Dr. George Burgess Magrath, the medical examiner of Suffolk County, made the autopsy on Berardelli, assisted by the Norfolk County examiner, Dr. Frederick Jones. He found four visible wounds: the first in the left back upper arm, the second near the left armpit, the third lower down on the left side, and the fourth at the right shoulder. According to Dr. Magrath, Berardelli might have recovered from the first three wounds, but not from the fourth. The bullet there had pierced the right lung, severed the great artery issuing from the heart, and continued down through the intestines until it lodged in the hipbone.

All four bullets had remained in the body. As Dr. Magrath recovered them he took a surgical needle and scored each in turn on the base with a Roman numeral. The mortal bullet he marked with three vertical scratches.

The shell cases that Jimmy Bostock had picked out of the gravel he handed to Thomas Fraher, the Slater & Morrill superintendent. These consisted of two Peters shells, one Remington, and one Winchester—the last identifiable by a W stamped on its base. Fraher in turn gave them to Captain William Proctor, the head of the State Police, who had driven down from Boston as soon as he heard of the shootings. Several hours later Fred Loring gave the cap he had picked up to Fraher, who kept it overnight and then passed it on to Chief Gallivan.

Over that week end South Braintree bubbled with gossip. State Police and Pinkerton detectives, occasionally at crosspurposes, combed the town, interviewing and filling out their reports. Chief Gallivan spent Sunday with a state policeman searching the Braintree woods for abandoned cashboxes. He found nothing. That was his last discouraged gesture in the case.

A rumor floated round that Berardelli had recognized the man who shot him, that he had known in advance something was up, and that was why he had been killed. There was a lot of such talk in the Hampton House. Mary Splaine and Jimmy Bostock told a young Pinkerton operative, Henry Hellyer, they thought a man named Darling who worked in the order department might have been the front man for the bandits. Darling had a bad reputation. Two of his friends had been arrested some years back for stealing shoes from the factory, and only a few weeks ago the police had found some stolen shoes at his house. Mary Splaine supposed that Darling had probably hatched the scheme and tipped off his accomplices as to the time the payroll went out. But when Hellyer asked Fraher about this, the superintendent told him that Darling was completely trustworthy and that Mary Splaine was too irresponsible for anyone to take her seriously.

On Saturday, when the inquest was held before Judge Albert Avery in the Quincy District Court, several witnesses said they had seen two cars during the holdup, a large touring car and a small sedan. Levangie, the gate-tender, described the driver of the touring car as having a “dark complexion, dark brown mustache, soft hat, and brown coat.” Everyone else described him as a pale, fair-haired man with a smooth yellowish face.

Detectives brought down a selection of rogues’-gallery pictures from Boston. Bostock, Wade, and several others who riffled through the assortment picked out a New York bank robber, Anthony Palmisano, as one of the South Braintree bandits. On April 23 a group that included Bostock, Wade, Albert Frantello, and Mary Splaine was taken to Captain Proctor’s office in the State House and shown a number of photographs, including Palmisano’s. Mary Splaine positively identified his picture as that of the man she had seen leaning out of the car with the revolver. Frantello and Bostock said it was an excellent likeness.

Unfortunately for their promising identification, it was soon learned that Palmisano—also known as Tony the Wop and Baby Tony—had been arrested in Buffalo in January and was still in jail there.

CHAPTER FOUR
BRIDGEWATER AND
WEST BRIDGEWATER

The attempted robbery of the L. Q. White Shoe Company payroll in Bridgewater, on Wednesday, December 24, 1919, resulted neither in loss of money nor life. At twenty minutes to eight on that freezing overcast morning Alfred Cox, the company paymaster, was taking the week’s payroll of $33,113.31 in his delivery truck from the Bridgewater Trust Company to the factory at the foot of the hill by the railroad station. The truck, a Ford with a tarpaulin top and solid rubber tires, was driven by Earl Graves, with Constable Benjamin Bowles beside him. Cox sat just behind Graves, on a large galvanized-iron box containing the money.