did not look like criminals. Sacco appeared to be an alert, bright, and rather clean-cut young fellow. Every time I looked at Vanzetti he seemed to be thinking with an impassive look on his face or listening intently to whatever was taking place at the time.... My sympathies were with the men on trial and I was hoping that the evidence would not be sufficient to establish their guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.”
The reasonable doubt became more shadowy after the spinsterish Hampton House bookkeepers, Mary Splaine and Frances Devlin, appeared. Both pointed to Sacco as the man they had seen leaning out of the murder car. Mary Splaine told how, after they had heard the shots, she and Frances Devlin had gone first to the front window, then to the one looking out on Pearl Street, just in time to catch the car as it careered across the railroad tracks. From sixty feet away she had watched the bareheaded bandit for the three seconds the car took to pass. “He had a gray, what I thought was a shirt—had a grayish, like navy color, and the face was what we would call clear-cut, clean-cut face ... a little narrow, just a little narrow. The forehead was high. The hair was brushed back and it was between, I should think, two inches and two and one-half inches in length and had dark eyebrows, but the complexion was white, peculiar white that looked greenish.” She had particularly noticed his left hand resting on the back of the front seat. It was “a good-sized hand that denoted strength.”
Dever thought Mary Splaine seemed honest, but he did not see how anyone could have remembered all those details from such a distant glimpse, and he decided that she must have refreshed her memory on her visits to the Brockton police station. At the Quincy hearing the year before, when her memory was greener, Mary Splaine had not been so certain of her identification. There she had said of Sacco: “I am almost sure I saw him at Braintree, but I saw him at the Brockton police station afterward.” When Moore, with the Quincy transcript in his hand, pressed her about her negative answers then, she belligerently denied making them but was finally forced to admit that she had said: “I don’t think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.” This she now qualified by saying that her observation of him for several hours in the Quincy court had convinced her that Sacco was the man in the car. “I am positive, certain he is the man,” she concluded, her voice ringing and determined. “I admit the possibility of an error, but I am certain I am not making a mistake.” As she said this Sacco thrust his head forward, smiling at her with fixed bitterness.
Frances Devlin’s story was almost the same as her friend’s, although not so detailed. She had seen the car spurt over the hill with a man leaning out firing at the crowd. She described him as “a dark man, and his forehead, the hair seemed to be grown away from the temple, and it was blown back and he had clear features, and rather good looking, and he had a white complexion and a fairly thickset man, I should say.” Sacco was that man. She was positive. Like Mary Splaine, in the Quincy court she had been less positive. There, the most she had said of Sacco was: “He looks very much like the man that stood up in the back seat shooting.”
McGlone, the young teamster who had caught the staggering Parmenter, was another disappointing witness for the Commonwealth. A ferret-faced, stubborn man, he said that the two bandits he had seen were Italians, but that was all he would say about them. Assistant District Attorney Williams could not bring him to say that Sacco and Vanzetti were the gunmen, any more than Moore could bring him to say that they were not. “Well,” McGlone kept on telling them, “I did not get a good look at them to see what they did look like.”
Edgar Langlois, the Rice & Hutchins foreman who had looked down from the second-floor window at the two gunmen below him, described them in court as short and dark-complexioned, full-chested, clean-shaven, with curly or wavy hair. He had not been able to identify either Sacco or Vanzetti at Brockton as the men he had seen from the window, nor was he now willing to identify them in court.
The only witness of the actual shooting to make any such identification was the young Jewish shoe-cutter Louis Pelser, who had been working on the first floor of Rice & Hutchins. After hearing shots outside, he said, he had opened the middle window and looked out at a bareheaded man with a gun, only seven feet away, shooting at Berardelli. “I seen this fellow shoot this fellow,” he told the court. “It was the last shot. He put four bullets in him.” The gunman had “wavy-hair—pushed back ... dark complexion,” and was wearing dark green pants and an army shirt. He had then seen the gunman climb into the car. Pelser pointed to Sacco as the man. Katzmann twice asked him, over Moore’s objections, if he had any question in his mind but that Sacco was the man. Pelser hesitated. In the heat of the day, in his blue serge suit, he was an abject sight. John Dever thought he “looked and acted like a man who was doing something he didn’t want or like to do.” Looking at Sacco, pressed by the district attorney, Pelser reluctantly came out with it: “I wouldn’t say he is the man, but he is the dead image of the man I seen.” He added that he had thrown open the factory window and watched there from the time the gunman shot Berardelli until the car disappeared up Pearl Street.
The day that Pelser testified, June 10, was the hottest of the year. Outside the sun was molten and inside the air had become so humid that the walls and marble floor were beaded. Judge Thayer allowed the jurors to take off their coats, and finally ordered the sheriff to bring them fans.
Moore, beginning his cross-examination, was like a cat with a not overly nimble mouse. Pelser sweated so that the drops fell. Some months earlier, when interviewed by Robert Reid, a white-bearded Boston constable who had become a defense investigator, Pelser had denied seeing any of the shooting. “They were shooting while I was at the window,” he had told Reid, “and I got under the bench, and that is all I seen of them.” Now he claimed that he had lied to Reid because he did not want to be called as a witness. Moore, driving him into a corner, made him admit that he had, after all, ducked under the bench. He also admitted that he had avoided going to the Brockton station with the other witnesses by telling the police he had not seen enough to identify anyone. However, Moore could not shake Pelser’s insistence that he had seen the gunman and the getaway car—and it was a fact that Pelser was the only person in South Braintree who had written down the car’s license number.
William Brenner, Peter McCullum, and Dominic Constantino, all of whom worked at the front benches with Pelser, were brought in as defense witnesses to contradict Pelser’s story, but their effect was lessened by the tidy mechanics of legal procedure that postpones the appearance of rebuttal witnesses until the prosecution has finished its case. So it was not until two weeks later, when the details of Pelser’s testimony were overlaid by that of a score of other witnesses, that Brenner took the stand. He too, after he had heard shots, looked through the partially opened center window and saw a man “sinking—sinking.” Pelser had not been near the window. After McCullum had raised the sash he had slammed it down again and yelled “Duck!” and they had all got down behind the benches. Under cross-examination Brenner admitted he really did not know where Pelser was when he himself was looking through the window.