I remembered that Vanzetti in his speech to the court had said that no human tongue could say what he and Sacco had suffered in seven years’ imprisonment. Yet if what Joe had just told me was so, he had suffered over four times as long, unknown, inarticulate, without friends and partisans to speak for him, without the satisfaction of a well-advertised martyrdom, and yet no tongue could truly say—not even his own—what he had suffered.
“Would you be willing to trust that to a lie detector, too, whether or not you killed the policeman?”
“Yes,” he said simply. We continued to the bottom of the stairs. Then at the door he held out his maimed hand to me and smiled slightly.
On January 30, 1961, John Conrad, an expert with many years of experience in operating the polygraph lie detector, conducted an examination on Joe Sammarco to verify the truthfulness of the answers to the following questions:
Q. Were you ever in a holdup attempt in Bridgewater with Doggy Bruno, Guinea Oates, and Frank Silva?
A. No.
Q. Were you ever in a car with Bruno and Oates?
A. No.
Q. Did you ever tell Jimmy Mede at Charlestown that you had participated in the Bridgewater holdup?