Full Answer
Based on reports of when Frank was kidnapped, at about what time was he hanged? 2. You are one of the attorneys hired by Leo Frank to defend him in the murder trial. Come up with different defense tactics than what was originally proposed during Leo Frank's trial. 3. Stage a mock trial of the Leo Frank Case.
Jan 13, 2022 · Three years ago Mr. Mann, a resident of Bristol, Va., after keeping silent since 1913, said in a sworn statement that Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil merchant, was innocent of the murder of 14-year-old Mary Phagan at an Atlanta pencil factory. He said the real killer was Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory.
Nov 24, 2020 · I said there were three strangling deaths. The third is the strangling to death of the truth. Much of the real history of this case, and the actual, primary evidence that was brought to light at the time, is almost unknown today – at least to that vast majority who consume the academic works, popular dramatizations, articles, and books that have addressed the subject …
But when the governor of Georgia commuted Frank's sentence in 1915 to life in prison, an outraged mob stormed the state penitentiary. Calling themselves “The Knights of Mary Phagan” they kidnapped Frank, carted him off to Phagan's hometown of Marietta, and on August 17th, lynched him. Leo Frank was 31 years old.Aug 17, 2021
Jim Conley died sometime in 1962. However, it's been alleged he confessed on his deathbed to killing Mary Phagan. But there is no evidence to support this claim. However, it came out that Annie Maude Carter, Conley's girlfriend at the time, claimed Conley told her he had killed Mary Phagan.Oct 5, 2019
Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan is found sexually molested and murdered in the basement of the Atlanta, Georgia, pencil factory where she worked. Her murder later led to one of the most disgraceful episodes of bigotry, injustice and mob violence in American history.
Mount Carmel CemeteryLeo Frank / Place of burialFrank was buried in Mount Carmel Cemetery in Queens, New York. His lynching was one of 22 in Georgia in 1915.
31 years (1884–1915)Leo Frank / Age at death
Leo FrankSummary. Dramatizing the true story of Leo Frank, a factory manager who was convicted of the murder a 13-year-old girl, a factory worker named Mary Phagan, in Atlanta in 1913. His trial was sensational and controversial and at its end, Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan and sentenced to death by hanging.
Newt Lee, an African American night watchman at the Factory who had discovered Mary's body, is arrested on suspicion of murder. ... Newt Lee and Leo Frank are ordered by a coroner's jury to be held under the charge of murder. May 13, 1913. Rumors abound that notes that have been discovered near Mary's body.
Frank denied knowing Phagan by name, but police reported that he seemed nervous. Detectives then took Frank to the morgue to view Phagan's body and to the scene of the crime, where they observed his behavior, before concluding, for the time being, that he was not likely the murderer.
The Leo Frank case is one of the most notorious and highly publicized cases in the legal annals of Georgia. A Jewish man in Atlanta was placed on trial and convicted of raping and murdering a thirteen-year-old girl who worked for the National Pencil Company, which he managed. Before the lynching of Frank two years later, ...
Leo Frank. Frank was not arrested until April 29, the evening of Phagan's funeral, when public outrage regarding her murder reached a fever-pitch. Under pressure to solve the case, detectives re-examined information they had been given earlier.
In 1915 Georgia musician Fiddlin' John Carson wrote a ballad about Mary Phagan, which he performed on the steps of the state capitol to protest the commutation of Frank's sentence. Ten years later the song was recorded as "Little Mary Phagan" by Moonshine Kate, Carson's daughter, and around the same time Carson recorded a related song, ...
Dorsey, the jury convicted the defendant. Frank's attorneys were unable to break Conley's testimony on the stand. They also allowed evidence to be introduced suggesting that Frank had many dalliances with girls, and perhaps boys, in his employ.
On April 26, 1913, Mary Phagan, the child of tenant farmers who had moved to Atlanta for financial gain, went to the pencil factory to collect her week's wages. Leo Frank, the superintendent of the factory, paid her. He was the last person to acknowledge having seen Phagan alive. In the middle of the night, the factory watchman found her bruised and bloodied body in the cellar and called the police. The city was aghast when it heard the news. Rumors spread that she had been sexually assaulted before her death. The public demanded quick action and swift justice.
After Slaton's commutation, Frank was interned at a prison farm in Milledgeville for just under two months. During his internment, a fellow prisoner slashed Frank's throat with a knife, though he survived. Frank's stay at the prison farm was cut short on the night of August 16, 1915, when twenty-five prominent citizens of Marietta , identifying themselves as the Knights of Mary Phagan, caravanned to Milledgeville, took Frank from his cell, and drove him back to Marietta, Phagan's hometown, where they hanged him from an oak tree. Only months later, many of these same men would take part in the nighttime ceremony at Stone Mountain that established the modern Ku Klux Klan.
Mary Phagan, a 13 year old factory worker , became a symbol of child labor and the issues it posed. Leo Frank, a Jew and the manager of the factory, represented a northern capitalist who was viewed as exploiting young children. 2.
affidavit: a sworn statement in writing; a declaration in writing, signed and made upon oath before an authorized magistrate. Anti-Defamation League: formed in 1913, the Anti-Defamation League's mission is "to stop the defamation of the Jewish people and to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike".
DNA would be one of the main tools investigators would have used to identify the real killer. Witnesses would certainly be questioned, but the use of polygraph tests – while not admissible in court – might be considered in deciding the identity of the killer.
bias: a leaning of the mind; propensity or prepossession toward an object or view, not leaving the mind indifferent; bent inclination. commute (the sentence): to diminish; as, to commute a sentence of death to one of imprisonment for life.
chief executive: the person who holds the office of head of state of the government defense. attorney: a lawyer representing the accused. due process: the administration of justice according to established rules and principles. industrialism: devotion to industrial pursuits; labor; industry.
lynching: to inflict punishment upon, especially death, without the forms of law, as when a mob captures and hangs a suspected person. pardon: the act of pardoning; forgiveness, as of an offender, or of an offense; release from penalty; remission of punishment; absolution.
petition: a written document that people sign to show that they want a person or organization to do or change something. populist: a member of the People's party. propaganda: any organization or plan for spreading a particular doctrine or a system of principles.
Events took an ugly turn in August 1915. The guilty verdict was upheld after nearly 13 appeal attempts and all legal appeals options were exhausted. Then, outgoing governor John Slaton, who was given a partnership with one of Leo Frank’s attorney’s law firm, shocked the Georgia public through this conflict of interest by commuting the death sentence to life in prison. The people were outraged, taking to the streets and marching in angry protest in major cities around Georgia.
He was married in 1910, living with his wife’s parents at their home on 68 East Georgia Avenue (now an overpass). Atlanta had more than a few Jewish residents in those days, some 3,000 families and Leo was a high-degree member of B’nai B’rith, a quasi-Masonic Jewish lodge. In 1912, he was elected president of the Atlanta B’nai B’rith chapter known affectionately by its members as ‘The Gate City Lodge.’
Due to his prominent position at the plant as well as in the Atlanta Jewish Community, Frank was not an immediate person of interest. German Jews had established a reputation in the South as being well assimilated, mannered, hard working and industrious. Frank had a good outward reputation, and provided jobs for hundreds of people at his factory. Suspicion later fell on him when employees spoke of his sexual harassment of female child employees and of his curious interest in office boys.
The evidence was overwhelmingly clear at the trial, yet one of Frank’s attorneys, Reuben Arnold, in desperation argued that the defendant was treated unfairly simply because he was Jewish, thus playing the “anti-Semitism card” to the best of his abilities. Frank was tried in a one month long trial, convicted on August 25th, 1913, by the jury with a recommendation of “no mercy” and sentenced to death by Judge Roan. However, this was not the end. Expensive private investigators from the Burns Detective Agency funded by the Atlanta Jewish community even came up with another suspect—once again, a black—but the allegations went nowhere and turned out to be a fraud.
In 1986, after failing to do so in 1983, and under heavy outside pressure from the Jewish community, the State of Georgia pardoned Leo Frank. The decision was essentially based on the premise that the State of Georgia failed to adequately protect Leo Frank, which was true. But as we already know, this had little to do with his actual guilt or innocence in the case. And, it must be recognized that the governor was acting in a conflict of interest to commute Frank’s sentence to life-in-prison, which was illegal. Nevertheless, the State of Georgia failed to recognize this obvious fact and granted the pardon. Still, it had a key proviso no one could fail to notice. It was granted “…without attempting to address the question of guilt or innocence”. The pardon was followed by a four hour TV “docu-drama” starring Jack Lemmon with a very predictable and politically correct storyline, but the 1986 pardon did not exonerate Leo Frank of the crime in any way.
Mary Phagan’s life, and the horrors she endured in her last moments, are almost forgotten except as a backdrop for Frank’s persecution and death at the hands of alleged anti-Semites. Her tragedy, and her family’s grief and outcry for justice, have been turned into little more than footnotes.
Late on Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, brightly dressed for the parade and festivities that were to take place that afternoon to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, Mary Phagan went to pick up her pay of $1.20 from factory superintendent and part-owner Leo Frank.
If there was prejudice against Leo Frank in 1913 Atlanta, it was almost certainly not because he was a Jew.
William Randolph Hearst, owner of the Atlanta Georgian and inventor of “yellow journalism.”. His paper eventually adopted a pro-Frank stance, but even his paper’s reportage was consigned to the memory hole. Many of the Georgia n’s articles are transcribed now (on leofrank.info) for the first time since 1913.
ON SATURDAY morning at 11:30AM, April 26, 1913 Mary Phagan ate a poor girl’s lunch of bread and boiled cabbage and said goodbye to her mother for the last time. Dressed for parade-watching (for this was Confederate Memorial Day) in a lavender dress, ribbon-bedecked hat, and parasol, she left her home in hardscrabble working-class Bellwood at 11:45, and caught the streetcar for downtown Atlanta.
The well-funded Scofield was rescued from decline and obscurity by wealthy Zionists and was a close associate of John Nelson Darby, an early advocate of what would later be called Christian Zionism, a militantly pro-Jewish strain of Christianity. His book deeply influenced Southern Baptist, Pentecostal, evangelical, and other Christians.
by Scott Aaronson. IT MAY WELL BE the greatest murder mystery of all time. Some assert that the Mary Phagan murder case is solved, but those who so assert are of two different and mutually exclusive camps. And those two camps still stand diametrically opposed to this day, four generations later.