The Murder of Mary Phagan
Mary Phagan was on her way to Atlanta’s Confederate Memorial Day parade on April 26, 1913 when she stopped in at the National Pencil Company to collect her paycheck–$1.20 for her 10-cents-an-hour work. The next day, the girl’s body was discovered in the factory’s basement.
As Steve Oney writes in his book, And The Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, Frank, 29 at the time of his arrest, was working at the factory that Saturday morning when he handed Phagan her pay, and, police later reported, was the last to admit seeing the girl alive. At approximately 3:30 a.m. the next morning, Newt Lee, the factory’s Black night watchman, reported finding the body to police.
Two “murder notes” were found on the body—badly battered, bloody and bruised—that read, “he said he wood love me and land down play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef” and “Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me down that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it wase long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me.”
The body was soon identified as Phagan and Lee became the investigators’ first suspect and arrest, reports Oney. But police quickly settled on Frank, who was arrested for the girl’s murder days later on April 29, 1913, and held at the Fulton County Jail.
Born in Texas and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Frank had attended the Pratt Institute and graduated with an engineering degree from Cornell University in 1906. After relocating to Atlanta to serve as superintendent of the pencil factory, he married Georgia native Lucille Selig, a member of a prominent Jewish family whose grandfather co-founded Atlanta’s Temple synagogue. Frank became president of Atlanta’s Gate City Lodge No. 144 chapter of B’nai Brith, and the couple was active in the local Jewish community.
Phagan's murder and Frank's subsequent arrest took off like a firestorm in Atlanta’s newspapers, including the Atlanta Georgian, a yellow journalism-heavy William Randolph Hearst publication.
Witness for the Prosecution
Even as Frank sat in jail, police had their eyes on yet another suspect. Jim Conley, a Black custodian at the factory, was detained two days after Frank’s arrest “when he was seen in the pencil-factory basement washing out a shirt soaked with what appeared to be blood,” Oney writes in a 2015 Esquire article. When police learned Conley could write, Oney adds, he was suspected of penning the notes found at the scene of the crime.
Questioned for two weeks, Conley eventually said Frank paid him to write the notes and that Frank confessed to him that he had committed the murder.
“The admission of authorship in hand, the investigators pushed their advantage,” Oney writes. “Under careful coaching, Conley would produce three affidavits that, while contradictory in parts, agreed on the main point: Frank murdered Mary Phagan and then conspired with Conley to dispose of the body and write the notes in the hope that they could pin the crime on either Lee or the black, pencil company boiler operator, William Nolle, who was also tall and dark.”
Prosecutors and defense attorneys were both keen on the jury hearing Conley’s version of events, “for different but equally racist reasons,” according to Oney. Lead prosecutor Hugh Dorsey hedged his bets the jury would find Conley too stupid to lie, while Frank’s lawyers counted on Conley’s contradictory affidavits falling apart on the witness stand.
Trial and Sentencing
With crowds gathered outside the courthouse chanting “hang the Jew,” the trial, based on mostly circumstantial evidence, made national headlines.
“It was a gigantic lightning bolt that hit this state,” Oney told the Atlanta Journal-Consitution. “It wasn’t just a whodunit, but a clearinghouse for cultural grievances that touched on issues of race, class, gender, religion.”
Based on mostly circumstantial evidence and relying on Conley’s testimony, the four-week trial ended with a guilty verdict on August 25 after just a few hours of deliberation. Outside the courthouse, the crowd cheered the conviction announcement. According to the New-York Tribune, Dorsey “was lifted to the shoulders of several men and carried more than a hundred feet through the shouting throng.”
The following day, Judge Leonard Roan sentenced Frank to death by hanging. Two years of denied appeals followed, including a request for a new trial on the basis that Frank’s constitutional rights were violated when Roan advised Frank’s lawyers it would be unsafe for him to appear in the courtroom upon the reading of the verdict. A retrial motion was also rejected after Conley’s former attorney said he believed Conley was the actual murderer.
Rising to the level of the U.S. Supreme Court, Frank’s conviction was allowed to stand when the court voted 7-2 on April 19, 1915, to deny his appeal. Justices Oliver Wendall Holmes and Charles Evan Hughes dissented, stating the hostility outside the courthouse influenced the conviction.
“The noise outside was such that it was difficult for the judge to hear the answers of the jurors, although he was only 10 feet from them,” Holmes wrote in the dissent. “With these specifications of fact, the petitioner alleges that the trial was dominated by a hostile mob and was nothing but an empty form.”
Governor Commutes Frank's Sentence to Life in Prison
Not satisfied with the sentencing, Georgia Governor John Slaton conducted his own extensive investigation into the case, and, on June 21, 1915, the day before Frank’s execution was to take place and as his term in office was ending, commuted his sentence to life in prison. Criticized for having a conflict of interest in the case—his law partner served as Frank’s lead attorney—and with antisemitism rising at a fever pitch, the decision led to outrage in the community.
“Armed mobs roamed streets forcing Jewish businessmen to board up windows and doors,” The New York Times reported. “A mob of several thousand people armed with guns, hatchets and dynamite surrounded the Governor's mansion until they were dispersed by state militiamen.”
Frank was attacked four weeks later, on July 18, 1915, by an inmate who slit his throat with a butcher knife. “If another prisoner, a surgeon convicted of murder, hadn’t stitched Frank’s wound, he would have died,” according to the Times.
The Lynching
But Frank wouldn’t survive a second attack less than a month later. A mob of 25 men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, arrived in the middle of the night at the Milledgeville prison farm where Frank was held, overpowering the guards—no shots were fired—and kidnapping Frank from his cell. A caravan of cars drove him some 100 miles away to an oak grove near Marietta, Phagan’s hometown, where he was handcuffed and hanged. Frank died August 17, 1915.
“As word spread that Leo Frank’s body was twisting from a limb on the outskirts of Marietta, a crowd of some 3,000 formed,” Oney writes. “Its members pecked at Frank’s corpse, tearing away his nightshirt up to the elbows. … All the while, photographers snapped pictures.”
The mob included some of Marietta’s most prominent citizens: a preacher, former governor, former mayor, doctor, judge, son of a U.S. senator and lawyer among them.
“After the lynching, one of the first things they did was preside over the perfunctory grand jury hearing that swiftly absolved the town’s population of any guilt in Frank’s death,” according to Oney. “The 25 men who participated in the incident swore one another to secrecy, and their names were never reported.”
Their identities weren’t made public for nearly 80 years.
