“Unsteady.”
Courtroom spectators were impressed by the heroic recital of “Slip” Harding. He described modestly his own coolness under fire; how he stood in the open during the gun-play in the Bridgewater attack. Some onlookers assert that Harding was behind a tree, but he testified that he took down the number of the bandits’ automobile as it sped away. Then he gave the memorandum to Police Chief Stewart, he said, and failed to keep a copy of it.
When Stewart went on the witness stand he stated that he had mislaid that important memorandum. After spending a whole day searching for the automobile number, he had to confess that he had lost it. Later, however, he gave “from memory” a number which he asserted was that of the bandit-car. That was six months after the crime. The number Stewart gave was that of a car stolen from Francis Murphy, a Natick shoe manufacturer, in November, 1919.
Two days after the South Braintree holdup, an abandoned Buick automobile, identified as Murphy’s, was found several miles away. The prosecution contended that it was used in both crimes.
Vanzetti was connected with that car by the thinnest threads. Remember the three shotgun shells found in his pocket many days after the second holdup. The prosecutors tried to introduce as evidence a fourth shotgun shell, alleged to have been found alongside the automobile. Judge Thayer would not admit its introduction.
Whether that shell actually was found beside the car may be questioned, in the light of a news story in the Boston Globe of April 19. That story told of State Detective Scott and Police Chief Jeremiah Gallivan of Braintree beating the bush for the missing $15,000 payroll.
(A curious thing about the South Braintree crime is that no trace of the stolen money, or of the black boxes that were said to have contained it, has been found. Stewart had an idea it was in Coacci’s trunk. It was not there. The only mention of any money that could possibly have come from that source was the two thousand dollars Madeiros went South with late in 1920. Being questioned by Mr. Thompson he refused to say where it came from, but it is to be inferred that it was part of the South Braintree loot.)
“Their search was fruitless,” according to the Globe, “except for finding of an empty RIFLE shell.”
Failing to get the fourth shotgun shell into evidence, the commonwealth tried another way to link Vanzetti with the Buick car.
It proceeded to build its case upon the shoulders of two missing men—a shaky scaffolding, but one which served the prosecution’s purposes.