"That was Shelley Neal"

I lived in Braintree until I was 12 then taught in Randolph and Holbrook for over twenty years. Sacco and Vanzetti, the Morelli Gang, Two Gun Baker, Pat McDonnell, and Hell's Kitchen were all living parts of the history of that area. On Friday evening I listened to dinner table conversation on the famous Sacco and Vanzetti case where two Eastoners traded much misinformation on the case. I was in no mood to straighten them out then, but here's a little bit about the famous case with some websites for you to dig deeper.

As a cub scout my den toured the Hunt's Potato Chip factory. Our guide was a friendly older man who made sure we all got plenty of free samples. After we left I remember my mom saying to another den mother in rather hushed tones "That was Shelley Neal." I don't know if she went on to mention Sacco and Vanzetti or whether she simply said he was involved in a famous court case, but that was my first introduction to one of America's most celebrated crimes.

Today Mr. Neal rests a few feet away from my family plot in the Blue Hills Cemetery, but on April 15, 1920 he was the luckiest man in America. At that time he was the local American Express Agent in Braintree and every Thursday he had the job of meeting the 9:18 train, picking up the payroll for two nearby shoe factories, loading the nearly $30,000 onto a horse drawn express wagon and driving it to his office. On the way he noticed a dark blue Buick touring car that he had never seen before. Mr. Neal's office was in the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company headquarters now the site of a McDonald's in South Braintree Square. He dropped off  the money and went back to work not knowing that he was soon to be one of the many witnesses to a terrible crime. Over the next few hours other people would report seeing this car as well.

Around 3 o'clock the Slater and Morrill paymaster and his guard picked up the money at the office and began walking down the street to the shoe factory. Just as they reached the railroad they were confronted by two men who shot and killed them both and took the money. The blue touring car roared up the hill, the men jumped in and then the car tore up the street, took a left towards Holbrook and disappeared. You can read Mr. Neal's testimony here.

 I've been using the main page  from Doug Linders site for my chronology today although the Internet has many S/V sites.

A dark blue Buick with no license plates, later shown to be stolen, was found in the woods in West Bridgewater. Beside the stolen car were tracks of a second smaller car. An Italian anarchist (not a communist-even the communists thought anarchists were crazy) named Coacci was supposed to have been deported on the day of the robbery. Coacci lived in West Bridgewater and had just quit his job at the Slater and Morrill factory in Braintree. He didn't appear for his deportation and then acted suspiciously afterward-claiming his wife was sick on the 15th when she wasn't, insisting he now wanted to leave the country immediately, and saying he didn't need to leaving support money behind for his wife and kids. The police put two and two together and went to Coacci house where another Italian named Boda showed them around. In the garage there were tracks of two cars, a larger and a smaller one. Boda said he owned the smaller car, an Overland, that was being repaired at a garage at the intersection where the Hockomock Liquor Store is today. When the police returned to question Boda three days later. The house was empty and all of its sparse furnishings had been removed. However, the Overland was still at the nearby garage so the police set up a sting with the garage owner. On the night of May 5th Boda showed up on a motorcycle with two friends to pick up the car, but became suspicious when the owner of the garage tried to stall him while his wife called the police. She had to run next door because they didn't have a phone!  Boda took off on the motorcycle while the other two men walked off towards the streetcar line to Brockton.

These two hopped on the trolley about 9:40 pm. At 10:04 when the trolley stopped in Brockton, two policemen entered the streetcar and arrested two men who turned out to be Sacco and Vanzetti. Sacco proved to be armed with a  .32 caliber revolver. Vanzetti, who always claimed to be a pacifist anarchist, was armed with .38 caliber Harrison and Richardson revolver. Sacco's gun matched the caliber of a gun used in both the Braintree crime and a shoe factory robbery-murder in Bridgewater (from 1919). Ballistics tests, still controversial to this day, linked the gun to the Braintree crime.  Sacco had also been absent from his job in a Stoughton shoe factory on the day of the crime. Vanzetti's alibi was stronger, but it depended on the testimony of other Italians in Plymouth. The trial began on May 21, 1921, and people still believe that this was one of the most biased trials in American history. After the men were found guilty and sentenced to death, six years of protests tried to save them before they were finally executed on August 23, 1927 (not the 1930s).

Quite a few years ago we had Christopher Daley come and speak to us at the Easton Historical Society. Mr. Daley is a fine local historian who has focused his study of the case on the surviving places associated with the crime and the police investigation. Here is a link to his website where he shares pictures of the places that still stand. His site also has a links page that will take you to other S/V sites.
Over the years I've done a little Sacco-Vanzetti research on my own, and I'll share that tomorrow.