_I warn you to keep your hands off of many things that in order to
obey or please other persons you had been trying to do for many
months past._
To supplement such part-time detectives as Robert Reid, Moore hired
two permanent investigators, Tommy Doyle and Albert Carpenter. Doyle,
a pious Catholic, was still young enough to think of himself as a
sleuth, so intrigued at playing Sherlock Holmes that he did not care
whether he was investigating thieves, anarchists, or Republicans.
Carpenter was an older man, more self-contained, oriented to
radical reform. He and Moore had first meet in San Diego, during
the free-speech fight of 1911. Together they had tracked down and
exposed the perjurer, Frank Oxman, in the Mooney-Billings case. In
Everett, Washington, in 1915, after a dockside clash in which five
I.W.W.’s and two sheriffs were killed and seventy-four Wobblies later
indicted for first-degree murder—a national record—Carpenter acted as
Moore’s chief investigator. In Chicago during the 1917 I.W.W. trials,
after Moore had been framed by the police and was on the run, it was
Carpenter who kept track of him through Lola Darroch, then Moore’s
secretary. Once Moore had settled down in Rollins Place, it seemed
only natural for him to send for his old reliable friend.
Moore had early become convinced that the South Braintree holdup was
the work of a gang of professionals. Also, his legal sixth sense
warned him there were unexplored depths to such equivocal witnesses
as Louis Pelser, Lola Andrews, and Carlos Goodridge. It seemed a pity
to him to have the money problem overshadowing all the others.
* * * * *
On May 4, 1922, Moore filed the second supplementary motion, the
Gould-Pelser motion. Roy Gould was the razor-paste salesman who on
the day of the South Braintree murders had stood near the crossing
and been fired at from the getaway car, the bullet passing through
his overcoat lapel. No one, not even Jimmy Bostock or Frank Burke,
had been so close to the moving car or had such a clear view of its
occupants. Immediately after the shooting Gould gave his name and
address to a Braintree policemen, John Heaney. Soon afterward he left
town to follow the summer carnivals and country fairs across New
England with his razor paste.
Moore first learned about Gould and his experience from Frank Burke,
who had known him for some time. No one, however, seemed to know
what had become of Gould. Moore sent Reid all over New England
inquiring at every carnival he could trace, without success. Finally
on November 3, while Burke was in Portland, Maine, on business, he
noticed Gould’s name on the register of his hotel. Burke was almost
too astonished to believe his eyes. When the two met, Gould said he
had gone to Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island shortly after the
murder, and had not read much about the trial.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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