Reading Time: 16 minutes [2807 words]
One Hundred and Twelve Years Ago in the Mary Phagan Case, April 25, 1914
Title: The Annie Maud Carter Episode: How Leo Frank Defenders Have Buried the Repudiation, the Poison Plot, and the Bribery Scandal of William J. Burns
Author Jay P. Smith, Edited by Mike T. Aaron, Contributors to the Mary Phagan-Kean Legacy Project | April 25, 2026
For more than a century, the orthodox account of the Leo Frank case has trained the public to know the name Annie Maud Carter through one document, the affidavit William J. Burns secured in New Orleans, April of nineteen fourteen, in which Carter is said to have reported that Jim Conley confessed the murder of little Mary Phagan to her in the Fulton County Jail.
The Frank defense filed this breaking affidavit in Atlanta on April sixteenth, nineteen fourteen, the day before Frank was scheduled to hang on his thirtieth birthday, April seventeenth. What the orthodox account leaves out, almost without exception, is everything that happened next, which is a recurring theme in the case called "The American Dreyfus Affair."
Solicitor-General Hugh M. Dorsey returned Carter to Atlanta, immediately placed her in custody, and within days obtained her sworn repudiation. In the testimony she then gave for the State, Carter described, in her own words, an attempted bribery in the city jail in which an unnamed man visiting Frank offered her money and a vial of poison to murder Jim Conley, presumably before Conley could testify at the new-trial hearing.[1] The attempted poisoning plot reached the national press in the New York Times on May sixth, nineteen fourteen.[1] No serious account of the case is complete without it. The pro-Frank literature has nevertheless managed to write it out of the story for over a hundred years.
Who William J. Burns was, and why his name on an affidavit should set off alarms
William John Burns founded the William J. Burns International Detective Agency in nineteen oh nine, after a career in the United States Secret Service. He marketed himself as the country's premier private detective and ran a national operation, headquartered in New York, with regional offices that included a Southern branch run out of New Orleans by Superintendent Dan P. Lehon, whom Tom Watson identified in his Jeffersonian as a former Chicago police officer who had been forced off the force for being a crooked cop.[2a] The chief criminal investigator who headed the Burns presence in Atlanta on the Phagan case was C. W. Tobie, a former agent of the Southern Railway who had moved from railroad work into private detection.[2]
Burns was hired into the Frank case in nineteen thirteen by Atlanta attorney Thomas B. Felder.[2] Felder operated as the Atlanta-side conduit between the Northern fundraising effort behind Frank, which was led by advertising magnate Albert D. Lasker, New York Times publisher Adolph S. Ochs, and constitutional lawyer Louis Marshall, and the local detective agencies in Georgia, including the Burns operation.[7a]
Within months, Burns and his men were openly accused of paying for affidavits and bribing witnesses. The Reverend C. B. Ragsdale of the Plum Street Baptist Church had given Burns an affidavit claiming he overheard Conley confess in an alley two nights after the murder. Ragsdale later admitted his affidavit was false, and stated that the Frank defense investigators "were just handing money out."[3] Dorsey accused Burns in open court of attempting to bribe witnesses to give false testimony, and the Burns agency was formally dropped from the case when things got too hot. Tobie left Atlanta for Chicago. Lehon announced the agency's withdrawal after a multi-hour conference in Dorsey's office.[2]
This is not a one-off. Burns's later career bears out the same pattern. In November of nineteen twenty seven, during the federal Teapot Dome trial of Sinclair Oil executive Harry F. Sinclair, Burns secretly placed fourteen Burns Detective Agency operatives on Sinclair's jury at the request of Sinclair Oil executive Henry Mason Day. The government discovered the operation midway through the trial. The judge declared a mistrial.[4]
In the same period, Burns's agents were caught issuing fake Industrial Workers of the World membership cards to infiltrate the labor movement.[5] In a federal trial of trade union leader William Z. Foster, a Burns undercover operative testified under oath that Burns had personally instructed him to lie in order to frame Foster as a dangerous subversive.[4]
This is the man, and this is the agency, whose New Orleans field operation produced the Annie Maud Carter affidavit in April of nineteen fourteen. Any honest discussion of that affidavit has to begin with that record. The pro-Frank literature does not begin there. It does not mention it at all.
The Pro-Frank Canon of Moral Pressure
The Frank vindicationist canon reads less like sober historiography than a century-long reputational rescue project, a fragile scholarly edifice continually reinforced through recursive bibliographies, recycled assertions, credentialed endorsements, and institutional repetition. Pro-Frank canon should not be mistaken for detached research in pursuit of dispassionate truth. This interpretive camp is better understood as an apparatus of institutional advocacy, curated omission, narrative laundering, and consensus-building within camp doctrine boundaries.
For more than one hundred years, this Leo Frank reverential apparatus has softened inconvenient evidence, sanitized the official record, and recast the case in service of Frank's public rehabilitation, ultimately for his eventual exoneration in the halls of the Capitol. This interpretive faction repeatedly presents Frank as a sacred martyr of antisemitic hatred while burying, minimizing, or explaining away the facts that disturb that hagiographical portrait. The long game has been to construct academic and journalistic agreement around a restored image of Frank as hero-crucified, converting repetition into authority, advocacy into orthodoxy, and selective memory into accepted history. Those who contradict the orthodox narrative that "antisemitism was the core behind it all" are often dehumanized or conflated with neo-Nazis, white supremacists, or extremists.
The substance of the Burns affidavit, April nineteen fourteen
The Burns affidavit, secured from Carter in New Orleans in early April of nineteen fourteen and filed by the defense on April sixteenth, nineteen fourteen, the day before Frank's scheduled execution on the seventeenth, contained the following claims, as summarized by Frank-innocence advocate Donald E. Wilkes Jr. of the University of Georgia School of Law in his two thousand four review of Steve Oney's two thousand three book.[6]
The affidavit asserted that Conley had confessed to Carter that on the day of the murder Conley was sitting on a box in the National Pencil Company factory when Mary Phagan came down the staircase from Frank's second floor office; that Conley told Phagan someone had called her; that Phagan turned back and Conley struck her with his fist, knocking her down; that Conley dropped her through a trapdoor scuttle hole into the basement to make people believe night watchman Newt Lee had committed the crime; that Conley wrote the two death notes himself, on a piece of paper he tore in two, and placed them near the body; that Conley kept the money he found in Phagan's purse; and that Conley pulled the staple out of the back door and fled the building.[6]
That Carter affidavit is the document the public has been told, for over a century, exonerates Leo Frank.
Burns also produced a batch of letters allegedly written by Jim Conley to Annie Maud Carter while Conley was in jail in late nineteen thirteen and early nineteen fourteen. The Atlanta Constitution reported on April twenty sixth, nineteen fourteen that original copies had been shown to its reporter, but that their contents were "so vile and vulgar" that publication was impossible.[1]
The repudiation, late April through early May nineteen fourteen
Within days of the affidavit's filing, Dorsey ordered Carter returned from New Orleans to Atlanta and placed her in custody. She formally repudiated the Burns affidavit and stated that her whole story given to the Burns agency was a lie.[1] She was then examined under oath for the State. The transcript is preserved in Mary Phagan-Kean's book. It contains an episode the defense had every reason to bury and the pro-Frank literature has been content to leave out of the record ever since.
Sunday, December seventh, nineteen thirteen
Carter testified that she entered the Fulton County Jail in October of nineteen thirteen, where she did some trustee work and where Conley was already incarcerated awaiting his role in Frank's new-trial proceedings.
On the first Sunday in December of nineteen thirteen, which was December seventh, an unnamed man Carter identified only as a Jew traveling with "the Klein boys" approached her on the second floor of the jail. Frank was present. Carter named "Mr. Pappenheimer" and three or four other Jewish visitors as also present.
The unnamed man asked Carter whether she ever went to talk with Conley. When Carter said she was on her way there, the man offered her money and a vial of poison. Her sworn words, from Chapter Six:[1]
I want you to take this little vial and put a drop in his food and give it to him, and I will guarantee you will have a pot of money and will be a free girl before tomorrow night, and I said he ain't done nothing to me, and he said I know, but it is our man he has got, and what do you care about a negro hanging, all you want is money, and I said I don't want the money, and he said if you refuse the money you are a damn fool and walked off. I don't know his name, but he comes up there with [the] Klein boys. He has black hair and his hair stands up and his hat pulled down on one side.
Carter Refused the Leo Frank Poisoning Plot Against Jim Conley
Three weeks before that approach, on the same second floor of the jail, a jailer named Mr. Gillem had also offered her two dollars to spend time alone with Conley to extract information from him.[1]
The plot to silence the State's chief witness was reported in the New York Times on May sixth, nineteen fourteen.[1] Carter named the man's traveling company in open court. The defense never produced him to deny it.
Burns Agency Does the Houdini Act
The Burns agency, by then publicly accused of bribing witnesses, was forced off the case and its operatives left the state. The Carter affidavit was dead on arrival with her repudiation, and so was the extraordinary motion for a new trial.
May 8th, 1914
On May eighth, nineteen fourteen, Superior Court Judge Ben H. Hill denied the motion. On October fourteenth, nineteen fourteen, the Georgia Supreme Court affirmed that denial of a new trial unanimously.[1]
How the pro-Frank literature has misrepresented the episode
The pattern is consistent across nearly a century of Frank-innocence writing. The Burns affidavit is foregrounded. The repudiation is either omitted or briefly conceded as the product of Dorsey's pressure. The poison-plot testimony is left out almost entirely.
Leo Frank Activist Donald E. Wilkes Jr.
Donald E. Wilkes Jr., in his two thousand four Flagpole review of Oney's book, summarizes the Burns affidavit at length and concludes "There are no valid reasons for doubting the truth of Carter's affidavit." He does not mention the repudiation, the poison plot, the Pappenheimer name, the "Klein boys" identification, the New York Times exposure, or the Burns bribery scandal that forced the agency off the case.[6]
Leo Frank Sympathizer Steve Oney
Steve Oney's two thousand three book, And the Dead Shall Rise, treats the Burns affidavit and the Conley letters as exculpatory evidence and largely passes over the repudiation as a side note.[7]
Leo Frank Vindicationist Leonard Dinnerstein
From the perspective of a professor of Judaic Studies, Leonard Dinnerstein’s 1968 book The Leo Frank Case treats the affidavit as part of the defense’s post-trial discovery and gives little attention to Carter’s poison-plot testimony.[8]
Leo Frank Case Cherry-Picker Marc Hoover
Marc Hoover's two thousand nineteen series in the Clermont Sun states flatly that "Annie Maude Carter, Conley's girlfriend at the time, claimed Conley told her he had killed Mary Phagan," and presents this as evidence of Frank's innocence, with no mention of the repudiation.[9]
Wikipedia Hasbara and Public Diplomacy
The Wikipedia article on Leo Frank, as of two thousand twenty six, presents the Carter material entirely from the defense angle, citing the Burns affidavit and the Conley letters without quoting Carter's State testimony.[10]
These are not innocent oversights. The pattern is the literature. The medium is the marketing. The orthodoxy is the advocacy.
How it Really Went Down: the Un-sanitized Version
The record, stated plainly, is this. The Burns affidavit from Carter was obtained in New Orleans in April 1914 by an agency that, within weeks, faced public accusations of bribing witnesses. The Burns agency paid Reverend Ragsdale to provide a false statement. Once this misconduct came to light, the defense dismissed the agency for cause and barred it from further involvement in the Leo Frank case. Its principal was later implicated in placing fourteen operatives on a federal jury and directing agents to commit perjury under oath.
Time, Space, Name and Face
Carter's State testimony, by contrast, is anchored in named individuals, Leo Frank, Mr. Pappenheimer, the Klein boys, and Mr. Gillem; in a named location, the second floor of the Fulton County Jail; on a specific date, the first Sunday in December nineteen thirteen; and in a specific transactional detail, a vial, a sum of money, and a hollow-promise release from custody by the following night.
Adolph Ochs and the New York Times
The poison-plot testimony was reported in the New York Times on May sixth, nineteen fourteen, and was never disproved by anyone in the Frank camp. The most ironic part about this news being published in the New York Times is that some pro-Frank authors suggest that Adolph Ochs had treated the Leo Frank case as his own cautious pet crusade.
One of these documents is the product of an agency caught in the act of paying witnesses. The other is a sworn account of a witness-tampering attempt, with named participants, in a named location, on a specific date, that was published in the largest newspaper in the country and never refuted. Those details matter because the Atlanta police could check the registry of who signed in to visit Leo Frank and when they signed out. Carter also names people who could come forward to deny her claims under oath to the benefit of Leo Frank. They never did.
The orthodox narrative has decided which one to remember. We are deciding to remember the other, because the presentation of both matters, in their context, is what objective history requires. The answer to the overwhelming amount of pro-Frank propaganda in the literature is not necessarily to put an equal amount of anti-Frank propaganda. The goal should be to present the evidence from both the prosecution and defense so that readers can draw their own conclusions.
Sources
[1] Phagan-Kean, M. (2025). Leo Frank case: The 1913 murder of Little Mary Phagan, Second Revised Edition, Chapter 6, Sentencing and Aftermath. Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project. https://www.maryphagan.org/chapter-6-sentencing-and-aftermath/
[2] The Atlanta Constitution. (1913). Burns Detective Agency formally withdraws from Phagan investigation: Statements of Dan P. Lehon, C. W. Tobie, and Thomas B. Felder. The Leo Frank Case Research Library. https://leofrank.info/tag/detective-william-j-burns/
[2a] Watson, T. E. (1914-1915). The Jeffersonian and Watson's Magazine, articles on the Burns Detective Agency, Dan P. Lehon, and the Frank case. Tom E. Watson Digital Papers Archive, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. https://www.lib.unc.edu/dc/watson
[3] Linder, D. O. (2026). The trial of Leo Frank: An account. Famous Trials, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Law. https://www.famous-trials.com/leo-frank/27-home
[4] Wikipedia contributors. (2026, January 8). William J. Burns. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Burns
[5] Wikipedia contributors. (2025, November 28). William J. Burns International Detective Agency. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_J._Burns_International_Detective_Agency
[6] Wilkes, D. E., Jr. (2004, May 5). Wrongly accused, falsely convicted, wantonly murdered: A review and analysis of the definitive book on the Leo Frank case. Flagpole. https://flagpole.com/news/news-features/2004/05/05/wrongly-accused-falsely-convicted-wantonly-murdered/
[7] Oney, S. (2003). And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. Pantheon.
[7a] Oney, S. (2003). And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank. Pantheon. (See chapters covering the Northern fundraising effort and Thomas B. Felder's role as the Atlanta retainer for the defense.)
[8] Dinnerstein, L. (1968). The Leo Frank case. Columbia University Press.
[9] Hoover, M. (2019, October 5). The killing of Mary Phagan, Part Three of Three. The Clermont Sun. https://www.clermontsun.com/2019/10/05/marc-hoover-the-killing-of-mary-phagan-part-three-of-three
[10] Wikipedia contributors. (2026, April 23). Leo Frank. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Frank
[11] The Atlanta Journal. (1915, June 2). Conley denies writing Carter woman notes. Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project digitization. https://www.maryphagan.com/1915-06-02-conley-denies-writing-carter-woman-notes-the-atlanta-journal
[12] Georgia Archives. (2026). Letters of prosecution witness Jim Conley to Annie Maude Carter (1913 -1914). Frank Clemency Collection, Virtual Vault. https://vault.georgiaarchives.org/digital/collection/frankclem/id/113