Even Barney Monterios managed to forget his old grudge long enough to visit Madeiros at Dedham, bringing Mae with him. Madeiros again complained to them that he had been double-crossed on the South Braintree job, and insisted that Sacco and Vanzetti had had nothing to do with it. As Mae later related in an affidavit, she asked Madeiros:
“Is it really true, the statement you made about the South Braintree murders, and were you really in it?” and he said, “Yes, it is the truth, I was in it.” He didn’t give me any more particulars. He said that he would like to save Sacco and Vanzetti because he knew they were perfectly innocent, and he felt sorry for Sacco because he had seen his wife and two children go by, but he said he hated to bring others into it where there were more than two; and he said “If I cannot save Sacco and Vanzetti by my own confession, why should I bring four or five others into it?” I said “It is an awful thing to see two innocent men lose their lives and the guilty escape.” He said, “Yes I know it.”
Each side in this battle of paper used its affidavits like pieces on a chessboard. On the whole, Thompson played a more skillful game. But it was a game, as he realized, in which a checkmate was not possible. Finally a measure of sense was brought into the proceedings when Ranney proposed that they take a joint deposition from Madeiros.
On June 28 Thompson, Ehrmann, Ranney, and Ferrari and Fleming of the state police spent the day at Dedham interviewing the convicted Portuguese. Madeiros was brought to the sheriff’s office in his blue prison denims, his rheumy eyes full of challenge.
As he had before, but in more detail, he told of taking part in the South Braintree holdup. He still declined to give the real names of the men who had been in the car with him, but he admitted that he had known them in Providence and said they had been in a lot of jobs there robbing freight cars. When Thompson showed him photographs of Joe, Patsy, and Fred Morelli he refused “for private reasons” to say whether he recognized them. He also refused to identify Bibber Barone and Jimmy Weeks, although finally he picked out the latter, saying “It doesn’t make much difference. It is Weeks, I guess.”
He stuck to his story that the payroll money had been in a black bag. There should, he thought, have been over four thousand dollars apiece in the division of the payroll, but he would not say directly whether he had considered himself double-crossed. Indirectly, he agreed that he did not feel he had been used right. He admitted that he had known Steve the Pole, but would not say whether he had ever mentioned the South Braintree holdup to him. He also admitted that he had confronted Bibber Barone in the yard of the Bluebird Inn when they quarreled about Tessie. However, he refused to tell where he had met Bibber or if Bibber had ever double-crossed him.
Ranney, cross-examining, asked Madeiros if it was true, as his mother had sworn, that when she visited him he had told her: “You think I am tough because I am in this case, but there is a man in here for five years who killed two men.” Madeiros could not remember saying any such thing. It was Ranney’s contention that Madeiros had made up his confession out of whole cloth after reading the Defense Committee’s financial report, that he was hoping to tap some of this money for his own defense and that he knew nothing about the South Braintree crime beyond the casual gossip he had picked up. The assistant district attorney kept trying to pin Madeiros down. What kind of a place was South Braintree? Had he seen any factories? Was there a water tank? A railroad crossing? Madeiros did not recall any of these things, nor any stores or excavations. All he remembered was the car going up the slope after the shooting and that “there were houses there. I don’t know how thickly populated it was. It was not country.” He did not deny that the money he used on his Mexican jaunt came from the South Braintree loot, but to any queries about the details he gave the set reply: “I ain’t saying anything about it.”
After the holdup, he said, he and his gang had changed from the Buick to the Hudson in the Randolph Woods and from there driven over the back roads to Providence. Yet an hour and a quarter had elapsed from the time the getaway car left South Braintree until Reed saw it at the Matfield crossing. Desperate men in a high-powered car would certainly not have taken so long to cover twenty-two miles. Even allowing the car a modest average speed of twenty-five miles an hour, there was still a time-lag of nineteen minutes. The question remained whether the lag occurred in the Randolph Woods, as in Madeiros’ story, or in the Manley Woods a dozen miles south where the Buick was found.
The getaway car was seen at 3:12, before it reached the Randolph Woods, by the tobacco salesman, Walter Desmond. Seven or eight minutes later the Farmers spotted it on the other side of the woods moving at about twenty miles an hour. Although the distance between these points was less than two miles, there would not have been time enough for the bandits to drive a hundred yards into the underbrush, change cars and license plates, transfer the payroll boxes, and drive out again.
When the car passed Clark, the bakeryman, twenty minutes after the Farmers had seen it, he noticed the first two digits of the license plate 49783 that had been identified at South Braintree. Julia Kelliher, going home from school at Brockton Heights, had missed the first digit but scratched the last four in the sand by the road. If, as Madeiros claimed, the bandits had switched cars in Randolph, then they must have taken the license plates from the holdup car and attached them to the second car that Clark and Julia Kelliher noted.