A week later the police of Norwalk, a dozen miles away, picked up a man who was wandering the streets at midnight in a suspicious manner. He was found to have a 32-caliber revolver in his pocket with four of the five chambers loaded and the other empty. He said his name was Harold Israel, that he had just come from Bridgeport, and that he was on his way to see his father in Philadelphia. Next morning he was given thirty days in the Bridgeport county jail for carrying a concealed weapon. Once there he was interrogated about the priest’s death, and several witnesses of the shooting were brought in to look him over.
The crucial evidence against Israel was the 32-caliber bullet removed from Father Dahme’s brain. Captain Van Amburgh, called in from the Remington Company, compared it with a test bullet fired through Israel’s gun and announced that both had been fired from the same weapon. This he said he had determined not only by his measurements but by the similarity of the bullets after he had made a strip photograph of each and superimposed one upon the other.
After a prolonged interrogation, Israel tangled himself in a web of conflicting statements and confessed that he had killed Father Dahme. When a detective asked what had become of the cartridge of the mortal bullet, Israel said it was in the toilet of his boarding house. The police found it there. With this evidence added to the confession, Israel’s trial and conviction seemed only a formality.
Homer S. Cummings, later Attorney General of the United States and then state’s attorney for Fairfield County, at first had no doubt of Israel’s guilt but gradually noticed flaws in the state’s case. First of all, Israel soon repudiated his confession, claiming that when he made it he had been questioned for so long that he was willing to confess anything to get a rest. Then Cummings discovered that after the police had left the boarding house, the landlady had found still another empty cartridge in the toilet. Both shells had been exploded by a dull firing pin. The pin of Israel’s revolver was sharp, and it turned out that a friend of his had sharpened it at his shop several weeks before the murder.
Cummings now spent some time with Van Amburgh examining the strip photographs of the bullets. As he testified at the preliminary hearing, Van Amburgh, in order to develop his argument, cut a slit in the photograph of the Dahme bullet. “Then,” said Cummings, “he inserts through that slit the strip picture of the recovered bullet, and pushing this up and down, finally reaches a place where he says the lines coincide. Well, I worked at that for two hours one day, and yesterday, in the presence of Captain Van Amburgh worked on it for more than an hour. It took Captain Van Amburgh fifteen minutes to find the point of juncture himself—well, say five minutes, it will be more conservative. Then a peculiar thing developed. I called his attention to it, and he had absolutely, so far as I could see, no answer to it. I asked him to put the photographs in the position which he claimed demonstrated his point, and he got them into that position. Then I said, ‘Now, lift up the flap and look and see what is under it,’ and I thought, somewhat reluctantly, the flap was lifted and on the under picture we saw a scene totally different from that which we saw on the upper picture. I asked him whether it was not perfectly logical to assume that if the two pictures had been superimposed—that is, if the other picture was transparent and placed over the other—that there ought not to be a continuous similarity in the surface appearance. He admitted that was logical, and I never could get a satisfactory explanation for the discrepancy.”
Cummings turned over the bullets and the photographs to five other experts from the Remington Company plus another from the New York Police Department. Their unanimous opinion was that there was no continuous similarity, that the mortal bullet had perceptible land and groove marks lacking in the test bullets, and that it could not have been fired through Israel’s gun. Following this testimony, Israel was released.
Van Amburgh’s Connecticut record apparently did not follow him north, for not long afterward he was appointed head of the newly formed ballistics laboratory of the Massachusetts Department of Public Safety.
Thompson had a way of striding into a courtroom with a confident ring of leather heels, as if he were taking over command on a parade square. That was how he struck Moore during the arguments on the supplementary motions. Moore, underneath his class-angled exterior, retained a sensitive—at times almost a sentimental—nature. He was hurt by being thrust aside by this corporation lawyer and by the supercilious Hill, who, even as he prided himself on doing his duty to his native state by defending two unpopular radicals, could remark “I do not like these people.”
In fact, Moore felt put upon. From his arrival in Boston he had transformed the case. At least a third of the defense money had come from sources he had tapped. He had brought in the American Civil Liberties Union, the International Labor Defense, the phalanx of Back Bay women headed by Mrs. Evans. Thanks to him the Cincinnati convention of the American Federation of Labor had passed a resolution demanding a new trial for Sacco and Vanzetti, “convicted by a biased jury under the instructions of a prejudiced judge.” And before the convention the delegates had never heard of the two Italians! At the next convention he would take care that they passed a stronger resolution. These things were his doing. If he had not managed to free the two men, he had at least managed to keep them alive for almost three years. He had brought them visitors, arranged for their English lessons, and encouraged them by letters and by visits, disregarding and excusing Sacco’s latent hostility. The reward for his efforts had been the sullen suspicions of the doctrinaire anarchists. They were always a problem to him. “The practical difficulty with such men as Felicani, Lopez and some of the others,” he complained in a letter, “is not that they do not want to help, but that in many cases they do not know how to help. They are not affiliated with either the American organized labor nor with the Italian labor movement.”