Tragedy in Dedham

The case of Sacco and Vanzetti, which began as the prosecution for a commonplace if brutal murder, developed gradually into one of the world’s great trials. In the end it was mu...

Walking up State Street a third of a century after the executions, on another August afternoon, I wondered again about the enigma of the case. The whole drama had been played ou...

Thursday mornings Shelley Neal, the South Braintree agent for the American Express Company, met the 9:18 local from Boston to pick up the payrolls of the Slater & Morrill and Wa...

The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to e...

A week after Stewart’s visit, Simon Johnson received a long-distance telephone call at his garage from Boda asking if the Overland was ready. Johnson told him it was. Boda said...

An introspective man, the sensitivity of his features concealed by prominent cheekbones and the drooping thatch of his ferocious mustache, Vanzetti was well known in North Plymo...

The first of the East Boston comrades to visit the Brockton police station was Professor Felice Guadagni, a graduate of the Institute of Naples and editor of the _Gazzetta del M...

A few days after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti their typesetter friend Aldino Felicani organized a defense committee among the East Boston anarchists. The seventeen members w...

Judge Thayer’s voice rasped as he looked down from the bench at the plump venireman from Brookline, the fourth in succession who had asked to be excused because he did not belie...

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-calib...

On July 5 Jerry McAnamey resumed his place within the bar enclosure. Attendance had fallen off in the last week, but on this Tuesday morning every seat was occupied in anticipat...

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 before Thompson and Hill entered the case Sacco went on a hunger strike. A year and a half had elapsed since his conviction, and he announced that he would continue to fast...

It is not unusual for a notable murder case to have several confessions as a by-product. Where these are false, they are either the notoriety-seeking of a psychopathic misfit or...

The sea-change decades of depression and war did little to alter the pattern of Joe Morelli’s life. On his return from Leavenworth he moved from Providence to the scarcely more...

After the flare-up in 1921, the Sacco-Vanzetti case smoldered obscurely for five years. Occasional sparks were thrown up, as when Ettor and Giovannitti returned to Boston in 192...

The state prison’s new electric plant went into use five days after New Year’s, when three young men known as the Carbarn Bandits were executed. Following executions the warden...

Not only in Europe but around the world—in Shanghai, Tokyo, Melbourne, Calcutta, Buenos Aires—the names Sacco and Vanzetti were by now familiar syllables and the image had becom...

Governor Fuller continued hearing witnesses until the end of July. Obviously he was not going to draw his own conclusions or even appear to have drawn them before taking his cue...

During the last hour before the executions Mary Donovan, Felicani, Gardner Jackson and his sister Edith, Ruth Hale, Jeannette Marks, and Joseph Moro waited in the inner office o...