Heron recalled the two Dagos he had seen in the South Braintree station the morning he had collared the McNamara kid. He remembered them particularly because they were smoking under the no smoking sign. There was no question in his mind but that Sacco was one of the men he had seen.
Goodridge, a middle-aged man of uneasy appearance, picked out the bandit who had leaned from the car and pointed a gun at him. He was “the gentleman on the right in the cage”—Sacco.
“Are you not,” Jerry McAnarney asked Goodridge “a defendant in a criminal case in this court?” Goodridge denied it, and Judge Thayer broke off the line of questioning by reminding McAnarney that a man’s record as a defendant could not be brought up unless he had been convicted. There was another conference at the bench, with the jury sent out. Jerry McAnarney handed Judge Thayer a document from the clerk’s office showing that on the same day Sacco and Vanzetti were arraigned Goodridge had pleaded guilty to stealing money from his employer and a week later had been placed on probation. Thayer ruled against the jury being allowed to hear this because the case had been filed. John Dever sensed that something was wrong about Goodridge, even if McAnarney could not bring out the details.
Goodridge was contradicted by four defense witnesses who, unhappily for the defense, also contradicted each other. Harry Arrogni, a barber in Damato’s shop, said that when Goodridge had had his hair cut a few days after the holdup, he had told of seeing the man in the car, adding, “if I have got to say who that man was I can’t say.” Katzmann forced Arrogni to admit that this was the only customer’s conversation he could remember from a period of fourteen months. Damato himself claimed that Goodridge had said he was inside the poolroom and did not see any of the men in the automobile.
Just before the shooting Peter Magazu had left his poolroom to wait on a customer in the shoe shop on the other side of the partition. After the car had swung by he asked Goodridge if he had seen anything. Goodridge told him, “‘I seen the men, they pointed with a gun.’ I says, ‘How do the men look like?’ He says, ‘Young man with light hair, light complexion and wore an army shirt. This job wasn’t pulled off by any foreign people.’”
Andrew Manganaro, Goodridge’s disgruntled employer, related that Goodridge had told him he “saw this automobile going by and as he did one of the men pointed a gun at him and he run in. When he saw the gun he was so scared he run right in from where he was. He could not possibly remember faces.” As for Goodridge’s reputation for veracity, Manganaro announced with emphatic satisfaction that it was bad.
After the identifications there followed a string of residual witnesses to establish at length for the bored jury facts that were for the most part apparent at a glance. Charles Fuller and Max Wind told of finding the Buick in the Manley Woods, whereupon Moore engaged in a lengthy dispute with Judge Thayer as to whether or not the Buick should be admitted as evidence. Francis Murphy, the owner, testified that the car was his. Warren Ellis identified his stolen license plates. There was more interest in the story of William Hill, the police officer who had driven the Buick to Brockton. He had spent fifteen or twenty minutes looking the car over in the police garage and found it undamaged, yet the next morning he had noticed a bullet hole in the right rear door.
Assistant District Attorney Williams, putting Napoleon Ensher on the stand, announced that the Commonwealth would “show that this man Boda ... was seen driving a car of the type which is of interest to us in this case; that he was associated with one Orciani, that he was associated with Sacco, and we shall ask the jury ... to draw the inference that the car which Boda was then driving was the car concerned in this murder, and we shall tie up the car and Boda, by evidence of other association between these four men, Sacco, Vanzetti, Orciani and Boda.”
Unfortunately for this theory, there was no link for Williams to connect the murder car with the one Ensher claimed to have seen Boda driving. The assistant district attorney admitted that all he could hope to show was that it was the same kind of car; he could not, however, “place the four men together at any time in this particular Buick car.” For lack of such a connection, Judge Thayer excluded Ensher’s testimony.
Officers Vaughn and Connolly again told their tale of arresting the two Italians, Connolly elaborating on the story he had told at the Plymouth trial. Vanzetti had so far controlled his feelings, but as Connolly told of Vanzetti’s reaching for his revolver the Italian jumped up in the cage and shouted “You are a liar!” The deputies forced him down, his eyes sparkling with anger, as Connolly continued.