Georgia has had a number of heinous crimes. One of the most notorious was the case of Leo Frank. In 1913, Frank, a Jewish man in Atlanta, was tried and convicted of raping and murdering Mary Phagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked at the National Pencil Company, where Frank was manager.
Frank was the last person to admit seeing Phagan shortly after she arrived to pick up her $1.20 pay for 12 hours of work. Her bruised and bloodied body was found later that night by a watchman, who called the police. The watchman was initially a suspect, but soon everything—especially public opinion, stirred by anti-Semitism—pointed to Frank as the killer.
The state’s main witness was Jim Conley, a black janitor who had been seen washing bloodstains from a shirt. Testifying for the state, he gave four different and contradictory statements about helping Frank dispose of the body.
Frank was convicted. Within days, many influential Jews from the North offered help with his appeals. After all the appeals were exhausted, Georgia governor John Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment.
Slaton’s action angered many and led to the abduction of Frank from his jail cell in Milledgeville by a mob of prominent citizens from Phagan’s hometown of Marietta. The men drove Frank back to Marietta and hanged him from an oak tree.
Belated justice was served more than 70 years later when the Georgia State Board of Pardons pardoned Frank. Its decision was based on testimony by Alzonzo Mann, 83, who was an office boy at the pencil factory when he saw Jim Conley carry Mary Phagan’s body to the basement. Conley allegedly had threatened to kill Mann if he talked.
The case has been the subject of a television miniseries, The Murder of Mary Phagan (1988); a Broadway musical, Parade, by Alfred Uhry; and several books. The most recent and most definitive work is And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank by Steve Oney, published in 2003.
Atlanta’s Missing and Murdered Children From the summer of 1979 until the spring of 1981, Atlantans lived under a cloud of fear and suspicion. During that period, 29 African-American children, teenagers, and adults were killed. Neighbors began to distrust neighbors. Strong rumors circulated that the murders were racially motivated.
In May 1981, police detectives staked out at a bridge over the Chattahoochee River got a break when they heard a splash in the water beneath the structure. A white 1970 station wagon was seen driving away from the bridge. A patrol car and an unmarked vehicle with federal agents followed it. The driver of the car, a young black man named Wayne Williams, was questioned and released. Two days later, the naked body of Nathaniel Cater was found floating a few miles from the bridge where Williams’s car had been stopped. Police began collecting fibers and other evidence connected to Williams.
On June 21, 1981, he was arrested and indicted for the deaths of Cater and another victim, Jimmy Ray Payne. On February 27, 1982, Williams was found guilty of the two murders and sentenced to two consecutive life terms in prison. Although some officials speculated that Williams was responsible for other deaths, no one has ever been charged in the remaining cases. Williams, meanwhile, still maintains he is innocent.
Centennial Olympic Park Bombing The festive atmosphere of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta was shattered when a bomb exploded in the midst of thousands of spectators at a post-games concert in the park. Two people died as a result of the bombing, and 111 were injured.
Richard Jewell, a security guard who had alerted Georgia Bureau of Investigation officials to a suspicious-looking knapsack, was first hailed as a hero and later scrutinized as “a person of interest.” The remains of the knapsack were analyzed and found to have contained nails and three pipe bombs. Other bombings in Atlanta and Birmingham eventually led the FBI to Eric Robert Rudolph as the prime suspect. Despite being the focus of a nationwide manhunt with a $1 million reward, Rudolph disappeared into the Appalachian Mountains for five years. He was arrested on May 31, 2003, in Murphy, North Carolina, and is now serving a life sentence without possibility of parole.
Fulton County Courthouse Shootings On March 11, 2005, Brian Nichols, who was on trial for rape and false imprisonment, escaped from the Fulton County Courthouse and allegedly went on a killing spree. The Fulton County district attorney’s office contends that the following events took place. After overpowering and beating a female deputy, Nichols took her pistol and went to the private chambers of Judge Rowland W. Barnes. Nichols then shot and killed the judge and a female court reporter. As Nichols fled the courthouse, he returned fire on Deputy Sergeant Hoyt Teasley, killing him. Several carjackings later, Nichols allegedly shot and killed United States customs agent David Wilhelm at his home near Lenox Square Mall. Nichols then forced a woman named Ashley Smith into her apartment, where he tied her up. After several hours, Smith convinced Nichols to surrender. Three years later, Nichols was found guilty by a Fulton County jury.
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil The death of a hustler in Savannah and the subsequent four murder trials of a respected art dealer in the 1980s would have remained primarily a local-interest story were it not for a New York author fascinated with the eccentric characters and gothic atmosphere of the coastal city.
Art dealer Jim Williams was accused of killing Danny Hansford, a young man with whom he was suspected of having a sexual relationship. Hansford was shot and killed in a house built by an ancestor of Savannah native and songwriter Johnny Mercer. Williams was finally acquitted eight years later, but by then John Berendt, a former editor of New York magazine, had moved to Savannah and begun writing Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), a book that would forever change the city.
Although the trials are at the heart of the book, Berendt also captures the city and its residents. The real-life characters include the Lady Chablis, a black drag queen and entertainer; pianist Emma Kelly (“the Lady of 6,000 Songs”); Sonny Seiler, Williams’s defense attorney and owner of Uga, the University of Georgia’s bulldog mascot; and Minerva, a self-described voodoo “root doctor.”
The book became an international bestseller that put Savannah on the map as a tourist destination. In 1997, Clint Eastwood’s film version premiered in Savannah. It featured Kevin Spacey as Jim Williams and Jude Law as Danny Hansford. The Lady Chablis played herself.
The Woolfolk Murders On August 6, 1887, Richard and Mattie Woolfolk, their six children, and an elderly female visitor were brutally slain with an ax at their plantation near Macon. The Woolfolks’ stepson, Tom, was the only survivor and chief suspect. Although he proclaimed his innocence, blaming the crime on unknown killers, he was tried and hanged on October 29, 1890.
The Alday Family Murders In a crime with echoes of In Cold Blood, Truman Capote’s account of the 1959 Clutter family murders in Kansas, six members of the Alday family were shot to death execution-style in 1973 in Donaldsonville. The victims were Ned Alday; his sons Jimmy, Jerry, and Chester; Jerry’s wife, Mary; and Ned’s brother Aubrey. The murders were cold blooded and random. Carl Isaacs, Wayne Coleman, and George Dungee had escaped from a minimum security prison in Maryland and happened upon the Aldays’ mobile home. They broke in and waited as members of the family began arriving separately that afternoon. The three fugitives raped Mary Alday. Isaacs’s 15-year-old brother, Billy, accompanied the gang but did not take part in the killings. Carl Isaacs remained on death row until he was executed 30 years later in 2003.
The Mark Barton Killings In July 1999, Mark Barton, who had lost thousands of dollars as a day-trader in the stock market, opened fire at two Atlanta brokerage firms, killing nine people and injuring 12 others before committing suicide. Later, police discovered the bodies of Barton’s wife and two children, who had been bludgeoned to death earlier that week.
Death and the Dentist In 2006, prominent Gwinnett County dentist Bart Corbin pleaded guilty to killing his wife and a former girlfriend in a case that shocked the Atlanta suburbs. The wife’s death appeared at first to be a suicide, but police found similarities to the death of a woman Corbin had dated 14 years earlier. In the best-selling true-crime book Too Late to Say Goodbye, author Ann Rule reveals some of the secrets in a troubled marriage that had appeared on the surface to be perfect.
Two of the worst plane crashes involving Georgians happened half a world apart.
On June 3, 1962, a chartered Boeing 707 carrying many of Atlanta’s cultural and civic leaders crashed on takeoff at Orly Field near Paris, France. The 122 victims included members of the Atlanta Art Association returning after a museum tour of Europe. The tragedy was a devastating blow to Atlanta’s arts community. In an outpouring of sympathy, millions of dollars were donated to the Atlanta Art Association for the creation of the Memorial Arts Center, later renamed the Woodruff Arts Center.
The second tragic air disaster occurred on April 4, 1977, when a Southern Airways DC-9 jet crashed in the small community of New Hope during a hailstorm. Sixty-eight people were killed and 27 injured. The plane hit a grocery store and several cars before exploding.
On December 7, 1946, some 120 persons were killed when flames erupted through the 15-story Winecoff Hotel in Atlanta. Of the 160 hotel guests who survived, many were badly burned or suffered fractures when they leaped from windows. The hotel fire remains the worst in the nation’s history.
On November 6, 1977, some 39 people were killed when an earthen dam at Toccoa Falls burst and sent a 30-foot wall of water onto the campus of Toccoa Falls Bible College. Twenty of the victims were children.
Flooding as a result of Tropical Storm Alberto in July 1994 is considered the worst natural disaster in Georgia’s recorded history. The storm dumped up to 28 inches of water in some areas. A third of the state’s counties were declared federal disaster areas.
Hurricanes took a heavy toll on life and property in Georgia in the 19th century. On August 27, 1881, some 700 were killed when a storm hit the Georgia coast. More than 1,000 were killed and 30,000 were left homeless when a major hurricane hit the Georgia and South Carolina coasts on August 27 and 28, 1893. And an estimated 179 were killed when a Category 3 hurricane hit Savannah on August 31, 1898. In 1911, a Category 2 hurricane hit Savannah, killing 17 people. The city was hit again in 1940, suffering a death toll of 50.
Hurricane Hugo (1989), Hurricane Bertha (1996), Hurricane Fran (1996), and Hurricane Floyd (1999) caused massive evacuations and property damage in the millions but resulted in no reported deaths.
The worst tornado disaster in Georgia, and the fifth-deadliest in United States history, occurred in April 1936 when two tornadoes struck Gainesville, killing an estimated 203 people and causing $13 million in property damage.
Nineteen were killed and more than 100 were injured in February 2000 as tornadoes ripped through Camilla in southwestern Georgia.