ONE HUNDRED YEARS AGO TODAY!
January 10, 1915
Tom Watson blasts Leo Frank
& the J-Team of newspapers and lawyers trying to get the murdering fiend off!
I am now recording an audiobook of a powerful article about this case....
....the first time Jews openly threw their weight around in the media, not even pretending to but "just good Americans," but trying to get a rapist-murderer, sexually-harassing boss, and top Jew official off BECAUSE HE WAS ONE OF THEIRS!
....while calling everyone else an antisemite!
It ended six months after this article with the Day of the Rope for Leo!
My 2013 video on this case:
My essay proving that Frank did it, and he was just obeying the Talmud by doing so!
http://johndenugent.us/glory-to-mary-phagan-and-the-white-men-who-avenged-her-2/
A first reaction, on Facebook: (CLICK ON THIS IMAGE TO ENLARGE!)
Audiobook script:
Tom Watson: The Leo Frank Case,
read by John de Nugent
This article on the website “americanmercury.org” of March 19, 2014 is the republication of an article published 100 years ago by the crusading Georgia publisher Thomas Watson, found in his Watson’s Magazine, Volume 20, Number 3, of January 10, 1915.......
AN AGED MILLIONAIRE of New York City had a lawyer named Albert T. Patrick, and this lawyer... poisoned his own aging client, forged a will in his own favor; was arrested, tried, convicted and sentenced to the electric chair for these crimes—and three years ago New York City set him at liberty, a pardoned man.
Through the falling out among Wall Street thieves, it transpires that the sensational clemency of Governor John A. Dix, in favor of Albert T. Patrick, was inspired by a gold mining transaction involving millions of dollars.
Patrick says that he was “pardoned on the merits of the case.”
It was a negligible coincidence that his brother-in-law, Milliken, who had for years resisted Wall Street efforts to get control of his Golden Cycle gold mine, finally yielded it as soon as Patrick got the pardon.
Such is life in these latter days, when Big Money makes and unmakes Presidents, makes and unmakes legislation, and makes and unmakes the policies of the greatest Republic.
And... there was a man of the name of Morse; and he was a parlous knave to be sure.[Narrator's note: “parlous” is an old word related to “perilous” and means “dangerous and cunning.”]
He also lived in New York, and he was an adept in the peculiar methods of Wall Street. To Charles W. Morse, it seemed good to organize an Ice Trust, and he did it.
[Narrator's note: 1) Ice was used for refrigeration of meat, supermarket food, and food in households. People had “iceboxes” in those days, or their food went rotten. You had to buy ice constantly, and it was hauled to your house in big cubes. It was a huge business. 2) So-called “trusts” were a major economic problem 100 years ago.
Companies would get together, end price competition, and fix the prices of food, cotton, steel, railroad tickets – everything -- at very high levels, ensuring obscene profits for Wall Street billionaires. This price-rigging by the so-called “trusts” was finally banned, under federal law, in Thomas Watson's time. (Now back to the article....)]
To prevent Nature from interfering too impertinently with his honest designs, Morse sent boats up the Hudson [Narrator's note: the river next to Manhattan, New York City] to destroy – the ice – which was in process of formation on the river.
There is no law against the breaking of ice—so far as I know—[though the people need it!] and therefore the curses, the imprecations and the idle tears of the independent ice-dealers availed them nothing.
Summer came, in due course; and with it came stifling heat in crowded tenements, the struggle for fresh air and the cool drink, and the sickness that pants for a chance to live. But Charles W. Morse had the ice. Nobody else had any. Charles W. Morse made new rules for the ice market: he not only raised the price, but refused to sell any quantity of his frozen water for less than ten cents. [Narrator's note: about ten dollars today, a day's wages for the poor, who also worked six or seven days a week.]
It seems a fearful thing that our Christian civilization should have reached a stage at which any one man, withholding a ten-cent block of ice, can condemn a sick child to death, but it is a fact. Unless the daily papers of New York and Jersey were the most arrant liars, the weaker invalids in the sardine-boxes called tenements died like flies.
Day after day, the editors pleaded with Morse, begging him to rescind the new rules and to sell to the poor the five-cent piece of ice that they had formerly been able to obtain.
The editorial appeals made to Morse might have softened the heart of the stoniest despot that ever sent human beings to the block, but they did not soften Charles W. Morse.
His relentless car was driven right on, day after day, week after week; and the victims that were crushed under his golden wheels, were pitiful little children.
Later, he made a campaign against the J.P. Morgan wolves of Wall Street, and he came to grief.
[Narrator's note: J.P, that is, Junius Pierpont .. Morgan was an infamous Wall Street financier, a mega-billionaire, and was hated by millions.
He was a gold-buying partner with the Jewish banking dynasty of Rothschild and possibly, by his Mediterranean appearance as well as behavior, was secretly Jewish himself. His first business coup was during the Civil War, when he 1) paid $30,000 in today's money to get out of military service. Then he bought defective rifles and made a killing by selling them to a Northern general for nine times the price. He helped the Tennessee Jewish Ochs family buy and take over the New York Times, he created the US Steel trust which rigged steel prices, and helped engineer the financial panic of 1906, being depicted as a great man when he then, quote, “solved” it. In this he fulfilled the Yiddish proverb: “Start a fire, then sell a firehose.” Since Morgan the financier had supposedly saved the nation, the 1906 panic was later used to justify creating the infamous Federal Reserve in 1913 on the claim that private billionaires like Morgan should run the US economy, and lend all US money to us .. at interest. So that was the “J.P. Morgan and his wolves” to whom Watson was referring. Now back to the article.]
The Morgan wolves turned upon Morse, and brought him down. His methods were the orthodox Morgan methods, but he was a poacher on the Morgan preserves; and so, he was sent to the penitentiary, not so much because he was a criminal, as because he was a trespasser.
Being in prison, Morse craved a pardon, and his [Jewish lawyer], Abe Hummel, was not at hand to get it for him.
[Narrator's note: The rest of this section is amusing, but confusing, 100 years later, but it was hot celebrity gossip when Watson wrote it. To summarize: Abraham Hummel was a little Hebrew shyster with a huge nose who represented organized crime, and made another fortune as a criminal himself, blackmailing rich Gentile married men with so-called “honey traps.” [http://ezinearticles.com/?Mobsters,-Criminals-and-Crooks---Howe-and-Hummel---The-Most-Crooked-Law-Firm-of-All-Time&id=6318158]
Excerpt:
After Hummel's conviction, he was also disbarred. Furthermore, in 1908, the law firm of Howe & Hummel was enjoined by law from further practice, thus ending an era of lawless lawyering that has never been duplicated. Howe and Hummel are accurately portrayed in the annals of American crime, as the most law-breaking law firm of all time.
He got them involved with Broadway show girls, then demanded the equivalent of $50,000 in today's money to hush it up, and did this many times, also controlling these rich men henceforth with blackmail.
Excerpt from the book Bath, Maine's Charlie Morse
Samuel Untermyer, the Jewish Zionist leader and lawyer who, on behalf of world Jewry, infamously declared war on Hitler Germany in March of 1933, was also involved, being the lawyer for the wife of Morse. In the end, Abe Hummel and his client Morse, the infamous “Ice King of New York,” went to prison over perjury and a divorce scam, but for only a scandalously short time, showing that in New York, or Jew York, City, money can get anybody out of jail.
And all this leads Thomas Watson up to the Leo Frank case, where New York Jewish lawyers also were trying desperately to get one of theirs off, a fellow Jew. In this case, it was Leo Frank, after his conviction and death sentence in the 1913 rape, strangulation and murder of a 13-year-old Irish beauty, his sweatshop employee, Mary Phagan. To resume the article:]
Abe was now in Europe, for his health. Abe had got Morse a young wife by the gentle art of taking her away from an older man, Dodge. Morse had looked upon the wife of Dodge; and, while doing so, his memory went back to the time when King David gazed upon the unveiled charms of Bathsheba. Dodge could not be sent the way of Uriah [that is, sent off to die in battle], but the woman could be taken by the modern process of the divorce-court. Abe Hummel found the fake evidence; Abe managed the case; Abe mildly took a penitentiary sentence which rightly belonged to Morse; Abe spent a short while in prison, and Morse took Mrs. Dodge; Abe got out of jail and went to Europe—afterwards, Morse too went briefly to jail, and also went to Europe.
Morse was in the Atlanta penitentiary for two years, and he became a very sick man. His lawyer said so; his doctor said so; the daily papers said so. Morse was suffering from several incurable and necessarily fatal maladies. His lawyer said so; his doctor said so; and the daily papers said so. Morse was a dying man; he had only a few days to live; his will had been made; the funeral arrangements were about complete; the sermon on the virtues of the deceased was in course of preparation; the epitaph was practically written; and all that Morse wanted was, that Dodge’s wife, and his own, should not have to bear, throughout the remainder of her chequered existence, as the ex-wife of both Dodge and Morse, the bitter recollection that the man who took her from Dodge had died in prison.
Therefore, heavens and earth moved mightily for the pardon of Morse, the dying man. President Taft was so afraid that any delay might seem hard-hearted, and that Morse’s death in the penitentiary might haunt him with reproach the remainder of his life, he hurriedly pardoned one of the grandest rascals that ever was caught in the toils of the law.
Of course, the man was shamming all along; and with indecent haste he revealed himself as the robust, impudent, unscrupulous knave that he had been, when he was virtually murdering the destitute sick in New York by doubling the summer price of ice.
These cases are cited because they are recent, and have been universally discussed. They are examples of what Big Money can do, when it has a fixed purpose to gull the public, influence the authorities, and use the newspapers to defeat Justice.
Let us now consider the undisputed facts in the case of Leo Frank, about whom so much has been said, and in whose interest Big Money has waged such a campaign of vilification against the State and people of Georgia.
Far and wide, the accusation has been strewn that we are prejudiced against this young libertine because he is a Jew. If there is such a racial dislike of the Hebrews among us, why is it that, in the formation of the Southern Confederacy, we placed a Jew in the Cabinet, and kept him there to the last? [Narrator's note: Judah P. Benjamin was the Treasurer of the Confederacy and a very powerful man in the Confederate Cabinet.] Why is it, we are constantly electing Jews to the State legislatures, and to Congress?
The law-partner of the best criminal advocate at our bar, is a Jew. I refer to Judge H.D.D. Twiggs of Savannah, and his able associate, Mr. Simon Gazan.
The law-partner of the Governor of Georgia, is a Jew. I refer, of course, to Mr. Benjamin Phillips, the partner of the Honorable John M. Slaton.
The daughters of our best people are continually intermarrying with Jews; and Gentiles are associated with Jews in fraternal orders, volunteer military companies, banking and mercantile firms, &c., &c.
The truth of the matter is, that the lawyers and detectives employed to save Leo Frank were themselves the authors of the hue and cry about his being a Jew, and they did it for the sordid purpose of influencing financial supplies [narrator's note: he means -- to get in more donations for the Frank defense]. Wealthy Israelites all over the land have been appealed to, and their race pride aroused, in order that the lawyers and the detectives might have the use of unlimited funds. The propaganda in favor of Frank has been even more expensive than that in favor of Morse.
The rich Jews of Athens, Atlanta, Baltimore, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, &c., have furnished the sinews of legal and media war. I dare say the campaign has not cost less than half-a-million dollars [narrator's note: about $50 million dollars today. A car back then cost $500 and a house $2,000.] The lawyers have probably been paid at least $100,000 [narrator: the equivalent of $10 million today]. The Burns Detective Agency has no doubt also fingered $100,000. The publicity bills [narrator: for huge display ads in major newspapers across America screaming about antisemitism] in the daily papers must be enormous.
Under the law of Georgia, no man can be convicted on the evidence of an accomplice. The testimony in the case, apart from that of the accomplice, must be of such a character as to exclude every other reasonable hypothesis, save that of the defendant’s guilt.
Has any civilized State a milder code than that? Could any sane person ask that the law of Georgia should be more favorable to the accused?
The newspapers which sold themselves to the Burns propaganda, have said, and repeated, that Leo Frank was convicted on the evidence of a low-down, drunken negro.
It is not true. Under the law of Georgia, that cannot be done. And in the Frank case, it was not done.
Before going into the facts of this most horrible case, let us get our bearings by referring to other celebrated cases. Take, for instance, the case of Eugene Aram, which still possesses a melancholy interest, though the murderer paid his penalty 155 years ago. “The Dream of Eugene Aram” is one of Thomas Hood’s fine poems; and Bulwer made the story the basis of one of his best novels.
Eugene Aram, the learned, respected schoolmaster, was convicted upon the evidence of his accomplice. Apart from this, there was almost nothing against the accused. There was not even an identification of the skeleton of the deceased, which for thirteen years had been buried in a cave. For thirteen years the scholarly Aram had been leading a correct, quiet life, when he was arrested. His character, previous to the crime, was unblemished. Without the accomplice, there was no proof of the corpus delicti, nor of any motive; nor was there any corroboration that excluded the idea of defendant’s innocence.
But there was testimony to the effect that Aram was in company with Clark (the deceased) the last time Clark was seen in life; and Aram (like Frank) did not even try to tell what had become of the deceased.
This was the circumstance that weighed most against Aram—who confessed, after sentence of death!
One of the most celebrated of American cases was the murder in 1849 of Dr. George Parkman of Boston by Harvard professor John Webster, a man of great eminence and of spotless character, whose friends were numerous and of the highest standing. All New England was profoundly stirred when it was learned that Dr. Parkman had disappeared, and that he had last been seen entering the College where he went for the purpose of seeing Professor Webster on a matter of business.
In this case the controlling factor was that Dr. Parkman had disappeared into the Professor’s rooms, and had never reappeared. What became of him? Professor Webster could not answer.
When Rufus Choate, the greatest criminal lawyer in New England, was applied to by the friends of Professor Webster, he offered to take the case if they would consent for him to plead manslaughter. He meant to put the defense on the line, that the two men had had a quarrel in the laboratory; and that, in the heat of passion, the Professor had killed the Doctor. Webster’s friends declined this proposition, and Choate refused the case.
Webster was convicted, and confessed, after sentence of death!
-In the 1911 case of the Virginia wife-murderer, Henry Clay Beattie, the testimony was about on a par, in character and convincing power, with that against Frank in 1913, who was convicted; yet, like Frank, Beattie profeessed innocence, continuing to lustily cry out, “I am innocent! They are about to commit judicial murder,” and there were numbers of our most intelligent people who believed his lies.
He also confessed after he lost all hope of reprieve.
The standard books on evidence teach young lawyers that one of the most striking phases of human nature is, the inclination to believe.
Trained lawyers, entrusted with the lives of the Beatties, the Patricks, the Beckers, the Woodfolks, and the Franks, realize the value of the constant repetition, “I am innocent. I didn’t do it! They are about to commit judicial murder!”
Realizing it, they make use of it. Sometimes, they overdo it!
In the 1887 Tom Woodfolk case in Georgia, a splendid gentleman and first-class lawyer, John Rutherford, actually worked himself to death defending a guilty monster who killed his whole family with an ax, among them a precious little girl.
In the Flanigan case too, the best criminal lawyer in North Georgia, Hon. Bill Glenn, made himself a nervous wreck, toiling to save a wretched miscreant who was as guilty as hell, and who didn’t deserve a day out of the Book of Life of any respectable lawyer.
And I venture to predict that when Leo Frank’s attorneys get through with their labors for this detestable Sodomite, they will never again be what they were—in health, standing, or practice.
Now let us focus on Leo Frank:
He came down from New York to take charge of a factory where young Gentile girls worked for Hebrews, at a wage-scale of five or six dollars a week. [Narrator's note: about $50 a week today].
Leo Frank was a typical young Jewish man of business who loves pleasure, and runs after Gentile girls. Every student of sociology knows that the black man’s lust after the white woman is not much fiercer than the lust of the licentious Jew for the Gentile.
Leo Frank was reared in the environment of “the gentleman friend,” whose financial aid is necessary to the $5-a-week girl. Frank lived many years in that atmosphere. He came in contact with the young women who are paid the $5-a-week, and who are expected to clothe themselves, find decent lodgings, and pay doctor’s bills out of the regular wage of five dollars a week.
Leo Frank knew what this system meant for the girls. In fact, we all know what it means.... but we don’t like to say so. We prefer not to interrupt our bounties to Chinese charities, or check our provisioning of Belgian derelicts.
How gay a life Leo Frank led among the wage-slaves of the North, we do not know; but when he arrived in Atlanta, he seems to have kept the pace, from the very beginning.
To his Rabbi, he was a model young man; to the girls in the factory, he was a cynical libertine. The type is familiar.
[Narrator's note: Author Thomas Watson, the crusader for the working poor who was the Populist Party candidate for vice-president in 1896, is here dealing with a little-known aspect of the tragedy of starvation wages. Not only could a boss demand sex or he would fire the girl, but if a girl, earning a pitiful $50 a week, were merely hit with one large bill, and facing homelessness or no medicine for an illness, she would be at her employer's mercy.]
-[The disgusted Watson continues, sarcastically..]
A policeman must wear a badge to seize his prey, but the employer-seducer does not. If all the immoral “gentlemen” had to wear a seducer badge to church, attendance would plummet.
With prurient curiosity, the Hebrew Leo Frank used to hover about the locker room where the girls changed their dresses.
A girl from the pencil factory's fourth floor spent some time, and frequently, in this locker room, in company with Frank, and they were alone. Neither Frank nor the woman from the 4th floor had any legitimate business alone in the private room of the girls. One of Frank’s own defense witnesses, a white girl, testified to these facts.
Such things cannot be done in a factory without being known to somebody; and that somebody is sure to tell the others.
-That is why Mary Phagan detested and rejected him! She was a good girl; and, while her poverty forced her to work under Frank, she was determined not to yield to him in any dishonorable way. But her resistance had the natural result of whetting his depraved appetite.
-The lawyers for the defense put Frank’s character in evidence, claiming, via certain witnesses, that it was good. The prosecution had no right to question these witnesses as to details.
Then, the State, the prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, put up witnesses who swore that Frank’s character, as to lasciviousness, was bad. Again, the State was not allowed to go into details.
But the defense could have done so!
The law allows a defendant – thus attacked – to cross-examine the witnesses, as to the particular facts and circumstances which cause them to swear that the defendant is a man of bad character. In other words, the law of Georgia authorized Leo Frank to inquire of each one of these witnesses:
“What moves you to testify that I am lascivious? What is it that you know against me? What are the facts upon which you base your opinion? Tell me what you saw me do! Tell me what’s in your mind, and perhaps I can explain, rebut, and remove the evil effect of your testimony.”
That’s the position in which our law places a defendant. It gives him the privilege of sifting the witness, and of drawing from him the particular incidents, or circumstances which have caused him to believe that the defendant is bad.
It often happens that, when the defendant cross-examines these witnesses against his character, they give flimsy and absurd reasons, thus bringing ridicule upon themselves, and vindication to the accused!
All lawyers know this; and all lawyers – if they feel sure of their client -- put these character-witnesses through the hurdles.
Confident in the integrity of their client, they know that a cross-examination of the character-witnesses will develop the fact that they have been jaundiced by personal ill-will, and have made mountains out of mole-hills.
But Leo Frank’s lawyers did not dare ask any character-witness why she swore that Frank was a man of lascivious character! They feared the details that would come out!
-The Frank attorneys, Messrs. Rosser and Arnold, knew well their client, Leo Frank; they did not dare ask a single witness the simple question, “Why, exactly, do you swear that Frank’s character is bad?”
They did not dare to ask, “What is it that you know about him?”
They KNEW – that the answers would ruin whatever chance Leo Frank had; and that it would be suicidal to ask those white girls to go into the details of Frank’s hideous private life.
-In this connection, there is another ominously significant fact that should be weighed: Frank and his lawyers did not offer to allow him to be cross-examined.
Under our law, it is the right of the defendant to make his statement to the jury, and his attorneys may direct his attention to any fact which he omits. But the State cannot ask him a single question, unless he voluntarily offers to.
In this case, where the defendant, Leo Frank, claimed that the only material evidence against him was that of “a drunken negro,” an innocent man would have joyfully embraced the opportunity to save his life, and clear his name!
Isn’t it so? Can you imagine what objection you would've had to being questioned, had you been in Frank’s place?
You are innocent; you could have accounted for your whereabouts at the time Mary Phagan was being done to death.
You would have gladly said, “Ask me any question you like. I have nothing to hide. I am not afraid of that negro. I know that I didn’t commit the crime. I know that I can tell you where-I-was when Mary Phagan was killed.”
Did Frank do that? NO, INDEED!
-- Frank sat there and heard Jim Conley’s story. He sat there, and listened, hour after hour, as Luther Rosser, the giant of the Atlanta bar, cross-questioned the negro, and vainly exhausted himself in herculean efforts to shatter the rock of Jim Conley’s simple and straightforward account of the crime.
-He sat there as Jim Conley fitted the damning facts on him, Frank, and he did not dare to do what the negro had done. He did not dare to allow the Solicitor-General [narrator's note: in Georgia, “Solicitor-General“ is the word for the district attorney, that is, the prosecutor] to cross-question him, as his lawyer, Luther Rosser, had cross-questioned Jim.
Innocent? Was that the courage of conscious innocence?
No. Frank prepared a careful statement, and recited it to the jury, and did not offer to answer any question. He knew that he could not afford to!
Helen Ferguson, a co-worker at the pencil factory, had often picked up Mary Phagan’s pay-envelope for her; and had Leo Frank merely allowed Helen to do this that Saturday, he would not now be where he is, on trial for his life—and poor Mary Phagan would not be a memory of horror to him, and to us.
Why wouldn’t he let Helen Ferguson draw the pay-envelope that one time? Ah... he wanted Mary to come back personally to get it.
The next day was our Confederate Memorial Day; the next day is the Jewish Sabbath; the next day, in the morning, Mary Phagan is one of the sweetest flowers of the Sunny South; the next day, in the morning, she is seen of all men, rosy, joyous, pure and full of life and hope; the next day, in the morning, she goes to Frank for the withheld pay-envelope, with its poor contents of one dollar and twenty cents; and when she is lost to sight, on her way to the den where Frank is waiting for her, SHE IS LOST FOREVER.
No man or woman ever sees her more, until the lifeless body is found in the basement.
There were scratch-pad notes lying beside her; and Frank says that the “drunken Jim Conley” not only raped and killed the girl while he, Frank, was unconsciously at his usual work in his office -- but that Conley all by himself got the body down to the basement, and then secured the scratch-pad, and composed those four notes.
In those notes, the negro is not only made to say that a negro “did it, by his self,” but the negro is described so particularly, that he can be advertised for; and no attempt is made to lay it on the white man who is the only other man in the building!
Marvelous negro, this Jim.
As for little Mary Phagan, she was not quite fourteen years old, and the evidence is all one way as to what kind of girl she had been. As far back as the early days of March, 1913, Leo Frank had begun to ogle her, hang about her, and try to get her into a conversation. The little white boy, Willie Turner, swore to it, and no attempt was made to impeach him. He saw Frank endeavor to force his attentions on Mary, in the metal room; and he saw the girl back off, and say to Frank that she had to go and do her work. He heard Frank when he made the effort to use the job-lash on Mary, saying to her, significantly, “I am the Superintendent of this factory.”
What did that mean?! He had not spoken to her about her work, or about the factory affairs. He was trying to get a personal “chat” going, as he had a habit of doing with other women of the place; and when she excused herself, and was backing away from the man whom she instinctively dreaded, he used that species of employer's intimidation, “I am the Superintendent of this factory.”
Meaning what?
Meaning, “It lies in my power to fire you, if you displease me.”
Dewey Hewell, a white girl who had worked in the factory under Frank—and who knew him only too well—testified under oath that she had heard Frank talking to Mary frequently, and had seen him place his hands on her shoulders, and call her by her given name.
Former employee Frank Gantt testified that Leo Frank had noticed that he, Gantt, knew Mary Phagan, and remarked to him, that is, to Gantt, “I see that you know Mary pretty well.”
Yet, Leo Frank afterwards claimed that he did not know Mary Phagan!
Frank had been monkeying with girls who depended on him for work and economic survival. He was lascivious in character, according to twenty white-girl witnesses, whom Rosser and Arnold dared not cross-examine. Leo Frank’s lewdness drove him toward Mary Phagan, as two white witnesses declared. She repulsed him, as the evidence of white witnesses showed.
-Her work-mate, Helen Ferguson, applied for the pay-envelope on Friday, April 25th. Frank refused it, and so Mary went in for it herself on the morning of the 26th. She is seen to go up the elevator towards Frank’s office.. on the second floor.
He admits that she came to him in his office, and she got her pay!
But no mortal eye ever saw that girl again, until her bruised and ravished body—with the poor under garments all dabbled in her virginal blood—was found in the basement.
Where-was-Leo Frank?!
-It was proved by the testimony of Albert McKnight [narrator's note: McKnight was the husband of the black maid at the home where Leo Frank and his wife Lucie Selig lived; they lived with her parents] that Frank went home sometime near 1:30 pm that day; the parents were absent; he just stood at the sideboard in the dining room -- for five or ten minutes -- did not eat a morsel, and went out again -- toward the city.
A determined effort was made to break down this evidence, but it failed.
-On that same day, Frank wrote to his Brooklyn people that nothing “startling” had happened in the factory since his rich uncle had left. He stated that the time had been too short for anything startling to have happened. The tragedy had already occurred.
That night – he did something which he had never done before: from his home he called up the night-watchman, Newt Lee, and asked him over the telephone if anything had happened at the factory.
Now Mary Phagan’s body was lying in the basement; and in his agony of suspense and nervousness, Frank was trying to learn whether the corpse had been found!
At three o’clock that same night, Newt Lee found the body, and gave the alarm. Detective Sharpe called Leo Frank on the phone, asking that he come to the factory at once. Two police officers were sent for him, and he was found nervously twitching at his collar, and his questions were: “What’s the trouble? Has the night watchman reported anything? Has there been a tragedy?”
Why did he think there had been a tragedy at-the-factory?
-If he had paid off Mary Phagan as he says, and she had then gone her way out of the building and into the city—to attend the Confederate Veterans parade, or for something else—why was he calling up Newt Lee, Saturday night, asking if anything had happened at the factory?
NOBODY ELSE THEN KNEW THAT ANYTHING TRAGIC HAD HAPPENED TO MARY, ANYWHERE!
-He was haunted by the dead girl who lay in the basement. To save his soul, he could not get her off his mind! The gruesome thing possessed him, held him, tortured him. Thundering in his brain, all the time, were the terrifying words, “Know that your sin will find you out!”
-During the dreadful hours that followed Frank’s return to the factory, his agitated mind cast about for a theory, a scape-goat, that would keep the bloodhounds off his own trail. He insinuatingly directed suspicion toward Newt Lee, the innocent negro night watchman who, of course, was never there at all during the middle of the day. He not only hinted at Lee, and suggested Lee, but after somebody had planted a bloody shirt on Newt Lee’s premises, Frank asked that a search be made at Lee’s house. The bloody shirt was found, bloody on both sides! Unless the carrier of the dead body shifted the body from one side to the other, there was no way to account for blood on both sides of any shirt.
But worst of all, whoever planted the dirty old shirt, and smeared the blood on it, forgot to saturate it with the sweat of a black man! There was none of the inevitable, and unmistakable, African scent on that soiled garment—and yet the armpits of a laboring negro release plenty of African scent.
-Not only did Frank try to fix guilt on Lee, but he hinted suspicion of Gantt, the man who went to the factory on the fatal Saturday, after Mary had been killed, to get two pairs of old shoes which he had left on one of the upper floors.
Leo Frank demurred at Gantt’s going in, and made up a tale about the sweeping out of a pair of old shoes along with the litter and trash. But Gantt caught Frank in the falsehood, by asking him to describe the shoes that had been swept out. Frank “fell for it,” and described one pair. “But I left two pairs!” exclaimed Gantt, and Frank was silenced. Gantt went up, got the shoes, and left. Yet Frank tried to fasten suspicion on him.
Now, use your mother wit:
-Why did Frank never cast a suspicious eye, or a suspicious word, TOWARD HIS JANITOR, JIM CONLEY?
He was ready to put the dogs on the tracks of Newt Lee, the negro who worked there at night! He was ready to lead the pack in the direction of Gantt, the white man who had came on Saturday merely to fetch his old shoes.
But he was not ready to breathe the slightest hint toward Jim Conley, whom all the witnesses placed in the factory, and WITH FRANK, during the very time that Mary Phagan must have been ravished.
Why did he keep the hounds off the trail of Jim Conley? Why did he point the finger of suspicion toward Gantt and toward Lee, and never toward Conley?
There is but one answer—and you know what that is. Frank could not put the dogs after Conley, WITHOUT BEING RUN DOWN HIMSELF!
-In vain did the detectives who were working to get Frank off endeavor to trace evidence against Lee, and against the fired ex-employee Gantt. In vain did they labor to get the trail away from the men in that factory. But it was all right there, and no earthly ingenuity could move it.
On Monday, after the crime, Frank telegraphed to his fellow Jew, Adolf Montag, the factory owner, claiming that the factory had the case well in hand, and that the mystery would be solved. He had employed a Pinkerton detective, but this detective, fortunately, pinned Frank down as to where he was at the crucial hour on that Saturday.
-Scott asked Frank—“Were you in your office from twelve noon until Mary Phagan entered your office, and did you stay there until ten minutes before one, when you went to get Mrs. White out of the building?”
And Frank, answering his own detective, said that he was. Thus, his own admission, before his arrest, placed him near the scene of the crime, and AT THE TIME IT WAS COMMITTED.
-Scott again asked: “Then, from 12 o’clock to 12:30, every minute of that half hour, you were in your office?”
-Frank answered, “Yes.”
But he lied! The unimpeachable white girl, Monteen Stover, who had also come for her pay, testified at his trial that she went to Frank’s office, during that half hour, AND NOBODY WAS THERE!
-No wonder the infamous William J. Burns did his utmost, afterwards, to frighten this young woman – trying to force her to take back what she had sworn. No wonder he sent the Rabbi after her. He himself threatened her, and then entrapped her in the law office of Samuel Boorstein, and tried to hold her there against her will!
The brassy, shallow, pretentious scoundrel! He richly deserves to be in the penitentiary himself!
-Mind you, when Frank told his detective, Scott, that he was in his office during the half-hour between 12 o’clock and half-past twelve, he did not know that Monteen Stover had been there. He had not seen her; he had not heard her. He was employed at doing something else, and somewhere else. At what? And where?
In his statement to the jury, which Frank refused to give under oath, and so he was not cross-examined, in this statement which he'd had months to prepare, Leo Frank said, well, during the time of the crime he might have gone to the water closet. [Narrator's note: That is an old word for the toilet.]
In the note that lay beside Mary Phagan’s body, she is made to say that she was going to the water closet, when the “tall negro,” and he was supposedly all by “his self,” assaulted her.
And it was on the passage to THIS toilet, (which, by the way, adjoined Frank’s own separate toilet he got as the factory manager), yes, while heading to this toilet that the crime was committed.
This water-closet idea is found in those telltale “notes” —that Frank wants us to think the girl wrote while being raped – and where else do we hear of the water closet? Why, in Leo Frank’s final statement to the jury!
--Now, would a (quote) “drunken brute of a negro” (as the Frank defense team called the employee Newt Lee), after raping and killing a young white woman within a few steps of a white man’s private office, and with said white man inside of it, linger at the scene of his awful crime to compose four notes? Would he need any theory about the water closet?
Would he have been in an agony of labor to account for the presence of his victim, at that place? Not at all.
He would have left that point to take care of itself, and he would have struck a beeline for the distant horizon. Negroes committing rapes on white women do not tarry. Never! NEVER!!
They go, and they keep going, as though all the devils of hell were after them; for they know what will happen to them, if the white men get hold of them.
[Narrator's note: By way of background, the crime against Mary Phagan occurred during the 40-year period of 1880-1920, when lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan were at their peak, thousands of lynchings occurred, and many of them, about three-quarters, were for black men who had raped white women. Another quarter were for white men who had committed rape, murder or child-molesting. For example, on June 13, 1913, just a few months, in fact, after the Phagan murder, a black male, Benny Simmons, was seized from jail where he was under arrest for the alleged killing of a white girl, 16-year-old Susie Church in Anadarko, Oklahoma, stripped naked, coated in coal oil, set on fire, hanged, and while in flames, was shot to pieces .
The Enfault Democrat newspaper reported that [quote] “The negro prayed and shrieked in agony as the flames reached his flesh, but his cries were drowned out by yells and jeers of the mob. As Simmons began to lose consciousness, the mob fired at the body, cutting it to pieces. The mobsters made no attempt to conceal their identity, but there were no prosecutions." [End of quote] Thus, in publisher Thomas Watson's common-sense view, during that heyday of lynchings no black man would sit around, after raping a white girl just feet away from the white boss, and write four notes purporting to be the rape notes composed in mid-rape by the victim!]
[returning to Watson's article:]
--Now, as for Jim Conley, the factory janitor—where exactly was he, at the time when Frank was not in his office?
.
Mrs. Arthur White (the wife of a foreman at the pencil factory who was there with her husband as he finished up some work) swore that Jim Conley, or a negro man that looked like him, was at his place of duty, downstairs. He was sitting down, and there was nothing whatever to attract any especial attention to him.
.
This was at thirty-five minutes after twelve noon, and Mary Phagan had already been to Frank’s office, by his own statement, and had gotten her pay envelope and gone away. But gone where?
.
Toward the toilet? If so, Frank knew it, and Conley didn’t, for Conley was below, on another floor. Mrs. White puts him there.
.
Who, then, wrote the note about the water closet, and made Mary say she went to it “to make water?”
Where was Mary, when Monteen Stover looked into Frank’s vacant office? Where was Frank THEN? The supposed note by Mary said she went toward the toilet “to make water.” Frank’s statement to the jury was that he must have been at the toilet, at the moment when Monteen looked into his office. Great God! Then Leo Frank is putting himself in his jury statement at the very same place where the note puts Mary Phagan!
--Did you ever know the circumstances to close in on a man as these do on Frank?
Out of his own mouth, this lascivious criminal is convicted!
The men’s toilet used by Frank, and to which he said he may have, quote, “unconsciously” gone, and this is important to understand, was only divided by a partition from the ladies’ room to which, the note said, Mary had gone.
THEREFORE, LEO FRANK PLACES HIMSELF WITH MARY, and AT THE TIME OF THE CRIME!
--Furthermore, why did he pretend that he did not know Mary by sight? Why did he go to the morgue twice, and shrink away without looking at her? And then afterwards, in his statement, describe her appearance on the cooling table as fairly and as circumstantially as though he had been a physician, making an expert examination?
Why was he so completely riddled with suspense and anxiety that he “trembled and shook like an aspen” on his way to the police station?
And why, why did this white man never flare up with blazing wrath against the negro who accused him of the awful crime, and gladly embrace the opportunity to face the negro and, being supposedly innocent, put him to shame? Where is the innocent white man, here in Georgia, who is afraid to face a guilty negro?
Where is the white man who would have tamely taken that negro’s fearful accusation, as Frank took it? Would you, as the boss and a white man, have failed to confront your own lowly employee, the negro janitor Jim Conley?
====================
--Apart from every word that Jim Conley uttered, we have the following facts.
Frank’s bad character for lasciviousness; his pursuit of Mary Phagan, and her avoidance of him; his withholding her pay-envelope Friday afternoon and thus making it necessary for her to return to his office on Saturday; his presence in his office in the forenoon, and her coming into it at noon, to get the pay-envelope; her failure to reappear down-stairs, or up-stairs, and the absence of both Frank and Mary, from his office, during the half hour that followed Mary’s arrival in the office; the presence of Conley on the lower floor, at the necessary time of the crime; the inability of Frank to account for himself, at the necessary time of the crime; the utter failure of Frank to explain what became of Mary; his desperate attempt to place himself in his office at the time of the crime, and the unexpected presence of Monteen Stover there, and her evidence that he was out; his incriminating lie on that point, and his nervous hurry to get Mrs. White out of the building; his strange reluctance to allow Gantt to go in for his old shoes, and his falsehood on that subject; his refusal to allow Newt Lee to enter the building at 4 o’clock, P.M., although the night-watchman came at that hour, and begged to be allowed to go in and sleep; his conduct that night, calling up Lee, and asking the officers about the “tragedy,” when no tragedy had been brought home to him by any knowledge save his own; his efforts to throw the officers off the scent; his amazing failure to hint a suspicion of Jim Conley; his equally guilty fear of calling Daisy Hopkins to the stand—Daisy, the woman who was shown conclusively to have visited Frank at the factory, and who had no business there except in her peculiarly shameful line of business. It was this woman that Conley said he had watched through the keyhole, when Frank was sodomizing with her, and Frank’s lawyers dared not put her up, as a witness.
The blood marks are found, in the direction of the men’s toilet and the metal room; and Mary’s bloody drawers and bloody garter-straps show that she bled from her virginal womb, before she died. Around her neck was the cord that choked her to death. On her head was the evidence of a blow.
Frank could not have been off that floor. He could not have been far away. He had been in his office, with Mary, just a few minutes before. He was back in his office, at 12:35, seen by Mrs. White, and jumping nervously as she saw him. He stated that his temporary absence from his office may have been caused by a call of nature. Such a call would have carried him directly toward the place where the note said Mary went, for the same purpose!
Had you been on the jury, with all these links of circumstances fastening themselves together in one great iron chain of conviction, what would you have believed, as to Frank’s guilt?
Now consider Conley:
He was Frank’s employee, and to some extent his trusty. Frank didn’t mind Conley’s knowing about Daisy Hopkins, and other things of the same kind. Frank did not want Rabbi Marx to know anything of his secret sins, but he did not care if Conley knew. Therefore, Conley was the person to whom he would naturally turn when the Mary Phagan adventure went wrong. Frank needed help to dispose of the body, for Frank had a vast deal at stake. His social position, his business connections, his fellowship in the B’nai B’rith, his standing in the synagogue, his wife and mother and father and uncle—all these imperatively demanded that Frank dispose of that terrible dead girl!
Would Conley have cared what became of her body?
Do negroes who violate white women stay to dispose of the bodies? Never in the world. Their first thought is to get away themselves, and they do it, whenever they can.
What hindered Jim Conley, if he was the rapist, from being in the woods, sixty miles away, by the time Mary’s body was found Sunday morning? Nothing!
If he had raped and killed the girl, he could securely have gone out of the building, out of the city, and out of the State, before anybody knew what had become of Mary Phagan.
Frank couldn’t afford to run!
He had to stay.
Ask yourself this question:
Was it more natural for a negro to rape a white girl, and stay where he was, in the belief that he could lay the crime on a white man; or was it more natural for a white man to do it, remain where he was, and hope to fix it on a negro?
It is unnecessary to relate Jim Conley’s evidence in detail. He made out a complete case against Frank, and he was corroborated by white witnesses at every point where any of the facts came within the knowledge of others. Of course, there could be no witnesses to what he and Frank did with Mary’s corpse, but so far as the physical indications of the crime existed, they contradicted Frank, and corroborated Conley.
According to the allegations made by Conley’s lawyer, William M. Smith, the friends of Leo Frank made strenuous efforts to corrupt Conley, then scare him, and perhaps poison him, before the trial came on.
William J. Burns afterwards made a fool of Smith; but Smith did not attempt to escape from the allegations which he had formally, in a legal paper, made against the friends of Frank. According to Smith, Conley’s life was in danger, and measures were taken to protect it.
This is the Smith that the New York Times, World, &c., made such a loud noise over, when he went into a deal with Burns, to play the Nelms case against the case of Frank.
The indictment against Frank was found by the grand jury, on May 24th, 1913. He had been in jail since the Coroner’s jury had committed him May 8th.
His trial commenced on the 28th of July, and more than 200 witnesses were examined.
On the 25th of August the Judge, L.S. Roan, charged the jury, and they went to their room for deliberation. In a comparatively short time, they returned, saying they had made a verdict, and defendant’s attorneys, waiving his personal attendance, polled the jury. That is, each juror was asked if the verdict of guilty was his verdict.
This perfunctory right is the only one that the law allows a defendant at that stage of the trial.
Frank was asked on August 26th what he had to say, as to why the sentence should not be pronounced on him. He had nothing of consequence to say, and he was sentenced to be hanged on October 10th, 1913.
On October 31, Judge Roan denied a motion for new trial, and the case was taken to the Supreme Court, which reviewed the evidence and sustained Judge Roan, Feb. 17, 1914.
An extraordinary motion for new trial was made and overruled in April, 1914.
Then, the lawyers of Frank raised the point, that he had not been personally present when the jury rendered their verdict. This was treated as trifling with the law and with the court.
It never was a right, under English and American law, for a defendant to be personally present all the time; and it is the law that whatever he can waive, during his trial, his attorneys can waive.
Had Frank been personally present, he could not have done anything more than his lawyers did; to-wit, poll the jury. That is a formal, valueless right which is almost never exercised, and which never has panned out results in Georgia.
Jurors do not bring in a verdict until they are agreed: the verdict is each juror’s verdict. Otherwise, there is a dead-lock and a mistrial.
After the best criminal lawyers of the Atlanta bar had exhausted themselves in behalf of Leo Frank, the case was given to that calliope detective, William J. Burns—the fussy charlatan who hunts for evidence with a brass band, and a searchlight.
With an uproarious noise, he invaded Georgia, and breezily assumed that the Frank case had just begun. He began it all over again. He went to the factory to look over the physical indications, just as though the crime had not been committed a year before Burns got to Atlanta.
He raised his voice, in a boastful roar, and invited mankind to watch him, “the Great Detective,” as he went sleuthing over the premises of that factory. The way the man talked was something phenomenal, prodigious, cyclonic, cataclysmic. Every morning the papers were full of Burns, the Great Detective. Every day we had to eat, drink and digest Burns. Every night we had to think, talk and dream about Burns. The whole State, and all the papers, got to looking toward Atlanta, as a Mussulman does toward Mecca, for Burns was there.
With inconceivable rapidity, Burns made up his mind, and announced his decision. Nay, he roared it from the castellated battlements, so that the whole human race could hear.
He had discovered that the crime on Mary Phagan had been committed by a moral pervert of the worst type. He had discovered that no one who had been suspected and arrested, was guilty. The miscreant who did the deed was “at large,” and Burns knew where to get him when he wanted him.
Then Burns shot out of Georgia, and went North—presumably to put his hands on that miscreant who had never been suspected, and who in Burns’ own words, “is at large.”
Everywhere that Burns went, the noise was sure to go.
The papers resounded with Burns. The Baltimore Sun, (Abell) the New York Times, (Ochs) the New York World, (Pulitzer) and other Hebrewish organs proclaimed the joyful news, “Burns clears Frank!”
It was airily assumed that Burns was the coroner’s jury, the grand jury, the petit jury, the judge, the witnesses, and the lawyers.
What did it matter to this asinine mountebank that Frank’s case had been given, to the fullest measure, the liberal metes of our statutory law?
Is every man to have two trials, because he wants them? Is any man entitled to exceptional rules, usages and privileges?
Did the gunmen who shot Rosenthal get two trials?
They also were Jews, and they also were vehemently “innocent.” Yet they confessed before execution.
Is the richly connected Jew, Frank, entitled to better treatment in Georgia, than those indigent Jews got, in New York?
The Abells, and the Ochses, and the Pulitzers, did not raise much fuss for the Hebrew gunmen.
If Mary Phagan had been a Jewess, and Frank a Gentile, would all this scurrilous crusade against Georgia have been waged in the Jewish papers?
If Frank had killed a Jew, as the New York gunmen did, would these Jewish millionaires be so lavish with their money and their abuse?
Do they imagine that we care nothing for the Mary Phagans that are left alive?
Is no check ever to be put upon the employers of girls, who insolently take it for granted that the girls can be used for lascivious purposes?
Shall the Law trace no deadline around the children of the poor, and say to arrogant wealth, “Touch them, at your peril?”
Upon what monstrous theory of shoddy aristocracy, and commercial snobbery, is based on the idea that, in pursuing Mary Phagan, entrapping her, ravishing her, and choking her to death, this lascivious pervert did not foully outrage every decent white man who has a pure daughter, granddaughter, sister or sweet-heart?
Burns rooted around in several Northern cities, endeavoring to discover the criminal who “is at large.” Burns failed to find this criminal. Then he returned to Atlanta, and began his virtuous efforts to suppress, and to invent evidence.
For his dastardly campaign against Monteen Stover, he richly deserves to be tarred and feathered in every State where he shows his brassy face.
For his abortive purchase of the affidavits of Rev. Ragsdale and the deacon, Barber, he richly deserves a penal term.
In May 1912, President Taft, upon the recommendation of Attorney-General Wickersham, set aside some verdicts in some Oregon cases, in the U.S. Courts, upon the express grounds that WILLIAM J. BURNS AND HIS AGENTS HAD PACKED THE JURY-BOXES!
No wonder Burns skipped out—the braggart, the faker, the crook, the coward!
His right hand man, Dan Lehon, was expelled from the Chicago police force for being a detected crook; and Lehon is a better man, and a braver man, than the contemptible Burns.
It was on this bought and perjured evidence that Frank endeavored to secure a new trial, by the extraordinary motion.
An effort to suppress evidence is indicative of guilt: Frank did that.
An effort to fabricate testimony is indicative of guilt: Frank did that.
An effort to seduce the attorney of an accessory, and to have that attorney betray his client, is indicative of guilt, especially when the attorney in question is willing, but not able, to shift suspicion to his own client.
Encircling Frank, and nobody else, are these convicting circumstances:
Motive; opportunity; unexplainable movements, sayings and conduct; contradictory statements; presence at the time and place of the crime; attempts to inculpate innocent persons; efforts to intimidate witnesses, suppress evidence, and use perjured affidavits; and lascivious character in dealings with the girls in that factory.
Frank wanted Mary Phagan, not to kill her, but to enjoy her. His murder of the girl was incidental.
He did not resolve to choke her to death, until after he realized that if she left there alive, she would raise the town, and he would be lynched by the infuriated people.
Then he called for Conley’s help, and his plan was, to make away with the corpse.
And because he had used Conley, and was therefore afraid of what he might say, Frank never once suggested to the policemen, or the detectives, to question Conley. Question Newt Lee, BUT DON’T QUESTION CONLEY, THE DAY MAN, WHO WAS THERE WHEN MARY WAS!
Why did Frank ignore THIS negro, at that time, and try to fasten the guilt on the other negro, Newt Lee?
Newt could not implicate Frank; Jim Conley could.
There you are; and all the lawyer-sophistry in Christendom cannot get away from it.
“A drunken negro!” That shibboleth, of late adoption, is now the burden of Frank’s statements. In his many newspaper articles, in the editorials which the Jewish papers publish, in Burns’ various proclamations and war whoops, in the pleas of the lawyers, it all simmers down to Jim Conley, “a drunken brute of a negro.”
When did Conley become the black beast of the case?
Burns himself did not make him the scape-goat when he uproariously bore down upon Atlanta, and lifted the floodgates of his jackass talk. At that time, the guilty man “is a pervert of the lowest type; he has never been arrested; he is at large.” Burns was going to spring a sensation by pouncing upon somebody that had never even been suspected. He was going to show the Atlanta police and the Pinkerton Detective Agency that they ought all to have gone to school to William J. Burns, The Great Detective. Conley was not at large; Conley had been arrested, investigated, and relegated to his proper position as accessory.
Therefore, Conley was not the imaginary man that Burns THEN had, in his omniscient optics.
Not until all his turbulent efforts to find a straw man had failed, did he and Lehon bribe the poor old preacher, Ragsdale, and his poorer deacon, Barber, to swear that they had heard Conley tell another negro that he had killed a white woman at the pencil factory. It was the clumsiest, Burnsiest piece of frame-up that I had ever read; and I immediately picked it to pieces, in the weekly Jeffersonian.
The papers had barely reached Atlanta for sale on the streets, before Ragsdale broke them down and confessed—and now Burns is afraid to put himself within the jurisdiction of the Georgia courts.
When did Frank discover that Jim Conley was a drunken brute of a negro? Not while employing him, for two years! Not while allowing him to remain inside the factory, that Saturday afternoon, when Newt Lee was not permitted to come in and go to sleep. Not while Frank’s own detective was probing, here and there, this one and that one, in the effort to find a lead. Not while the Coroner had the case in charge. Not once did Frank aid the police, the Pinkerton Detective, or the City detectives, by so much as a suspicious look toward the drunken brute of a negro.
Why not?
This young, lascivious Jew is a Cornell graduate, is as bright as a new pin, and keen as a needle; but in the tremendous crisis in which he found himself, that Saturday afternoon, his brain was in a turmoil, “a whirling gulf of phantasy and flame.” Hence, having made a terribly criminal mistake, he followed it up, as most criminals do, by making minor mistakes.
It was a mistake to move that bleeding body. It was a mistake to lie to Gantt about those old shoes. It was a mistake to refuse to let Newt Lee enter. It was a mistake to show so much anxiety to get rid of Mrs. White. It was a mistake to call up Newt Lee and inquire whether anything had happened at the factory. It was a mistake to ask the men, Rogers and Black, whether a tragedy had taken place at the factory. But of course, the crowning mistake was, to take Jim Conley into his confidence, in the mistaken effort to dispose of the corpse.
The one mistake in calculation led to the other, and these two led to the third; to-wit, the writing of those four notes, in which he made the dead girl say she had gone to the toilet “to make water.”
Are you to be told that a drunken brute of a negro would seize a white girl, inside a house, on a quiet legal holiday, violate her person, choke her to death with a cord, and then sit down to write four notes about it? Are you to be told that a drunken brute of a negro would attempt such a crime, within a few steps of the white man’s office; and would leave the stunned, unconscious victim on the floor while he searched around to find a cord with which to choke her to death? The hands of the drunken brute of a negro would have been as much cord as he wanted.
When you put Jim Conley in the place of the murderer of Mary Phagan, you cannot budge an inch. Nothing going before the crime, points at him. Nothing that is shown to have happened at the time and place of the crime, points to him. Nothing that occurred afterwards, points to him. Against Conley, the only testimony is that of Leo Frank!
Had the State endeavored to convict Conley, it would have been met at the very threshold by the law which mercifully says the accomplice cannot convict the acc