“Some of the defense lawyers claimed it was,” I told him.
He cupped it in his hand. “The markings on the base do look somewhat different. Those scratches—it’s hard even to be sure if there are three of them. There’s so much muck on it you can’t really tell. They ought to clean them, but first of all they ought to make blood tests. Had you ever thought of that?”
I said I had not. He explained that it might still be possible to detect residual blood with proper tests and even to determine the blood type. Forty years were nothing. They could even blood-type mummies. If bullets I, II, and IV showed traces of blood when tested, while III showed none, it would be fairly conclusive that the mortal bullet was a substitute. If, on the other hand, all four showed blood, then it would be practically certain that all of them came from Berardelli’s body.
“Of course it’s possible that there won’t be any blood traces on any of the bullets,” said Collins.
I had thought that once the ballistics exhibits were back in the hands of the State Police, I should have no difficulty in having tests run on the bullets. When I went to see Commissioner Goguen, a gray, diminutive man, sharp-eyed as a chameleon, I soon learned otherwise. Instead of being grateful to me for recovering the material, he seemed aggrieved. “Why don’t you just forget the whole thing?” he asked me querulously. “I’m not going to allow any of your tests. No, sir, I don’t want any of that Sacco-Vanzetti business stirred up again.”
He wore a silver tie-pin engraved with the seal of Massachusetts, and in the buttonhole of his sharkskin suit I noticed the rosette of the Legion of Honor. Someone at the Globe told me he had been awarded it ex officio as president of L’Union St. Jean Baptiste d’Amérique, the largest French-Canadian fraternal-insurance association in the United States—from which he still received his salary while serving as Commissioner of Public Safety.
“No tests!” he announced, but a week after I had coaxed an editorial from the Herald, “Do Not Let Sleeping Bullets Lie,” he said I had quite misunderstood him. He would have no objection to tests made by properly qualified experts; he just did not want amateurs fooling with the exhibits. I thought my difficulties were over when I returned with the names of the honorary curator of the West Point Museum and of an internationally known hematologist. But I still could not get a straight answer from the commissioner. This time he said that before any tests could be made, he must first have permission from the attorney general’s office. Undoubtedly he thought this would not be forthcoming, but after a delay of several months I managed to turn up with it.
Goguen’s eyes darted at me as if I were a fly on the wall while he explained that he would have to consult with the members of his department. It was a consultation that took two more months. Then he told me that although he personally would be happy to allow such tests, his term of office was coming to a close and he did not want to commit his successor. The governor’s council, that archaic colonial survival, delayed month after month confirming the successor, and the gray little commissioner stayed on.
On my last visit to him, a year after the exhibits had been recovered, he had finally evolved what no doubt seemed to him the ideal politician’s formula—to say yes and to mean no. He now told me that if the American Academy of Forensic Sciences wanted to appoint a committee of experts to examine all the ballistics evidence, he would allow them to do so; but he could not allow any examination, even by experts, merely at the request of a private individual.
Not until Goguen was out of office did I finally get my permission. His successor, Frank Giles, raised no objections at all. A few weeks later Dr. William Boyd of the Boston University School of Medicine made the blood tests, although he said in advance he doubted whether after so many years and so much handling the bullets would still indicate anything. So it turned out. Dr. Boyd tested the four bullets taken from Berardelli’s body and the two taken from Parmenter. The result with all six was negative: no longer any trace of blood on any of them.