'Son of Sam' killer caught

It's about to be the end of what American's call 'summer'. New Yorkers, at least, don't follow the poets for their signs of changing seasons, they follow the Old World.

New Yorkers may think of themselves as totally emancipated immigrants melted down into pure distillations of a foreign triumphant American type but New York still clings, unconsciously no doubt, to some of the customs of Old York, after which they city was named. That's to say that August Bank Holiday, now it's been shifter nearer to the American Labor Day – the first Monday in September – is what the bosses say is the end of the proper time for boating and fishing and wiggling your toes in the sands of Blackpool or Brighton. September is the time to stash away the sports shirts, the old gym shoes, the barbecue griddle and get back to work. 

Well, to call an end to summer with the end of August is ridiculous in New York, or for that matter in about two-thirds of the American continent. There'll be more blasting heat: September can be as awful as anything Europe knows in mid-summer. October has it in the 80s quite often. October is, in fact, the month when the winners in the rival baseball leagues go into the week-long national orgy known as the World Series. 

But I guess the example of the colonial Britons is still stubborn after three centuries and a week from now there'll be the long holiday of the Labor Day weekend and the vast trek back to the cities – the summer cottages deserted, the beaches empty through a couple of months of what in Ireland or Norway would be considered marvellous summer weather. 

Labor Day, by the way, was the invention of an Irish carpenter named Peter McGuire. He founded the Carpenters' Union and in the spring of 1882 he proposed that there should be an annual labour day, so-called, to pay tribute to the workers, so-called, of America. His notion was no more than an annual parade on a date to fall mid-way between July 4 and Thanksgiving Day at the end of November. This was one of those proposals like having an annual Mothers' Day, something that nobody wants madly but something that no politician can dare to come out against. 

Well, within 12 years of McGuire's suggestion, by 1894, 31 states declared the first Monday in September a legal holiday and then the heat was put on President Cleveland and he was not the type to say, 'Hold! Enough!' He signed the bill making Labor Day a national holiday – parades in every city and town that could claim a citizen who had any other occupation than that of milking cows. 

And then, what with the growth of labour unions and the coming of the automobile and the transformation of open country into picnic grounds, cottage colonies, mountain guesthouses, circus stops, somebody decided that there had to be a day when you closed up the summer retreat and called a moratorium on holidays. And so, on Tuesday September 7, millions of Americans, in spite of their wildly different climate, will be back in their offices and factories for the long winter (pull), comparing summer tans and postcards and brief romances and getting back to the insurance payments and who ought to be mayor. 

There is, however, one institution that goes on through most of the summer – through all the summer – and it's that of the courts, since crime rarely takes a holiday. The last time this happened in New York was in November 1965, the night of the first blackout. We reel now for an answer to the fact that there was not a case of arson or looting. The United States Supreme Court is in recess, since it ponders matters that take a long time to resolve whether the matter is weighty or seemingly light as fluff. A case that goes before the Supreme Court is one that claims to have violated a citizen's constitutional rights. Whether the plaintiff says he's been denied his right to vote or, as once happened, a man claimed he had a constitutional right to eat a meal in a restaurant without being annoyed by the scrapings of a string trio. But violence and murder and rape go on and there are similar atrocious crimes that do not, however, have anything to do with constitutional rights. 

Last Tuesday, a plump, pleasant-looking young man appeared in a court in the New York borough of Queens. He was dressed in hospital-green pyjamas and a blue dressing-gown. A clerk of the court asked him if he was David Berkowitz. He said he was. He was asked if he was represented by counsel. He was. He was arraigned on a charge of having committed two murders and attempted seven others in Queens. He'd been indicted a week ago in Brooklyn for murders alleged to have been committed in that borough. He was asked how he pleaded. He pleaded, 'Not guilty.' 

On Wednesday, in a hospital hearing, which was held there for security, he said he was not David Berkowitz. He is, of course, the suspect known to the papers as 'Son of Sam, the .44 caliber killer'. This mild-mannered youth will make another court appearance in the next two weeks by which time a team of psychiatrists will submit their report on whether he's legally insane or whether he's mentally competent to stand trial. 

The fury over 'Son of Sam' was, until Berkowitz was arrested, was... must have been as fearful as any that seized a big city since the days or nights of Jack the Ripper. But this week the news of it retreated on to the back pages while the papers and the magazines recalled the 50-year-old memory of a murder case that has been called 'the case that will not die'. On 23 August 1927 not only America, but much of what we call the 'civilized' world was shocked to hear that two Italian immigrants had been executed for the murder of the paymaster of a shoe company and his guard in a small town outside Boston. Their names, of course, were Sacco and Vanzetti. I suppose they're the first names of Italian immigrants into America that I ever heard, except of course that of Cristoforo Colombo. 

No item of American news stirred my school and its masters more than the word of the execution, unless it was the word three months earlier that Charles Lindbergh had made the first solo flight across the Atlantic. And I must say that if I'd been asked in 1927, or for many more years thereafter, what Sacco and Vanzetti were all about, I should have said that they represented a monstrous miscarriage of justice for that was how the case was reported in our papers. And this prejudice was powerfully reinforced by the public statements, cablegrams to the governor of Massachusetts, denunciations given to the press by such people as George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Albert Einstein. 

Now, in simple but I hope firm outline – there was a robbery which didn't work at a shoe company in another Massachusetts town in December 1919. The following April, the paymaster and guard in South Braintree were murdered. An informer told the police chief of the first town that the failed robbery and assault had been done by Italian anarchists and the police chief came to the quick conclusion that the South Braintree murders were the work of the same men. Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested in a streetcar. They were both carrying guns. 

They were about to be charged with the first robbery but no witness could identify Sacco, he was let off. Vanzetti had 20 witnesses say he was somewhere else, nevertheless he was sentenced for assault with intent to rob. And after that they both stood trial for the murders. They were admitted anarchists at a time when the United States was bristling with suspicion of most immigrants with halfway radical ideas and the trial turned on their radicalism. At the end of seven weeks they were found guilty of murder in the first degree. 

Well, for the next six years the defence filed eight motions for a new trial bringing a wad of testimony, prejudice, suppression of evidence and a fellow convict of Sacco's had given him a note confessing to the South Braintree murders. Through those six years, but especially towards the end, the world was roused by the contradictions and mysteries of the case and many distinguished people were convinced that Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent illiterates, the victims of WASP prejudice and the prevailing witch hunt. 

The last Court of Appeal upheld the verdict. Final appeals to stay the execution went to the governor of Massachusetts. Over 60 professors of law were sufficiently disturbed to beg the governor for a committee review, a rare proposal, if not a precedent. The committee was formed, a tribunal. The president of Harvard, the president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a former probate judge. Two months later, they upheld the verdict and, on 23 August, Sacco and Vanzetti were put to death. 

To commemorate this famous case, two books have come out this week. The one of them adds very little by way of facts or interpretation and the other, I'm sorry to say, is so passionately and indignantly convinced from the start that the case was one of 'Justice Crucified' (the title of the book) that one either swallows whole the author's thesis that the men were put to death by a puritan legacy of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite or one gags at the unflagging prejudice of author. By the way, great numbers of WASPs contributed thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of spare time by way of financial and legal aid to Sacco and Vanzetti. The fair, if agonising, conclusion seems to me to be that of such a WASP professor who wrote, 'against a masterful and none-too-scrupulous prosecution was opposed a hopelessly mismanaged defence before a stupid trial judge.' 

Fifty years after the event there is no rousing place to go for an answer. When all the heat and the roaring indignation has cooled, the case of Sacco and Vanzetti remains a tragic legal puzzle but what has passed over into the American memory is a strong and nagging doubt that the shoemaker and the fishmonger were guilty not beyond all doubt – nobody then or now would say that – but, as the law stipulates, beyond a doubt that might be entertained by reasonable men.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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