On Wednesday, June 22, the short opening statement for the defense was made by William Callahan, who, although he had been dropped as Vanzetti’s counsel in the Plymouth trial, still remained associated with Sacco’s defense. Whatever his capacities, he kept the confidence of both defendants to the end. Moore wanted him, as a local lawyer, to present the case, and this was one of the few times he emerged from his background role. Callahan first reminded the jurors that the defendants were presumed innocent. Then he promised that the defense would show what Vanzetti was doing on April 15 and would prove that Sacco was in Boston getting a passport. In addition, the defense would offer witnesses to show that the men in the South Braintree bandit car were not Sacco and Vanzetti.
Moore intended to swamp the prosecution with witnesses. After a protracted exposition by Charles Breed, a civil engineer who had made maps and photographs of the Pearl Street area for the defense, Moore produced Edward Carter, a cutter at the lower Slater & Morrill factory. As the first shots were fired Carter had looked out a window and up the street to what, until he saw a man drop, he thought was a bunch of boys fooling. From his distance of eighty yards and with the sun in his eyes the men had been indistinct. He was unable to say whether or not the defendants were the men he had seen.
Frank Burke remembered the man in the front seat who had thrust a pistol in his face as the Buick passed the cobbler’s shop. That man was “very dark complected and needed a shave very badly.” Burke also noticed a man with a “short cropped mustache” in the back seat. But when Callahan asked him if the defendants were the men he had seen ten feet away in the car, the most he could get Burke to say was: “I would say they were not.” John Dever was not favorably impressed. Burke seemed to him to be “altogether too anxious at times to volunteer information and at other times evasive and vacillating.”
Katzmann wanted to know how Burke knew the car was a Buick. Because, Burke said, it was like the car belonging to lawyer Callahan in which he had ridden to court this morning. His powers of observation were at a discount when it turned out that Callahan’s car was a Hudson.
Albert Frantello, who had run into Parmenter and Berardelli as they left the Hampton House, recalled that on his way up from the lower factory he had met two men leaning against the Rice & Hutchins pipe fence. He particularly remembered the dark one in a dark cap who needed a shave, for he had passed so close he could have touched him. The other man had a lighter complexion. They were talking to each other in “the American language,” and he was sure that neither of them was either of the men in the cage.
As part of his cross-examination Katzmann led Frantello to the jury box, asked him to observe two jurors, then turn away and describe them. Although both jurors were clean-shaven, Frantello described one of them as having a mustache as well as a nonexistent watchchain. Immediately after the murders he had told Brouillard that the dark man by the fence was “a regular wop”; now he denied that the man was an Italian. Whether or not he had told Brouillard that he did not know the language the men were speaking he could not recall, but whatever he might have said then, he now insisted that they were speaking “American.”
Wilfred Pierce and Lawrence Ferguson, shoe-cutters who had been working with Mark Carrigan on the third floor of the Hampton House, were no more satisfactory witnesses for the defense than Carrigan had been for the prosecution. Both had heard the shots and looked out the window as the touring car crossed the tracks. Both had seen a dark man climb from the rear seat to the front. Pierce saw him fire a shot. When asked if the man was either of the defendants, he would say no more than “I don’t think it was, but I am not positive.” Ferguson was equally uncertain: “It may or it may not have been. I don’t know positively.” The most that their testimony seemed to show—and this by contrast—was the extraordinary vision and tenacious memory of Frances Devlin and Mary Splaine.
Through the last of June the hot spell was unrelenting. To speed up the trial Judge Thayer agreed to extend the session from 9 A.M. until 6 P.M., but he rejected the jurors’ suggestion for evening sessions. The days followed each other torpidly. Sacco and Vanzetti sat upright in the cage, occasionally whispering to one another; the jurymen sat fanning themselves. The succession of witnesses accelerated and the spectators thinned out. Mrs. Evans, the “angel for the radicals” as the Post called her, continued to write voluminously at her desk. Her hats changed frequently, her attitude did not.
With June fading, Moore found the defense again in the familiar position of running short of money. The fifty thousand dollars collected over the past year was gone, used up in investigations and fees and a hundred other unavoidable expenses. Judge Thayer offered to allow the defense to proceed in forma pauperis with some of their costs home by the Commonwealth, but this humiliation Moore refused to accept. On June 29 with the defense lacking funds even to pay witnesses, Mrs. Evans produced $1500 to tide them over for the week. At the end of the week she added to this all her available income, $2950, plus $600 contributed by her friends. Mrs. Cerise Jack handed over $100.