When, just before the ballistics testimony at the trial, Van Amburgh, Proctor, and the defense expert Burns test-fired Sacco’s pistol, none of them was able to get hold of any obsolete Winchester cartridges similar to Bullet III. Proctor fired three Winchesters of the new type without the cannelure; Van Amburgh fired three Peters; Burns fired eight U.S. cartridges. None of these could have been used as a substitute for the obsolete Winchester Bullet III.
That Proctor made any switch of bullets or shells seems impossible in view of his character and the relevant facts. Proctor was amateurish in his knowledge of ballistics, and it was for other reasons than the bullet evidence that he felt Sacco and Vanzetti were not guilty. At the trial he had not thought Bullet III had come from Sacco’s pistol, and in 1923, in his affidavit for Thompson, he still insisted that Sacco’s pistol had not fired the mortal bullet. But if the prosecution had somehow replaced the original Bullet III by a falsely marked bullet actually test-fired from Sacco’s pistol, there would have been no need for Van Amburgh to be so qualifying in his identification of the bullet, and no need for Proctor to use his ambiguous “It is consistent with.” Both he and Van Amburgh would have known that the false bullet came from Sacco’s pistol and could have said so flatly.
Then, too, there is the matter of motive. When the case first came to trial it was no earth-shaking issue for District Attorney Katzmann or for the State Police. Katzmann, if he had lost, would still have been re-elected district attorney. The case could not have been worth the risk of detection and disgrace for him or for Proctor to forge the evidence for a conviction.
After examining Bullet III, Weller and Jury concluded that it had been fired into a body—though whether a human or animal body, whether living or dead, they could not say. They did not think it possible that the slightly flattened side of the bullet could have been produced in a test firing. In contrast to Ehrmann and Wilbur Turner, Thompson’s expert, Weller and Jury did not find that the identifying scratches on the bullet’s base varied noticeably from the scratches on the other three bullets.
The inquest record of April 17, 1920, bears out these findings. Eighteen days before Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested, Dr. Frederick Jones testified that the bullet which lodged against Berardelli’s hip bone and was subsequently marked III had been slightly flattened as it came to rest against the bone. Dr. Magrath, who performed the autopsy, identified the bullet at the trial a year later by the three scratches he had made on it:
As I found it, it lay sideways against the flat surface of the hip bone, and in my opinion the flattening of the bullet was due its striking that bone side on. The bone is curved at that point, and a very slight amount of impact from the more pointed part of the bullet would bring its side against the bone, if it had not force enough at that point to perforate the bone and go through it, which it did not.
The cumulative evidence is overwhelming that the Colt automatic found on Sacco the night of his arrest was one of the two pistols used to kill Berardelli. Even if one accepts the possibility that someone other than Sacco fired the Colt, Sacco knew who that someone was.
Vanzetti’s innocence is, at least for me, confirmed by my talks with Brini and by Tresca’s admission to Eastman, as well as by the contradictions to the court testimony brought out in the Pinkerton reports. Yet it would have been like Vanzetti to go to the chair rather than betray a friend. He had once remarked that it was an evil to be arrested, but a still greater evil to desert a comrade. When Moore was preparing his closing argument at Dedham, he felt that if he sacrificed Sacco he had a fighting chance of persuading the jury to acquit Vanzetti. “So I put it up to Vanzetti,” he later wrote; “‘What shall I do?’ and he answered, ‘Save Nick, he has the woman and child.’”
Both men died bravely, undoubtedly fortified by the thought, expressed by them many times, that they were dying for the working class of the world. Vanzetti, in the death chamber, calmly reasserted his innocence. Yet it is noteworthy that Sacco, who had refused to sign all pleas for clemency, chose rather in his last moment to proclaim his vindicating belief in anarchy.
It is possible that Sacco, whatever his guilt, may have considered himself innocent in the sense that he was serving a higher cause. His dreams were of violence. He was, as he told Thompson, at war with the government. To defend anarchy in the persons of his comrades Elia and Salsedo may have seemed to him to justify Parmenter and Berardelli sprawled in the gravel. The paymaster and his guard would merely be soldiers on the other side of the barricades, their deaths insignificant in comparison with the triumph of the cause. Vanzetti could express his anarchistic beliefs and then say, “Of course, I may be wrong.” Sacco could not qualify himself. His was the iron belief, one that has caused so much slaughter in the world, that the cause is more important than the individual. So he turned with fanatic hatred against Moore; so he applied the imagery of the Passion to his dilemma; so he died.