The Commonwealth’s second expert was Charles Van Amburgh of the Remington Union Metallic Cartridge Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. Before going to Remington, he had spent nine years at the Springfield Arsenal, and then periods at the Westinghouse and Colt Firearms companies. His evidence was a corroboration of Proctor’s. He, too, had compared Bullet III with those recovered from the sawdust. By measuring the lands, he had determined that the bullet had been fired from a 32-caliber Colt. As to whether he thought it had been fired from Sacco’s Colt, he replied circumspectly, “I am inclined to believe that it was fired, Number III bullet was fired, from this Colt automatic pistol.” He went on to say that there was a rough rust track at the bottom of the pistol barrel, and that corresponding marks could be traced on the bullet. Under cross-examination he admitted that it was common for Colts to rust at that particular place. Like Proctor, he thought that the other five bullets had come from a Savage and had been fired from the same weapon.
Burns, the first of the defense’s experts to testify, had spent thirty years as a ballistics engineer with the U.S. Cartridge Company. He agreed that Bullet III could have been fired from a Colt but felt that it could also have been fired from a Bayard, a foreign make. Whatever pistol it had come from, the rifling had been fouled and corroded. The other bullets, he testified, could have been fired from a Savage, a Steyr, or a Walther. Burns produced six of the eight bullets he had fired from Sacco’s Colt—the other two, he explained, he had lost. He pointed out that the lands and grooves were regular and clean. To the question whether Bullet III had been fired from Sacco’s pistol his answer was: “In my opinion, no. It doesn’t compare at all.”
J. Henry Fitzgerald, the second defense expert, backed him up. Fitzgerald had been twenty-eight years in the weapon business and was now in charge of the testing room at the Colt Patent Firearms Company. “Number III bullet was not fired from the Sacco pistol,” he told the court. “I can see no pitting or marks on bullet Number III that would correspond with a bullet coming from this gun.”
With these paired contradictions the bullet testimony ended.
Berardelli had owned a 38-caliber Harrison & Richardson revolver. After his death it could not be found. It was Katzmann’s contention, underlined in his summing-up, that the revolver found on Vanzetti the night of his arrest had been lifted by Sacco from the dying detective.
In Dedham Vanzetti was to tell a different story about his revolver than he had told at the Brockton police station. When he took the stand he admitted he had lied before, claiming that he had wanted to protect the friends from whom he had bought the gun. His first story—that he had bought it five years before his arrest for eighteen dollars was false; he had really owned it only two or three months, and he had bought it from Luigi Falzini, an East Boston marble cutter, who in turn had bought it not long before from Ricardo Orciani. Instead of paying eighteen dollars for it, Vanzetti had paid five; he had never fired it; the bullets now in the revolver were there when he bought it. The reason he had bought it was to protect himself, for often when he went to buy fish he carried eighty or a hundred dollars in his pocket, and it was “a bad time, it was many crimes, many holdups, many robberies.” He did not remember telling Katzmann in Brockton that he had bought a box of cartridges or that he had shot off all but six on the beach at Plymouth. If he had said this, it was not so.
Falzini took the stand after Vanzetti and recognized the revolver as his because of rust spots and a deep scratch behind the trigger guard that he had noticed when he bought it. In the time he owned it, he had never fired it or taken it apart.
For his next corroborating witness Moore brought Rexford Slater from Dexter, Maine. Before settling in Maine, Slater had worked in the same Norwood foundry as Orciani. He had bought a Harrington & Richardson revolver from his mother-in-law, a Mrs. Mogridge, who happened to bring it with her when she came from Maine on a visit. He had fired it several times, once killing a cat, and in 1919 had sold it to Orciani. He recognized it on the stand by the way the nickel plating had worn off the end of the barrel and over the cylinder. The holster—picked up by the police in searching Vanzetti’s room—he also recognized from the brass knob on it, a tear in the back, and a small side-strap.
Slater was at first an argumentative witness. When Katzmann asked if another revolver of the same kind fired under the same conditions might not show the same wear, he denied that any conditions could ever be the same. As Katzmann kept pressing him, Slater’s confidence began to wilt. The district attorney asked him if he was not just guessing, if he was sure that Vanzetti’s revolver was the one that had belonged to him. “I am sure the same scars as on the gun I sold, and exactly the same,” Slater answered in syntactical confusion. Katzmann persisted. “I did not ask you that. Are you sure that is the same gun?” Slater delayed his answer so long that Judge Thayer finally rapped out: “Answer the question!”
“I am not,” he admitted.