1, 2 .... source

Frank kills and then
cancels trip to baseball

Admits to wife he killed Mary

Frank immediately gets lawyer

\

The murder

Dressing room

Phagan was a virgin

She had been strangled with a 3/4-inch cord, which was still
around her neck, and blood was
still flowing from her genital region when the body was
discovered.

Panties around neck

1913 This was the second day of the trial of Leo
Frank. Newt Lee, the night watchman who discovered Mary Phagan's body, concluded
his testimony by repeating his story for the defense. Altogether Lee spent four
hours and forty-five minutes on the stand. The next witness was police
Sgt. L.S. Dobbs, who took Lee's
phone call and rushed to the factory. He said he found the body in the basement,
face down, with a cord tied tightly around the neck, and a pair of women's
underpants tied loosely around the neck. The back of
the head was covered in blood. He also found two notes, her shoes, and a trail
where the body was dragged to its location. Detective John Starnes then took the
stand. He had called Leo Frank to inform him of the murder, and said Frank
appeared extremely nervous when he arrived at the factory. The highlight of the
day was strong verbal clashes between prosecutor Hugh Dorsey and defense
attorney Luther Rosser over Rosser's attempts to discredit the testimony of
Starnes.

She had been strangled with a 3/4-inch cord, which was
still around her neck, and blood
was still flowing from her genital region when
the body was discovered.

gruesomely disfigured corpse of a child 12-year-old Mary
Phagan, who was beaten, bludgeoned, raped, sodomized, and
murdered

At
approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the
National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered
body in the factory's basement.
Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes
were bruised, her face slashed and some of her fingers out of
joint. A piece of rope, along with
a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

Mary’s battered body was found face down on a pile of sawdust shavings
in the factory basement. Her tongue is swollen and protruding. A cord was
knotted around her neck and there was massive bleeding from a deep wound to her head. Cinders
were found under her fingernails, showing she had clawed the ground in her
struggles. Her underclothing was ripped

Her body was found
the following morning in the factory basement--tortured, raped, and
strangled.

Dr. Roy Harris, secretary of the State Board of
Health  who had examined Mary Phagan's corpse. The defense witnesses said
Harris was merely guessing at the time of death and that Phagan had
been sexually violated

There she was brutally
murdered. She was choked with her
undergarments and her skull crushed

When pretty Mary Phagan's body was
found, her clothes were asunder, and she had been bleeding from her
vagina.

At 3:30 A.M. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the battered corpse of
thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan was found by an Atlanta policeman in the rear of
the basement of the National Pencil Factory. Newt Lee, the plant's black
watchman, discovered her mad phoned in the alarm. The girl's face was bruised,
her scalp gashed, but she had died of
strangulation by a wrapping cord.

Her dress was hiked up to her
knees, the belt attaching her garters to her corset were unfastened, and her
underpants had been ripped up the crotch. The dishevelment of her clothes and
blood in her vagina and drawers indicated that murder had not been the only
violation committed upon the body of the girl.But Mary’s mouth, nostrils,
and fingernails had been full of sawdust and grime similar to that in the
basement, not on the second floor.

Sept. 8

Governor Slaton was bribed

GEORGIA: (death penalty-related)

A rabbi wants the National Football
League to censure an investor in the
Atlanta Falcons for remarks he made
about the notorious 1915 lynching of
Leo Frank.

The rabbi's target is Tom Watson
Brown, who owns 6 % of the Falcons and
whose great-grandfather was
editorialist and U.S. Sen. Tom Watson, whose
writings are blamed for
whipping up anti-Semitism before the lynching.

Brown contends Frank, a Jew, was
properly convicted of killing 13-year-
old Mary Phagan, and Frank was lynched because his supporters
bought off
the governor to get him to commute his sentence.

Brown recently was quoted in The
Atlanta Journal-Constitution saying,
"Maybe the Frank people should apologize for
bribing the governor."

Rabbi Steven Lebow of Cobb County says those words perpetuate
the
stereotype of "rich Jews" controlling the system while most historians

believe the governor acted ethically.

"As a Harvard-educated lawyer, Mr. Brown should be more careful of what
he says
when he slanders people," Lebow wrote the NFL. "An NFL owner
should not
be making bigoted statements."

Brown said he will not retract his
statements.

NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue will respond when he receives Lebow's
letter, said spokesman Greg Aiello. The
Falcons aren't commenting because
the dispute involves a minority owner
whose role is as an investor, said
spokesman Aaron Salkin.

Frank, a Northern-born Atlanta
factory manager, was sentenced to death in
the killing of Phagan, whose family lived in Marietta.

Gov. John M. Slaton, a law partner of Frank's lawyer, commuted his
sentence
to life. A group of Marietta residents kidnapped Frank from his
cell and
hanged him.

Brown claims that, because the
governor was a partner in the law firm, he
shared in its
proceeds -- including a promised bonus if it won a commutation.

Steve Oney, a writer who has spent 13 years researching
and writing a
book on the case, said there is no evidence the governor was
bribed into
an action that ruined his political career.

"I think Slaton made a decision of conscience," he said.
"That said,
there was a clear and troubling appearance of a conflict of
interest."

(source: Miami Herald)

Jews
make a 13 yr old girl into a harlot  Source 1

SO: Well, the material is so inherently
dramatic. A little girl, Mary Phagan, beautiful,
busty, murdered on Confederate Memorial
Day, 1913, in a society that is in transition from the old South
to the new South.

The unusually savage slaying of Mary Phagan, the beautiful,
voluptuous daughter of a working class
family who like other Southern youth in the early twentieth
century was forced into child labor by harsh economic times, and
who in the springtime of life was sexually violated and then
choked to death with a cord by her bestial killer, continues to
engender primordial fears about the ultimate crimes of murder and
rape.  Her murder is emblematic of the tragedy of youth and
beauty suddenly, senselessly destroyed by unexpectable bloody
violence.

She was a beautiful girl, and the search
for her murderer was later to reveal more than one boy who had
been smitten by her blue eyes and precociously well developed
figure. She
was only 4 feet 11 inches (150 cm) tall, but still might have been
able to pass for being as old as eighteen.[1] Her
family were country people who had moved to the city, known as "crackers" in
local parlance That morning, thirteen-year-old Mary
Phagan, after eating a breakfast of
cabbage and wheat biscuits, devoted herself to getting dressed.

First, she donned stockings and
garters, then a store-bought violet dress and
gunmetal-gray pumps. Two bows in her auburn hair and a blue
straw hat adorned with dried red flowers atop her head
completed the outfit. Mary wanted to look nice, for
Saturday, April 26, 1913, marked a special
occasion-Confederate Memorial Day. Around 11:45, with a
silvery mesh purse and an umbrella (the skies were misting
rain) in her hands, she boarded the English Avenue trolley
headed to downtown Atlanta, where the annual parade would
soon begin.

Well turned out or not, Mary would have
been one of the prettiest girls in any crowd. Eyes blue as
cornflowers, cheeks high-boned and rosy, smile beguiling as honeysuckle, figure
busty (later, everyone
acknowledged that "she was exceedingly
well-developed for her age"),
she had undoubtedly already tortured many a boy. There was
simply something about her-a tilt to the chin, a dare in the
gaze-that projected those flirtatious wiles that Southern girls often employ to
devastating
effect.

Harry Golden

This Jewish
writer/convict declared 12 yr old Mary Phagan a 'loose women' and
was not a virgin.

Harry Golden's book A LITTLE GIRL IS
DEAD  Golden states flatly,
"she was not a virgin"

Shortly after 1 p.m. Leo Frank leaves the building, boards a street car
around 1:10 p.m., and arrives at his home for lunch around 1:20 p.m.  He
returns to the building around 3 p.m.

Raped

Around 3 a.m. Mary Phagan’s dead body is discovered in
the basement by the National Pencil Company Building’s night watchman, a black
man named Newt Lee who immediately telephones the police station.

Police rush to the building by automobile.  They
find the corpse lying face down at the rear of the 200-foot long, earthen-floor
basement, a filthy catacomb littered with trash, coal dust, sawdust, and ashes,
and lighted by a gas jet.  The body is 136 feet from the elevator shaft.

Phagan has been strangled with a
seven-foot length of cord tied in a slipknot still tightly wrapped around her
neck. (Quantities of cord
of this character are found throughout the building.)  Her tongue is
swollen and protruding.  She has soot on her face, dirt in her eyes, and
cinders in her mouth and nostrils.  She has a black eye, there are wounds
on her scalp and below the knee and scratches on the elbow, and her clothing has
been torn.  There is fresh blood in
her underclothing, and she appears to have been raped vaginally or
anally.  She has also been robbed: her purse containing the $1.20 is
missing.

She had been strangled with a 3/4-inch cord, which was
still around her neck, and blood
was still flowing from
her genital region when the body was
discovered.

What is known to be fact is that her body was discovered
strangled in the basement “…ravished and brutally garroted with a piece of
cord…blood matted her hair and her face was swollen and grimy”.  Her
undergarments were cut open and evidence of sexual misconduct (sodomy, but not
vaginal intercourse) was present.

the Jew’s sexuality was corrupt,
degenerate, wholly unnatural--an indication of the Jew’s urbanity and
“over-civilized” lifestyle, of the corrupting influence of the city represented
by the sexual corruption of Jewish sexuality. As Watson wrote, the murder and supposed rape
of Mary Phagan could only be the act:

not of robust negroes but of decadent white men… Sodomy
is not the crime of nature, barbarism, or of lustful black brutes; it is the
overripe fruit of civilization and is always indicative of a decaying society
(in Jacobson: 66).

The accusation of sodomy--apparently unmotivated by the facts of the case--arose from the
Jewish nature of the defendant; once postulated, the perversity of Jewish desire
wholly exonerated Conley who, while sharing somewhat in the racialized
sexualization of the predeterminately guilty Frank, shared neither Frank’s urban
background, outsider status, nor class position, all of which seems to have
contributed to the threat posed by Frank’s Jewish sexuality.

Factory
girls

Phagan murder investigation, there was disturbing circumstantial evidence
that reinforced suspicion about Frank: he appeared unduly nervous when police
first questioned him the morning Phagan’s body was discovered and a number of factory employees – all of them
teenage girls - soon came forward with unsettling allegations about improper
touching, lecherous stares and lewd remarks they attributed to Frank.

The murder

“The next person I saw was Miss Mary Perkins, that’s what I called her, this
lady that is dead.  I don’t know her name.  After she went upstairs I heard footsteps
going toward [Leo Frank’s] office and after she went in the office, I heard two
people walking out of the office and going like they were coming down the steps,
but they didn’t come down the steps, they went towards the metal
department.  After they went back there, I heard the lady scream, then I
didn’t hear no more, and the next person I saw coming in there was Miss
Monteen Stover....  She stayed there a pretty
good while, it wasn’t so very long either.  After she came back down the
steps and left, I heard somebody from the metal department come running back
there upstairs on their tiptoes, then I heard somebody tiptoeing back towards
the metal department.  After that I dozed off and went to sleep.

“Next thing I knew Mr. Frank was up over my head stamping and ... then I went
up the steps.  Mr. Frank was standing there at the top of the steps and
shivering and trembling and rubbing his hands like this.  He had a little
rope in his hands and a long wide piece of cord.  His eyes were large and
they looked right funny.  He looked funny out of his eyes.  His face
was red.  Yes, he had a cord in his
hands just like this here cord.  After I got up to the top of the
steps, he asked me, ‘Did you see that little girl who passed here just a while
ago?’ and I told him I saw one come along there and she come back again, and
then I saw another one come along there and she hasn’t come back down, and he
says, ‘Well that one you say didn’t come back down, she come into my office
awhile ago and wanted to know something about her work in my office and I went
back there to see if the little girl’s work had come, and I wanted to be with the little girl, and she
refused me, and I struck her and I guess I struck her too hard and she fell and
hit her head against something, and I don’t know how bad she got
hurt.  Of course, you know I ain’t built like other men.’  The
reason he said that was, I had seen him a position I haven’t seen any other man
that has got children.  I have seen him in the office two or three times
before Thanksgiving and a lady was in his office, and she was sitting down in a
chair, and she had her clothes up to here, and he was down on his knees.  I
have seen him another time there in the packing room with a young lady lying on
the table, she was on the edge of the table when I saw her....

“He asked me if I wouldn’t go back there and bring her up so that he could
put her somewhere, and he said to hurry that there would be money in it for
me.  When I came back there, I found the lady lying back flat on her back
with a rope around her neck....  I noticed the clock after I went back and
found the lady was dead and came back and told him.  The clock was four
minutes to one....  I found I couldn’t get [the body] on my shoulder, it
was heavy... and when I got away from the little dressing room that was in the
metal department .. I let her fall ...and I said, ‘Mr. Frank, you have to help
me with this girl, she is heavy,’ and he came and caught her by the feet and I
laid hold of her by the shoulders ... and we went on the elevator ... and the
elevator went down to the basement ... and we carried her out ... and rolled her
out on the floor, and Mr. Frank turned about and went up the ladder [to the
first floor] ... and I got on the elevator and started it on to the first
floor.... [then] Mr. Frank ... stepp[ed] on to elevator [with me] ... and we ...
got ... [to] the second floor....

“I followed him into his private office and I sat down and he commenced to
rubbing his hands and began to rub back his hair and after a while he got up and
said, ‘Jim,’ and I didn’t say nothing, and all at once he happened to look out
the door and there was somebody coming and he said, ‘My God, here is Emma Clark
and Corinthia Hall,’ and he said ‘Come over here, Jim, I have got to put you in
this wardrobe,’ and he put me in this wardrobe, and I stayed there a good while
and they come in here and I heard them go out, and Mr. Frank come there and
said, ‘You are in a tight place,’ and I said, ‘Yes,’ and he said, “You done very
well.’....

“[A]nd then he said, ‘Can you write,’ and I said, ‘Yes, sir, a little bit,’
and he taken his pencil to fix up some notes.  I was willing to do anything
to help Mr. Frank because he was a white man and my superintendent, and he sat
down and I sat at the table and Mr. Frank dictated the notes to me.
Whatever it was it didn’t seem to suit him, and he told me to turn over and
write again, and when I done that he told me to turn over again and I wrote on
the next page there and he looked at that and kind of liked it and he said that
was all right.  Then he reached over and got another piece of paper, a
green piece and told me what to write....

“And Mr. Frank turned around in his chair ... and he looked back at me and
folded his hands and said, ‘Why should I hang, I have wealthy people in
Brooklyn.’....”

After Jim Conley completes his direct examination, he is cross-examined by
Frank’s attorneys for a total of 12 hours over the course of the rest of today
and the next two days.  Although the cross-examination shows that Conley
has previously told lies and half-truths to the police and that his memory is
suspiciously poor except as to the matters he testified to on direct
examination, defense attorneys are unable to seriously damage his credibility or
shake his story.  They do not even ask Conley, in front of the jury, to put
the contents of the murder notes in writing, so as to let the jury see what he
does, and to see how long it actually takes Conley to write the notes Frank
allegedly dictated.  (A police detective has testified that he dictated
eight words to Conley, and it took Conley about six minutes to write
them.)

The police, reconstructing the crime,
theorized that she had been attacked in this room, that she had fallen and
struck her head on a lathe, and that her attacker had gone berserk. The murderer
had beaten her first, then strangled her. Afterward, frightened and
confused, he had dumped her corpse in the basement.

He also said the head wounds were caused by a human fist.

In
testimony given on August 6, Dr. Roy Harris, secretary of the State Board of
Health, insisted Phagan had died from strangulation, not from blows
to her head.

An autopsy would reveal that her murderer had choked her with a piece of her own
underdrawers and broken her skull.

Oral Sex sexOral

Furthermore, during the cross-examination defense lawyers
egregiously err by allowing Conley to amplify his sinister, devastating claim,
originally made on direct examination, that Frank is a sexual degenerate who performed
oral sex on numerous women in his office and other rooms in the building.

When questioned, a number of Frank's female employees
said that he had made "immoral" advances toward them.

Frank's lawyers made mistake after
mistake. They brought up the subject of extramarital sex. They suggested
that their client wasn't perfect, but he should not be judged on his moral
failings, only on the question of whether he committed murder.

One of Frank's supposed mistresses
testified that she had never had sex with him, but was also caught in a lie on
the stand regarding a previous run-in with the law on
a fornication charge.

Frank was accused, for an example, of
frequenting a house of prostitution for the purpose of indulging in the
"perverted vice" of oral sex, itself a crime punishable by death at that
time.

Preforming oral
sex on office boys

The prosecution insinuated that Frank was
homosexual, and that an
office boy who testified for the defense had been having sex with
Frank. Dorsey asked one witness, "Didn't you
hear about twelve months ago of Frank kissing girls and playing with the
nipples of their breasts?"

Based mainly on the testimony of the
janitor, who had been held in seclusion for six weeks before the trial
on orders from Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey, the jury
convicted the defendant. Frank's attorneys were unable to break Conley's
testimony on the stand. They also allowed evidence to be introduced suggesting
that Frank had many dalliances with girls, and perhaps boys, in his
employ.

Frank was
accused, for an example, of frequenting a house of prostitution for the
purpose of indulging in the "perverted vice" of oral
sex, itself a crime
punishable by death at that time.

Commutation Letter

Governor Slaton commutes Frank's hanging

After Slaton had been elected
governor in November 1912, the law firm of Slaton
and Phillips was
merged with that of Rosser and Brandon.

In December 1914, the United States Supreme Court
agreed to hear the case on the grounds that Frank had not been in the
courtroom when the jury’s verdict was received. But on April 19, 1915,
the argument was rejected by a vote of 7 to 2, Justices Oliver Wendell
Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes famously dissenting. Wrote Holmes: “Mob
law does
not become due process of law by securing the
assent of a terrorized jury.”

The Supreme Court’s decision left
Frank with one recourse: to seek executive clemency from Georgia’s
governor, John Slaton, who was nearing the end of his term. In 1913, however,
Slaton and Luther Rosser,
Frank’s lead counsel, had become partners — a fact
that appeared to Frank’s accusers to jeopardize Slaton’s
neutrality.

On June 20, 1915, after reviewing the case,
Slaton
commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison.

Governor Slaton lived about six miles from the
state capital, and had to declare martial law within a half mile radius
of his house, calling out a battalion of state militia to protect him
and his family.

While many believed that the governor had been bought with
Jewish money and influence, the commutation
stood. It was done.

Tom Watson did not view Slaton’s decision so
charitably. In the first issue of The Jeffersonian after Frank’s
sentence was commuted, he wrote: “At last, one partner got before the
other — Rosser before Slaton — and one partner
gave what the other partner wanted . . .
Hereafter, let no man reproach the South with Lynch law: let him remember
the unendurable provocation; and let him say whether Lynch law is not better than
no law at
all.”

The defendant
was represented by the high-powered Atlanta law firm of Rosser &
Brandon, which merged with Slaton & Phillips in 1913, the same year
as the trial. John Slaton from that same law firm became governor of
Georgia and commuted the death sentence to life imprisonment on June 21,
1915. While commutation is certainly within a
Governor's discretion and makes ethical sense in a case where the
defendant had no prior convictions, the commutation made no sense
politically. The Jewish groups weren't happy about it because they
claimed Frank was innocent and wanted a new trial that would clear the
defendant. Mary Phagan's
family and much of the general public thought the commutation looked
like a back room deal between the Governor and his old law firm, which
represented the defendant.

http://www.cwporter.com/slaton.htm

June 21st, 1915.

In Re Leo M. Frank, Fulton Superior
Court. Sentenced to be executed, June 22 nd, 1915.

Saturday April
26th, was Memorial Day in Georgia and a general holiday. At that time Mary
Phagan, a white girl, of about 14 years of age, was
in the employ of the National Pencil Company located near the corner of Forsyth
& Hunter Sts in the city of Atlanta. She came to the Pencil Factory a little
after noon to obtain the money due her for her work on the preceding Monday, and
Leo M. Frank, the defendant, paid her $1.20, the amount due her and this was the
last time she was seen alive.

Frank was tried for the offense and
found guilty the succeeding August. Application is now made to me for clemency.

This case has
been the subject of extensive comments through the newspapers of the United
States and has occasioned the transmission of over 100,000 letters from various
States requesting clemency. Many communications have been received from citizens
of this State advocating or opposing interference with the sentence of the
court.

I desire to say
in this connection that the people of the State of Georgia desire the esteem and
good will of the people of every State in the Union. Every citizen wishes the
approbation of his fellows and a State or Nation is not excepted. In the
preamble to the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “When
in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve
the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among
the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the Laws of
Nature and of Nature’s God entitles the, a decent respect to the opinions of
mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel to the
separation”.

Many newspapers
and multitudes of people have attacked the State of Georgia, because of the
conviction of Leo M. Frank and have declared the conviction to have been through
the domination of a mob with no evidence to support the verdict. This opinion
has been formed to a great extent by those who have not read the evidence and
who are unacquainted with the judicial procedure in our State.

I have been
unable to open even a large proportion of the letters sent me, because of their
number and because I could not through them gain any assistance in determining
my duty.

The murder committed was a most
heinous one. A young girl was strangled to death by a cord tied around her
throat and the offender deserves the penalty of death. The only question is as
to the identity of the criminal.

The
responsibility is upon the people of Georgia to protect the lives of her
citizens and to maintain the dignity of her laws, and if the choice must be made
between the approbation of citizens of other States and the enforcement of our
laws against offenders, whether powerful or weak, we must choose the latter
alternative.

MOBS

It is charged
that the court and jury were terrorized by a Mob and the jury were coerced into
their verdict.

I expect to
present the facts in this case with absolute fairness and to state the
conditions with regards only to the truth.

When Frank was indicted and the air
was filled with rumors as to the murder and mutilation of the dead
girl, there
was intense feeling and to such extent that my predecessor, Governor Brown,
stated in argument before me that he had the Military ready to protect the
defendant in the event any attack was made. No such attack was made and from the
evidence that he obtained none was contemplated.

Some weeks after
this, the defendant was put on trial. Georgia probably has the broadest
provision for change of venue in criminal cases that exist in any State. Our law
permits the Judge to change the venue on his own motion, in the event he thinks
a fair trial cannot be given in any county. The defendant can move for a change
of venue on the same ground, and if it be refused, the refusal of the judge is
subject to an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court, and in fact, the entire
genius demands a fair trial absolutely free from external influence.

Frank went to
trial without asking a change of venue and submitted his case to a jury that was
acceptable to him. He was ably represented by counsel of conspicuous ability and
experience.

During the
progress of the case, after evidence had been introduced laying the crime with
many offensive details upon Frank, the feeling against him had become intense.
He was the general superintendent of the Factory and Mary Phagan was a poor working girl. He was a Cornell
graduate and she dependent for her livelihood upon her labor. According to a
witness, whose testimony will subsequently be related more completely, when this
girl came to get her small pay, since she only worked one day in the week,
because of lack of material, this general superintendent solicited her to yield
to his importunities and on her refusal slew her.

The relation of
these facts anywhere and in any community would excite unbounded condemnation.

If the audience
in the court room manifested their deep resentment toward Frank, it was largely
by this evidence of feeling beyond the power of a court to correct. It would be
difficult anywhere for an appellate court, or even a trial court, to grant a new
trial in a case which occupied thirty days, because the audience in the court
room upon a few occasions indicated their sympathies. However, the deep feeling
against Frank which developed in the progress of the evidence was in the
atmosphere and regardless of the commission of those acts of which the court
would take cognizance, the feeling of the public was strong.

Since Gov. Brown
has related secret history in his public argument before me, I may state that
Friday night before the verdict was expected Saturday, I had the Sheriff to call
at the Mansion and inquired whether he anticipated trouble. This was after many
people had told me of possible danger and an editor of a leading newspaper
indicated his anticipation of trouble. The Sheriff stated he thought his
deputies could avert any difficulty. Judge Roan telephoned me that he had
arranged for the defendant to be absent when the verdict was rendered. Like Gov.
Brown, I entered into communication with the Colonel of the Fifth Regiment, who
stated he would be ready if there was necessity.

I was leaving on
Saturday, the day the verdict was expected, for Colorado Springs to attend the
Congress of the Governors, and did not wish to be absent if my presence were
necessary. I have now the original order prepared by me at the time, in the
event there were a necessity for it. I became convinced there would be a slight
chance for any use of force and therefore filled my engagement in Colorado.

Judge Roan, in
the exercise of precaution, requested that both counsel and defendant be absent
when the verdict was rendered, in order to avoid any possible demonstration in
the event of acquittal.

The jury found the defendant guilty
and with the exception of demonstration outside the court room, there was no
disorder.

Hence it will be
seen that nothing was done which courts of any State could correct through legal
machinery. A court must have something more than an atmosphere with which to
deal, and especially when that atmosphere has been created through the processes
of evidence in disclosing a horrible crime.

Our Supreme
Court, after carefully considering the evidence as to demonstrations made by
spectators, declared them without merit, and in this regard the orderly
processes of our tribunals are not subject to criticism.

RACIAL PREJUDICE

The charge
against the State of Georgia of racial prejudice is unfair. A conspicuous Jewish
family in Georgia is descended from one of the original colonial families of the
State. Jews have been presidents of our Boards of Education, principals of our
schools, Mayors of our cities, and conspicuous in all our commercial
enterprises.

THE FACTS IN THE CASE

Many newspapers
and non-residents have declared that Frank was convicted without any evidence to
sustain the verdict. In large measure, those giving expression to this utterance
have not read the evidence and are not acquainted with the facts. The same may
be said regarding many of those who demanding his execution.

In my
judgement, no one has a right to an opinion who is not
acquainted with the evidence in the case, and it must be conceded that those who
saw the witnesses and beheld their demeanor upon the stand are in the best
position as a general rule to reach the truth.

I cannot, within
the short time given me to decide the case, enter into the details outlined in
thousands of pages of testimony. I will present the more salient features, and
have a right to ask that all persons who are interested in the determination of
the matter, shall read calmly and dispassionately the facts.

THE
STATE’S CASE

The State proved
that Leo M. Frank, the
General Superintendent of the Factory, was in his office a little after 12
o’clock on the 26th day of April 1913 and admitted
having paid Mary Phagan, $1.20, being the wages due her for one day’s
work. She asked Frank whether the metal had come, in order
to know when she could return for work. Frank admits this and so far as is known, he
was the last one who saw her alive.

At three o’clock
the next morning (Sunday), Newt Lee, the night watchman, found in the basement
the body of Mary
Phagan strangled to death by a cord of a kind kept
generally in the Metal Room, which is on Franks’ floor. She had a cloth tied
around her head which was torn from her underskirt. Her drawers were either
ripped or cut and some blood and urine were on them. Her eye was very black,
indicating a blow, and there was a cut 2 ½ inches in length about four inches
above the ear and to the left thereof, which extended through the scalp to the
skull. The County Physician who examined her on Sunday morning declared there
was no violence to the parts and the blood was characteristic of menstrual flow.
There were no external signs of rape. The body was not mutilated, the wounds
thereon being on the head and scratches on the elbow, and a wound about two
inches below the knee.

The State showed
that Mary Phagan had eaten her dinner of bread and cabbage at
11.30 o’clock and caught the car to go the Pencil Factory which would enable her
to arrive at the Factory within the neighborhood of about thirty minutes. The
element of exact time will be discussed later.

Dr. Harris, the
Secretary of the State Board of Health, and an expert in this line, examined the
contents of Mary Phagan’s stomach ten days after her burial and found
from the state of the digestion of the cabbage and bread, that she must have
been killed within about thirty minutes after she had eaten the meal.

Newt Lee, the
negro night watchman, testified that Frank had “told me to be back at the
Factory at 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon”, and when he “came upstairs to report,
Frank rubbing his hands”, met Newt Lee and told him to “go out and have a good
time until 6 o’clock”, although Lee said he would prefer to lie down and sleep.
When Lee returned, Frank changed the slip in the Time Clock, manifesting
nervousness and taking a longer time than usual.

When Frank
walked out of the front door of the Factory, he met a man named Gantt, whom he
had discharged a short time before. Frank looked frightened, his explanation
being that he anticipated harm. Gantt declared he wished to go up stairs and get
two pairs of shoes which permission Frank finally granted, stating that he
thought they had been swept out.

About an hour after this occurrence,
Frank called up Lee over
the telephone, a thing he had never done before, and asked him if everything was
all right at the Factory. Lee found the double inner doors locked,
which he had never found that way before. Subsequently, when Lee was arrested
and Frank was requested by the Detectives to go in and talk to him in order to
find what he knew, Lee says that Frank dropped his head and stated “If you keep
that up, we will both go to hell”. [*see note]

On Sunday morning
at about 3 o’clock, after Newt Lee, the night watchman, had telephoned the
Police Station of the discovery of the dead body and the officers had come to
the Factory, they endeavored to reach Frank by telephone, but could not get a
response. They telephoned at 7.30 Sunday morning and told Frank that they wanted him to come down
to the Factory and when they came for him, he was very nervous and
trembled. The
body at that time had been taken to the Undertakers, and according to the
evidence of the officers who took Frank by the Undertaker’s establishment to
identify the girl, he (Frank) showed a disinclination to look at the body and
did not go into the room where it lay, but turned away at the door.

Frank had made an engagement on
Friday to go to the Base Ball Game on Saturday afternoon with his
brother-in-law, but broke the engagement, as he said in his statement, because of the
financial statement he had to make up, while before the Coroner’s Jury, he said
he broke the engagement because of the threatening weather.

The contention of
the State, as will hereafter be disclosed, was that Frank remained at the Factory Saturday
afternoon to dispose of the body of Mary Phagan, and that that was the reason he gave Newt
Lee his unusual leave of absence.

The cook’s
husband testified that on Saturday, the day of the murder, he visited his wife
at the home of Mr. Selig, defendant’s father-in-law, where Frank and
his wife were living, and that Frank came in to dinner and ate nothing.
The negro cook of the Selig’s was placed upon
the stand and denied that her husband was in the kitchen at all on that day.
For purposes of
impeachment, therefore, the State introduced an affidavit from this cook
that on Sunday morning after the murder, she heard Mrs. Frank tell her mother
that Mr. Frank was drinking the night before and made her sleep on a rug and
called for a pistol to shoot himself, because he (Frank) had murdered a
girl. This
affidavit was relevant for purposes of impeachment, although, of course, it had
no legal probative value as to the facts contained therein. On the stand,
the cook declared that she was coerced by her
husband and Detectives under threat of being locked up unless she gave it, and
it was made at the Station House. The State proved it was given in the presence
of a lawyer and said that her denial of the truth of the affidavit was because
her wages had been increased by the parent of Mrs. Frank. No details are
given as to where the conversation occurred between Mrs. Frank and her Mother,
nor is there any explanation as to how she happened to hear the
conversation. It will be
easily seen that the effect of the affidavit upon the jury might be great.

It is hard to
conceive that any man’s power of fabrication of minute details could reach that
which Conley showed, unless it be the truth.

The evidence
introduced tended to show that on Sunday morning Frank took out of the Time Clock the slip
which he had admitted at that time was punched for each half hour, and
subsequently Frank claimed that some punches had been missed. The suggestion was
that he had either manipulated the slip to place the burden on Lee, or was so excited as to
be unable to read the slip correctly.

The State
introduced a witness, Monteen Stover, to prove that at the time when Mary
Phagan and Frank were in the Metal Room, she was in
Frank’s Office and he was absent, although he had declared he had not left

His office. The
State showed that the hair of Mary Phagan had been washed by the Undertaker with pine
tar soap, which would change its color and thereby interfere with the ability of
the Doctor to tell the similarity between the hair on the lathe and Mary
Phagan’s hair.

The State further
showed a cord in the
character which strangled Mary Phagan was found in quantities on the Metal Room
floor, and
was found in less quantities and then cut up in the basement. As to this
Detective Starnes testified: “I saw a cord like that in the basement, but it was
cup up in pieces. I saw a good many cords like that all over the Factory”.

Holloway
testified: “Those cords are all over the building and in the basement.

Darley testified to the same effect.

However, this
contradicts the testimony that was presented to the Jury for solution.

The State claimed
in open Court to the Jury that witnesses for the defendant, under the suggestion
of counsel, would change their testimony so that it might not operate against
the defendant.

I have not
enumerated all the suspicious circumstances urged by the State, but have
mentioned what have appeared to me the most prominent ones. Where I have not
mentioned the more prominent ones, an inspection of record maintains to maintain
the contention.

It is contended
that a lawyer was engaged
for Frank at the Station House before he was arrested. This is replied to by the
defense that a friend had engaged counsel without Frank’s knowledge, and the
lawyer advised Frank to make full statement to the Detectives.

JIM CONLEY

The most
startling and spectacular evidence in the case was that given by a negro, Jim
Conley, a man 27 years of age, and one who frequently had been in the chain
gang. Conley had worked at the Factory for about two years and was thoroughly
acquainted with it. He had worked in the basement about two months and had run
the elevator about a year and a half.

On May 1 he was
arrested by the Detectives.

Near the body in the basement had been found
two notes, one written on brown paper and the other on a leaf of a scratch pad.
That written on white paper in a negro’s hand writing showed the following:

“He said he would love me, lay down play like
the night witch, did it, but that long, tall black negro did boy hisself.”

On the brown
paper, which was the carbon sheet of an order blank which hereafter becomes
important, headed “Atlanta, Ga., _________190”, was written in a negro’s hand
writing the following:

“Mam that negro fire down here did this I went
to make water and he push me down a hole a long tall negro black did [had] it I
write while play with me.:

The Detectives
learned about the middle of May that Conley could write, although at first he
denied it. He made one statement and three affidavits which are more fully
referred to in stating the defendant’s case. The affidavits were introduced by
the defendant under notice to produce.

By these
affidavits there was admitted the substance of the evidence that he delivered on
the stand which in brief was as follows:

Conley claimed
that he was asked by Frank to come to the Factory on Saturday and watch for him,
as he had previously done, which he explained meant that Frank expected to meet
some woman and when Frank stamped his foot Conley was to lock the door leading
into the Factory and when he whistled, he was to open it.

Conley occupied a
dark place to the side of the Elevator behind some boxes, where he could be
invisible.

description of murder

Conley mentioned
several people, including male and female employees, who went up the steps to
the second floor where Franks’ office was located. He said that Mary Phagan went up the stairs and he heard in
a few minutes foot steps going back to the Metal Room, which is 150 to 200 feet away from the
office. He heard a scream and then he dozed off. In a few minutes
Frank stamped and then Conley locked the door and then Frank whistled, at which
time Conley unlocked the door and went up the steps. Frank was shivering and trembling and told
Conley “I wanted to be with the little girl and she refused me and I struck her
and I guess I struck her too hard and she fell and hit her head against
something, and I do not know how bad she got hurt. “Of course, you know I
ain’t built like other men”.

Conley described Frank was having
been in position which Conley thought indicated perversion, but the facts set out by
Conley do not demand such conclusion.

Conley says he found Mary
Phagan lying in the Metal Room some 200 feet from
the office, with a cloth [her underwear] tied about her neck and murder the head
as though to catch blood, although there was no blood at the place.

Frank told Conley
to get a piece of cloth and put the body in it and Conley got a piece of striped
bed tick and tied up the body in it and brought it to a place a little way from
the dressing room and dropped it and then called on Frank for assistance in carrying it. Frank
went to his office and got a key and unlocked the switch board in order to
operate the Elevator, and he and Conley took the body in the elevator down to
the basement, where Conley rolled the body off the cloth. Frank returned to the
first floor by the ladder, while Conley went by the elevator and Frank on the
first floor got into the elevator and went to the second floor on which the
office is located.

They went back into Frank’s private
office and just at that time Frank said, “My God, here is Emma Clark and
Corinthia Hall”, and Frank then put Conley into the
wardrobe. After the left Frank let Conley out and asked Conley if he could
write, to which Conley gave an affirmative reply. Frank then dictated the
letters heretofore referred to. Frank took out of his desk a roll of green backs
and told him, “Here is $200.00”, but after a while requested the money back and
got it.

One witness
testified she saw some negro, whom she did not recognize, sitting at the side of
the elevator in the gloom. On the extraordinary motion for new trial, a woman,
who was unimpeached, made affidavit that on the 31st of May,
through newspaper report, she saw that Conley claimed he met Frank by agreement
at the corner of Forsyth & Nelson Sts., on the 26th of April, 1913, and she
became satisfied that she saw the two in close conversation at that place on
that date, between 10.00 and 11.00 o’clock.

Frank put his
character in issue and the State introduced ten witnesses
attacking Frank’s character, some of whom were Factory
employees, who testified
that Frank’s reputation for lasciviousness was bad and some told that
he had been making
advances to Mary Phagan, whom Frank had professed to the Detectives,
either not to have known, or to have been slightly acquainted with.

Other witnesses
testified that Frank had
improperly gone into the Dressing Room of the girls. Some witnesses who
answered on direct examination that Frank’s reputation for lasciviousness was
bad, were not cross-examined as to details, and this was made the subject of
comment before the Jury.

The above states
very briefly the gist of the State’s case, omitting many incidents which the
State claims would confirm Frank’s guilt when taken in their entirety.

DEFENSE

The defendant
introduced approximately one hundred witnesses as to his good character. They
included citizens of Atlanta, college mates at Cornell and Professors at that
College.

The defendant was born in
Texas and his education
was completed at the Institution named.

The admission of Conley that he wrote the
notes at the body of the dead girl, together with the part he admitted he played
in the transaction, combined with his history and his explanation as to both the
writing of the Notes and the removal of the body to the basement, make the
entire case revolve about him. Did Conley speak the truth?

Before
going into the varying and conflicting affidavits made by Conley, it is
advisable to refer to some incidents which cannot be reconciled to Conley’s
story. Wherever a physical fact is stated by Conley, which is admitted, this can
be accepted, but under both the rules of law and common sense, his statements
cannot be received, excepting where clearly corroborated. He admits not only his
participation as an accessory, but also glibly confesses his own infamy.

One fact in the
case, and that of most important force in arriving at the truth, contradicts
Conley’s testimony. It is disagreeable to refer to it, but delicacy must yield
to necessity when human life is at stake.

The mystery in the case is
the question of to how Mary Phagan’s body got into the basement. It
was found 136 feet away from the elevator and the face gave evidence of being
dragged through the dirt and cinders. She had dirt in her eyes and mouth.
Conley
testified that he and Frank took the body down to the basement in the elevator
on the afternoon of April 26th, 1913, and leaves for inference that Frank
removed the body 136 feet
toward the end of the building, where the body
was found at a spot near the back door which led out towards the street in the
rear. Conley swears he did not return to the
basement, but went back up in the elevator, while Frank went back on the ladder,
constituting the only two methods of ingress and egress to the basement,
excepting through the back door.

Conley testified that on
the morning of April 26th he went down into the basement to relieve his bowels
and utilized the elevator shaft for the purpose.

On the morning of
April 27th at 3 o’clock, when the Detectives came down into the
basement by way of the ladder [emphasis in
the original], they
inspected the premises, including the shaft, and they found there human
excrement in natural condition.

Subsequently, when they used the elevator,
which everybody, including Conley who had run the elevator for 1 and ½ years,
admits, only stops by hitting the ground in the basement, the elevator struck
the excrement and mashed it, thus demonstrating that the elevator had not been
used since Conley had been there. Solicitor General Dorsey, Mr. Howard and
myself visited the Pencil Factory and went down this elevator and we found it
hit the bottom. I went again with my Secretary with the same result.

Frank is delicate in physique, while Conley is
strong and powerful. Conley’s place for watching, as described by himself, was
in the gloom a few feet from the hatchway, leading by way of ladder to the
basement. Also he was [with]in a few feet of the elevator shaft on the first
floor. Conley’s action in the elevator shaft was in accordance with his
testimony that he made water twice against the door of the elevator shaft on the
morning of the 26th, instead of doing so in the gloom of his corner behind the
boxes he kept watch.

Mary Phagan in coming down stairs was
compelled to pass within a few feet of Conley, who was invisible to her and
[with]in a few feet of the hatchway.

Frank could not have carried her down the
hatchway. Conley might have done so with difficulty. If the Elevator Shaft was
not used by Conley and Frank in taking the body to the basement, then the
explanation of Conley, who admittedly wrote the notes found by the body, cannot
be accepted.

In addition there was found in the Elevator
Shaft at 3 o’clock Sunday morning, the parasol, which was unhurt, and a ball of
cord which had not been mashed.

Conley in his
affidavits before the Detectives testified he wrapped up the body in a
crocous sack at the suggestion of Frank, but on the
trial, he testified he wrapped up the body in a piece of bed-tick “like the
shirt of the Solicitor General”. The only reason for such change of testimony,
unless it be the truth, was that a crocous sack unless split open would be too small for
the purpose. If he split open the crocous sack with a knife this would suggest the
use of a knife in cutting
the drawers of the girl.

So the question
arises, whether there was any bed-tick in the Pencil Factory? And no reason can
be offered by bed tick should be in a Pencil Factory. It has no function there.
Had such unusual cloth ever been in the Factory, it certainly must have been
known, but nobody has ever found it.

Conley says that
after the deed was committed, which everybody admits could not have been before
12.05, Frank suddenly says, “Here comes Emma Clark and Corinthia Hall”, and he put Conley in a wardrobe.

The uncontradicted
evidence of these two witnesses, and they are unimpeached, was they reached the
Factory at 11.35 A.M. and left it
at 11.45 A.M., and therefore this statement of
Conley can hardly be accepted. Conley says that when they got the body to the
bottom of the elevator in the basement, Frank told him to leave the hat, slipper
and piece of ribbon right there but he “taken the things and pitched them over
in front of the boiler” which was 57 feet away.

Conley says that Frank told him when
he watched for him to lock the door when he Frank stamped and to open the door
when he whistled. In other words, Frank had made
the approach to the girl and killer before he had signalled Conley to lock the
door.

Conley says, “I
was upstairs between the time I locked the door and the time I unlocked it. I
unlocked the door before I went upstairs.

This explanation is not clear,
nor is it easy to comprehend the use of the signals which totally failed their
purpose.

It is curious during the course of the story
that while Frank explained to Conley about striking the girl when she refused
him and Conley found the
girl strangled with a cord, he did not ask Frank anything about the use
of the cord, and that subject was not mentioned.

The wound on Mary Phagan was near the top of
the head and reached the skull. Wounds of that character bleed freely. At the
place Conley says he found blood, there was no blood. Conley says there was a
cloth tied around the head as though to catch the blood, but none was found
there.

One
Barrett says that on Monday morning he found six or seven strands of hair on the
lathe with which he worked and which were not there on Friday. The implication
is that it was Mary Phagan’s hair and that she received a cut by having
her head struck at this place. It is admitted that no blood was found there. The
lathe is about 3 and ½ feet high and Mary Phagan is described as being chunky in build. A blow
which would have forced her with sufficient violence against the smooth handle
of the lathe to have produced the wound must have been a powerful one, since the
difference between her height and that of the lathe could not have accounted for
it. It was strange, therefore, that there was a
total absence of blood and that Frank, who was delicate, could have hit a blow
of such violence.

Some of the
witnesses for the State testified the hair was like that of Mary Phagan, although Dr. Harris compared Mary
Phagan’s hair with that on the lathe under a
microscope and was under the impression it was not Mary Phagan’s hair. This will be the subject of further
comment.

Barrett and
others said they though they saw blood near the dressing room, at which place
Conley said he dragged the body.

Chief of Police
Beavers said he did not know whether it was blood.

Detective Starnes
said, “I do not know that the splotches I saw was blood”.

Detective Black
says, “Mr Starnes, who was there with me, did not call my attention to any blood
splotches”.

Detective Scott
says: “We went to the Metal Room where I was shown some spots supposed to be
blood spots.

A part of what
they thought to be blood was chipped up in four or five chips and Dr. Claude
Smith testified that on one of the chips he found, under a microscope, from
three to five blood corpuscles, a half drop would have caused it.

Frank says that
the part of the splotch that was left after the chips were taken up was examined
by him with an electric flash lamp, and it was not blood.

Barrett, who
worked on the Metal floor, and who several witnesses declare claimed a reward
because he discovered the hair and blood, said the splotch was not there on
Friday, and some witnesses sustained him.

There was
testimony that there were frequent injuries at the Factory
and blood was not infrequent in the neighborhood of the ladies’ dressing
room. There was no blood in the elevator.

Dr. Smith, the
City Bacteriologist said that the presence of blood corpuscles could be told for
months after the blood had dried. All of this bore upon the question of whether
the murder took place in the Metal Room, which is on the same floor as Frank’s
office. Excepting near the Metal Room at the place mentioned where the splotches
varied according to Chief Beaver’s testimony, from the size of a quarter to the
size of a palm leaf fan, there was no blood whatever. It is to be remarked that a white substance
called haskoline used about the Factory was found spread over
the splotches.

CONLEY’S AFFIDAVITS

The defense
procured under notice one statement and three affidavits taken by the Detectives
from Conley and introduced the in evidence.

The first
statement, dated May 18, 1913, gives a minute detail of his actions on the 26th
day of April and specifies the saloons he visited and the whiskey and beer he
bought, and minutely itemized the denomination of the money he had and what he
spent for beer, whiskey and pan sausage.

This comprehends
the whole of Affidavit no. 1

On May 24, 1913,
he made for the Detectives an affidavit in which he says that on Friday before
the Saturday on which the murder was committed, Frank asked him if he could
write. This would appear strange, because Frank knew well he could write and had
so known for months, but according to Conley’s affidavit Frank dictated to him
practically the contents of one of the notes found by the body of Mary
Phagan. Frank, then, according to Conley’s
statement, took a brown scratch pad and wrote on that himself, and then gave him
a box of cigarettes in which was some money and Frank said to him that he had
some wealthy relatives in Brooklyn, and said “why should I
hang”.

This would have made Frank guilty of the
contemplated murder on Friday which was consummated Saturday and which was so
unreasonable, it could not be accepted.

On May 28th,
1913, Conley made for the Detectives another affidavit, which he denominates as
“second and last statement”. In that he swears that on Saturday morning after
leaving home he bought two beers for himself and then went to a saloon and won
90 cents with dice, where he bought two more beers and a half pint of whiskey,
some of which he drank, and he met Frank at the corner of Forsyth & Nelson
Sts, and Frank asked him to wait until he returned.

Conley went over
to the Factory and mentioned various people whom he saw from his place of
espionage going up the stairs to Mr. Frank’s office. Then Frank whistled to him
to and he came up stairs and Frank was trembling and he and Frank went into the
private office when Frank exclaimed that Emma Clark and Corinthia Hall were coming and concealed Conley in the
wardrobe. Conley said that that he stayed in the wardrobe a pretty good while,
for the whiskey and beer had gotten him to sweating. Then Frank asked him if he
could write and Frank made him write at his dictation three times and Frank told
him he was going to take the note and send it in a letter to people and
recommend Conley to them. Frank said, “Why should I hang?”

Frank took a
cigarette from a box and gave it to Conley, and when Conley got across the
street, he found it had two paper dollars, and two silver quarters in it, and
Conley said “good luck has done struck me”.

At the Beer
Saloon he bought one-half pint of whiskey and then got a buck and bought 15
cents worth of beer, 10 cents worth of stove-wood, and a nickel’s worth of pan
sausage and gave his old woman $3.50. He did not leave home until about 12
o’clock Sunday. On Tuesday morning Frank came up stairs and told him to be a
good boy. On Wednesday Conley washed his shirt at the Factory and hung it on the
steam pipe to dry, occasioning a little rust to get on it. The Detectives took
the shirt and finding no blood on it returned it.

On the 29th of
May, 1913, Conley made another affidavit, in which he said that Frank told him
that he had picked up a girl and let her fall and Conley hollered out to him
that the girl was dead, and told him to go to the cotton bag and get a piece of
cloth, and he got a big wide piece of cloth and took her on his right shoulder,
when she got too heavy for him and she slipped of when he got to the Dressing
Room. He called Frank to help and Frank got a key to the elevator and the two
carried the body down stairs and Frank told him to take the body back to the saw
dust pile and Conley says, he picked up the girl and put her on his shoulder,
while Frank went back up the ladder.

It will be observed that the testimony and the
appearance of the girl indicated that she was dragged through the cinders and
debris on the floor of the basement, yet Conley says he took her on his
shoulder.

The affidavit
further states that Conley took the cloth from around her and took her hat and
slipper, which he had picked up upstairs, right where her body was lying and
brought them down and untied the cloth and brought them back and “throwed them
on the trash pile” in front of the furnace. This was the time Conley says Frank
made the exclamation about Emma Clarke and Corinthia Hall.

An important
feature in this affidavit is as follows:

Conley states in it that Mr. Frank
said: “here is $200.00 and Frank handed the money to him”.

All of the
affidavit down to this point is in type-writing the original was exhibited to
him. At the end of the affidavit in hand writing is written the following:
“While I was looking at the money in my hands Mr. Frank said, let me have that
and I will make it all right with you Monday, if I live and nothing happens”,
and “he took the money back and I asked him if that was the way he done, and he
said he would give it back Monday”.

It will be noticed that the first question
which would arise would be, what became of the $200. This could not be accounted
for.

Therefore, when that query presumably was
propounded to Conley, the only explanation was that Frank demanded it back.

The Detectives
had Conley for two or three hours on May 18 th trying to obtain a confession, and he denied
he had seen the girl on the day of the murder. The Detectives questioned him
closely for three hours on May 25 th, when he repeated this story. On May 27th,
they talked to him about five or six hours in Chief Langford’s office.

Detective Scot, who was introduced by the State, testified regarding
Conley’s statement and affidavit as follows:

“We tried to impress him with the fact that
Frank would not have written those notes on Friday, that that was not a
reasonable story. That it showed premeditation and that would not do. We pointed
out to him why the first statement would not fit. We told him we wanted another
statement. He declined to make another statement. He said he had told the
truth”.

“On May 28th, Chief Langford and I grilled him
for five or six hours again, endeavoring to make clear several points which were
far fetched in his statement. We pointed out to him that his statement would not
do and would not fit, and he then made the statement of May 28th, after he had
been told that his previous statement showed deliberation and could not be
accepted. He told us nothing about Frank making an engagement to stamp and for
him to lock the door, and told nothing about Monteen Stover. He did not tell us
about seeing Mary Phagan. He did not see her. He did not say he saw Quinn.
Conley was a rather dirty negro when I first saw him. He looked pretty good when
he testified here.

“On May 29th, we talked with Conley almost all
day. We pointed out things in his story that were improbable and told he must do
better than that. Anything in his story that looked to be out of place, we told
him that would not do. We tried to get him to tell about the little mesh bag. We
tried pretty strong. He always denied ever having seen it. He denied knowing
anything about the matter down there in the basement in the elevator shaft. He
never said he went down there himself between the time he came to the factory
and went to Montags. He never said anything about Mr. Frank having hit her, or
having hit her too hard, about tip-toes from the Metal Room Department. He said
there was no thought of burning the body.

“On May 18th we undertook in Chief Langford’s
Office to convince him he could write, and we understood he said he could not
write and we knew he could. We convinced him that we knew he could write and
then he wrote.”

In his evidence before the Jury in the
re-direct examination, Conley thought it necessary to account for the mesh bag,
and for the first time, said that Mary Phagan’s mesh bag was lying on Mr.
Frank’s desk and Mr. Frank put it in the safe”. This is the first mention of the
mesh bag.

The first suggestion that was made of Frank being a
pervert was in Conley’s testimony. One the stand, he declared Frank said “he was
not built like other men”.

There is no proof in the record of Frank being
a pervert. The situation
in which Conley places him, and upon Conley’s testimony must that charge rest,
does not prove the charge of perversion if Conley’s testimony be true.

On argument
before me, I asked what motive Conley would have to make such a suggestion and
the only reason given was that someone may have made him the suggestion because
Jews were circumcised.

Conley in his
evidence shows himself amenable to suggestion. He says, “if you tell a story,
you know you have got to change it. A lie won’t work and you know you have got
to tell the whole truth”.

Conley in
explaining why his affidavits varied said: “The reason why I told that story was
I do not want them to know that these other people passed by me for they might
accuse me. I do not want people to think that I was the one that done the
murder”.

AUTHOR OF THE NOTES

Conley admits he
wrote the notes found by the body of Mary Phagan. Did Frank dictate them? Conley swears he
did. The State says that the use of the word “did” instead of “done” indicates a
white man’s dictation. Conley admits the spelling was his. The words are
repeated and are simple, which characterizes Conley’s letters. In Conley’s
testimony, you will find frequently that he uses the word “did” and according to
calculation submitted to me, he used the word “did” over fifty times during the
trial.

While Conley was in jail charged with being an
accessory, there was also incarcerated in the jail, a woman named Annie Maude
Carter, whom Conley had met at the Court House. She did some work in the jail
and formed the acquaintance of Conley, who wrote to her many lengthy
letters.
These
letters are the most obscene and lecherous I have ever
read. In these letters, the word “did’ is
frequently employed. It will be observed that in Conley’s testimony, he uses
frequently the word “negro”, and in the Annie Maude Carter notes, he says, “I
have a negro watching you”.

The Annie Maude Carter notes, which were
powerful evidence in behalf of the defendant, and which tended strongly to show
that Conley was the real author of the murder notes, were not before the jury.
[emphasis in the original]

The word “like” is used in the Mary Phagan
notes, and one will find it frequently employed in Conley’s testimony. The word
“play” in the Mary Phagan notes, with an obscene significance, is similarly
employed in the Annie Maude Carter notes. The same is true as to the words “lay”
and “love”.

In
Conley’s testimony, he uses the words “make water”, just as they are used in the
Mary Phagan notes.

In Conley’s testimony, he says the word
“hisself’ constantly.

It
is urged by the lawyers for the defense that Conley’s characteristic was to use
double adjectives.

In the Mary Phagan notes, he said “long tall
negro black”, “long, slim, tall negro”.

In his testimony Conley used expressions of
this sort. “He was a tall, slim build heavy man”. “A good long wide piece of
cord in his hands”.

Conley says that he wrote four notes, although
only two were found. These notes have in them 128 words, and Conley swears he
wrote them in 2 and ½ minutes. Detective Scott swears he dictated eight to
Conley and it took him about six minutes to write them.

The statement is
made by Frank, and that statement is consistent with the evidence in the record,
that the information that Conley could write came from Frank when he was
informed that Conley claimed he could not write. Frank says he did not disclose
this before, because he was not aware that Conley had been at the Factory on the
26th day of April, and therefore the materiality of whether Conley could write
any more than any other negro employee, had not been suggested to him. Frank
says that he gave the information that Conley had signed receipts with certain
jewelers, with whom Conley had dealings.

WHERE WERE THE NOTE WRITTEN

At the time of
the trial, it was not observed that the Death Note written on brown paper was an
order blank, with the date line “Atlanta, Ga.____190. Subsequently the paper was
put under a magnifying glass and in blue pencil, it was found that one Becker’s
name was written there. He had been employed at the Factory on the fourth floor.
Investigation was made and Becker testified that he worked for the Pencil
Factory from 1908 until 1912., and the order blank was no. 1018. During that
entire time, on signed orders for goods and supplies. The brown paper on which
the Death Note was written bears his signature, and at the time he left Atlanta
in 1912, the entire supply of blanks containing the figures 190__, had been
exhausted, and the blanks contained the figures “191__”, had already been put in
use. Becker makes affidavit that before leaving Atlanta, he personally packed up
all of the duplicate orders which had been filed and performed their functions,
and sent them to the basement to be burned. Whether the order was carried out,
he did not know.

In reply to this
evidence, the State introduced on the extraordinary motion the testimony of
Philip Chambers, who swears that unused order blanks entitled “Atlanta, Ga.,__,
191__ were in the office next to Frank’s office and that he had been in the
basement of the Factory and found no books or papers left down there for any
length of time, but same were always burned up.

This evidence was never
passed upon by the jury and developed since the trial. It was strongly
corroborative of the theory of the defense that the death notes were written,
not in Frank’s office, but in the basement, and especially in view of
the evidence of Police Seargeant Dobbs, who visited the scene of the crime
Sunday morning, as follows:

“This scratch pad
was also lying on the ground close to the body. The scratch pad was lying near
the notes. They were all right close together. There was a pile of trash near
the boiler where this note was found, and paper and pencil were down there
too”.

Police Officer Anderson testified:

“There are plenty
of pencils and trash in the basement”.

Darley testified: “I have seen all kinds of paper
down in the basement. The paper that note is written on is a blank order pad.
That kind of paper is likely to be found all over the building for this reason,
they write an order and sometimes fail to get a carbon under it, and at other
times, they change the order and it gets into the trash. That kind of pad is
used all over the factory.

Over the boiler
is a gas jet.

Another feature which was
not known at the trial and which was not presented to the
jury, but came up by extraordinary motion, was
regarding the hair alleged to have been fund by Barrett on the
lathe. The evidence on the trial of some of the
witnesses was that the hair looked like that of Mary Phagan. It was not brought out at the trial that Dr.
Harris had examined the hair under a microscope and by taking sections of it and
comparing it with Mary Phagan’s hair, and thought that on the lathe was not
Mary Phagan’s hair, although he said he could not be
certain of it.

This, however,
would have been the highest and best evidence.

The evidence as to the probability of the
blank on which the death note was written being in the basement, and the
evidence as to the hair, would have tended to show that the murder was not
committed on the floor on which Frank’s office was located.

THE TIME QUESTION

The State contented that Mary
Phagan came to the office of Leo M. Frank to get her
pay at some time between 12.05 and 12.10 and that Frank had declared that he was
in the office the whole time.

It is true that
at the Coroner’s Inquest held on Thursday after the murder (Page 364*), he said
he might have gone back to the toilet, but did
not remember it. However, in some of his testimony, Frank said
he had remained the whole time in his office, Monteen Stover swears that she came into Frank’s
office at 12.04 and remained until 12.10, and did not see Frank or anybody. She
is unimpeached, and the only way to reconcile her evidence
would be that she entered Frank’s office, as she states for the first time in
her life, and did not go into the inner room, where Frank claimed to have been
at work. If Frank were at work at his desk, he could
not be seen from the outer room. Monteen Stover said she wore Tennis Shoes and her
steps may not have attracted him.

However, the
pertinency of Monteen Stover’s testimony is that Mary Phagan had come to get her pay and Frank had gone
with her to the Metal Room and was in the process of killing her while
Monteen Stover was in his office, and this was at a
time when he had declared he was in his office.

The evidence loses its
pertinency, if Mary Phagan had not arrived at the time Monteen Stover came. What is the evidence?

The uncontradicted [evidence] disclosed that
Mary Phagan ate her dinner at 11.30, and the evidence of the street car men was
that she caught the 11.50 car, which was due at the corner of Forsythe &
Marietta Sts., at 12.07 and ½. The distance from this place to the Pencil
Factory is about one-fifth of a mile. It required from 4 to 6 minutes to walk to
the Factory, and especially would the time be enlarged, because of the crowds on
the streets on Memorial Day.

While the street
car men swear the car was on time, and while George Epps, a witness for the
State, who rode with Mary Phagan, swears he left her about 12.07 at the corner
of Forsyth & Marietta Sts.. There is some evidence to the effect that the
car arrived according to custom, but might have arrived two or three minutes
behind schedule time. If so, the distance would have placed Mary Phagan at the
Pencil Factory at some time between 12.05 and 12.10. Monteen Stover looked at the clock and says she
entered at 12.05. A suggestion is made that the Time Clocks, which were punched
by the employees, might have been fast. This proposition was met by W.W. Rogers,
who accompanied the Detectives to the scene of the murder on Sunday morning, and
who testified (Page 200), “I know that both clocks were running, and I noticed
both of them had the exact time”. Therefore Monteen Stover must have arrived
before Mary Phagan, and while Monteen Stover was in the room, it seems hardly
possible under the evidence, that Mary Phagan was at that time being murdered.

Lemmie Quinn testifies that he reached Frank’s
office about 12.20 and saw Mr. Frank. At 12.30, Mrs. J.A. White called to see her husband at the
Factory where he was working on the fourth floor, and left again before one
o’clock.

At 12.50,
according to Denham, Frank came up to the fourth floor and said that he wanted
to get out. The evidence tends to show that the time taken
for moving the body, according to Conley’s description, was so long that it
could not have fitted the specific times at which visitors saw
Frank. It will be seen
that when Mrs. White came up at 12.30, the doors below here were locked.

Another feature
of the evidence is that the back door in the basement was the former means of
egress for Conley, when he desired to escape his creditors among the employees.
On Sunday morning, April 27, the staple of this door had been drawn. Detective
Starnes found on the door the marks of what he thought were bloody
finger-prints, and he chipped off two pieces from the door, which looked like
“bloody finger-prints”. The evidence does not disclose further investigation as
to whether it was blood or not.

The motive of this murder may be either
Robber, or Robber and Assault, or Assault.

There is no
suggestion that the motive of Frank would be robbery. The mesh bag was in Mary
Phagan’s hands and was described by Conley, in his
re-direct examination, at the trial for the first time. The size of the mesh
bag, I cannot tell, but since a bloody handkerchief of Mary Phagan’s was found by her side, it was urged before me
by counsel for the defense that ladies usually carry their handkerchiefs in
their mesh bags.

If the motive was assault, either by
natural or perverted means, the physician’s evidence, who ma+de the
examination, does not disclose its accomplishment. Perversion by none of the
suggested means could have occasioned the flood of blood. The Doctors testified
that excitement might have occasioned it under certain conditions.
Under the evidence, which
is not set forth in detail, there is every possibility that the virtue of Mary
Phagan was not lost on the 26th of
April. Her
mesh bag was lost, and there can be no doubt of this. The evidence shows that
Conley was as depraved and
lecherous a negro as ever lived in the state of Georgia. He lay in watch and
described the clothes and stockings of the women who went to the Factory.

Hs story
necessarily bears the construction that Frank had an engagement with Mary
Phagan which no evidence in the case would justify.
If Frank had engaged Conley to watch for him, it could only have been for Mary
Phagan, since he made no improper suggestion to any
other female on that day, and it was undisputed that many did come up prior to
12.00 o’clock, and whom could Frank have been expecting except Mary Phagan under Conley’s story. This view cannot be
entertained, as an unjustifiable reflection on the young girl.

Why the negro
wrote the notes is a matter open to conjecture. He had been drinking heavily
that morning, and it is possible that he undertook to describe the other negro
in the building so that it would avert suspicions.

It may yet be
possible that his version is correct.

The testimony discloses that he was in the
habit of allowing men to go into the basement for immoral purposes for a
consideration, and when Mary Phagan passed by him close to the hatchway leading
into the basement and in the gloom and darkness of the entrance, he attacked
her. What is the truth we may never know.

JURY’S VERDICT

The jury which
heard the evidence and saw the witnesses found the defendant guilty of murder.
They are the ones, under our laws, who are chosen to weigh evidence and to
determine its probative value. They may consider the demeanor of the witnesses
upon the stand and in the exercise of common sense will arrive with wonderful
accuracy at the truth of the contest.

JUDICIARY

Under our law,
the only authority who can review the merits of the case and question the
justice of a verdict which has any evidence to support it, is the trial judge.
The Supreme Court is limited by the Constitution and the correction of errors of
law. The Supreme Court found in the trial no error of law and determined as a
matter of law., and correctly in my judgement, that there was sufficient evidence to
sustain the verdict.

But under our
judicial system, the trial judge is called upon to exercise his wise discretion,
and he cannot permit a verdict to stand which he believes to be unjust. A
suggestion in the order over-ruling a motion for a new trial, that the judge was
not satisfied with the verdict, would demand a reversal by the Supreme Court.

In this
connection Judge Roan declared orally from the bench that he was not certain of
the defendant’s guilt – that with all the thought he had put on the case, he was
not thoroughly convinced whether Frank was guilty, or innocent – but that he did
not have to be convinced – that the jury was convinced and that there was no
room to doubt that – that he felt it was his duty to order that the motion for a
new trial be over-ruled.

This statement
was not embodied in the motion over-ruling new trial.

Under our
statute, in cases of conviction of murder on circumstantial evidence, it is
within the discretion of the trial judge to sentence the defendant to life
imprisonment (Code Section 63).

The conviction of
Frank was on circumstantial evidence, as the Solicitor General admits in his
written argument.

Judge Road,
however, misconstrued his power, as evidence by the following charge to the jury
in the case of the State against Frank:

“If you believe
beyond a reasonable doubt from the evidence in this case that this defendant is
guilty of murder, then, you would be authorized in that event to say: ”We, the
jury, find the defendant guilty”. Should you go further, gentlemen, and say
nothing else in your verdict, the court would have to sentence the defendant to
the extreme penalty of murder, to wit: “To be hanged by the neck until he is
dead”.

Surely, if Judge
Roan entertained the extreme doubt indicated by his statement and had remembered
the power granted him by the Code, he would have sentenced the defendant to life
imprisonment.

In a letter
written to counsel he says, “I shall ask the Prison Commission to recommend to
the Governor to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment ****. It is
possible that I showed undue deference to the jury in this case, when I allowed
the verdict to stand. They said by their verdict that they had found the truth.
I was in a state of uncertainty, and so expressed myself. **** After many months
of continued deliberation, I am still uncertain of Frank’s guilt. The state of
uncertainty is largely due by the character of the Conley testimony, by which
the verdict was largely reached.

“Therefore, I
consider this a case in which the chief magistrate of the State should exert
every effort in ascertaining the truth. The execution of any person, whose guilt
has not been satisfactorily proven, is too horrible to contemplate. I do not
believe that a person should meet with the extreme penalty of the law, until the
Court, Jury and Governor shall have all been satisfied of that person’s guilt.
Hence, at the proper time, I shall express and enlarge upon these views,
directly to the Prison Commission and Governor.

“However, if for
any cause I am prevented from doing this, you are at liberty to use this letter
at the hearing.”

It will thus be observed that if commutation is
granted, the verdict of the jury is not attacked, but the penalty is imposed for
murder, which is provided by the State and which the Judge, except for his
misconception, would have imposed. Without attacking the jury, or any of the
courts, I would be carrying out the will of the Judge himself in making the
penalty that which he would have made it and which he desires it shall be made.

In the case of
Hunter, a white man charged with assassinating two white women in the City of
Savannah, who was found guilty and sentenced to be hung, application was made to
me for clemency. Hunter was charged together with a negro with having committed
the offense, and after he was convicted the negro was acquitted. It was brought
out by the statement of the negro that another negro who was half-witted
committed the crime, but no credence was given to the story, and he was not
indicted.

The Judge and Solicitor General
refused to accord clemency, but upon a review of the evidence, and because of
the facts and at the instance of the leading citizens of Savannah, who were
doubtful of the guilt of the defendant, I commuted the sentence, in order that
there should be no possibility of the execution of an innocent man. This action has met with
the entire approbation of the people of Chatham County.

In the case of
John Wright in Fannin County, two men went to the mountain home of
a citizen, called him out and shot him and were trampling on his body, when his
wife, with a babe in her arms, came out to defend her husband. One of the men
struck the babe with his gun and killed it. Wright was tried, found guilty and
sentenced to death. Evidence was introduced as to his borrowing a gun. His
threats, his escape after the shooting occurred at the time he was in escape
from the Fannin County Jail under indictment for felony.

I refused to
interfere unless the Judge, or Solicitor, would recommend interference, which
they declined to do. Finally, when on the gallows the Solicitor General
recommended a reprieve, which I granted, and finally on the recommendation of
the Judge and Solicitor General, as expressed in my Order, I reluctantly
commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. The doubt was suggested as to the
identity of the criminal and as to the credibility of the testimony of
prejudiced witnesses. The crime was as heinous as this one and more so.

In the Frank case three matters have developed
since the trial which did not come before the jury, to wit: the Carter notes,
the testimony of Becker, indicating that the death notes were written in the
basement, and the testimony of Dr. Harris, that he was under the impression that
the hair on the lathe was not that of Mary Phagan, and thus tending to show that
the crime was not committed on the floor of Frank’s office.

While made the
subject of an extraordinary motion for a new trial, it is well known that it is
almost a practical impossibility to have a verdict set aside by this procedure.

The evidence
might not have changed the verdict, but it might have caused the jury to render
a verdict with the recommendation of mercy.

In any event, the
performance of my duty under the Constitution, is a matter of my conscience. The
responsibility rests where the power is reposed. Judge Roan, with that awful
sense of responsibility, which probably came over him as he thought of that
Judge before whom he would shortly appear, calls to me from another world to
request that I do that which he should have done. I can endure
misconstruction, abuse and condemnation, but I cannot stand the constant
companionship of an accusing conscience, which would remind me in every thought
that I , as a Governor of Georgia, failed to do what I thought to be
right. There is a
territory “beyond a REASONABLE DOUBT and absolute certainty”, for which the law
provides in allowing life imprisonment instead of execution. This case has been
marked by doubt. The trial judge doubted. Two Judges of the Supreme Court of
Georgia doubted. Two Judges of the Supreme Court of the United States doubted.
One of the three Prisoin Commissioners doubted.

In my
judgement, by granting a commutation in this case, I am
sustaining the jury, the judge, and the appellate tribunals, and at the same
time am discharging that duty which is placed on me by the Constitution of the
State.

Acting,
therefore, in accordance with what I believe to be my duty under the
circumstances of this case, it is

ORDERED: That the sentence in the
case of Leo M. Frank is commuted from the death penalty to imprisonment for
life.

This 21st day of June, 1915.

John M. Slaton,

GOVERNOR
[signature]

* [Note: according to THE MURDER OF LITTLE MARY PHAGAN, by Mary
Phagan, the victim's great-niece, who believes that Frank was guilty,
the police put Frank in a cell with the night watchman, Newt Lee, and
Frank told Lee: "if you know anything, it's best to tell all you know."
The police took this as an "admission of guilt" and may have fabricated
the statement attributed to Frank as mentioned by Governor Slaton,
above, "if you keep that up, we will both go to hell".

She also says that the affidavit of the cook (that Frank said he was
going to buy a gun and shoot himself because he had murdered a young
girl), was plastered all over the front pages of every newspaper in the
state; but that when the affidavit was retracted, the retraction was
printed in a very small notice on the inside pages, so that almost
nobody ever saw it!

I had a lengthy correspondence with Mary Phagan about twenty years
ago. She was very warm to me, answering all my questions, and saying
"call me Mary". The correspondence terminated abruptly when I told her I
thought Frank was innocent.

Harry Golden's book A LITTLE GIRL IS DEAD contains one
misstatement of fact: Golden states flatly, "she was not a virgin",
which is utrue.
I have not read Steve Oney's book AND THE DEAD SHALL
RISE.

- C.P.[Carlos Porter]
26 JANUARY 2006]

Information on
Harry Golden  ....Writer who
said Mary had slept around

The story of "the Coat" led to my contretemps
with Harry Golden. Golden, a short, rotund, Jewish, cigar-smoking
colorful writer, was also a bit
of a rogue. In 1929, when he was in his late twenties, he pled guilty to mail
fraud charges in connection with his activities as a stockbroker in New York
City. After serving a four-year
prison sentence, he changed his name from Goldhurst to Golden and moved to Charlotte, North Carolina, a most unlikely setting in
what became a most unlikely career. As he put it, he was "a Northerner living in
the South, a Jew in the most Gentile community on the continent, [and] an
integrationist among white supremacists." (1)

http://www.answers.com/topic/harry-golden

http://www.plcmc.org/libLoc/papersGolden.pdf

Harry Golden

This Jewish writer/convict declared 13 yr old Mary Phagan a 'loose
women' and was not a virgin.

Supreme Court Heard the
Case

In December 1914, the United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case on
the grounds that Frank had not been in the courtroom when the jury’s verdict was
received. But on April 19, 1915, the argument was rejected by a vote of 7 to 2,
Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes famously dissenting.
Wrote Holmes: “Mob law does not become due process of law by securing the assent
of a terrorized jury.”

The Supreme Court’s decision left Frank with one
recourse: to seek executive clemency from Georgia’s governor, John Slaton, who
was nearing the end of his term. In 1913, however, Slaton and Luther Rosser,
Frank’s lead counsel, had become partners — a fact that appeared to Frank’s
accusers to jeopardize Slaton’s neutrality.

Jews were relieved

Then an equally heinous murder
occurred when the defendant was abducted from his prison cell and
lynched. The justice system completely broke down and no one was ever
arrested, prosecuted, or otherwise held accountable for this second
murder. And there was no
shortage of braggarts claiming responsibility for the lynching. What secretive,
organized movements were involved in this gangsterism?

If B'nai B'rith
really thought their defendant was innocent, wouldn't they have applied
pressure to assure that his butchers were brought before the bar of
justice? But if some people felt he was actually guilty, the lynching
solved a lot of problems. A guilty man spending the rest of his life in
prison might decide to confess somewhere along the line in hope of
getting released.

The Pollard spy case comes to mind in that regard. We know
who killed Mary Phagan. The real question is why didn't anybody care
who lynched the President of Atlanta B'nai Brith? Not just who participated in the lynching, but also who
was involved in the cover up? Who were the accessories before the fact to this
murderous obstruction of justice? Many decades later, after most of the
witnesses were dead, he received a posthumous pardon that did nothing to bring
his killers to justice. Of course, a pardon is usually based on political
influence and has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.

http://www.vho.org/GB/Books/tfh/2.html

Murder notes

Murder Notes

Two notes were found in the plant, supposedly written by Mary
Phagan as she was dying, and accusing
a "Negro" of killing her. These came to be known as the "murder notes."
Great suspicion was cast on the notes, and, e.g., there was debate about
whether Phagan would have used the word "Negro," which was seldom used
by white people in the South at that time. Jim Conley later claimed that
the notes were dictated to him by Frank. The text of the notes
was:

Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and
he push me doun that hole a long negro black that hoo it was long sleam
tall negro i wright while play with me.

He said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did
it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.

Leo Frank and the murder of Mary Phagan

12 yrs old

The riddle of Mary's age

How old was Mary Phagan when she
died?

Most sources say she would have been 14 on June 1, 1913. And that is what her
mother testified to during the trial of Leo Frank. But Mary’s tombstone at
National Cemetery in Marietta, Ga., says
she was born in 1900, which would mean she would have been 13 on June 1,
1913. Mary was 12 when she was
murdered

National Pencil
Company child
laborer  Mary Phagan   murdered
by Jim Conley; however, National Pencil Co. manager Leo Frank was tried and convicted
for the murder; a lynch mob, calling itself "The
Knights of Mary Phagan," stormed the prison where Frank was being held,
kidnapped him and took him to Frey's Grove where he was lynched; later that day
the "Knights" held a rally at Stone Mountain and rechristened themselves the
Ku Klux
Klan
born on 6-1-1900 in Marietta,
Georgia
expired 4-26-1913 in Atlanta, Georgia   age 12   cause: murdered

Mary Phagan was
born on June 1, 1900 to John and Frances Phagan in Marietta, Ga.

Mary Phagan
( June
1, 1900
- April 26, 1913),

April 17, 1884 Leo Frank born, Cuero, Texas

June 1, 1900 Mary
Phagan born, Marietta, Georgia
Marietta, GA
April 26, 1913 Mary Phagan is
murdered at the National Pencil Company
Fulton County, Georgia

She was 12 yrs
old

Believing that the mother’s testimony is the most reliable source, The
Tennessean has chosen to accept her account.
April 27, 1913 The body of Mary Phagan, bloody, broken, possibly sexually
assaulted, was found in the basement of the National Pencil Company in
Atlanta. Newt Lee, who found the body, is arrested.
Atlanta, Georgia
(1900-2000)
May 1, 1913 Jim Conley, a black janitor, is arrested when he is
discovered rinsing blood off a shirt in the basement of the National Pencil
Company
May 8, 1913 Leo Frank and
Newt Lee are ordered to be held in the murder of Mary Phagan
May 23, 1913 Leo Frank is indicted
in the murder of Mary Phagan
May 28, 1913 Jim Conley admits his involvement
with the murder. He claims that Leo Frank ordered him to write the murder notes,
and that Frank had killed Mary Phagan and had Conley carry her downstairs

July 28, 1913 Leo Frank's trial begins
"Fiddlin'" John Carson
August
4, 1913 Jim Conley testifies at the trial of Leo Frank, claiming that Frank had
gotten his help in moving Mary Phagan's body to the cellar.
August 25, 1913
Leo Frank is found guilty of the murder of Mary Phagan
February 24, 1914 Jim
Conley, self-professed accomplice to the murder of Mary Phagan, is sentenced to
a year of hard labor for his role in the crime.
June 21, 1915 Leo Frank is
transferred from the Fulton County prison to the State Penitentiary at
Milledgeville
Fulton County, Georgia
June 21, 1915 Governor John Slaton
commutes Leo Frank's death sentence to a lifetime prison sentence.
July 18,
1915 Leo Frank is assaulted by an inmate of the prison. His throat is slashed.

August 17, 1915 A lynch mob hangs Leo Frank, near the present-day site of
the Big Chicken
November 25, 1915 William Simmons, along with some of the
men who lynched Leo Frank, and others burn a cross at the top of Stone Mountain,
signaling the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan
Stone Mountain
Ku Klux Klan in
Georgia
March 4, 1982 Alonzo Mann, a teenage helper in the National Pencil
Factory, admits that he saw Jim Conley carrying the body of Mary Phagan by
himself, implicating Conley's testimony
March 11, 1986 Georgia pardons Leo Frank, not
because of new evidence in the murder of Mary Phagan, but because the state failed to provide
protection while Frank was in custody.

Brothel

Yet even in the wake of Watson's scathing pogrom
Atlanta kept its head, angry but confident that legal measures would
take care of the atrocity. It was not until the Atlanta
Constitution printed an interview--a scoop which it
probably regrets today--with Mrs. Nina Formby that the tornado of
Juden-Hetze got out of control and swept the city and state and
the South.

Mrs. Formby was well acquainted with
the detectives of Atlanta. She ran a brothel, and she later
swore--from the safety of distant New York City--that the sleuths got
her drunk and made her accuse
Leo.

The Constitution carried a story that on the
evening of the murder Leo had telephoned her, frantically demanding a room in
her house for himself and a young girl. "It's a matter of life and death," she
said Leo told her. And though Leo proved by many witnesses that he was at that
time entertaining friends in his home, the story got out that Frank was a
pervert--and the town went mad.

The madam of a whorehouse, Nina Formby, told the police
that on the night of the murder, Frank, a frequent customer, had called her
asking if she had a room in which he could get rid of Phagan's body. However, Formby skipped town,
and recanted her statement from New York, saying that the police had gotten her
drunk and offered her money. The police also, in an intense grilling, persuaded
the Franks' housekeeper to change her statement helping to establish Frank's
alibi, but she also recanted her statement immediately.

Nina Formby, who ran a brothel,
claimed on the evening of the murder that Frank had telephoned her, urgently
demanding a room in her house for himself and a young girl. "It's a matter of
life and death," she said Leo told her.

Most damaging of
all, a woman who ran a rooming house, Mrs. Nina Formby, told police two weeks
later that, on the day of the murder, Frank had called her repeatedly in order to
secure a room for himself and a young girl.

The madam of a house of ill repute claimed that
Frank had phoned her several
times, seeking a room for himself and a young girl.

Frank was accused, for an example, of
frequenting a house of
prostitution for the purpose of indulging in the "perverted vice" of
oral sex, itself a crime punishable by death at that
time.

Newt lee

Watchman Lee was a sinister witness, from Leo's
viewpoint. He said, he came to work at 4 o'clock and that, contrary to
custom, Leo told him to go away and return at 7 o'clock. Leo said he
merely tried to give the Negro a little rest on the
holiday.

Testimony showed
that Frank had telephoned Newt Lee at the factory late Saturday evening
to make sure everything was all right.

After several
attempts at drafting the notes -- which appeared to be aimed at placing
blame for the murder on night watchman Newt Lee -- Frank was finally satisfied,
Conley said, and gave him $200 with the instructions: "You go down there
in the basement and you take a lot of trash and burn that package that’s
in front of the furnace."

Instead he worked at the factory until evening. In
fact, he had told Lee who
had come to work at 4pm to leave and return at
6pm.

Conley

On the day of the murder, Conley went on, he came into
the office and found Leo crouching over the unconscious girl. Leo told him that
Mary had resisted his advances, and when he grabbed her had fallen and struck
her head. When he had finished with her he decided to kill her. So he strangled
her to death with the cord.

He then promised Conley $200 to burn the
body, and did, in fact, give him that sum, the Negro said. They carried her together to the elevator,
found it would not work, and so passed her down through a trapdoor and on into
the cellar. Then, fearing the smoke from the furnace
would attract attention on the holiday, Leo dictated the notes which Conley
wrote, and they left them beside the body. But, said Conley, Leo made him return
the $200 because he hadn't burnt the body. If Conley came down early the next
day and burnt it Leo would then give him the money.

that
he dropped her through the trapdoor hole;

After stating that the financial
records of the National Pencil
Factory showed there were
two-hundred dollars (the amount Jim Conley said Frank had showed
him) on the premises the day of the murder, solicitor Hugh Dorsey rested the
state's case.

Description of murder

The state made the detective theory largely its own: that Mary tried to run
after Leo made an improper proposal; that he caught her, struck her, and that
she fell, breaking her neck against a lathe in a nearby room, that strands of
her hair were found on the lathe, that Leo carried her back to his room and then
to the wash-room in an effort to revive her there; that he feared she would talk
when she became conscious; and that he then tied the cord about her neck, and
got Conley to help him get rid of the body.

She was raped - when did he do it?

The state saw something significant in the fact that, in a letter which Leo
said he wrote to his father that Saturday, he told him that "there was nothing
startling" in Atlanta to report--thus preparing his alibi in advance of the
discovery of the body.

The next thing he remembered, Conley said, was Frank’s stomping his
foot -- the signal to lock the front door. He added:

"The next thing I heard was Mr. Frank whistling. Mr. Frank was
standing there at the top of the steps and shivering and trembling and
rubbing his hands like this. He had a little rope in his hands. A long
wide piece of rope. His eyes
were large. They looked right funny, like diamonds. His face was red.

"He asked, ‘Did you see that little girl who passed here a while
ago?’ I told him I saw one come along there and she has no come down,
and he says, ‘well, that one you say didn’t come back down, she came
into my office a little while ago and I wanted to be with the little
girl and she refused me and I struck her and I guess I struck her too
hard and she fell and hit her head against something and I didn’t know
how bad she got hurt.’"

After several attempts at drafting the notes --
which appeared to be aimed at placing blame for the murder on night
watchman Newt Lee -- Frank was finally satisfied, Conley said, and gave him
$200 with the instructions: "You go down there in the basement and you
take a lot of trash and burn that package that’s in front of the furnace."

But, Conley added, "I was afraid to go down there
by myself and Mr. Frank wouldn’t go with me. He said, ‘there’s no need of
my going down there.’ And I said, ‘Mr. Frank, you are a white man and you
done it and I’m not going down there and burn that myself.’ He looked at
my then, kind of frightened, and he said, ‘Let me see that money,’ and he
took the money back and he put it in his pocket."

Q. What did he say next?

A. He turned around in his chair and looked at the
money and looked back at me and folded his hands and looked up at the
ceiling and said, "Why should I hang? I have wealthy people in Brooklyn."
I said, "Mr. Frank, what about me?" and he said, "That’s all right, don’t
worry about this thing, you just come back to work Monday like you don’t
know anything and keep your mouth shut. If you get caught I will get you
out on bond and I will send you away," and he said, "Can you come back this evening and do
it?"

Conley said he went home and went to sleep,
leaving the body of the little girl in the basement, where it was
discovered by Newt Lee the next morning.

What is known to be fact is that her body was
discovered strangled in the basement “…ravished and brutally garroted with
a piece of cord…blood matted her hair and her face was swollen and
grimy”.  Her
undergarments were cut open and evidence of sexual misconduct (sodomy, but
not vaginal intercourse) was
present.

Racist Defense

Readers who wish to find a progressive Jewish social ethic at work in the
Frank camp will be sorely disappointed.
Frank's lawyers played the race card for all it was worth. ''Why, Negroes rob
and ravish every day in the most peculiar and shocking way,'' they offered. Then
they looked the jurors in the eye. ''If you, as white men, should believe Jim
Conley, it will be a shame on this great city and on this great state and will
be until the end of time.''

Watson

Watson had refused a $5000
retainer to defend Frank; he had declined to assist the
prosecution. Indeed, he had publicly said nothing about the case. But
the Journal had always opposed Watson, who saw the editorial as
an opening shot in a "gigantic conspiracy of big money" to corrupt the
state’s courts, government and press to save the life of a wealthy
murderer.

A celebrated criminal defense
lawyer for much of his career, Watson still was no newcomer to
publishing

Watson's
contentious publications again found the national spotlight in
1914, after Watson bristled at an Atlanta Journal
editorial urging a retrial for Leo
Frank.
A wealthy, northern, Jewish manager of
the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank had been convicted a
year earlier of raping and murdering Mary Phagan, a working-class
thirteen-year-old company employee. Frank's conviction was
subsequently upheld on five appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court
and the U.S. Supreme Court. Watson, who had refused offers
to assist in the defense and in the prosecution, remained publicly
silent on the case until Hoke Smith's newspaper printed the
editorial.

Watson assailed the
Journal for judicial tampering (the case was
under appeal), took on northern publishers who clamored for a new trial,
and began a two-year defense of Georgia's judicial system and
demonstration of the guilt of the "libertine Jew."

Editorials in his weekly
exploded into expansive evidentiary and trial reviews in Watson's
Magazine. Georgia governor John M. Slaton commuted
Frank's death sentence during his final days in office, outraging many
Georgians and prompting Watson to ask his readers "whether Lynch law
is not better than no law at all." Two months later Frank was
taken from the jail in Milledgeville by a group of
prominent Marietta citizens, driven
back to Marietta, and hanged. Watson responded to the news through the
Jeffersonian: "Now let outsiders attend to their own business,
AND LEAVE OURS ALONE." For many, the episode branded Watson as an
anti-Semite for the only time in his life.

Watson’s contentious
publications again found the national spotlight in 1914, after
Watson bristled at an
Atlanta Journal editorial urging a retrial for Leo
Frank. A wealthy,
northern, Jewish manager of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank had
been convicted a year earlier of raping and murdering Mary Phagan, a working class 13-year-old company
employee.
Frank’s conviction was subsequently upheld on five appeals to the Georgia
Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court. Watson, who had refused offers
to assist in the defense and in the prosecution, remained publicly silent on
the case until Hoke Smith’s newspaper printed the
editorial.

Watson assailed the
Journal for judicial tampering (the case was under
appeal), took on northern publishers who clamored for a new trial, and began a
two-year defense of Georgia’s judicial system and demonstration of the guilt
of the “libertine Jew.” Editorials in his weekly exploded into expansive
evidentiary and trial reviews in Watson’s
Magazine.

The purpose of
the coroner's
inquest is
to determine the manner of death. But the Coroner's Jury also brought forth
witnesses who suggested that Frank was an immoral
womanizer. A number of former employees testified that
Frank flirted and made indecent suggestions to female employees. A policeman testified that he had found
Frank in a desolate wooded
area with a young woman, and that Frank had admitted that he
had taken her there "for immoral purposes."

Background

Leo Frank, 29, was a stable, respected, and well-known
member of the community. Atlanta had a large Jewish population, which had become
highly assimilated under the leadership of Reform rabbi David Marx, and the
Franks were part of its upper economic stratum. Frank had been born in Texas and
raised in Brooklyn, New York. His father was a German-born physician who had
worked as a salesman in the U.S. Frank received an engineering degree at
Cornell, and married Lucille Selig in 1910. Lucille came from a wealthy family of
industrialists, which had founded the first synagogue in Atlanta two generations
earlier. An uncle of Frank's was a wealthy Confederate veteran who owned a large
percentage of National Pencil Factory, and it was through him that Leo ended up
as the factory's superintendent.

The job was no sinecure, however; Leo was highly
qualified, and had traveled to Massachusetts, New York, and Germany for further
apprenticeships in pencil manufacturing. Leo was president of a local chapter of
the B'nai
Brith, and the Franks moved in a cultured and privileged
milieu of tennis, bridge, and opera.

Jews Refuse to pay
Pinkerton

FEW CRIMINAL TRIALS IN AMERICAN HISTORY have been
so carefully studied as Leo Frank’s, and with all the principals of the
case now deceased and the written record generally available, it may
come as a surprise that there is something new to be said about the
case. But there is.

About three months after the
murder of Leo Frank, a case was tried in the
Fulton County Superior Court, of which Atlanta is the county seat.
Unfortunately the record of this trial is not available; the case was
appealed, however, and papers associated with that appeal provide an
accurate, if less than full, account of the trial’s proceedings, a trial
that reveals much about the one that doomed Frank.

The original case, Pinkertoris National Detective Agency
v. National Pencil Company, was heard before
Judge W. D. Ellis on November 17, 18, 19, and 22, 1915. At issue was an
unpaid bill in the amount of $1,286.09 for detective services rendered
by Pinkerton in 1913 for the investigation of Mary Phagan’s murder.
Pinkerton prevailed in the superior court; National Pencil appealed the
decision to the Georgia Court of Appeals, and Pinkerton, now the
appellee, won that decision as well.

The reason that the National Pencil Company
refused to pay Pinkerton’s bill can be found in the Amended Motion for
the New Trial, in which National Pencil claimed that Pinkerton
"did not seek honestly and in good faith to ascertain the truth, but, on
the contrary, endeavored dishonestly and in bad faith to suppress and
distort the truth and to bring about the conviction of Frank regardless
of guilt or innocence." Even though the court
found against the National Pencil Company, a fair-minded reading of the
Brief of Evidence—a 134-page document that summarizes the trial and
whose accuracy was ratified by lawyers for both sides—and of supporting
papers strongly suggests that Pinkerton wanted Frank to be found guilty
and worked toward that end.

The National Pencil Company’s case against
Pinkerton turned on the actions of the agency’s employee Harry Scott. As
assistant superintendent of Pinkerton’s Atlanta office, Scott was in
charge of the investigation of the Phagan murder from the day after her
body was discovered in late April until sometime in August, the month
Frank was convicted. Ironically it was Leo Frank himself, as manager of the
pencil factory, who arranged with Scott to hire Pinkerton. Not only did Scott take an active part in the
investigation, he also supervised all the numerous Pinkerton employees
looking into the crime.

From the beginning the pencil company’s lawyers
should have been wary of the way Scott handled the investigation, for in
his testimony Scott explained that "the established policy of the
plaintiff [i.e., Pinkerton] in dealing with [a] crime in its relations
with the local police is to cooperate with the State and County
authorities to the fullest extent and work with them in the interest of
public justice." When
Frank’s lawyers requested that Scott inform them first about any new
development, he was adamant that "any new facts that we unraveled in a
criminal case, we go right to the police about it." The Atlanta police,
in turn, assigned Detective John Black to work with Scott.

The record indicates that Scott may have been
more than merely ineffective as an investigator; there is ample evidence
that he actually conspired with the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey. After Scott
was subpoenaed by the prosecution in the Frank trial, Frank’s lawyers
asked Scott to discuss with Dorsey beforehand the nature and content of
what the prosecutor planned to ask him on the stand and then report back
to them. But Scott never spoke to Frank’s
lawyer about his forthcoming testimony, although it would prove a
devastating setback for the defense.

The reason was that Scott
differed with Frank about many things—what Frank had done on the day of
the murder, Frank’s knowledge of the principals in the crime, Frank’s
behavior after the discovery of the victim’s body—and the accumulation
of differences undermined the veracity of the defendant’s testimony.
Worse still, Scott posed not only as a disinterested third party whose
only concern was the truth but as an employee of the defense.

Early in the trial Scott contradicted what he had
said at the coroner’s inquest and written in a report he had made as a
Pinkerton employee to the National Pencil Company’s lawyers. At issue
was what Frank had told Scott soon after the murder, when he explained
how Mary Phagan had come by the pencil factory for her pay and that
before leaving she had asked whether the metal had arrived. This was
important to her because her job was to attach the metal sleeves to the
pencils, and no metal meant no work. Both in his report and at the
coroner’s inquest, Scott had said that Frank told him he had answered no
to Phagan’s question. However, at the trial Scott changed the answer to
"I don’t know," which let the prosecution contend that Frank had an excuse to go with
Mary Phagan to
another part of the factory where he could check on the metal’s
availability and that it was there that the murder had taken place.
Though caught off guard, Frank’s attorney, Luther Z. Rosser, was able to
question Scott on why he had changed his testimony from what he had
written in his report and thus blunt, but not entirely remove, doubts
about Frank’s actions on the day of the murder.

Scott may been more than merely ineffective as a
defense investigator; he may have actually conspired with the
prosecutor.

THIS IS ALSO TRUE OF ANOTHER CHANGE in Scott’s
testimony. Scott reported to the pencil-company lawyers that in an early
interview Frank had said he had left the pencil factory to go home for
lunch at 1:00 P.M. on the day of the murder. At Frank’s trial Scott changed this to
1:10 P.M., suggesting that the defendant had more time to move Mary
Phagan’s body to the basement. Again, Rosser pressed Scott for the reason why he changed
his testimony from 1:00 P.M. to 1:10 P.M. Scott claimed that "it must be
a typographical error" in the coroner’s report and that his notes would
show that Frank had said 1:10 P.M. From what is available of the trial
record, it appears that these notes were never entered into
evidence.

On another point there was no written evidence to
help Rosser contradict Scott’s damaging testimony. Scott claimed that
Frank had told him that
J. M. Gantt, a former employee whom Frank had fired only a couple of
weeks before the murder, "was very familiar and intimate with Mary
Phagan." This testimony suggested that Frank
knew the dead girl by name, although he had testified to the contrary at
the coroner’s inquest; indeed, he’d had to check his payroll books to
verify that it was Mary Phagan who had been paid around noon that
day.

With no written record on this point, all Rosser
could obtain from Scott was a lame admission that his failure to mention
it at the coroner’s inquest "was an oversight, if anything at all."
Under cross-examination Scott made a contradictory statement: "I did not
consider it material at all to mention in the report to the Pencil Co.
that statement of Leo Frank regarding Gantt’s intimacy with Mary
Phagan.…I knew that Frank had stated that he did not know Mary Phagan
and that he had to look into the books to tell her name, but it wasn’t a
material fact against Frank at that time that he said to me that Gantt
was familiar with her.…The first time I saw the materiality of it was
when the Solicitor [Dorsey] asked me the question [during Frank’s murder
trial]." This is quite an admission for a man who considered himself a
savvy and seasoned detective.

The record, however, suggests more than a mere
oversight. The following exchange during Frank’s murder trial between
Rosser and Scott implies collusion between Dorsey and Scott:

Q. [Rosser] Was it an oversight before the
coroner’s inquest too[?] Look at it [i.e., the transcript of the
coroner’s inquest], and see if you said anything about that before the
coroner’s inquest; your mind was fresher then about a verbal
conversation [between you and Frank] than it is now, wasn’t it[?]

A. [Scott] Well, it was fresher on my mind at the
time, certainly, but you will understand the coroner asked me certain
questions, and I gave him answers to the questions, but he did not cross
examine me like Mr. Dorsey has.…

There is more. Scott’s testimony at Frank’s trial
on how Frank behaved when
confronted with the night watchman Newt Lee,
who had found the body and was for a time a prime suspect, went far
beyond what Scott had said at the coroner’s inquest. Two days after the
discovery of the body, Scott and Detective John Black asked Frank to
talk with his employee Lee and persuade him to be more forthcoming.
Black and Scott left the two men alone in a room for about ten minutes,
then returned. Scott, at Frank’s trial, described what happened next:
"…we took seats alongside of both of them; Newt Lee was handcuffed to
the chair, and he says: ‘Mr Frank, it is awful hard for me to remain
handcuffed to this chair,[’] he says: ‘It is awful hard, awful hard,
Mr Frank.’ Frank hung his head the entire time the negro was
talking to him. Finally in about 30 seconds, he says: ‘Well, they have got me,
too.’"

Dorsey continued the questioning:

Q. [Dorsey] Now, describe if you can the
appearance and deportment and manner in which Frank talked and carried
himself at the conference set forth on that occasion.

A. [Scott] Well, he was extremely nervous at that
time.…very squirmy in his chair, crossing one leg and then with the
otherf,] he didn’t know how to put his hands,
he was moving them up and down on his face, and he hung his head a great
deal of the time while the negro was talking to him, that is, in my
presence.

Q. How did he talk[?]

A. Well, as I say, he hesitated some…

Q. How did he breath[e][?]

A. Well, he just took a long sigh that
[illustrating], more of a sigh than a breath.

Q. Did you notice his eyes[?]

A. Yes sir, I judged their insecure condition all
the way through, yes.

On cross-examination Rosser was not able to
refute much of Scott’s testimony. However, he did establish that at the
coroner’s inquest Scott had testified he heard nothing of the
conversation between Lee and Frank and then at the murder trial claimed
that Frank had declared: "Well, they have got me, too." Rosser forced
Scott to admit that this was a change in his testimony.

As for Frank’s nervousness, Scott had never
mentioned it at the inquest. When Rosser asked him about this, Scott
said: "At the time, Frank’s nervousness had no effect whatever on my
mind, because I did not consider Frank any suspect at all. Knowing the
man was under a strain, I did not suspect him at all at that time, and
therefore it was not a material fact at the time. I did not consider him
a suspect." This is impossible to believe, for Scott admitted that on
the previous day, when he first interviewed the defendant, he "knew then
that Frank was under strong suspicion."

Though Rosser blundered later in the trial, he
was powerful and effective when confronting the state’s witness John Black, the city detective who
worked with Scott on the case. Through
careful and insistent questioning, Rosser all but destroyed Black’s
testimony against Frank. At one point Black was so confused that he took
six minutes to answer a question, and near the end of his testimony he
declared, "I don’t like to admit that I’m crossed up, Colonel Rosser,
but you have got me in that kind of a fix and I don’t know where I’m
at." No surprise then that the headlines of the story of Black’s
testimony read: DEFENSE RIDDLES JOHN BLACK’S TESTIMONY/SLEUTH CONFUSED
UNDER MERCILESS CROSS-QUESTIONS OF LUTHER ROSSER. The Atlanta Georgian
said, "There is a feeling growing more fixed every day,…that the state,
if it hopes to win, must set up something more than it has yet made
public."

When Scott took the stand, he proved a more
difficult target for Rosser’s cross-examination than Black had been.
Dorsey was able to get Scott to give testimony that damaged the
defense’s case, and as we have seen, because much of this was a surprise
to the defense, Rosser was hard-pressed to get Scott to retract it.
Summarizing the day’s testimony, the Atlanta Constitution declared,
"Harry Scott…proved a strong witness for the state, although at first it
looked as if he would prove of more value to the defense." Though the
trial had been under way for several days, Scott was the first witness
who really aided the case against Frank.

Rosser was emphatic about how the changes in
Scott’s testimony had damaged the defense. In the trial over the unpaid
Pinkerton bill, he declared: "At no time prior to the trial of the Frank
case, was I informed verbally by Mr. Scott…that he intended to change
the testimony that he gave at the Coroner’s inquest and the information
that he gave me in his reports as to the matter of Frank’s saying ‘no’
or ‘I don’t know[.]’ He certainly did not tell me before he went on the
stand at the trial that he was going to testify that Frank told him that
Gantt was intimate with Mary Phagan. His testimony at the trial on that
point certainly surprised me. In my opinion, as an attorney, that was
certainly a matter of materiality and consequence in the
case."

On cross-examination Rosser expressed in even
stronger terms what he considered Scott’s duplicity: "Mr. Scott never
made any effort to get a conference with the attorneys for the defense
before the trial. I did not know that Mr. Scott had any opinion about
the case that had not been communicated to me…and everything he knew was
supposed to have been put in writing in the reports, that he had made to
me, and I supposed that those reports were true. If I had thought that
Mr. Scott was going to testify anything different from what was in the
writings that had been submitted to me, I would have wanted to talk to
him."

SCOTT CLAIMED THAT AFTER HE HAD DISCUSSED his
testimony with Dorsey, he attempted to speak to Frank’s attorneys but
was refused an interview. But surely, if Frank’s lawyers had had any
indication that Scott’s testimony at the murder trial would differ from
what he’d said at the coroner’s inquest or in his written reports, they
would have found time to talk to him.

More plausible is that even though he was
employed by the defense lawyers, Scott had been conspiring with Dorsey
for some time to establish Frank’s guilt. This is nowhere more evident
than in the role he played in the several statements made by the
prosecution’s most devastating witness, Jim Conley.

At first Conley had been overlooked as a possible
suspect because the investigators believed his claim that he could not
write. But at some point two Pinkerton detectives, L. P. Whitfield
and W. D. McWorth, became suspicious.
According to Leo
Gottheimer, a National Pencil Company salesman, the two detectives visited the factory on May 16, 1913,
a little more than two weeks after the murder, and asked "those present
if they knew whether Jim Conley could write." At McWorth’s request
Gottheimer went over to the "Tower," the county jail where Frank was
being held, to ask Frank. The answer was definitive: "Yes, I know he can
write, I have had notes from him asking me to lend him
money…"

Frank directed Herbert Schiff, acting
superintendent of
the pencil factory, to a drawer in the company safe that contained
documents associated with Conley’s purchase of watches from local
jewelry stores and pawnshops. These led the Pinkerton detectives to
three shops where they were able to secure loan contracts signed by
Conley, and when the signatures were compared with the murder notes,
Whit field noted in his report for that day, "the hand writing appeared
to be identical."

Four times in all, and all under oath, Schiff insisted
Harry Scott had stated explicitly that Pinkerton wanted Frank to
be found guilty.

Though Scott could not prevent the knowledge that
Conley was able to write from becoming known, he did try to hide Frank’s
role in its discovery, for if Frank were guilty of the murder and Conley
were his accomplice, then Frank would be expected to try to shield
Conley from questioning.

Luther Rosser had no doubts about the
significance of Scott’s failure to inform him that Frank was
instrumental in the discovery. At the unpaid-debt trial he stated, "In
my opinion, as an attorney, it was material that I should have known
before hand the information that the Pinkerton’s [sic] had that Leo
Frank had said that Conley could write and that information should have
been given me by the Pinkertons." Under questioning by the attorney
Harry A. Alexander, acting for the pencil company, Rosser explained how
valuable this knowledge could have been for the defense:

Q. [Alexander] When Mr. Scott took his stand
at the trial and testified that he ha[d] gotton [sic] the information
about Conley writing from sources entirely disconnected from the pencil
factory, would it or would it not have been material to you?…You could
have disproved it by their own reports, couldn’t you[,] if Mr. Scott,
had—

A. [Rosser] If they had reported to me, I could
have shown it in their reports, of course.

Q. Yes, if it was in that report that they
had got it from Leo Frank?

A. If they had given me that information I could
have just handed it up to him [Scott], and said: "What did you report
that to me for?"

Evidence offered by the National Pencil Company
lawyers shows that Scott edited Pinkerton documents to remove any
mention of Frank. This evidence consisted of two copies of Whitfield’s
report for May 16, 1913—a draft in Whitfield’s hand and the final typed
version. In the handwritten version the following words were crossed
out: "but that he would sent [sic] to the tower and learn from Leo Frank
if Conley could write." These words did not appear in the typed version
submitted to Frank’s lawyers, and it was Harry Scott who had edited
Whitfield’s draft report.

Once Conley became a prime suspect, he eventually
made four different statements, a process that involved Harry Scott more
than any person except Conley himself. At Frank’s trial Scott claimed
that he coaxed Conley to write by dictating "That long, tall, black
negro did by himself," words similar to those on the murder notes. Scott
explained: "We [Scott and John Black] talked very strongly to him, and
tried to make him give a confession[;] we used a little profanity, and
cussed him, and he made that statement that he knew that I knew that he
could write; we talked for about 2 or 3 hours that day. He made another
statement on May 24th, which was put in writing."

On the basis of the second statement, Scott and
Black "questioned him [Conley] very closely for about 3 hours" and again
the next day, but Conley stuck to his story. In this statement Conley claimed that Frank had paid him
to write the murder notes on Friday, April 25, the day before the
killing. Scott continued: "We saw him [Conley] again on May 27th in
Chief [Newport] Lanford’s office. Talked to him about 5 or 6 hours. We
tried to impress him with the fact that Frank would not have written
those notes on Friday, that was not a reasonable story, that showed
premeditation and that wouldn’t do."

On May 28, 1913, Scott, joined this time by Chief
Lanford, "grilled" Conley for "5 or 6 hours, endeavoring to make clear
several points which were far fetched in his statement; we pointed out
to him [Conley] that his statement would not do, and would not fit. He
then made us another long statement on May 28th."

This was Conley’s third statement. On the very
next day, May 29, Scott and another person, most likely either John
Black or Chief Lanford, spent "almost all day" talking with Conley in an
attempt to improve on it. As Scott explained, "we pointed out things in
his story that were improbable, and told him he must do better than
that, anything in his story that looked to be out of place, we told him
wouldn’t do; after he had made his last statement, we did not wish to
make any further suggestions to him at that time; he then made his last
statement on May 29th."

MORE THAN TWO YEARS LATER, when he was confronted
with these statements by the National Pencil Company attorneys, Scott
explained that he was only trying "to make Conley confess that he killed
the girl. That was my idea, and I put most unusual efforts in that line.
The affidavits that I took from Conley were taken to make him confess
that he committed the crime himself."

This strains credulity. Scott’s own words give
ample evidence that rather than induce Conley to confess that he alone
murdered Mary Phagan,
Scott was working
with Conley to produce a statement that would convict Frank of the
killing and portray Conley as a paid accomplice after the fact. Had
Scott and the others not pushed Conley on his several statements, it is
very likely that Conley rather than Frank would have been found
guilty.

The sequence of events lends further support to
the hypothesis that Scott
and the prosecution were working singlemindedly to establish Frank’s
guilt. Conley made his second statement on
May 24, 1913, the same day that Frank was indicted for the murder. If
Scott was really trying to get Conley to confess, the indictment could
have been delayed pending the results of his interrogation. Rather, they
had no doubt already made up their minds; Scott could not have been
ignorant of the proceedings of the grand jury as he testified before it
on the very day Frank was indicted.

THE TRIAL OVER THE UNPAID BILL OFFERS further
evidence about Scott’s motives. According to H. B. Pierce,
superintendent of Pinkerton’s Atlanta office, Scott failed to broaden
the investigation to include Conley but "was entirely interested in
developing the Frank proposition." Pierce testified that he and Scott
"clashed very often" and "had several discussions on some matters
[associated with the investigation] bordering at time[s] on quarrels."
Pierce went on to say that Scott "was influenced by public opinion, he
was of the opinion that if so many people saw it that way, that is the
way the case was being developed, [and] that, in his opinion, must be
right, against all other facts or anything else, regardless of [the]
facts." Pierce, on the other hand, thought that public opinion could be
wrong and that if there were differences between the Pinkerton agency
and the police, Pinkerton should "go on making [the] investigation for
our client, regardless of the theories of the police department or
anybody else, or we would quit."

The reason that Scott could go against the wishes
of Pierce, his supervisor, was that the Pinkerton hierarchy was on his
side. Pierce testified that "Mr. Scott had the weight of opinion both
with his superiors and with himself. By superiors, I mean his general
superintendent and his other superior officers. Mr. Scott, was then in
correspondence with the officers higher than myself and his course in
working on the Frank angle met [with] their approval."

Pierce queried his immediate superior A. S.
Cowerdin. "I went over the case with him in detail and explained my
views. He very politely replied that from the revealed facts and the
reports that had been submitted, and that were being rendered, it was
his opinion that the investigation was being carried on in a proper way.
He disagreed with me and agreed with Mr. Scott."

Pierce was not the only one in the local Atlanta
Pinkerton office who differed with Scott over the direction of the
investigation. Leo Gottheimer, the National Pencil Company salesman who
had been sent to ask Frank whether Conley could write, testified about
conversations he had had with Whitfield and McWorth. According to
Gottheimer, the two investigators "said as to the relations between
themselves and their superiors…there seemed to be friction with their
superiors, everything they done…they told me they would not accept their
theories, and they seemed to be tickled to death to get this new
evidence…[that Conley could write. Gottheimer quotes them as saying] ‘We
have got the goods now, they can’t deny this, we can prove this on them
in such a way that they can’t deny it.’"

Herbert Schiff, Frank’s
successor as factory superintendent, also
testified about tensions in the Pinkerton’s Atlanta office. During
several of the many visits that Whitfield and McWorth made to the
factory, "they told me of the dissention [sic] in the office, and of the
things that they put up that never seemed to agree with Mr. Scott, and
Whitfield told me on one occasion that Mr. Scott called him into the
private office and told him that if Leo Frank wasn’t convicted it would
be the last of the Pinkerton agency in Atlanta." Twice under
crossexamination and twice more under re-direct examina- don—four times
in all, and all under oath—Schiff insisted that Scott had stated
explicitly that Pinkerton wanted Frank to be found guilty.

In itself this document, the Brief of Evidence,
which has for so long lain dormant, does not prove guilt or innocence.
It does, however, add substantially to the evidence that Leo Frank did
not receive a fair trial. In fact, the conclusion that he was railroaded
is now inescapable.

Whatever his reasons, Harry Scott was a key
figure in convicting Frank of murder. Less certain, but still highly
suggestive, was the malign role played by the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey.
Here ambition was certainly a motive, and a successful one, for Dorsey
was twice elected governor of Georgia. This document strongly suggests
that Dorsey urged witnesses to embellish their testimony, even lie under
oath, to build a case against Frank.

The picture that emerges from this civil trial
over an unpaid bill is of a conspiracy between the prosecutor Hugh
Dorsey and Harry Scott of Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency to find
Leo Frank guilty of murder. Although we will
almost certainly never know just what was said between Dorsey and Scott,
their collaboration seems to have assured that Leo Frank would not
receive a fair trial for a crime he almost certainly did not
commit.

Stephen J. Goldfarb is on the staff of the
Atlanta-Fulton Public Library in Atlanta, Georgia.

Maude McKnight - cook

After
Conley’s depositions, Mrs. Maude McKnight, the cook in the
Frank household, was grilled for four hours and kept in jail for another
twenty-four.

She
signed a statement that she had overheard Mrs. Frank tell her
mother that her husband had “confessed to a crime.”  She
repudiated her affidavit after her release.  The questioning of her
cook brought an angry protest from Mrs. Frank, who
deplored the treatment of Mrs. McKnight.
She further stated that her husband was innocent.  Hugh Dorsey
responded to reporters’ questions by pointing out that a wife is
expected to defend her husband.

Jew's Bribing
people

Paid on Friday because of holiday - Frank told Mary she had to come
Saturday

Mary Frightened of
Franks

Phagan's friend, fifteen-year-old newsboy
George Epps, came forward to say that
Frank had flirted
with Phagan, and frightened her:

She began talking about Mr. Frank. When
she would leave the factory on some afternoons, she said,
Frank would rush
out in front of her and try to flirt with her as she passed. She
told me that he had often winked at her and tried to pay her
attention. He would look hard and straight at her, she said, and
then would smile. It happened often,
she said. She told me she wanted me to come down to the factory
when she got off as often as I could to escort her home and
kinder protect her.

Next on the stand was
George
Epps, a thirteen-year-old boy who
also worked at the National Pencil Factory, where Frank was
supervisor. Epps had ridden the streetcar with Phagan the morning
of April 26th, and the two had agreed to meet for an ice cream and
to watch the Confederate Memorial Day Parade at 1:00 p.m. When
Mary didn't show, Epps went to a baseball game.

Alonso Mann....
Frank’s former office boy

On the fourteenth day of
the trial, a thirteen year-old office boy named Alonzo Mann
testified that he never saw strange women enter Leo Frank's office, his
testimony was discounted.

Leo Frank's office boy,
Alonzo
Mann. I was
nervous and afraid that day. I was very nervous. The courtroom was
filled with people. Every seat was taken. I was interested mostly in
getting out of there. It was not an easy place for a young boy to be,
there in court like that. The
prosecution insinuated that Frank was homosexual, and that an office boy who testified for the defense had
been having sex with Frank

Among the many witnesses had been a
young boy, Alonzo Mann, who was one of the office boys who worked for Frank. He was nervous and timid the few
minutes he was on the stand

ADL

In 1982, 70 years
after Mary Phagan's murder, pro-Frank operatives backed by the ADL met
with Alonzo
Mann,
an office boy at the National Pencil Factory who was in the building on
the day the crime was committed. The ADL claims the critically ill,
83-year-old man gave death bed testimony implicating another
suspect

Conley testified that Frank had called him
to his office a little after noon that day and told him that Mary Phagan’s body was in the metal room on
the second floor. He
testified that Frank told him to
get the body and take it on the elevator down to the basement. He swore that he
tried to carry the body to the elevator but dropped Mary Phagan because she was
too heavy for him to carry. At that point, he testified, he asked Frank to help
him. According to Conley’s testimony, Frank picked her up by her legs, while
Conley lifted the upper part of her body. Conley said that Frank had pulled the
rope to start the elevator down and that they went with the body directly to the
basement, past the first floor without stopping there.

Conley claimed
that Frank dragged the body from
the elevator to a point in the rear of the building. Conley contended during the trial that after
Frank dragged the body away from the elevator, Conley ascended in the elevator
and Frank came back upstairs by way of the trapdoor to the first floor, and then
came on up the stairway from the first to the second floor.

The lynching

The facts. 1914, Atlanta. A Jewish
factory owner called Leo Frank was convicted of the rape and murder of a
young girl in his employ: ‘And ravaged her. And beat her. And took her life.’
After a period in gaol, Frank was forcibly taken by a mob, castrated and lynched. A postcard of the limp body hanging from a
tree, his mutilation discreetly disguised by a blanket, was for a time a big
seller in the enlightened South.

The miscarriage of justice was so blatant that even arch anti-Semite Henry
Ford signed an appeal for clemency.

Lemmie Quinn

Lemmie Quinn testifies that he reached Frank’s office about
12.20 and saw Mr. Frank. At 12.30, Mrs. J.A. White called to
see her husband at the Factory where he was working on the fourth floor,
and left again before one o’clock.

Frank also produced alibis
for the entire time during which the crime could have been committed,
but suspicion was aroused by the fact that he waited a week to bring
forward one crucial witness, Lemmie Quinn, saying that he had
forgotten.

Lemmie Quinn, foreman of Mary Phagan's work area at the National
Pencil Factory, testified he saw Leo Frank the Saturday of the murder
and that all was perfectly normal. Furthermore he knew Frank well and
was certain that he was not guilty of the murder. But detectives accused
him of accepting a bribe from Frank to make those statements, an
accusation Quinn firmly denied.