Although the Madeiros confession was signed and ready in November 1925, Thompson did not make it public while his death-sentence appeal was pending, since both he and the district attorney felt that if it became known that Madeiros had admitted to a second murder the fact would damage him in any new trial. Then, too, Thompson was optimistic about the Massachusetts Supreme Court’s pending decision on the defense’s appeal from Judge Thayer’s denial of the supplementary motions—he had argued the appeal before Chief Justice Arthur Rugg in the Pemberton Square Court House through three bleak January days. Four months later, on May 12, 1926, the court ruled against the defense on all points.
Madeiros had better, if brief, luck. His conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court in March 1926, thus demonstrating to Judge Lummus and other whimsically inclined judges that the formula must not be tampered with. Madeiros went on trial again in May. During most of the proceedings he slumped in his chair with his feet on the rail and his eyes shut as if he were asleep. The jury took less than two hours to find him guilty.
On the second day of the Madeiros trial, Thompson drove down to Oak Street in Randolph to locate the house Madeiros had marked on his crude map and see if there was any trace of the boy called Thomas. He found the house more easily than he had expected. It was occupied by a Thomas Driver, who regretfully admitted knowing both Weeks and Madeiros. Weeks, in fact, had been arrested in the house, and the publicity that followed had caused the Drivers much humiliation.
For six months before the Wrentham holdup, Weeks with his wife and children had lived in a shack on Cedar Street a half-mile down the road. A friendly neighbor, he used to run small errands for the Drivers in his Ford, often gave a lift to young Tom, then in high school, and even promised to teach the boy how to drive.
Driver scarcely knew Madeiros in the brief time that the latter lived with Weeks, but shortly before their arrest he had begun to wonder if the pair might not be bootleggers. He could not say whether his son had seen the holdup car on the day of the South Braintree murders.
The boy himself was away at sea, working for the United Fruit Company. Thompson saw him later when he returned from his voyage. Young Driver told him that he had not personally seen the car go past but that his mother had, and that after she had read about the crime in the paper she thought the men must have been the South Braintree bandits.[16]
Thompson, faced with increasing demands on his time, found the added complications of the Madeiros confession too much for him. He needed an energetic young lawyer to devote all his time to investigating Madeiros’ story. In search of one he turned to Dean Roscoe Pound of the Harvard Law School. Pound mentioned Herbert Ehrmann, then in his thirties, a lawyer who had come to Boston from Louisville, Kentucky, via Harvard College and the Law School. Four years before, Pound and Felix Frankfurter had edited a survey, Criminal Justice in Cleveland, and Ehrmann had contributed a chapter on the city’s courts. It seemed to Pound that Ehrmann, with his Cleveland experience in investigating civic scandals, would be just the man to track down the intricacies of Madeiros and the Providence gang.
At the outset Ehrmann did not have the conviction he came to share later so burningly with Thompson that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent. When, on May 22, 1926, two days after Madeiros had been found guilty for the second time, he set out for Seekonk and Providence, he did not expect much.
The Bluebird Inn, on the shabby outskirts of Seekonk, had been closed by the police. It looked a traditional New England farmhouse gone to seed. A few chickens were wandering about the dusty front yard, and at the side an open kitchen door sagged on its hinges. Going up to the door, Ehrmann found a wrinkled Brava woman in a red bandana sitting just inside, plucking a fowl. She said she was Barney Monterios’ mother. When Ehrmann asked about her son, she slipped into the next room and returned with Mae Boice, who told him curtly that her husband was not at home. Ehrmann got nowhere with her until he mentioned that he had just talked with Madeiros. At the name the hard face beneath the brass hair softened and the voice was full of concern as she asked about the surly Portuguese. Did Ehrmann think it fair to execute a man who was not really sane? As she talked she led him out of the kitchen, across the dance floor, and past the piano to the dining alcove. He told her of Madeiros’ confession. At first she said it could not be true because on April 15, 1920, he had been in Mexico, but after thinking it over she agreed that he had not left New England until the following January. Mae remembered that he had said he had twenty-eight hundred dollars with him. Ehrmann knew that when Madeiros was arrested in June 1920 he had no money at all. Yet six months later and just out of the house of correction he had acquired a sum, it struck Ehrmann at once, equal to just about a fifth of the South Braintree payroll. That was all the Boston lawyer found out at the Bluebird Inn. Nevertheless, he felt he was on the track of something tangible.