With the jury absent, the defense endeavored to introduce testimony to show that when Goodridge first identified Sacco in September, 1920 (when Vanzetti was in this same courtroom in Dedham for a hearing), Goodridge was in court to answer a charge of absconding with funds belonging to his employer. Judge Thayer barred that evidence on the ground that no final judgment was entered in the Goodridge case. Goodridge simply pleaded guilty to the theft, and the case was “filed.”
Lewis L. Wade was a disappointment to the prosecution, as he was one of those upon whose testimony the indictment of Sacco was based. He was an employee of Slater and Morrill, and was in the street when the crime occurred, saw Berardelli shot from a distance of 72 paces. Just then a car came up; the man at the wheel was pale, 30 to 35 years old, looked sick. The assailant threw a cash box into the car and jumped in.
This man was described by Wade as short, bareheaded, 26 or 27, weighed about 140, hair blown back, needed shave, hair cut with “feather edge” in back. Wore gray shirt.
“Have you seen the man who shot Berardelli since?” asked Prosecutor Williams.
“I thought I saw him in Brockton police station,” Wade answered. “I thought then it was Sacco.”
But Wade declared now that he wasn’t sure. He had felt “a little mite of doubt” when he had testified in the preliminary hearing at Quincy. “I might be mistaken,” he had then testified. His doubt deepened about four weeks before he took the witness stand. “I was in a barber shop, and a man came in. His face looked familiar. The more I looked at that man and the more I thought about him the more I thought he resembled the man who killed Berardelli.”
Another heavy setback awaited the prosecution in the testimony of Louis De Berardinis, cobbler, who it was claimed had “identified” at Brockton. His shop is on Pearl Street with the Hampton building behind, a grass plot being between. He heard shots, ran out of shop, saw bandit-car coming across tracks, man jumping in. Man leaned out of the car with gun in hand, came opposite, pointed gun at him, pulled trigger; no explosion.
“That bandit was pale, had a long face, awful white,” said De Berardinis, “and he had light hair. A thin fellow, light weight. Not like Sacco. The one I saw was light. Sacco is dark.”
This is the complete identification case against Sacco so far as the murder scene is concerned. As has been shown, Pelser is discredited by his self-contradictions on the stand, and both his testimony and Goodridge’s is refuted by several undiscredited witnesses. The two bookkeepers were at a disadvantage in their location for purposes of identification, and they were positive fourteen months after the crime, whereas only a few weeks after it, they had expressed some uncertainty.
In addition to the above six, the government put five witnesses on the stand who got a sufficiently good view of bandit with whom it was sought to identify Sacco to describe his appearance; namely, Carrigan, Bostock, McGlone, Langlois, and Behrsin. None of them were able to make an identification. It is of prime importance that their locations were such as to make their testimony applicable to the same bandit whom the four “positive witnesses” identify as Sacco.