suggest to the police that there could have been blood on the shirt.
Conley apparently began by lying: he told the police he could neither read nor write, but he could do both. Over the next few weeks he gave four affidavits—the last of which helped convict Leo Frank—each of which told a different version than the previous one. Yet it was largely on his testimony that Leo Frank was found guilty of murder. Could Jim Conley have been the culprit?
It would have been easy to convict Jim Conley, a semiliterate, poor, friendless Negro with a chain gang record. Leo Frank, on the other hand, a white man with allegedly rich relatives, would be another story: he could raise sufficient funds to defend himself vigorously and effectively. Why did they home in on Leo Frank?
Some writers, such as Harry Golden in his book A Little Girl Is Dead, feel that many Atlantans were grossly anti-Semitic and accused Frank of the murder because he was Jewish.
Luther Otterbein Bricker, who was the pastor of the First Christian Church in Bellwood where Mary Phagan went to Bible school, described the high feelings which ran through Atlanta regarding the murder of little Mary Phagan in a letter to a friend dated May 26, 1942 which he allowed to be published in 1943.
The letter states his impression upon hearing of the murder:
But, when the police arrested a Jew, and a Yankee Jew at that, all of the inborn prejudice against the Jews rose up in a feeling of satisfaction, that here would be a victim worthy to pay for the crime.
From that day on the newspapers were filled with the most awful stories, affidavits and testimonies, which proved the guilt of Leo M. Frank beyond the shadow of a doubt. The police got prostitutes and criminals, on whom they had something, to swear anything and everything they wanted them to swear to. And reading these stories in the paper day by day, there was no doubt left in the mind of the general public but that Frank was guilty. And the whole city was in a frenzy. We were all mad crazy, and in a blood frenzy. Frank was brought to trial in mob spirit. One could feel the waves of madness which swept us all.
Had I been a member of the jury that tried Frank I would have assented to the verdict of guilty, for the jury did exactly as I wanted it to and I applauded the verdict.
It has also been said that Solicitor-General Hugh Dorsey had strong feelings about Leo Frank’s guilt, and through the years there has been much speculation on what brought about Dorsey’s certainty that Frank was guilty.
In a 1948 study of the Mary Phagan-Leo Frank case, Henry L. Bowden reported a discussion with Hugh Dorsey that seems to shed light on the prosecutor’s feelings about Leo Frank. Bowden had, in conversation with Dorsey, asked him just what it was that had made him suspicious of Frank, and Dorsey reportedly replied that someone had planted a bloody shirt in a well on the property where Newt Lee lived, and that as he and several of the force, including Boots Rogers, the local detective who according to Dorsey was the best detective around, were riding out to the property to check on the shirt, Rogers described to Dorsey Leo Frank’s “extreme” uneasiness and nervousness when confronted with the murder at the factory. This, Dorsey related, had led him to be suspicious of Frank.
Dorsey stated further to Bowden that he had arranged that all the detectives and operatives on the case reported to him directly rather than to the police force, and that the two advantages of this were that the papers were not informed of every little thing that the investigation disclosed and, moreover, that defense counsel were kept in complete ignorance as to what Dorsey’s evidence consisted of and were therefore unable to prepare defenses in advance to such evidence.
Dorsey sought Frank’s indictment for the following reasons: Frank had sent Newt Lee away at 4:00 p.m. and then called the factory at 7:00 p.m. (which Lee claimed Frank had never done before) to check that things were all right. Frank had not answered Newt Lee’s or Captain Starnes’s telephone calls. He hadn’t wanted to come to the factory. He had said he couldn’t tell if Mary Phagan worked at the factory since he didn’t know the names of most of the factory girls (later at the office he was able to tell the exact time Mary had come for her pay on Saturday). Frank had then accused J. M. Gantt of being intimate with Mary Phagan, although earlier Frank had said he hadn’t known her. The police officers who had taken Frank to the mortuary recalled his extreme nervousness. They now considered this emotional agitation important, as well as the fact that Frank had inquired about their finding Mary Phagan’s pay envelope.
At the inquest, J. W. Coleman stated: “Mary often said things went on at the factory that were not nice and that some of the people there tried to get fresh. She told most of those stories to her mother.” Yet the defense for Frank never asked Fannie Phagan Coleman any direct questions about this. Of course, the state had other witnesses and perhaps chose not to upset the mother any more than was necessary.
Additional information which seemed to point to Leo Frank’s guilt was his failure to throw suspicion on Conley who testified that he helped Frank dispose of the body and his concealment of his ballgame date.
Most importantly, Dorsey felt that Frank’s cook, Minola McKnight’s, first statement was true:
Sunday, Miss Lucile said to Mrs. Selig that Mr. Frank didn’t rest so good Saturday night; she said he was drunk and wouldn’t let her sleep with him, and she said she slept on the floor on the rug by the bed because Mr. Frank was drinking. Miss Lucile said Sunday that Mr. Frank told her Saturday night that he was in trouble, and that he didn’t know the reason why he would murder, and he told his wife to get his pistol and let him kill himself. I heard Miss Lucile say that to Mrs. Selig, and it got away with Mrs. Selig mighty bad, she didn’t know what to think. I haven’t heard Miss Lucile say whether she believed it or not. I don’t know why Mrs. Frank didn’t come to see her husband, but it was a pretty good while before she would come to see him, maybe two weeks. She would tell me “Wasn’t it mighty bad that he was locked up.” She would say: “Minola, I don’t know what I am going to do.”
The affidavit of Monteen Stover following the coroner’s verdict added credence to Dorsey’s suspicions that Frank was the murderer, since Miss Stover reported that she got to the office at 12:05 p.m. to get her pay, and Frank wasn’t there. This contradicted Frank, who had said he was continuously in his office from 12:00 noon on.
Dorsey also weighed heavily the record and comments of the jury which pointed to their theory that the murder took place on an upper floor of the factory and that the body was taken to the basement with the intention of burning it. There were other comments by jury members on the factory being used by Frank for immoral purposes and his relations with some of the female employees.
Not yet sure of whom the actual murderer was, Dorsey had indictment forms drawn up for both Leo Frank and Newt Lee. On May 24, however, after the last testimony was heard, he asked for a true bill against Frank. The jury complied and returned an indictment charging Leo Frank with first degree murder.
Because the ninety-degree heat had already begun to take its toll, the Honorable Leonard Strickland Roan ordered the windows and doors thrown open when he convened the Leo Frank case in the temporary Atlanta courtroom on July 28, 1913, at 10:00 a.m. The two hundred and fifty seats in the courtroom were packed full. Outside, crowds milled, spilling over onto Pryor and Hunter Streets.
Twenty officers guarded the courtroom. Judge Roan, an experienced and able jurist, who had served as the
