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.