Similar alteration of testimony was made by Benjamin J. Bowles, one of the men on the paytruck. Bowles is a special officer for the White Shoe Company and member of Chief Stewart’s police force in Bridgewater. At the preliminary hearing Bowles swore the shotgun man’s moustache was “short and croppy.” But presently it became known that Policemen Schilling and Gault, of Plymouth, together with the Chief of Police there and various prominent persons, would testify for the defense that Vanzetti’s moustache had been full and flowing for years. So in the trial Bowles declared that the shotgun man’s moustache was “bushy.”
Bowles’ “pretty positive” identification, thrice repeated at the preliminary hearing (Page 32, preliminary record), became “positive” in the trial. (Page 25, trial record.)
Although refusing to make a positive identification for the commonwealth, Paymaster Alfred E. Cox reversed his general testimony at the trial and gave a description which would fit the defendant. In the Brockton police court on May 10, Cox declared several times that the shotgun man, in contrast to the other bandit, was “short and of slight build” (Page 11, preliminary record), the “short” fellow of the attacking party.
This was bad for the commonwealth’s case. But it didn’t stand. Bowles followed Cox with a “five feet eight inches” description which fitted Vanzetti better, and said that the shotgun man was the taller of the two. Then, when the case went to trial, Bowles was called first and Cox carefully patterned his description after him and let the bandit grow taller. When Bowles again said “five feet eight inches” Cox repeated “five feet eight inches.”
Bowles gave a description of the shotgun man’s hair, eyes, face and clothes of minute completeness. Such fullness of detail six months after he had seen a man for only a few chaotic seconds seems incredible. Bowles described graphically how he helped operate the motor truck after Earl Graves, the driver, collapsed from fright with the first bullet, and how they steered around a trolley car directly ahead of them.
And most marvelous of all—at the very time when he was doing this, he was engaged in a pistol duel with another bandit from the one he was describing. This other bandit, he said, was fully eight feet away from the shotgun man. All this is in the preliminary trial record.
At the trial however the defense attorneys challenged Bowles on the latter point and he promptly changed his testimony, saying now that his second shot was fired at the shotgun man. But he had just said that he was from 25 to 50 yards away when he fired the second shot.
Mrs. Georgina Brooks is an elderly woman who appears to have supernatural powers. Buildings become transparent when they stand in her way. She declared she saw “fire and smoke from a gun” while she stood in a window of the railway station, 75 feet back from Broad Street and 300 feet from Hale Street where the events took place.
But there is a two-story frame house half-way along Broad Street which completely shuts off an observer in that window from any view of the crime-area!
Mrs. Brooks makes no secret of being able to see only the vague silhouette of objects before her with one of her eyes, and she has been taking treatment for the other. But on the way to the railroad station with a small child before the shooting, she took observations afterwards useful to the prosecution. She was walking north on the west side of Broad Street, she said, when she noticed an automobile drawn up in Hale street, east of the eastern sidewalk line on Broad Street. The rear of the car was toward her.