Craves drove from the bank along Summer Street to the square, then turned down Broad Street—divided in the middle by a single streetcar track—moving at a cautious ten miles an hour because of the ice on the road. A streetcar moving in the same direction had just stopped at the corner of Hale Street, seventy-five yards away. At the same moment a curtained touring car swung over the tracks and pulled up on the corner, its wheels on the sidewalk. Three men jumped out and dog-trotted toward the oncoming truck. The man in the lead, bareheaded, with a dark mustache and wearing a long black coat, carried a shotgun. The two behind him held pistols.
Graves had first noticed the touring car—a Hudson, he thought it was—while he was passing Harlow’s blacksmith shop. He watched the men get out and start running, but it was not until the mustached man knelt and took aim that he realized he was in for a holdup. Yanking on the gas lever, he veered the truck across the tracks. Bowles reached for his revolver. When the truck was some twenty-five yards away the mustached man fired both barrels. A few pellets rattled against the truck’s metal body without doing any damage. One of the men with pistols, standing eight feet behind the man with the shotgun, exchanged random shots with Bowles until the streetcar came between them. Then the mustached man dashed across the street and fired again at the slithering truck.
Cox, from his seat on the cashbox, saw the kneeling figure and the smoke from the discharged shotgun, “everything like the snap of a camera.” As the truck skidded, Graves lost control of the wheel. Bowles grabbed it out of his hands. Wavering from one side of the street to the other, the truck finally crashed against a telephone pole, smashing headlights and radiator. In the meantime the three gunmen had scurried back to their car with its waiting driver and spun out of sight down Hale Street in the direction of the normal school.
When Frank (“Slip”) Harding, an auto-parts salesman on his way to Bassett’s Garage just across from the corner of Hale Street, first saw the men carrying guns, he thought it was some kind of movie stunt. He was only four feet away as they began firing and he watched them, too astonished to move. Then within seconds they had run back to their car and driven off. Harding later described the car as a black Hudson Six with the license number 01173C.
Dr. John Murphy, a young general practitioner with his house and office at 76 Broad Street, was getting dressed when he heard the shots. He looked out his window just in time to glimpse the touring car moving away. By the time he reached the street, about the only thing he could see was the litter of glass where the truck was rammed against the pole. Then he noticed a spent shotgun shell in the gutter. He picked it up and put it in his pocket.
For Bridgewater’s police chief, Michael Stewart, the robbery attempt lay outside the range of small-town peccadilloes with which he was used to dealing. His force consisted of two officers, one patrolman, and one night patrolman. In addition there were the specials, one at the normal school, one for the night performances at the Princess Theater, one at the L. Q. White factory, and six for the Fourth of July only. Stewart, in his forties, had held his job since 1915. Before this he had spent four years as chief of the two-man force in Rockland, another of the flat semirural manufacturing towns lying inland between Boston and Cape Cod. In Rockland most of his trouble had come from the foreign workers. The same was true in Bridgewater, where a third of the population was now made up of Poles, Russians, Greeks, and Armenians. As a second-generation Irish-American Stewart tended to be suspicious of these newcomers. He had an idea that the holdup men might be Russians, with a confederate working in the factory. Inspector Albert Brouillard of the State Police, who was sent down to Bridgewater to work with Stewart, was more inclined to think the holdup the work of one of the gangs that had moved into the area after the recent Boston police strike. Graves thought the men were Italians.
The license number that Harding had written down was traced through the Registry of Motor Vehicles to George Hassam’s garage in Needham, a Boston suburb, twenty-three miles northwest of Bridgewater. It turned out to be a dealer’s plate. Hassam owned five sets of them.
On Monday, December 22, a foreigner had come into Hassam’s office and asked if he could borrow a set of plates. In broken English he told Hassam he had just bought a car in Wellesley and wanted to take it away. When Hassam said he could not lend his dealer’s plates, the man left. He was a surly man of about forty, as Hassam remembered him, dark, with a close-cropped mustache.
Hassam forgot about him until the police telephoned regarding the plates on the Bridgewater car. Then, as he went to the back of his garage to look at a secondhand Hupp that had been carrying a set of his dealer’s plates, he found them missing. When or how they had been taken he did not know.
On December 26 the Pinkerton operative Henry Hellyer noted in his report that on Sunday evening, December 21, a Buick touring car belonging to Daniel H. Murphy of Natick had been stolen from 115 Fair Oaks Street, Needham, not far from Hassam’s Garage. Hellyer was right about the Buick though not about some of his other details. The car, belonging to a Francis J. Murphy had actually been stolen in Needham a month earlier, on November 23, from in front of a house in Fair Oaks Park.