During the noon recess, while Sacco and Vanzetti were marched back to the jail for their meal, Judge Thayer walked down the street to the Dedham Inn. Whenever he was in Dedham he took his midday meal there, as did the newspapermen and most of those connected with the courthouse. Returning from the inn, Thayer could not conceal his scorn at the sight of the coatless Moore taking a nap on the grass plot in front of the courthouse. Moore was always doing things like that, offending the New England sense of decorum without even realizing he had offended. Once in court on a hot afternoon he took off his shoes and stepped before the bench to make an exception in his stocking feet. Jerry McAnarney, watching Judge Thayer’s bottled-up indignation as it approached the uncorking point, was fearful as well as dismayed. “For God’s sake,” he warned Moore, “keep your coat and vest on in the courtroom, can’t you?”
Ripley, the dodderer with the tobacco-stained mustache, had been appointed foreman of the jury, possibly because at sixty-nine he was the oldest of the twelve. When on that first day he returned to the courtroom from lunch, he paused with self-conscious rectitude and—to the embarrassment of the others—saluted the American flag that stood beside the jury box.
The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began, the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones, who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr. Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues, and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even Moore had no questions to ask him.
Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer, irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty.
Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand. Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery, the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three o’clock.
Mark Carrigan, the shoe-cutter, was next. From his window on the third floor of the Hampton House he had watched the paymaster and the guard go down the street; then he had heard the shots and seen the car cross the tracks with the gunman crouched in the front seat. But from that glimpse Carrigan had not been able to identify the defendants in the Brockton police station and he was not now able to identify them in the courtroom.
So far the trial was going in the routine manner that Katzmann had planned. These early witnesses were not expected to identify anyone. They were there merely to set the scene. Something more, however, was expected of Jimmy Bostock, the repairman, who had talked with Parmenter and Berardelli at the crossing, had seen the two men fall, and afterward had held the dying guard in his arms. The getaway car with the Italian-looking man who was leaning out shouting had passed so close to Bostock on Pearl Street that he could have reached out and touched it. Nevertheless, when asked in the Brockton station if he could tell whether Sacco and Vanzetti were the bandits he had answered, “No sir, I could not tell whether or not they was, no sir.” On the stand Bostock testified that Berardelli usually carried a 38-caliber revolver. He had seen it several times, the last time the Saturday before the murder. He had joked with Berardelli about it and asked him if he carried it to shoot rats. The mention of the revolver seemed irrelevant—especially as nobody had seen it on April 15—and Moore objected. Judge Thayer held a conference at the bench. There Assistant District Attorney Williams revealed for the first time the Commonwealth’s contention that the revolver found on Vanzetti had been taken from Berardelli’s body by the man who shot him.
When Lewis Wade was taken by Katzmann to the Brockton station he had pointed out Sacco as the wavy-haired man he had seen standing over Berardelli. At the preliminary hearing in the Quincy court three weeks later he was not quite as certain. “I don’t want to make a mistake,” he had said, looking at Sacco. “This is too damn serious, but he looks like the man.” Since then Katzmann had given Wade a pep talk and was now counting on him for a positive identification. Williams, leading the witness along, became stutteringly disconcerted when Wade balked, maintaining that although Sacco looked to him somewhat like the man who did the shooting, he “had a doubt.” Several weeks ago, Wade explained, he had seen a man in Damato’s barbershop who looked just like the man who had shot Berardelli. Since that time he had decided that Sacco was not the man. Williams managed to recover his composure, but though he did his forensic best, he could get no further in persuading the intractable Wade.
As Wade left the stand one of the police officers at the door called him a piker and another muttered: “We’re not through with you yet.” It was a remark borne out a few weeks later when Wade was dismissed from his job at Slater & Morrill. He had it coming to him. That was the way people felt in South Braintree.
John Dever, in the first row of the jury box, glancing from time to time at the defendants in the cage, was so far not impressed by the Commonwealth’s case. Sometimes he felt frightened at having to decide whether two men should live or die. Sacco and Vanzetti, he thought,