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The Atlanta Georgian,
Thursday, 12th March 1914,
7th Edition (Final),
PAGE 1, COLUMN 1.
W. S. Jenkins, a bricklayer living on West Fourteenth Street, and his wife, along with their daughter, Mrs. Lula Belle Brown, will likely be important witnesses for Leo Frank in his motion for a new trial. Their testimony, which was discovered Thursday, will be used in an effort to show attempts at a "frame-up" by Detective John Black.
Mrs. Brown has been married since the Frank trial and is now in a reformatory at Milledgeville. Last spring, she was 16 years old, unmarried, and living with her parents.
Jenkins and his wife told the following story freely, and assert they will make an affidavit and testify in court if called.
About one month after Frank was arrested, the Jenkinses state, John Black came to their home and asked to see Lula Belle. "You are the girl who went with Mary Phagan to the factory the day she was killed, aren't you?" the detective is said to have asked. When the girl told him no, he pressed the assertion, and added: "You went there with Mary Phagan, and Frank sent you away, but kept Mary Phagan there, saying she had some work to do." The girl denied this assertion also, and after some more questions by the detective, he went away.
"The following Monday he came back again," said Mrs. Jenkins. "He asked to see Lula Belle and put the same questions to her. She denied knowing anything about the case, and the detective became threatening. There was another detective with him and they both talked that way, said they 'had something on' the girl and could have her locked up if they wanted to." The detectives went away, Mrs. Jenkins said, only to return that night; at last Black came back, and the same detective, or maybe another, was with him. This time the detectives were open in their threats to lock the girl up if she did not admit her knowledge, Mrs. Jenkins said.
"And I heard Black tell Lula Belle that if she would admit what he had said, she could 'have part of his salary.' They were promising her money as well as threatening her, it seemed." In the course of the conversation, Black is quoted as stating that a Mrs. Moody, who lived nearby, had told the police that Lula Belle had told her she went to the factory with Mary Phagan. "I wanted to see the matter to the bottom," said Jenkins, "so we all went around to Mrs. Moody's. She said plainly that Lula Belle never had told her anything like that. On the way home, one of the detectives talked in an undertone to Lula Belle, and after they had gone away, she told me that Black had offered her $10 to tell what he had said about going to the factory with Mary Phagan. But she did not work at the factory, and she did not know Mary Phagan."
With William J. Burns expected either late Thursday or sometime Friday to open his probe of the Mary Phagan murder and the startling developments that followed, interest in the Frank case centers now about the great detective. Burns is known to be keeping his own counsel about the investigation he already has made, and has refused to discuss valuable clues he is said to have picked up in New York.
There was all sorts of speculation about the attitude he would assume toward Jim Conley, and the Negro is said to have declared that he was willing to face the detective if some "unbiased" white man were present. The Negro, however, is being guided entirely by his lawyer, W. M. Smith, who does not look with particular favor on any interview between Conley and Burns.
Messages which have been received in Atlanta indicate that Burns' arrival in Atlanta will be followed by important developments. It is understood that the detective has ferreted out valuable evidence in the East.
Much of Mr. Burns' time in the East has been taken up with a study of the testimony given at the trial, and clues suggested to him by discrepancies in the stories of some of the witnesses have been the subjects of exhaustive investigation.
Whether Burns' work will be hampered by the refusal of Attorney Bill Smith to permit the detective to question Jim Conley is problematical. Men who are familiar with the methods employed by the detective declare that the attitude of the lawyer will not worry him and that he has overcome much bigger obstacles than a lawyer's objections. The talk that one of the detective's first steps will be to grill Conley and hear the Negro's story from his own lips is mere speculation.
Smith says that he will not permit Burns to use anything that has the appearance of the "third degree" on the Negro. He declared that he has not yet decided whether Burns will be permitted to see Conley at all, and that if he talks to the Negro it will have to be in the presence of the attorney and possibly Detectives Starnes and Campbell, who were instrumental in working up the case against Frank. "If I find that Burns is working solely in the interests of Frank," said Smith, "he will not have a chance to see my client." Smith protested that other than providing safety for his client, he had no interest at stake.
Attorney Smith and Solicitor Hugh Dorsey held a secret conference in the latter's office Wednesday afternoon, and it is understood that they went over some new data to combat the motion for a new trial which Frank's attorneys are expected to file with Judge Ben Hill about April 10.
The claims committee of the City Council has refused to accept the finding of hair and blood on a lathe in the metal room of the pencil factory as positive proof that Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan. The petition of Robert Barrett's claim for the $1,000 reward offered by the city for information leading to the arrest of the murderer was denied Thursday afternoon.
L. H. Beck, foreman of the Grand Jury that indicted Frank, was greatly surprised Thursday at the published report that the members of this Grand Jury proposed getting together to consider the alleged circumstance that Solicitor Dorsey did not put them in possession of all the facts connecting Conley with the crime at the time the Solicitor asked for the indictment of Frank. "If there is any such movement on foot, I have heard nothing of it," he said. "I have not even heard of such a thing being discussed. I don't know what we could do if we should meet. The old Grand Jury is dissolved and has no official standing."
S. C. Glass, whose name was mentioned in the report of the proposed meeting, was indignant that he had been connected with the rumor. He declared that he, too, was unaware of a movement to call the former Grand Jurors together and that, if there were such a movement, he had had no part in it. The rumor was to the effect that the Grand Jurors were dissatisfied with the regularity of the Frank indictment and felt that they had been tricked into indicting Frank because of their ignorance of Conley's admission of writing the notes.