At this point the writer asked Mr. McHenry if he furnished Mr. Trickey with a list of the witnesses for the government. He replied, “The only living evidence that I furnished Mr. Trickey with the names of living witnesses, is that I did tell him that I, my wife and Bridget Sullivan were witnesses for the prosecution, and that he knew before I told him. I defy contradiction of this statement.”
“Did you furnish him with that list of names which it is alleged that he showed the managing editor of the _Globe_, in order to convince him that the story which he had bought from you was true?” Mr. McHenry answered, “That list of names is in Mr. Trickey’s own handwriting, and if you or anybody else want further evidence of the truth of this statement, examine the affidavits of those persons who were present when he wrote the list, and which are now locked up in the Attorney-General’s office, Commonwealth Building, Boston.”
“Who made these affidavits?” I asked, and he answered, “Several persons, but all of them were not summoned to the Grand Jury to testify. For instance, there are two Providence policemen, two Providence lawyers, two of my men, and Captain Desmond of Fall River, who know about this case, but were not called. All this documentary evidence against Mr. Trickey is in his own handwriting and laid away in the same place, and marked exhibit No. 1. I want to say here and now that Andrew J. Jennings has been clean and free in this whole business. In justice to the man I do not believe that he did in any way give his sanction to the action of other friends of the accused woman. I say this through no fear of Mr. Jennings, but because he would not countenance any such actions as Trickey represented to have come from those friends. As to the story I furnished Mr. Trickey, he had the gist of it in his pocket three weeks before it was printed in the _Globe_. I gave him a skeleton of what the alleged witnesses would testify to, and he carried that around with him, I suppose. The Attorney-General has the affidavits of eight witnesses to this transaction, all of whom heard what was said at the time I gave him the story. In an editorial of the _Globe_ of October 12th, this statement appears: ‘Reports are examined at short notice, and sometimes under great hurry and excitement, etc.’ Now, that was no excuse for printing the stuff I sold Mr. Trickey, for he had the skeleton of the story for three weeks at least, and if he had wanted it primarily for the _Globe_, there was no reason why he could not have examined it at his leisure. The editorial goes on to say the story was so well written and on the face of it appeared to be so plausible, that it was used without attempt at verification. Now, I never read stronger language than that, and I consider it a great compliment to me from the editor of the _Boston Globe_. After Mr. Trickey had made the proposition to buy the State’s case from me, I lay in bed that day and thought the matter over, and formed some idea of the story which I would give out. That night Trickey came down and he and I worked on the story, writing it out from the skeleton. He wrote and I dictated. We were at it until three o’clock in the morning. This was on Thursday before the Monday on which the story appeared in print. Mind you, I had not given the bogus witnesses names to him until that night. In the skeleton there appeared no names. But the separate statement of each witness was numbered, from 1 to 25, and it read something like this: Witness No. 1 will testify to so-and-so; Witness No. 2 will testify to so-and-so; and in this manner through the whole list. That night I told him who the witnesses were and he used their names instead of the numbers. After this was completed he showed me a draft made out by a certain gentleman payable to me in the sum of $5000. It was drawn on Andrew J. Jennings, and was in payment for the government’s case. That draft was never honored. With it was a letter authorizing the expenditure of any sum of money to get at the whole case of the prosecution. That letter was laid in a convenient place, and I got Trickey out of my office long enough to afford other people a chance to get a good look at it and to read it. I consider that movement a nice piece of detective work. During the evening, Captains Harrington and Desmond sat behind the curtain in my office and heard Mr. Trickey say to me that he had bribed them and that they had told him many of the State’s secrets. Why, Trickey went so far as to accuse the Mayor of the city of accepting a bribe and selling out to him, the representative of the defense.”