Lottie told Moore she had informed Shea, the day after the crime, that one of the men by the car was the one who had thrown the last at her. But, she told Moore, she did not want to testify in court. She had not come to ask him for money, but she saw no way of avoiding going on the stand except to leave the state for a while. She continued, according to the stenographic record, “I am pretty sure that Mr. Sacco was the man who done the murder. It is his wife that holds me back. I think she needs him.... I’ll tell you the truth. I am not a girl crazy for money or anything like that.”
“How much are you willing to suggest that you want?” Moore asked her finally.
“I don’t know,” she told him calculatingly. “I just came to help you on the defense case.”
Lottie’s story as she presented it to the Lowell Committee had altered singularly since that November evening, seven years earlier, at Tremont Row. Whenever Thompson challenged her, she stormed at him until her voice rang down the corridors. “I don’t remember,” she replied at one point to a question of Lowell’s, “my head is too full of music and things like that, to remember.” She now insisted that Sacco had worked for Rice & Hutchins in 1908 at the time of a strike—it was then and only then she had known him. That was the time when he had struck her with the last, and she had thought to herself: “That man will do something before he dies.” She denied ever having told Moore she had known Sacco in 1915, or that when she saw him on the street in 1920 he was wearing a derby. He was, she told Lowell, bareheaded. When Lowell first asked her whether she had seen Sacco on April 15 she replied: “I don’t say I saw him. I will never say I saw him, and I don’t think it was him now.” A few minutes later, however, she revived her story of seeing him by the car with Vanzetti across the street talking about clams, this time with Parmenter, the paymaster, standing in the background. After she came back from lunch she had told Frank Jackson she had seen Sacco. She did not tell Shea about this until after the men’s arrest.
When Thompson produced her 1920 statement that she had told Shea about Sacco the day after the crime, she raged: “No, I did not tell it to John Shea. How many times do you want me to answer that question? I will tell the truth at the Divine bar of Justice, and that has got more power than you have got. You have got a witness here that you cannot make waver.”
Judge Grant, trying to calm her, brought her a glass of water and accidentally spilled some down her back. Still trying to be helpful, he suggested she might have lunch now. “I don’t want any lunch,” she snapped, glaring at Thompson. “I have got enough lunch listening to this man here, he’s good enough lunch for anybody.”
When Thompson remarked that she had gone to Moore voluntarily, her voice rose to a shriek: “Who came to Moore voluntarily? You lie, I did not; I was brought to Moore, for Sacco and Vanzetti to do a dirty, rotten, nasty thing! I will make you prove your statement.”
She now insisted that Moore had offered her five hundred dollars to leave the state, an offer she had indignantly refused. Thompson sent her into another tantrum when he suggested she was trying to get money from Moore. When Lowell finally dismissed her, she left the room still spluttering.
A few days later Jackson, the Rice & Hutchins foreman, made his appearance in the council chamber. He admitted that Lottie had told him of seeing Sacco, but only after Sacco was in jail. Before his arrest she had never mentioned Sacco to anyone. Only afterward had she come out with her story of talking with him on the street the morning of April 15. Jackson had no memory of Sacco’s working in the factory, and there was no record of his having worked there.
Lottie, following her turbulent session with Thompson, swung round again a few hours later and told a sympathetic Post reporter that she was now convinced that the man she had seen was not Sacco and that she believed Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.