Sacco and Vanzetti - Robbery

Robbery

At the Slater-Morrill Shoe Company factory, on Pearl Street in Braintree, Massachusetts, during the afternoon of April 15, 1920 robbers had approached two men as they were transporting the company payroll into two large steel boxes to the main factory. Alessandro Berardelli, a security guard, was shot as he reached for his hip holstered .38-caliber, five-shot, Harrington & Richardson revolver, not recovered from the scene. Frederick Parmenter, a paymaster, who was unarmed, was shot twice: once in the chest and a second time — fatally — in the back as he attempted to flee. The robbers seized the payroll boxes and escaped by climbing into a waiting getaway car, a stolen dark blue Buick, which sped away with the robbers firing wildly at company workers nearby.

A coroner's report and subsequent ballistic investigation revealed that six bullets removed from the murdered men's bodies were of .32 automatic (ACP) caliber. Five of these .32-caliber bullets were all fired from a single automatic pistol, a .32-caliber Savage Model 1907, which used a particularly narrow-grooved barrel rifling with a right-hand twist. Two of the bullets had struck and mortal recovered from Berardelli's body. Four .32 automatic brass shell casings were found at the murder scene, each manufactured by one of three firms: Peters, Winchester, and Remington. The Winchester cartridge case was of a relatively obsolescent cartridge loading that had been discontinued from production some years earlier. Two days after the robbery, police located the robbers' getaway car, a stolen dark blue Buick; several 12-gauge shotgun shells were found on the ground nearby.