Fake News and False History: The 1913 Leo Frank Case in the Midst of a 21st-Century Jewish-Gentile Culture War.
The Rape-Murder Victim Mary Anne Phagan (1899–1913)
Attention #MeToo Activists: We are calling on ALL Feminists and folks advocating against the stigmatization of sexual assault survivors, we are calling upon you to use your voice for ‘Children's Rights’ to peacefully confront by open letters, Israel Zionist advocacy groups like ADL and other Jewish organizations (including their individual associates) who promote the misogynist, bigoted, prejudiced, racist and anti-Gentile, Leo Frank hoax, that he was innocent and a martyr of anti-Semitism. The century of bullying with this case has become enough-is-enough. The time to push back is now.
Breaking News February 2019 During Black History Month: Amazon Books in ironically racist contradiction to Jeff Bezos’ claim, “Democracy Dies in Darkness” has removed from its website the Nation of Islam’s book series, ‘Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volumes 1, 2, and 3.
Volume 3, was a scholarly monograph on the Leo Frank Case and its aftermath. Allegations of Jewish advocacy groups partnering with “big tech” companies to lead censorship efforts abound on the Internet. It’s no longer a secret that the ADL and SPLC are working with Tech Titans to censor the Internet and make it safe for Zionist bullies.
The Anti-Semitism Smear
The American Mercury — described as a deeply anti-Semitic website by Abraham Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League — has produced an authorized 29-part audiobook serial of NOI’s highly contested volume 3 in the year 2018, which is astoundingly well done. Extraordinarily prolific neo-Nazi demagogue, Alex Linder, who has personally produced more than 10,000 pages of audiobooks on classical anti-Semitic books at his VNNForum discussion group’s “Learning College”, published in 2017 an unauthorized version of NOI’s volume 3, with anti-Black racist commentary. Jewish groups are likely misusing this independent creation to conflate, any attempt to expose the fake history surrounding the Leo Frank case with anti-Semitism.
The Modern Leo Frank Case Revival Back Story Requires Traveling in Time to December 1998
Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry, Re-Ignites the Centenary Jewish-Gentile Southern Conflict, Smoldering Like a California Wild Fire in the Streets of Manhattan, New York City. After 84 Shows the Musical Closed. On Broadway, where the money is made with multiple showings a day, that’s considered a flop. However, a second release of the Musical would change all that at a later time.
Before the turn of the millennia, Y2K, just a little more than a bakers-dozen years before the double centennial of Mary Phagan’s rape-strangulation (April 26th, 1913–April 26th, 2013) and Leo Frank’s lynching (August 17th, 1915–August 17th, 2015), there was what already appeared to be the nascent great revival of interest in this nearly-forgotten, infamous criminal affair, one almost lost in the annals of Atlanta Georgia’s legal history. Two kingly drama queens brought it back to life! Together, Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry, were a dynamic duo. They were helped significantly by Harold Prince (deceased).
It was the December 1998 launch of the Leo Frank Broadway Musical, ‘Parade’ that forever changed the course of historical interest of the nearly forgotten Frank-Phagan affair, lighting one lengthy fuse attached to a crate full of Jewish-Gentile relations dynamite.
Prior to 1998, there seemed almost little interest in this contentious case (except in the Jewish community which was sometimes reticent about the subject), it was almost forgotten as a curious kind of artifact from the early 20th-century history of the American-South. Yet even today, most people aren’t aware Leo Frank’s 1913 case would be mentioned in important Supreme Court legal decisions in the decades hence when involving issues with respect to Habeas corpus.
1988, One Decade Prior.
January 24–26, 1988, there was a 2-part made-for-TV miniseries, ‘The Murder of Mary Phagan’ which outraged many “Southrons” for its defamation of Gentiles and false-history portrayal of the true-crime events. The film continues to anger people who study the Frank-Phagan true crime because of Hollywood’s dishonest portrayals of the principals in the case.
The Board of Pardons and Paroles, Atlanta Georgia.
Two years prior to this 4-hour NBC television special, a trinity of Jewish activist groups, Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, Atlanta Jewish Federation, and American Jewish Committee had secured an illegal posthumous pardon of Leo Frank some 73 years after the Phagan molestation-slaying. Oddly enough the 1986 Frank Pardon did not officially exculpate the perverted sex killer for the capital crime for which he was duly convicted. There was a lot of moaning and groaning in the muttering that followed from the dubious “political pardon”.
“How peculiar,” people whispered rhetorically of the outcome in 1986 — Leo Frank was pardoned a full lifetime after his unnatural death, but the issue of his innocence or guilt was intentionally avoided, thus he was never officially absolved and therefore his conviction remains unmodified and was never set aside. By pardoning Leo Frank, he had to be collectively acknowledged as guilty by the tribunal, but when the Board refused to make an official declaration of his innocence, Jewish groups worked thereafter to put in place a Marietta Cemetery, historical marker, scrub the sentence that Leo Frank was still officially guilty. The information to be erased from the public eye was “His 1986 Pardon is based on the state’s failure to protect him/apprehend his killers, not his innocence.”
This was the first inscription on a large steel sign, placed by Mary Phagan’s grave, posted 11 inches from the border of the family grave:
In the 1980s, many senior citizen members of the Jewish community at large, who were alive as children during 1913, were embarrassed by the cringe-worthy finale of the 4-year “pardon” ordeal (1982–1986), feeling a sense of tired defeat and humiliation for the old ghosts which had been dug up from their quiet graves for yet another anticlimactical curtain drop. Most Gentile Georgians were outraged, but reticent to speak out publicly. However one of the most respected jurists in Georgia at the time spoke out about the unconstitutionality of the bogus pardon.
Court of Appeals Biography of Justice Randall Evans:
Randall Evans, Jr. was born May 3, 1906, in Thomson, Georgia into a large, poor, but hard-working family. He attended McDuffie County Schools and there attained good marks and the position of captain on the track team. After graduation, he could not afford to go to college. Instead, he started the study of law at Maynard Law School in Macon, Georgia under the tutelage of Lige Maynard. He earned his L.L.B. degree after seventy days as Maynard’s apprentice, graduating in 1924. Thereafter, Randall Evans, Jr., passed the bar exam at age 18. He practiced as an associate under Lige Maynard in 1925. After a year of practice with Maynard, Evans decided that he would rather return to his hometown of Thomson, Georgia, and did so in 1926. There, he started a law practice with his brother Jack Evans, which joint practice lasted roughly a year. In 1927, Randall Evans, Jr. started his individual law practice in Thomson, Georgia. His practice consisted of general practice which gradually grew into a well-renowned personal injury tort litigation practice. In 1929, at age 23, he became the youngest elected state representative to ever sit in the Georgia General Assembly. While serving in the legislature, he served simultaneously as City Attorney for Thomson and County Attorney for McDuffie County. On Christmas Day, 1930, he married the love of his life, the beautiful Tullyne Moye of Wrightsville, Georgia.
His reputation spread from near to far as a steadfast defender of “the little man,” the underdog, who was injured, hurt, and helpless, and one who worked tirelessly to vindicate his client’s rights. His time was divided between public service and private practice for his clients. Not only did he serve in both the Georgia State Senate and the House of Representatives, he also became the youngest Speaker of the House of Representatives when the honor came to him at age 35. He even ran for governor of the State of Georgia before returning to his beloved clients back home. He was at home in a Courthouse, having tried cases in almost every county in this fine state. When in time of trial, Randall Evans, Jr. considered it a battle to the death for his client. He believed totally in his client’s causes, and he gave unselfishly of himself in representing them. His deep feelings and emotional involvement in a case were passed through to the jury when arguing to them by his great fervor and zest in presenting his case. And usually, justice was on the side of Randall Evans, Jr., as the juries returned verdicts in his clients’ favor. He would return home to his great and faithful lifelong companion, Tullyne, and he would smile into her beautiful face and say “you can’t win ’em all, but we won this one.”
His fifty-seven year legal career was marked for a change in 1969. It was then that Governor Lester Maddox approached Evans with an offer to appoint him to the Georgia Court of Appeals. Randall Evans, Jr., exhibiting frank sincerity and brashness, quickly informed Governor Maddox that he did not vote for him. That did not mean anything to Governor Maddox, who only sought to appoint a man of high wisdom to the jurists then sitting on the Court of Appeals. Thus, Evans ascended the bench. He served in that capacity with fairness and a continuous legal analytical approach that will always benefit those who study his opinions. In 1975, he was bestowed a unique honor by being awarded “Most Outstanding Appellate Judge in the Nation” by the Association of Trial Lawyers at their meeting in Ontario, Canada.
A year later, Judge Randall Evans, Jr. stepped down from the bench into a well-deserved retirement. He left the capitol for his home of Thomson, Georgia. Evans soon found that his retirement was to be short-lived, for lawyers throughout the State of Georgia were constantly calling him, seeking his learned and sage advice. He constantly counseled attorneys who were in the midst of trial as to how to pursue strategies that would best help their clients’ cases get to the jury. A young lawyer once told Randall Evans, Jr. of a remark the young lawyer made to the opposing counsel when on trial. That is, the young lawyer looking across the way at the three opposing counsel, who were older, more experienced, and very sure of their case, told them “I have something that you do not have. I have a secret weapon.” The other, older lawyers looked at him curiously and asked, “What is it that you have, what is your secret weapon?” The young lawyer replied, slowly, quietly, but yet very proudly, “I have Randall Evans, Jr.’s phone number in my pocket.”
On November 30, 1986, Randall Evans, Jr. passed away. With his passing, Georgia lost one of the finest men of this state. He was an orator, author, statesman, scholar, lawyer, judge, advocate, and a friend. However, Georgia’s loss was Heaven’s gain.
182 Georgia Appeals Reports, pages XXXI-LX
Citation: Court of Appeals of Georgia https://www.gaappeals.us/history/judges.php?id=42
Former Georgia supreme court justice, Randall Evans Jr. wrote about the illegality of the largely symbolic/fake pardon, but no one contested the declarative issue, allowing it to stand as a paper tiger or figurative participation award. The Pardon of Leo Frank opened new wounds because it was clearly not justified. Criminals are unfortunately murdered all the time at the hands of others when serving their sentences, even if one example was an uncommon occurence, it doesn’t retroactively take away their convictions.
In truth, the Frank-Phagan case was no artifact from a forgotten part of early 20th-century jurisprudence — even if today, most people have never heard of this true-crime saga — the appeals in this case to the U.S. Supreme Court had later shaped and elucidated legalistic interpretations of Habeas Corpus decades after-the-fact.
Little did anyone know at the time, so far, and long ago, there was a smoldering political inferno set alight after the discovery of a dead little girl in the earliest morning hours of Sunday, April 27th, 1913.
Phagan’s corpse was found mauled, mutilated/disfigured, and discarded in the rear corner of the National Pencil Company’s basement, some 15 hours after she had been theorized killed at noontime on Saturday, the 26th day of April, in a room located opposite Leo Frank’s accounting office. And though Phagan’s cadaver was initially found dumped in the factory’s cellar, it would take the police 1-day to figure out the real scene of the crime was two floors above in the factory’s machine room, known colloquially as the metal room.
The metal room was where Mary Phagan had worked for 53 weeks straight until she was sexually abused and snuffed out by the factory superintendent. When police began interviewing her coworkers, salacious stories emerged, about Leo Frank’s lewd behavior toward his child laborers. He was also seen taking a forelady, Rebecca Carsen, into the women’s dressing room for 15 to 20-minute trysts, three times a week.
Leo Frank’s 5-year-long-occupied office was located opposite the machining area where Phagan worked (see second-floor plats in BOE of the National Pencil Company), and he was the last known person to openly admit having seen her alive before she was theorized to have been killed shortly thereafter. Studies have shown that typically the last person to have been affirmatively identified as seeing a slain victim is a majority of the time is the perpetrator.
A peculiar detail was that Mary Phagan’s machine desk was right near to the hallway door of the men’s toilet, and Leo Frank had to pass next to her assembling pencils each day, when he had to use the bathroom. Frank denied knowing Mary Phagan, even though he used the toilet every workday and employees testified that he was always bothering her about non-work related stuff. Some employees clearly remember him placing his hands on her shoulders and calling her Mary. Many reasoned, how could he have forgotten her name when he was inappropriately touching her at work?
Within the metal room was a large area called the tipping department, this is where Phagan worked using a Knurling machine, inserting rubber erasers into the brass cylinders of pencil caps. Mary Phagan’s workstation was right by the entryway to the men’s toilet (something which must be repeated because Leo Frank’s defenders have tried to suppress this fact), putting incredulity into Leo Frank’s repeated statements he did not know this employee that he had to walk next to — a matter of a couple of feet — for reaching the water closet.
Leo Frank, a well-known copious drinker of black coffee (a fact backed up by his wife in press interviews), would have likely needed to urinate at least once or twice per 11-hour workday. So oddly, Leo Frank would use the need to relieve his bowels and bladder as an explanation at the trial of why his office was found empty by Monteen Stover, an event signifying a possible solution to the whodunnit murder mystery. It was the wow moment at the climax of trial on the afternoon of August-18th, when Leo Frank made this statement of his whereabouts on that fateful day, sustaining the prosecution’s chain of events.
Pre-Dawn, Sunday, April 27th, 1913
The factory director, Mr. Leo M. Frank, had been called at 3:50 o’clock a.m. on the wall phone in his business office by police, but he never answered it until about 7:00 a.m., and he was not suspected of the crime until days later as Atlanta PD began building profiles, collecting evidence, interrogating people of interest, and gathering depositions.
The Case of Mary Phagan Becomes Leo Frank’s Criminal Affair
Without a definitive prime suspect at first, other than the weakly suspected nightwatchman, Newt Lee, the case of Mary Phagan quickly metamorphosized days later into the case of Leo Frank, when he was arrested on suspicion of murder, Tuesday, April 29th. Just before the noon hour of this day, Frank forever lost his freedom, he was arrested at 11:30 a.m. and held in a private holding cell at the stationhouse.
The Patsy Gets the Gun Fire Spotlight
Leo Frank had made a number of incriminating statements that began to turn the tide of evidence against him. On Sunday, April 27th, he at first told police the Negro nightwatchman’s time card was punched correctly every half hour as it was expected to be on the day the murder had taken place, but on Monday, April 28th, he told police there was 4 hours worth of punches missing that he had overlooked (Frank lied and said his foreman N.V. Darley had pointed the discrepancy out). It was such a wreckless blunder on Leo Frank’s part because the cops standing next to Leo Frank on Sunday morning April 27th, eyeballed the time card with him and Newt Lee was standing right there handcuffed looking onward.
The cops didn't memorize the exact minutes on each 30-minute punch or take the card to the station house as evidence, they just let Leo Frank keep the card and put it in his safe, but what they did remember was seeing that approximately every half the card had an appropriate timestamp corresponding to the numbering system at the left side of the sheet. The 2009 ADL-approved, propagandistic documentary, People vs. Leo Frank by Jewish-American film director Ben Loeterman and Steve Oney, briefly touches upon this contentious issue. In a rare moment of honesty at approximately 13 minutes and 30 seconds, going forward, the drama film barely glosses over the Newt Lee time card debacle.
The People Vs. Leo Frank on YouTube
https://youtu.be/F9fRs2xd890
Reposted For Meticulous Explanation: Newt Lee’s Time Card.
Now pay special attention to Newt Lee’s time card and how the time stamp increases every half hour starting from punch 101 (at the left). Between punch 108 and 109, it’s missing a 10:00 pm time stamp. Between punch 110 and 111, it’s missing an 11:30 pm time stamp. Between Punch 111 and 112 is missing the 12:30 am time stamp. Punch 114 to 115, is missing a 2:30 pm time stamp. The highest probability is that Frank forged the newfangled incriminating time card.
In the skeptical minds of Atlanta police, it began to look a lot like Leo Frank was trying to pin the crime on the old Black graveyard shift security guard, Newt Lee. They asked how did four punches go missing on his timesheet? Leo Frank bungled his racist intrigue — big-time blundered. On Sunday, April 27, 1913, with Newt Lee present, and the police holding him in handcuffs, they went to Leo Frank’s office. Frank pulled the April 27, 1913 timesheet belonging to Newt Lee, saying it was punched every half hour +/- a few minutes. The police eyeballed the timesheet with him and noted it was correct. Why with two police officers witnessing the 30-minute stamps would Leo Frank do something so wreckless on Monday, April 28, 1913, giving the police a newly created timecard missing four obvious 30-minute stamps? What would make the brainy Leo M. Frank even conceive of doing something so incriminatingly outlandish?
Strange Last Words!
What was even more telling were two mysterious notes written in black dialect, suggesting a tall slim Nightwatch (misspelled as nightwitch) had committed a sexual assault upon Mary Phagan. These notes, dubbed the “death notes” or “murder notes” described the physical appearance of Newt Lee. If this line of forged evidence had played out as Leo Frank intended, Newt Lee would have been a dead man in the making. He would have most certainly been hanged. But the police felt something wasn’t connecting, because Newt Lee had no criminal record, was married, had come to work 6 hours after the rape-murder was theorized to have taken place, and typically old Negroes who were in their early 60s were seldom deadly rapists. Newt Lee just didn’t fit the profile of a pathological killer-rapist.
The police brutalized Newt Lee using the old-fashioned 3rd-degree method, they fired a gun at point-blank range next to his head, his ears rang numb and he collapsed, crumbling to the floor into tears. Then a contiguous series of different interrogation games began, good cops and bad cops visiting him in turns, some bearing gifts, others presenting new tortures such as sleep deprivation and making him sleep on ice-cold hard floors. The police put the screws to Newt Lee until he was psychologically shattered, but he stuck to the main thrust of his story. Finally, the cops beat him with a wet rubber hose so there would be no obvious bruises on his body. It was a miracle the old negro survived the brutality. #BlackLivesMatter
Depositions Accumulated
It wasn’t long before child laborers at the NPCo (National Pencil Company Inc.) were coming forward to report Leo Frank was propositioning them for sex on their payday (Saturdays at noon was the standard day and time for employees to receive their paychecks). Frank would use the brief moment, just before giving his child employees their wages, to test them, to rake them, to see if they might be compliant to his bisexual sexual needs or potentially might be open to the idea in the future. Leo Frank was grooming the boys and girls who worked for him.
Conley’s Breakdown
A month later police would find out through third-degree interrogation methods that the peculiar death notes were written not by Mary Phagan, but by a Black man, James “Jim” Conley, allegedly at Leo Frank’s orders, with the intention of pinning Phagan’s death on the patsy, Newt Lee. Leo Frank’s racist intrigue was designed to play on the violent rage White men felt when Negroes raped their women or had “down-low” consentual relationships with them. The idea that an old Negro had raped a White little girl, would have almost surely meant a mob would have stormed to the jailhouse, overpowering the security guards, and lynching Newt Lee. It would have been a “case closed” and Leo Frank would have gotten away with it all scott-free. An innocent man would have died, and a guilty man would have gone on with his life, but probably would have committed similar crimes in the future with more caution. Leo Frank’s racist plot collapsed due to a number of silly mistakes he made, one of which was thinking Jim Conley would keep his mouth shut on the promise of $200 (6 months wages).
Atlanta Newspaper Frenzy
Once Atlanta’s highly competitive local daily press organs (Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Georgian, and Atlanta Journal) got a firm hold of the controversy, in the days, weeks, months, and years that followed, screaming headlines from day one, eventually caused the scandal to go viral in Georgia, initially, and in the South shortly thereafter. With the help of Jewish-Americans, Adolph Ochs (owner of NYTimes) and Albert Lasker (described as a marketing wizard by Leonard Dinnerstein), the case went viral nationally in 1913, 1914 and 1915 having metastasized into the biggest Jewish-American cause celebre of its time and arguably one of the top tier historical events in American Jewish social history.
Albert Davis Lasker (May 1, 1880 — May 30, 1952)
Modern Interest Growing
At present, the century-old story refuses to stop being retold, often with greater fervor in the media, every single year, peaking in coverage on the 17th of August — the Frank lynching anniversary. Even the date of the Phagan murder is getting more coverage, every forthcoming decade.
Without fail, post-centenary, the Frank-Phagan case continues to garner major mainstream media headline coverage, every late-April, and mid-August. Some notable examples are the Washington Post, Business Insider, and Salon Magazine. Before 2015, the true-crime was only given lesser “page-6” coverage, and sometimes in even prior years, it was hardly even mentioned, that is until Broadway re-ignited the affair in the consciousness of the masses. Not many people had heard of the sensational criminal epic before the musical, ‘Parade’ became wildly popular in its second iteration, post-millennium. The first iteration of Parade flopped after 84 showings, its second iteration went viral internationally in theatres, literally everywhere.
Recap: 2017 Anniversary Treatments of the Frank-Phagan case
For this year’s 2017 Phagan murder anniversary, some treatments were released approximately mid-to-late April. Most notably the case of Mary Phagan was featured in two apparently biased stories, one by a self-described Jewish-Activist who behaves like a “False-History” professor, Ingrid Anderson, in a Salon Magazine re-post, and one by “Fake News” journalist Jacob Bogage in Washington Post. Both articles mangle the facts of the case.
In the Salon Magazine story, Anderson claimed Leo Frank was actually exonerated of the Phagan sex-killing, when in fact his posthumous-pardon 7-decades after the fact, did not officially absolve him of the murder.
According to the Georgia Board of Pardon’s and Paroles — the tribunal who rendered their March 11th, 1986 posthumous-pardon of Leo Frank — they emphatically stated that they were not addressing the issue of his guilt or innocence. Yet, they had to unofficially agree to his guilt in order to give him a fake pardon. Oh, the irony!
Leo Frank’s guilty verdict has never been overturned to date (2019), even now 106 years later there are Frankite activists like Rabbi Steven Lebow, Roy Barnes, and Dale Schwartz working behind the scenes with garden variety Jewish activists groups, trying to get the government of Georgia to officially recognize Leo Frank as innocent. But to do this, they must get his guilty verdict set aside. They are still hunting for a kangaroo activist judge who will disgrace himself or herself to do it. Though Leo Frank is still officially guilty as charged, this fact hasn’t stopped people from trying to re-write history and claim he was “falsely accused” and “wrongfully convicted” whenever his 1913 summer trial is mentioned. The ADL is at the forefront of this propaganda campaign, because this biased activist organization was founded on his behalf.
A great effort lead by the Jewish community has been made over the decades to create a mainstream popular-cultural mythology that Leo Frank was railroaded because of anti-Semitism, not the facts tried in a courthouse and thus his August 25th, 1913, conviction, his devotee's claim was patently unjust and rendered by mob terrorism. However, when pressed, most of his defenders struggle to, or cannot give any specific anti-Jewish examples that supposedly led to his guilty verdict, except citing the tired anti-Gentile canards mainstreamed by Leonard Dinnerstein, the Samueles’ and Harry Golden, that wild hordes of Christian men, thronging outside the courtroom, where screaming anti-Semitic death threats into the open windows of the courthouse, directly at the judge and jury. That racist hoax is fake news.
The mythos surrounding Leo Frank’s supposed innocence seems to be based around anti-Gentile tropes about supposed widespread anti-Semitism and societal tensions (the agrarian economy becoming one of industrialization caused his conviction according to the pro-Frank activist narrative) that simply did not exist or play a part in Frank’s trial (respectively) in the overwhelmingly philosemitic American South of 1913.
Even Jewish historians have a difficult time finding examples of Southern anti-Semitism in the 19th and 20th centuries. The historical consensus is the South was philosemitic at the time, so the accusations of anti-Semitism are a racist and anti-Gentile hate crime hoax.
The Silent Minority of Jews
The general consensus within minority circles of Jewish historians is the “Old South”, also the overlapping period of the Antebellum South and Progressive Era, were well known historically to be tolerant toward Jews, given the very high prevalence of intermarriage and successful Jewish-Gentile business partnerships. The South was a place where the Jewish community thrived in business and society. During the civil war of the early to mid-1860s, Judah P. Benjamin’s face was at one time printed on Confederate money, and Jews disproportionately owned slaves and had African-American household staff, according to census records.
The Temple Bombing Hate Crime Hoax?
When Jewish historians are pressed, the 1958 Temple bombing is mentioned as one of the most egregious acts of anti-Semitism in Georgia, but no one was ever convicted of the crime and one man who was falsely accused, George Bright, had been acquitted at trial. Reading the contrived Wikipedia article on the Temple Bombing you would think it impossible Bright was innocent. However, Jewish-American scholar Melissa Fay Greene, who wrote an account of the incident in 1996 and is considered the foremost expert on the subject, believes Bright was innocent. At the time of the 1958 Temple Bombing, fake news New York Times, had — just like it did with the 1913 Leo Frank case — misrepresented the facts and evidence of the bombing, egregiously. When you read the fabricated Wikipedia article on the Temple Bombing, it is written with trickery and advanced sophistry by activist editors who almost exclusively use the NYTimes in its bibliography. The Wikipedia article on the Temple Bombing does not comport with the Bright trial legal records, in the exact same way, the Wikipedia article on Leo Frank does not comport with the Frank case legal records. We are living in an ongoing age of disinformation by the fake news media.
Moreover, the damage done to a 12-foot by 12-foot wall in the adjacent room of the Temple was repaired with money raised by primarily Christian Gentiles and voluntary Baptist denomination bricklayers. Donations from almost exclusively Christians and State grants exceeded $832,302.00 (source: Atlanta Temple Officially Closes Campaign by Alfred Rosenberg) for repairs, which ended up costing in the low double-digit thousands. It turned out to be a windfall for the synagogue and sent a clear message that such attacks could be used to raise obscene amounts of money.
Given how many hate crime hoaxes against religious institutions have been uncovered in the last few decades, the Temple bombing might easily have actually been an early example of a mid-century hate crime hoax. The explosion was at a location where no one was hurt and no valuable assets were damaged on the inside. Other than a brick wall facade, and the hard foam ceiling tiles, the room had not been a high-value target area containing anything of significant importance. Nothing priceless was lost, everything was easily replaced.
According to the Temple website “ The explosion caused almost $100,000 worth of damage (approximately three-quarters of a million dollars today)”. Actually, the materials were only in the double-digit thousands of dollars, not $100,000, and some of those Christian men who did the actual physical labor repairing the site and bricklaying did so on a voluntary basis (that means they worked for free). After much hoopla, more than $800-grand was leftover from donations when the smoke cleared and the masonry work was completed. None of the claims about retaliation against the synagogue could ever be substantiated. Even Wikipedia isn’t safe from grievance activist hoaxers.
Profiling terroristic attacks against religious institutions, a significant percentage of seemingly hate crime incidences almost invariably turn out to be hoaxes when people are not specifically targeted — violently — in the attacks. There are websites that document chronologically hate crime hoaxes.
Biggest Jewish Hate Crime Hoax in American History During 2016 and 2017
In 2016 and 2017 there were more than 120 hate crimes against Jewish institutions purportedly orchestrated by neo-Nazi terrorists, which turned out to be the hoaxery dirty work of a 19-year-old Israeli citizen and Zionist activist. The ADL did not remove these fake crimes from its statistics analysis meant to show the growing hate epidemic of White extremists and they continue to raise donations of 7 to 8-figures, while censoring the crimes against the Palestinian people.
Another series of hate crime hoaxes by purportedly White extremists turned out to be the work of a Black man seeking revenge because he was spurned by his White girlfriend. The media swept the incident under the rug.
In another incident, a Jewish girl was caught on camera drawing a swastika on her own dorm room door to garner sympathy. She got off with a slap on the wrist and transferred to another university.
One of the more notorious hate crime hoaxes going back into the 1980s was involving Al Sharpton (after the fact) and Tawana Brawley, who covered herself in human feces as an attempted victim bamboozle. The media went wild with the story and after it was discovered as a hoax, it was swept under the rug.
Jacob Bogage’s False News and Fake History
Jacob Bogage’s Washington Post article makes the false claim that Leo Frank’s accessory-after-the-fact, Jim Conley, spent his life in and out of jail for convictions of violence against women (categorically false, we have a copy of his criminal record). Conley was once fined for having a very loud and emotional argument with his common-law wife, but served no time. His rapsheet is mostly about public intoxication and at one time he tried breaking into a Negro-owned pharmacy in 1919 as it was reported in the press at the time. When he pried open the pharmacy’s front door after Jimmying the lock, he was shot in the chest, wounded severely, and miraculously survived.
He was sentenced to 20 years in prison and released after 15 years on good behavior. The only other major sentence of jail time Conley earned for himself was for his role as an accessory-after-the-fact in helping Leo Frank cover up the murder of Mary Phagan in the immediate aftermath of the factory sweatshop boss raping and strangling her. Conley helped the police solve the case after breaking down under 3-weeks of interrogation.
Leo Frank enlisted Conley to remove the dead body from Frank’s office floor to the basement two floors below. Conley only served 10-months time as an accessory after the fact — for helping to attempt to cover up Leo Frank’s sex murder. Conley’s confession of his role in the removal of the dead child helped the police put the pieces of the puzzle together with better clarity. Leo Frank when given the opportunity refused to confront Jim Conley, even with his lawyers present.
There are too many other errors to mention in Bogage’s and Anderson’s articles, but you can read about them in other fact-checking reports published online. A number of articles go into meticulous detail debunking them both.
Leo Frank’s defenders engage in all sorts of bamboozling behavior and have not stopped doing so since 1913.
In response to the two false-history and fake-news articles published respectively in Salon and Washington post in April 2017, a White activist website National Vanguard published a radio program ‘Leo Frank making a Martyr our of a Murderer’ promoting a new book published the year before on April 26, 2016, ‘The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Volume 3, Leo Frank Guilty Man Lynched’ by NOI Research Group, with NOI standing for Nation of Islam. Both White and Jewish extremists seem to be fighting over the facts of this case. What a truly sad world we live in that we have to go to controversial websites to learn the truth about the Leo Frank case. It’s like the world is turned upsidedown.
NOI is an unabashedly pro-black, anti-White, and anti-Jewish organization.
Their book makes the case Leo Frank is guilty, basically, it’s an opposing mirror image of all the Leo Frank partisan books written with the intention of perpetuating the self-serving narrative of the Jewish community that Leo Frank was framed because of anti-Semitism. The NOI compilation is probably the most well-researched book on the Leo Frank case published to date. There is even a free (no signup required) audiobook of it published by The American Mercury.
In the NOI compilation proposes the thesis that Leo Frank was not only guilty, but that he attempted a racially-tinged and anti-Gentile framing against two of his African-American employees (first Newt Lee, followed by the accomplice-after-the-fact James “Jim” Conley). Despite the obviously biased language of this particular Leo Frank detractor oriented book, and some snarky or snide comments within it, surprisingly it makes a very well reasoned set of arguments propounding that Leo Frank failed miserably in his racist attempt to frame the murder of Mary Phagan on Newt Lee his Negro nightwatchman and Jim Conley the Negro custodian at the factory. This is one of the biggest secrets of the case that has brought it to the attention of Black Lives Matter activists and the MeToo movement.
Frank embarrassed himself in the process and the greater Jewish community — made in part of anti-Gentile groups which racketeer anti-Semitism and fearmongering — have taken up Leo Frank’s status as a “civil rights icon” and “martyr” with dogmatic and religious zealousness. It’s time Jews and Gentiles have conferences to discuss the affair without all the ad hominem attacks like calling people Hitler if they believe Leo Frank was a misogynist, racist, habitual pedophile, rapist, and sex killer.
The New York Times, Once Owned by Jewish Press Magnate Adolph Ochs
It is becoming well known that Adolph Ochs took on the case of Leo Frank between 1913–1915, as his own cynical personal crusade. This year’s mid-August 2017 lynching anniversary, the Frank case was featured or mentioned with prominence in the fake-news New York Times, the left-biased Time Magazine, and on the anti-Gentile Jewish-Israel activist, Anti-Defamation League’s website. Raising eyebrows, ADL’s treatments insensitively attempted to conflate the Leo Frank case outcome with the recent night-time torch-lit “Unite the Right” rally and the ensuing next-day car-ramming tragedy in Charlottesville at the end of a rally. Activists have repeatedly asked the ADL to stop using tragedies to conflate them with the Leo Frank case.
Using Sensitive Events to Rehabilitate Leo Frank
As an example of their callousness. The ADL has in the past tried disgustingly to compare the Leo Frank case to the Shoah. In another event, Many leftist activists and feminists were livid when ADL tried to equate the child molesting homicidal pervert, Leo Frank, with Heather Heyer, who was not directly hit by the vehicular-ramming but died of a heart attack during the aftermath of James Field’s vehicle plowing through the protest.
Update September 2021*
At a public school in Cobb County, September 2021, a student troll drew a crudely designed swastika over a urinal that students frequented when nature called. He got what he wanted in that he want to create huge throngs of outcry and that he did. Nobody was amused but the perp, and perhaps other “shitlord” types might have got a giggle about it, but parents from White students protested that it was completely unacceptable the student got a slap on the wrist. Christians came out in droves to protest against the behavior, and some Jewish residents showed up as well, and dragged Leo Frank into the fray. Many righteous Gentiles community members were happy to come out in droves to denounce the Swastikas but the attempt to use Leo Frank as some kind of civil rights icon for fighting racism, was just pure plane gauch. Everyone had their smartphone cameras out in this public space and were taking photos. It was heart-warming and restored my faith in humanity to see that Christians had come out in force to denounce the Swastikas.
Protest Madness
August 17, Every Year.
It seems the Leo Frank lynching anniversary is being used as a kind of proto fundraising tool for ADL and also furthering attempts at rehabilitating him, more widely in the American mainstream media, and among Jews worldwide. It gives the impression that fear-mongering with narratives of anti-Semitism and conflation of his case with unrelated tragedies (like Heather Heyer or the Shoah for instance) is decidedly a lucrative racket for ADL. There is no comparison with the misogynist and racist Leo Frank and Charlottesville protests against White supremacy, when one delves into the dark depths of these mutually exclusive events. Leftist activists are beginning to see Ashkenazi defense groups as simply White supremacist groups fighting against Gentile White supremacists groups. Jews are no longer seen as victims in the eyes of the left, due to Israel’s 72-year history of crimes against humanity and colonial invasion of the region.
The American Mercury Strikes Back With Vervey Wit
In response to the three false-history and fake-news articles published in the left-leaning major mainstream media (MSM) outlets, the contentious American Mercury put out a professional audiobook series about the Leo Frank trial (surprisingly a well-balanced treatment). After listening to the first half of the series, I can see why Jewish-Israeli activists groups like ADL would seek to discredit the people who supposedly produce the online magazine, because the arguments presented there are soundly convincing that Leo Frank is guilty and that his conviction was not based on any anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, but ultimately fair-minded justice. Leo Frank’s trial was fair based on reports of it in the press at the time and the records of his appeal from a to z. This is the case, even though some judges commenting on the case, had been influenced by the popular propaganda news sources of the time (Can you guess the high-jurist’s name?).
The Leo Frank Revival at Vivian Beaumont Theater
Talk of the “case that dares not speak its name” was mostly quiescent until December 1998, when Jason Robert Brown and Alfred Uhry launched the Leo Frank Broadway Musical called, “Parade” (named after the Confederate memorial parade). It was a mix of chorus singing, confederate flag-waving, replicated vintage clothes from the late 19th century and early 20th century, dancing, singing, marching, cake-walking, parading around on stage, theatrical acting, drama, and telling the story of a Southern Jewess who was married to a Yankee Jew who was in the wrong place at the wrong time.
So Frank’s life goes sideways and he somehow got mixed up in a criminal entanglement involving an underage Christian girl (allegedly).
Through the chaos and controversy, the cold, emotionally-distant Leo Frank finally falls in love with his wife again, Lucille Selig, before his life ends at the end of a rope — lynched by a Gentile mob of bigoted yahoos. This play is clearly meant to express a sanitized version of anti-Gentile melodrama, behind a historical facemask of a hyper-partisan narrative where Leo Frank’s innocence is taken for granted as gospel.
As to be expected, the theatrical version of Leo Frank’s tumultuous life during the years before he was extrajudicially killed are deeply imbued with creative-license that seems to almost invert reality when one actually takes closer looks at the records of his life and primary sources of his infamous legal travails. Not to mention, the aftermath of his life is very telling about how the case is being used to create great conflict between Jews and Gentiles (addendum).
Jewish activists are embroiled in a culture-war with Gentile activists of the White to Brown skin spectrum variety — yes even African-American groups now have a dog in this fight (Nation of Islam’s Infamous Secret Relationship Series, Volume 3, The Leo Frank Case)— one involving an intensification of emotionally-laden adhominem being flung around, with the most common name-calling being volleyed back and forth:
“Extremist”, “Black Supremacist”, “Bigot”, “Jewish Supremacist”, “White Supremacist”, “Jewish Hatemongers”, “Nazis”, “Jewish Extremists”, “Fascist Globalist”, “Jewish fearmonger”, “White Nationalist”, “Jewish Nationalist”, “KKK”, “Black Panther” and “Zionist Pig”.
Whether these labels are accurate or not isn’t the point at all, they are being used to discredit and dehumanize each leg in the triad of opposition, so now the great debate about the Leo Frank case becomes less about the facts, evidence or testimony, and more about personal attacks used to end the conversation and declare victory.
Moreover, these dehumanizing pejoratives literally do nothing to advance academic dialogue, fact-checking and scholarly research, but create politically correct echo chambers, where people crystallize into their own camps of “othering” which basically result in “us versus them”, “tribe-blue” against “tribe-red”, or the “orange-shirts” against the “purple-shirts and vice-versa.
The centenary “unsolved” murder mystery — the sadistic sexual assault, ghastly strangulation-murder and corpse-mutilation of a Christian teenage girl five weeks short from turning 14-years-old, Mary Anne Phagan, and the subsequent lynching of her convicted sex-killer, Jewish industrialist and pencil manufacturing executive Leo Max Frank — has now been patently solved by legal and history scholars using the extensive 1913 official investigation and trial records.
In this once-in-a-lifetime event, the book publishing houses, mainstream media, and ivory tower establishment of the academy — who have for numberous generations since 1913, promoted the racist hoax and anti-Gentile conspiracy theory that anti-Semites framed Leo Frank for the crime, simply because he was Jewish, and that the “blood of a Negro” was not enough to pay or atone for the crime — have been definitively proven to be wrong by the stenographed statements of Leo Frank himself (see: Leo Frank trial statement in the official brief of evidence, 1913).
The Jewish Daily Forward
It was recently revealed by two Jewish-American journalists in separately published articles that Abraham Cahan, founder of ‘The Jewish Daily Forward’ (called Forverts at the time in 1914) interviewed Leo Frank in Atlanta, who suggested it was not anti-Semitism, but instead “keystone cops” were the primary source behind his criminal case. Leo Frank also believed that Hugh Dorsey needed to bolster his legal career as a prosecutor because he had a couple of recent “embarrassing” defeats in the courtroom. However, an audit of Dorsey’s legal career as Solicitor General in Atlanta proves that his prime directive and motive as a prosecutor was seeking justice for victims of crimes, not about “winning or losing”.
According to Paul Berger of The Jewish Daily Forward (Leo Frank Case Stirs Debate 100 Years After Jewish Lynch Victim’s Conviction, August 30, 2013):
Cahan traveled to Atlanta in March 1914 to visit Frank in his cell [in “The Tower”]. In the fifth volume of Cahan’s memoirs, published in Yiddish in 1931, Cahan relates that Frank told him the Atlanta police were desperate for a conviction. Mary Phagan’s murder presented a huge challenge for prosecutor Hugh Dorsey, who had just come off the back of two embarrassing courtroom defeats.
“Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me,” [Leo] Frank told [Abraham] Cahan. “It isn’t the source nor the result of this sad story.”
Organized Jewry
Yet, even a century later Frank’s defenders in both public and private schools, synagogues, churches, civic events, history conferences, and the mainstream news-medium, over-use and exaggerate every sort of sectarian division as to why Frank was supposedly convicted, while distorting and suppressing the substantial evidence against him recorded in his trial brief of evidence. Leo Frank they claim is a martyr of anti-Semitism and has been elevated to the status of a civil rights icon used for morality tales, agitation, and fundraising by Jewish groups like the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.
The great breakthrough of our time is that since the legal records of the Leo Frank case have been scanned by Government researchers in Atlanta and put online (the 1,800 page Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court records is published on Flickr.com), it is now possible for people who live far away from the Georgia legal records and archives office to learn why Leo Frank was really convicted, and why his defenders, who say he is innocent, have been objectively perpetuating a century of pathological lies — a web of lies involving many people past and present, where men and women with academic credentials quote and re-quote each other, while providing almost copycat analysis of each other, but using variant words from the thesaurus’ lexicon population to give the appearance of being independent researchers. In other words, Leo Frank’s defenders all basically say almost exactly the same thing, however, using different colorful words, sentence structures, and syntax formulations to repeat each other's assertions in essence.
These in-group self-serving tactics and strategies described above that are used for controlling the mainstream story of history, are called the “web of lies” and this is how politically correct academia and fake news journalism works in the United States for controlling the narrative of false-history and creating a popular culture orthodoxy that pits Jews against Gentiles and vice-versa. This is why today there is a great culture war over dominating the historical jurisprudence narrative of the Leo Frank case and as it stands today the Jewish community remains as the majority controlling interest.
This quote sums up perfectly the pro-Frank camp:
“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” — D. James
Frank Ineluctably Entrapped Himself Beyond Escape
At the murder trial, a stupefying admission was made by the defendant, when he testified from the witness stand, amounting to what his detractors consider a pitiful cry of mercy that has the lineaments of a soft-confession.
Something very quietly climactic happened during the four-week People v. Leo M. Frank murder trial, held within Georgia’s Fulton County Superior Courthouse in the Summer of 1913 — Mr. Leo Max Frank inadvertently revealed the solution to the murder mystery of Mary Phagan…
The Epic Trial of 20th Century Southern Legal History
The spectators sat in the tight outer arena at one of the most astounding murder trials in the history of Georgia jurisprudence. Nestled deep within the ass-breaking pews of the courtroom were the luckiest of public spectators, defense and prosecution witnesses, journalists, officials, and courtroom staff.
Like gladiators inside an arena, in the center of it all, with their backs to the audience, seated in ladder-back chairs, were the most important principals. They were the State of Georgia’s prosecution team, made up of three members, led by Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey and Frank Arthur Hooper. Arrayed against them were eight Leo Frank defense counselors, led by Luther Zeigler Rosser and Reuben Rose Arnold.
The presiding judge, the Honorable Leonard Strickland Roan, sitting in a high-backed leather chair, was separated by the witness stand from the jury of 12 White men who were sworn to justly decide the fate of Leo Frank.
Crouched and sandwiched between the judge’s rostrum and the witness chair, sitting on the lip of the bench’s foot rail, was a stenographer capturing the examinations. Stenographers clicked away with pencil in hand throughout the trial and were changed regularly in relays.
Surrounding the four major defense and prosecution counselors were an entourage of uniformed police, plainclothes detectives, undercover armed security men, government staff, and magistrates.
The significance of Leo Frank’s left fist would be revealed when evidence from the Mary Phagan autopsy — conducted in early May of 1913, by Dr. H. F. Harris — was reported during the Leo Frank trial (Mary Phagan had been punched in her right eye causing her to fall backward and slamming the back of her head against the handle of a lathe in the metal room).
The first day of the 4-week-long Leo Frank trial began on July 28, 1913, and led to many days of successively more horrifying revelations. But the most interesting day of the trial occurred three weeks later when Leo Frank sat down in the witness stand on Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913.
Everyone in Georgia had a question they wanted to be answered
What Leo Frank had to say to the court became the spine-tingling climax of the most notorious criminal trial in US history, and it was the moment everyone in all of Georgia, especially Atlanta, had waited for.
Judge Roan explained the circumstances to the jury and the unique rules concerning the unsworn statement Leo M. Frank was to make to them. At a quarter after 2:00 o’clock pm, Leo Frank was called rise from his chair and mount the hard seat placed in the middle of the witness stand’s stage. When Frank stood up, walked forward, and mounted the stand, a deep hush of quiet descended into the main courtroom, as 2-hundred spellbound citizens log-jammed in the seating area became silent. They were more than just speechless: They were literally transfixed, holding their breath, sitting on the edges of their folded seats, with heart-stopping anticipation for every sound which came forth from the mouth of Leo Frank. He spoke from 2:15 pm to 6:06 pm, with one short 10 to 15-minute break in-between his 3.5-hour oral statement, that he read from a notepad.
But tuning in to his energetic and cold oration became especially arduous at times. Little did the audience know Leo Frank had developed a reputation as a “gas jet” from his college days (see his 1906 Cornell University Senior Class Yearbook entry, p 79), and he lived up to it now with thick, mind-bending verbiage.
Image from Leo Frank’s graduation year class book: Leo Frank’s reputation as a champion “hot air artist” — and service as a debating coach — shown in his college yearbook entry.
Four Hours of Deflection and Pencil Manufacturing Accounting
To bring his major points home during his almost four-hour speech (3 hours and 40 minutes to be exact), Leo Frank presented original pages of his accounting books to the jury. For three hours he went over, in detail, the accounting computations he had made on the afternoon of April 26, 1913. This was meant to show the court that he had been far too busy to have murdered Mary Phagan on that day nearly 15 weeks before.
One dispute emphasized by the defense was over how much time it took Frank to do his accounting calculations: Was it 90 minutes as some said, or 180 minutes? Can either answer ever be definitive, though? No matter what the pace one accountant works, is it beyond belief that another could be twice as fast?
The Ultimate Question Waiting to be Answered
Image: Little Miss Monteen Stover, 14 years old and 5’2” tall.
The most important unanswered question in the minds of everyone at the trial was this:
Where had Leo Frank gone between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m. on Georgia Confederate Memorial Day, Saturday, April 26, 1913?
This was the crucial question because Monteen Stover had testified she found Leo Frank’s office empty during this five-minute time segment — and Leo Frank had told police he never left his office during that time, when he claimed Mary Phagan was with him. And the evidence (state of digestion of the food in her stomach from the autopsy, hair on the lathe and blood on the floor) had already suggested that Mary Phagan was murdered sometime between high-noon and 12:15 p.m. in the metal-room on the same floor, located opposite of where Leo Frank works in his window-front office.
Two investigators had testified that Leo Frank gave them the alibi that he had never left his office from noon until after 12:45 p.m. If Leo Frank’s alibi held up, then he couldn’t have killed Mary Phagan during that time.
Everyone wanted to know how Leo Frank would respond to Monteen Stover’s seemingly contradictory testimony clashing with his alibi. And, after rambling about near-irrelevancies for hours, he did:
Now Gentlemen [of the jury], to the best of my recollection from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock [noon] until after a quarter to one [12:45 p.m.] when I went upstairs [to the fourth floor] and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of the inner office [located at the front of the second floor]; but it is possible that in order to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet [located at the back of the second floor in the metal room]. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and cannot tell how many times nor when he does it. Now, sitting in my office at my desk, it is impossible for me to see out into the outer hall when the [four foot tall] safe door is open, as it was that morning [on Saturday, April 26, 1913], and not only is it impossible for me to see out, but it is impossible for people to see in and see me there.
Source: Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913.
Frank stated — in complete contradiction to his numerous earlier statements that he’d never left his office — that he might have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom during that time — placing him in the only bathroom on that floor of the building, the Metal Room bathroom, which is where Jim Conley had finally admitted that he first found the lifeless body of little Mary Phagan, and immediately adjacent in the Metal Room proper, where Mary Phagan’s blood (found on the floor) and hair (found on the machine handle) was found, and where the prosecution had spent three weeks at the trial proving that the murder had actually taken place there at approximately that time.
Frank gave himself 2 ways out:
Frank also stated that at the exact same time he was simultaneously in the metal room bathroom, he might have simultaneously been unseeable behind the four-foot-tall safe door in his office (Monteen Stover was 5'2" tall). Who could believe he was at two possible places at the exact same time? It had to be one or the other, but Monteen Stover said his office was empty and mentioned no open safe door, so it tended to place Leo Frank in the metal room during the critical time.
The Eminent Coroner Paul V. Donehoo and his Jury of Six Men:
This was doubly amazing because weeks earlier Leo Frank had emphatically told the seven-man panel lead by Coroner Paul Donehoo, and represented via the six-man Jury at the Coroners Inquest, that he (Leo Frank) did not remember using the bathroom that day when at the factory.
The partially blind, but prodigious savant Coroner Paul Donehoo — with his highly-refined “B.S. detector” was incredulous as might be expected. Who disremembers using the bathroom all day? (especially a person who admittedly was a heavy coffee drinker) It was as if Leo Frank was consciously, albeit crudely and unbelievably, trying to distance himself from the bathroom where the body was later claimed to be originally found (Conley finally testified on August 4th, 1913, he first found the dead body of Mary Phagan in the men’s toilet area of the metal room, after Leo Frank allegedly confessed the assault in confidence).
Furthermore, on Saturday, May 3rd, 1913 and Sunday, May 4th, 1913, Leo Frank had told Pinkerton detective Harry Scott — witnessed by police detective Mr. Black — that he (Leo Frank) was in his office every minute from noon to half past noon, and in State’s Exhibit B (Frank’s stenographed statement to the police on Monday Morning, April 28, 1913, see full text of it from August 2nd, 1913, Atlanta Constitution), Leo Frank never mentions a bathroom visit all day and said Mary Phagan was in his office between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m. maybe 12:07 p.m.
And now he had reversed himself!
Why would Leo Max Frank make such a startling admission, after spending months trying to distance himself from that part of the building at that precise time? And, why would Leo Frank place himself in the men’s toilet, when he watched James Conley testify on the witness stand (August 4, 5, 6, 1913) that the bathroom was the area where he found the dead body of Mary Phagan?
These are two questions that are curious, but there are some intriguing clews (Atlanta Constitution, 1913).
( 1.) The testimony of Monteen Stover (who liked Frank and who was actually a supportive character witness for him) that Frank was missing from his office for those crucial five minutes was convincing. Few could believe that Stover — looking to pick up her paycheck, and waiting five minutes in Frank’s business office for an opportunity to do so — would have been satisfied with a cursory glance at the room and therefore somehow missed Leo Frank behind the 4ft tall open safe door as Frank had alleged along with his “unconscious” visit to the men’s toilet in the metal room (See State’s Exhibit A, Defendant’s Exhibit 61.)
( 2.) The evidence suggests that Frank did not always make rational decisions when under stress: Under questioning from investigators, he repeatedly changed the time at which Mary Phagan supposedly came to see him in his office. These four timeline inconsistencies given by Leo Frank caused the police to question his integrity for honesty with greater frequency with each different story he was giving.
Four separate times Leo Frank changed the stated time Mary Phagan allegedly arrived at his office on the day of the murder:
First — On Sunday, April 27, 1913, less than 24 hours after the murder occurred, Leo Frank told police that Mary Phagan arrived in his office on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at about 12:03 p.m.
Second — On Monday, April 28th, 1913, some 48 hours after the murder occurred, Leo Frank stated in an unsworn deposition that Mary Phagan arrived “Between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m., maybe 12:07 p.m. (State’s Exhibit B digest of Q & A; and Atlanta Constitution, August 2nd, 1913 for full questions and answers.)
Third — On May 5th and 8th, 1913 at the Coroner’s Inquest, Leo Frank said Mary arrived at about 12:10 p.m. to 12:15 p.m.
Fourth — On August 18, 1913, at his trial, Leo Frank said Mary Phagan arrived between 12:12 to 12:17 p.m. (Because his stenographer changed her original testimony, restating it at trial, saying she left at “12:02 p.m.”)
Four separate times that kept inching upward, minute by minute, away from his initial statement of 12:03 p.m. and lastly book-ending at 12:17 p.m. gave the impression he was trying to move the arrival of Mary Phagan from before Monteen Stover arrived to after Monteen Stover arrived.
3) Leo Frank reportedly confessed his guilt to his wife the day of the murder (Albert McKnight’s Affidavit in Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court Records, and Magnolia “Minola” McKnight Affidavit, see State’s Exhibit J in Leo Frank trial brief of evidence, 1913); he, if guilty, reacted out of all proportion and reason to being spurned by his teenage employee; and he maintained the utterly unbelievable position throughout the case that he did not know Mary Phagan by name, despite indisputably knowing her initials (he wrote them on the company books by hand) and interacting with her hundreds of times. Moreover, every day that Frank went to the bathroom in the metal room, he passed by Mary’s workstation by a matter of feet.
Does the fact that Lucille Selig Frank (Leo Frank’s wife) explicitly requested not to be buried next to her husband (Steve Oney, Features, UGA, Georgia Magazine, March 2004) speak volumes about the veracity of State’s Exhibit J and Albert McKnight’s affidavit?
Even if only one of these lapses is true as described, it’s enough to show a pronounced lack of judgment. A man with such impaired judgment may actually have been unable to see that by explaining away his previous untenable (and now exposed as false) position of “never leaving the office” with an “unconscious” bathroom visit to use the men’s toilet, he was placing himself at exactly the prosecution’s theory of where the violence occurred at the scene of the crime, at the very precise time of the murder. Thus are men who tell tales undone, even as they fall back upon a partial truth. This was Leo Frank’s, “Oh, By the Way” moment that solved the murder of Little Mary Phagan.
Georgia: Right to Refuse Oaths and Examination.
Why did Leo not permit cross-examination after his own courtroom Statement — under Georgia Law, since 1868 (Title VI), it WAS allowed (unsworn), IF the defendant agreed (source: Professor Allen Koenigsberg, Brooklyn College, 2013)
Under the Georgia Code, Section 1036, the accused has the right to make an unsworn statement and, furthermore, to refuse to be examined or cross-examined at his trial. Leo Frank made the decision to make an unsworn statement and not allow examination or cross-examination.
The law also did not permit Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey or his legal team to orally interpret or comment on the fact that Leo Frank was not making a statement sworn under oath at his own murder trial. The prosecution respected this rule.
The jury knew that Leo Frank had months to carefully prepare his statement. But what was perhaps most damaging to Leo Frank’s credibility was the fact that every witness at the trial, regardless of whether they were testifying for the defense or prosecution, had been sworn-in, and therefore spoke under oath, and had been open to cross-examination by the other side — except for Leo Frank. Thus it didn’t matter if the law prevented the prosecution from commenting on the fact Leo Frank had refused cross-examination, opting instead to make an unsworn statement, because the jury could see that anyway. Making an unsworn statement and refusing to be examined does not prove that one is guilty, but it certainly raises eyebrows of doubt about truthfulness.
The Southern Society “Honor Bound”
Could a sworn jury upholding its sacred duty question Leo Frank’s honor and integrity as a result of what Southerners likely perceived as his cowardly decision under Georgia Code, Section 1036? If so, the greater weight would naturally be given to those witnesses who were sworn under oath and who contradicted Leo Frank’s unsworn alibis, allegations, and claims. It put the entire case under a new lens of the sworn versus the unsworn defendant.
The average Southerner in 1913 was naturally asking the question: What White man would make an unsworn statement and not allow himself to be cross-examined at his own murder trial if he were truly innocent? Especially in light of the fact that the South was culturally White separatist — and two of the major material witnesses who spoke against Leo Frank were African-American, one claiming to be an accomplice after the fact turned accuser.
In the White racial segregationist Atlanta of 1913, African-Americans were perceived as second-class citizens and less reliable than Whites in terms of their capacity for telling the truth.
Photo: Lucille Selig Frank, the wife of Leo Frank left. (see Flickr)
Today, we might ask:
Why wouldn’t Leo Frank allow himself to be cross-examined when he was trained in the art and science of debating during his high school senior year and all through his years in college, where he earned the rank of Cornell Congress Debate Team coach? (Pratt Institute Monthly, June 1902; Cornellian, 1903 through 1906; Cornell Senior Class Book, 1906; Cornell University Alumni Dossier File on Leo Frank, retrieved 2013).
Odd Discrepancies
illustration: Newt Lee at the Coroner’s Inquest Months Before
Most Leo Frank partisan authors omit significant parts of the trial testimony of Newt Lee and Jim Conley from their retelling of the Leo Frank Case. Both of these African-American men, former National Pencil Company employees, made clearly damaging statements against Frank.
The Negro Nightwatchman Newton “Newt” Lee:
The evidence Newt Lee brought forward was circumstantial, but intriguing — and never quite adequately explained by Leo Frank then, or by his defenders now.
Mr. Lee stated that on Friday evening, April 25, 1913, Frank made a request to him, that he report to work an hour early at 4:00 p.m. on Confederate Memorial Day, the next day. The stated reason was that Leo Frank had made a baseball game appointment with his brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, a Gentile Christian who was married to one of (Frank’s wife) Lucille’s older sisters. Leo Frank would eventually give two different reasons at two separate times as to why he canceled that appointment:
( 1.) “I was too busy to have done it”: he had too much work to do,
and
( 2.) “The rainy weather was too cold and the stadium too crowded”: he was afraid of catching a cold, but the fact he never said both of these reasons at the same time was a circumstance of minor suspicion. Investigators were wondering, why would he change his story on such a throw-away detail?
Saturday, April 26, 1913, at almost 4:00 o’clock p.m.
Newt Lee’s normal expected time at the National Pencil Company factory on Saturdays was 5:00 pm sharp. Lee stated that when he arrived an hour early that fateful Saturday at 3:56 p.m., Leo Frank had forgotten the change because he was in an excited state. Frank, he said, was unlike his normal calm, cool, and collected “boss” self. Normally, if anything was out of order, Frank would command him, saying “Newt, step in here a minute” or the like. Instead, Frank burst out of his office, bustling frenetically towards Lee, who had arrived at the second-floor lobby at 3:56 pm. Upon greeting each other, Frank requested assertively that Lee go out on the town and “have a good time” for two hours and come back at 6:00 pm.
Old Newt Lee was Tired:
Because Leo Frank on Friday asked Newt Lee to come to work one hour early, Lee had lost that last nourishing hour of sleep one needs before waking up fully rejuvenated, so Lee requested of Frank that he allow him to take a nap in the Packing Room (adjacent to Leo Frank’s front office). But Frank re-asserted that Lee needed to go out and “have a good time” for 2 hours. Finally, Newt Lee acquiesced and left for two hours.
At trial, Frank would state that he sent Newt Lee out for two hours because he had work to do. When Lee came back, the double doors halfway up the staircase were locked — very unusual, as they had never had been locked before on Saturday afternoons. When Newt Lee unlocked the doors and went into Leo Frank’s office he witnessed his boss bungling and nearly fumbling the timesheet when trying to put a new one in the punch clock for the night watchman — Lee — to register.
It left people wondering why an executive whiteman who had 5 years of experience putting time cards into the punch clock was bugging out on it at that exact moment.
It came out before the trial that Newt Lee had earlier been told by Leo Frank that it was a National Pencil Company policy that once the night watchman arrived at the factory — as Lee had the day of the murder at 4:00 pm — he was not permitted to leave the building under any circumstances until he handed over the reins of security to the day watchman. Company security necessitated being cautious — poverty, and therefore theft, was rife in the South; there were fire risk hazards; and the critical factory machinery was worth a small fortune. Security was a matter of survival.
The two-hour timetable rescheduling — the canceled ball game — the inexplicable sudden security rule waiver — the bumbling with a new timesheet — the locked double doors — and Frank’s suspiciously excited behavior: All were highlighted as suspicious by the prosecution, especially in light of the fact that the “murder notes” — found next to Mary Phagan’s head — physically described Newt Lee, even calling him “the night witch.” And, the prosecutor asked, why did Leo Frank later telephone Newt Lee, not once but two or more times, that evening at the factory?
A Jewish “Racist” Subplot Against Two Negroes?
The substance of what happened between Newt Lee (and janitor James “Jim” Conley — see below) and Leo Frank from April 26, 1913, onward is most often downplayed, censored, or distorted by partisans of Leo Frank.
From the testimony of these two Black witnesses, we learn of an almost diabolic intrigue calculated to entrap the innocent night watchman Newt Lee. It would have been easy to convict a Black man in the White separatist South of that time, where the ultimate crime was a Black man having interracial sex with a White woman — to say nothing of committing a battery, rape, strangulation, and mutilation upon her in a scenario right out of the book: Psychopathia Sexualis.
Photo: Luther Zeigler Rosser, Lead Counselor for the Leo Frank defense and their Deliciously Racist Gambit.
The plot was exquisitely formulated for its intended audience, the twelve White men who would decide Leo Frank’s fate. It created two layers of Black men between Frank and the murder of Mary Phagan. It wouldn’t take the police too much time to realize Newt Lee didn’t commit the murder, and, since the death notes were written in Ebonics (Negro dialect), it would leave the police hunting for another Black murderer. As long as Jim Conley kept his mouth shut, he and Leo Frank wouldn’t hang. So the whole plot rested on Jim Conley — and it took the police three weeks to crack him using the third-degree method (Good Cop versus Bad Cop).
The ugly racist and anti-Gentile element of Leo Frank’s defense ploy is rarely mentioned today. The fact that it was Leo Frank, a Jew (and generally considered White in the racial separatist Old South), who first tried to pin the rape and murder of Mary Phagan on the elderly, balding, and married Black man Newt Lee (who had no criminal record to boot) is not something that Frank partisans want to highlight. Instead, the shrill cry of “anti-Semitism was the reason Leo Frank was convicted at trial” is repeated in the academy and mainstream media with such intentional frequency that the result is millions of people who never actually studied the Frank-Phagan case believe anti-Gentile conspiracy theory as gospel.
Leo Frank’s modern pedophile denialists also downplay the racial considerations that made Frank — when his first racially-tinged defense move failed and was abandoned — change his failed anti-Gentile course for the last time, and formulate a new subplot to pin the crime on Jim Conley, the admitted accessory-after-the-fact.
If events had played out as intended in the White Racial Separatist Atlanta of 1913, there would have likely been one or two dead Black men in the wake of the defense team’s intrigue.
Jim Conley knew far too much. He admitted he had helped the real murderer, Leo Frank, remove the body of Mary Phagan after the fact from the back section of the 2nd-floor to the rear-section of the basement. To prevent Conley, through extreme terror, from revealing any more about the real solution to the crime, and to discredit him no matter what he did, a new theory was needed. Jim Conley certainly was terrified beyond comprehension, knowing what White society did to Black men who beat, raped, strangled to death and mutilated White girls.
The Accuser Becomes the Accused
Image: Meet the Negro Custodian: 27-Year-Old, James “Jim” Conley.
The new murder theory posited by the Leo Frank defense team was that Jim Conley assaulted Mary Phagan as she walked down the stairs from Leo Frank’s office (see in the appendix Adolph Ochs’ now-censored black-face photo archive at New York Public Library). Once Phagan descended to the first-floor lobby, they said, she was assaulted and robbed, then thrown down 14 feet to the basement through the two-foot by two-foot scuttle hole at the side of the elevator. Conley then supposedly went through the scuttle hole himself, climbing down the ladder, dragged the unconscious Mary Phagan to the garbage dumping ground located at the back section of the basement, which was also diagonally in front of the large cellar incinerator (known as the “furnace”), where he then raped and strangled her.
The location where Phagan was discovered by Newt Lee and then afterward seen by Atlanta PD was well known by factory employees as the place garbage was temporarily stored before being burned in the incinerator-furnace.
But this grotesque racially-tinged framing was to fail in the end because of rudimentary medical forensics: The scratch marks all over Mary Phagan’s body didn’t bleed, it meant she was already dead before being brought to the basement and dragged from the cellar elevator shaft entryway to the furnace dumping ground at the back of the factory. First-responders, despite having trampled across the floor leaving footprints, still noted that there were clearly visible drag marks from the elevator shaft to where Phagan was dumped some 140 feet away.
Now we Flashback to Newt Lee the Nightwatchman and Leo Frank on the Night of Tuesday, April 29, 1913, at the Station-house.
Investigators arranged for a conversation to take place between Leo Frank and Newt Lee, who were intentionally put alone together in a police interrogation room at the Atlanta Police Station. The experiment was to see how Frank would interact with Lee and determine if any new information could be obtained.
Once believing they were alone, Leo Frank scolded Newt Lee for trying to talk about the murder of Mary Phagan and said that if Lee kept up that kind of talk, Frank and he would go straight to hell. Leo Frank had told the police he was willing to cooperate and help them uncover any information helpful to the investigation, but when he thought the police had left and it was only himself and Newt Lee, he tried to put the fear of God into the Negro nightwatchman so he would be apprehensive about giving any more details concerning the events on the evening the murdered had occurred several days prior.
Star Witnesses: Monteen Stover versus Jim Conley.
The Jewish community has crystallized around the notion that Jim Conley was the star witness at the “Southern Trial of the Century”, and not 14-year-old Monteen Stover, who ironically defended Leo Frank’s character against the charges of lasciviousness— and then inadvertently put his alibi into question.
Leo Frank partisans downplay the significance of Monteen Stover’s trial testimony and Leo Frank’s attempted rebuttal of her testimony on August 18, 1913. Governor John M. Slaton also ignored the Stover-Frank incident in his 29-page commutation order of June 21, 1915. Why do Leo Frank’s defenders, then and now, seldom mention this critical breakthrough when re-telling the epic saga?
Many Frank partisans have chosen to obscure the significance of Monteen Stover’s revelations in May of 1913 and her trial Testimony at the end of July 1913, by putting the intense analytical focus on Jim Conley’s word versus that of Leo Frank, and then claiming that without the contradictory statements of the alleged “accomplice-after-the-fact” there would have been no conviction of Leo Frank and he would have certainly been acquitted to live his life as a free man again.
Could they be right? Or could Leo Frank have been convicted on the testimony of Monteen Stover, without the testimony of Jim Conley?
It is a question left for conjecture and guesswork only, because no one ever anticipated the significance of Jim Conley telling the jury that he had found Mary Phagan dead in the men’s toilet hallway located in the corner section of the Machine Department.
It was not until Leo Frank gave his response to Monteen Stover’s testimony — his explanation of why his second-floor business office was empty on April 26, 1913, between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm — that everything came together tight and narrow into a focal point of precision. At that exact wrinkle in time and space, everyone seated just outside the perimeter of the courtroom’s open inner arena, collectively gasped in absolute consummate silence.
Frank ripped away the curtain obscuring the mire of one of the greatest murder mysteries of all time, it was one of those chilling moments where observers who had been paying meticulous attention to every detail of the trial testimony and pondered the forensic evidence, suddenly, felt goose-pimples rise from their flesh.
Had you been selected to be seated at the defense team's table you, would have gulped, sighed, and swallowed air, had you been sitting in the high-back leather chair behind the judge's rostrum your beetle-browed bedecked eyes would have risen and had you been sitting in the jury‘s wooden panel box you would have felt cold shivers down your spine.
Leo Frank with exactness threaded the needle’s eye of the Atlanta police detective's Mary Anne Phagan murder thesis, and the district attorney’s theory of how the crime unfolded — thus the defendant ineluctably entrapped himself beyond escape in a sumptuous dark twist of the ironical.
What could any fair-minded jury, then or now, do in such circumstances?
And why does the Jewish community continue to malevolently insist Leo Frank was convicted because of “mob-terrorizing” anti-Semitism?
Even after all the best legal minds in the state and federal appeals courts overwhelmingly ruled Leo Frank had a fair trial in their rulings, this doesn’t mean there were no dissenting opinions, because there certainly were, but they were likely influenced by ideas implanted through the incessant well-networked national newspaper torrents of false narratives about the case, admittedly lead by Jewish media moguls, Adolph Ochs, and Albert D. Lasker. Both of these media juggernauts confessed in their own subtle way they regrettably took on the case as a kind of personal crusade.
Tom Watson resolved the “no conviction without Conley” controversy in the September 1915 number of his Watson’s Magazine, but perhaps it is time for a 21st-century explanation to make it clear why even the Georgia Supreme Court ruled that the evidence and testimony of the trial sustained Frank’s conviction.
August 18, 1913: You Are the Jury
The four-hour-long unsworn statement of Leo Frank was the crescendo of the trial. (Later, just before closing arguments, Frank himself was allowed the last word. He spoke once more on his own behalf, unsworn this time also, for five minutes, denying the damaging testimony of others that he had actually known Mary Phagan by name and that he had gone into the dressing room for presumably immoral purposes with one of the company’s other employees, Rebecca Carsen.)
Image: The jury that convicted Leo Frank
Some have claimed there are three alleged “Confessions” Found in the Brief of Evidence, 1913, but this is obviously hotly contested.
It is important to understand that Leo Frank’s startling admission of his presence in the death room at the critical moment did not stand alone in the jury’s eyes. Conclusive as it was, it was not Frank’s only confession, allegedly.
The official record shows Leo Frank allegedly “confessed” (hearsay) to murdering Mary Phagan three times, though he would deny all three.
• Alleged “Confession” Number One — April 26, 1913: Leo Frank’s murder confession number one was made to Jim Conley when Leo Frank told him he had tried to “be with her” (have sexual intercourse with Mary Phagan) and she refused him. According to Conley, Frank then stated he had struck the thirteen-year-old girl and hit her too hard, she had hit her head against something. Some of Mary Phagan’s blood-soaked hair was discovered on Monday, April 28, 1913, by R. P. Barrett on the handle of his lathe in the second floor machine department (R.P. Barrett Testimony, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913).
- Alleged “Confession” Number Two — April 26, 1913: According to the McKnight family (See: Albert’s and Magnolia’s Affidavit, Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court Documents, 1913, 1914), Allegedly Leo Frank confessed about murdering Mary Phagan to his wife Lucille Selig Frank on the evening of April 26, 1913, at around 10:00 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. Leo Frank said to his wife that he didn’t know why he would murder — and asked his wife for his pistol so he could shoot himself. Lucille told her family and her cook Magnolia “Minola” McKnight, about what happened that evening. Minola McKnight told her husband Albert McKnight, who thereafter told his boss, because he had contacts in the Atlanta Police. Decades later, Lucille Selig-Frank refused to be buried in the Frank-Stern family plot, next to her husband, leaving explicit instructions to the contrary and this fact gives some gravitas to State’s Exhibit J, June 3, 1913. (With respect to Lucille Selig, see: Oney, UGA, Georgia Magazine, ‘Features’ March 2004 at the Leo Frank Research Library).
Source of State’s Exhibit J: Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. the State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913. Brief of Evidence 1913
STATE’S EXHIBIT J, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913.
An affidavit executed by Magnolia Minola McKnight for Solicitor Dorsey, as follows:
The state of Georgia, County of Fulton.
Personally appeared before me, a notary public in and for the above
State and county, Minola McKnight, who lives in the rear of 351 Pulliam St.,
Atlanta, Ga., who being duly sworn deposes and says:
On Saturday morning, April 26, 1913, Mr. [Leo] Frank left home about
eight o’clock, and Albert [McKnight], my husband, was there Saturday, too.
Albert [McKnight] got there I guess about a quarter after one [1:15 PM] and
he [Albert McKnight] was there when Mr. [Leo] Frank come for dinner (Dinner is what they called Lunch back then), which was about half-past one [1:30 PM], but Mr. Frank did not eat any dinner (Lunch), and he left in about ten minutes [1:40 PM] after he [Mr. Leo Frank] got there.
Mr. [Leo] Frank come back to the house at seven o’clock that night, and Albert
[McKnight] was there when he [Leo Frank] got there. Albert [McKnight] had gone home that [early] evening but he come back. I don’t know what time he [Albert McKnight] got there, but he come sometime before Mr. [Leo] Frank did, and Mr. [Leo] Frank eat supper about seven o’clock, and when I left there that night about eight o’clock, I left Mr. [Leo] Frank there.
Sunday morning I got there about eight o’clock, and there was an
automobile standing in front of the house and I didn’t pay any attention
to it. I saw a man in the automobile get a bucket of water and pour into
it. Mr. [Leo] Frank’s wife [Lucille Selig Frank] was downstairs and Mr. [Emil Selig] and Mrs. [Josephine] Selig were upstairs. Albert [McKnight] was there Sunday morning, but I don’t remember what time he got there. I called them down to breakfast about half past eight [8:30 AM] and I found out that Mr. [Leo] Frank was gone.
Mr. [Emil] Selig and Mrs. [Josephine] Selig eat breakfast, but Mrs. [Lucille] Frank didn’t eat until Mr. Frank come back and then they eat breakfast together. I didn’t hear them say anything at the breakfast table. After dinner I understood them to say that a girl and Mr. [Leo] Frank were caught at the office Saturday. I don’t know who said it, Miss Lucile (Mrs. Frank) and
Mr. [Emil Selig] and Mrs. [Josephine] Selig and Mr. [Leo] Frank were standing there talking, after dinner when they said it; I understood them to say it was a Jew girl.
On Tuesday, Mr. [Leo] Frank says to me, ‘It is mighty bad Minola, I might
have to go to jail about this girl, and I don’t know anything about it.’
Sunday, Miss Lucile said to Mrs. Selig that Mr. Frank didn’t rest so good
Saturday night; she said he was drunk and wouldn’t let her sleep with him,
and she said she slept on the floor on the rug by the bed because Mr. [Leo] Frank was drinking.
Miss Lucile [Selig Frank] said Sunday that Mr. [Leo] Frank told her Saturday night that he was in trouble, and that he didn’t know the reason why he would murder, and he told his wife to get his pistol and let him kill himself. I heard Miss Lucile [Selig Frank] say that to Mrs. [Josephine] Selig, and it got away with Mrs. [Josephine] Selig mighty bad; she didn’t know what to think. I haven’t heard Miss Lucile say whether she believed it or not. I don’t know why Mrs. Frank didn’t come to see her husband, but it was a pretty good while before she would come to see him, maybe two weeks. She would tell me, ‘Wasn’t it mighty bad that he was locked up,’ she would say, ‘Minola, I don’t know what I am going to do.’
When I left home to go to the solicitor general’s office, they told me to mind how I talked. They pay me $3.50 a week, but last week they paid me $4.00, and one week she paid me $6.50. Up to the time of the murder I was getting $3.50 a week and the week right after the murder I don’t remember how much she paid me, and the next week they paid me $3.50, and the next week they paid me $6.50, and the next week they paid me $4.00 and the next week they paid me $4.00. One week, I don’t remember which one, Mrs. Selig gave
me $5, but it wasn’t for my work, and they didn’t tell me what it was for, she just said, ‘ Here is $5, Minola.’
I understood that it was a tip for me to keep quiet. They would tell me to mind how I talked and Miss Lucile gave me a hat.”
Question: “Is that the reason you didn’t tell the solicitor yesterday all about this, that Miss Lucile and the others had told you not to say anything about what happened at home there’?”
Answer: “Yes, sir.”
Question: “Is that true?”
Answer: “Yes, sir.”
Question:. “And that’s the reason you would rather have been locked up last night than tell?’”
Answer: “Yes, sir.”
Question: “Has Mr. Pickett or Mr. Cravens or Mr. Campbell or myself influenced you in any way or threatened you in any way to make this statement? “
Answer: “No, sir.”
Question: “You make it of your own free will and accord in their presence and in the presence of Mr. Gordon, your attorney?”
Answer: “Yes, sir.”
(Signed) MINOLA McKNIGHT.
Sworn to and subscribed before me, this 3d day of June 1913.
(Signed) G. C. FEBUARY, Notary public, Fulton County, Ga.
Torture and Coercion
Leo Frank’s defenders, then and now, have long claim Minola was tortured or coerced to produce State’s Exhibit J. But Concerning the veracity of State’s Exhibit J, one should consider State’s Exhibit B, and why Leo Frank so thoughtfully bought Lucille Selig Frank a box of Chocolates at Jacob’s Pharmacy on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at 6:15 pm, just minutes before catching the 6:20 pm trolly home, to his in-laws residence at 68 East Georgia Avenue, Atlanta. Leo Frank claimed he arrived at home at 6:30 pm.
• Leo Frank Alleged Murder “Confession” Number Three — August 18, 1913: At the Phagan Murder Trial the “unconscious bathroom visit” statement delivered by Frank to the court in his unsworn statement, placing him unequivocally at ground zero of the theorized murder scene at the critical time (Leo Frank’s Statement to the Court, Trial Brief of Evidence, August 18, 1913).
Number Four?! Frank would also reaffirm this admission in a newspaper interview published by the Atlanta Constitution on March 9th, 1914.
Quote:
Question 9. Did you [Leo Frank] not at one time say you were not out of your office at 12:05 o’clock? Did not Monteen Stover say she was there at that time and you were not in? Did you not then change your statement? If so, what is your explanation?
Leo Frank’s Answer — I said I was not out of my office at 12:05 [pm on Saturday, April 26, 1913]. I always contended that, and I still assert it. I never changed. I may have stepped to the toilet for a minute or two, but one couldn’t remember such an occurrence. I am not fully satisfied as to the accuracy of Miss Stover’s testimony. She is but a child, and may not be accurate.
Let me say, as I did in answer to the preceding question, that I always stated freely and voluntarily that I saw and talked with Mary Phagan in my office. I gave her pay envelope. She asked me if the metal had come, and when I told her no, she departed. I did not see her alive again. Now, if I had anything to conceal about the meeting between Mary Phagan and myself, if I had been the guilty man, would I not have denied from the first that I had ever seen her at all? Would I ever have come forward freely and voluntarily and stated that I had seen and talked with her? Would I not have tried to conceal that fact? Let me say that if some other man were accused of a murder, and he were to come forward voluntarily and state, without any compulsion, that he had seen and talked with the dead person just a few moments before the killing was supposed to have occurred, I would say that the man had a clear conscience and was not guilty. For, if he had been guilty, common sense would have made him hide and conceal the fact of seeing the dead person just before the killing.
Photo: The Presiding Judge Leonard Strickland Roan (1849–1915)
With Mercy — or Without?
Judge Leonard Strickland Roan gave the jury two options if they found the defendant guilty: ‘With Mercy’ or ‘Without Mercy.’ If there was any doubt of Leo M. Frank’s guilt, the judge and jury could have sentenced Frank to life in prison instead of sentencing him to death by hanging. When the jury unanimously sentenced Leo Frank to death by hanging after deciding on a verdict of guilt, Judge Roan had the legal option to downgrade the jury’s death sentence, and only give Leo Frank life in prison — that is, if Roan disagreed with the judgment. But Judge Roan agreed with their collective verdict and sentencing recommendation. Roan denied Leo Frank’s post-conviction petition for a new trial, rejecting it on 107 grounds.
Then and Now:
Many in the Jewish community, and other Leo Frank partisans, have suggested that Judge Roan doubted the verdict because of one of his apparently appeasing comments made orally to his former law partner, Luther Zeigler Rosser. But if Roan actually doubted the verdict, he could have exercised his power many times to prevent Frank’s execution, and even given him a new trial if that would have served the cause of justice. But he did none of these things. Roan rejected Leo Frank’s appeals to him for a new trial on more than 100 grounds!! The oral history of the Roan family was that Leonard emphatically believed Leo Frank was guilty. The 1915 purported typed letter by Judge Roan saying otherwise was an obvious forgery, one only needs to read the 1800 page Leo Frank Georgia appellate records to understand the depth of depravity Frank’s elite supporters went to, in order to vindicate their guy.
Then something very cruel occurred after the Georgia Supreme Court rejected one of Leo Frank’s appeals and returned his case back to Judge Benjamin Hill for re-sentencing in 1914. Hill re-sentenced Leo Frank sentenced to hang, scheduled for April 17, 1914. Thus Judge Hill implicitly declared without actually stating these words orally or in writing: Mr. Frank you are hereby; “Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday to You, Happy Birthday Dear Leo, Happy Birthday to You! How Old Are You Now? How Old Are You Now? How Old Are you Nowwww…..? Happy Birthday to You.”
The certainty of Leo Frank’s guilt was so strong that, after reviewing his trial testimony for months, the Fulton County Superior Court Judge Benjamin H. Hill, on March 7th, 1914, re-sentenced Leo Frank, forthcoming 5 to 6 weeks later, to die on his 30th birthday: April 17, 1914. Only absolute mathematical certainty of guilt warrants such a cruel sentencing date by a judge.
Leo Frank’s capital punishment stayed one more time as he continued to press for new appeals and he would eventually be sentenced to die, scheduled for Summer Solstice, June 22nd, 1915.
* * *
Appendix: Essential Reading
To gain a full understanding of the Leo Frank case, and the tissue-thin “anti-Semitic conspiracy” theories advanced by the media today, it is necessary to read the official record without censorship or selective editing by partisans. Here are the resources which will enable you to do just that.
• Leo M. Frank Brief of Evidence, Murder Trial Testimony, and Affidavits, 1913
• Leo M. Frank unsworn trial statement (BOE, Leo Frank Trial Statement, August 18, 1913)
• Leo Frank trial, State’s Exhibit B, April 28, 1913 (BOE)
Original State’s Exhibit B:
Part 1 — published on www.Flickr.com
Part 2 — published on www.Flickr.com
Complete Analysis of State’s Exhibit B (required reading): The full review of State’s Exhibit B at the Leo Frank Research Library
• Leo Frank Case files from the Georgia Supreme Court, Adobe PDF format: published on www.Flickr.com
• Atlanta Constitution issue of March 9, 1914 (Leo Frank Answers List of Questions Bearing on Points Made Against Him, March 9, 1914)
• Compare the analysis of the bathroom statement by reading: Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey, followed by Argument of Mr. Frank Hooper — also compare with Tom Watson’s version
• Minola McKnight statement (Magnolia Mcknight, State’s Exhibit J, June 3, 1913) and cremation request in the 1954 Notarized Last Will and Testament of Lucille Selig Frank (State of Georgia Records Archives, 1954)
• 2D and 3D National Pencil Company floor diagrams (Defendant’s Exhibit 61, and State’s Exhibit A, 1913)
Image: The National Pencil Company in 3 Dimensions, State’s Exhibit A.
3-Dimensional Floor Plan of the National Pencil Company from the Leo Frank Georgia Supreme Court File: published on www.Flickr.com
The Defendant Leo Frank’s Factory Diagrams Made on His Behalf: published on www.Flickr.com
2-Dimensional Floor Plan of the National Pencil Company in 1913: published on www.Flickr.com
Image: Defendants Exhibit 61, Ground Floor and Second Floor 2D Birds Eye View Maps of the National Pencil Company. Plat of the First and Second Floor of the National Pencil Company.
- Images: State’s Exhibit A (Small Image) or State’s Exhibit A (Large Image).
2. Different Version: Side view of the factory diagram showing the front half of the factory, source: www.Flickr.com
3. Bert Green Diagram of the National Pencil Company, Atlanta, Georgia, 1913, Available on www.Flickr.com
• James “Jim” Conley’s testimony (James Conley, Brief of Evidence, August, 4, 5, 6, 1913),
• 1914 Staged late defense version of Mary Phagan murder events by Jewish Media Mogul Adolph Ochs owner of Jewish Newspaper the New York Times, Available on www.Flickr.com
• The Jeffersonian Newspaper 1914–1917 and Watson’s Magazine (August and September 1915) series on the case, images posted on www.Flickr.com
• Defense and prosecution both ratify the original Brief of Evidence: Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. the State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913. Brief of Evidence. Available on www.Flickr.com
- John Davison Lawson’s American State Trials, Volume X, 1918, Read the closing arguments here of Luther Zeigler Rosser, Reuben Rose Arnold, Hugh Manson Dorsey, and Frank Arthur Hooper) Available on www.Flickr.com
- Required Reading: Mary Phagan Kean’s analysis of the Leo Frank Case: The Murder of Little Mary Phagan available in a free audiobook version of this book is at www.TheAmericanMercury.org
- The primary sources of the Leo Frank Case are available at
1) www.Flickr.com — Flickr
2) www.Archive.org — The Internet Archive
3) www.LeoFrank.org — The Leo Frank Case Archive
4) www.LeoFrank.info — The Leo Frank Research Library
- Leo Frank Case Stirs Debate 100 Years After Jewish Lynch Victim's Conviction by Paul Berger, August 2013, Jewish Daily Forward. Read more: http://forward.com/news/182399/leo-frank-case-stirs-debate-100-years-after-jewish/
29-Segment Audiobook:
Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, Vol. 3, The Leo Frank Case, The Lynching of a Guilty Man by the NOI Research Group (April 26, 2016).
Podcast 02
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/05/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-2
Podcast 03
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/05/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-3
Podcast 04
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/05/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-4
Segment 05
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/05/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-5
Podcast 06
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/05/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-6
Podcast 07
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/06/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-7
Podcast 08
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/06/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-8
Podcast 09
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/06/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-9
Podcast 10
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/06/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-10
Podcast 11
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/07/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-11
Podcast 12
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/07/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-12
Podcast 13
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/07/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-13
Podcast 14
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/07/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-14
Podcast 15
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/08/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-15
Podcast 16
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/08/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-16
Podcast 17
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/08/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-17
Podcast 18
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/08/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-18
Podcast 19
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/08/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-19
Podcast 20
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/09/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-20
Podcast 21
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/09/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-21
Podcast 22
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/09/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-22
Podcast 23
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/09/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-23
Podcast 24
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/10/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-24
Podcast 25
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/10/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-25
Podcast 26
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/10/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-26
Podcast 27
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/10/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-27
Podcast 28
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/11/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-28
Podcast 29
https://theamericanmercury.org/2018/11/the-leo-frank-case-the-lynching-of-a-guilty-man-part-29
Update May 2019:
Video News — Infamous Leo Frank trial, lynching to be reexamined by new Fulton County task force, 11 Alive, May 7, 2019. Roy Barnes is caught lying on TV that every single day during the month-long Leo Frank trial, crowds were shouting lynching threats at the jury. Web Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4tgKcqOXyhc
Article News — Did Leo Frank Kill Mary Phagan? 106 Years Later We Might Finally Find Out For Sure by Steve Oney, (July 2019 Print Issue of Atlanta Magazine). Steve Oney promotes the 1964 Pierre van Paassen fraud that Mary Phagan had bite wounds on her neck and shoulder. Web Reference: https://www.atlantamagazine.com/news-culture-articles/did-leo-frank-kill-mary-phagan-106-years-later-we-might-finally-find-out-for-sure/
Added October 2019:
Phagan Family’s Little Mary Phagan Website http://www.LittleMaryPhagan.com
