Sacco-Vanzetti Hearings

To the State House in Boston last week came a six-year-old child, Inez Sacco, accompanied by her mother, Mrs. Nicola Sacco. While Mrs. Sacco talked to Governor Alvan Tufts Fuller of Massachusetts and to his Advisory Committee, Inez chatted with newspapermen. An unconscious witness to the law's delay was Inez, born while her father was in jail, growing up with her father under a death sentence.

Yet last week, at least, Massachusetts legal machinery moved with an accelerated rate. In rooms on opposite sides of a corridor in the State House sat Governor Fuller and the Advisory Committee. Many witnesses told their stories of the Sacco-Vanzetti case, stepping from the Governor's office to the Committee room (or vice versa) and making each recital a twice-told tale.

Among those interviewed last week were Robert C. Benchley, humorist, dramatic editor of Life; Judge Webster Thayer; onetime District Attorney Frederick G. Katzmann, and the Misses Minnie E. Kennedy and Louise Kelley, who were employees of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Co. at the time (April 15, 1920) of the South Braintree murder of which Messrs. Sacco & Vanzetti were found guilty.

Mr. Benchley was summoned to repeat statements first made in an affidavit last spring (TIME, May 16). In his affidavit Mr. Benchley said that Mr. Loring Goes, Worcester manufacturer, had told him of various remarks made by Judge Thayer to Mr. Goes concerning Messrs. Sacco & Vanzetti. The most striking portion of these remarks was a reference to the two Italians as "those bastards down there." Later Mr. Goes denied that he had made the remarks credited to him by Mr. Benchley.

Judge Thayer was the trial judge and Mr. Katzmann the prosecutor at the Sacco-Vanzetti trial. The Misses Kennedy and Kelley were new witnesses, both of whom claimed to have been eyewitnesses of the Braintree payroll robbery and who maintained that Mr. Vanzetti was not an occupant of the "murder car." Neither of these women had been called as a witness in the original trial.

All interviews were held in private and no reports were given to the press. An unconfirmed rumor related a quarrel between onetime District Attorney Katzmann and William G. Thompson, chief counsel for the condemned men. The Governor and his Advisory Committee (Abbott Lawrence Lowell, Samuel Wesley Stratton and Robert Grant) kept their sittings independently.