One of the new discoveries claimed by the defense concerned the cap found by Berardelli’s body—the cap that the prosecution had tried to prove belonged to Sacco. Williams had pointed out the tear in the lining, implying that Sacco had made it by hanging his cap on a nail at the factory. It was a corroborative point mentioned several times during the trial and later by Judge Thayer in his ruling on the Madeiros motion.
Not until shortly before the Lowell Committee began its meetings was the point again raised. Then Tom O’Connor, combing South Braintree for new evidence, had the thought that he might pick up something from the now-retired Chief Gallivan. He found him weeding in his garden and quite willing to talk. The first thing they talked about was the cap Loring had picked up.
Gallivan said that the Saturday after the murder Fraher called him from Rice & Hutchins to say he had a cap found on the street after the murders. That evening Gallivan went to pick it up. The autumn before, he had been able to identify the remains of a man who had hanged himself in the Braintree woods by the name inked into the lining of the man’s cap. With that identification in mind, he ripped a hole in the lining of the cap Fraher gave him. Finding neither name nor marks, he tossed the cap under the seat of his car. There it stayed for a week or two until John Scott of the State Police asked him for it.
For O’Connor the tear in the cap seemed a tear in the very fabric of the prosecution’s case. He gave his information to Thompson, and Gallivan was summoned before the Lowell Committee. The ex-chief readily admitted that there was no hole in the cap’s lining before he got his hands on it, and said he told Scott he himself had made the tear. Tampering with evidence was a concept alien to his naïve mind; he still could see nothing wrong in what he had done. Katzmann, when the tear in the cap was brought to his attention, insisted that this was the first time he had ever heard of it—that if he had known about it during the trial, he would have explained it to the jury. Although Thompson argued that an important piece of evidence relied on by the prosecution had now turned out to be false, and that this alone should be sufficient grounds for a new trial or for clemency, the committee members did not appear impressed.
The confidentially verbose Dr. Hamilton again came from Auburn to defend his ballistics theses before the committee and to repeat his conversation with the conscience-stricken Proctor. Whether or not the committee had read the Dedham file on Hamilton, Ranney obviously had, for he ticked off the ex-druggist’s extraordinary expertise and ended with a reference to the Stielow case that made Hamilton jump. Major Goddard’s apparently definitive report had been read, and the committee was also much more aware than the jury had been that the six obsolete Winchester bullets found on Sacco were similar to Bullet III.
Thompson now produced Wilbur Turner, a self-designated criminologist, who had just examined the four Berardelli bullets at Dedham and found “a tremendous difference” between the markings on the base of Bullet III and the others, “as though they were made with a different tool or scratched with a different instrument.” And Thompson spelled out for the record his bitter conviction that Captain Proctor had substituted a fake bullet test-fired from Sacco’s gun for the genuine bullet taken by Dr. Magrath from Berardelli’s body.
The hot days slipped by, the old autocrat met his two colleagues with austere condescension each morning, and the parade of witnesses continued. Lowell felt—he would feel this way for the rest of his life—that he was performing a disagreeable civic duty because such was the obligation of a Lowell. In essence the committee bearing his name was conducting a second trial, but it had without his conscious awareness become a trial in which the Commonwealth was the defendant. What the Lowell Committee was taking on itself to decide was not whether Sacco and Vanzetti had had a fair trial and were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, but whether the presumably innocent Commonwealth had beyond a reasonable doubt erred. In the beginning Thompson and Ehrmann, as Harvard graduates, had pinned their hopes on Lowell, but after the Guadagni-Bosco episode Lowell began to seem more the challenger than the judge. The two lawyers had the uneasy feeling that evidence and argument were becoming useless, and even considered whether or not they should boycott the hearings.
The doom of our clients seemed as inevitable as that of Socrates [Ehrmann wrote afterward], and we were unwilling to continue in the farce of fair treatment. We were diverted from this course, however, by two outstanding jurists [Dean Pound and Professor Frankfurter], who inspired us with some semblance of hope. Theirs was perhaps the greater wisdom, since, had we withdrawn, it would have been said that we had lost faith in the cause of our clients.
By Saturday, July 23, the committee members had run through their witnesses, from Cox the paymaster to Rosen the peddler, Gould, the Hayes and Kennedy girls—everyone they thought might add anything new to the case. Lincoln Wadsworth, still working for Iver Johnson, and afraid that his Dedham testimony had been misinterpreted, told the committee that although the revolver found on Vanzetti might have been Berardelli’s, “there are thousands of times more chances that it was not than that it was.”