“I returned at two o’clock,” she said, “and he took the carriage to the back part of the store, and he asked me to come in the back and sit down. I sat by the baby-carriage, and my baby started to cry. I bent over the baby and Cocchi came over behind me and embraced me and acted in a disorderly manner. He asked me to kiss him and he tried to kiss me. I had 35 cents in my hand which I was offering to him, when he took my hand and tried to place it on his private parts; he also placed his hand on my breast; at the same time he attempted to kiss me. I kept pulling back. I succeeded, however, in tearing myself away and making an outcry. When I released myself from him he said to me: ‘You don’t owe me anything.’”
Mrs. Powers ran out of the store with her baby and the carriage. When her husband got home from work, she told him everything. He went over to Cocchi’s in haste. Cocchi said it was all a misunderstanding. It was his helper, not him who had done this outrage. Her husband returned with a policeman, but the store was closed. So she let it go. When she was shown her testimony, Mrs. Powers signed below the line that read: “The acts related above by me were not done by any helper, but were done by the defendant, Alfredo Cocchi.”
Swann also summoned a number of men whom Cocchi said would speak to the quarrelsome nature of his wife. Joseph Caggiano would sometimes help with the billing at the shop. One day, Maria Cocchi took him aside and told him that her husband was running around with other girls. Caggiano remembered one time when the couple was arguing, Cocchi told his wife to be quiet. Maria then tried to grab at one of the tools lying around the shop. Caggiano couldn’t remember if she actually swung it at him, but he did remember one time when she threatened it.
“This is what I have to put up with,” Maria Cocchi had told him. It was sometime late in 1913 or early 1914. Frank Bauer was another machinist who similarly worked on and off for Cocchi. “I personally never saw him act improperly towards any women who came into his shop,” he said.
One of the last names on the list had been a difficult man to find. Victor Blady still lived in Jersey and was a chauffeur now, though he was not presently employed.
“I remember reading about the disappearance of Ruth Cruger,” said Blady. “Sometime around Lincoln’s birthday.… I have no recollection of having seen him either on the 14th or 15th of February, 1917.” Blady knew Herbert Roemmele, Cocchi’s helper, too. Blady’s next words were chosen very carefully, and almost rehearsed:
“I have no distinct recollection of having taken Herbert F. Roemmele, Alfredo Cocchi, and the latter’s own Athos in an automobile driven by me, from Cocchi’s shop to Manhattan Street,” Blady said. “I will say, however, that I have on several occasions driven Alfredo Cocchi and his son and Herbert F. Roemmele from Cocchi’s shop to 75 Manhattan Street, but I cannot say that I did so on the afternoon of February 13th.” Blady had been suspected of being the mysterious driver. Blady claimed to know of no difficulties within the Cocchi marriage, though he did remember one time when Mrs. Cocchi told him that her husband had a girlfriend. Blady said he didn’t want to get involved.
Leah Brinckmann, German, was married with five kids. For the past nineteen years, she had also been the janitor of the house adjoining Cocchi’s motorcycle shop. “I never talked with him except to bid him the time of day,” she said of Cocchi. “I know his wife; I frequently saw her in front of the premises. She used to sit outside of her husband’s store with the children, and I often talked with her.”
Brinckmann told a story how Maria Cocchi had accused one of her daughters of spying on her at the park, presumably on the orders of her husband. Maria Cocchi asked Brinckmann, and she refuted it, but when the daughter in question came home later, she was crying. She was eight or nine. She said that Mrs. Cocchi had slapped her. “I did not speak to Mrs. Cocchi after that day,” Brinckmann said. “I believe this occurred in July, 1916.” She paused a moment. “Mrs. Cocchi always appeared to me to be a hard-working woman,” she added. “Neat and clean, and took good care of her children.” Leah’s daughter remembered nothing of the incident.
John Lagarenne came as the next-to-last witness. He was wearing his police uniform. The man who stunned the room with his terse, one-word answers three years ago finally seemed ready to help. “I am now,” he said, “and since the 16th of October, 1905, a member of the Municipal Police Force of the City of New York with the rank of Sergeant.” He didn’t mention his conviction at the end of the Cruger inquiry or his time away. He still lived in Brooklyn and made a point to say that he had been assisting the DA in locating the witnesses on Cocchi’s list. The only person he couldn’t find was a Miss Wells, though he searched the post office and rode up to Middletown, sixty-eight miles away, where she had lived in 1916.
The next witness was very well-known to Swann, though he had not seen her in some time. Maria Cocchi walked in and sat down.
“I reside at 37 Old Broadway in the borough of Manhattan,” she said. “I am the wife of Alfredo Cocchi, now waiting his trial for the murder of Ruth Cruger in the County of New York. I have been shown the documents where he said it was me. I, his wife, in fit of jealous fury. I desire to say that this statements are false.
“My husband states that he accused himself in order to preserve a mother to his children,” she said. Calmly, Maria Cocchi proceeded to refute her husband’s claims against her. Swann asked her about her husband’s claim that she had attacked him with a hammer.
Mary Probst, as her own testimony had said, lived in the same house as the Cocchis with her parents. Her job in the Cocchi household was “to clean up and take care of the home and fix their bed each day.” The arrangement seemed to be working very well until one day, Mrs. Cocchi claimed, she received an unsigned letter. It read: “‘Mary Probst, instead of taking good care of your home, is taking good care of your husband.’” Maria added that the writer said they “had seen Mary Probst go into my husband’s apartment after 10 o’clock at night, also at 6 o’clock in the morning.” Maria said she destroyed the letter in a fit of rage.
Days later, Maria was getting the mail when she noticed a letter in the Probst box with her husband’s handwriting on it. Maria slipped the letter out, opened it, and read the letter. There was a five-dollar bill inside. This letter read that he wanted to meet her that evening at Seventy-second Street and Riverside Drive. Maria said that she brought the letter and showed it to Cocchi.
“What happened?” asked Swann.
“I quarreled with my husband and he struck me,” Maria replied.
“It was Christmas morning, 1914, when I found Mary Probst in bed with my husband,” Maria said. “I chased her out of my room and she was in the hallway asking for her clothes.” Edward Fish, who was her husband’s friend, was there at the time. “He saw her in the hallway naked,” Maria said.
Maria composed herself. “All of our quarrels were caused by his improper conduct towards me and my child by his intimate relations with other women. My husband frequently remains away from my bed and home on various occasions sometimes one and two nights each week. I was not dominated by jealousy,” she said, matter-of-factly.