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.