The three—Edward Heinlein, John Devereaux, and John McLaughlin—had held up the night cashier at the Waltham carbarn on October 4, 1925; while escaping, Devereaux had shot and killed an elderly night watchman who tried to stop them. They were caught the same night, and by next day the press had already labeled them the Carbarn Bandits. At their trial Devereaux admitted that he had fired the fatal shot but said he had meant to fire at the ground. He told the court that he did not see why his two friends should suffer for what he had done. Nevertheless, all three were found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. As faithful if erring Catholics they walked to the chair accompanied by a priest, and their last look was at a crucifix held before their eyes.
In the six months between their conviction and their execution, their fate caused more of a stir locally than did the postponed fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. All three had served in the Army during the war, and Devereaux had been wounded. They were Irish by descent, and whatever their faults, they had remained true to their church. The mothers of the three organized a Massachusetts Clemency Committee and presented the governor, Alvan Fuller, a petition of 120,000 names that included those of three ex-governors. Protest meetings were held all summer and autumn. In a desperate last appeal the mothers visited Fuller in his office and got down on their knees in front of him to pray for their sons’ lives. But the governor was adamant. As he had often publicly stated, he believed in the death penalty as a deterrent, in less sentimentality about murders, in modernization of the law, and more religion in life.
If Fuller had been a politician rather than a businessman he would not have hesitated about commuting the sentences, for no Massachusetts politician in his senses would have let three Irish-Catholic ex-servicemen go to the chair. To the astute it had long been clear that the descendants of the Famine immigrants, who had taken over Boston in 1902 with the election of Mayor John F. “Honey” Fitzgerald, would before long take over the Commonwealth. That Fuller’s belief in the salutary effects of capital punishment could overrule his concern for this powerful voting bloc would make it that much more difficult for him later to consider clemency for two anarchist atheist alien slackers. The execution of the Carbarn Bandits filled the Boston Irish with resentments that were transferred with accrued bitterness to Sacco and Vanzetti.
Fuller prided himself on not being a politician. His favorite maxim was Calvin Coolidge’s “More business in government, less government in business,” and he had forty million dollars to prove his point. Never had he bothered to conceal his contempt for the Republican bosses of Massachusetts with their well-established escalator system of advancement that he was rich enough to disregard. In fact, his contempt for them and his successful defiance of their candidates had made him seem outside the Commonwealth something of a La Guardia-type liberal. In 1912 he had broken with the Republican State Committee to support Theodore Roosevelt’s Bull Moose party. In 1916, again in disregard of the state committee, he had run for Congress as an independent, defeating the regular Republican candidate.
During two terms in Congress he distinguished himself chiefly by attacking abuses of the franking privilege and the mileage allowance. However, he did not hesitate to defy Massachusetts’ senior senator, Henry Cabot Lodge, by supporting the League of Nations. In 1920 he again frustrated the state Republican bosses by taking the nomination for lieutenant governor away from their designated candidate. He served the conventional two terms as lieutenant governor before defeating James Michael Curley for the governorship in 1924. In 1926 he was easily re-elected.
As he approached his fiftieth birthday he could take satisfaction in being both the leader of his state and the richest man in Massachusetts. His granite-faced neo-Renaissance mansion on the water side of Beacon Street occupied the site of two brownstone town houses that had belonged to Mrs. Jack Gardner. Old ladies might shrug their shoulders and whisper behind his back at the Longwood Cricket Club, but no one could deny him entree anywhere. The lean bicycle mechanic had become portly in middle age, his confident asymmetrical face plumping over his stiff collar. His lobeless ears clung close to his head, his thinning hair clung to his scalp, and he had curiously amber-tinted eyes that many found disconcerting. His mouth looked like a dollar sign set sideways. On the stubby little finger of his left hand with its moonless nail he wore a gold signet ring with the resurrected Fuller crest. When in an affable mood he used to say he would like to run a newspaper and teach Sunday school.
The unspoken image that fluttered in his mind during his final term as governor was the Republican National Convention of 1928 with its shimmering prospect of the Vice-Presidential nomination. It was not an impossible thought after all, for mousy Calvin Coolidge had managed it eight years before from the same governor’s chair on the strength of one of his copybook maxims pronounced during the Boston police strike: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.”
On January 27 and 28, 1927, in Boston’s Pemberton Square Courthouse, Thompson, assisted by Ehrmann, appeared before the Massachusetts Supreme Court to argue against Judge Thayer’s denial of the Madeiros motion. It was the coldest weather in two years, with a high wind curling up State Street and the fringes of the harbor beginning to freeze. The courtroom was almost empty as Thompson developed his thesis. Not until he mentioned Judge Thayer could one sense the restrained passion behind the quiet voice:
“I must refer to a thing I am almost ashamed to mention. The judge, having spent a page and a half of his decision in vituperation of myself, suggested that my belief in the innocence of these defendants was due to a mental disease. He also suggested that there had been fraud and deceit in the methods used in procuring this evidence.”