I trust you will agree that these important objects should be placed in our vaults for all time where they will be safe from opportunists as well as enemies.
The ample facilities of the State Police Laboratory will be utilized to obtain a photographic record in the most graphic form of each of the exhibits. The work contemplated will constitute an important addition to the record in this great case.
Yet when I asked to examine these “important objects” thirty-three years later, they were nowhere to be found. I tried first at the clerk of court’s office in Dedham. The clerk, Willis Neal, a nephew of the South Braintree express agent, said that from time to time someone would drop in to ask about the exhibits, but that he had never been able to locate them. He admitted he had never looked very hard. Together we went down to the storage files in the basement and spent several dusty hours going through the records. Finally he found a 1927 memorandum that the guns and bullets had been forwarded to the Lowell Committee.
I asked about them at the State Police ballistics laboratory on Commonwealth Avenue. Lieutenant John Collins, in charge there, was interested in the case, in fact had a private file on it that he had put together himself, but he had no idea what could have become of the exhibits.
I wrote to Governor Foster Furcolo about the missing exhibits, explaining my belief that they had never been tested properly and might still have much to reveal. After several weeks I received a reply routed from the governor’s office to some subordinate of the attorney general, who informed me that “we have no record in this office of ever having had the exhibits or as to any disposition of them after they were viewed by the Lowell Committee.” On reading this I again wrote to Governor Furcolo to say that I did not think this was good enough and that someone in the State House should look a little harder. I received no reply.
By chance I came on the trail of the missing exhibits when I happened to be in the Boston police headquarters talking to one of the men in the laboratory there.
“Why,” he said, “Van Amburgh’s son has those things. I thought everyone round knew. They were in the State Police lab for years, and then one of the Van Amburghs—I don’t know whether it was the old man or the son—took them away with him when he retired. That’s where they are. Young Van Amburgh has them down at Kingston.”
I wrote Van Amburgh twice, received no reply, and finally telephoned him to ask if he had possession of the exhibits in the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
“I have a lot of things around here,” he said.
“But do you or do you not have the pistols and the bullets that were examined by the Lowell Committee?”