The following is a bonus excerpt of R. Barri Flowers bestselling historical true crime short
The Killing of Mary Phagan 100 Years Later
On Saturday April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan, age thirteen, became the victim of a violent death at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia where she was employed. Her job at the factory was putting erasers into the metal casing atop pencils. The appalling crime left residents of the city outraged and wanting justice for the victim. Fingered for the crime and convicted was factory superintendent Leo Frank, a Jewish-American, who would be hanged by a lynch mob in spite of controversy surrounding Frank's guilt. The century old case was every bit as captivating and publicized as any high profile crime today—complete with a shaky investigation, anti-Semitism, racism, stereotyping, rush to judgment, injustice, and murder—with the effects and outcome of the case still being felt to this day.1
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Mary Phagan was born in Marietta, Georgia on June 1, 1899 to tenant farmers John and Frances Phagan. Following her father's death shortly thereafter from the measles, the family relocated to East Point, Georgia where Frances ran a boarding house while her children went to work in the mills.
Mary dropped out of school when she was ten years old and worked part-time for a textile mill. By 1911, she had gone to work for a paper manufacturing plant. The owner of the plant, Sigmund Montag, was the National Pencil Company treasurer. The following year, Frances Phagan married John William Coleman.
During the spring of 1912, Mary went to work for the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, where she operated a knurling machine that fitted rubber erasers into the metal casing atop pencils, earning $4.05 a week for a fifty-five hour work week. The factory superintendent was a twenty-nine-year-old Jewish-American named Leo Frank.
On the cool, crisp late Saturday morning of April 26, 1913, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan—who had been temporarily laid off earlier in the week because the factory was short on brass sheet metal—took the trolley to Atlanta from East Point in order to collect wages she was due for a twelve hour work week. Afterward, she had plans to get together with friends to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day—a holiday in some Southern states since 1866 that honored soldiers who fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War.
It was around noon when Mary arrived at the Pencil Factory, a four-story stone building in downtown Atlanta that encompassed the entire block of 37 to 41 South Forsythe Street. She came inside the main entrance on the first floor and made her way toward the stairway en route to the second floor, where she had performed her duties in the "tipping department" section of the metal room prior to being laid off. It was also the floor where factory superintendent Leo Frank's office was. Not far away from the stairs on the first floor was a hole, often covered by a hatch, which led to the basement via a ladder.
Mary Phagan went to Leo Frank's office, where he handed her a paycheck for $1.20. Frank would later acknowledge paying her and say that she left his office afterward.
This would be the last time Mary Phagan was seen alive by anyone who could attest to that.
* * *
Leo Frank was born in Cuero, Texas on April 17, 1884 to parents Rudolph and Rae Frank. A few months later, the family relocated to Brooklyn, New York, where Frank would later attend Pratt Institute for his high school education. He graduated in 1902 and enrolled in Cornell University, majoring in mechanical engineering and participating in sports, the debate team, and photography before receiving his degree in June 1906.
He was hired to work as a draftsman for a six-month stint by the B. T. Sturtevant Company in Hyde Park, Massachusetts before going back to New York to work for the National Meter Company as a testing engineer until October 1907.
In December 1907, Frank did a nine-month apprenticeship in Germany's Eberhard Faber pencil factory, learning the skills for pencil manufacturing. The following year, on August 6th, he moved to Atlanta, Georgia where he had a job waiting for him as the supervisor of the National Pencil Factory that his uncle, Moses Frank, had a stake in.
Shortly upon his arrival in Atlanta, Leo Frank met Lucille Selig, a member of a prominent Jewish family whose ancestors had founded Atlanta's first synagogue. In November 1910, the two married, living at the home of Lucille's parents on East Georgia Avenue.
By 1913, Atlanta's Jewish community was the largest in the South. The year before, Frank had been elected as president of the city's chapter of the Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith. The Franks had settled comfortably into a "cultured and philanthropic milieu whose leisure pursuits included opera and bridge."2
Leo Frank, who was five-foot-six, of slender build, and on the frail side, wore thick glasses. He had successfully served as supervisor of the National Pencil Factory for five years with seemingly no problems to speak of until the day Mary Phagan became the victim of foul play.
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It was around 3:15 a.m. on Sunday, April 27th that the factory's night watchman, an African American named Newt Lee, went into the basement to use the toilet meant for Negros and came upon the dead body of a young girl. She was dirty, disheveled, and appeared to have been severely beaten.
Aghast at the horrifying image, Lee quickly reported what he had found to the police by phone. When the authorities arrived, Lee met them at the Pencil Factory's front entrance and led them to the basement, which was about 200 feet long with an earthen floor and described as "a filthy catacomb littered with trash, coal dust, sawdust, and ashes, and lighted by a gas jet."3
They found the deceased girl's body in the back of the basement close to the incinerator and separated from the elevator shaft by 136 feet. The police noted that the girl, with her face down, was badly bruised, cut, bloodied, and darkened from soot off the floor. She was further described as having "dirt in her eyes, cinders in her mouth and nostrils...a black eye, [tongue that was] swollen and protruding...wounds on her scalp and below the knee and scratches on the elbow, and her clothing ha[d] been torn."4
Her dress was lifted up to her waist and there was blood found on her underthings to suggest she had been sexually assaulted. A piece of her undergarment was tied around the girl's neck. There was also a seven-foot piece of wrapping cord looped tightly around the victim's neck.
There were two notes found amidst a mound of garbage near the girl's head. One, written on white lined paper, read: "He said he wood love me land down play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef."5 The second note, scrawled on a blank carbon copy of the pencil factory's lined order sheet, 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."6
While trying to make sense of the cryptic, unintelligible notes, it was clear to the police that the girl had been cruelly murdered and that a killer was on the loose.
They discovered that someone had messed with a sliding door by a service ramp in the basement that led into an alley, allowing the door to open without the need to unlock it first. Bloody fingerprints were found on the door and a metal pipe that was substituting for a crowbar, as well as on the dead girl's jacket.
In a further investigation of the crime scene, police discovered an intact clump of human excrement in the elevator shaft. Once the elevator car dropped to the basement thereafter and touched the ground, it pressed into the feces and a putrid scent filled the air.
Later in the morning, a worker in the factory who was related to one of the police working the case was brought to the scene. She identified the decedent as her coworker, thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan. Missing was the victim's purse, along with the $1.20 she had purportedly collected from superintendent Leo Frank.
* * *
With the media picking up on the murder of young Mary Phagan, the police were under pressure right away to identify and apprehend her murderer.
Given that he had been the one to contact police and allegedly discovered the body with the bizarre notes left near the corpse, suspicion was cast on National Pencil Factory night watchman Newt Lee. On Sunday, April 27th, the dark-skinned, tall, slender man was arrested, suspected of being involved in the crime.
Also arrested the same day was ex-streetcar driver Arthur Mullinax—who had often driven Mary Phagan to work and back—after a witness reported seeing them together on Saturday, with Phagan giving the appearance of having been in a daze or drugged.
The following day, two more men were under arrest suspected of being a party to Mary Phagan's murder. John Gantt had previously worked for the National Pencil Factory as a bookkeeper and made no secret of his attraction to Phagan. He was taken into custody in Marietta before he could climb aboard a train. The other man arrested in connection with the murder was an unidentified African American.
The Atlanta Constitution and Atlanta Georgian newspapers offered more than $2,000 in reward money in total to anyone who could provide information that resulted in the capture of Mary Phagan's killer.7
At the same time, police had to break up a white mob that wanted to lynch Newt Lee, believing he was Phagan's killer.
* * *
As the suspects in custody were being interrogated, unbeknownst to the public, the police were also routinely questioning National Pencil Factory superintendent Leo Frank about Mary Phagan's murder.
* * *
Suspicion began to fall on Leo Frank nearly from the start. Upon discovering Mary Phagan's body, Newt Lee indicated he had tried phoning Frank for eight minutes, to no avail. The police followed up on this by attempting to call Frank themselves at four a.m. and also got no answer.
They went to his house the morning of April 27th and reported that Frank seemed nervous and was shaking during questioning, and as he was taken to the undertaker in the P. J. Bloomfield's Mortuary to see the dead girl before daybreak and then the factory. According to Frank, he had remained in his office for around twenty or so minutes after Phagan picked up her paycheck. However, another young woman who worked at the factory and came to pick up her own check just after Phagan, claimed she did not see Frank in his office and left a few minutes later empty-handed.
Leo Frank, whom the police remained suspicious of, tried to help his cause by hiring two Pinkerton detectives to assist in the investigation to bring a killer to justice.
* * *
On Tuesday, April 29th, Mary Phagan was laid to rest in Marietta, Georgia even as the investigation into her brutal murder continued. Though Newt Lee was still considered a strong suspect in her death, more and more focus was put on Leo Frank. At eleven-thirty that morning, he was arrested at his office by police and charged with Mary Phagan's murder. The headline for that day's Atlanta Georgian in announcing Frank's arrest was: "Police Have the Strangler."8 For his part, Frank maintained his innocence, as did Lee, with Frank actually interrogating Lee at one point as perhaps the true killer. Earlier, a detective had uncovered a bloodstained shirt from Lee's apartment that was hidden in a burn barrel. Apart from the blood that was mostly around the armpits, the shirt appeared unworn. Newt Lee argued that the blood was his own, caused by an injury. Later, the prosecution in Leo Frank's trial would assert that Frank had planted the shirt in Lee's residence to try to implicate him for the murder of Mary Phagan.
At an inquest into Phagan's death on April 30th, her friend and coworker at the pencil factory, thirteen-year-old George Epps, testified that Phagan was fearful of Leo Frank who had been flirtatious with her and had also made advances toward her. Newt Lee further testified that Frank seemed nervous the day Phagan was murdered and had phoned him to check on things at the factory, something the superintendent had allegedly never done before. Two mechanics, who had been working on the factory's top floor that day, challenged Lee's claim, arguing that Frank's behavior was normal to them.
On May 1st, Arthur Mullinax and John Gantt were set free, no longer considered suspects in Phagan's murder, while Newt Lee and Leo Frank remained in custody.
The press was unaware that another suspect had emerged. That same day at about two in the afternoon, James (Jim) Conley, a twenty-nine-year-old African American janitor at the National Pencil Factory since 1911, was arrested by police. This came after the factory's day watchman, E. F. Holloway, observed him on the second floor scrubbing red stains from a blue shirt. Conley, who was short, brawny, and light brown skinned, initially attempted to hide the shirt. When that failed, he claimed the reddish coloring on it was actually rust that came off a pipe overhead where he had hung the shirt. Detectives gave the shirt a cursory examination and decided the stains were not blood without formal testing, and returned the shirt to the suspect.
The following day, Leo Frank and Newt Lee were adamant in proclaiming their innocence to a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, with Frank expressing confidence that the ongoing investigation would prove he had nothing to do with the crime.9