“He was slightly taller than I,” she testified; “weighed about 140 to 145 pounds, had dark hair, dark eyebrows, thin cheeks, and clean-shaven face of a peculiar greenish-white. His forehead was high. His hair was brushed back, and it was, I should think, between two and two and a half inches long. His shoulders were straight out, square. He wore no hat.... His face was clear-cut, clean-cut. He wore a gray shirt. He was a muscular, active looking man, and had a strong left hand, a powerful hand.”
She said he was leaning half out of the car, just behind the front seat, and that his left hand was on the back of that seat, presumably at arm’s length from his face.
“He was in my view from the middle of the distance between the railroad tracks and the cobbler shop, a distance probably 60 to 70 feet, and half distance would be 30 to 35 feet. My view was cut off by the cobbler shop.”
Miss Splaine declared positively that Sacco was the bandit who leaned from the car. Defense Counsel Fred H. Moore confronted her with the record of the preliminary hearing in the Sacco case, which shows that at that time, a year before the trial and a few weeks after the crime and after she had looked Sacco over to her complete satisfaction on three different days, she admitted under oath that she “could not swear positively that Sacco was the bandit.”
“That is not true,” she now asserted. “I never said it.”
But next day she came into court and announced that she wished to change her testimony, and admitted she had said at the preliminary hearing that she could not swear positively Sacco was the bandit. (Page 416, official transcript.) She added that her present certainty of Sacco’s being the bandit came from “reflection.” The transcript of the preliminary testimony (Page 56) showed that she had said in police court: “I do not think my opportunity afforded me the right to say he is the man.”
In the preliminary hearing she remembered a revolver in the right hand. At the trial she recalled nothing about the right hand or this revolver.
Finally she admitted that when she visited state police headquarters in Boston shortly after the crime, she was shown a rogues’ gallery photograph of a certain man. Of him she said: “He bears a striking resemblance to the bandit.”
Later she learned that this man was in Sing Sing prison on April 15.
Frances J. Devlin, also a bookkeeper for Slater and Morrill, gave testimony similar to that of Miss Splaine. She saw the escaping car from the same observation point, a window in the second story of the Hampton House, at least 80 feet from the car. She said she saw a man in the right rear seat of the automobile lean out and fire at the crowd.