The photographer was followed by Edward Hayward, the surveyor who had made the large-scale map of the South Braintree scene that hung to the right of the flag. Then the medical testimony began, the reiterative technicalities that the law requires to prove the indisputable fact that a man is dead. Indifferently the jury followed the course of the bullets through the bodies, listened to Dr. Hunting, who had operated on the dying Parmenter; Dr. Jones, who had picked up the bullet shaken out of Parmenter’s jacket; Dr. Frazer, who had examined Berardelli’s body in the front room of the Colbert house. The medical evidence was summed up and concluded by Dr. Magrath, whose boast was that he had performed more autopsies and attended more symphony concerts than any other medical examiner in New England. His toupee, the most obviously artificial in Massachusetts, was equally familiar to Symphony Hall, city morgues, and the Harvard Medical School. Dr. Magrath was a character. There was an iron quality about him that did not brook contradiction. Even Moore had no questions to ask him. Such preliminaries took up the first week. Meanwhile Judge Thayer, irritated enough by the sight of the squint-eyed California lawyer bobbing up in front of him, found a more pervasive irritant in the printed broadsides of the Defense Committee denouncing the unfairness of the trial even before it started. “I am here to see the defendants get a fair trial,” he announced from the bench. And one day he asked a group of reporters at the Dedham Inn if they had ever seen a case in which so many leaflets had been spread around saying that people could not get a fair trial in the State of Massachusetts. As he went out onto the porch his face was flushed and his voice rose. “You wait till I give my charge to the jury,” he told the reporters, shaking his fist. “I’ll show ’em!” Even the monarchist Ferrante, whose chief regret was that Sacco and Vanzetti had not become American citizens so that he could have washed his hands of them, sensed within the first few days that Thayer was sure they were guilty. Not until Wednesday morning, June 8, did the South Braintree express agent, the Commonwealth’s first important witness, take the stand. Considerably embellishing the story he had told in the Quincy court the year before, Shelley Neal again described his payroll delivery, the pale man in the doorway of the Hampton House, his brief view of the car that he was again to see jolting over the railroad crossing after the holdup. But Neal did not attempt to identify Sacco or Vanzetti as anyone he had seen that day. Margaret Mahoney, the paymistress, followed Neal; she told of making up the payroll boxes and handing them over to Parmenter and Berardelli just before three o’clock.