which I thought some of the boys had put there to scare me, then I got out of there. I got up the ladder and called up the police station. It was after three o’clock ... I tried to get Mr. Frank on the telephone and was still trying ... I guess I was trying about eight minutes.
L. S. Dobbs, Sergeant of Police, and J. N. Starnes, City Officer, went to the National Pencil Factory after receiving the call from Newt Lee. They discovered the notes under the sawdust, a hat without ribbons on it, paper and pencils, and a shoe near the boiler; a bloody handkerchief about ten feet further from the body towards the rear on a sawdust pile.
While Dobbs was reading the notes—“and land down play like night”—when he said the word “night,” Lee said, “That means the night watchman.”
J. N. Starnes finally reached Frank by telephone around 6:30 a.m. and sent Boots (W.W.) Rogers with John R. Black after him. The earlier calls made by Lee and the police had not been answered.
Boots Rogers and Mr. Black said they found Frank extremely nervous and that he asked to eat his breakfast before leaving—a request the police denied him. Frank also denied knowledge of a little girl named Mary Phagan.
They then took Frank to the morgue. They stated that he scarcely looked at the body and would not enter the room where it lay. He continued to be agitated and nervous. Upon arriving at the factory, he consulted his time book and reported, “Yes, Mary Phagan worked here, and she was here yesterday to get her pay.”
He then told the police, “I will tell you about the exact time she left here. My stenographer left about twelve o’clock, and a few minutes after she left, the office boy left, and Mary came in and got her money and left.”
Further questioning revealed that Frank maintained he was inside his office “every minute” from noon to 12:30. On Sunday, he confirmed to the police that the time slips punched by Newt Lee were correct, but the next day he said the time slips contained errors.
Frank appeared at police headquarters on Monday morning with his attorneys Luther Z. Rosser and Herbert Haas, who evidently had been contacted on Sunday.
Frank advised police that Newt Lee and J. M. Gantt had been at the factory and that Gantt “knew Mary Phagan very well.” This led to their arrests.
On Monday morning, April 28, when the factory opened, R. P. Barrett, a machinist, reported that he found blood spots near a machine at the west end of the dressing room on the second floor which had not been there Friday. Hair was also found on the handle of a bench lathe and strands of cords of the type that were used to strangle Mary Phagan were hung near the dressing room.
Leo Frank was arrested on Tuesday, April 29, and incarcerated in the Fulton Tower. The police said his hands were quivering and that he was pale. He again reported that Mary Phagan came in “between 12:05 and 12:10, maybe 12:07, to get her pay envelope, her salary.” He stated, “I paid her and she went out of the office.”
Later that evening Frank had a conversation with Newt Lee, who was handcuffed to a chair. Newt Lee reported that when Frank came in, he dropped his head and looked down. They were all alone and Lee said, “Mr. Frank, it’s mighty hard for me to be handcuffed here for something I don’t know anything about.”
Frank said, “That’s the difference, they have got me locked up and a man guarding me.”
Lee then asked, “Mr. Frank, do you believe I committed that crime,” and he said, “No, Newt, I know you didn’t, but I believe you know something about it.”
Lee then said, “Mr. Frank, I don’t know a thing about it, no more than finding the body.”
Frank said, “We are not talking about that now, we will let that go. If you keep that up we will both go to hell.”
The police had also learned that Frank refused to send Mary Phagan’s pay home with Helen Ferguson, a friend. Then, not too long after Leo Frank’s indictment and Jim Conley’s statements, the police also obtained a statement from Minola McKnight, the black cook in the Frank home. She reported that when Frank came home that Saturday, he was drunk, talked wildly, and threatened to kill himself, thus forcing his wife to sleep on the floor. Minola’s sworn statement was witnessed by her lawyer, George Gordon.
Yet, three days later Mrs. McKnight publicly repudiated her affidavit, claiming that she had signed it to obtain release from the police. It seems that while her original statement made the front page of the newspapers, her repudiation was printed unobtrusively on an inside page.
Other questions nagged at me. My family maintained that Mary Phagan had been violated. What did the medical evidence disclose? Was the blood found on her legs and underwear the result of rape or menstrual blood? Was undisputable evidence of rape found?
Had she been bitten on the breasts? X-rays of her body had apparently shown teeth indentations on her neck and shoulder. Where were the X-ray records? Were the marks made by Leo Frank’s teeth? Did Solicitor Dorsey have Mary’s body exhumed a second time to check the marks against X-rays of Leo Frank’s teeth?
Was Leo Frank a “pervert,” as the state attempted to establish? The state had certainly enough people to state on the witness stand that he’d made sexual overtures to the female employees at the factory.
But does that mean—did the answers to any of my questions mean—that Leo Frank killed Mary Phagan?
On the Saturday following the murder, Monteen Stover, a fellow worker at the factory with Mary Phagan, came forward to tell the police that she had come for her pay on April 26 but was unable to collect it because Frank was absent from his office.
Monteen informed the police that “it was five minutes after twelve. I was sure that Mr. Frank would be in his office, so I stepped in. He wasn’t in the outer office, so I stepped into the inner one. He wasn’t there either. I thought he might have been somewhere around the building so I waited. I went to the door and peered further down the floor among the machinery. I couldn’t see him there. I stayed until the clock hand was pointing to ten minutes after twelve. Then I went downstairs. The building was quiet, and I couldn’t hear a sound. I didn’t see anybody.”
On April 30, 1913 a coroner’s inquest began. Leo Frank repeated his story concerning his whereabouts on April 26. A point of contention between the police, the coroner, and Frank was Frank’s physical location when the whistles blew. Since Saturday was Confederate Memorial Day, police argued that no whistles blew. Leo Frank had difficulty establishing his whereabouts during that time frame.
Monteen Stover repeated the testimony which she had reported to the police at the coroner’s inquest. On May 8, 1913 the jury returned a verdict of murder at the hands of a person or persons unknown. Both Frank and Lee were returned to the Fulton Tower.
Why did people feel it was Leo Frank, rather than Newt Lee, who was responsible for the murder?
Some who have studied the Mary Phagan case seem to feel that many people in Atlanta—including the police and the Fulton County Solicitor-General, Hugh Dorsey—demanded Leo Frank’s indictment and conviction because of his status as an outsider.
Moreover, the Atlanta Police Department had a series of unsolved murders on their hands and were desperate for a conviction. They were also pressured by the public, who vociferously demanded that Mary Phagan’s assailant be discovered.
Then there was Jim Conley. On rounding up witnesses from the National Pencil Company, they apparently paid special attention to Jim Conley, who had been seen washing
