From Brockton Heights to where the abandoned Buick was found is 3.2 miles, and it is 5.3 miles further to the Matfield crossing. When the Kelliher girl saw the oncoming car at 3:45, its speed of fifty miles an hour scared her. Half an hour later it arrived at the crossing. Yet even if the driver had slowed down to forty he should have made the distance in twelve minutes or less. By any reckoning there was a lag of almost twenty minutes in the running time of the getaway car between Brockton Heights and the Matfield crossing. It was a lag easily accounted for if the car shift had taken place in the Manley Woods. Nor was it merely a matter of time. Even the trail to the woods ran directly off the route that the driver must have taken to get to Matfield.
Madeiros’ confession just did not fit into the time sequence. His claim that the gang had driven back and forth twice from Providence to Boston before the holdup seemed as unlikely as his account of the getaway, for if the gang had spent so much time driving, no one in South Braintree would have had a glimpse of them or their cars that morning.
FOOTNOTES:
[15] Certain other leads, neglected at the time, are tantalizing in their possibilities. One such concerns a professional car thief, William Dodson, who worked in a Needham garage from 1917 to 1919 and who in February 1921 was arrested in Providence after stealing Judge Thayer’s car in Worcester. When, a year later, Dodson’s wife sued him for divorce, she testified that in the spring of 1920 he had given her eight hundred of the thousand dollars he had received for driving the bandit car in South Braintree. Another concerns the Randolph Savings Bank holdup of November 17, 1919. Although the bandits were never identified, the robbery was apparently planned by four men and a woman in a Brockton lodging house. Afterward a phial of cocaine was found in their empty room. The plates of the car they used had been stolen from Hassam’s Garage in Needham. According to the Brockton Enterprise of five days after the South Braintree holdup, “Thomas Finnegan of Braintree picked up a small bottle said to have been thrown from the murder car as it sped away. This leads police to believe that dope played a part in the crime?” Needham again crops up in the suspicion that the never-traced South Braintree payroll money may have been hidden there. Two days after the holdup, Fred Lyons passed a car that had stopped in the middle of an isolated road near the Working Boys’ Home. A short, slightly built man was walking up and down beside the car as Lyons drove by. Then, as Lyons continued, the other car started up and followed him a mile to his home. There it turned around and drove away. Next morning Lyons notified the police. They found a freshly dug hole about two feet deep in a clump of brush not far from where the strange car had stopped. After digging down three more feet they struck rock. Several weeks later it was discovered that someone had dug the hole several feet deeper, removing two boulders to uncover a shelf of rock with a pocket scooped out under it large enough to hold a suitcase.
[16] It may have been the mother rather than the son who saw the car go by, but Driver then had a good position with United Fruit Company and obviously did not want to become involved in a notorious case, especially after his family’s embarrassing experience with Weeks.
[17] In his book The Untried Case Ehrmann maintained that there was no link between Sacco and Vanzetti and the South Braintree holdup except for the negligible one that Sacco had worked a week at Rice & Hutchins in 1917. He was apparently not aware that their friend Coacci was working at Slater & Morrill until early in April 1920.
[18] Years later Ehrmann happened to meet his old classmate in the Pemberton Square Courthouse, and for some reason Ranney began to talk about the Sacco-Vanzetti case, speculating as to how he would have felt if he had been on the jury. “I think,” he told Ehrmann finally, “I should have considered the Commonwealth’s case not proven.”
[19] Kelley, in his affidavit, denied that any such conversation had taken place.
[20] Boda’s gun, examined by Chief Stewart at Coacci’s house, was a Spanish-type automatic. Stewart did not report the make.
[21] Joe had been moved from the Atlanta penitentiary after tipping off the Atlanta warden to an inmates’ drug-smuggling ring—for which he received a letter of commendation.