Perhaps the most crucial testimony offered in the trial, the deciding factor—if John Dever is to be believed—was the evidence of the guns and the bullets. If, as Moore was well aware, it could be proved beyond a doubt that the mortal bullet found in Berardelli’s body had not been fired from Sacco’s automatic, the keystone of the Commonwealth’s case would be demolished. In February 1923, with this in mind, he engaged Dr. Albert Hamilton, a New York expert who had testified in 165 homicide cases, to prepare the fifth supplementary motion, the Hamilton-Proctor motion.
Hamilton came into the case through Frank Sibley, who happened to meet him while riding on the train from Portland, Maine, to Boston. Hamilton, an authoritative little man with a convincing air, told Sibley that if he had been a witness at Dedham he could have proved quickly and conclusively whether or not Sacco’s pistol had fired the mortal bullet. Once back in Boston Sibley recommended Hamilton enthusiastically to Moore. The lawyer immediately wrote Hamilton to ask what he would charge for coming to Boston. Without bothering to reply, Hamilton confidently took the next train. In their first interview Moore told Hamilton he was vitally concerned in learning the answers to four fundamental questions: Had the hammer of the Vanzetti revolver been replaced by a new hammer? Were one or more of the shells that Fraher had picked up fired in the Sacco pistol? Had Bullet III been fired from the Sacco pistol? Was the mortal bullet discharged from a cartridge of the same date of manufacture as any of the cartridges found on Sacco when he was arrested? Hamilton agreed to make the investigation and determine the four answers.
Hamilton was an unlucky choice. Moore did not suspect that his doctorate was self-awarded. By trade a druggist and concocter of patent medicines in Auburn, New York, Hamilton had developed expertness as a second career, advertising himself as a “micro-chemical investigator.” His avocation became his calling. In 1908, in a publicity pamphlet entitled “That Man from Auburn,” he described himself as a qualified expert in chemistry, microscopy, handwriting, ink analysis, typewriting, photography, fingerprints, toxicology, gunshot wounds, guns and cartridges, bullet identification, gunpowder, nitroglycerine, dynamite, high explosives, blood and other stains, causes of death, embalming, and anatomy. Unknown to Moore, he had earlier written to Judge Thayer claiming that he knew a method of examining the Sacco-Vanzetti ballistics exhibit that would reveal the truth. He had received no reply. Men who had worked with Hamilton in the past did not recommend him. The Auburn coroner said that his reputation for truth was bad. The assistant district attorney of Monroe County considered him “a professional expert ... whose testimony should not be accepted in any court of record, and should receive no credence at the hands of a judge or jury.”
Much of Hamilton’s clouded reputation in New York stemmed from the murder trial of Charles Stielow who, in 1915, was accused of shooting Charles Phelps and his housekeeper in West Shelby. Hamilton had appeared for the prosecution. After tests and a minute examination of Stielow’s revolver and of the three bullets taken from Phelps’ body and the one from that of his housekeeper, he testified that only Stielow’s revolver could have fired the bullets. Principally because of this testimony Stielow was found guilty and sentenced to death. Later he was proved to be innocent and pardoned. In a post-trial review of the evidence Max Poser, an expert in applied optics with the Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, demonstrated that the bullets taken from the bodies had not come from the Stielow revolver. “The opinion expressed by the expert Hamilton in his evidence at the trial,” Poser concluded, “was worthless.” The setback, however, did not seem to hamper Hamilton’s career.
It did not take Hamilton long, after inspecting the Sacco-Vanzetti exhibits, to come to his conclusions. In the motion, filed on April 30, 1923, he claimed that by using a Bausch & Lomb compound microscope he was able to ascertain discrepancies between the markings on the test bullets from Sacco’s pistol and the markings on Bullet III. According to his measurements the land and groove widths in the barrel of Sacco’s Colt agreed with the land and groove widths on the test bullets but not with the mortal bullet. He also found that a microscopic examination of the Fraher shells eliminated the possibility of any one of them having been fired in the Colt. Because of a difference in the cannelures, he contended that Bullet III was not manufactured at the same time as the six Winchester cartridges found on Sacco. Augustus Gill, Professor of Technical Chemical Analysis at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had been engaged to assist Hamilton. His tabulations, made under different conditions, varied somewhat from Hamilton’s. Nevertheless, he was convinced from his own measurements “that the so-called mortal bullet never passed through the Sacco gun.” As for Vanzetti’s revolver, Hamilton maintained that it had not been fitted with a new hammer, because an essential screw did not show marks of having been removed.
Captain Van Amburgh, in an affidavit for the Commonwealth, became much more positive than he had been at the trial. He now used a more powerful microscope and in addition he had had comparative photographs taken of Bullet III and one of the test bullets. He offered twelve pictures of each bullet in which the lands and grooves were separately photographed so that the enlarged pictures could be compared. “The facts which I have found from my entire investigation,” he asserted, “are so clear that, in my opinion, they amount to proof. I am absolutely certain that the Fraher Shell W was fired in the Sacco pistol. I am also positive that the mortal bullet was fired in the Sacco pistol.” His findings were confirmed by Merton Robinson, a ballistics engineer for the Winchester Arms Company. Robinson not only maintained that Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s pistol, but rejected Hamilton’s argument that the mortal bullet and those found on Sacco were of a different date of manufacture. As for Hamilton’s photographic evidence to prove that the hammer in Vanzetti’s revolver had not been replaced, it would have been quite possible, Robinson asserted, for an expert repairman to have inserted a new screw, or to have removed and replaced the old one, without leaving marks on the screw head.
On March 8, 1923, after much persuasion on the part of the McAnarney brothers, William Thompson agreed to enter the case for the limited purpose of arguing the motions for a new trial. He had been hesitant about becoming involved, but, ironically enough, it was Katzmann’s attack on the integrity and qualifications of Dr. Hamilton that finally persuaded him.
Thompson knew that his entering this by-now notorious case would arouse a great deal of hostility in State Street legal circles, and he persuaded his friend of many years, Arthur Dehon Hill, to come in with him so that, as he explained, he would have an associate he could talk with more frankly than he could with Moore. Hill, a lawyer who had once been corporation counsel of the City of Boston, was a more integral State Street figure than Thompson, who—like Judge Thayer—had been brought up in Worcester and was a Bostonian merely by attrition. Although fortuitously born in Paris, Hill was an inbred Bostonian whose perspective was limited by the familiar triangle of Beacon Hill, the Harvard Yard, and the North Shore. Like so many Boston lawyers who moved securely in their dimly lit world of irrevocable trusts, he was cadaverous—as if his blood stream had by some subtle osmosis absorbed the dried leather of a century’s Massachusetts Reports. Even as a Harvard undergraduate he looked as if he had never been young. Yet this secure, aloof lawyer who appeared so typical of his caste was not wholly typical. There was something more to him, a quality of fiat justitia that went beyond Beacon Hill. In the 1912 Bull Moose campaign he had come out for Theodore Roosevelt, a rejection of the Boston norm. When Thompson first asked him to enter the Sacco-Vanzetti case, he was reluctant. Although he had a poor opinion of the garrulous Thayer he thought well of Katzmann, whom he had known for a number of years.