He and Moore continued their verbal dueling, carrying it over to the concluding arguments on Saturday, November 5. When Moore tried to explain how the issue of radicalism had injured his clients, Judge Thayer pointed out his trial ruling that “No evidence of the defendants’ radical activities or opinions would be allowed until the defense released such matter themselves.” Moore characterized the ruling as a Greek gift, the Virgilian reference escaping Judge Thayer. Following this formal and predetermined motion the defense filed five supplementary motions for a new trial: the Ripley motion, the Gould-Pelser motion, the Goodridge motion, the Andrews motion, and the Hamilton-Proctor motion. A month or so after the trial Jerry McAnarney had met the jury foreman, Walter Ripley—whom he had known for years—on the street in Quincy. They stopped on the corner to talk, and Jerry learned for the first time about the three cartridges that Ripley had casually brought to court in his vest pocket and during the trial compared with the five cartridges found in Vanzetti’s revolver. Ripley thought nothing of the matter, but for Jerry it was the first crack in the verdict. He now interviewed nine of the other jurors and obtained affidavits from several of them. Wallace Hersey and Frank McNamara admitted they had seen the Ripley bullets, Frank Marden and Seward Parker that they had heard about them. Ripley himself had died of a heart attack on October 10, before McAnarney could get an affidavit from him. His widow signed an affidavit that her husband had had the bullets with him during the trial. This admitted fact was the basis of the first supplementary motion, a lengthy document that claimed in substance that “if during the trial Ripley made a comparison between these three cartridges and the five cartridges taken from Vanzetti’s revolver, then the defendants are entitled to a new trial as a matter of right.” The Ripley motion with its accompanying affidavits was filed on November 8. Judge Thayer announced that he would set a hearing date satisfactory to both sides. On the afternoon before Christmas, 1921, exactly two years after the Bridgewater crime, in a gray, nearly empty courtroom, the wintry-faced Thayer denied the October motion for a new trial. “I cannot,” he intoned, “as I must if I disturb these verdicts—announce to the world that these twelve jurors violated the sanctity of their oaths, threw to the four winds of bias and prejudice their honor, judgment, reason and conscience, and thereby abused the solemn trust reposed in them by the law as well as by the Court. And all for what purpose? To take away the lives of two human beings created by their own God. The human frailties of man, his tender regard and love for human life and his profound sympathy for his fellow-men, when charged with the gravest offence known to the law, repudiates the suggestion.” Three days after this denial Fred Moore wrote to a friend: