Letter from the San Fernando Valley

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.

Next month, in Part II: the trial