The other witnesses were routine. John King of Grove Street had been in his upstairs bedroom when he heard the car roar by. Looking out, he noted it was a seven-passenger Buick. Dr. Murphy once more told of picking up the spent shotgun shell. Simon and Ruth Johnson appeared and told their stories, and George Hassam, the Needham garage owner, told his. Officer Connolly told of arresting Vanzetti. Chief Stewart submitted a transcript of his interview with the defendant. Most of it was excluded because of its references to political beliefs.
Captain William Proctor of the State Police, testifying as a ballistics expert, claimed that the 12-gauge Winchester shell Dr. Murphy had found in the gutter and the Winchester shells found in Vanzetti’s pocket were identical, except that one was empty and the others loaded. Vahey objected that the shell in the gutter might have been dropped there by any passing hunter and that there was no connection between it and the shells found on Vanzetti four months later. Judge Thayer overruled Vahey and admitted the shells as evidence for the jury to pass on.
Sacco’s name was mentioned only once during the trial, when Austin Cole, the streetcar conductor, testified that he had seen Sacco and Vanzetti on the Brockton car not only the night of their arrest but also on the fourteenth or fifteenth of April, when the two men had got on at the same Sunset Avenue stop at the same time and had got off at Brockton. On that first night, according to Cole, Sacco had paid the fares with a quarter and a nickel. “I changed the quarter,” Cole continued, “and I said to him ‘To Brockton?’ He says ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘It will be thirty cents.’ ‘I know it,’ he says and he handed me a nickel and the other hand was thrust into the pocket, and he asked for two transfers. When I was talking with him he smiled and I noticed the gold tooth on Sacco.”
Vahey wanted to know how the conductor could remember a particular day of no special significance among many days he could not remember at all. Cole maintained that he had worked Wednesday and Thursday, the fourteenth and fifteenth, and not again until the following Tuesday. He remembered those dates particularly because he associated them with Patriot’s Day, the nineteenth.
Katzmann’s efforts to link Boda with the holdup attempt were fumbling. One witness, Napoleon Ensher, who lived a quarter of a mile from Puffer’s Place, said that early in the spring he had seen Boda drive past in a Buick and that Boda had waved to him. At the Dedham trial a year later Ensher’s evidence was ruled out as unsubstantiated. Another witness, Richard Casey, had watched the bandit car stop near his house at the corner of Broad and Main Streets. He described the driver as a man with a short mustache and prominent nose, wearing either a velour or a black soft hat. All that Casey could remember of the man next to the driver was that he wore a brown cap. When Stewart showed him half a dozen caps, Casey picked out the one that the chief had taken from Vanzetti’s room.
District Attorney Katzmann took three and a half days to present his case. On Monday, June 28, just before the noon recess, he announced that the Commonwealth rested.
The defense lawyers did not search Bridgewater for refuting witnesses. Their strategy was to rely on Vanzetti’s alibi as established by his North Plymouth neighbors. Judge Thayer charged the jury that if they could conclude Vanzetti was in Plymouth on the morning of December 24, the case was ended. In addition the defense had collected several witnesses to testify that during all the years Vanzetti had lived in Plymouth he had never worn anything but his present shaggy mustache.
Awed and uneasy, the Italian witnesses marshaled by Vahey sat together in the back of the courtroom talking in whispers and waiting for their names to be called. Except for those who were American-born, they spoke through the interpreter, Govoni. First to take the stand was Vittorio Papa, the elusive Poppy Vanzetti had claimed he was trying to visit the night of his arrest. Papa merely said that he had been friendly with Vanzetti in Plymouth and that when he moved to East Bridgewater he had asked his friend to come and visit him. He had not given Vanzetti his address there.
Papa was followed by Mary Fortini, Vanzetti’s landlady, who told how on that day before Christmas she had gone upstairs and called her lodger at a quarter past six. A few minutes later he had come down in his stocking feet, wearing overalls and a green sweater. She had warmed some milk for his breakfast. After drinking it, he had put on his boots and gone out.
A day or two before, a barrel of eels had come down from Boston for him by express, and she happened to be at home when it arrived. Vanzetti had spent the evening of the twenty-third in the kitchen cleaning and weighing them, wrapping them in newspapers, and ticketing them for delivery next day. After he left the house the morning of the twenty-fourth, he came back again about eight o’clock with a boy who was helping him, and the two of them had loaded the pushcart and a wheelbarrow with the packages of eels.