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 a shirt at a faucet in the factory, thereby causing an anonymous informer to 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