The sixteen-man crew that had been digging the excavation across the street from Rice & Hutchins and that Mrs. Nichols saw cut and run when the shooting started could scarcely be considered the most reliable of witnesses, but Moore with his weight-of-numbers tactics how brought in five of them, of whom only one could speak English.
William Foley, the driver of a dump truck, had just left the excavation with a load when the shots rang out and the Buick swayed up Pearl Street. Foley, headed in the other direction, saw only the driver clearly and his description of him was unique: “eyeglasses, short mustache, soft hat, high cheekbones, sallow complexion.” He also had a glimpse of another man in a cap sitting in the rear seat. At this point he could not recall the men’s faces, but they were not the men in the cage. Katzmann, weaving back to Boda, asked Foley several times if the driver was not wearing a velour hat. Foley remembered it as a soft hat, but was positive it was not velour. He admitted that he could not tell whether or not the man in the back seat was one of the defendants.
Emilio Falcone, who had been shoveling dirt into Foley’s truck just before the shooting, testified through the court interpreter, Joseph Ross, who also acted as Judge Thayer’s chauffeur. Falcone thought that he had been forty or fifty feet away from the shooting, near enough at least so that he heard Parmenter groan as he dropped. The man who shot him was “kind of pale, light, pale.” Another man had picked up the money-box. Under Callahan’s rather fussy questioning as to whether the two men in the cage resembled the men in the car, Falcone said they did not. Callahan’s reiterations, doubly tedious through translation, made Falcone lose his temper. “Well, for God’s sake,” he replied, “why do you ask me again?”
Three Spaniards who had been working next to Falcone testified through an interpreter of their own. Pedro Iscorla, on his way to get a drink of water, had seen a “high, thin, slim, light fellow” shoot Parmenter and a dark man shoot Berardelli. These men were not the defendants. Henry Cerro had seen a light gunman who resembled neither of the defendants. Like Iscorla, Sibriano Guidierris had seen a light man and a little dark man with a dark cap. Each shot a different man. Neither gunman resembled the men in the cage.
Moore now brought in eight of the railroad workers who had seen the Buick pass. They had all noticed the meager light-complexioned driver and four of them had seen the dark man next to him. All were positive that the defendants had not been in the car. Nicola Gatti, one of the workers, had known Sacco in Milford eight years earlier—the only witness of the crime who had previously known either of the defendants. In spite of the remonstrances of the foreman, he had pushed ahead of the others when he heard the shots until as the Buick passed he was standing just behind the gate-tender. He had been that close, and he had seen three men distinctly: the pale driver, the dark man beside him, and a man in the back who was firing a gun. Sacco was none of these men—nor was Vanzetti.
One of the track workers, Joseph Cellucci, testified in English. He had recently joined the Navy and appeared on the stand in uniform. As soon as he had heard the shots he had thrown down his shovel. Ricci, the foreman, had tried to stop him, but he had ducked away and was only about five feet from the Buick as it passed. A dark bristly man half-kneeling between the front and back seats had leveled a revolver and fired at him, the shot winging so close to his ear that he was deaf for three days. Cellucci had only a glimpse of the driver but it was enough to convince him that neither of the prisoners had been in the getaway car.
Barbara Liscomb, who had looked directly down at the bareheaded gunman, was considered the star witness for the defense. The contorted face of the dark man with the pistol who stared up at her as she stood at a second-floor window of Rice & Hutchins, had made an imprint in her mind she could never forget. “I would always remember that face,” she told the court. She was “positively sure” it was not the face of Sacco or Vanzetti.
Jenny Novelli described the man she had seen in the car who looked so much like her friend as having “dark hair and a dark complexion, like a man that has to shave every day.” Neither prisoner was that man. Just after the arrest of Sacco and Vanzetti, Hellyer, the Pinkerton operative, had shown Mrs. Novelli a photograph of Sacco and she said it greatly resembled the man next to the driver. She now denied ever making such a tentative identification. Sacco was not the man.
Hellyer himself would take the stand almost at the end of the trial and testify that when he interviewed Mrs. Novelli on April 17, 1920, she had described the man beside the driver as “twenty-seven years, five feet seven inches tall, slim build, black hair, black eyes, dark complexion, thin features, wide mouth, smooth-shaven, but appeared to be a man who could grow a heavy beard from the dark stubble on his face.” Hellyer’s Pinkerton report, which was not produced in evidence, recorded a markedly different description of the man: “27 years, 5 feet eight inches, medium build, light brown hair, fair complexion and smooth shaven, wore a cap but cannot recollect what else he wore.”
Mrs. Novelli was followed by minor witnesses whose fleeting glimpses, although not enough to establish much about the other passengers in the Buick, at least corroborated the now-undisputed fact that the driver was a pale, fair man. Elmer Chase, who had been loading his truck in front of the Co-operative Society as the Buick passed, had looked down at the driver and the bareheaded man next to him. He was positive that neither of the men he saw that day were the men in the cage. Walter Desmond, the tobacco salesman who had met and passed the Buick on his way from Randolph, had seen the pale-faced driver but scarcely noticed the man next to him. All he could say in court was that the driver was not one of the defendants. Wilson Dorr, working in the sandpit with John Lloyd on the Stoughton Post Road, had seen four “light complected,” men in the Buick as it passed within twenty-five feet of him. All had looked directly at him. None of them resembled Sacco or Vanzetti.