Judge Thayer’s weekend instructions to the jury seem, at least from the record, judicious and temperate. “Drop this case now,” he told them, “to be taken up Monday morning at ten o’clock. Don’t discuss this case among yourselves. You haven’t heard all the evidence; you haven’t heard any of the evidence of the defense. You haven’t heard the argument; you haven’t heard the charge. Just keep your minds open, absolutely open, fair and impartial, so that when you finally cross the threshold of the jury room for your final determination of this case your mind will be as impartial and as open as it is humanly possible for any man’s mind to be.”
The trial was now beginning to look like a long one, and most of the jurors were concerned about getting back to their families. They talked about asking the judge to hold longer sessions. Dever was worried that Filene’s might cancel his summer vacation after he had been away so long. Saturday morning he had just opened a Geographic when Sheriff Capen stuck his head in the door and asked if anyone wanted to take a bath. At first they thought it was his idea of a joke, but the sheriff marched them up to the jail and there in the basement they found twelve bathtubs all set up and waiting. For over an hour they soaked and splashed and tossed cakes of soap back and forth. Dever could see a rim of dirt forming all along the edge of his tub. The water felt great. So did the clean clothes his sister had sent him.
Monday morning brought Lola Andrews back to the stand. Moore repeatedly tried to force the witness into admitting that she had spoken to the pale sickly man, not the squat dark one. Over and over he asked about the location of the car, the position of the two men, the distance from the factory. Katzmann objected to the repetitions. So did Judge Thayer. “I thought we had been all through this before,” the judge exclaimed caustically. Moore explained that he was trying to show that “much of the testimony of the witness ... is one of rather hopeless confusion.” Katzmann objected and Thayer turned on Moore. “That is an unfair criticism of any witness,” he told the Westerner. “Kindly refrain from taking up a subject that has already been exhausted.”
Moore’s tactics were apparently to wear the witness down. All morning he kept hammering at her, going back again and again to what she had told him in January, making her retrace each step along Pearl Street on the morning of the crime. He could not, however, change her identification of Sacco.
Much of the testimony was irrelevant. Moore wanted to know how long the witness and Julia Campbell had worked at Rice & Hutchins, what they did there, and whether they had worked on men’s or women’s shoes. He became visibly embarrassed when the subject of Julia Campbell’s present address in Maine came up and Lola Andrews said he had asked her how she herself would like a little vacation down there. When she had told Moore she was afraid she would lose her job, he had promised her a job in Maine “as good or better.” Katzmann and Williams, sitting at the side of the enclosure, grinned at Moore’s efforts to defend himself.
At the beginning of the afternoon session Jerry McAnarney took over the questioning, leading back to the matter of the photographs that Mrs. Andrews had or had not identified for Moore in January. Then there was a conference between Thayer and the lawyers as to how far the defense might go into the witness’ past history. On overhearing this, she complained that she felt faint. A few seconds later she fell forward. Katzmann and Williams caught her as she slumped. She did not take the stand again until the following morning.
In the anteroom she told the district attorney that she had fainted because she had suddenly seen in the courtroom the man who had assaulted her. During the short recess it was whispered in the corridors that one of the spectators had been caught with a revolver. Unlike most courtroom rumors, it happened to be true. The man had a permit and was released, but on the morning following Lola Andrews’ fainting fit those who arrived early found the courthouse gates closed and guarded. Only five minutes before the session were they opened, and then each entering spectator was patted. There was another flurry when the police thought they had discovered a man in possession of three small bombs. They turned out to be hard-boiled eggs that he had brought for his lunch.
When John Dever thought of Lola Andrews being overborne in Quincy by Moore, with a stenographer taking down every word she said, he felt sorry for her. Moore’s harsh cross-examination backfired, causing Dever and the other jurymen to feel sympathetic enough to believe her.
Although Lola’s testimony dragged on for another day, little more was added. There was an involved and lengthy discussion as to whether the photograph she had identified for Moore had been of Sacco—as she now maintained—or of an unidentified mustached man in a straw hat holding a cigar. Indirectly Williams brought up the matter of the one-eyed stranger who had assaulted her. The assistant district attorney claimed that she had been in a frightened state of mind at the time of her interview with Moore and could not be held to what she had said. Although the jury was sympathetic, the newspapermen were less so. One of the Hearst reporters nicknamed her “Fainting Lola.”
Moore was sensitive enough to a jury’s mood to realize the impression her identification had made. To help repair the damage he brought in five refuting witnesses. Alfred LaBrecque, a young Quincy reporter, had gone to Lola Andrews’ room shortly after the assault, and she had told him that she could not say if the man who forced her into the toilet resembled the man at South Braintree because she had not seen the face of the man in South Braintree. George Fay, a Quincy policeman, testified that Lola had told him much the same thing. Harry Kurlansky, a tailor, who had known Lola for eight years, told of her passing his shop in February and his saying “‘You look kind of tired.’ She says ‘Yes.’ She says ‘They’re bothering the life out of me.’ I says, ‘What?’ She says, ‘I just came from jail.’ I says, ‘What have you done in jail?’ She says, ‘The Government took me down and want me to recognize those men,’ she says, ‘and I don’t know a thing about them. I have never seen them and I can’t recognize them’.”