Chapter IV: Preface: XI (3)

A. Well, he was carrying the suitcase, and his head was working on a pivot, and he looked all excited as if he was worrying about something. That is what called my attention to him first.

Q. You at that time then noticed the cellar doors, the iron doors there?

A. Yes.

Q. Did he put the suitcase down before he got to the iron doors or afterwards?

A. No, before he got to the iron doors.

Q. He put it against the wall?

A. Let it down by the side of the wall.

Then he had watched Billings walk to the saloon at the corner of Steuart and Market where, just as he pushed the swinging door open, “right on the second, that man there, Mooney, he came out of the saloon.” As the two men were talking, Mooney kept checking his watch with the clock on the Ferry Building on the Embarcadero Plaza. When the brief conversation ended, Billings “started out in the crowd and I lost sight of him and my attention was drawn to this other man.”

Q. Thomas J. Mooney?

A. Yes.

Q. What did he do?

A. He took his watch out again and looked down toward the dock in the Ferry building and after he put his watch back in his pocket he drew his shoulders up and put his hand to his face like he was studying and looked alongside the building.

Q. What did he do?

A. He turned around and went through the crowd and I lost sight of him.

McDonald described the suitcase as being “kind of jersey, brownish color,” nineteen inches long, fourteen inches deep and seven inches thick. He was “just as positive as I am sitting in this chair” that Billings and Mooney were the men he had watched that July day. As far as the time was concerned, he thought that he had seen Billings walking up Steuart Street “about five minutes” after he himself had arrived at the corner at 1:40.

Cockran, who had been thumbing through the transcript of McDonald’s testimony at the Billings trial, could hardly wait for Cunha to finish with the witness. He didn’t waste any time getting down to bedrock.

Q. Didn’t you say at the Billings trial that when you saw Billings place that suitcase there it was about two o’clock?

A. Yes, but Mr. Cockran--

Q. Explain your answer. I understood you to say at the last trial ... it was two o’clock, and now you want to add something to your testimony. Am I right?

A. I know that is also the way I also testified in Judge--

Q. Can’t you answer that? Did you say at the last trial it was two o’clock when you saw Billings place that suitcase near those trap doors?

A. Yes, but I also said in Judge Dunne’s court it was eight or ten minutes of two when Billings came at the time with the suitcase.

Q. You repeat now it was eight to ten minutes of two and it wasn’t two o’clock when he put it down?

A. No, sir, I don’t say it was two o’clock when he put it down.

Q. You said it then, didn’t you?

A. Yes.

After Cockran had brought out that it would have been difficult for McDonald, who was standing more than one hundred feet away, to see the five-foot-four Billings through the crowd, the defense attorney came back to the all-important time element.

Q. Wasn’t the parade between you and Billings?

A. They were standing 50 feet off or more on Steuart Street.

Q. They were on the move at the time?

A. No, sir.

Q. Do you mean to say they were not moving at two?

A. I wasn’t there at two.

Q. Where were you at two?

A. Down towards the Alameda Cafe on Market Street or close to it.

Q. Then you were not there looking at him place it there at about two o’clock?

A. I mean about as near as I can tell to two o’clock.

Q. You don’t want to qualify it now?

A. I don’t change it.

In his testimony before the Grand Jury, McDonald had said that, after losing sight of Mooney, he had “started down Market Street and I got as far as the Alameda Cafe when the explosion occurred.” He had repeated this statement, almost word for word, at the Billings trial. Cockran decided to put the question to him once more.

Q. How far did you get when the explosion occurred?

A. Well, I had been standing down in front of the Alameda Cafe looking at the parade go by, and the parade had gone by, and I still stood there awhile and I seen the people pushing up toward Steuart and Market and I thought they were, that it was the units coming out of Steuart Street, and I was standing in front of the Alameda Cafe when the explosion occurred. When I did hear the report, I thought it was a signal for the units to come out of Steuart Street.

If McDonald could be believed (and it was obvious that Cockran was not prepared to accept this thesis), he had walked some 150 feet up Market Street after watching the Mooney-Billings tableau before he heard the blast. Since he had testified that he had first seen Billings at “eight or ten minutes to two,” some “25 to 50 feet” away from the corner, that the machinist had placed the suitcase against the building wall “about two o’clock,” and that he himself had started up Market Street in the direction of the cafe before two, it had taken him more than six minutes to cover the half-block. But the witness had an answer for this: “... when I started down Market I just took my time and walked along slowly. I didn’t walk any faster than a snail crawls almost. It took me a little time to get down to the coffee house.” Didn’t Mr. Cockran realize that he was still a very weak man?

McDonald was followed on the stand by Frank C. Oxman, a cattle dealer from Durkee, Oregon, who had replaced the syphilitic, wife-beating Crowley as a corroborative witness. It seems that he, too, had been on the corner of Market and Steuart Streets just before the explosion. He had pulled into town from Portland “between 12 and 1 o’clock,” and checked into the Terminal Hotel which was directly across Market Street from the Alameda Cafe. Then “I went to two or three restaurants and they were crowded and I couldn’t get a seat and I went over and bought some fruit and was at the corner of the street and was expecting to cross the street when the automobile drove up.”

Q. Where did it come from?

A. I call it down Market Street. It was going toward the Ferry Building.

Q. What was it attracted your attention to that machine?

A. This defendant was in the front seat holding a suitcase on the outside with his hands, on the running board.

Q. The defendant on trial, Thomas J. Mooney?

A. Yes.

He described the car as “an old Ford” and identified Israel Weinberg as its driver. He had seen Mrs. Mooney and Billings, whom he depicted as “the little auburn-haired boy,” in the vehicle’s rear seat. When Weinberg stopped the car near the saloon at the corner of Market and Steuart, “the little auburn-haired boy jumped out of the hind seat, very excitedly and very rapidly, and took the suitcase from the other gentleman that was holding it on the front of the machine.” Another man, who had been sitting in the Ford’s back seat, a man who “had a stubby mustache and looked like a working man,” got out of the car and relieved Billings of the suitcase. Then the two men had walked rapidly down Steuart Street just beyond some metal cellar stairs where Billings “took the suitcase from the other man and ... set it down by some doors.”

While all this was going on, Mooney had left the car and was standing on the curb, “right out near where I was,” watching Billings and his mustached companion walk down Steuart Street.

Q. Then what happened?

A. Then they came on back where Mr. Mooney was standing near the post and seemed to be looking for somebody, I don’t know--I think they went in the door of the building there, I won’t be sure whether all of them or not, and directly came out.

Oxman was near enough to hear Mooney tell Billings, “Give it to him and let him go; we must get away from here; the bulls will be after us.” The latter then handed something “to the other gentleman that carried the suitcase part of the way.”

Q. What happened?

A. He went across the street ... the other gentleman, I don’t know who he was.

After another brief conversation between Mooney and Billings, the machinist “went first toward the car and Mr. Mooney looked at his watch and looked at his watch and looked at the tower clock also at the same time. He glanced over to where the suitcase was after Mr. Billings left him and then he proceeded to go to the car also.” When he last saw the Ford, it had “turned into Steuart and went up Steuart.”

Oxman was certain that all of this had taken place at least twenty minutes before the explosion because he had returned to the hotel to wait for a telephone call.

Q. Now, when you got over to the hotel, did you notice anything about the time?

A. Yes.

Q. What would you say the time was when you arrived there?

A. It was 15 minutes to two o’clock.

Q. Around fifteen minutes to two?

A. Yes, because my telephone call was at two o’clock.

When Cockran took over, he wanted to know why Oxman had been so intensely interested in three men and a suitcase with a mammoth parade going by right under his nose. The witness had a ready answer to this oblique reflection on his credibility. “I thought these people were a set of thieves,” he said. “I took more than one glance at them. I thought they had stolen this suitcase and were caching it out, that was the reason I took close observation of them.” Besides, despite the fact that the cattleman weighed two hundred pounds, “Billings pushed me out of the way so he could go past.” A fat man would remember a thing like that.

Why hadn’t he reported the incident to the police when “he had noticed a mounted policeman there very close just before that?” He didn’t want to become involved. “Although I thought these men were thieves, I didn’t call a policeman, I didn’t look for one.” But he did jot down the license number of the Ford jitney--No. 5187--on the back of a Western Union envelope with the notation, “Think stolen grip. S. F. July 22.”

Thirteen-year-old Jimmy McDougall had been a flag boy with the First California Volunteers that afternoon. His unit formed in Steuart Street and had just turned the corner into Market Street when the bomb exploded. While he was waiting for the Volunteers to join the parade, Jimmy remembered seeing a light-brown leather suitcase “sitting where the hole was afterwards.” He had first seen the suitcase, which was about fifty-one inches long, ten inches wide, and a little more than fourteen inches high, “about ten minutes before I started to march.” But he hadn’t noticed any of the defendants in the area.

Before turning to les dames Edeau, Fickert called Detective John A. Dolan who had “arrived at the scene of the explosion about five minutes after it.” Like the other gendarmes who had preceded him on the stand, he described the positions of the bodies, the condition of the sidewalk, and the various pieces of metal that littered the area. When Fickert turned the witness over to him, Cockran saw a neat opportunity to put a small spike in Oxman’s story. He asked Dolan whether he had noticed any cars on Market Street after the parade had started. The detective, who had been assigned to look out for pickpockets on the sidewalks, said that he had seen no automobiles along the line of march and that he knew there was a general order excluding them from the area.

Sadie Edeau and her mother had both testified in the Billings trial. Although the two women swore that they had observed Billings on the roof of 721 Market Street, neither one had mentioned seeing any of the other defendants. Now Miss Edeau said that, shortly after witnessing Billings on the roof, “I saw Thomas J. Mooney and Mrs. Mooney ... coming down from the way of 721 Market Street.” When Billings came out of 721, she had watched him talking to Patrolman Moore. “I next saw Billings meet Mooney in the center of the sidewalk a little past the entrance to the Kamm Building a little further out on Market Street.” When she last saw the trio, they “all started down to the Ferry.” A few minutes earlier, she had seen Weinberg enter a “five-seated Ford” which had been parked on Market Street, facing downtown, and “drive down toward Third Street.” All of this had occurred “between half past one and twenty minutes to two.”

Cockran was beside himself when he took the witness over.

Q. Now, Miss Edeau, will you tell us why you didn’t mention Mr. Mooney and Mrs. Mooney and Israel Weinberg and the Kamm Building and that automobile ... at any time during the trial of the Billings case?

A. Yes, I was never asked anything about them on the witness chair.

Q. Were you asked what you saw that day?

A. I was only asked what I saw Billings do.

In fact, she hadn’t even told Draper H. Hand, the detective who had interviewed her in Fickert’s office before the Billings trial, all that she had seen because she “wanted to stay out of the affair.” But she insisted that she had revealed to him “about seeing the jitney and seeing the officer honk that horn.”

However, there was someone in whom Miss Edeau had confided before going to the police. She had spoken to Professor H. C. Migram, an elder in her church. But, while she had told him “more than I told Mr. Hand,” she was obviously not a lady who liked to reveal all at one sitting.

Q. Did you tell him everything you saw?

A. I didn’t tell him everything we saw.

Q. He told you to come over to the District Attorney and tell him everything you saw?

A. Certainly.

Q. And as I understand you, you didn’t tell him everything you saw, some of it you reserved until today?

A. Yes.

Q. Why didn’t you?

A. Because I didn’t feel like doing it.

Q. You didn’t feel like telling the whole truth?

You wanted to tell as much as you wanted?

A. The reason why I didn’t tell it was because I didn’t want to get into it.

Q. But you were in it!

A. We need not have gotten into it if we didn’t want to be truthful.

Q. But the elder advised you to go and tell the District Attorney everything you know?

A. Yes.

Q. And you went over and didn’t tell him all that you knew?

A. I think we did.

Cockran was muttering to himself when he sat down.

Mellie Edeau not only vigorously confirmed her daughter’s version, but insisted that they neither knew of any reward nor were “after the reward.” “Such a thing as that would not appeal to me,” she told Cockran. After Patrolman Moore, Peter Vidovich and Herbert C. Wade had repeated the testimony they had given in the Billings trial, Fickert called T. K. Stateler, a Civil War veteran who, like young Jimmy McDougall, had also seen “a suitcase at the place where I afterwards saw the indentation on the sidewalk.” Stateler, who didn’t have the stamina he had had at Gettysburg, had tired on his walk from his office to his unit’s assembly point in Steuart Street. “I looked for something to sit down on,” he said, “and I saw the suitcase. It was in the shade and it occurred to me to sit on it.” But a solid belief in private property had won out and he had decided to rest his G. A. R. bones on a nearby fence instead. As for the suitcase, “it looked like an old one, dark tan I should say.”

Fickert closed out his case with a lecture on the detonation of dynamite by Arthur H. Crane, an explosives expert, and the testimony of the officers who had arrested Billings and Weinberg. Lieutenant Bunner had picked up Billings at the Lane Hospital on July 26th. Later that day, he had searched the suspect’s home at 2410 Mission Street where he had uncovered a can of .22-caliber cartridges, a loaded .32-caliber pistol, a .22-caliber rifle, and ten ball bearings. Detective Hand had apprehended Weinberg in the famous Ford jitney that same day at the corner of Golden Gate Avenue and Market Street. Sergeant William R. Proll, accompanied by two policemen and the ubiquitous Martin Swanson, had ransacked the Mooney studio in the Eilers Building on July 26th. They had found “fifteen .32-caliber cartridges ... also three steel-jacketed bullets ... nine .38-caliber cartridges,” as well as an Iver Johnson pistol. On Tuesday, January 30th, twelve days after Cunha had arisen to address the newly impanelled jury, he informed Judge Griffin that “the State rests, your Honor.” Now it was Mooney’s turn.

Fickert’s case depended on convincing the jury that the cause of the blast was a time-bomb concealed in a suitcase which Mooney and Billings had planted at Steuart and Market Streets. Yet, there were witnesses who had seen an object falling from a roof just before the explosion occurred. Dr. Mora J. Moss, a physician who was marching with the Sons of the American Revolution, happened to look toward a building on the southwest corner and “saw a black object falling through the air.” When he noticed it, it was between twelve and fifteen inches from the ground. “It disappeared,” he testified, “behind the people standing on the sidewalk and a violent explosion immediately followed.” At the time, he was sure that it was a signal bomb to start the parade and had been dropped from the Ferry Building.

Fannie Dahl, Charles F. Hollfender, Louis Eris, and Maud Masterson, all of whom had been standing in the crowd on Market Street, also had seen “a dark object” flashing by. Dr. Moss had described it as “a foot to fourteen inches in length and three and a half to four inches in diameter.” Eris thought that “it seemed to be cylindrical in shape and about a foot across.” To Mrs. Masterson it resembled “an object like a balloon falling.” Janice Compton, who had a sixth-floor room in the Terminal Hotel, had been watching the parade from her window when she “saw a man crawl along the cornice of the building then being demolished just east of the saloon, walk across the roof of the southwest corner building and lean over the cornice and return, and in a second the explosion occurred.”

Thomas U. Doidge, who worked for the Fine Arts Engraving Company, said that he had been standing near the trolley pole in front of 721 Market Street, waiting for the parade. After the street had been cleared of all traffic, a car drove up and parked so close to him that he had to step aside so that its driver could get out. A few minutes later, Patrolman Moore had walked over and asked Doidge, “Is this your car?” When the witness answered, “No, sir, the driver has gone in the building here,” Moore “took hold of the horn and honked four or five times.” Shortly after the policeman had continued on his beat, the driver came out of 721, entered his car and turned left into O’Farrell Street. Doidge had not noticed any “suitcase or anything else in his hand.”

On the afternoon of July 22nd, Wade Hamilton, an employee of the Eilers Music Company, had been photographing the parade with a small Brownie folding camera from the roof of 925 Market Street. Four of his pictures were taken from the rear of the roof and, when he developed them, he noticed that the Mooneys were included in a group of persons standing within camera range. A large jeweler’s clock on the opposite sidewalk also showed up in the photographs. When the defense attorneys asked Hamilton to let them see prints of the films, he refused and immediately turned them over to Fickert. At the Billings trial, blurred prints, which failed to show the clock in the background, were furnished to the defense and introduced in evidence.

Now, Maxwell McNutt, who had taken over for Cockran, was determined to force the prosecution to come across with Hamilton’s negatives. He asked Griffin to order the Police Department to “produce the films referred to by this witness.” Cunha gave him a bit of a fight.

MR. CUNHA: I believe they are in the possession of Mr. Blum, the police photographer.

MR. McNUTT: We will ask that they be brought here before the witness leaves the stand.

THE COURT: Yes, send for them.

MR. CUNHA: It is Mr. McNutt’s business not ours, to send for them.

MR. McNUTT: I have no control over Mr. Blum. Go and get Mr. Blum and tell him to deliver the films which were delivered to him a week after the day of the Preparedness Day Parade.

Cunha, after reminding McNutt that he “had copies of those at the last trial,” gave in meekly. When the films were brought into the courtroom, Hamilton identified them as those he had taken on July 22nd.

Theodore Kytka, a photography expert for the United States Government, had made enlargements of Hamilton’s pictures. They clearly showed that the Mooneys had been on the Eilers Building roof at 2:01 p.m. and 2:04 p.m. on the day of the parade. Since the Eilers Building was more than a mile away from the corner of Market and Steuart, it was difficult to see how Mooney could have been in two places at approximately the same time unless one was prepared to accept a theory later advanced by Mrs. Edeau that a person’s “astral” and “physical” bodies can be separated at will.

John C. Lawlor, another Eilers Music Company employee, had gone to the roof with his wife “about a quarter to two, ten minutes to two, something like that.” He had seen Rena Mooney there “about ten minutes to two.” However, in the Billings trial, he had testified that “I first went up about ten minutes to two and that I remained there about ten minutes and started to go down the street and had an engagement and met Mrs. Mooney coming on the roof alone.” His wife, Gertrude, remembered that Mooney had also been on the roof “but I can’t say what time it was.” Mr. and Mrs. Mario Cresafulli had seen the couple there at 1:50 p.m. as had Mrs. Julia de Lorenzo.

Before the Mooneys had gone to the roof, they had been in their fifth-floor studio-apartment. Benjamin Kirsch, who had his tailor shop in Room 503 of the Eilers Building, had seen Rena Mooney “going down to the mezzanine floor with a sheet of music in her hand” between one and 1:30 p.m. Harry Rosenblatt, Mrs. Kirsch’s brother, arrived at the shop “between one and half past” and met the Mooneys there as did Sam Green, a family friend. Nicholas Hugh Treanor went to Mrs. Mooney’s studio on the morning of July 22nd and did not leave until 12:30. Rebecca Cutler, a violin pupil, said that she had come for a lesson that morning but that she couldn’t remember “what time of day it was.”

Rena Mooney testified that she had seen three of her pupils on the morning of the parade. Camille Leger had arrived first, only to announce that “she would rather not take her lesson that week because she had been on vacation and had not practiced.” Mrs. Mooney told the girl not to give it a second thought since the cancellation “was just as well for me as I was going on a vacation myself.” She had decided to purchase some underwear at Schwartz & Goodman’s on Fifth Street and the girl accompanied her to the elevator. While she was out, Rena stopped in the Clarion and bought a shirt and a tie for her husband.

After Rebecca Cutler’s violin lesson, the Mooneys decided to go up to the roof to see the parade because a huge flag on the front of the building had blocked all their windows. Martha Timberlake, Mrs. Mooney’s cousin, and Belle Hammersburg, her sister, went to the roof with the couple and stayed there until the parade ended. Hilbert Roberts, a fourteen-year-old pupil of Mrs. Mooney’s, “saw her on Parade Day on top of the Eilers Building while the parade was going on,” but didn’t know what time it had been.

When Mooney took the stand, he confirmed his wife’s account of their activities on July 22nd. He had left the apartment for breakfast at Hoffman’s Restaurant at 9:30 that morning and returned an hour later. He recalled that Rebecca Cutler had left his wife’s studio “in the neighborhood of 1 or 1:15.” A few minutes later, Mrs. Hammersburg and Mrs. Timberlake arrived and, at approximately 1:30, the quartet went up to the roof. “We did not leave the roof,” he testified, “until the last section had passed.” Like his wife, he denied being either at Steuart and Market Streets or 721 Market Street at any time during the day.

Israel Weinberg, a Russian-born ex-journeyman carpenter who had turned to hacking early in 1915, had met Mrs. Mooney when a Mrs. Strager (his wife remembered the name as Trager) recommended her as a music teacher for his son. Until he was arrested, he had never met Nolan or Billings. At 2:05 on July 22nd, he had been paying a bill at the gas company office on Grant Avenue. Then, after buying some chops and a loaf of bread, he went home and had his lunch. At 4:45, he had driven to the Ferry and “kept working until ten o’clock that night.” When it came to denials, he was just as definite as the Mooneys. “I did not drive a jitney on parade day up to 721 Market Street or to Steuart and Market or carry as passengers Mooney, Billings, Mrs. Mooney and a man with a stubby mustache.”

Weinberg insisted that he had picked up two men at 29th and Valencia who ordered him to take them to the 12:20 Ferry. Although he told them that “I guess I can make it,” he had arrived five minutes too late. Then, the cabbie picked up two more passengers on E Street who were destined for Fillmore and Sutter. When the cab reached Golden Gate Avenue and Jones Street, Weinberg said, “I saw a jitney driver I know, Simon Statler.” Later a Simon L. Sutter testified that “I saw Israel Weinberg driving around Golden Gate Avenue and Jones St. between 12:30 and around 1 p.m. or probably a little after. I don’t know the exact time. It was in the early afternoon.” Esther Caplan, who ran a misfit clothing store at 1269 Golden Gate Avenue, had seen Weinberg “between half past one and two on Saturday” when he had stopped in for a few minutes to read her a letter from his wife, who had gone east for the summer. David J. Smith, an old friend, had met him on Golden Gate between Webster and Fillmore “about a quarter to two.” Weinberg was on the sidewalk, walking toward his cab, when Smith, who was accompanied by Leon Carasso, a life insurance agent, had hailed him.

On February 9, 1917, the jury returned a verdict, finding Mooney guilty of murder in the first degree. Cockran immediately moved for a new trial on the ground that the verdict was against the weight of the evidence, but Judge Griffin decided to let things stand as they were. On February 24th, he sentenced the defendant to be “hanged by the neck until you be dead.” If this wasn’t the end of the road for the thirty-year-old ex-moulder, it was as reasonable and uncomfortable a facsimile as a union man could ask for.

But there was more to come. On April 11th, the _San Francisco Bulletin_ published photostatic reproductions of a series of letters between Oxman and one F. E. Rigall, the proprietor of a pool hall in Grayville, Illinois. In the early morning hours of December 14, 1916, the Oregon cattle dealer had written an urgent--and misspelled--note on the stationery of the Hotel Terminal to his old friend, urging him to “cum to San Frisco as a expurt witness in a very important case.” He promised him “mileage and all that a witness can draw probly 100 in the clear.” Oxman closed with the plaintive plea that “I need a witness.” Two days later, Rigall wired: “Will come. Wire transportation and expenses.”

Oxman answered him at once. “Your Telegram Received,” he wrote, “I will wire you Transportation in Plenty of time.” But there was one condition. “You will only hafto say you saw me on July 22 in San Frisco and that will be easey dun.” In the meantime, he advised his friend that “the silent Road is the one and say nothing to any Body the fewer People no it the Better.” On Christmas day, Oxman informed Rigall’s mother that he was “sending Ed transportation tomorrow.” Perhaps, he would be able to use her, too, as “a Extry witness” might come in very handy.

Rigall arrived in San Francisco on January 6, 1917, and registered at the Terminal Hotel as “L. O. Charles.” He was given Room 437. Four days later, the register was changed to show that 487 was now occupied by an “F. E. Rigall, Evansville.” On January 17th, at the request of “Mr. C. M. Fickert,” a card was issued to an “F. E. Rigall” by the Olympic Club of San Francisco, extending to him “the privileges of the club for a period of two weeks.” Apparently, nothing was too good for “a Extry witness.”

But Rigall was destined never to see action in the Mooney trial for the simple reason that he had never been in San Francisco before in his life. On February 12, 1917, three days after Mooney’s conviction, he sent Cunha a congratulatory wire but warned him that “my evidence will get party new trial.” The Assistant District Attorney replied by return telegram that he was “astonished at your suggestion that you have testimony to help defendant,” and exhorted Rigall to “wire me collect all details at once.” There was no answer from Grayville.

On February 13th, Charlotte La Posee gave the defense attorneys an affidavit in which she swore that she had seen Oxman watching the parade near the entrance to the Phelan Building, more than a mile from Steuart and Market, at the exact time when, according to his testimony, he had observed Mooney and Billings planting the lethal suitcase. According to the _Examiner_, Fickert was “undisturbed” at this revelation because “John Regal, an Oregon business man, was a companion of Oxman the day of the Preparedness Parade and could corroborate the testimony of the cattle man.” The reason “Regal” hadn’t been called at the trial was “because of domestic difficulties.”

Rigall got around to putting his story in writing on April 22nd when he signed an affidavit in which he claimed that Oxman, with Fickert’s help, had tried to get him to say that he had seen Mooney at the corner of Market and Steuart on Parade Day. For this, he was to receive $250.00 from Oxman and a liberal share of the reward money. But his conscience had gotten the better of him and he had left San Francisco on January 26, 1917, without testifying. When he returned home to Grayville, he had told the story to Mayor Claude O. Ellis, who had persuaded him to return to California and prevent “the God damndest frame-up that you ever heard of.”

Six days earlier, Estelle Smith, the dental assistant who had testified that Billings and his famous suitcase had been on the roof of 721 Market Street on the day of the explosion, had admitted that Oxman had tried to bribe her to identify Weinberg as well. “Wouldn’t you testify,” he had asked her, “that you saw him for a check in four or five figures?” To her question, “Who sent you to me, Fickert?,” he had replied, “No, not Fickert, but men higher up than Fickert.” When she had told the District Attorney of this offer, she was informed that the cattleman was “a queer old duck.”

On April 30, 1917, Oxman was indicted for subornation of perjury. One month later, Rena Mooney was brought to trial and acquitted on July 25th. Fickert managed to keep her in jail on the other seven indictments until March 30, 1918 when she was released in five thousand dollars bail. On November 27th, Weinberg also was acquitted but it was not until March 22, 1918, that he was admitted to bail. Nolan, with Captain Matheson’s help, walked out of prison shortly after the Oxman exposures and was never tried.

In the Weinberg trial, eighteen police officers who had been stationed in the vicinity of Steuart and Market on July 22nd testified that they had seen no jitney in that area between 1:30 and 2:06 p.m. Inspector William H. Smith and Captain Walter J. Peterson of the Oakland Police Department both said that Mrs. Edeau had first told them that she and her daughter had seen two middle-aged men “carrying a black suitcase with white metal trimmings at Steuart and Market Streets.” When Mrs. Edeau was taken to City Prison to identify Mooney and Billings, she had told Inspector Smith, “I have never seen either of these men in my life before.” In any event, it had been her “physical” body at Steuart and Market, she had informed the startled officer, because her “astral” body was standing on the sidewalk in front of the Kamm Building watching Billings leaning over the roof of 721 Market Street. Two years later, her physical hand was to write for the rewards her astral eyes had earned.

Although Oxman was acquitted of subornation of perjury, Woodrow Wilson appointed a Mediation Commission to make an investigation into the Mooney case. On January 16, 1918, the Commission informed the President that, while it was not in a position to determine the defendant’s guilt or innocence, it did feel that “a solid basis exists for the feeling that an injustice was done ... and that an irreparable injustice would be committed to allow such conviction to proceed to execution.” On the strength of this report, Wilson persuaded Governor William D. Stephens to commute Mooney’s sentence to life imprisonment.

Because California law did not permit the granting of a new trial on the basis of evidence that was not in the original record, it became impossible, notwithstanding Judge Griffin’s earnest attempts, to give Mooney another hearing. Both the trial judge and the Supreme Court of California were powerless to act despite that fact that, in May of 1921, Mr. and Mrs. Earl Hatcher of Woodland, California, told a Grand Jury investigating Oxman’s possible perjury at the Mooney trial that the cattleman did not board the San Francisco train until 2:15 p.m., nine minutes after the bomb had exploded some ninety miles to the southwest. When Griffin reminded Governor Stephens that Mooney had been condemned upon evidence “concerning the truth of which, there had arisen a very grave doubt,” he had made the understatement of the century.

But there were still more surprises in the offing. Alice Kidwell, Estelle Smith’s mother, who had testified before the Grand Jury that she saw Mooney waiting for Billings outside of 721 Market Street, had written a letter on February 2, 1917, to her husband, who was then serving a term for forgery in Folsom Penitentiary. In it, she told him that “the authorities are going to let you out and maybe in a few days. Captain Matheson and the District Attorney went to see two of the Board this A.M. and will see the others at Sac. I know I am needed for authorities and they are helping me by getting you out.”

Fickert’s largesse was impressive. Before Estelle Smith had retired to the safety of a dentist’s office, she had been a San Francisco prostitute with a long arrest record. In addition, she and James L. Murphy, an uncle, had been indicted in 1913 for the murder of a boarder at the rooming house in which they were then living. Estelle was never tried but her uncle was convicted and sentenced to twelve years in the penitentiary. Coincidentally, Uncle Jim was released on April 10, 1917, forty-five days after Mooney’s sentence. In 1929, Miss Smith gave Fremont Older, then the editor of the _San Francisco Call_, a sworn statement in which she admitted she and the Edeaus had been carefully coached by Fickert’s men.

On February 7, 1921, John McDonald, the only key witness besides the Edeaus to testify in all four trials, executed a startling affidavit in New York City. In it, he stated that, while he had seen a man “lay down a suitcase” on Steuart Street, he had never seen that man again. But the District Attorney had wanted more out of him than this. “I think I talked to Fickert every day for weeks about the case. He kept saying to me every time I came, always using hard names against Mooney and Billings, ‘Those are the men you saw there that day.’ Up to this time I had never told Fickert that I could not have identified these men if they had not been pointed out to me, and I could not do so.” Just before the trial, Fickert told him that “there is a reward of $17,500 for the conviction of these people, and when I put them away, I will see that you get the biggest slice of the reward.” For a man who hadn’t worked in months, the temptation was just too much.

For some weeks prior to July 22nd, more than two hundred hand-printed post cards had been mailed to various sponsors of the parade. These cards warned their recipients that, because of their “extreme activity in promoting and glorifying militarism ... the extermination of you and your evil class, is going to be the sole and patriotic duty of the Employees Liberty League.” Although many detectives thought that there was a connection between the cards and the explosion, Fickert had dropped any further investigation along this line when handwriting experts advised him that neither Mooney nor Billings could have written them. But in 1930, Alonzo A. Smith swore that his brother, Louis, had told him before he died that he had been hired to throw a time bomb from the top of Market Street building during the Preparedness Day Parade. Dora E. Monroe said that Louis had once stated that “it was me that threw the bomb ... which Tom Mooney was convicted for.” It was to be dropped into a certain car in the parade and Smith had received a two-thousand-dollar advance with eight thousand more promised for results. But he had lost his nerve and thrown the bomb too early.

The rest of the story consisted of one application after another by Mooney for a pardon. Although his petitions were supported, at one time or another, by Captain Matheson, Detective Hand, Matthew Brady, Fickert’s successor, Judge Griffin, and nine of the ten living Mooney jurors, four California governors in a row--Richardson, Young, Merriam and Rolph--refused to free him. Even a daring attempt by the defendant in 1933 “to risk my neck” by insisting on being tried on one of the other murder indictments, came a cropper when the district attorney informed Judge Louis H. Ward that “the evidence in this case is insufficient ... the State asks for an instructed verdict and rests.”

It was not until January of 1939 that Governor Culbert L. Olson ended more than twenty-three years of imprisonment by granting Mooney an unconditional pardon. But for San Quentin Convict Number 31921, it all came much too late. The fifty-six-year-old man, who returned to San Francisco to find his countrymen on the brink of another war, had only three more years to live. The spirit that, as late as 1932, had been “aflame with furious indignation,” had burned itself out in a dungeon.

4

_Anarchists With Bloody Hands_

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

_versus_

Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco

Thursday, April 15, 1920, dawned bright and windy in South Braintree, Massachusetts, a manufacturing town some twenty miles south of Boston. Shortly after nine that morning, Shelley A. Neal, the local American Express agent, waited at the New Haven railroad station for the delivery of a $15,776.51 payroll. The money was consigned to Slater & Morrill, Inc., one of South Braintree’s two shoe companies.

The cash arrived on the Boston train at about 9:10, and Neal took it to his office on the first floor of Hampton House, a four-story frame building on Railroad Avenue, a few feet from its intersection with Pearl Street, South Braintree’s main thoroughfare. Slater & Morrill occupied the top three floors of Hampton House, with its business office on the second floor. After he had sorted and counted the money, Neal left his office and walked down Railroad Avenue to the shoe company’s main entrance in the center of the rectangular building. As he locked his door, he saw that the hands on his office clock stood at exactly 9:30. He was a rapid walker and had almost arrived at the double-doored entrance before he noticed, with some apprehension, that a large, newly varnished black automobile with its motor running was parked alongside the curb.

When Neal passed the car, he saw that its driver, a light-haired man with an emaciated, jaundiced face, was watching him intently. As he entered Hampton House, he observed that the man got into the car and drove slowly up Railroad Avenue. Neal followed the vehicle with his eyes and thought that he could glimpse another man sitting in its rear seat. Although he later admitted that he had considered the driver’s conduct extremely suspicious, the agent did not report the incident to anyone at Slater & Morrill.

The company’s paymistress receipted for the money and began at once to fill the pay envelopes. When she had finished, the grey-colored packets were stacked in two large tin flats. Thursday was payday at the factory, and the boxes were scheduled to be picked up at three o’clock that afternoon by Frederick A. Parmenter, Slater & Morrill’s acting paymaster.

The car that had aroused Neal’s suspicions was apparently seen in other parts of South Braintree that morning. At 10:30, Harry E. Dolbeare, a piano repairman, was walking on Hancock Street when he noticed what he later described as “a carload of foreigners” in a large black sedan turning into Hancock Street from Holbrook Avenue. In the back of the car, he saw a man with “a very heavy mustache ... leaning forward as though he was talking to either the driver or the other person in front of the car.” In all, there were four men in the car who appeared to him to be “a tough looking bunch.”

A little after 11:30, Mrs. Lola R. Andrews, an unemployed practical nurse, arrived in South Braintree with Mrs. Julia Campbell, an elderly friend. Both women were seeking work and applied first at Slater & Morrill’s Factory No. 2, a four-story frame building which was located about an eighth of a mile east of Hampton House on Pearl Street. As the women entered the factory, Mrs. Andrews noticed a large black car parked in front of it. She saw a swarthy man, dressed in dark clothing, bending over the hood. In the back seat, she observed a thin, emaciated looking man with what she later depicted as “a light complexion.”

There were no jobs open at Slater & Morrill and, when Mrs. Andrews left the building some fifteen minutes later, she saw that the swarthy man was now lying on the ground with his head and shoulders under the front part of the vehicle. The sickly looking man, who had been sitting in the rear seat, was outside, leaning against the back of the car. Mrs. Andrews asked the man under the car if he could direct her to the Rice & Hutchins factory. At the sound of her voice, he got to his feet and pointed to the five-story brick building which was some 120 feet west of Factory No. 2.

Earlier that day, John M. Faulkner, a Cohasset pattern maker who was bound for the post hospital at the Watertown Arsenal to be treated for an infected hand, had boarded the 9:20 train to Boston. He was sitting in the second seat on the left hand side of the smoker. As the train came into East Weymouth, the passenger sitting on his right asked him if the stop was East Braintree. As Faulkner remembered it, “he said, ‘the man behind me wants to know if it is East Braintree.’” The pattern maker had then looked at the other man who was sitting in a single seat near the lavatory. “He looked like a foreigner, with a black mustache, and cheek bones.” The “foreigner” wore a felt hat and was dressed in “kind of old clothes.” Faulkner had watched him leave the train, carrying a leather bag, when the local pulled into East Braintree shortly after ten o’clock.

At 11:30, William S. Tracy, a real estate broker, had driven by South Braintree Square. He “saw two men standing with their back to the window of that [drug]store, the window nearest the corner of Pearl Street.” Some ten minutes later, he returned to the Square and noticed that the two strangers were still there. “The man nearest the drugstore was the shorter of the two and the other fellow ... the shorter man of the two, he stood erect, and their general appearance was that they were dressed respectably and looked as if they might have been waiting for a car.” What had attracted his attention to the men, whom he thought were Italians, was the fact that “no one was allowed to lean up against that building.”

Just after noon, one William J. Heron, a railroad detective, saw two strange men loitering near the station restroom. “One of them was about 5 feet 6 inches, weighed about 145 pounds, Italian. The other fellow was about 5 feet 11; I should say, weighed about 160. They were smoking cigarettes, one of them.” He had observed them closely because he considered it unusual for them to be there with no train due for some time, and “they acted kind of funny to me, nervous....” Heron had come to South Braintree to look for a lost boy whom he had found in the station and taken into the ticket office. When he emerged, a few minutes later, “the two men were gone.”

Shortly before three o’clock, Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli, a guard, arrived at the paymistress’ office on the second floor of Hampton House. They signed for the payroll and each man took one of the tin boxes containing the pay envelopes. Mark Carrigan, a shoe cutter, who worked on the third floor of Hampton House, watched the two men leave the building. They crossed Railroad Avenue, passed to the right of the New Haven station, talked briefly with James E. Bostock, a Slater & Morrill millwright, and then started up Pearl Street toward Factory No. 2.

A few minutes earlier, Bostock had noticed two foreign looking strangers--he later said he thought they were Italian fruit peddlers--leaning against a fence near a water tank on the north side of Pearl Street, but he did not mention them to Parmenter or Berardelli. His conversation with the paymaster and the guard was brief--he remembered only that Parmenter had ordered him to “go into the other factory and fix the pulley on the motor” and that he had answered that he couldn’t do the job that afternoon because he was “going to get this quarter past three car to Brockton.”

Albert Frantello, a former Slater & Morrill employee, also saw the two strangers who had attracted Bostock’s attention, and remembered that “the one that was nearest me had on a black cap, dark suit, dirty front on him, looked like a jersey, dark complexion and needed a shave, and he was a stocky build. The other fellow, he was light complexioned. He had on a cap; dark suit. He was about as tall as the other fellow, about the same height, only he was slimmer, kind of pale looking, and his hair was light. It was not as dark as the other fellow’s. I would say he was slimmer than the other fellow. He was not stocky build.” The first man had been wearing “a dark cap ... pulled down just like any ordinary fellow would have his cap on, just resting on his forehead.” The two men had been having an argument and Frantello overheard the stocky one berate his companion “in the American language.”

After his brief conversation with Parmenter and Berardelli, Bostock hurried on toward Hampton House. He had only gone a few steps when he was startled to hear a fusillade of shots behind him. He turned and saw the guard lying on the ground and a man standing over him with a smoking pistol in his hand. As he later testified, “... he stood over him. He shot, I should say, he shot at Berardelli probably four or five times. He stood guard over him.” Parmenter had dropped his box when he was hit by the first bullet and managed to run across Pearl Street, closely pursued by a second man who shot him in the back just as the pair reached an excavation for a new restaurant on the north side of the street.

According to Bostock, both bandits “was dressed in sort of dark clothes, with ... dark caps ... they appeared to be foreigners.” As for their physical appearance, “they was fellows of medium build ... smooth face, dark complected.” When one of the gunmen fired two shots at him, the millwright jumped behind the wooden fence where he had first noticed them just before meeting Parmenter and Berardelli. He had started to run back toward the railroad crossing when a black seven-passenger Buick drove slowly down the street, picked up the two gunmen and their loot, and then proceeded down Pearl Street toward the railroad crossing. The millwright ducked behind the water tank as the car shot by him. It was so close to him that “if I laid out at arm’s length I could have touched the spokes of the car as it passed me.” He saw four men inside, one of whom was firing at the excited crowd which was rapidly collecting around the bodies of the paymaster and the guard.

When the shooting started, Lewis L. Wade, a sole leather cutter who doubled in brass as an auto mechanic for Slater & Morrill, was filling Mr. Slater’s car with gasoline from a pump located in a little concrete shed in front of Factory No. 2. He saw Parmenter run across the street and disappear from view behind “a dirt truck.” A short, bareheaded man who “needed a shave” was standing over Berardelli, pumping bullets into the fallen guard. “And the next thing that I saw was a car come up Pearl Street, and stop--well, it didn’t exactly stop. I wouldn’t say for sure whether it stopped or not. And there was a man at the wheel ... he was a pale-faced man, a man, I should judge ... about probably 30 or 35. He looked to me like a man that had sickness or he was sick.”

As soon as the car had passed him, Wade ran into the factory office and called in the first alarm to the Braintree police. When he returned, he “went to where Berardelli lay and he was not dead then. He was breathing, and when he breathed the blood would come up and down on his face.” Across the street, the mechanic noticed that James E. McGlone, a teamster who was transporting stone from the restaurant excavation, was struggling to keep his frightened team from stampeding. McGlone later described the killers as “dark-skinned Italians” while Hans Behrsin, Mr. Slater’s chauffeur, who had been crouched behind the gasoline shed during the shooting, thought they had been “light complexioned boys.”