Eldridge Atwater, Slater’s brother-in-law, took the stand to say that eight years before he had often borrowed his father-in-law’s Harrington & Richardson to shoot at bottles and cans. After Mogridge’s death, his widow had taken the revolver with her when she went to Norwood to visit her daughter and that was the last Atwater had ever seen of it. He could not quite bring himself to say that the revolver exhibited in court was the same one he had fired seventy-five or a hundred times in Maine. The closest he would come to it was to say that “as far as those two markings, that is the revolver Mr. Mogridge had eight years ago.” He had never paid any attention to the revolver’s serial number.
The missing link in the ownership chain was Orciani. Some months before the trial he had given up his foundry job to become Moore’s chauffeur. The fact that he was never called as a witness was not missed by the jurors. Katzmann in his summing-up made the most of it. “Why didn’t you bring Orciani into this courtroom?” he demanded rhetorically. “He has been within the control of this defense. He has been outside the courtroom, and he is not produced. What is the reason?”
While there was no one in South Braintree who could say with certainty that Berardelli had his revolver with him on the day of his death, his widow testified that he generally carried it. Margaret Mahoney and the other girls in the Slater & Morrill office had seen the revolver at various times, and he had even showed it to Jimmy Bostock the Saturday before the robbery. Bostock knew that it was nickel-plated and that the guard carried it in his hip pocket, but what kind it was he did not know. No one had seen the bandits take anything from Berardelli’s body. Lewis Wade saw the guard reach for his hip pocket as he was falling, and Peter McCullum saw one of the bandits holding a “white” revolver in his left hand.
Sarah Berardelli, a sad, illiterate Jewish woman, told what she knew of her husband’s revolver. It was like Vanzetti’s. Three weeks before the murder her husband had taken it to Boston to be repaired—it had a “spring broke.” Sarah had accompanied her husband and they had gone to a store on Washington Street which—with prompting from the district attorney—she remembered: the Iver Johnson Company. Berardelli had been given a claim check. This he turned over to Parmenter, who then let him take another gun that looked just like the first. Whether anyone had picked up the gun at Iver Johnson’s, whether it had come back into her husband’s possession, Sarah Berardelli did not know.
Lincoln Wadsworth, the clerk in charge of repairs at Iver Johnson’s, said that according to his records he had received a 38 Harrington & Richardson, the property of Alex Berardelli, on March 20, 1920, to which he had given the repair number 94765. George Fitzemeyer, the gunsmith on the fifth floor, testified that he had been given a revolver with that repair number sometime between the nineteenth and the twenty-second of March. He had repaired it and marked it “H. & R., revolver 32, new hammer, half an hour.” Since he repaired twenty-five or thirty revolvers a day, he could not be sure of the caliber of this particular one. On inspecting Vanzetti’s revolver he said that it had a new hammer. “The firing pin,” he said, “does not show of ever being struck.” Williams, conducting the questioning, neglected to ask him whether the Vanzetti revolver was the one he had repaired.
Fitzemeyer’s testimony about the hammer contradicted that of the defense ballistics experts, Burns and Fitzgerald. Burns stated that to the best of his knowledge the hammer was no newer than the rest of the weapon, but admitted that the revolver “bore little indication of being fired much.” Fitzgerald maintained that “the hammer in this revolver has every indication of being as old and used as much as any other part of the pistol.” Thinking it over, John Dever felt that Fitzemeyer, with thirty years’ experience taking revolvers apart, ought to know what he was talking about.
According to James Jones, the manager of the Iver Johnson firearms department, the gun with repair number 94765 must have been delivered because it was no longer in the store. When a repaired gun was not called for in a reasonable time the firm’s policy was to lock it away until after stocktaking time in January. If still unclaimed, it was then sold. Iver Johnson kept a record of every sale. There was no record of Berardelli’s revolver being sold. Unfortunately, records of delivery were not made, and there seemed to be no written record that this revolver had been delivered.
If the serial number of the missing revolver had been recorded when it was left for repair, it could have been determined at once whether or not Berardelli’s was the one found on Vanzetti—but at this point, as at so many in the case, the direct proof turned as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp.
To Ripley, the jury foreman, Vanzetti’s revolver looked just like the Harrington & Richardson he himself owned. The last time he had used it—to fire some blanks at the Quincy firemen’s muster—he had found three bullets in the cylinder. These he had extracted, putting them in the vest of the suit he had worn to court. At the next recess, when he was downstairs in the dormitory, he searched his vest pockets and found the bullets still there. He later showed them to Hersey and McNamara, and Dever also had a glimpse of them.
While Ripley was downstairs examining his bullets, Thomas McAnarney in the upstairs corridor happened to run into Captain Proctor and the Commissioner of Public Safety, Colonel Alfred Foote, and they chatted together before court resumed. McAnarney never forgot Proctor’s parting remark to the commissioner: “These are not the right men. Oh, no, you haven’t got the right men.”