Leo Frank Murder Case Level 1

Leo Frank Murder Case Level 1 Leonard Dinnerstein Leonard Dinnerstein is Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Arizona. This selection is an updated version of the account first published in his book The Leo Frank Case (1968), which was the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. The Leo Frank case began with the discovery of a murdered girl in the basement of the 1 National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, at about 3:30 A.M. on Sunday, April 27, 1913. The night watchman had gone downstairs to use the “colored” toilet, and his flashlight shone on a human heap in the corner. It turned out to be a hefty girl with matted blood on her hair, bruises and lacerations about her face, swollen and blackened eyes, a strong cord and two strips of her underdrawers pulled tightly around her neck, a protruding tongue, distorted hands and fingers, and a filthy dress. Sawdust and grime covered both the garment and the human form to such an extent that it was difficult to see immediately whether she was white or black. The night watchman called the police, who arrived within 10 minutes. The sister-in -law of one of the officers worked in the factory, and she was summoned to identify the victim. “Oh, my God,” she cried, “that’s Mary Phagan.” Because the body was found in the basement of the factory, the police went to the home of 2 Leo Frank, its manager, and brought him first to the mortuary to see it and then back to the scene of the crime. He did not recognize the dead girl, but after being given her name he checked his records and acknowledged that she had been paid the previous day, a Saturday. What would be revealed in the newspapers was that since it was Confederate Memorial Day, Mary had put on a fancy dress and silk stockings and had gone downtown to collect her wages. She planned to spend time afterward watching the Memorial Day parade and having fun with her friends. She reached the factory and was paid at about noon. Thereafter no one claimed to have seen her alive. As the police searched the basement for clues, they discovered two notes purportedly written 3 by the girl while being murdered! They read: 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 wright while play with me he said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long trall black negro did buy his slef That a person being attacked would have had time to pen such things was, of course, utterly 4 preposterous. However, more plausibly, some police thought they had been written by the murderer to push suspicion onto someone else. That was just about the only correct assumption the police made. In addition to these scraps of paper, which would thereafter be labeled the “murder notes,” 5 observers saw a path from a ladder to where the body was found; another trail from the body to the back door, which was open; blood-stained fingerprints on that door; and a girl’s hat and parasol, a ball of twine, and formed human excrement at the bottom of the elevator shaft. When the elevator was later used, it crushed everything at the bottom of the shaft and led to the spread of a foul odor. At the time no one realized how important these clues were and how significant was the crushing of everything at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Police sawed off a board in the door and took the corpse’s jacket with the intent of searching for fingerprints, but no report of such tests (if they were indeed done) was ever made. A couple of days later police arrested Jim Conley, the African-American janitor, after an informant observed him washing blood off a shirt; but the police lost the shirt before analyzing the blood. The nature of the corpse, the circumstances under which the white “little girl” was found, 6 and the kind of work that she had been forced into—laboring in a factory with male supervisors who probably “had their way” with their female employees—aroused a city that had not been so exercised since the 1906 riot in Atlanta. One of the reasons the populace reacted so violently to the child’s death stemmed from 7 changes caused by industrial exploitation. Mary Phagan’s family was among those rural dwellers who moved to the city in search of a better life. But a “better life” meant that everyone would have to be gainfully employed; most of the opportunities for children were in the new industrial establishments. Both Baptist and Methodist preachers (an overwhelming majority of Southern workers were either Baptists or Methodists) had warned their parishioners that urbanization and industrialization would sap their strength and corrupt their morals. But the industrialists who denied labor a living wage had no qualms about undermining Christian teachings. Since the 1880s Atlanta had transformed itself from a sleepy village into an industrial 8 metropolis. As cotton textile mills and other newly formed manufacturing enterprises proliferated, the city’s population mushroomed. Census takers counted fewer than 40,000 people in the city in 1880, but found 89,000 people there in 1900. By 1913 an estimated 173,000 persons lived in Atlanta. Despite the growth of the population there were not enough laborers, and the new entrepreneurs, many from the North, hired women and children to perform menial tasks. But wages were low (Mary Phagan had earned 10 cents an hour) and hours were long. Factory workers remained at their tasks from 6 A.M. to 6 P.M. except for Saturdays, when they finished at noon. Not only were the establishments in which they spent most of their days filthy, but safety and health regulations were almost nonexistent, and many a child caught a finger or hand while operating machinery. Atlanta proved a particularly harsh environment for workers. Thirty-five thousand families 9 had to make do with only 30,000 dwelling units in the city; recreational facilities were inadequate and health hazards abounded. From 1904 to 1911 the number of diphtheria cases in the city increased by 347 percent, typhoid fever increased by 307 percent, and tuberculosis increased by 602 percent. Not surprisingly, Atlanta had one of the nation’s highest death rates. Of 388 American cities, only 12 recorded more deaths per 1,000 people than Atlanta. The city also had an appallingly high crime rate and an inadequate police force. More children were arrested in Atlanta in 1905 than in any other city in America; 2 years later, only New York, Chicago, and Baltimore—cities with much larger populations—arrested more children than did Atlanta. That same year, 1907, the city counted 102,000 people and 17,000 arrests. It is no wonder therefore, that the 1913 president pro tem of the Southern Sociological Congress, then meeting in the city, stated, “If social conditions in Atlanta were of the best— if conditions in factories were of the best; and lastly, if children of such tender years were not forced to work, little Mary Phagan would probably never have been murdered.” No doubt such thoughts crossed the minds of mourners who were present while they laid the child’s body to rest. At Mary’s funeral her mother’s wailings interrupted the singing of “Rock of Ages” dozens of 10 times. “The light of my life has been taken. Oh, God,” her mother sobbed, “her soul was as pure and as white as her body.” Newspapers reported that before the completion of “Rock of Ages,” “there was scarcely a dry eye in the whole church.” The presiding minister proclaimed that he believed “in the law of forgiveness. Yet I do not see how it can be applied in this case. I pray that this wretch, this devil, be caught and punished according to the man- made, God-sanctioned laws of Georgia.” “The assault and murder of 14-year-old Mary Phagan,” the Atlanta Constitution reported, 11 “comprise the most revolting crime in the history of Atlanta. Homocide is bad enough. Criminal assault upon [a] woman is worse. When a mere child, a little girl in knee dresses, is the victim of both there are added elements of horror and degeneracy that defy the written word.” The editorial went on to denounce the “human beast with more than jungle cruelty and less than jungle mercy” who committed the crime. “The detective force and the entire police authority of Atlanta are on probation in the detection and arrest of this criminal,” the editorial warned. “All Atlanta, shocked at a crime that has no local parallel in sheer horror and barbarity,” the writer continued, “expects the machinery of the law to be sufficient to meet the call made upon it. If ever the men who ferret crime and uphold the law in Atlanta are to justify their function it must be in apprehending the assailant and murderer of Mary Phagan.” The police had been sloppy in the past and there had been 18 unsolved murders in the city 12 during the previous 2 years; the prosecutor had lost his two previous cases. This time, incompetence would not be tolerated. Law officers felt the city breathing down their necks. One day after the body’s discovery newspapers headlined the hiring of Pinkerton detectives.

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