When Bosco remained adamant, Lowell ordered him to bring in the files of La Notizia for April and May 1920. Next morning Bosco and a revived Guadagni appeared with the paper of April 16, 1920. There on the front page was the vindicating notice:
Yesterday the Franciscan Fathers of North Bennett Street gave a luncheon in honor of the new Commandante Williams, editor of the Boston Evening Transcript.
Lowell sent the Italians out of the room and put a telephone call through to Williams. This time the Transcript editor recalled the earlier luncheon. Lowell turned to the stenographer, who had begun to record the conversation, and told him not to take down “colloquies.” He summoned Bosco and Guadagni back, shook hands with them, told them he believed them to be honest, and that he regretted his mistake.[27]
Thompson tried to impress on the committee that since the alibi had been reestablished, it must again be taken seriously. Lowell did not reply. Grant remarked that “You are just back where you were before.”
Lottie Tatillo, though presented to the committee a few days later as a new witness, could scarcely be considered new by either side. Both prosecution and defense had been aware of her and her story since the summer of 1920, when she made a statement to Brouillard and Stewart that on the morning of April 15 she had seen Sacco and Vanzetti in South Braintree.
Everyone in South Braintree knew Lottie by her maiden name of Packard. In 1901, when she was fourteen, she had gone to work in the stitching room of Rice & Hutchins. Pretty and wayward, full of wild stories, she would take the path down behind the millpond evenings with any good-looking young fellow from the factory. “Twelve ounces to the pound,” Frank Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, described her. “A nut. She is crazy and has been for years,” was Police Chief Gallivan’s opinion.
After Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Lottie told Jackson that she had seen Sacco in South Braintree the day of the murders and remembered he used to work in Rice & Hutchins. Later she elaborated on this story to John Shea, the local policeman, who passed her on to Stewart and Brouillard. She claimed she had recognized Sacco’s picture in the paper after his arrest because she had known him in 1915; when he was working in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins. On the morning of April 15 on her way to lunch she had passed him on Pearl Street standing near a shiny Buick touring car. She noticed him bite his lip and then all of a sudden it came back to her that he was the fellow named Sacco who used to work in the factory as a laster. She would never forget him because once in a temper he had thrown a last across the room at a boy and it had struck her in the foot.
If Lottie’s story was true, she would stand out as the most important witness of the murder day, the only one who had known Sacco previously and had then seen him at the scene of the crime. And if she had told her story to Jackson or Shea the day after the holdup, when no one in South Braintree had even suspected Sacco, that would indeed have made an almost watertight case for the prosecution. But Lottie had said nothing, nothing to Carlos Goodridge or anyone else, until after Sacco and Vanzetti had been arrested and their pictures had appeared in the paper. Stewart could find no record of Sacco’s ever having worked at Rice & Hutchins. It is of course possible that Lottie had seen Sacco during the week or so he worked in the factory under the name of Mosmacotelli in October 1917, and if before the arrests she had identified the man she had seen in the stitching room then with the man she claimed she saw standing by the Buick on April 15, 1920, this would have come close to being conclusive. Even after the arrests such an identification from a more stable person might have carried weight. But, as LaBrecque, the Quincy reporter, later explained to the committee, Lottie would tell one story one night and another the next and make so many irresponsible statements there was no use believing her. Stewart and Brouillard had long ago made the same discovery. Whenever they tried to check up on her account, she would take each question as an insult, denouncing both them and Sacco and Vanzetti incoherently. Finally Stewart gave up. “A blister,” he decided, as he struck her off his list of witnesses.
In the autumn of 1920 Moore had got wind of Lottie’s potentially dangerous testimony and sent down a Joseph Mina from East Boston to see what he could find out about her. Mirra, under the name of Joseph Meyers, got himself a job as a vamper in the finishing room of Rice & Hutchins and found it easy enough to strike up an acquaintance with the accommodating Lottie. He made several dates with her, taking her to the pictures at Gordon’s Olympia in Boston and to the amusement park at Revere Beach. Each time he took her out he tried to pump her about Sacco and Vanzetti. One night when he took her to his house in East Boston for supper and felt he had broken the ice sufficiently, he asked her if she would tell what she knew to a lawyer friend of his. She agreed, and the two of them went to Moore’s Tremont Row office.
Moore and several others were waiting with a stenographer when Lottie and Mirra arrived. Lottie was voluble. She again said that she had known Sacco in 1915. The morning of the murders when she passed him on Pearl Street he was standing near the Buick wearing a derby,[28] and looking as if he were in a hurry. Vanzetti, whom she had never seen before, was standing on the other side of the street and called across to Sacco as she passed: “I wish you would hurry up and get this over. I have an appointment at 3:30 this afternoon in Providence to dig clams.” After Sacco was arrested she said she had seen his picture and asked the other girls in the factory: “What has Sacco done?” They told her he was being held for murder.