Reading Time: 19 minutes, [3500 words]
Leo Frank's Racially Tinged Railroading of the African-American Nightwatchman Newt Lee
This video clip herein is from the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, ADL-backed 2009 agitprop docudrama People vs. Leo Frank, produced by Jewish-American film director Ben Loeterman, with author-journalist Steve Oney, serving as its senior consultant. Oney wrote the 2003 book And the Dead Shall Rise, widely considered the most thorough book-length pro-Frank treatment of the Mary Phagan case.
In a rare moment of partial candor from a production that otherwise functions as an advocacy vehicle for Leo Frank, Oney briefly sketches the chronology of the Newt Lee time-slip controversy. Even so, the account stays at the surface, with little depth, analysis or elucidation of the facts. The vignette does not explain the mechanics of the patrol clock, name who was present at the Sunday morning April 27, 1913 examination, describe what Leo Max Frank said and did with the slip in front of witnesses, identify what the police first concluded, or account for what changed by Monday afternoon, April 28, 1913.
Beneath the Superficial Presentation
What follows reconstructs those details from the trial's Brief of Evidence, the coroner's inquest record, contemporaneous Atlanta newspaper coverage, and Defendant's Exhibit 1 itself the time clip that Leo Frank forged to incriminate Newt Lee:
The Document
The photograph embedded in this post shows a facsimile of Defendant’s Exhibit 1 from the Leo Max Frank murder trial, held in Fulton County Superior Court in Atlanta, Georgia. The trial began on July 28, 1913, and the jury returned its guilty verdict on August 25, 1913.
The pre-printed notice at the top of the form appears to read: “For slips not obtained at our office, we decline responsibility. Dey Time Register Co., Endicott, N.Y.”
That manufacturer’s imprint warrants a brief side light: The Dey time recorder was invented by Alexander Dey, a Scottish inventor. PBS’s Antiques Roadshow identifies Alexander Dey as a Scotsman and explains that his brother John Dey was living in New York when the two men began the Dey Time Register business.
The company history should be stated carefully. The Dey Patents Company was formed in Syracuse, New York, in 1893 and became the Dey Time Register Company around 1900. In 1907, the United States-based Dey Time Register business was acquired by the International Time Recording Company. IBM’s official history states that International Time Recording relocated from Binghamton, New York, to Endicott, New York, in 1907. In 1911, International Time Recording merged with two other firms to form the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, later renamed International Business Machines, or IBM.
This explains why a 1913 Dey time-slip form could carry an Endicott, New York, address. By the time Newt Lee was punching his rounds at the National Pencil Company factory in April 1913, the Dey Time Register line had already been absorbed into the International Time Recording operation connected to Endicott.
The exhibit header also states that the slip was “dated April 28, taken out of clock by Frank.” At the bottom of the form, a date stamp reads “APR 28 1913.” In the upper right corner, a handwritten annotation records that Solicitor General Hugh Manson Dorsey stated in open court that he had made one erasure on the slip because he believed the notation had been placed there by detectives. The erased wording appears to have concerned the phrase “taken out at, 8:26 a.m.” A circled oval notation in the middle of the slip reads “Erasure here.”
The National Pencil Company
The National Pencil Company was housed in the Venable Building from 1908 to 1916, a four-story structure with a basement, eighty feet wide and two hundred feet long. The building had formerly operated as the Venable Hotel and, for a time, the Granite Hotel. The ground floor had once been used for wagon storage and horse stables in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
How the Patrol Clock Worked at the National Pencil Company
The pencil factory at 37 to 39 South Forsyth Street in Atlanta, Georgia, used Dey Time Register clocks for employee timekeeping and patrol verification. The clock central to the Newt Lee dispute was Clock No. 2, the right-hand clock on the second floor near Leo Max Frank’s window front office.
The National Pencil Company had two time clocks positioned side by side: Clock No. 1 and Clock No. 2. Because the factory employed more than one hundred workers (about 170 employees), one clock recorded employee numbers up to 100, while the other recorded numbers up to 200. Clock No. 2 became important because it recorded Newt Lee’s patrol punches during his night-watch shift from Saturday evening, April 26, 1913 to Sunday morning, April 27, 1913.
During his night-watch shift, Lee was expected to move through the building at regular intervals and return to the clock area to punch the record. The clock mechanism stamped the hour and minute onto the paper slip inside. Lee testified that he went over the building every half hour, punched on the hour and on the half, and made all his punches. Leo Frank affirmed this fact about Newt Lee at his office in the presence of Atlanta police, on Sunday morning, April 27, 1913.
A complete, unaltered time slip should have shown a regular sequence of entries across the night shift. Because Lee was expected to make his rounds at approximately 30-minute intervals, the slip should have shown punches about on the hour, and half-passed every hour, beginning near the start of his shift at 6:00 o'clock on Saturday evening, April 26, 1913, and continuing until the end when his shift would end at 6:30 a.m on Sunday morning, April 27, 1913. However, a substantial gap in that pattern could be read as evidence that a patrol round had been skipped, delayed, or not recorded. If gaps were in existence, the follow up question would be: why did you not stamp, and where were you during that full span of unaccounted for time?
Newt Lee testified in the Brief of Evidence: “I made my rounds regularly every half hour Saturday night [April 26, 1913]. I punched on the hour and punched on the half and I made all my punches.”
Saturday Evening, April 26, 1913: Frank Changes the Slip
Before the murder, before the discovery of the body, and before any police involvement, Leo Max Frank was already handling the time clock mechanism. This detail from Lee's Brief of Evidence testimony is worth examining carefully.
When Lee returned to the factory at approximately 6:00 p.m. that Saturday evening, Frank told him: “Don’t punch yet; there were a few who worked today, and I want to change the slip.” Frank then changed the slip in the clock. Lee noted that “it took him twice as long this time than it did the other times I saw him fix it. He fumbled putting it in.”
If Jim Conley’s testimony was substantially true, then Frank had already begun forming a plan to cast suspicion on Newt Lee before Lee’s night shift was fully underway. Conley’s testimony supplies the basis for that inference: he claimed Frank directed him to write the murder notes in language that pointed toward the night watchman. The notes did not just contain the “night witch” phrasing that investigators understood as a crude reference to the night watchman; they also described a “long, tall,” “black,” and “slim” man, physical details that could be read as pointing toward Lee. That description fit Lee, who was tall, slim, and dark-complexioned, better than it fit either Leo Frank or Jim Conley. Both Frank and Conley were shorter than Lee, and Conley was described in period accounts as light-complexioned, or in one older racial phrasing, “ginger-colored.” In that context, Frank’s nervousness while changing the time slip would make sense: the man he allegedly intended to scapegoat was standing directly in front of him.
This is significant for two reasons.
First, it establishes that Frank was completely familiar with the clock mechanism: he knew how to unlock the housing, remove the slip, insert a new one, and close the clock.
Second, Lee's observation that Frank fumbled and took twice as long as usual may reflect that something was already occupying Frank's attention on that Saturday evening. By April 26, 1913, Leo Frank had been superintendent of the factory for nearly 5 years, he had started work in August of 1908.
Whatever the reason for the fumbling, Frank's 56 months of hands-on familiarity with the clock's interior on Saturday evening is directly relevant to what happened to the slip between Sunday morning, April 27, 1913, and Monday afternoon, April 28, 1913.
Early Sunday Morning, April 27, 1913: The Body
During his security patrol of the National Pencil Company factory, Newt Lee descended to the basement to use the segregated restroom. There, near a service ramp at the rear of the dirt-floored cellar, he discovered Mary Phagan's body; her head was battered and a cord was knotted around her neck. Horrified, Lee scrambled from the scene, his feet shuffling across the dirt from the rear of the basement to the ladder at the front. He clambered up the rungs through the scuttle hole trap door into the ground floor lobby, clattered up the wooden staircase, and hurried into Leo Frank's office. At approximately 3:24 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, he used the call box to alert the Atlanta Police Department.
The police were on the scene shortly thereafter.
Police received Newt Lee’s call from the National Pencil Company at about 3:25 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, and arrived at the factory within roughly five to ten minutes, around 3:30 to 3:35 a.m. The first responding officers went to the building in W. W. ‘Boots’ Rogers’ automobile, found the door locked, knocked, and waited until Lee came down and admitted them.
Later, Detective John R. Black telephoned Leo Max Frank at his residence at 68 East Georgia Avenue and told him he wanted Frank to come to the factory right away. Frank said he had not had breakfast. Black asked Boots Rogers to go and pick Frank up in his automobile. Rogers drove to the Selig family residence, collected Frank, and transported him back to 37-39 South Forsyth Street.
Detective Black later described Frank as appearing nervous, while everyone else did not at that time. Frank's manner of speaking to Mr. Darley was trembling. Black said he was guarded with Frank in his conversation over the telephone and had not told him what had happened, and Frank had not asked.
The Oakland Plant
The ‘Oakland plant’ was apparently the National Pencil Company’s Oakland City slat mill, a wood-processing operation that supplied prepared wooden slats for pencil manufacture. A pencil slat was a thin rectangular piece of wood, usually cedar or another suitable pencil wood, into which grooves could be cut for the graphite core. In the manufacturing process, two grooved slats were glued around the graphite rods, forming the wooden body of the pencil.
Frank Begins Pointing Toward Lee
While the group was still in the basement, before they had even reached the time clock, Frank made a suggestive remark to Detective John R. Black. He said that N. V. Darley had worked Newt Lee for some time at the Oakland plant, and that if Lee knew anything about the murder, Darley would have a better chance than anyone of getting it out of him.
The remark mattered because it shifted attention toward Lee at the very start of the factory inspection with Frank in tow. Lee had not been present when Mary Phagan came to collect her pay earlier that fateful day at noon. He did not begin his night-watch shift until about 6:00 p.m., roughly six hours after the period when the murder was believed to have occurred inside the building. Yet before the clock was opened, and before the time slip became an issue, Frank was already inviting police to look at Lee as someone who might know more than he had said.
Sunday Morning, April 27, 1913: The Clock Is Opened and the Slip Examined
After police had taken Leo Frank to view Mary Phagan’s body at the undertaker’s establishment, they brought him back to the National Pencil Company factory for an inspection of the crime scene. The body was no longer lying in the basement when this later factory inspection took place. The basement was now a crime scene, not the location of the body.
After the group returned upstairs from the basement inspection, attention shifted to the second-floor time-clock area near Leo Frank’s front office overlooking South Forsyth Street. The relevant clock was Clock No. 2, the right-hand clock. Based on Rogers’s description, the clock appears to have stood just outside or immediately adjacent to Frank’s office door, close enough that Frank could remove the slip, set it by the clock, step into his office to get another slip, and return to the clock within moments.
This was not a private moment between Frank and Lee. Several witnesses placed themselves, or others, at the second-floor clock area when Frank opened the right-hand time clock and removed the slip recording Newt Lee’s Saturday night patrol punches.
Time Slip Witnesses
Newt Lee gave the clearest witness list for the clock-opening scene. In the Brief of Evidence, Lee testified: “Boots Rogers, Chief Lanford, Darley, Mr. Frank and I were there when they opened the clock.” Lee did not name Detective John R. Black or Detective Starnes in that answer, although Black’s own testimony later placed both men in the Sunday morning group.
Lee then described what Frank did and said. According to Lee, Frank opened the clock and stated that the punches were “all right.” When asked what Frank meant by “all right,” Lee explained that it meant he had not missed any punches. Since Lee was required to punch the clock at approximately thirty-minute intervals, Frank’s statement meant that no expected half-hour patrol punches appeared to be missing from the time slip when it was first examined on Sunday morning. This was a significant event in hindsight during the first day of the Mary Phagan case.
Detective John R. Black supplied a second witness list of the time slip event. Black testified that when Frank said the slip had been punched regularly, the people present were Detective Starnes, Chief Lanford, Newt Lee, Boots Rogers, and Black himself. Black’s answer did not name Darley at that point, but it added two police names: Detective Starnes and Detective Black (himself). That means the clock-opening scene was witnessed not only by the night watchman and factory personnel, but also by multiple police officers.
W. W. "Boots" Rogers corroborated the account from the perspective of an eyewitness who had no stake in the outcome. Rogers testified that after the group returned from the basement and as they were starting out for the police station, Frank said: "I had better put in a new slip, hadn't I, Darley?" Darley told him yes. Frank took out his keys, unlocked the door of the right-hand clock, and lifted out the slip. He looked at it and declared that it had been punched correctly.
Rogers examined the slip personally and noted that the first punch read about 6:00 o'clock and the second half-passed 6, glancing all the way down, he found a punch recorded for each and every number. Frank then inserted a new blank slip, locked the clock, and wrote "April 26, 1913" in pencil on the slip he had removed. Both Darley, Frank's own floor manager, and Newt Lee were standing there when Frank made his declaration, making them witnesses to an assessment Frank would contradict less than twenty-four hours later.
Rogers as Independent Witness: The Slip Examined
Rogers testified at the trial about what he personally observed when Frank removed the slip. His words were precise: "I looked at the slip that Mr. Frank took out (Defendant's Exhibit I), the first punch was 6:01, the second one was 6:32 or 6:33. He took the slip back in his office. I glanced all the way down and there was a punch for every number."
Rogers was not merely present. He examined the slip himself, noted the first two recorded times, and then scanned the full length of the document. What he found, row by row, was an entry at every position. From that kind of inspection, the slip appeared complete and unremarkable. What neither Rogers nor anyone else in the room appears to have done that morning was calculate the actual time interval between each consecutive punch. That distinction matters considerably: a row-count scan establishes only that no numbered position was left blank, while a time-interval analysis measures whether the gap between entries corresponds to the expected thirty minutes. The same document could satisfy the first test while failing the second, which is precisely what the later examination of the slip was said to reveal.
Rogers' account is also notable because it independently corroborates Frank's own explanation for why he declared the slip correct on Sunday. Frank testified that he and Darley scanned the numbered column rather than studying the recorded times. Rogers, without apparent coordination with that explanation, described doing exactly the same thing. Both men looked at rows, not intervals.
Forged Time Slip With Four Hours of Gaps?
Frank’s own trial statement offered his explanation for the Sunday-to-Monday reversal. He said that after returning upstairs, he and Darley looked over Lee’s slip only casually, checking whether each numbered row had a punch rather than measuring the actual time between punches. On that reading, the slip appeared complete, and Frank said it had been punched correctly. The problem is that the slip later produced to Chief Lanford showed several near-hour intervals where half-hour punches should have appeared, creating nearly four hours of suspicious gap-spans and turning the record into evidence against Newt Lee.
Rogers’s testimony is more precise than some newspaper accounts. While an inquest report summarized the slip as showing regular punches from about 6:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., the Brief of Evidence gives exact early entries: Rogers said the first punch was 6:01 and the second was 6:32 or 6:33. That difference matters because newspaper accounts often rounded testimony, while the trial record preserved more specific details.
The Sunday morning clock-opening was not private. The witnesses tied to the scene include Leo Max Frank, Newt Lee, N. V. Darley, W. W. “Boots” Rogers, Chief of Detectives Newport Alonzo Lanford, Detective John R. Black, and Detective Starnes. Lee named Rogers, Lanford, Darley, Frank, and himself as present when the clock was opened. Black separately named Starnes, Lanford, Lee, Rogers, and himself as present when Frank said the slip had been punched regularly. Rogers confirmed that Darley and Lee were standing there when Frank said the punches had been made correctly.
That overlap is the point. On Sunday morning, in front of police and factory personnel, Frank opened Clock No. 2, removed Lee’s slip, examined it, and said it was all right. The slip was not first treated as evidence against Lee. It was first treated as a regular patrol record.
Frank then inserted a new blank slip, closed and locked the clock, and took the original slip back into his office area. The exact placement afterward is described differently across accounts: Rogers testified that Frank took it back into his office; some secondary archive material says it went into Frank’s four-foot-tall safe in the anteroom; the Atlanta Georgian’s inquest coverage says Rogers stated Frank put it in his desk. The safest formulation is that police did not seize the slip, and Frank retained access to it after the Sunday inspection.
That was the critical lapse. The slip had just been described as properly punched, so police had no immediate reason to treat it as incriminating. Yet by letting Frank keep control of the paper record, investigators allowed a central piece of physical evidence to leave police custody. Within roughly a day, the same time-slip issue was no longer being used to support Lee’s claim that he made his rounds. It was being used to suggest that he had missed them.
This Sunday-to-Monday transformation is the core of the Newt Lee time-slip dispute. On Sunday, the slip was described in front of witnesses as all right. By Monday, it had become the basis for arguing that Lee failed to punch the clock at key half-hour intervals. The deeper question is not simply whether the slip showed gaps later. It is how a slip first examined in front of police and described as correctly punched became, the next day, evidence against the night watchman.
To be continued....