During the rest of the morning Thompson sat with the McAnarneys watching the resumed parade of prospective jurors. A new lot of 160 veniremen had been brought in, but the selection was going no faster than it had the day before. Moore was again needling Judge Thayer. He could not seem to help it, even though he must have sensed the tensing of the atmosphere. It was a morning Thompson was to remember in all its immediacy years later. “Katzmann would say something,” he recalled to the Lowell Committee in 1927, “and Moore would object to it. He was jumping up all the time. He would make objection after objection. Judge Thayer would sit there and look at Moore with the fiercest expression on his face, moving his head a little. Moore would say ‘I object to that’ and Judge Thayer ... would sit back in his chair and say ‘Objection overruled.’ It wasn’t what he said, it was his manner of saying it. It looked perfectly straight on the record; he was too clever to do otherwise. I sat there for a while and I told John McAnarney ‘Your goose is cooked. You will never in this world get these men acquitted. The judge is going to convict these two men and see that nothing gets into the record; he is going to keep his records straight and you have no chance.’” * * * * * When John Dever, a Filene’s clothing salesman, received a post card ordering him to report at the Norfolk county courthouse for jury duty, he had expected he might serve on some civil case. Not until the Decoration Day week end did he learn that his summons might be for the South Braintree murder case. Of that case he had only a blurred recollection, something he had read in the papers the year before. It gave him a queer feeling to think he might find himself on a murder jury. His supervisor at Filene’s told him he was lucky—it would be like having time off, with Filene’s paying his salary. Although Dever was twenty-seven, he could have passed for twenty-one. He had been a poor Irish-Catholic boy brought up on the wrong side of the tracks in the quarry city of Barre, Vermont. As he grew up he had played with many of the children of the Italian immigrant stoneworkers. Some of these workers had been anarchists, or at least radicals. Dever, though a pious adolescent, had had no particular feeling against the local anarchists in their clapboard hall. He was used to them. At fifteen he had left Barre for Boston, where he first worked as a bellboy in the Parker House. He had volunteered for the Army in 1917 but had not been sent overseas. In 1919 he had gone to work at Filene’s. Unmarried, he lived in a brick rooming house on upper Beacon Street, Brookline.