Moore came to Portland on the next train and found Gould perfectly
willing to tell his story about South Braintree. The man who had
fired at him that day, Gould said, was someone he could never forget.
Moore paid Gould’s way to Boston and there showed him photographs of
Sacco and Vanzetti. Gould was positive that neither was the man who
had fired at him. Later Moore took him to the Dedham jail where they
talked with Sacco. After watching Sacco for about ten minutes Gould
said he was certain that this was not the gunman and he was willing
to sign an affidavit to that effect.
It was Moore’s claim that Gould’s affidavit was “new and independent
testimony,” that the Commonwealth had known about him and yet made no
effort to call him as a witness, and that his identification would
have been sufficient to warrant a different verdict.
Louis Pelser was the next witness on Moore’s retribution list. All
Moore could learn of him at first was that after the trial he had
lost his job and left his parents’ flat in Jamaica Plain. Tommy Doyle
finally tracked him to a derelict South End rooming house. Pelser was
in an abject alcoholic state, red-eyed and maudlin. When he said he
had not eaten anything all day, Doyle bought him a meal, then gave
him seventy cents and paid his carfare to Moore’s Pemberton Square
office.
Doyle had telephoned ahead and Moore was waiting there with Lyons,
Reid, and a stenographer. Pelser sobered up when he saw them. As
always, when faced with authority, he began to doubt himself, what
he had seen, what he had previously said. Moore tried to reassure
him, patting him on the back and telling him “You look like a regular
fellow.” Pelser said that the day he arrived at Dedham District
Attorney Williams had taken him to a little upstairs room in the
courthouse and shown him several pictures of Sacco, asking if he was
the man he had seen below the factory window. “No,” Pelser had told
him, “I don’t think that’s the man I seen. I just got a glance of
everything. I could not identify if you brought me a hundred pictures
here.” Williams insisted that he, Pelser, knew “right well” Sacco was
the man.
Now, in the Pemberton Square office, Pelser said he “did not get a
good enough view to see any man.” How the “dead image stuff” had come
up in court he could not tell.
“Now why in God’s world did you testify as you did?” Moore bellowed
at the cowering sour-breathed Pelser.
“I must have been forced,” the other replied lamely. He still
maintained that he had seen a man with a gun, but he could in no way
describe him. The “dead image,” he admitted, had been a mistake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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