I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
It’s hard to believe, but up until 1985 it was legal for police to shoot and kill an unarmed suspect who tried to run away. Could shoot ’em in the back. Even if the suspect was a child.
A Tennessee statute said if an officer cried “Halt!” and the 17-year-old suspect tried to hop a fence instead, the lawman could “use all the necessary means to effect the arrest.” I suppose the law was trying to protect the health of a fat cop who couldn’t give chase without risk of a heart attack, or stubbed toe.
But the Supreme Court, in Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1, which by then had been deciding what the police could and couldn’t do for 196 years, said it was time we stop shooting fleeing and unarmed juveniles in the back. Two Justices thought we should give the police more time to get used to the idea.
We’d come a long way since 1789. Some day we may even decide it’s just not right to shoot a suspect reaching for his wallet or cell phone, even if he or she is black, or shaded that way.
Editor’s Note: The first part of this three-part tale of crime and punishment from the second decade of last century ran here last month.
University of Maryland Professor Aryn Phillips and her father, Encino lawyer Mark Phillips, share this updated version of the story first told in their absorbing volume, “Trials of the Century.”
This month: after the horrific murder of a child, a more horrific trial.
Three months after her death, the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan commenced before Judge Leonard Roan on the blisteringly hot Atlanta morning of July 28, 1913. During the course of the trial, the courtroom windows had to be left open, and in addition to the hundreds of spectators in the courtroom, a large and impassioned crowd collected outside to watch and listen. The trial pitted two well-known lawyers against each other. Thirty-two years old and a native Georgian, prosecutor Hugh Dorsey was an ambitious lawyer from a family of lawyers. Since 1911 he had been the Solicitor-General of the Fulton County Superior Court, and thus responsible for the prosecution of Mary Phagan’s accused killer. Bespectacled and intelligent, a series of embarrassing trial losses had nonetheless placed him in a position where a win was necessary to salvage his career. Dorsey’s opponent, fifty-three-year-old Luther Z. Rosser, was at the peak of his career. Portly and old-fashioned, famous for never wearing a tie in the courtroom, he had the deceptive air of a country lawyer, but was considered then the best advocate in Georgia.
The defense strategy was simple: in an era of endemic racial prejudice, no white man had ever been convicted of murder in the state of Georgia solely on the testimony of a black witness. Rosser intended to pick apart the testimony of the prosecution witnesses, and present a parade of character witnesses on Frank’s behalf who would testify to his upstanding reputation and paint a picture of a man incapable of this kind of crime. The prosecution strategy was less clear. Dorsey did not publicly denounce Frank’s Jewish faith or tie that faith to the commission of a crime, but chose to prosecute Frank on the testimony of his principal witness, Jim Conley, notwithstanding serious doubts about his credibility.
Trial was held in the old Atlanta City Hall, in the room formerly used for City Council meetings. While accommodating hundreds of spectators on three sides, the courtroom was crowded for the parties, attorneys and numerous reporters present to write down every word of testimony and verbal exchanges between the lawyers. The room was also stifling. Photographs of the first day of trial show the many men present having removed their coats and hung them on their chair backs, although the principal lawyers and Frank kept theirs on.
Jury selection occupied the morning of that first Monday, and after lunch the prosecution commenced with the testimony of Phagan’s weeping mother, followed by Mary’s young friend George Epps, and finally the factory’s night watchman, Newt Lee. His testimony was elicited to provide the jury with the physical layout of the factory, the timeline of the murder, and the discovery of Phagan’s body. Over the following days, Dorsey called as witnesses the investigating police detectives, sixteen-year-old fellow worker Grace Hicks, the discharged bookkeeper and initial suspect James Gantt, other factory workers, and the physicians who had exhumed and examined Phagan’s body. Every word of testimony was transcribed by the reporters present, and reprinted for an enraptured public. When the week was finished, the prosecution had demonstrated that Frank had had the opportunity to commit the murder of young Phagan, but not that he had done so.
On Monday morning, August 4th, Dorsey called his star witness, Jim Conley, now washed, shaved, and resplendent in new clothes. Spectators had lined up for hours to get a seat in the courtroom and they were not disappointed by the coming performance.
Dorsey began by asking how he had come to be at the factory on that Saturday. He was there to keep watch for Leo Frank, as he had on prior Saturdays. “For what purpose?” asked Dorsey. “While he was upstairs with young ladies,” came the response.
Conley then held the courtroom enthralled while he recounted his version of the events of April 26th: the arrival of young Mary Phagan, misidentified as “Mary Perkins,” who disappeared upstairs, then waiting for Frank’s summoning whistle, and when it came, Leo Frank’s appearance. “He was standing at the head of the stairs shivering. He was rubbing his hands together and acting funny.”
“What did he say?”
“He says, ‘Well, that one you say didn’t come back down, she came into my office a while ago and wanted to know something about her work and I went back there to see if the little girl’s work had come, and I wanted to be with the little girl, and she refused me, and I struck her and I guess I struck her too hard and she fell and hit her head against something, and I don’t know how bad she got hurt. Of course, you know I ain’t built like other men.’ The reason he said that was, I had seen him in a position I haven’t seen any other man that has got children. I have seen him in the office two or three times before Thanksgiving and a lady was in his office, and she was sitting down in a chair and she had her clothes up to here, and he was down on his knees, and she had her hands on Mr. Frank. I have seen him another time there in the packing room with a young lady lying on the table, she was on the edge of the table…”
This testimony was new and damning. It was unlike anything in Conley’s prior sworn statements, offered a rapacious motive for the killing, implied a deviant sexual character for the superintendent, and described perverse acts that were crimes under Georgia law. Eventually the rest of the story emerged under the prosecutor’s deft questioning. Conley claimed to have found Phagan lying dead on the factory’s second floor, bundled up the body and carried it with Frank’s help by elevator to the basement, and then returned upstairs to write the murder notes. Dorsey was done with him in two hours, and the court adjourned.
When it reconvened, Judge Roan cleared the courtroom of women and children, deeming the testimony too sensational for gentle ears. What followed over the next three days was thirteen hours of cross-examination by Rosser, variously cajoling, quiet, angry, or sarcastic. Frank’s lawyer took Conley through the day’s alleged activities, compared his testimony with the contradictions of his three prior affidavits, all to no avail. When the object of the questioning was new, Conley was brilliantly retentive, adding new and startling details, and by turns apologetic, charming, shuffling, and clever. When Rosser challenged him with the inconsistent statements in his prior affidavits, he claimed not to remember, or simply admitted to lying to officers on the earlier occasions. In the preëminent book on the Frank trial, “And the Dead Shall Rise,” author Steve Oney recounts in riveting detail how Rosser tried time and again to corner the clever Conley, only to have him dance away. “Within an hour, Conley had admitted to a multitude of falsehoods and a dozen times claimed lapses in recall — none of which tarnished his major allegations.” Rosser gave up attempting to trap the sweeper, and by the last day of his testimony simply read the prior affidavits aloud, allowing the jury “to ponder the glaring discrepancies among the various statements.”
All three Atlanta papers reported the testimony of Conley nearly word for word to the impassioned citizens of the city.
When the court reconvened the next day, Judge Roan denied the motion of Frank’s lawyers to strike the sexually explicit parts of Conley’s testimony and the hundreds of spectators in the courtroom burst into applause, hooting and clapping, some shouting the news out the windows to the throngs of onlookers assembled in the streets outside. There was no mistaking the sympathies of the citizens of Atlanta. One more witness was called to testify, completing Dorsey’s presentation of Frank’s guilt, and the prosecution rested.
As damning as Conley’s testimony had been, over the next two weeks Frank’s lawyers orchestrated a thorough and painstaking defense. Rosser and his associates called an astonishing 169 witnesses, presenting testimony on every aspect of the crime, the science, and Frank’s character. The one living person that Conley had identified as an illicit paramour of Frank was called to testify that she didn’t know Frank and had never been in the factory with him. Medical experts challenged the conclusions of the prosecution’s experts as to the time of death and the likelihood of sexual assault. Factory workers present that Saturday testified that they witnessed neither Phagan nor evidence of an assault upon her. They also verified that they had never seen Frank entertain women in the office on Saturdays. Accounting experts reconstructed Frank’s work that day and opined that he had no time to have committed the murder. Minola McKnight, the Franks’ cook, took the stand to repudiate the affidavit coerced from her by the Atlanta police. Local witnesses discredited every element of the prosecution’s timeline, contradicting Conley’s testimony of where Frank was and when. Scores of witnesses from Atlanta and New York swore to the excellent character of the defendant, including friends, family, factory workers, former Cornell schoolmates and instructors, his rabbi, president of the Chamber of Commerce, heads of charities, even one of prosecutor Dorsey’s law partners. Others swore to the disreputable character of the prosecution witnesses. Conley in particular was pilloried by fellow factory employees, both white and black. Physicians were even called to opine that they had examined Frank’s private parts and that he was, indeed, like normal men, contradicting Conley’s most sensational revelation. “I have examined the private parts of Leo M. Frank,” testified Dr. Thomas Hancock, a graduate of Columbia University and Chief of Medicine for the Georgia Railway and Power Company, “and found nothing abnormal.”
On Monday, August 18, 1913, the nineteenth day of trial, Leo Frank took the stand in his own defense. Under Georgia court rules, he was allowed to read a statement without being subject to cross-examination. Throngs lined up to get seats, and hundreds were turned away. Unemotional and cool, Frank spoke for four hours, giving what at times was mind-numbingly tedious detail of the accounting work that he performed in general and on that Saturday that Phagan was murdered. He exhibited little passion, devoting only a few moments in his recitation to the arrival and departure of Mary Phagan as she came for her pay that April afternoon. Coming at the close of the defense’s case, Frank’s statement moved no one, impressed no one, convinced no one. Rosser had apparently not read the superintendent’s remarks in advance.
In closing arguments, the unexpressed prejudice on both sides that had lurked for weeks just below the surface of the trial boiled over. Frank’s attorney recounted the unlikely nature of the circumstantial evidence, summarized the testimony in favor of the defendant, and told the jury, “I tell everybody, all within the hearing of my voice, that if Frank hadn’t been a Jew he never would have been prosecuted. I am asking my kind of people to give this man fair play. Before I do a Jew injustice, I want my throat cut from ear to ear.” Then he publicly accused Conley of the murder of Mary Phagan, describing him in condemnation and derision, “Conley is a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying nigger with a spreading nose through which probably tons of cocaine have been sniffed. But you weren’t allowed to see him as he is.”
Prosecutor Dorsey was in his turn ferociously elegant. He explained away the character witnesses the defense had offered by characterizing Frank as a Jekyll and Hyde. “Dr. Marx, Dr. Sonn, all those other people who…run with the Dr. Jekyll of the Jewish Orphan’s Home, don’t know the Mr. Hyde of the factory.” Of Frank’s religion he said, “This great people rise to heights sublime, but they sink to the depths of degradation, too, and they are amenable to the same laws as you or I and the black race.” Pointing at Frank, his voice rising in power and volume, he intoned:
You assaulted her and she resisted. She wouldn’t yield. You struck her and you ravished her when she was unconscious. You gagged her, and then quickly you tipped up to the front, where you knew there was a cord, and got the cord and in order to save your reputation which you had among the members of the B’nai B’rith, in order to save, not your character because you never had it, but in order to save the reputation of the Haases and Montags and the members of Dr. Marx’s church and your kinfolks in Brooklyn, rich and poor, and in Athens, then it was that you got the cord and fixed the little girl whom you’d assaulted, who wouldn’t yield to your proposals, to save your reputation, because dead people tell no tales.
It was now Saturday afternoon, August 23rd, and with a huge crowd outside and the state militia on call, Judge Roan halted proceedings until Monday morning. The city of Atlanta spent Sunday in hushed expectation. On Monday morning Dorsey finished, re-summarizing the evidence, pitching to the jury as the noon hour neared, telling them “[T]here can be but one verdict, and that is: we the jury find the defendant, Leo M. Frank, guilty!” At that moment, by design or marvelous chance, the bells of the nearby Church of the Immaculate Conception began their mournful count and Dorsey repeated twelve more times, echoing each toll, “Guilty, guilty, guilty…”
By the time the jury began deliberations at 1:35 p.m., a crowd of 5000 prowled the streets outside. Calls to lynch Frank could be heard through the open windows. In the air of hostility against the defendant, Judge Roan and the attorneys agreed that Frank and his lead attorneys should not be present when the verdict was read, as their safety could not be assured.
The jurors took just four hours to come back with a verdict of guilty, and the news quickly spread:
The tumultuous roar echoed from street to street. Trolley cars halted and their drivers and conductors jumped down to join in the jubilation. The result was posted on the scoreboard of the Atlanta Crackers’ baseball game and the grandstand let out a roar. Spontaneous applause broke out at social functions. Hundreds joined hands and danced the cake-walk in front of the pencil factory. The telephone company handled three times as many calls as on any previous day in its history.
The Atlanta newspapers kept pace. The first “extra” edition announcing Frank’s guilt was on the street within three minutes of the announcement of the jury’s verdict.
Prosecutor Dorsey, riding a wave of fame that would carry him to the governor’s house in 1916, on this occasion “…reached no farther than the sidewalk. While mounted men rode like Cossacks through the human swarm, three muscular men slung Mr. Dorsey on their shoulders and passed him over the heads of the crowd across the street.”
The next day, August 25, 1913, Judge Roan sentenced Leo Frank to death.
Next Month: The sentence is carried out, but not by the state.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
The other day someone asked if there have been times over the years when I hate being a lawyer.
I’ve never had one of those days when I hate being a lawyer. There are plenty of things I do hate, but that isn’t one of them. This is what I really hate:
Police who lie on the witness stand (or anyplace else for that matter).
District attorneys who somehow can’t look past the law to see the person who has allegedly violated that law.
Judges whose scales of justice bend more weightily toward re-election than actual justice.
Lawyers whose first loyalty is to their wallets rather than to their clients.
Clients who think they can outsmart their lawyers (they probably can, but the people you want to outsmart sit on the other side of the courtroom).
And what do I really love? When I can get a cop, a DA, a judge, a lawyer, or a client to remember their humanity, and respect the long line of experiences, choices, and mistakes that brought all of them to that particular point in time we call, now.
Editor’s Note: Southern California lawyer Mark Phillips and his daughter, Aryn Phillips, a University of Maryland professor, have entertained readers of Drunk & Disorderly a half dozen times over the past several years with updated tales of the most sensational criminal trials of the twentieth century.
Today marks one hundred ten years since the murder that sparked another of those trials. The murder of a child, and the arrest and conviction of an innocent man whose greatest offense against his community was that he was a Jew.
As in other parts of the world, tides of antisemitism have ebbed and flowed throughout the history of this country. Mark tells me that right now, he sees a rising tide. Many of us probably see that: not quite high tide, not yet, but still, we’re holding on.
Their book, of all ten trials — one for each decade of the 1900s — is “Trials of the Century” and you can get it here.
The story of this trial, of Leo Frank, is told in three parts.
This month: the crime.
The second decade of the twentieth century was one of sobering change in the lives of Americans. World War I brought an end to the nation’s isolation in the world. With astonishing suddenness, Marconi’s telegraph and the advent of programmed radio did the same for the country’s most homebound citizen. The end of the Gilded Age of privilege, symbolized by the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, proved permanent with the imposition of both income and estate taxes during the decade. The explosive sales of Henry Ford’s Model T, coupled with rapidly expanding public transportation, meant new mobility to Americans, shrinking the country and bringing people into contact with those beyond an afternoon’s walk: people of different ethnicity, social status, race, and culture. Millions moved to the cities, where the friction of overcrowding, poverty, child labor, and dire workplace conditions produced riots, political agitation, and anarchists. It was the end of an age of innocence.
It was in that roiling decade of change that Leo M. Frank was tried for the murder of young Mary Phagan, and perhaps no twentieth century trial had more far-reaching effects on American society. Now largely forgotten, in its day the case was on everyone’s lips, from Maine to Mobile, from street car to the Oval Office.
On a humid and overcast Saturday, April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan left her Atlanta home headed to the annual Confederate Memorial Day Parade. That day she was dressed in a lavender frock trimmed in lace, a blue hat adorned with flowers, and carrying a pink parasol and a silver mesh bag. Photographs show her looking older than her age, with dark hair and eyes, a clear white complexion, and full lips.
Mary had been born in Florence, Alabama, into a family of poor tenant farmers. Her father died when she was an infant and her mother moved the family to East Point, Alabama, where she opened a boarding house. Phagan left school at the age of ten to work part-time in a textile mill, not unusual for girls at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1912 her mother Frances Phagan married John William Coleman, and she and the children moved with him to Atlanta. In the spring of 1912, Phagan took a job with the National Pencil Company at 37 South Forsythe Street where she ran a knurling machine, inserting rubber erasers into the metal bands at the end of pencils. She earned $4.05 per week, or approximately 7½ cents an hour for 55 hours.
Confederate Memorial Day was a highlight of turn-of-the-century Atlanta. The city had suffered harshly at the hands of the Union Army, and less than fifty years later was still populated by veterans and civilians for whom the loss to the North remained a raw memory. The parade that year featured bands and displays, and crowds lined Peachtree Street to watch and mourn, the celebration one of heritage, culture, and loss.
Mary Phagan never got there. Shortly after noon on that Saturday, she stopped at the factory to pick up her wages for the week. Normally distributed on Fridays, Mary had been laid off from her job the previous Monday due to a lack of materials, and so was not at work to collect the amount due her, the sum of $1.20. Her body was found at three o’clock the next morning in the cluttered and filthy factory basement by Newt Lee, a tall, slender, and elderly black man who served as the night watchman. Frightened to be found with the body of a white girl, he immediately called the police.
Mary Phagan had been strangled with a length of cord used to tie up pencil boxes. Her face, hair, and clothing were covered with dirt, blood, and urine. Her face was bruised and scratched from having been dragged facedown across the floor. So dirty was she that the police had to turn down the edges of her stockings to see the color of her skin. Her skirt was thrown up above her hips, and a strip of cloth torn from her undergarments was wrapped around her throat. One shoe and the pink parasol were lying nearby, but the silver mesh bag had disappeared. A fresh pile of human excrement was found at the bottom of the nearby elevator shaft.
Two handwritten notes were found by Mary Phagan’s head. Written in the first person as if she had written them as she was being assaulted, one said:
He said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef.
The other note said:
Mam that negro hire down here did this i went to make water and he push me down that hole a long tall negro black that hoo it wase long sleam tall negro i write while play with me.
As was probably intended, the initial effect of the notes was to cast suspicion on the night watchman Newt Lee, and he was immediately arrested. When he read the note, Lee said “Boss, that’s me.”
But the notes were so fraught with problems that he couldn’t be held on their strength alone. Reference to “night witch” was assumed to mean night watchman, but it was clear from the beginning that the notes were forgeries. Even supposing that Phagan could have written them as she struggled for her life, her spelling and grammar were known to be excellent, and the notes appeared to be the work of a semi-illiterate.
Compared to modern standards, policing in the early decades of the twentieth century was a harsh and unscientific business. The crime scene was not secured, and even obvious clues such as blood and hair samples were not harvested. Harold Ross, the twenty-year-old reporter for the Atlanta Journal who would go on to create The New Yorker, one of the great periodicals of the twentieth century, had absconded with the murder notes. Instead, the police simply rounded up and browbeat anyone who had any connection with the location, crime, or victim. Over 200 people were questioned in connection with Phagan’s murder, often held for long periods of time, shackled, and beaten. The police had no hesitation about intimidating witnesses.
Several people were arrested in connection with the crime. Along with Newt Lee, police arrested Arthur Mullinax, a streetcar conductor who had frequently driven Phagan to and from work and who knew her from church. Mullinax proclaimed his innocence and was soon released. On Monday, April 28th, police arrested James Milton Gantt, a discharged bookkeeper at the National Pencil Company who had openly admired Phagan. Gantt had appeared at the factory on Saturday afternoon on the pretense of recovering lost shoes, and police considered him an excellent suspect. When he was arrested in nearby Marietta, Gantt was waiting with a suitcase to board a train. Other suspects were similarly arrested and released.
The Atlanta police were under the immediate and intense public scrutiny of the city’s three daily newspapers. By Monday morning, the staffs of the Journal, Constitution and Georgian were fully dedicated to the creation of front page stories on Mary Phagan’s death. All three papers reported what they knew of the circumstances of the crimes, but were spiced with uncorroborated theory and supposition.
The Atlanta Constitution had been the preëminent newspaper in Atlanta since the Civil War, and it broke the story on Sunday morning. At the time of Mary Phagan’s murder, it was engaged in a heated battle for readers with the Atlanta Georgian, purchased just the year before by William Randolph Hearst. He had transformed the Georgian into an organ of yellow journalism, making it much more successful, if less respected. In April of 1913, the bombastic Georgian was in the hands of editor Foster Coates, who had crafted the headline “Remember the Maine” for Pulitzer’s World in 1898. As many as 40 extra editions were published by the three dailies that Monday morning. Sensational and eye-catching, some coverage was accidentally or intentionally slipshod. The Georgian dedicated five full pages to the crime, including a doctored morgue photo of Mary Phagan in which her head was shown on the body of another girl. The Journal reported that the authorities were following leads that Phagan was the victim of white slavers.
But the harshest condemnation was saved for the police themselves. In articles reporting the heartbreaking details of Phagan’s funeral on Tuesday, the newspapers demanded action. Their early suspects released, and smarting from editorial comments on Tuesday, police now focused their suspicion on Leo Max Frank, twenty-nine-year-old Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company, the last person known to have seen Mary Phagan alive. Slight and fair, with a nervous personality, Frank was a highly educated and well-traveled factory manager from the industrial North. Although he was born in Texas, his parents had moved the family to Brooklyn, New York, when he was only three months old. Educated at Cornell University in mechanical engineering, he dabbled in photography and played chess and tennis. He was thoroughly a Yankee in upbringing, looks and disposition.
At the invitation of his uncle Moses Frank, Leo had traveled to Atlanta in 1907, where Moses offered him a job working for the National Pencil Company, of which the elder Frank was an owner. After a nine-month apprenticeship at Eberhard Faber in Bavaria, Frank settled in Atlanta in August of 1908 and began work as superintendent. He was known to be conscientious and hard-working. In November of 1910 he married Lucille Selig, the daughter of a prominent and wealthy Jewish Atlanta family. He was active in Atlanta Jewish life, serving as President of the local chapter of the B’nai B’rith. Numbering several thousand, the Jewish community in Atlanta was “the largest in the South, and the Franks moved in a cultured and philanthropic milieu whose leisure pursuits included opera and bridge.”
Evidence against Frank on that Tuesday morning was circumstantial at best, and manufactured at worst. Blonde hairs and suspected blood spots were found at the second floor workstation Phagan had used, but not analyzed. Officers Boots Rogers and John Black, who had picked Frank up from his home early Sunday morning and escorted him to the mortuary and factory, reported that he seemed nervous. Under police pressure, several fellow employees of the factory, including young George Epps, whom Phagan had planned to meet at the parade that afternoon, were induced to state that Frank had flirted with Phagan and frightened her. Local brothel-keeper Nina Formby was questioned, and after being plied with alcohol told police that Frank had phoned her continuously through Saturday afternoon and evening seeking a room for himself and “an unconscious girl.” Formby told police that she had turned him away, but she told reporters that Frank was a regular customer and “a pervert.” She later recanted her statement, but her description of Frank as a pervert was indelible. Minola McKnight, the African American cook for Frank’s family, was held overnight and questioned severely, eventually signing a statement saying that Frank was nervous and drinking heavily the night after the murder. She said she overheard Lucille say that Frank kept asking for a pistol so that he could shoot himself. McKnight also later recanted her statement as having been forced from her by the police, but her original story was repeated by her husband. Factory worker Monteen Stover told investigators that Frank was absent from his office at the time of the presumed attack on Phagan, contradicting his statement that he had never left his desk. She had come for her pay packet, but left when she found the offices empty. “The whole place was awfully quiet,” she said, “and kind of scary.”
At 11:30 a.m. Tuesday morning, April 29th, Atlanta police arrested Leo Frank. The Georgian extra ran the headline “Police Have the Strangler” with a photo of Frank.
The police desperately needed hard evidence on which he could be prosecuted, and they found that evidence on May 1st. That afternoon, Jim Conley, a negro sweeper at the factory, was discovered rinsing out a blood-stained shirt in a factory watercooler and was taken into custody. Twenty-nine years old, short, and powerfully built, the native Atlantan had worked at the National Pencil Company for two years, his failure to rise partially the result of heavy drinking. He had a long arrest record for drunkenness and disorderly conduct.
Over the next four weeks in custody he gave several conflicting accounts of the events of April 26th. He at first denied being able to write, but when it became clear that he had lied about his illiteracy and exemplars of his handwriting matched the two murder notes, Conley told police on May 24th that he had written the notes, but claimed to have been forced to do so by Leo Frank on the day before the murder. His sworn affidavit stated:
He asked me could I write and I told him yes I could write a little bit, and he gave me a scratch pad and…He told me to put on there ‘dear mother, a long, tall, black negro did this by himself,’ and he told me to write it two or three times on there. I wrote it on a white scratch pad, single ruled. He went to his desk and pulled out another scratch pad, a brownish-looking scratch pad, and looked at my writing and wrote on that himself.
Inconsistencies troubled investigators. After four more days of intense questioning, Conley contradicted his prior statements and now told how he had met Frank on the street on Saturday and was instructed to follow him to his office at the factory. He said that Frank dictated the murder notes for him to write, gave him cigarettes, told him to leave the factory. He said he did not learn of the murder until he went to work on Monday. Both the Journal and the Georgian gave Conley’s new story front-page coverage.
But Conley’s revised testimony still did not satisfy the Atlanta police. They accepted that he had written the murder notes, but his absence from the factory during the afternoon of April 26th while Phagan met her death left too many questions unanswered. After another day of relentless examination, Conley gave yet another affidavit, and in this version he admitted to being at the factory the entire time. He now told police that Frank had summoned him up to the second floor, where the Jewish superintendent allegedly admitted to having accidentally killed Phagan, and instructed him to dispose of her body in the basement. In this new account, Conley described how he and Frank had carried the young girl to the elevator, rode it down to the basement, and left her body on the refuse pile, then returned to the second floor where Frank dictated the notes for Conley to write. He allegedly told Conley, “Why should I hang?” The next morning, May 30th, the headline of the Constitution reported to an excited population “Conley Says He Helped Frank Carry Body of Mary Phagan to Pencil Factory Cellar.”
On the thin and inconsistent testimony of Jim Conley, Leo Frank would stand trial for his life.
I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…
When I sang “Scarlet Ribbons” to my children, at their bedtime, it was Harry Belafonte I was thinking of. The same with “Abraham, Martin, and John.” He could tear your heart with his voice; he tore mine, many, many times.
In the late 90s, I took the older one way past his bedtime to hear the legend sing at an age most men have retired. He was still in strong voice — Belafonte, not my son, who was four and doesn’t remember; I do.
His voice was just as strong for human rights. He was more than a friend to Martin Luther King, Jr. He marched with him, diverted a large part of his personal fortune to the civil rights movement, helped Coretta Scott King pick out the suit he was buried in.
He worked to end apartheid in South Africa; originated United Support of Artists for Africa (USA for Africa) to fight disease and famine, including with the hit song “We Are the World” for which he selflessly sang chorus from the back row; was goodwill ambassador for UNICEF to protect children’s rights everywhere.
He was part of the world for ninety-six years until his death today, and will remain part of it as long as recordings exist of that magnificent voice and memory remains of his magnificent commitment to the human family.
The album pictured above is “The Best of Harry Belafonte.”
