There was a light dusting of snow or frost on the roads which,
with some wayside evidence, enabled Stewart to track the bandit
car from the scene of the crime through Stoughton to Randolph,
but he lost it there. Searches were made in Bridgewater and neigh-
boring towns, but the car was not found at this time. Nor until
the arrest did investigations by the Pinkertons, the State Police,
and Stewart solve the crime.

During the afternoon of April 15, 1920, Frederick A. Parmenter,
paymaster of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Factory, and his guard,
Alessandro Berardelli, while carrying a payroll of $15,776 in two
large black boxes from one factory building to another along
Pearl Street in South Braintree, were shot and killed by two men
who had been leaning on a fence waiting for them. Immediately
after the shooting a large dark-colored car moved up the street;
the two murderers picked up the boxes and with a third man got
into the automobile, which left the scene of the murder and made
its getaway.

The car was abandoned the same day. On Saturday, April 17,
it was found by horseback riders in the woods off Manley Street
in West Bridgewater and brought by the Brockton police to the
Brockton police station. Later it was identified as the bandit car
used in the Bridgewater crime. Although this discovery connected
the two crimes, it did not solve them.

During World War I, an alien anarchist named Feruchio Coacci
lived in Bridgewater. Stewart had arrested him there under a war-
rant of the Department of Labor, the charge being that Coacci
was spreading literature advocating overthrow of the government
by force and violence. Stewart, as a police officer of Bridgewater,
had had to do with several other deportation cases initiated by the
Immigration authorities. His connection with deportation cases
was, however, limited to arrests of persons living in Bridgewater

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