On September 11 Moore presented a fourth supplementary motion, requesting a new trial because of additional facts discovered about the witness Lola Andrews, “a person whose testimony should not constitute the basis of a verdict of guilty on a charge of murder.”
Six months before the trial, when Moore had interviewed her in the Alhambra Block in Quincy and shown her pictures of Sacco and Vanzetti, she had been unable to identify them and had made a statement exonerating the defendants. On the witness stand she had claimed that this statement had been untruthfully reported. Now Moore, as he wrote to Upton Sinclair, had “wilted” her. She had signed an affidavit for him repudiating her court testimony and admitting that she had lied because the district attorney knew “many chapters of her private life that she could ill afford to have revealed.”
Her affidavit stated that some time before the trial Stewart and Brouillard had taken her to the Dedham jail, shown her Sacco, and asked if he was the man she had seen on April 15. She said she did not know. Later Assistant District Attorney Williams put the same question to her. She said she could not be positive. Williams then shook his finger in her face and told her, “You can put it stronger than that. I know you can.”
Her testimony in court had been “false and untrue.... She had never ... at any time or place or under any conditions and specifically on April 15, 1920, at South Braintree, seen said Nicola Sacco until she saw him in the Dedham County Jail.” Her false statements “were made under the intimidating influences of Michael E. Stewart, Albert L. Brouillard, Harold Williams and Frederick G. Katzmann.”
Like Pelser, Lola Andrews found herself overborne by any determined person who talked with her. In addition she had much to conceal. Her life in Quincy was in part known to the police. Recently there had been some business about a naval officer named Landers in her room, hushed up for the time but still rumor-heavy. When Moore found out that she had originally come from Gardiner, Maine, he sent Bert Carpenter there to see what he could learn. What Carpenter learned would have ruined her in any court.
She had been born Rachel Andrews, the by-product of an encounter between a Yankee farmer’s daughter and an itinerant Italian. A tow-path child brought up in a shanty settlement on the outskirts of the trim Kennebec town, she had scarcely passed adolescence when she married an ex-soldier returned from the Philippines, Mayhew Hassam, an alcoholic who used her cruelly. She had borne him one son. After the marriage ended she had stayed on in Gardiner across the street from the Soldiers’ Home, available and accommodating. In Augusta she had been convicted of lewd and lascivious conduct. Moving on to Massachusetts, she had left her son behind, sending money back for his board. At the time she testified in Dedham he was eighteen years old. What her life had been she did not ever want him to know. The boy was her weak spot—a spot Moore did not hesitate to exploit. He had been hard on Pelser, hard on Goodridge, he would be hard on her. A lawyer, to his mind, could not be delicate when men’s lives were at stake.
Lola Darroch brought young Hassam from Maine, hired a room for him in the seedy Hotel Essex opposite the South Station, and sent for the mother. The boy, though an unkempt rustic, had proved tractable and intelligent, accepting Moore’s version of the case and agreeing to try to persuade his mother to repudiate her courtroom testimony. Lola Andrews, brought in from Quincy, confronted her son while Moore told her that she had lied in Dedham and that it was now up to her to tell the truth. She wilted at once and began to cry. Moore spent the evening drafting an affidavit. When it was handed to her, her son begged her to sign. Moore showed her certain affidavits that Carpenter had collected in Gardiner, without, however, allowing her to read them. She signed.
Moore could indeed browbeat such witnesses as Pelser, Goodridge, and Lola Andrews. The difficulty was that when they were alone again they had second thoughts that generally took the form of a disclaiming letter to the district attorney. On January 9, 1923, Lola signed a counteraffidavit for District Attorney Katzmann and Assistant District Attorney Williams in which she claimed that Moore had used her boy to trap her and that she had not read the nine pages of the affidavit. She had not wanted to sign it.
I told them that if I put my name to that paper that they had already drawn up for me ... I could see it meant a terrible disgrace for me. They told me no, that I was doing the grandest thing a woman could do, and that by doing what they wanted me to do I would gain the respect and friendship of everyone, and that my boy would not be ashamed to look upon me as his mother, and the evidence they had brought with them from Maine would not be submitted to the court or to the eyes of anyone, not even to my son.... Mr. Moore took me over to a small desk and laid the paper in front of me and told me to sign it. I told him I would not, for I did not realize what I was doing.... They dipped the pen in the ink and tried to pass it into my hand.... All the time I was crying and asking them not to force me to sign it. My son then said, “Mother, I want you to sign that paper, for it means a whole lot to me.” I do not seem to remember much what happened after that, only that someone put the pen in my hand and told me to sign it, and asked my boy to come over to me and help me. My boy came over and put his arm around me and said, “Mother, sign this paper and have an end to all this trouble, for you did not recognize these men”—meaning Sacco and Vanzetti—“and you will only be doing a terrible wrong if you send those men to the chair.”
“I was like I was in a trance,” she later told Katzmann.