into oiled sawdust at Lowell, Massachusetts. “My measurement of rifling marks on No. III bullet as compared with the width of the impressions which I have taken of No. III or of this particular barrel,” he explained, “together with the measurements of the width or dimension of rifling marks in bullets recovered ... in Lowell, inclines me to the belief.” In addition, he had observed marks on No. III which he thought were caused by pitting in the groove of Sacco’s Colt.

James E. Burns, an expert marksman who had been employed by the United States Cartridge Company for more than thirty years, contradicted the prosecution’s experts. He, too, had examined the fatal bullet, and he was convinced that it had not been fired from Sacco’s gun.

Q. ... on what do you base that opinion?

A. On the 11 bullets that I examined that were fired from the Sacco gun. It doesn’t compare with them at all.

The Colt’s barrel had shown “a clean-cut lead all the way through.” There wasn’t a particle of doubt in his mind that No. III had not been fired “from a gun that had a clean lead.”

J. Henry Fitzgerald, the director of the testing room at the Colt Firearms Company, agreed with Burns that No. III “was not fired from the pistol given to me as Exhibit 28.” He had examined three bullets which had been fired by Mr. Van Amburgh at Lowell and, “the land marks of the No. III bullet do not correspond, in my best judgment, to bullets I have seen fired from this pistol.” Like Burns, he had been unable to find any distinctive pittings in the groove of Sacco’s gun.

The cap which Fred L. Loring had found lying near Berardelli’s body had been turned over to Thomas F. Fraher, Slater & Morrill’s superintendent. Katzmann called George T. Kelley, Sacco’s foreman at the 3-K Shoe Factory, who testified that the defendant often wore a cap to work. “There were times that he wore a cap,” Kelley said, “There was other times he wore a hat.” As to the former, he could remember only that it had been “a dark cap ... of a salt and pepper design.” He was unable to recall whether the cap he had seen hanging on a nail near Sacco’s workbench had earlaps or not.

When the defense objected to the introduction of the cap on the ground that it had not been sufficiently identified as belonging to Sacco, Judge Thayer ordered Mr. Williams to ask Kelley whether “that cap ... is like the one that was worn by the defendant Sacco?” “In color only.” the witness replied.

THAYER: That is not responsive to the question. I wish you would answer it, if you can.

KELLEY: I can’t answer it when I don’t know right down in my heart that that is the cap.

THAYER: In its general appearance, is it the same?

KELLEY: Yes, sir.

Thayer promptly admitted the cap into evidence as the Commonwealth’s Exhibit 29.

After Sacco’s arrest, Lieutenant Daniel T. Guerin had visited his home and found another cap in the kitchen. Later in the trial, when Kelley was recalled as a witness for the defense, he was shown this second cap. He said that he thought that the cap the policeman had found looked more like the one he had seen the defendant wearing than did Exhibit 29. On cross-examination, Katzmann asked him if he hadn’t told the police when they interviewed him about the cap that “I have an opinion ... but I don’t want to get a bomb up my ass.” Kelley admitted that he “might have said it when they drove off, but not at the time when they showed me the cap.”

Q. Was that in reference to the cap?

A. Yes.

Later in the trial, when Katzmann cross-examined Sacco, he asked him to put Exhibit 29 on his head. According to the _Boston Herald_, “It stuck on the top of his head and he turned with a satisfied air to let the jury see.” He then explained to the District Attorney that the cap was “too tight” to fit properly.

Q. You are sure of that?

A. I am pretty sure. I can feel it.

He denied that the cap was his and his wife subsequently testified that her husband “never wore caps with anything around for his ears, never, because he never liked it and because, besides that, never, he never wore them because he don’t look good in them, positively.”

Mrs. Simon Johnson said that, after her husband had gone to bed on May 5th, Boda had knocked on her front door and asked her whether he could pick up his Overland car. When she awakened her husband, he had told her to go next door to Mrs. Bartlett’s and telephone the police. She had walked over to her neighbor’s house and called Chief Stewart. Although there was no street light near her home, the area had been illuminated by the headlight of a motorcycle which she noticed was parked in the street. Two strange men who were standing in the vicinity of the vehicle, seemed to follow her when she left to make her call. Ten minutes later, when she was walking back from Mrs. Bartlett’s, she saw the same men who appeared to be “walking along” with her. She was sure that Sacco was one of the men who had tailed her that night.

When she had testified in the earlier trial of Vanzetti at Plymouth, Mrs. Johnson had not been so confident of her identification of the men who had followed her. Then she had been certain that she “did not know who they were or whether they were the same men or not.” Now, she was prepared to say that “one of them” was the same man.

Q. ... do you want to say that you recognized Sacco before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. I would know him if I saw him again.

Q. I submit it is not an answer to the question.

THE COURT. Can you answer it, Mrs. Johnson, by Yes or No?

A. Yes.

Q. Then by that I assume that you mean you did recognize him before you went into the Bartlett house?

A. Before I did, yes.

The witness’ husband told a somewhat different story. At no time, had either of the strange men been illuminated by the beams of the motorcycle’s light. While he had not watched his wife walk over to the Bartlett’s, he had seen her on the return trip. At that time, he was sure that, with the exception of Boda, all the strangers were standing near the cycle. He had told Boda that he couldn’t have the car that night because “there were no 1920 number plates on it.” The latter had replied that “I will send somebody for it tomorrow,” but no one had ever called for the car.

Michael J. Connolly and Earl J. Vaughan, two Brockton policemen, had arrested the defendants on the North Elm Street trolley later that evening. Connolly was the first officer to board the car. “... I went down through the car,” he said, “and when I got opposite the seat I stopped and I asked them where they came from. They said, ‘We went down to see a friend of mine.’ I said, ‘Who is your friend?’ He said ‘A man by the ---- they call him ‘Poppy.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I want you, you are under arrest.’”

According to Connolly, Vanzetti, who had been sitting on the seat nearest the window, put his hand in his hip pocket. The policeman had shouted, “Keep your hands out on your lap, or you will be sorry!” When the two defendants asked him why they were being arrested, he had told them that they were “suspicious characters.” Vaughan then boarded the car and Connolly ordered Vanzetti to stand up so that the latter could “fish” him. He himself gave Sacco “a slight going over ... did not go into his pockets.”

Q. Was anything found on either man at that time?

A. There was a revolver found on Vanzetti.

The two suspects were then transferred to a police car which was waiting alongside the tracks. Connolly “put Sacco and Vanzetti in the back seat ... and Officer Snow got in the back seat with them. I took the front seat with the driver, facing Sacco and Vanzetti.” During the trip to the Brockton station house, Connolly noticed that Sacco “reached his hand to put under his overcoat and I told him to keep his hands outside of his clothes and on his lap.” When he asked the defendant, “Have you got a gun there?,” the latter had replied, “No, I ain’t got no gun.” Merle A. Spear, the driver of the car, swore that he had heard this conversation and that Sacco had answered, “You need not be afraid of me.” Later that evening, a Colt revolver had been found in Sacco’s pocket.

Chief Stewart had arrived at the police station shortly after eleven o’clock that night. The two prisoners told him much the same story that they had related to Connolly. They insisted that they had gone to West Bridgewater to see a friend named Poppy but denied any knowledge of Boda or Orciani’s motorcycle. Sacco thought that they had left his house at 6:30 that day while Vanzetti was sure that they had started out three hours earlier. Sacco claimed that he had purchased his Colt in Hanover Street in Boston many months before his arrest.

On June 22nd, after fifty-nine witnesses had testified for the prosecution, Katzmann informed Judge Thayer that “We believe we have nothing further to offer ... the Commonwealth rests, if your Honor please.” Following Callahan’s opening statement, the defense promptly called Frank J. Burke, the glassblower who had watched the Buick race over the Pearl Street crossing after the murders. He had gotten a good look at its passengers and he was certain that neither defendant had been in the car. “I would say they were not,” he said. But on cross-examination, Katzmann succeeded in showing that the witness had such poor eyes that he had thought that Mr. Callahan’s Hudson in which he had been driven to the courthouse that very morning was a Buick.

Mrs. Barbara Liscomb, the Rice & Hutchins employee who had fainted when one of the gunmen pointed his pistol at her, “would always remember his face.” When she had been taken to the Brockton police station, she had been unable to identify either defendant.

Q. And you have looked at these men in the dock?

A. I have.

Q. Are either of the men in the dock the man you saw pointing the revolver at your window?

A. No, sir.

She was “positively sure” that she had never seen either Sacco or Vanzetti before.

Jennie Novelli, a nurse, who, some ten minutes before the shooting, had seen the Buick proceeding slowly up Pearl Street in the direction of the Rice & Hutchins plant, said the man who had been sitting next to the driver was not Sacco although she had previously told a detective that a photograph of the defendant “resembled” the man she had seen in the car. Albert Frantello insisted that the defendants were not the men he had noticed leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence before the murders. None of the laborers at the restaurant excavation or the railroad employees who had been repairing tracks at the Pearl Street crossing could say that they had seen Sacco or Vanzetti in the vicinity of the crime. In all, some two dozen eyewitnesses testified that they had not seen either defendant in South Braintree on April 15, 1920.

Vanzetti was the first of the two defendants to take the stand. As far as the day of the murder was concerned, he insisted, in broken English, that he had not left Plymouth. In the morning, he had been “selling fish from a cart” on Castle and Cherry Streets. Some time during the morning, he had asked Joseph Rosen, a peddler, to accompany him to the home of Mrs. Alphonsine Brini so that she could look at a piece of cloth which Rosen wanted to sell to him. Vanzetti thought that this had taken place “near one o’clock, about half past eleven, something like that, half past twelve, about one o’clock.”

After he had sold all his fish, the defendant had visited Melvin Corl, a friend of his, who was painting his boat. He had had a long conversation with Corl--about an hour and a half--during which time he had also talked to a boat builder by the name of Frank Jesse. Then he had gone home, changed his clothes, and eaten his supper. He could not remember what he had done after finishing his dinner.

On May 5th, he had accompanied Boda to the Johnson home in order to pick up the latter’s car which was to be used in collecting radical literature from the homes of some of his friends “in five or six places, five or six towns.” The mysterious death in New York, on May 3rd, of Andrea Salsedo, a radical with whom he had been associated for many years, had convinced him that he should “get the books and literature to put at some place and hide not to find by the police or the state.” He had not told the police about his plans for that night “because in that time there, there was the deportation and the reaction was more vivid than now and more mad than now.”

He readily admitted that he had lied to Stewart when the police chief had questioned him after his arrest. “I was afraid,” he said, “he went into the house of the people that they named and found some literature or paper and arrested the men ... I was scared to give the names and addresses of my friends as I knew that almost all of them have some books and some newspapers in their house by which the authorities take a reason for arresting them and deport them.” His fears had been aggravated by the fact that Officers Connolly and Vaughan had refused to tell him why he was being taken into custody.

Q. What did they say what you were arrested for?

A. They say, ‘Oh, you know, you know why.’ And when I try to sleep in the cell, there is no blanket, only the wood. Then we called for the blanket, because it was rather cool. They say, ‘Never mind, you catch warm by and by, and tomorrow morning we put you in a line in the hall between the chairs and we shoot you.’

In fact, during the night, one of his jailers had spit in his face and threatened him with a revolver.

Vanzetti also conceded that he had lied to Katzmann when the District Attorney had questioned him about the price he had paid for his revolver, the number of times he had visited Boston overnight, and his acquaintance with Boda. Again he based his reluctance to tell the truth on his desire to shield his friends. “I intend to not mention the name and house of my friends” he explained.

Joseph Rosen testified that he had sold Vanzetti several pieces of cloth at noon on April 15th. Mrs. Brini remembered that she had seen the defendant selling fish that morning and that he and Rosen had come to her house to get her opinion as to the worth of some swatches of material. Her daughter, LeFavre, had also seen the fish peddler on both occasions. At noon, Angel T. Guidobone, a rug worker, had purchased some codfish from Vanzetti. Melvin Corl recalled that the defendant had visited him when he was painting his boat, and Frank Jesse stated that he had talked to Vanzetti about an automobile while they were watching Corl at work.