First of all he persuaded Elias Field and Richard Evarts to join him as junior counsel. Then on the morning of August 5 he called a conference in his office of Frankfurter, Ehrmann, and Musmanno. It was a conference of desperation, as Hill, beneath his assured, impervious exterior, was well aware. So it was felt by everyone present except for the buoyant Musmanno. There were only a few legal maneuvers left, and time was running out like quicksilver from a broken thermometer. Hastily they evolved a program. They would file a motion in Dedham for a new trial and revocation of sentence on the grounds of Judge Thayer’s prejudice. They would request Chief Justice Hall of the Superior Court to assign a judge other than Thayer to hear the motion. They would petition Governor Fuller for a stay of execution. They would file a motion in the Supreme Court for a writ of error, a writ of habeas corpus, and a stay of execution.
Musmanno arrived next morning at the clerk of court’s office with a sheaf of affidavits from Mrs. Bernkopf, Mrs. Rantoul, Frank Sibley, George Crocker, Robert Benchley, Professor Richardson, and Chief Gallivan. He had also dug up a new witness of the South Braintree crime, Candido Di Bona, whose peculiar version of the event was that the driver of the Buick had been a gray-haired man, the two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins fence had been about eighteen years old, and that there had been a fourth man wearing a soldier’s uniform and carrying a rifle. Hill and Field, arguing on Thayer’s unsuitability, got nowhere at all with Chief Justice Hall, who retired into legal phraseology to observe that “precedent and established practice require that the said motions in the said cause should be heard by the judge who had presided at the original trial thereof.” He then directed that the motions should be heard before Judge Thayer on Monday, August 8.
Musmanno had more to think of than his affidavits as he drove to Dedham on that August Saturday, for the morning papers were splashed with accounts of a series of bombings that had wrecked four New York subway and elevated stations the night before. Between 11:17 and 11:37 tremendous explosions had occurred at Times Square, and on Fourth Avenue at Thirty-third, at Twenty-eighth and at Twenty-third streets, destroying surface kiosks, blowing sidewalks into the air, and shattering windows a hundred yards away. Only one person was killed, but numbers were injured. The same night the Emmanuel Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia was bombed, as was the house of the mayor of Baltimore. None of the bombers was ever discovered—in that respect the police kept their record unblemished.
Two days later bombs did heavy damage in Utica, New York. News came—undoubtedly exaggerated—of a wave of bombing overseas. Whether or not the bombings were the result of Governor Fuller’s decision, a renewal of the anarchist propaganda of the deed, most Americans thought that they were. That week Massachusetts businessmen took out two hundred million dollars’ worth of bomb and riot insurance. Boston police were placed on a bomb alert, all leaves and vacations were canceled, and the police commissioner ordered three hundred rapid-fire guns for the riot squad. Filene’s sent John Dever away on an indefinite paid vacation.
The full text of the Lowell Committee report was published in the Sunday papers of August 7. Those concerned with the case spent the better part of the day analyzing it. It was a curiously ambiguous document. In regard to Sacco it concluded:
The Committee are of the opinion that Sacco was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. In reaching this conclusion they are aware that it involves a disbelief in the evidence of his alibi at Boston, but in view of all the evidence they do not believe he was there that day.
As for Vanzetti:
The alibi ... is decidedly weak. One of the witnesses, Rosen, seems to the Committee to have been shown by the cross-examination to be lying at the trial; another, Mrs. Brini, had sworn to an alibi for him in the Bridgewater case, and two more witnesses did not seem certain of the date until they had talked it over.... Four persons testified that they had seen him.... His face is much more unusual and more easily remembered, than that of Sacco. On the whole, we are of the opinion that Vanzetti also was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.