Reading Time: 52 minutes, [9572 words]

THE FRANK CASE

BY C. P. CONNOLLY

Collier’s

Saturday, December 19, 1914

Volume 54, Number 14

Pages 6–7, continued on pages 22, 23 and 24

This is the first of two articles which will tell the story of the Frank case. The second article will appear in Collier’s for December 26. The writer, Mr. C. P. Connolly, has had long experience as a practicing lawyer and prosecuting attorney. He represented Collier’s at the trial of Haywood and Pettibone in Idaho, at the trial of the MacNamaras in Los Angeles, and in other important cases.

PAGE 6

SATURDAY, April 26, 1913, a holiday, Mary Phagan went from her home in Atlanta to the National Pencil Factory at which she worked, to get some pay still owing her. She did not return to her home. A search was instituted, without success. At 3.30 o’clock the following morning her dead body was accidentally discovered in the basement of the pencil factory by the night watchman, whose duty it was to make the rounds of the building.

Two men were immediately arrested. One was Leo M. Frank, the superintendent of the factory, who admitted having paid the girl her wages in his office at noon on Saturday. The other was Newt Lee, the night watchman, who had discovered the body.

Alongside Mary Phagan’s body were found two illiterate notes in pencil, purporting to have been written by the victim, and stating that the deed had been done by “a long, tall, sleam, black negro.” The notes were manifestly a clumsy invention of the murderer to divert suspicion.

It soon became apparent that the night watchman was not the guilty person. Suspicion fastened on Frank and rapidly intensified. During the next three or four days the police, the newspapers, and practically the entire population of Atlanta came to the conclusion that Frank was the guilty person.

Then a third man, a negro named Jim Conley, who also worked in the factory, but who was not known to have been in the factory at the time of the murder, was accidentally discovered washing a stained shirt. He was arrested and held as a suspect, but suspicion was not seriously directed toward him. The stained shirt was returned to him by the police, and his name was practically eliminated until three weeks later, when it was discovered that he could write. He had previously denied that he could write.

Still later it was discovered and admitted by Conley that he had been in the factory at the time of the murder. When the fact that he could write was pressed upon him he told in succession four different formal stories, each of which was taken down by the police. On the trial he told a fifth different story.

His first story was that he had not been at the factory at all. His second story, in which he still maintained that he was not at the factory on the day of the murder, admitted that he had written one of the notes, but claimed that he had done it the day before the murder at Frank’s dictation, and that Frank had written the other note. Both notes were in the same handwriting.

His third story admitted that he was at the factory on the day of the murder, but knew nothing of the murder, and in this story Conley said that he had written one of the notes at Frank’s dictation on that day, instead of on Friday, and that Frank had written the other note. He said he had no idea at the time what use Frank was to make of the note.

He did not admit having written both notes until two months afterward when he was sworn as a witness on the stand. He finally claimed that he had helped Frank carry the body from the second story of the factory, where Frank had murdered the girl, to the cellar. He gave as his reason for not telling this story at first that Frank had promised to protect him and he was waiting for Frank to make his promise good.

The fastening of the authorship of the notes on Frank, however, as told in one of Conley’s first stories, fixed the crime on Frank, on the theory entertained by the police that whoever was the author of the notes was the author of the crime.

Frank was the first one to furnish the information to the police that Conley could write as soon as he learned that Conley had denied this fact.

After the trial of Frank, Conley was indicted and convicted as accessory after the fact and sentenced to one year.

Frank was convicted by the jury, the trial judge afterward saying that he was not convinced that Frank was guilty, but overruling Frank’s motion for a new trial and stating that not he but the jury were the ones to be convinced, which action of the trial court was sustained by the Supreme Court.

By a constitutional amendment, adopted in 1906, the Supreme Court of Georgia cannot reverse a case on other than errors of law.

An extraordinary motion for a new trial, based on newly discovered evidence, was subsequently made, in which were incorporated the affidavits of many witnesses who repudiated their former testimony on collateral facts. This extraordinary motion was overruled by the trial court, presided over this time by another judge, and this action was again sustained by the Supreme Court.

Subsequently Frank’s counsel moved the trial court to set aside the verdict on the ground that Frank was not present when the verdict was rendered, due to the fact that the trial judge feared for Frank’s life at the hands of a threatening mob surrounding the courthouse, in the event of his acquittal by the jury.

This motion was also rejected by the trial court, and this action again was sustained by the Supreme Court on the ground that the motion should have been incorporated in the original motion for a new trial.

Two judges of the Supreme Court of the United States have since refused Frank’s petition for Federal intervention. So the case stands at the present writing.

Photo caption:

Leo M. Frank, condemned to death, whose lawyers have exhausted all legal remedies in Georgia. Yet William J. Burns, the detective, and every investigator and newspaper man sent to Georgia to report the case, so far as is known, have declared their belief in Frank’s innocence. Three detectives resigned their positions rather than prosecute Frank.

Leo M. Frank is in a cell under sentence of death at Atlanta, Ga., convicted by a jury of the murder of Mary Phagan, a fourteen-year-old child. The Supreme Court of Georgia has twice refused Frank a new trial.

It is believed in Georgia, at the time this article is written (December 1), that neither the Governor nor the Pardoning Board of Georgia is likely to interfere; that the same fatality that has attended Frank from the beginning will, in all human probability, bear company with him to the end.

On the last day I was in Atlanta I went to the office of one of Frank’s lawyers to say good-by. The telephone rang.

“If they don’t hang that Jew, we’ll hang you,” came the message.

The lawyer tried to learn the name of his unknown menacer, but without success. After Frank had been convicted, and even before his trial, scores of such anonymous messages came by letter and telephone to his lawyers.

Frank is the victim of the police fastening the crime on him as the result of a public opinion which demanded conviction. This same public opinion now terrorizes officials and citizens who believe Frank innocent—and there are many such citizens in Atlanta to-day. They are afraid to proclaim their convictions—afraid of a business boycott, afraid of being marked for social persecution, or mayhap afraid of violence.

In certain parts of the South, as indeed in certain other sections of our country, there are those who still harbor the medieval picture of the fire-breathing, murderous Jew portrayed by Marlowe. Undoubtedly the man who murdered Mary Phagan was “not so much an example of human nature in its depravity and in its paroxysms of crime as an infernal being, a fiend in the ordinary display and development of his character.”

Leo M. Frank is a young man of whose intellectual attainments any community might well be proud. Atlanta has been combed to find something against his moral character, and a like comb has been applied to Brooklyn, N. Y., the city of Frank’s youth, and to Ithaca, N. Y., where he attended Cornell, but without success.

Though he was convicted largely on the theory that he was a degenerate, William J. Burns, after his conviction, offered a reward of $5,000 to anyone who would produce evidence of a single immoral act of Frank’s whole life, without producing a claimant; and then the police of Atlanta made the astounding statement that they had never claimed that Frank was a degenerate. Solicitor General Dorsey, who prosecuted Frank, still insists that the charge is true, though the $5,000 reward is outstanding and unclaimed.

No defendant in a criminal case in Georgia may give testimony under oath in his own behalf, nor is his wife allowed to testify either for or against him; but he may make a statement not under oath to the jury. His own lawyers are not allowed to ask him any questions, and the prosecutor never asks any, for he fears the answers of a witness not subject to the penalties of perjury.

When Frank had concluded his four-hour statement to the jury, the crowd in the courtroom, though mostly antagonistic to him, was deeply moved. It was one of those moments so rarely experienced of an audience absolutely spellbound. Moisture was in the eyes of some of the jurors.

“The statement,” said one newspaper which all along has been antagonistic to Frank, “carried the ring of truth in every sentence, and scores in the room whose minds hadn’t been made up left the court room convinced of the man’s innocence.”

Frank’s Remarkable Statement

DURING one of the days of intense excitement in vogue throughout the trial, as Frank was being taken from the courthouse to the jail, the crowd wedged threateningly about the automobile.

Sheriff Wheeler Mangum, an outspoken believer in Frank’s innocence, hurriedly told Frank to get under cover behind him.

“I am an old man,” said this brave Confederate veteran, “and you are young. If they ‘get’ you, it will be over my dead body.”

Frank has been twice sentenced to die, the last time on his birthday. When on that last occasion he was asked if he had anything to say, he made a remarkable statement.

As showing its effect even in cold print, United States Senator William E. Borah of Idaho told me, before I went to Atlanta, that it so gripped him at the time that he was half inclined to take a train and go to Atlanta for the purpose of learning more about the case.

Speaker Champ Clark gummed it in his infrequent scrapbook as a rare gem. He declared it one of the most remarkable and convincing statements he had ever read.

When Frank had concluded this statement there was hardly a dry eye in the court room, according to many witnesses, and Solicitor General Dorsey, who prosecuted Frank relentlessly, was moved to say that Frank was a consummate actor.

I have no doubt that Atlanta sided with the Solicitor General, for one of the stories most religiously circulated by certain well-meaning and highly respected citizens of Atlanta after Frank’s arrest was that the tenets of the Jewish faith forbade the violation of a Jewess but condoned that of a Christian woman.

Another grotesque story that was told about Atlanta after Frank’s conviction, and believed, was that Nathan Straus, who was passing through Atlanta at the time on his way to California, had brought $40,000 in cash to Atlanta to buy up the Supreme Court of Georgia to overturn the verdict.

Some may say that thousands of men in Europe are being sacrificed in a senseless war, and that, after all,

PAGE 7

the fate of Frank is no worse than that of others who must suffer in this world of injustice and mistakes.

Indeed, the Macon (Ga.) “Daily Telegraph” of March 26 last, speaking of the Frank case, said editorially:

“If a mistake is made involving a single human life, it would be deplorable; but it is better that such a mistake should be made than that our legal system should be brought into disrepute.”

These are remarkable sentiments; but they are not uncommon in this case; and yet they are regrettable.

Frank is as cool and collected in extremis as any human being could be expected to be. He looks through his prison bars with the eyes of the stoic who goes to meet his fate with calmness, confident that Atlanta will some day know the truth, but certain that he will be finally judged by One who, though He notes the fall of the sparrow, is unmoved by the clamor of the mob.

When Mary Phagan was killed the newspapers accounted for the public interest by saying that every mother in Atlanta felt as if Mary Phagan had been her own daughter. I think it is time now that every parent took the same interest in Frank’s case. The lessons of this case may come home to any of us at any time.

Death is bad enough; attainted death is another thing; but the infamy of such a death in the case of an innocent man is an unspeakable thing.

If Frank is absolutely innocent—if the hand of the law reached out for him without warning, with no mark of murder upon him, and has hounded him to his death, then his fate is surely as tragic as was that of Mary Phagan. The wrong committed by a whole people is far more tragic in its consequences than any wrong committed by a single individual.

When he was about to render his decision on the motion for a new trial, the Judge who presided at Frank’s trial was in ill health; while the motion was pending he had received over seventy threatening letters; and—he put the case up to the Supreme Court of Georgia.

He said:

“I have given this question long consideration. It has given me more concern than any other case I was ever in, and I want to say right here that, although I heard the evidence and arguments during those thirty days, I do not know this morning whether Leo Frank is innocent or guilty. But I was not the one to be convinced. The jury was convinced, and I feel it my duty to overrule the motion.”

A Georgia jury, dominated by one of its members, once returned a verdict that shocked the moral sense.

Chief Justice Thomas J. Simmons of Georgia, in the court over which he then presided as a trial judge, immediately ordered the verdict set aside with the remark that “it takes at least thirteen men in Georgia to deprive a man of his property.”

And yet here is a man about to be deprived of his life on the verdict of twelve jurors, without the consent of the conscience of the judge who heard the testimony.

Under a constitutional amendment adopted in 1906 the Supreme Court of Georgia is not allowed to reverse any capital case where no error of law has been committed in the trial, no matter how weak the evidence may be, and cannot investigate or pass upon the question of guilt or innocence. Two of the Supreme Court judges were for reversing the case on alleged errors of law, but four voted to sustain the conviction.

In a published statement, after the Supreme Court of Georgia had for the third time refused to interfere, Frank said:

“Can it be that the law, and our system of its administration, is so inexorable that truth and innocence may never be heard after once the die is cast? Is the door forever closed and the way barred? Is the technical finesse of the law to forever preclude a hearing of facts, and human right to be trampled beneath the judicial feet?

“If this is so, and I cannot as yet believe it, then our twentieth century civilization is but a myth, and the divine spark in each human breast a fairy tale. Then, in truth, we hark back hundreds of years in human progress to when the arena and ‘thumbs down’ was the last word of the law.

“It just cannot be that way! The revolving years of twenty-odd centuries must have brought a juster heritage than a condition barbaric in its essential details.”

I am not concerned so much for the fate of Frank, though that appeals strongly to me, as I am for the fate of a legal system which in cold blood decrees the death of an innocent man, and thereby indicts our entire civilization; for the truth will ultimately prevail.

I am concerned for three or four pillars of our civilization which in the Frank case have completely collapsed. One single act of injustice may suffice for a whole nation to be stricken with moral atrophy.

While Frank’s trial was pending and just before the jury retired for deliberation, Judge L. S. Roan, who presided, held a consultation on the bench, and in the presence of the jury, with the Chief of Police of Atlanta, and with the Colonel of the Fifth Georgia Regiment, to decide on the best means of protecting Frank in case of his acquittal by the jury. The Fifth Regiment was kept under arms throughout the night.

Before delivering his charge to the jury, Judge Roan also called the lawyers into another room and advised that neither Frank nor his counsel be present when the verdict of the jury was rendered, for fear that if Frank were acquitted the mob would hang both him and his lawyers.

While the prosecuting attorney was making his concluding argument in the case, the newspaper editors of Atlanta joined in a petition to the presiding judge to adjourn the case over for a day, “because,” as the Atlanta “Journal” said:

“It was known that a verdict of acquittal would cause a riot such as would shock the country and cause Atlanta’s streets to run with innocent blood.”

It was common street talk that if the jury discharged Frank, or dared to disagree, Judge Lynch would take a hand before Frank could reach his home or the jail.

“Innocent or guilty, we will ‘get’ the d—— Jew!” was a remark frequently heard in the crowd around the courthouse on the day of the verdict.

The mob was breathing vengeance in the very face of the judge and jury.

Jungle Fury of the Mob

NEITHER Frank nor his lawyers were present in court at the moment which, according to Anglo-Saxon justice, is considered the supreme moment of his trial, when the twelve jurors look the defendant in the face and condemn him to death or set him free.

All were cringing before the mob.

When the jury brought in their verdict and as the judge was polling them in a room from which the audience had been excluded, the cheers from the crowd surrounding the courthouse were so deafening that the judge, ten feet away, heard with difficulty the responses of the jurors.

These things are not the hearsay of irresponsibles. They are the admitted facts as set forth in the appellate records over the sign manual of the trial judge.

As they caught the word “guilty” the crowd, stretching away on all sides, sent up a roar that, without exaggeration, resembled the bellow of the jungles.

On the previous trial day, as these terrifying bays swept over the crowd in repeating waves outside, Frank’s wife, in the court room, shrank each time in terror behind her escort, her face white as death.

A Roman Holiday

FRANK’S lawyers failed to raise the question of his absence at the time of the rendition of the verdict. They did this at Frank’s request.

That question favorably decided would have released him to liberty without further parley or proceedings. Frank wanted a new trial and vindication. He thought as much of his honor as of his life.

Besides, his lawyers—and they were able ones—assured him this constitutional question could be raised at any time. They based this opinion on the decisions of their courts for fifty years. But, alas for Frank, the Supreme Court of Georgia decided differently in his case.

When the verdict was rendered, street-car employees quit their street cars to join the crowds that cheered; women in fashionable groups in Atlanta’s stores and at semisocial functions clapped their hands.

It was a Roman holiday in Atlanta.

The news of the verdict was chalked up on the score board at a baseball game at Piedmont Park, and a wild demonstration of approval ensued in the grand stand and on the bleachers.

Hundreds “cakewalked” for an hour in front of the pencil factory of which Frank had been the superintendent and where the girl had been murdered.

Telephone bells rang incessantly.

“It looked as if every man, woman, and child in Atlanta wanted to use the telephone as soon as the verdict was rendered,” said an official of the Southern Bell Telephone Company.

More than three times the number of telephone connections were called for on that Monday afternoon than on any previous day in the history of the company in Atlanta.

A week after the trial a barbecue was given in honor of the prosecuting attorney and the jury.

Let me quote from the Atlanta “Constitution” a pen picture of the scene around the courthouse when the verdict was rendered:

“A veritable honeycomb of humanity spread over the section from Whitehall to Central Avenue, on Hunter Street, and from Alabama to Mitchell on Pryor. Men and women clung to the walls of buildings and stood in doorways. Windows were crowded with women and girls and children.

“It was as though a street audience had gathered to watch an eventful procession. The shrill orders of the mounted policemen rose over the hum of the crowd.

“As the reporters at the telephone shouted the verdict to their offices, the word came through the windows. It was received with a shout. The cry of ‘guilty’ took flight from lip to lip. It traveled like the rattle of musketry.

“Then came a combined shout that rose to the sky. Pandemonium reigned. Hats went into the air. Women wept and shouted by turns.

“As Solicitor General Dorsey appeared in the doorway of the courthouse, while the crowd yelled its reception of the Frank verdict, there came a mighty roar. The Solicitor reached no farther than the sidewalk.

“While mounted men rode like Cossacks through the swarm, three muscular men swung Mr. Dorsey (the prosecuting attorney) on their shoulders and passed him over the heads of the crowd across the street to his office.

“With hat raised and tears coursing down his cheeks, the victor in Georgia’s most noted criminal battle was tumbled over a shrieking throng that wildly proclaimed its admiration.

“Few will live to see another such demonstration.”

The trial took place on the first floor of the old city hall, which was used as a courthouse during the construction of Atlanta’s new county building. It was during the hottest days of summer.

Photo captions on page 7:

Mrs. Leo M. Frank,
Wife of condemned man

Mrs. J. W. Coleman,
Mother of Mary Phagan

Mary Phagan,
the murdered girl

Judge L. S. Roan,
Who presided at Frank’s trial

Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey,
Who prosecuted Frank

PAGE 22

The windows were open, the heads of men standing in the street were practically on a level with the sills of these open windows.

In an alley on one side of the court crowds of men sat perched on the low roof of a shed ten feet behind the judge and the witness chair, and looked directly into the court room.

Spectators inside the court room sat immediately behind the jurors. The jurors themselves could feel every pulsation of the crowd.

Time and again the crowd in the court room clapped their hands and stamped their feet in approval of some act of the prosecutor and laughed aloud at the objections of Frank’s lawyers.

Frank’s lawyers protested, but the only relief the court gave was to direct the sheriff to find out who was making the noise.

When Frank’s lawyers in the early stages of the trial called the names of several Jewish ladies as character witnesses for Frank, the crowd jeered and laughed.

When, toward the end of the thirty days’ trial, they moved the court for a mistrial on the ground of these various demonstrations of applause and hisses—the clapping of hands, the stamping of feet, and the boisterous, sarcastic laughter in the presence of the jury—the crowd jeered more uproariously than before.

The judge repeatedly but timidly threatened, but the sheriff informed him in open court that the only way order could be maintained was to clear the room.

I know how difficult it is to believe these things—I doubted them myself at first—but they are there in the printed record; and, however incredible it may seem to the reader, I am understating rather than overstating them.

When Solicitor General Dorsey, the prosecuting attorney, was in the middle of his impassioned argument, pointing out how this “fiendish degenerate” took Mary Phagan’s life, he held up the bloody clothes before the jury and, dramatically pointing to them, said:

“I ask you to look at them—I ask you to look at them.”

In the tense stillness Mary Phagan’s mother uttered a terrifying shriek. The crowd in the court room rose as a man to their feet. The hands of numbers of these men went to their pockets.

Every bailiff in the room instantly called out in excited tones:

“Order! Order!”

It was a critical moment. This gives only an idea of the scene.

As the prosecutor concluded his fiery address to the jury, which, instead of being a calm analysis of the testimony, was an appeal to passion and prejudice, and tended to increase rather than to allay the frenzy of the crowd, he dramatically repeated the words “guilty, guilty, guilty.”

With each “guilty” the bell in a neighboring church simultaneously tolled, and the superstitious crowd regarded it as Providential approval of the words.

There is not a note in all the gamut of human passion that has not been sounded in the Frank case. There is not a fabric of civilization which it does not touch somewhere—the press, the courts, the police system, labor and capital, racial prejudice, politics, the hue and cry of the impassioned pack hungering for the blood of their fellow.

But for brevity, the heart of the Frank case may be summed up in three words—politics, prejudice, and perjury.

Frank’s most ordinary movements, such as catching a street car on this corner or on that, the lowering of his head, the fashion of his hair, the rubbing of his hands, the tone of his voice, the contour of his lips, were magnified and lifted into glaring light, while every move of his was under green and gullible suspicion.

All the riffraff who love the garish light came forward with the most unbelievable tales, which were given unquestioned credence, and no one of any prominence dared to raise his voice in behalf of common sense for fear of the same white light of publicity, from which they shrank in such a reeking mess.

No one gave Frank credit for any innocent purpose or unguilty motive. From the first, suspicion of guilt fastened on him; and three weeks later, when the real murderer was discovered, the community was greedy for the sacrifice of Frank.

The Day of Tragedy

SATURDAY, April 26, 1913, was Confederate Memorial Day, when the veterans of Lee have their annual parade. It was a dark, gloomy, overcast day.

On the following Sunday morning, at about half past three o’clock, the body of Mary Phagan was discovered by Newt Lee, a negro night watchman, in the cellar of the factory of the National Pencil Company, at 37-39 South Forsyth Street, in the heart of Atlanta.

This factory employed over a hundred girls.

“When we looked at the body,” swore one of the officers, “‘Why,’ said I, ‘for Heaven’s sake, this is nothing but a child!’”

The street lights were just being turned out and daylight was breaking as the officers left the building after their haunting inquest.

Mary Phagan lived in a suburb of Atlanta called Bellwood. She was considered the most beautiful girl in her neighborhood, and was a general favorite.

She had impersonated the “Sleeping Beauty” at a church entertainment on the Christmas Eve before her death.

She was employed at the pencil factory, and worked in the metal room on the second floor, but had not been at work for several days, owing to a shortage of the metal with which the pencils are tipped.

She had taken a street car near her home at 11.50 on the morning of the day of the murder.

She was dressed in holiday fashion, and must have been rarely attractive.

She was on her way to the factory to draw the small sum of $1.20 due her for the work she had done during the previous fiscal week up to the time that the metal tips had run out.

The employees were usually paid off on Saturdays at noon; but this Saturday being a holiday, notices had been posted in the factory that the help would be paid off on Friday evening.

Not having been at the factory, Mary had not seen this notice, and reported at the usual hour on Saturday.

Into the Shadows

LEO FRANK was the superintendent of the factory. He was twenty-nine years old, and had been married to an Atlanta girl of his own (Jewish) faith about two years.

He was born in Texas, but his parents removed to Brooklyn, N. Y., when Frank was but a few months old. He is a graduate of Cornell. His father had been a traveling salesman.

Frank was a small stockholder in the pencil concern. It had been his habit to go to the factory on holidays to catch up with his office work.

So far as he knew, if we accept his story, he was alone in the factory at the time of Mary Phagan’s arrival, except for two workmen who were doing some repair work on the fourth floor and who were never connected with the crime.

Frank’s office was located on the second floor with an entrance from the street by means of a stairway.

Frank swore that Mary Phagan arrived at his office, he thought, between ten and fifteen minutes after twelve noon. The State insisted that she was murdered between twelve and five minutes after twelve noon.

In any event, Mary Phagan is not known to have left the factory alive after entering it, though numerous persons who said they knew her came forward immediately after her death with story after story that they had seen her on the street that night.

One man who was raised with her swore that he saw her near the pencil factory at twelve o’clock that Saturday night in company with a young man whom he also identified; that he called her by her Christian name and that she answered in kind.

Another positively swore that he saw Mary in company with “a young Jew” in front of the pencil factory at four o’clock that Saturday afternoon; but these were undoubtedly of that class which the limelight of every tragedy reflects.

Her stepfather made the rounds of the moving-picture shows, but failed to find Mary, and neither he nor his wife slept that night.

The next morning a rap at the door startled them, and the mother instinctively sensed the truth. It was a chum of Mary’s, who told them Mary had been murdered.

When Mary Phagan entered Frank’s office she asked for her pay. Frank asked for her number, without asking her name, and, receiving it, went to the cash box, identified the envelope by the number, according to the company’s system, and handed the envelope to the little girl.

As Mary got to the door leading to the outer office she turned and asked if the metal had arrived.

Frank told her “No.”

He heard the sound of her footsteps dying in the distance as Mary went downstairs. A moment later he had an impression that he heard a female voice, but could not determine which direction it came from, and paid no further attention.

When the officers, led by Newt Lee, found the body, they were unable to tell, because of the cinders and sawdust which covered the face and hands, whether it was a white girl or a colored girl.

Her face was pitted and seamed with indentations and scratches from the cinders, a bank of which stretched along the side of the cellar for a hundred feet or more.

There had evidently been a struggle.

Her hat, one slipper, and her handkerchief lay in widely different parts of the cellar.

Her silver mesh bag, containing her little money, was never found; neither were the flowers or the ribbons that had been stripped from her hat.

The murderer apparently had escaped from a sliding door in the rear of the basement, forty feet from where the body was found.

This door led to an unfrequented alley.

The inside hasp had been pried off with an iron bar which lay by, and in the haste of flight the door had been left open—wide enough for a human exit.

On the inside of this door were the marks of bloody finger prints made in pushing the sliding door back.

PAGE 23

Early Belief in Frank’s Guilt

FRANK and Newt Lee were both arrested and held as suspects, together with several others, though the police, the newspapers, and the people of Atlanta came to sharp and instant conclusion as to Frank’s guilt.

This can be accounted for only on the theory that Frank was, according to his own statement, the last one to see the girl alive (if he had been guilty, as he pointed out afterward, this would have been the last admission he would have made); that he had asked the night watchman to report at four o’clock in the afternoon of that holiday, and that when the night watchman reported, he had told him he might go out again and return at six; that on that same evening, after going home, he had called the night watchman at seven o’clock on the telephone and asked if everything was all right at the factory.

These things are still convincing circumstances of Frank’s guilt in the opinion of many Atlantans who early formed their opinions and have not changed.

The public seemed to leap instantly to a conviction of Frank’s guilt upon the first announcement of the crime and of the fact that Frank had been in the building and that he had telephoned Newt Lee, “a thing he had never done before.”

But these facts were not the only things that made against Frank.

That he was an employer of cheap labor aroused a strong feeling in certain quarters. The South has taken grudgingly to the employment of its white women in factories.

The fact that Frank was a Jew was another indictment against him; there was sold on Atlanta’s streets a bit of doggerel verse in which the murder of Mary Phagan was attributed to either “a lustful Jew or a brutal negro”; and it sold like hot cakes.

The same stories, grisly and repulsive, that have been bandied from tongue to tongue in the undercurrents of masculine gossip about every historic degenerate were told of Frank—and they traveled like wildfire, and were believed, perhaps because they were new to Atlanta.

Again there were stories, facts, and suspicions that found their way into the newspapers in floods.

George Epps, a youth of fifteen, who claimed to be a chum of Mary Phagan, swore at the coroner’s inquest, a few days after the tragedy, that he had ridden to town from Bellwood with Mary Phagan on the street car on her way to the factory that Saturday.

He said that on that trip Mary told him of attempts Leo Frank had made to flirt with her, and of apparent advances in which he was daily growing bolder.

“She said she was getting afraid. She wanted me to go to the factory every afternoon in the future and escort her home. She didn’t like the way Mr. Frank was acting toward her.”

False Tales

THESE alleged remarks of Mary Phagan were not competent evidence under well-known legal rules; but the public accepted the story in perfect good faith at the time, until months later, when at the trial young Epps swore that he could tell time by the sun (although that Memorial day was dark and cloudy) and that he knew that Mary Phagan had got off the street car at seven minutes past twelve by the sun.

Thereafter when any one in Atlanta wanted to describe a young liar, they said “he’s a little Epps.”

The motorman and conductor of the car contradicted Epps as to his presence on the car that morning with Mary; they knew her well and said she was alone; some of Epps’ young friends have declared that they saw him that morning riding to town on an ice wagon.

An Atlanta “Georgian” reporter who interviewed young Epps and his sister on the day the body of Mary Phagan was discovered, swore that young Epps then said that he occasionally rode to town with Mary Phagan on the car, but said nothing about being on the car with her that Saturday.

Young Epps had an overweening fondness for putting himself in the limelight even in his own neighborhood. He is now in the Georgia Reformatory.

The police gave to the newspapers mysterious hints of telephone operatives who were prepared to swear to certain damaging conversations over the pencil factory line on the night of the tragedy, and of Mary Phagan having been called over the telephone to come to the factory; but these witnesses never materialized at the trial.

A woman of the underworld, whose connection with the police of Atlanta is beyond dispute, came forward with the most circumstantial story of how Frank had repeatedly telephoned her that Saturday night between 6.50 and 10 o’clock, begging for a room; that he wanted a room at her place because he implicitly trusted her; that it was a case of life and death—and this over the telephone.

She declared that Frank had been a frequent visitor at her house, and that since his arrest she had had a secret conference with him in the jail.

She also swore that she had been offered large sums of money to leave the city.

As a matter of fact, there was a card party at Frank’s house that night, and there were a dozen guests in the room where the telephone was located. Also, Frank’s telephone was on a different system from this woman’s telephone.

But the public did not know these facts, Frank, by the advice of his counsel, remaining silent during all these developments.

Stories of Frank’s alleged philandering utterly inconsistent with the conduct of his whole life, filled the air, every one of which was later—but too late—proved to have not the slightest foundation in fact.

Frank was practically a stranger in Atlanta, unknown except to a small circle. He is of a rather shy, nervous, and intellectual temperament. He and his wife lived with Mrs. Frank’s parents.

On account of real or fancied racial prejudice, the Jewish people of Atlanta move altogether in their own religious-social set.

Frank was president of the local B’nai B’rith, a charitable and fraternal organization. He was strictly devoted to his business, and outside his own circle was little known in Atlanta. He had lived in the city less than five years.

The public from the beginning seemed ready to believe anything about this young Jewish stranger from the North. One slander was multiplied into a hundred, and all were accepted without question in the state of public fanaticism.

The “Murder Notes”

AMONG the suspects was a colored man named “Jim” Conley, who had been arrested on the Thursday succeeding the murder because of the fact that he was seen washing a shirt in the factory.

He was a floor sweeper employed on the fourth floor.

Conley lay in jail for three weeks, almost forgotten, while the whirlwind of calumny had been swirling about Frank’s head.

Then it was discovered that Conley could write.

The significance of this discovery is explained by the fact that near the body of Mary Phagan were found a pencil and two pieces of paper, on which were written a note or notes, addressed to Mary Phagan’s mother, which the murdered girl was “supposed” to have written, and in which she told her mother how she was murdered, giving a physical description of the person who, according to the notes, murdered her.

This description was exactly the reverse of “Jim” Conley’s physical characteristics.

The notes described the murderer as a “long, tall, sleam, black negro.”

Conley is short and stout, with a “ginger-cake” complexion.

These notes are here reproduced with several unprintable words elided.

One note read (in pencil):

“Mam that
negro hire(d) down here did this i went
to . . . and he push(ed) me down that
hole a long tall negro black that hoo it
wase long sleam tall negro . . .”

This note was crowded toward the extreme bottom edge of the page, and was therefore evidently the first note, and the writer did not have room on this page to finish; either that, or he was possessed by a desire to emphasize still more strongly the physical characteristics of the “murderer.”

The other, or second note (in pencil) read:

“. . . but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.”

One of the first efforts of the police was to locate the author of these notes.

In pursuance of this purpose, each of six suspects, among them Frank and Newt Lee, were required to write portions of the notes for comparison of handwriting.

All of the suspects gave specimens of their handwriting without hesitation except Conley, who claimed that he could not write.

The proof that he could write

PAGE 24

was finally furnished after three weeks by Frank, who did not know that Conley’s handwriting had not been compared with the handwriting of the “murder notes,” or that Conley had denied that he could write—the police had kept these facts to themselves—but the credit of the discovery was denied to Frank at the time and claimed by the police with sensational flourish, in a full-page newspaper story, as a clever piece of clairvoyant detective work.

There is no doubt that Conley was a keenly surprised negro when he discovered from the newspapers (for he could read, although he denied that too) that the police were looking, not for the “long, tall, sleam, black negro” described in the notes, but for the one who wrote the notes.

Admits Writing “Murder Notes”

A BANK teller supposed to be an expert declared that these notes were in the handwriting of Newt Lee, the negro night watchman; another bank official in Atlanta declared they were in the disguised handwriting of Leo Frank.

One expert declared that the notes were written by the murderer, “a shrewd man, with intent to reflect guilt upon an illiterate negro.”

Thus again was public suspicion directed against Frank.

This was before the discovery that Conley could write.

These notes were, as a matter of fact, in the handwriting of “Jim” Conley, as he afterward confessed, though up to the time of the trial he insisted that one of the notes was written by Frank and the other by himself.

But the notes were so obviously in the handwriting of the same person that the police made him change his story before the trial, as they admitted they had made him change it in many other respects.

Conley’s presence in the factory was unknown and unsuspected by everyone connected with the unravelment of the mystery until May 28, ten days after it was discovered he could write.

During all that time he denied having been at the factory that day—in strong contrast to Frank, who promptly admitted he had seen the little girl at the factory and had paid her off.

Frank was indicted after the police and the prosecutor knew that Conley had admitted the authorship of the “murder notes,” but the Grand Jury was not advised of this fact.

The police had already given the public to understand that they had overwhelming evidence of Frank’s guilt.

“Jim” Conley, obliged to acknowledge authorship of the “murder notes” by the knowledge of the police that he could write, and by a comparison of the “murder notes” with his handwriting, finally admitted that he was at the factory on Saturday.

This admission was made after the visit to the jail of a woman witness who saw a negro in the factory entrance that day.

During this visit Conley was noticeably nervous.

One of the officers testified that he “chewed his lips and twirled a cigarette in his fingers; he didn’t seem to know how to hold onto it; he could not keep his feet still.”

Conley had no mission at the factory that day, unless his story, told for the first time at the trial, was true, that he was there at Frank’s direction, fortified with a bottle of cheap whisky, to see that nobody entered the factory during Frank’s “flirtations.”

Frank was to give a certain signal from the second floor by stamping with his feet, when the front door downstairs was to be locked until such time as he whistled “all right,” when the door was to be unlocked.

A Drunken Negro in the Shadows

IF Mary Phagan went down the stairway that noon, as Frank declared, then she was in plain view, with her silver mesh bag in her hand, of this semiintoxicated, lustful, improvident, and impecunious negro, who lay concealed all that morning in the shadow of a pile of packing boxes stacked at the foot of the stairway.

This entrance was always dark even with a burning gas jet, but on that Saturday it was darker than usual because of the lowering day without and because, being a holiday, the gas was extinguished.

At the foot of the stairway was an elevator shaft which led to the still darker cellar or basement, and alongside of this elevator shaft was also a trap door leading to the basement by means of a ladder—the “hole” referred to in one of the “murder notes,” if my theory of this crime is correct; for the negro made the notes in part tell truth, just as he made his main story in part tell truth.

On the Saturday of the murder, notwithstanding it was a holiday, Frank, who was all attention to business, had gone to the factory to catch up with his work.

Several people were in and out of the office during the morning.

From three o’clock in the afternoon, when Frank returned from his lunch, until six (the State contended that Mary Phagan was murdered on the second floor between twelve o’clock noon and five minutes after twelve) he was alone in the office working on a financial sheet which it was his custom to mail each Saturday to the stockholders of the concern.

This sheet, according to the computation of experts, necessarily occupied him at least three hours.

It was in Frank’s handwriting, without a trace of nervousness, and with but one slight error in the entire calculation.

Both sides practically admitted that it would have been physically impossible to have prepared this sheet in his own handwriting that afternoon if Frank had murdered the girl at noon.

Frank was nervous after the discovery of the body next morning—as indeed was everybody else.

The factory had to be closed down on Monday because of hysteria among the women employees.

He could therefore hardly have been the abnormal creature to have performed this piece of intricate calculation and pencraft without trace of nervousness or confusion.

The State, therefore, ineffectually endeavored to show that this work was done in the morning.

There was, however, the testimony of too many witnesses who had been in and out of the office that day before Frank left for lunch to have left this matter in any doubt.

After completing this statement, Frank wrote a letter in his own handwriting to his uncle, the president of the pencil company, who had just gone North and was stopping at the Hotel McAlpin in New York, on his way to Europe.

That letter is here set out because Solicitor General Dorsey, in his argument to the jury, insisted that certain sentences in it were strong indications of guilt:

“ATLANTA, GA., April 26, 1913.

“DEAR UNCLE—I trust that this finds you and dear Tante (Aunt) well after arriving safely in New York. I hope that you found all the dear ones well in Brooklyn and I await a letter from you telling me how you find things there. Lucile and I are well.

“It is too short a time since you left for anything startling to have developed down here. The opera has Atlanta in its grip, but that ends to-day. I’ve heard a rumor that opera will not be given again in a hurry here.

“To-day was ‘yontiff’ (holiday) here, and the thin gray line of veterans, smaller each year, braved the rather chilly weather to do honor to their fallen comrades.

“Inclosed you will find last week’s report. The shipments still keep up well, though the result is not what one would wish. There is nothing new in the factory, etc., to report. Inclosed please find the price list you desired.

“The next letter from me you should get on board ship. After that I will write to the address you gave me in Frankfurt.

“With much love to you both, in which Lucile joins me, I am,

“Your affectionate nephew,

“LEO M. FRANK.”

Perhaps I can best give the reader an idea of the kind of “evidence” produced against Frank, and of the absolutely unfounded and ridiculous suspicions against him by quoting here from the printed argument of Solicitor General Dorsey to the jury:

“Now here is a sentence that is pregnant with significance, which bears the earmarks of the guilty conscience; tremulous as he wrote it? No, he could shut his eyes and write and make up a financial sheet—he’s capable and smart, wonderfully endowed intellectually, but here’s a sentence that, if I know human nature and know the conduct of the guilty conscience, and whatever you may say about whether or not he prepared the financial sheet on Saturday morning, here’s a document I’ll concede was written when he knew that the body of little Mary Phagan, who died for virtue’s sake, lay in the dark recesses of that basement.

“‘It is too short a time,’ he says, ‘since you left for anything startling to have developed down here.’ Too short! Too short! Startling! But ‘too short a time,’ and that itself shows that the dastardly deed was done in an incredibly short time.

“And do you tell me, honest men, fair men, courageous men, true Georgians seeking to do your duty, that that phrase, penned by that man to his uncle on Saturday afternoon, didn’t come from a conscience that was its own accuser?

“‘It is too short a time since you left for anything startling to have developed down here.’ What do you think of that?

“And do you tell me that this old gentleman, expecting to sail for Europe, the man who wanted the price list and financial sheet, cared anything for those old heroes in gray?

“And isn’t this sentence itself significant?

“‘To-day was yontiff (holiday) here, and the thin gray line of veterans here braved the rather chilly weather to do honor to their fallen comrades’; and this from Leo M. Frank, the statistician, to the old man, the millionaire, or nearly so, who cared so little about the thin gray line of veterans, but who cared all for how much money had been gotten in by the pencil factory. . . .

“I tell you that that letter shows on its face that something startling had happened, and that there was something new in the factory, and I tell you that that rich uncle, then supposed to be with his kindred in Brooklyn, didn’t care a flip of his finger about the thin gray line of veterans.”

If there is any evidence of guilt in this letter, then one might be convicted on circumstantial evidence for reciting the Lord’s prayer.

Frank explained that the reason he had asked Newt Lee to report at four o’clock on Saturday was that he was to have gone to the ball game; but that on account of the raw day and the accumulation of work he didn’t go.

There was therefore no occasion for the services of the watchman, and when he came, the day being a holiday, he had told Lee he might go out and return at six.

On leaving the factory that night at six, Frank had found at the street entrance, in conversation with the watchman, a man named Gantt, a former timekeeper and chief clerk at the factory, who had been discharged by Frank some days before because of a cash shortage which Gantt had refused to make good.

The night watchman himself testified that Frank had told him that he had discharged Gantt, that he didn’t want him around the factory, and for Lee to watch him if he saw him around.

Gantt was a large man, “six feet four inches,” who had just come across the street from a saloon and was apparently intoxicated.

He wished to get into the factory to get an old pair of shoes which he said he left there.

Lee swore that he thought Frank looked startled when he ran into Gantt at the door, but explained that he thought Frank feared that Gantt “might do him dirt.”

After some hesitation, Frank told Lee to go into the factory with Gantt, to see that he got his shoes, to see him out, and then to lock up.

Calling the Night Watchman

FRANK explained that immediately on his arrival home, and at half-past six, he had called Lee on the telephone, but was unable to get him; that he again called him at seven o’clock when Lee, who was supposed to punch the register at that hour, would be sure to be in the neighborhood of the telephone; that he had asked if Gantt was gone and if everything was all right at the factory, and that Lee had answered both questions in the affirmative.

Frank’s explanation was that Lee had been in the employ of the factory less than three weeks at the time, and that in addition to the unwelcome presence of Gantt in the factory that night, it was not unusual for him to call up the watchman, as former watchmen well knew; that the factory had no regular nocturnograph, with stations in different parts of the factory where the night watchman would be compelled to punch; and that having only the regular register, it had been his custom to call the watchman on various pretexts, even as late as eleven o’clock at night, for the purpose of assuring himself that the watchman was in the factory, awake and alert; and that other officials of the factory as well as himself had been in the habit of doing this.

Lee, in fact, admitted that Mrs. Frank, as well as the bookkeeper, had rung him up in the three weeks he had been there.

Negro help is not the most reliable in the world, and there was in the factory, in addition to the danger from fire, valuable secret machinery which it was necessary to safeguard.

That Frank’s anxiety was not wholly unjustified was proved by the fact that Gantt hung around the factory some time and went into the office and used the telephone while he was there.

Dismissing for the moment the psychology of the “murder notes” and the story of Conley’s doings on that Saturday, let us turn to the developments which moved the police to place Conley’s apparent guilt on Frank, and to make Conley the crooked, unstable, crumbling, broken rod of Justice.

(To be Concluded NEXT WEEK)

Source:

C. P. Connolly. “The Frank Case.” Collier’s: The National Weekly. Saturday, December 19, 1914. Vol. 54, No. 14, pp. 6–7, 22–24.

http://www.archive.org/details/sim_colliers-the-national-weekly_1914-12-19_54_14