About Me
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I am a Roleplayer + Historical Tribute.
Yes, I drew this. Do NOT steal.
"I am not guilty. Such an atrocious crime has never entered my mind. I am a man of good character and I have a wife. I am a home-loving and God-fearing man. They will discover that. It is useless to detain me, unless for investigation and for information I might be able to give."
-Leo Frank,
on the steps of police headquarters at 175 Decatur Street
Atlanta, Georgia - 1913.
"I know my husband is innocent. No man could make the good husband to a woman that he has been to me and be a criminal...Being a woman, I do not understand the tricks and arts of detectives and prosecuting officers, but I do know Leo Frank, and his friends know him, and I know, and his friends know, that he is utterly incapable of committing the crime that these detectives and this Solicitor (Dorsey) are seeking to fasten upon him."
-Lucille Frank,
in an open letter to the citizens of Atlanta, ran in three papers the day after the incident that inspired it.
Atlanta, Georgia - 1913.
"Where once the Phagan investigation had merely been in danger of becoming a jurisdictional squabble, it was now degenerating into a calumnious rhubarb pitting faction against faction, class against class, faith against faith."
-Steve Oney,
And The Dead Shall Rise.
Leo Frank 1884 - 1915
This is a historical biography of Leo Frank, written by myself. I give much credit to Wikipedia.org, Steve Oney's book And The Dead Shall Rise to miscellaneous other websites I have visited in the past, and to Jason Robert Brown's beautiful musical representation of the case from 1913-1915, "Parade."
(See my Rules blog for help with playing with this character, and to read my rules! Thank you.)
~
To this day, no one is positive who murdered 13-year-old Mary Phagan. However, the evidence against 29-year-old Leo Frank, president of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta Georgia, was extraordinary. In 1915 Frank was snatched out of prison and lynched innocently for a crime many believe he did not commit.
Chapter 1.
Leo Max Frank was born in 1884 in Cuero Texas to Rudolf (a German-born physician) and Rae Frank, however was raised in Brooklyn, NY when his family moved there shortly after his birth. The Franks were highly cultured and enjoyed tennis, bridge, and opera. Leo was educated in the public schools in Brooklyn and attended Pratt Institute in New York City, NY and received an engineering degree at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY in 1906. In addition he became president of a local chapter of the B'nai Brith, the oldest operating Jewish service organization in the world. A Confederate veteran, Frank's uncle owned a large percentage of a National Pencil Factory and through him Leo earned the position of superintendent of the factory. He was highly qualified, having traveled to Massachussets, New York, and Germany for apprenticeships in pencil manufacturing. Leo moved to Atlanta Georgia to attend the business and married Lucille Selig in 1910. Lucille's family was rather important in the city of Atlanta, being a wealthy family of industrialists and having founded the first synagogue in the city shortly prior.
At 3:00 on the morning of April 27th, the police received a call from Newt Lee, the factory's night watchman, reporting that he had found the body of a dead white girl in the factory's basement. The police who came to the scene were unpracticed, much of the force having been replaced prior after a scandal in Atlanta involving the force. They had had only a week of formal training, there was no fingerprint lab, and the force was not yet motorized. When they arrived, they found the body of Mary Phagan, a girl who had begun working at the factory in order to support her widowed mother and five siblings in Marietta, Georgia, in the filthy basement covered with coal dust and pencil shavings, so dirty that some initially believed she was black until one of her stockings was pulled down to verify her race. It was found that she had been strangled with a 3/4-inch cord which was still tied around her neck when she was discovered, and there was evidence that she had been raped. Some evidence at the scene was lost and there was a trail in the dirt indicating that she had been killed and dragged from someplace else.
After finding that the watchman's time card had not been punched in three places, he was arrested along with a young friend of Mary's, George Epps, though both were found to be innocent of the crime - even after a detective snuck into Lee's apartment to find a shirt, blood-soaked on the inside, newly pressed. The police accused Leo Frank himself of planting the shirt in order to incriminate his watchman.
Mary Phagan had come to the factory to collect her paycheck on the morning of April 26th, Confederate Memorial Day, before going to see the annual town parade. The pay had been issued personally by Leo. At 4 AM, Leo did not answer his phone and he appeared nervous when the police arrived at his house to bring him to the factory. He answered questions in detail, though was trembling strongly so as not to be able to carry out simple tasks. This evidence was used against him when he was officially accused of the murder of the 13-year-old girl.
The press jumped on the opportunity for a story in a town which otherwise claimed no significant news. The Atlanta Constitution broke the story, and soon began to compete with the Georgian. As many as 40 extra editions came out the day of the murder, both papers offered $1,800 in reward money for information regarding the murder, which led to many false or irrelevant leads given to the police, and in the rush some evidence went missing when borrowed from the police by reporters. In addition to this information, two notes were found in the factory, supposedly written by Mary as she was dying, which became known as the "murder notes." On one of these was written as follows: "Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me doun that hole a long negro black that hoo it was long sleam tall negro i wright while play with me. He said he wood love me and land doun play like night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef."
All eager to land suspicion on him, many began to give evidence to the police against Leo Frank. George Epps said that Mary had told him that Frank flirted with Mary and had frightened her often. He told officials that she told him that he wanted him to come to the factory as often as he could to escort her home as protection. The Hearst Papers fictionally described the basement walls as adorned with pictures of "Salome dancers in scanty raiment and of chorus girls in different postures." The Constitution published a story stating that a private detective, Robert House, had seen Leo take a girl to an isolated, woody spot in the city. Nina Formby, the madam of a bordello, told the police that the night of the murder, Frank, who had been reported as a frequent customer, had called wondering if she had a room in which he could get rid of Mary's body. Soon after this statement, she left town.
On May 1, 29-year-old janitor of the factory, Jim Conley, was caught by the day watchman, E.F. Halloway, washing a shirt. After trying to hide the shirt to no avail, he claimed that the stains on it were from rust. He lied under oath that he had not had a grade-school education, and could not read nor write. He had a record of drinking and of violence, serving one sentence on the chain gang. The newspapers gossiped that he had fired a gun at his wife. Holloway told the Georgian that he was convinced that Conley had strangled Mary Phagan while half drunk, and he became the other major suspect in the case. After seeing the May 28th headline in the paper, he provided a new story in which he stated that Frank made him hide in a wardrobe to avoid being seen by two women, had dictated the murder notes to him, gave him cigarettes, and told him to leave the factory. Afterward, he said, he went out drinking and saw a movie. This statement, however, did not seem to prove that the crime had been committed at all. It was soon found that Mary's pay had disappeared from her pocket, leading the police to suspect that Conley had killed her for the money. When the police asked Leo to confront Jim, Leo refused on the grounds that his lawyer was out of town. However, even when his lawyer, Rosser, returned, the meeting did not take place. Under further pressure, Conley gave another version of his story in which Frank asked for help in moving Mary's body and in return gave him $200, though later said that Frank had taken it back.
Frank hired two detectives of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to help him prove his innocence, which was interpreted in a sinister light by many observers, especially since the Pinkerton agency had a reputation as the violent enforcers for American industrialists. Frank produced alibis for the entire time during which the crime could have been committed, but suspicion was aroused by the fact that he waited a week to bring forward one crucial witness, Lemmie Quinn, saying that he had forgotten. Gradually, however, the Georgian began to take Frank's side, responding to outrage from Atlanta's Jewish community at what they saw as a grave injustice being committed. Meanwhile, the Constitution continued to criticize the police for their lack of progress.
The Georgian obtained William Smith to be Conley's lawyer and offered to pay all of his fees. Smith was known as a "nigger lawyer" because he commonly represented black clients. Despite this, he had won many cases for black men and women, and had even taken a case as far as the Supreme Court. When Smith discovered that his client had begun to give long jailhouse interviews with crowds of reporters - including those from the Hearst Papers, he arranged for Conley to be moved to a different jail. The Hearst Papers had also begun to take Frank's side. Two witnesses came forward to share their experiences with Jim Conley, one reporting that while playing craps at the factory he had run away when hearing that Conley had an intention to rob a girl walking by. The other declared that when meeting Jim drunk on the street, to brush him off he had said, "I have killed one today and do not wish to kill another," though the man had thought that it was a joke.
Chapter 2.
Leo Frank's trial began on July 28th. It was hot outside and because the windows were wide open, in addition to hundreds of spectators inside the hall a mob gathered outside to watch through the windows. The prosecutor was Hugh Dorsey. Frank was represented by eight lawyers led by Luther Rosser.
Conley reiterated his testimony: that Frank was the murderer and that the murder notes had been dictated by him in order to pin the crime on Newt Lee, adding that he kept watch while Leo had sex with women in his office on Saturdays. Another witness (with a criminal record, like Conley) agreed. The defense pointed out that there were too many workers in the factory on Saturday for him to sneak sexual escapades past and that the windows of his office lacked curtains. Their theory remained that Conley was the murderer and Conley, with the help of Newt Lee, wrote the notes. They brought up a large number of witnesses who left him without enough time to have committed the crime. Conley, admitting to being an accessory, was not harmed by declaring that he had changed his story, lied, and had exaggerated repeatedly. Furthermore, his race was on his side. Because he was a black man, many did not believe that he could have created such a story if it did not have some basis of fact. He continued to lie about his education and ability to read and write.
The prosecution continued to accuse Leo, insinuating that he was homosexual, and when Dorsey asked a witness if he had heard about "12 months ago [when] Frank [was] kissing girls and playing with the nipples of their breasts," Leo's mother leaped out of her seat, reportedly shouting things at Dorsey and calling him a "Gentile dog." This outburst helped to crystallize anti-Semitic sentiment in Atlanta and hardened feelings against Frank amongst the public.
At this point, Frank spoke on his own behalf, making an unsworn statement that did not permit any cross-examination without his consent. Most of his 4-hour speech consisted of a detailed analysis of the accounting work he had done on the day of Mary's murder, proving that the act was too time-consuming for him to have done anything else. He ended with a description of how he saw the crime, including a moving explanation of his nervousness: "Gentlemen, I was nervous. I was completely unstrung. Imagine yourself called from sound slumber in the early hours of the morning ... to see that little girl on the dawn of womanhood so cruelly murdered - it was a scene that could have melted stone."
In the defense's closing statements, they explicitly opened up the racial dimensions of the case. They pointed out that "... if Frank hadn't been a Jew he would never have been prosecuted..." and, "Conley is a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying ni**er with a spreading nose through which probably tons of cocaine has been sniffed." The prosecution, in theirs, said that Frank had killed Mary to keep her from talking.
As the trial continued, public sentiment in Atlanta had turned strongly against Leo Frank, so much that in case of an acquittal, the judge brokered a deal in which the jurors would not be present when the verdict was read, for fear of Frank's safety.
Frank was convicted of murder.
Following this, (from the Constitution,) "three muscular men slung Mr. Dorsey on their shoulders and passed him over the heads of the crowd across the street."
Dorsey was elected governor of Georgia.
Chapter 3.
Leo Frank's appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court failed in November. Writs of habeas corpus were denied, though subsequently Justice Lamar granted a writ of error allowing Frank to appeal to the full U.S. Supreme Court, which heard his appeal in April 1915. On April 19th, in the case of Frank v. Magnum Frank's appeal was denied on a 7-2 vote.
Frank applied for clemency from the departing governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton. Slaton reviewed more than 10,000 pages of documents and carefully examined new evidence. Convinced that he was innocent, on June 20th, 1915 Slaton commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, "assuming that Frank's innocence would eventually be fully established and he would be set free." Georgia politician and publisher Tom Watson (who used the case to build support for the renewal of the Ku Klux Klan, which had been destroyed by the federal government in the early 1870s) railed against the decision and urged the lynchings of both Frank and Governor Slaton. A model of Slaton was hung hatefully in effigy the town square, a sign beneath him reading "John M. Slaton: The King of Jews."
A group calling itself the Knights of Mary Phagan began openly organizing a plan to kidnap Frank from the state prison farm and take him to Marietta, 150 miles away, to lynch him. They recruited between 25 and 28 men with the necessary skills, consisting mostly of prominent names, including the son of a senator, a former governor, lawyers, one prosecutor, a doctor, and the former sheriff of Cobb County.
Then, on August 17th, the Knights of Mary Phagan kidnapped Frank from the prison farm. They forced their way in with a display of their weapons and took Frank in one of their caravan of seven cars (one used as a decoy). Many accounts say that they intended to drive to Mary Phagan's grave and intended to hang him there, but ran out of time and lynched him before reaching it. Frank's only requests were that they allow him to write a note to his wife and that they cover his lower body before hanging him (as he was wearing nothing but a nightshirt when they kidnapped him)
Frank's last words were, "I think more of my wife and my mother than I do of my own life."
Crowds descended on the site, snatching up pieces of the tree and the rope as souvenirs. A man who had been grinding his heel into Frank's face was dissuaded by Judge Morris and Frank's body was transferred to an undertaker.
Eventually, Frank was vindicated, however posthumously. In 1982, a man came forward with the information that he had seen Jim Conley dragging Mary Phagan's body. The then thirteen-year-old office boy at the pencil factory had been told by Conley not to tell what he had seen or Conley would kill him. Alnzo Mann swore in an affadavit and died in 1985.
On March 11, 1986 Frank was issued a pardon by the Georgia pardons and paroles board without clearing him of the crime. Mary's family continue to insist on Frank's guilt, and her great grand-niece, also named Mary, wrote a novel about the case in 1987.
Leo Frank is buried in Brooklyn, NY at Mount Carmel Cemetery.
