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Old September 7th, 2005 #61
H.T.
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Default Stay In School, JP

Quote:
Originally Posted by J.P. Slovjanski
Learn to read. I said there was "no" evidence as in their was no significant evidence pointing to Conley. There WAS evidence pointing to Frank.
Learn to read? Your words are there for all to read. If you want to get your point across, make the effort. Could this be the root cause of WN distortionism?

And sorry to burst your bubble JP, but to a stranger your opinion is valueless, let alone one on VNN. If you say there "WAS" evidence, provide it. If not, step to the back of the line and quit clogging up this thread.

Quote:
Originally Posted by J.P. Slovjanski
Either way, blame Frank and it proves the ADL was founded in memory of a pervert perpetrator, or blame the black man and confirm what we all already knew.
Either way? Sorry again PJ, it was either one or the other, and the preponderance of evidence points directly at Conley. What does that mean? The kkk, and every splinter group since then, has been founded on one big lie - a true hoax. BTW, the ADL was formed after, and in direct response to the creation of the kkk, Leo was only the catalyst.

Quote:
Originally Posted by J.P. Slovjanski
I for one would find it odd that Conley would live if there was so much evidence pointing to him raping a white girl in the South.
Lol, suddenly you find a place in your warm WN bosom for black murderers and rapists? Just look how tolerant and understanding WN's are....LMWFAO, [you can laugh your WAO too.] "Either way," a fair trial and an impartial review of the evidence is all that matters.


Quote:
Originally Posted by J.P. Slovjanski
Not impressed pal. An before you start trying to pull the critical thinking act, keep in mind that an ad hominem is evidence of nothing. It is what it is. In other words, your arguments are fallacious and you are also a moron.
Lol, impressing you? Gawd you full of auto-flattery. It's called education - do you pick an opinion and stick with it come hell or high water, or are you at least amenable to change?

I understand how difficult it must be for you to admit to committing a fallacy you pounce on others so well for - but now you're projecting. An ad hominem is a logical fallacy – it has no bearing on the truth or falsity or quality of my argument like you said, it does however impugn your credibility. It is what it is for damn sure.

Next.
 
Old September 7th, 2005 #62
J.P. Slovjanski
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Apparently in your "education" nobody ever told you that the KKK had been around since 1874.
 
Old September 7th, 2005 #63
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Leo Frank dragged the body, like a sack of potatoes, to the basement

Quote:
Originally Posted by Antiochus Epiphanes
I am wondering what all the Jews reading and monitoring this web page think about this perverted Jew Leo Frank and how he received justice for his crime. Or better yet what do you think of poor Mary Phagan?
The Jew paid Jim Conley $ 200 to burn the body, like some much garbage.
 
Old September 8th, 2005 #64
H.T.
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Default Time to Evolve

Mr. Skunk,

Providing ACCURATE information OUT OF CONTEXT is IN FACT INACCURATE (and dishonest.) But now you’re providing the probable murderers/rapists testimony as information?!?

I have sympathy for your situation. It must be very difficult to have a belief system blow up in your face after years of faithful service. If you dislike the herd ZOG mentality, now’s the time to prove your own ability at independent thought.
 
Old September 11th, 2005 #65
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Leo Frank was a true monster




He did such despicable and preverted acts that women jurors were appalled

Judge cleared courtroom of women and children
 
Old September 15th, 2005 #66
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HateThis
Mr. Skunk,

Providing ACCURATE information OUT OF CONTEXT is IN FACT INACCURATE (and dishonest.) But now you’re providing the probable murderers/rapists testimony as information?!?
Who was the probable rapist ?
 
Old September 15th, 2005 #67
H.T.
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Default Who? Huh?

Quote:
Originally Posted by The_skunk
Who was the probable rapist ?
The answer wasn’t secretly encoded in my previous posts. But allow me to help.

There was this guy named Jim Conley, a maintenance worker at the pencil factory, a career criminal, found rinsing blood out of his t-shirt the night of the murder, initially admitted to writing the notes found next to the murdered body, admitted to his lawyers he murdered the little girl, gave inconsistent testimony, initially determined by the Atlanta Police Dept. and Pinkerton Detective Services to have committed the murder, and who was spotted by a boy the day of the murder carrying a dead white girl over his shoulder that, according to him, was Mary Phagan.

Ever heard of him?
 
Old September 15th, 2005 #68
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Quote:
Originally Posted by HateThis
There was this guy named Jim Conley, a maintenance worker at the pencil factory, a career criminal, found rinsing blood out of his t-shirt the night of the murder,
So this negro may have killed the girl, and they hung the Jewish guy. I heard that southerners really hated Jews - saying they started the civil war, but never served in the army. No doubt a lot of hate was put on Frank becaues of the jew carpetbaggers, after the civil war.
 
Old September 15th, 2005 #69
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Quote:
Originally Posted by The_skunk
So this negro may have killed the girl, and they hung the Jewish guy. I heard that southerners really hated Jews - saying they started the civil war, but never served in the army. No doubt a lot of hate was put on Frank becaues of the jew carpetbaggers, after the civil war.
Well, the Southerners feelings for Jewish carpetbaggers notwithstanding, Leo Frank (or any individual) deserved a fair trial.

No doubt Southerners also held much contempt for blacks too, but their feelings, justified or not, does not grant anyone the right to murder.

You know, Osama Bin Laden also feels justified to murder Americans, and with divine support from Allah no less.
 
Old September 24th, 2005 #70
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Police caught the jew with little girls



Leo Frank was caught in the park with a little girl
 
Old September 26th, 2005 #71
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Skunk, very good one. Shows Jew Leo Frank's guilt convincingly.
 
Old September 26th, 2005 #72
H.T.
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Default DSM IV-R s/s

Quote:
Originally Posted by Antiochus Epiphanes
Skunk, very good one. Shows Jew Leo Frank's guilt convincingly.
AE, your schizophrenic/OCD personality disorders are now both documented and visible to everyone... oops!

(kike talk not withstanding...)
 
Old October 22nd, 2005 #73
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The jury thought he may even had sex with her corpse
 
Old June 18th, 2012 #74
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jewsign Leo Frank made four separate and distinct murder confessions

If you want to learn everything about the Leo Frank case without Jewish censorship and omission, visit the largest Leo Frank web site in the world at http://www.LeoFrank.org at the Leo Frank Research Library. The web site published the complete Leo Frank trial brief of evidence and the Georgia Supreme Court Case file on Leo Frank. Visit the web site to learn the truth.
 
Old August 28th, 2012 #75
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Who Really Solved the Mary Phagan Murder Case?

Book Review: Steve Oney’s And the Dead Shall Rise, 2003.

IN HIS 742-page magnum opus about the Leo Frank case, author Steve Oney shamelessly fails to inform the reader of who ultimately solved the Mary Phagan murder mystery in 1913.

On Monday morning, April 28, 1913, Leo Frank was taken to the Atlanta Police Station for routine questioning during the critical first 48 hours of the Mary Phagan murder investigation. In an interrogation room, Leo Frank was flanked by his two elite lawyers, Luther Z. Rosser and Herbert Haas, and surrounded by a team of police, staff, and detectives. Leo Frank made a deposition concerning his whereabouts during Confederate Memorial Day, Saturday, April 26, 1913, and about his “brief” encounter with Mary Phagan minutes after high noon.

Leo Frank’s statement was stenographed by a government magistrate named Mr. Febuary, and the statement became part of the official record at the Leo Frank trial, registered as State’s Exhibit B (Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913). Leo Frank specifically stated that Mary Phagan entered his second floor office on Saturday, April 26, 1913 between “12:05 pm and 12:10 pm, maybe 12:07 pm.” Leo Frank also repeatedly told the police and detectives that he never left his office on April 26, 1913 between twelve noon and 12:45 pm. However, Leo Frank’s timeline alibi would dramatically change at his trial (which took place from July 28 to August 21, 1913) on August 18, 1913, when he mounted the witness stand.

At the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, a 14-year-old girl named Monteen Stover who formerly worked at the National Pencil Company testified she went there to collect her pay envelope inside Leo Frank’s office on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at 12:05 p.m. and found Leo Frank’s office completely empty. Monteen Stover described waiting inside the office for five minutes, until 12:10 pm when she left because she thought the factory might have been deserted. If Monteen Stover was telling the truth, she had inadvertently broken Leo Frank’s alibi concerning his whereabouts on that fateful day. What was ironic about Monteen Stover’s testimony is that she was a positive character defense witness for Leo Frank, unlike 19 of his other employees and associates whose testimony suggested Leo Frank was a lecherous, licentious, lascivious, and libertine boss.

Leo Frank specifically answered on August 18, 1913, why Monteen Stover found his office empty on Saturday, April 26, 1913 between 12:05pm and 12:10pm — and in doing so, Leo Frank himself solved the Mary Phagan murder mystery.

Leo Frank mounted the witness stand at 2:15 pm to make an unsworn courtroom speech to the judge and jury on the record. During Leo Frank’s four-hour trial statement, he refused to be examined or cross examined by defense and prosecution counselors, but he answered the question everyone wanted to know by directly responding to the testimony of Monteen Stover about why his office was empty on April 26, 1913 between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm. Leo Frank contradicted his earlier statement to the police and explained this five minute absence with a never before heard admission that, during those crucial moments, he might have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom in the Metal Room.

It was an astonishing, jaw dropping, and spine-tingling admission by Leo M. Frank that left everyone in the courtroom perplexed and stunned, because there was only one bathroom on the second floor and it was located inside the Metal Room — the real scene of the crime. Leo Frank not only put himself in the Metal Room where all the forensic evidence suggested Mary Phagan had been murdered, but he put himself in the specific location at which Jim Conley testified he found the dead body of Mary Phagan.

The newfangled explanation delivered by Leo Frank on August 18, 1913 at 2:45 pm to the judge and jury was considered the equivalent of a murder confession, because the state’s prosecution team spent the entire duration of the four-week-long trial proving Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan in the Metal Room on April 26, 1913 between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm.

The Metal Room was down the hall from Leo Frank’s office, and was the place Mary Phagan had toiled for more than a year at a wage of 7 and 4/11th cents an hour. The Metal Room was where Leo Frank went to use the bathroom each and every day, as he worked down the hall in his second floor office at the front section of the National Pencil Company. When Leo Frank went to the bathroom each day between the year’s time from the Springs of 1912 and 1913 that Mary Phagan was employed, he had to immediately pass by her work station within a matter of feet — but Leo Frank denied even knowing Mary Phagan at the trial, and it became an incriminating point of contention against him.

Jim Conley Testifies at the Trial of Leo Frank in the Summer of 1913

On Monday, August 4, 1913, Jim Conley was called to mount the witness stand and reported that he’d discovered the dead body of Phagan in the metal department (Metal Room) bathroom at the behest of Leo Frank during the noon hour of April 26, 1913. Conley stated that Leo Frank asked him to move her body to an area of the basement where garbage was normally placed before being incinerated in a large cellar furnace. In the aftermath of Jim Conley’s refusing to complete the job of stuffing Mary Phagan into the furnace for $200 (and thereby destroying the evidence), Conley instead agreed to write the “death notes” pinning the bludgeoning, rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan on a tall, dark, and slim black man named Newt Lee, the factory night watchman and security guard who had worked at the factory for less than three weeks. The “death notes” were found next to the body of Mary Phagan, and they describe her going to “make water” in the only place she could “make water,” which was the bathroom in the Metal Room on the second floor. There was no bathroom accessible on the first floor and the one in the dark, dingy basement was segregated for “Negroes Only.”

Flashback to the Critical First 48 hours

On Monday morning, April 28, 1913, a factory employee named Robert P. Barret discovered a bloody tress of hair tangled on the steel handle of his lathe in the Metal Room, and moments later a 5-inch-wide fan-shaped blood stain on the floor of the Metal Room in front of the girls’ dressing room next to the bathroom.

At the trial, Barret testified about the forensic evidence he found, and it pointed to the same conclusion: the Metal Room had been the scene of a heinous crime of violence followed by a very poor clean-up job.

All of the evidence presented at the trial pointed to the Metal Room as the real scene of the crime, against the defense’s intimations the basement was where the murder of Phagan occurred.

Everything Came Around Full Circle at the Trial of Leo Frank

Jim Conley saying he found Mary Phagan dead in the Metal Room bathroom at the behest of Leo Frank and Leo Frank saying he might have “unconsciously” gone to the bathroom in the Metal Room at the same time he originally told the police that Mary Phagan was with him in his office (State’s Exhibit B), and at the same time Monteen Stover said Leo Frank’s office was empty, resulted in the case coming together at the murder trial in full circle with absolute precision. It was tight and narrow enough for it to be considered beyond reasonable doubt that Leo Frank did indeed commit an unspeakable crime right out of the chapters of the book ‘Psychopathia Sexualis’.

Leo Frank entrapped himself beyond escape at his trial seated and speaking on the witness stand, Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913, at 2:45 pm in the Fulton County Superior Court of Atlanta, Georgia.

The timeless question everyone wants to know the answer: how many times in the annals of United States legal history has the accused made an admission that amounted to an unmistakable murder confession at his or her own trial?

If there are any doubts about Leo Frank’s August 18, 1913 murder trial confession, consider reading the March 9, 1914, Atlanta Constitution newspaper’s jailhouse interview of Leo Frank, in which he reconfirms his trial testimony about a Metal Room bathroom visit, specifically responding to Monteen Stover’s testimony about his office being empty between 12:05 p.m. and 12:10 p.m. on Saturday, April 26, 1913.

The solving of the Mary Phagan murder mystery is found in the fact that Leo Frank made the equivalent of a public murder confession at his trial. This is documented in the official Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913, and the Georgia Supreme Court Case File on Leo Frank, 1913, 1914. No appellate tribunal called to review the Leo Frank trial brief of evidence from 1913 to 1915, and from 1982 to 1986 disturbed the unanimous verdict of the judge and jury originally made in August of 1913.

One may also read between the lines of appeasement concerning the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B’nai B’rith sponsored Leo M. Frank posthumous pardon — without exoneration — issued on March 11, 1986.

Leo Max Frank

Steve Oney weaves together a fantastic collage of unsubstantiated Leo Frank hoaxes throughout his entire book And the Dead Shall Rise (2003), as part of his shameless efforts to rewrite history, exonerate Leo Frank of the Mary Phagan murder, and ultimately rehabilitate the image of Leo Frank from that of a perverted and violent pedophile, rapist, and strangler — toward that of a kind, gentle, almost mythic stoic-martyr who was unjustly scapegoated in a vast conspiracy.

By cherry-picking and misrepresenting large parts of the case, a subtext is inserted in Oney’s book — that an innocent and well-educated Ivy League Jew named Leo Frank was ensnared by the real culprit, a semi-literate and drunken stumble-bum, the African-American factory sweeper Jim Conley.

Oney downplays the fact that Leo Frank and Jim Conley had a personal relationship that was a bit too close for comfort. Leo Frank would often goose and jolly with James “Jim” Conley at the factory. Leo Frank also managed Jim’s pawnshop contracts as Conley had a shady side business selling watches at the factory and even ripped off his fellow co-worker Mr. Arthur Pride who testified about it at the trial.

In October 1912, even though Jim Conley had just served three weeks of a one month sentence for drunk and disorderly behavior, Leo Frank took him back at the National Pencil Company. It was Conley’s 7th repeat offense and the judge decided it might do “Connolly” some good to serve some time for his drinking problem.

Did Leo Frank Know Jim Conley Could Write?

There was conflict over whether or not Leo Frank knew Jim Conley could write or not. The police said Leo Frank never told them Jim Conley could write, Leo Frank claimed he had told detective McWorth that he knew Jim Conley could write. Officer McWorth had been fired because he kept finding planted evidence at the National Pencil Company, specifically a contrived bloody club where Jim Conley sat on the first floor the day of the murder, and forged pay envelope with the initials MP on it.

Mum’s the Word

Leo Frank knew for a fact Jim Conley could write, but kept this information in confidence until it was too late. Leo Frank never said a single word about Conley to the police during the early days of the Mary Phagan murder investigation, even though the “death notes” were clearly written in Ebonics, and there were only eight African-American employees, out of 170 employees in total, working at the National Pencil Company factory HQ.

It was revealed Jim Conley worked at the National Pencil Company in various capacities for two years (1911 to 1913) and had even done some written inventory stock work for Leo Frank.

Steve Oney never addresses why Leo Frank knowingly refused to tell the police 27-year old Jim Conley could read and write on a pre-teen to teenage level.

What Steve Oney fails to elaborate fully for the reader is the most grotesque subplot of the bludgeoning, rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan: its pinning on the African-American night watchman Newton “Newt” Lee. Lee was ordered by Leo Frank on Friday, April 25 to arrive at work an hour early, 4:00 pm, on the infamous day of April 26, 1913 — so Leo Frank could go to a ball game with his brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach.

Oney points out in his book that weeks after Leo Frank and Jim Conley were arrested, the police arranged for them to confront each other face-to-face over the murder. Jim agreed, but Leo refused. Oney never answers the question why an “innocent White man” would refuse to confront an African-American man, accusing him of strangling a 13-year old White girl in the context of the White racial separatist south of 1913, where the word of a Black man would almost never be taken over the word of a White man.

Though Steve Oney claims he spent 17 years of his life traveling the country to research and write this colorful and thesaurus-enriched book, his analysis is shallow and myopic at best. Oney tends to wear blinders and drives with the emergency brakes on during his epic 700+ page journey, and, as a result, he does not plumb the depths of the case or soar above it’s centenarian heights with new eyes, thus leaving the reader truly frustrated, unsatisfied, and unfulfilled.

No real modern forensic analysis is applied to this case by Oney despite the hundreds of documents surviving into the 21st century, including crime scene and autopsy descriptions by police, detectives, undertakers, and physicians.

Oney does, however, fill his book with every crackpot theory ever advanced on behalf of Leo Frank’s defense, regardless of whether or not the inclusions stand up to even minimal scrutiny.

Pierre van Paassen, who, in addition to penning some rather incredible tales about the Leo Frank case, also claimed to have seen ghostly black dogs which could appear and disappear at will and killed one of his police dogs.

One of the biggest frauds Oney perpetuates was originally fabricated by the tabloid-style journalist Pierre van Paassen in his book To Number Our Days, published in 1964. In this 404-page work, van Paassen spends less than two pages (pp. 237-8) recalling an incident that happened in 1922, at a time when he was in Atlanta, Georgia, working as a journalist for the Atlanta Constitution, and investigating the then almost decade-old Leo Frank Case.

To Number Our Days, by Pierre van Paassen, chapter: “Short Stand in Dixieland,” page 237, line 27:

“The Jewish community of Atlanta at that time seemed to live under a cloud. Several years previously one of its members, Leo Frank, had been lynched as he was being transferred from the Fulton Tower Prison in Atlanta to Milledgeville for trial on a charge of having raped and murdered a little girl in his warehouse which stood right opposite the Constitution building. Many Jewish citizens who recalled the lynching were unanimous in assuring me that Frank was innocent of the crime.

“I took to reading all the evidence pro and con in the record department at the courthouse. Before long I came upon an envelope containing a sheaf of papers and a number of X-ray photographs showing teeth indentures. The murdered girl had been bitten on the left shoulder and neck before being strangled. But the X-ray photos of the teeth marks on her body did not correspond with Leo Frank’s set of teeth of which several photos were included. If those photos had been published at the time of the murder, as they should have been, the lynching would probably not have taken place.

“Though, as I said, the man died several years before, it was too late, I thought, to rehabilitate his memory and perhaps restore the good name of his family. I showed Clark Howell the evidence establishing Frank’s innocence and asked permission to run a series of articles dealing with the case and especially with the evidence just uncovered. Mr. Howell immediately concurred, but the most prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, Mr. Harry Alexander, whom I consulted with a view to have him present the evidence to the grand jury, demurred. He said Frank had not even been tried. Hence no new trial could be requested. Moreover, the Jewish community in its entirety still felt nervous about the incident. If I wrote the articles, old resentments might be stirred up and, who knows some of the unknown lynchers might recognize themselves as participants in my description of the lynching. It was better, Mr. Alexander thought, to leave sleeping lions alone. Some local rabbis were drawn into the discussion and they actually pleaded with Clark Howell to stop me from reviving interest in the Frank case as this was bound to have evil repercussions on the Jewish community.

“That someone had blabbed out of school became quite evident when I received a printed warning saying: ‘Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy.’ The unsigned warning was reinforced one night, or rather, early one morning when I was driving home. A large automobile drove up alongside of me and forced me into the track of a fast-moving streetcar coming from the opposite direction. My car was demolished, but I escaped without a scratch…. “

Van Paassen’s account of these events that allegedly happened more than four decades before is faulty in several particulars. Dental X-ray forensics were in their infancy in 1913, and never used in Georgia for any murder case until countless years after Leo Frank was hanged. Is it “Mr. Harry Alexander” or Henry Alexander? And why would the attorney who represented Leo Frank during his numerous appeals say Leo Frank didn’t have his murder trial yet? Leo Frank was not lynched on his way to trial or prison in late June 1915; he was lynched 170 miles away in Marietta on August 17, 1915. Bite marks on Mary Phagan’s left shoulder and neck? None of the numerous examinations or autopsies of Mary Phagan conducted by the undertaker, police, detectives, and physicians reported in the official record and newspapers mention any bite marks on Mary Phagan’s shoulder, neck or anywhere else on her body. Van Paassen also claims an attempt was made on his life by forcing him into a head-on collision with a streetcar in which his car was demolished, but he escaped without a scratch — all this in 1922 when there were virtually no safety features to speak of in automobiles.

The definitive book on the Leo Frank case has yet to be written. Perhaps it’s time for Steve Oney to re-read and carefully study the 1,800-page Georgia Supreme Court file on Leo M. Frank, and put out a new edition of his book without all the easily-verified misrepresentations, fabrications, half-truths, omissions, and sloppy research.
 
Old March 11th, 2015 #76
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A Full Review of the Leo Frank Case

Watson’s Magazine, Volume 20 Number 5, March 1915

On the 23rd page of Puck, for the week ending January 16, 1915, there is, in the smallest possible type, in the smallest possible space, at the bottom of the page, the notice of ownership, required by law.
Mankind are informed that Puck is published by a corporation of the same name, Nathan Strauss, Jr., being President, and H. Grant Strauss being Secretary and Treasurer. You are authorized, therefore, to give credit to the Strauss family for the unparalleled campaign of falsehood and defamation which Puck has persistently waged against the State of Georgia, her people, and her courts. Inasmuch as the Strauss family once lived in Georgia, and are loudly professing their ardent devotion to the State of their birth, you may feel especially interested in Puck.
Looking over the pages of this Strauss publication, I find a characteristic thing: on page 22, there is an illustrated advertisement of “Sunny Brook Whiskey” which is recommended as “a delightful beverage, and a wholesome tonic.” To give force to the words of testimonial, there is a picture of an ideally good-looking man, and this smiling Apollo is pointing his index finger at a large bottle of the delightful Sunny Brook fire-water.
On the next page, is a strikingly boxed advertisement of “The Keely Cure Treatment,” with references to such nationally known stew-it-out resorts as Hot Springs, Arkansas; Jacksonville, Florida; and Atlanta, Georgia. The advertisement states that the Keely Cure is “John Barleycorn’s Master,” and that during the last thirty-five years half-a-million victims of the drink appetite have been cured.
Therefore, the Strauss magazine is open to contributions from both sides. Those who don’t want the Keely Cure, are told where to get the liquor; while those who have had too much of the liquor, are told where to get the Keely Cure. In either event, the Strauss family continue to do business, and to add diligent shekels to the family pile.
Puck is one of those magazines which indulges in fun, for the entertainment of the human race. You can nearly always tell what sort of a man it is, by the jokes he carries around with him. In parallel column to the ad. of the Sunny Brook Whiskey, Puck places a delicate little bit of humor, like this:

“We stand behind the goods we sell!”
The silver-throated salesman said.
“No! No!” cried pretty, blushing Nell,
“You see, I want to buy a bed!”

Another bit of refined fun, which is so good that the Strauss family went to the expense of a quarter-page cartoon, represents a portly evangelical bishop, seated in the elegant room of a young mother, who is at the tea-table, close by, pouring “the beverage which cheers but not inebriates.” Her little boy sits on the bishop’s knee, and the kindly gentleman, with one hand on the lad’s plump limb, exclaims, “My! My! What sturdy little legs!” and the boy answers, “O, you ought to see mother’s!” and the mother is in arm’s length of the bishop!
The tone of Puck, and its sense of responsibility to its readers, when discussing matters of the gravest public concern, is shown by its treatment of the profoundly serious and important subject of Prohibition. I quote what Puck says, not to exhibit Richmond Pearson Hobson, or the pros and cons of Congressional legislation on that question, but to exhibit the levity and dishonesty of Puck:

Congress was treated to an excellent vaudeville a few days ago as part of the prohibition propaganda engineered by that earnest young white-ribboner, Richard Pearson Hobson. From all press reports of the session, it must have been an inspiring sight.
Mr. Hobson had placed in the “well” of the House—the big space in front of the clerk’s desk—twenty large lettered placards pointing out the alleged evils of the “liquor curse.” Some of those placards were: “Alcoholic Dogs Had More Feeble and Defective Puppies,” “Destructive Effect of Alcohol on Guinea Pigs,” etc.—New York Tribune.
Puck has long pointed out the terrible effects of alcoholic indulgence among our canine friends. It feels, with Mr. Hobson, a heartfelt pity at the picture of a tipsy terrier going home to a boneless doghouse and a hungry litter. But Mr. Hobson’s flapdoodle did not stop here. He rants:
“The national liquor trust in America opened four different headquarters in Alabama and conducted the major part of the great campaign against me, with their one hundred stenographers and eight hundred men on the salaried payroll. I found out also that Wall Street—and I am not guessing—raised a fund which was sent there to defeat me.”—New York Tribune.
Poor old Wall Street! No sooner is it out of the doldrums of an enforced vacation than it is dragged into action to lead that peerless force of “one hundred stenographers and eight hundred salaried men” against Mr. Hobson. It is a heart-rending picture, this spectacle of impoverished financiers passing ’round the hat to collect a fund to be used in behalf of the Demon Rum. Wall Street reeks with whiskey—if we believed the oratory of Prohibition’s Alabama advocate.
But, to continue:
That whiskey is killing daily more men in the United States than the war is taking away in Europe, was one of the statements emphasized by Mr. Hobson.—New York Tribune.
Is it to be wondered that the cause of Prohibition, championed with such rubbish as this, met with a decisive and well-deserved defeat?

The prominent feature of this number of Puck, is another full-page cartoon, by Hy Mayer, representing Leo Frank, this time, as an innocent prisoner barred from his freedom by the symbolic columns of “Wisdom, Justice, and Moderation,” as they appear on Georgia’s coat of arms. The Strauss accusation is, that the State has falsified her own motto, and converted her temple into a Bastille, through whose bars the innocent Frank is gazing outward for the liberty of which he has been so unlawfully deprived.
A paragraph on another page runs thus:

IN SAFE HANDS AT LAST.
Perhaps the Georgia mob that hooted its way to fame outside the court-room where Frank was being tried for his life will now pack up its carpet-bags and journey to Washington.
The Supreme Court of the United States would doubtless be tremendously overawed by a demonstration of mob violence on the part of an Atlanta delegation.

What are people to do, when mercenary detectives, and newspapers, and Hessians of the pen, hire themselves to push a propaganda of libel and race prejudice, in the determined effort to hide the evidence of Frank’s guilt, nullify the calm decisions of our highest court, and substitute the clamor of Big Money for the stern, impartial mandate of the Law?
In this same issue of the Strauss magazine, is another cartoon, by M. De Zayas, labeled, “ALONE IN HER SHAME!” The subject of odium is the State of Georgia, and she is pictured as being pointed at by the scornful fingers of all the other States.
If this kind of thing could work a mercurial public into hysteria, or hypnotize a governor into blue funk, what rich criminal would ever go to the scaffold? If Big Money can hire Hessians enough to fight Frank’s way out of the consequences of his awful crime, what is it that Big Money cannot do?
In the same Strauss magazine for January 30th, there is a still more insulting and defamatory cartoon. We reproduce it, for the information of our readers. It pictures the State of Georgia as a masked ruffian, with a coil of rope in his hand, trying to seize Leo Frank, and lynch him, without a legal trial. The witnesses to the scene are Uncle Sam, and a touring-car full of the other States in the Union! A guide, with a megaphone, is proclaiming the infamy of Georgia.
In all of the months during which William J. Burns has been working these agencies to create sentiment in favor of Frank, not a page of the essential sworn testimony has been given to the public. On the contrary, the wildest rumors, and the most craftily devised falsehoods, have been put into circulation, in the effort to get a favorable verdict from unthinking editors and readers who are slow to suspect that there is a systematic campaign of willful lies.
Excuse me for speaking plainly, the time has come for it.
Let us begin with Collier’s. This is the weekly paper which has sold books in so many peculiar ways, and made a nation-wide campaign against patent medicines—and then stopped quite suddenly.
It is the paper which editorially accused the white women of the United States of squealing on their negro paramours, and thereby causing them to be lynched—to avoid scandal!
The exact language of Collier’s was—

It is well known that many identifications are mere hysteria, often for crimes that were never committed, and many charges and identifications are founded on something worse than hysterical invention; they are the easiest escape from scandal. Now these are not the things to say, no doubt. They altogether lack chivalry and the aristocratic virtues. But perhaps it is time to put justice and truth above “honor,” whatever that may be.

Thus spoke Collier’s editorially in October 1908.
Is Collier’s the kind of publication which you would select for the championship of Truth?
Is Collier’s the weekly that would go to great expense in the Frank case, for the holy sake of Justice?
C.P. Connolly had been with William J. Burns in the McNamara cases, and Burns took up Connolly in the Frank case, to blow some bugles through the Baltimore Sun, the daily paper of the worthy Abells. After the Abells got through with Connolly, Collier’s picked him up, and translated him to Atlanta. What did he do there? With whom did he talk? How did he try to get at the facts of the Frank case?
He did not go over the record, with the Solicitor who was familiar with it, and who proffered his services to Connolly for that very purpose!
If Connolly came for the truth, why did he not listen to both sides? Why did he not read the record? Or if he read it, why did he so grossly misrepresent it?
Let us examine a few of Connolly’s statements—statements which being accepted as true, have poisoned the minds of honest people throughout the Union, just as they were meant to do!
Connolly says—“Leo M. Frank is a young man of whose intellectual attainments any community might well be proud. Atlanta has been combed to find something against his moral character….but without success.”
There you have a flat, positive assertion that the city of Atlanta was diligently searched for witnesses who would testify against Frank’s moral character, and that none could be found.
What will be your amazement and indignation, when I tell you that numerous white girls and white women went upon the witness stand, and swore against Frank’s moral character?
One after another, those white accusers, braved the public ordeal and testified that Frank was lewd, lascivious, immoral!
Frank’s lawyers sat there in silence, not daring to ask those witnesses for the details upon which they based their terrible testimony.
Why did Frank’s lawyers allow that fearful evidence to have its full effect upon the jury, without asking those white women what it was they knew on Frank?
Suppose you had been accused in this case, and those same witnesses had testified against your character, would you have been afraid to cross-examine them?
Only a man who shrank from what those women could tell on him, would have let them go, without a single word! The State could not ask them for specific facts. The defendant alone had the legal right to ask for those—and the defense was afraid to do it.
Among those white witnesses were, Miss Marie Karst, Miss Nellie Pettis, Miss Maggie Griffin, Miss Carrie Smith, Mrs. C.D. Donegan, Miss Myrtie Cato, Mrs. Estelle Winkle, Mrs. M.E. Wallace, Mrs. H.R. Johnson, Miss Mary Davis.
Another white girl who did not know enough of Frank’s general character for lasciviousness, to swear against it, was offered by the State to prove that she went to work in Frank’s factory, and that Frank made an indecent proposal to her, on the second day!
Frank’s lawyers objected to the evidence, and Judge L.S. Roan ruled it out. But if Connolly was eagerly bent on finding the truth as to Frank’s character, he would certainly have heard of Miss Nellie Wood, who doubtless can tell Connolly at any time the exact language that Frank used in his effort to corrupt her.
When you pause to consider that here were many white witnesses, none of whom could be impeached, who took a solemn oath in open court, and swore to Frank’s immoral character—standing ready to bear the brunt of the cross-examination of the crack lawyer of the Atlanta bar—what do you think of Connolly, when he states that no such witnesses could be found? And what do you think of Burns, who pulled off the jackass stunt of afterwards offering “a reward” for any such witnesses?
With reference to his said offer of the $5,000 reward, this impostor, Burns, said on Feb. 3, in the Kansas City Star, which is (disinterestedly, no doubt) giving so much space to the campaign of slander against the people and courts of Georgia:

“Let me tell you this—no man has a more remarkable past than Frank. I investigated every act of his life prior to the accusation against him. There was not a scratch on it. Then I offered a reward of $5,000 to anyone who could prove the slightest immorality against him. No one, not even the Atlanta police, have attempted to claim it.”

Instead of his flamboyant and empty offer of $5,000, why didn’t Burns quietly take Rev. John E. White, or some other respectable witness, with him, and visit the white ladies who had already publicly testified to Frank’s lewd character?
Those white ladies were right there in Atlanta, while that noisy ass, Burns, was braying to the universe. The record showed him their names. If he wanted to know WHAT THEY COULD TELL ON FRANK, why didn’t he go and ask them?
He knew very well that nobody would claim his reward, for he knew that there wasn’t anybody who was fool enough to believe they could ever see the color of his money.
If he wants to learn the truth about Frank’s double life, he can go to those ladies now!
WHY DOESN’T HE DO IT? He can save his imaginary $5,000, and ascertain the truth, at the same time.
The mendacious scoundrel was quick enough to hunt up Miss Monteen Stover, and use his utmost efforts to scare her into changing her evidence. He went so far as to entrap her, in Samuel Boornstein’s office, where the attempt was made to hold her by force.
Other girl witnesses, in the case were subjected to persecution and threats, by these infamous Burns detectives, who wanted to change their evidence, as they did change the fearful evidence of Frank’s negro cook.
Why was Burns afraid to ask Mrs. Johnson, or Mrs. Winkle, or Mrs. Donegan what it was, that caused them to swear that Leo Frank is a libertine? Miserable faker! He didn’t want the truth.
Do William J. Burns and Luther Rosser mean to say that all these respectable white girls and ladies who swore to Frank’s immoral character, perjured themselves? If so, what motive did they have? And if Rosser was satisfied those ladies were swearing falsely, why didn’t he cross-examine them? Why was he afraid to ask them a single question?
Your common sense tells you why. Rosser feared what would COME OUT!
Another statement made by Connolly is, that the face of the dead girl “was pitted and seamed with indentations and scratches from the cinders, a bank of which stretched along the cellar for a hundred feet or more. There had evidently been a struggle.”
Again, Connolly says—

There were cinders and sawdust in the girl’s nose and mouth, drawn in, in the act of breathing, and under her finger nails. Her face had been rubbed before death into these cinders, evidently in the attempt to smother her cries.

Here the purpose of Connolly was, to make it appear that Mary Phagan had been killed in the basement, after a struggle, during which her mouth had been held down in the cinders, to stifle her screams!
In that event, of course, her tongue, her mouth, her throat, and perhaps her lungs would have shown saw-dust, and cinders.
There is absolutely no evidence in the record to support any such theory.
There was absolutely no evidence of any long “bank of cinders,” in the basement. There was, in fact, no such bank of cinders!
(See evidence of Defendant’s witness, I.U. Kauffman, pages 148, 149, 150. Also, evidence of Dobbs, Starnes, Barrett, &c.)
The evidence of all the witnesses is, that the girl’s tongue protruded from her mouth, and that the heavy twine cord had cut into the tender flesh of her neck, and that the blood-settlings showed the stopped circulation—manifest not only in her purple-black face, but under the blue finger nails.
There was no evidence whatever of cinders, ashes, or saw-dust in her mouth, in her throat, or in her lungs.
There was not a scintilla of evidence that she had met her death in the basement!
(See evidence of Dobbs, Starnes and Barrett.)
The sworn testimony in the record is, that, although the girl’s face was dirty from having been dragged by the heels through the coal-dust and grime, natural to the basement where the furnace was, the negro who first saw her that night, by the glimmer of a smoky lantern, telephoned to the police that it was a white girl. The officers, Anderson and Starnes, so testified!
Sergeant Dobbs swore that the body seemed to have been dragged by the heels, over the dirt and coal-dust, and that the trail led back from the corpse to the elevator. His exact words are, “It began immediately in front of the elevator, at the bottom of the (elevator) shaft.”
The word, “It,” refers to the trail of the dragged body; and the witness swore that the thought the condition of the girl’s face “had been made from the dragging.”
There was the unmistakable sign of the dragged body, as legible as the track of a foot on the soft ground; and the weight of the head and the friction, in dragging and bumping, would naturally cause soilure and abrasions. (The distance was 136 feet.)
W.E. Thomson whose booklet of 32 pages has been generously scattered “from the Potomac to the Rio Grande”—in the evident effort to reach all of his blood-relations who, as he tells us, are dissolutely distributed over the entire region between these two watercourses—W.E. Thomson says, on page 18 of his rambling, incoherent pamphlet.—
“There is not a shadow of doubt that she was murdered in this basement, on this dirty floor. The back door had been forced open by drawing the staple. This door opened out on an alley back of the building. There is every reason for believing that the murderer went out that door.”
Thomson argues that Jim Conley did the work.
But why did Jim Conley have to draw the staple, and leave the building by that door? Conley had the run of the building, was in it that fatal Saturday, was there when the white ladies and girls left, and was gone, in the usual way, when Newt Lee came on duty for the evening, as night watch.
The basement door was not then open. But the crime had already been committed, and the dead body lay there in the gloom. Whose interest would it serve to afterwards draw the staple, and give the door an appearance of having been forced?

When William J. Burns came to Atlanta, last Spring, and began his campaign of thunder and earthquake, he deafeningly shouted to the public at every step he took. His very first whoop was, that a careful examination of the facts in the case showed that the crime had been committed by “a degenerate of the lowest type.” Burns roared the statement, that the guilty man had never been suspected, and was still “at large.”
Burns yelled that this unsuspected criminal of the lowest type was hiding out, somewhere nearer to the North pole than Atlanta; and, with an ear-splitting noise, Burns set out to find that man. Burns said he was “utterly confident” he would find this man—who was expected to wait calmly, until Burns could nab him.
As everybody who read the papers last summer knows, that was precisely the theory upon which Burns started to work. He went on a wild-goose chase, into the Northern States, and was gone for months, working the Frank case. Working it how? Hunting for what?
He didn’t have to go North to find evidence against Jim Conley. Every bit of evidence against Jim was right there, in Atlanta.
Burns has never produced a single witness from the North. Not a scrap of testimony resulted from all his months of labor in the North! What was he doing there?
From day to day, and week to week, he put out interviews in which he declared he was making “the most gratifying progress.”
“Progress,” at what? “Gratifying,” how?
My own idea was, that Burns spent his time chasing around after opulent Hebrews; and that his gratifying progress consisted of relieving the prosperous Children of Israel of their superfluity of ducats. It takes money to stimulate the activities of such a peculiar concern as the Burns Detective Agency.
In one of his many interviews, published in the papers of Cain and Abel, this great detective, Burns, said, “The private detective is one of the most dangerous criminals that we have to contend with.”
I considered that the superbest piece of cool effrontery that a Gentile ever uttered, and a Jew ever printed. You couldn’t beat it, if you sat up of nights, and drank inspiration from the nectar Jupiter sips.
Week after week, Burns pursued the pleasures of the chase, up North, presumably bringing down many a fat Hebrew. He not only got a magnificent “bag” of rich Jews, but, with the unholy appetite of an Egyptian turning the tables on the Chosen People, he spoiled them to such an extent that it was a “battue.”
Having bled these opulent Hebrews of the North until they were pale about the gills, and mangled in their bankbooks, William J. came roaring back Southward, oozing newspaper interviews at every stop of the cars. Burns said he had his “Report” about ready. That Report was going to create a seismitic upheaval. That Report would astound all right-thinking bipeds, and demonstrate what a set of imbeciles were the Atlanta police, the Atlanta detectives, the Pinkerton detectives, the Solicitor-General, the Jury, the Supreme Court, and those prejudiced mortals who had believed Leo Frank to be the murderer of Mary Phagan.
Naturally, the public held its breath, as it waited for the publication of this much-advertised Report. At last, it came, and what was it? To the utter amazement of everybody, it consisted of an argument by Burns on the facts that were already of record. He did not offer a shred of new evidence.
His only attempt at new testimony was the bought affidavit of the Rev. C.B. Ragsdale, who swore that he overheard Conley tell another negro that he had killed a girl at the National Pencil Factory.
So, after all his work in the North, and after all his brag about what he would show in his Report, Burns’ bluff came to the pitiful show down of a bribed witness who was paid to put the crime on the negro.
As Burns said, “the private detective is the most dangerous criminal we have to contend with.” “We” have so found.
Commenting upon the Connolly articles, the Houston, Texas, Chronicle says, editorially:

Collier’s Weekly has espoused Frank’s cause in its usual intense way, and has put the work of analyzing the facts into the hands of a man who does not mince words; and, while one may not be willing to agree with all of its contentions, there is one point on which it hits the bullseye—that of the speech of the solicitor general, or prosecuting attorney.

In what manner had Collier’s hit the bull’s eye?

According to Collier’s, the speech was “venomously partisan,” and the wish is editorially expressed that all lawyers in the United States could read it and let that paper know what they think of it. So presumably it was stenographically reported, and it may safely be assumed that Collier’s quotes correctly. It says the Reuf case, the Rosenthal murder and other crimes in which Jews played a part were dragged into the argument.

Elevating himself to the pinnacle of moral rectitude, the editor of the Chronicle says—

In England, where trials are conducted more nearly along proper lines than they are anywhere else in the world, a crown’s counsel who would make a denunciatory or emotional appeal to a jury would be adjudged in contempt.
With such a speech, and a crowd which had already prejudged the case filling the court house, a fair trial in the meaning of the constitution and the law was impossible.

In England it would have been different, says the Chronicle.
Yes, it would. In England, Leo Frank would have long since gone the way of Dr. Crippin, and suffered for his terrible crime.
But was Dorsey’s speech such a venomous tirade? Was he in contempt of court in his allusions to Reuf and Hummel and Rosenthal? Did Dorsey bring the race issue into the case?
Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey’s speech was stenographically reported. It makes a booklet of 146 pages. On pages 2, 3, and 4, Mr. Dorsey deals with the race issue and deplores the fact that the “defense first mentioned race.”
Mr. Dorsey says, “Not a word emanated from this side, not a word indicating any feeling against…..any human being, black or white, Jew or Gentile.
“But, ah! the first time it was ever brought into this case,—and it was brought in for a purpose, and I have never seen two men manifest more delight or exultation than Messrs, Rosser and Arnold, when they put the question to George Kendley at the eleventh hour.
“A thing which they had expected us to do, and which the State did not do, because we didn’t feel it and it wasn’t in this case.
“I will never forget how they seized it, seized with avidity the suggestion, and you know how they have harped on it ever since.
“Now, mark you, they are the ones that mentioned it, not us; the word never escaped our mouth.”
There sat Frank’s lawyers, two of the most aggressive fighters, men who rose to their feet, again and again, during the course of Dorsey’s speech, to deny his statements, and interject their own, but they did not utter a word of denial when he charged them to their teeth, in open court, with bringing into the case the evidence that Frank is a Jew. Nor did they challenge his statement that they had “laid for” him to do it, and had done it themselves when they saw that he did not mean to give them that string to harp on.
Having made his explanation of how the fact of Frank being a Jew got into the case, Dorsey paid this glowing tribute to the great race from which this degenerate and pervert sprung:

“I say to you here and now, that the race from which that man comes is as good as our race. His ancestors were civilized when ours were cutting each other up and eating human flesh; his race is just as good as ours,—just so good, but no better. I honor the race that has produced D’Israeli,—the greatest Prime Minister that England has ever produced. I honor the race that produced Judah P. Benjamin,—as great a lawyer as ever lived in America or England, because he lived in both places and won renown in both places. I honor the Strauss brothers—Oscar, the diplomat, and the man who went down with his wife by his side on the Titanic. I roomed with one of his race at college; one of his race is my partner. I served with old man Joe Hirsch on the Board of Trustees of the Grady Hospital. I know Rabbi Marx but to honor him, and I know Doctor Sonn, of the Hebrew Orphan’s Home, and I have listened to him with pleasure and pride.
“But, on the other hand, when Becker wished to put to death his bitter enemy, it was men of Frank’s race he selected. Abe Hummel, the lawyer, who went to the penitentiary in New York, and Abe Reuf, who went to the penitentiary in San Francisco, Schwartz, the man accused of stabbing a girl in New York, who committed suicide, and others that I could mention, show that this great people are amendable to the same laws as you and I and the black race. They rise to heights sublime, but they sink to the depths of degradation.”

After Rosser and Arnold had dragged the Jewish name into the case, could Dorsey have handled it more creditably to himself, and to those Jews who believe, with Moses, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, that crime must be punished?
Read again what Dorsey actually said as stenographically reported, and remember that Connolly pretended to have read it before he wrote his articles, and then sift your mind and see how much respect you have for a writer who tries to deceive the public in that unscrupulous manner.
C.P. Connolly makes two statements about the law of Georgia.
On Dec. 14, 1915, he stated in Collier’s that, “By a constitutional amendment, adopted in 1906, the Supreme Court of Georgia cannot reverse a case on other than errors of law.”
This remarkable statement he varies somewhat, in his article published Dec. 19, 1915.

Under a constitutional amendment adopted in 1906, the Supreme Court of Georgia is not allowed to reverse any capital case where no error of law has been committed in the trial, no matter how weak the evidence may be, and cannot investigate or pass upon the question of guilt or innocence.

Since the days of Magna Charta, it may be doubted whether any State, set up under English principles, could legally deprive reviewing courts of the right to annul a verdict which has no evidence to support it. In such a case, the question of evidence would become a question of law. Without due process of law, no citizen can be robbed of life, liberty, or property; and, while it is the province of the jury to say what has been proved, on issues of disputed facts, it is for the court to decide whether the record discloses jurisdictional facts.
It necessarily follows that, if a record showed that no crime had been committed, or, if committed, the evidence failed to connect defendant with it, the verdict would have to be set aside, as a matter of law.
The constitutional amendment of 1906, to which Connolly refers, had for its main purpose the creation of a Court of Appeals, as an auxiliary and a relief to the Supreme Court. In doing this, the legislature had to divide appealed cases between the two courts. The new law provided that the Supreme Court should review and decide those civil cases which went up from the Superior Courts, and from the courts of ordinary, (our chancery courts) and “all cases of conviction of a capital felony.”
To the Court of Appeals, was assigned those cases going up from city courts, and all convictions in criminal cases less than a capital felony.
The Supreme Court of Georgia in every open case of motion-for-new-trial, is now constantly passing upon the sufficiency of the evidence to support the verdict; and the Court passed upon that very question, in Frank’s first motion for new trial.
I cannot imagine anything that would cause a more universal wave of protest, than an effort to emasculate our Supreme Court, by robbing it of the time-honored authority to review all the evidence in contested cases; and to decide, in the calm atmosphere of the consulting room,—remote from personalities, passions, and the dust of forensic battle—whether the evidence set out in the record is sufficient to support the verdict.
If Connolly’s idea of the change made in 1906 were correct, it would lead to the preposterous proposition, that the Supreme Court might have before it a case of a man condemned to death for rape, when the evidence showed that there had been no penetration. The Court would have to let the man die, because the judge below had committed no error of law! Would it not be the greatest of errors of law, to allow a citizen to be hanged, when there is no proof of a crime? Would it be “due process of law,” to kill a man, under legal forms, without evidence of his guilt?
Those men who alleged that Connolly is a lawyer, also allege that Burns is a detective. Both statements cut a large, and weird figure, in the realm of cheap, ephemeral fiction. If being a lawyer were a capital offense, and Connolly, were arraigned for the crime, the jury would not only acquit him without leaving the box, but would find a unanimous verdict of “malicious prosecution.”
If being a detective were virulent, confluent small-pox, the wildest advocate of compulsory vaccination would never pester Burns. It is as much as Burns can do, to find an umbrella in a hall hat-rack.

A prodigious noise has been made over the alleged statement of Judge L.S. Roan, who presided at Frank’s trial, that he did not know whether Frank was guilty or innocent. All of that talk is mere bosh. What Judge Roan said was exactly what the law contemplates that he shall say! The law of Georgia, constitutes the trial judge an impartial arbiter, whose duty it is to pass on to the jury, in a legal manner, the evidence upon which the jury are to act as judges.
They are not only the judges of the evidence, but the sole judges of it. The slightest expression of an opinion from the bench, as to what has or has not been proven, works a forfeiture of the entire proceeding.
In no other way, can a defendant be tried constitutionally, by his peers, than by clothing the twelve jurors whom he, in part, selects as his peers, with full power to adjudge the facts.
(I am confident that it is the intention of the law to also make these peers of the accused the full judges of the law, to exactly the same extent that they are absolute judges of the facts; but that is a question not germane to the Frank case.)
Now, if Connolly and Collier’s had taken the pains to examine our law, they would have realized that the legal intendment of Judge Roan’s declaration was no more than this:
“It is not for me to say whether this man is innocent or guilty. That is for the jury. They have said that he is guilty, and I find that the evidence sustains the verdict. Therefore, I refuse to grant the motion for new trial.”
In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, our judges utter some such words as those, in charging the jury, and in passing upon motions for new trial.
I will say further, that a lack of definite opinion as to the guilt or innocence of the defendant at the bar, is an ideal state of mind for the presiding judge.
We are all so human, that if the judge feels certain of the guilt, or innocence of the accused, he will “leg” for one side or the other.
So well is this understood, that the trial judge almost invariably takes pains to say to the jury—
“Gentlemen, the court does not mean to say, or to intimate what has, or has not, been proven. That is peculiarly your province. It is for you to say, under the law as I have given it to you, whether the evidence establishes the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, &c.”
There isn’t a lawyer in Georgia who hasn’t heard that kind of thing, times without number.
If Judge L. S. Roan did, indeed, keep his mind so far above the jury-function in this case, that he did not form an opinion, either way, he maintained that ideal neutrality and impartiality which the Law expects of the perfect judge.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is another paper that has taken jurisdiction of the Frank case. It employs another famous detective for the defense, a New York person, named George Dougherty. Every detective who favors Frank is a famous detective, a scholar, a gentleman, a deep thinker and a model citizen—just as Frank is.
Those detectives and police officers who testify the other way, are bad men, the scum of the earth, crooks, rapscallions, liars, and pole-cats.
The famous detective, George Dougherty, appears to have studied the case hurriedly. He says—

And the office in which Frank was charged with having committed immoral attacks was in direct line of possible observation from several people already in the building, whose approach Conley would have known nothing of.

George D. is mistaken. Frank and the other man took the women to a place where they were not “in direct line of possible observation,” &c.
The famous detective again says—

Another point: Conley’s statement is that Frank knew in advance that Mary Phagan was to visit the factory that day for the purpose of getting her pay. There is no reasonable cause for believing this to have been true; no other employee went there that day to be paid. If Frank did not know that Mary Phagan was to be there, Conley’s entire story falls. And, as a matter of fact, there seems to be more reason to believe that he did not, than there is to believe that he did.

Now, what will you think of this famous detective, when I tell you that page 26 of the official court record of this case shows, that Monteen Stover swore she went there to get the wages due her, and was at the office of Frank at the fatal half-hour during which he cannot give an account of himself?
George Dougherty does not even know that Frank, in his statement to the jury, stated that Miss Mattie Smith came for her pay envelope, that Saturday morning, and also for the wages due her sister-in-law; and that he gave to the fathers of two boys the pay envelopes for their sons.
This makes five other employees—two in person, and three by proxy—who were there for the wages due them, on the identical day when Mary Phagan went for her pay, and disappeared—the very day when Dougherty asserts, “no other employee went there that day to be paid!”
(See Frank’s statement, page 179.)
Is it any marvel that the public has been bamboozled, and the State of Georgia made the object of condemnation, when famous detectives write such absurdities, and respectable papers publish them?
The State of Georgia has no press agent, no publicity bureau, no regiment of famous detectives, no brigade of journalistic Hessians. The State can only maintain an attitude of dignified endurance, while this mercenary, made-to-order hurricane of fable, misrepresentation and abuse passes over her head.
All she asks of an intelligent, fair-minded public is, to judge her by the official record, as agreed on by the attorneys for both sides. All that she expects from outsiders is, the reasonable presumption that she is not worse than other States, not worse than Missouri which tried the Boodlers of St. Louis, not worse than California which tried the grafters and the dynamiters; not worse than Virginia, which tried and executed McCue, Beattie and Cluverius, on less evidence than there is against Frank.
The New York World, owned by the Pulitzers, said in its report of the case:

May 24—On evidence of Conley, Frank was indicted for murder.
July 28—Trial of Frank began.
Aug. 24—Conley testified Frank entrapped the girl in his office, beat her unconscious, then strangled her.
Aug. 25—Jury found Frank guilty of murder, first degree.

“On evidence of Conley,” Frank was indicted and convicted, according to the Pulitzers. Of course, the general public does not know that Frank could not have been convicted upon the evidence of Conley, a confessed accomplice. The general public—which includes such lawyers as Connolly—cannot be supposed to know that the law does not allow any defendant to be convicted upon the evidence of his accomplice.
In the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (which I believe is also a Pulitzer paper) there are two recent letters by Wm. Preston Hill, M.D. Ph.D., in which the State of Georgia is violently arraigned.
Wm. Preston Hill, M.D. Ph.D., starts out by stating that “anybody who has carefully read the proceedings in the murder trial of Leo Frank must be convinced…the whole trial was a disgraceful display of prejudice and fanatical unfairness….This whole proceeding is a disgrace to the State of Georgia, and will bring on her the just contempt of the whole civilized world.
“Everywhere thoughtful men will judge Georgia to be filled with semi-barbarous fanatical people of low mentality, and strong, ill-controlled passions, a race to be avoided by anybody who cares for liberty, order or justice.”
Then to show what a thoughtful man is Wm. Preston Hill, M.D. Ph.D., and how carefully he has read the record in the case, he proceeds to state that “Frank was convicted on the unsupported evidence of a dissolute negro of bad character” who was contradicted in 22 different instances!
Then Wm. Preston Hill, M.D. Ph.D., gives himself away by advising people to study the case—how?
By an examination of the record that went up to the Supreme Court?
Oh no! Study it by the paid columns of C.P. Connolly, who got his ideas of the case from the rascally and mendacious poseur, William J. Burns.
In the Chicago Sunday Tribune of December 27, 1914, appears a full page article beginning, “Will the State of Georgia send an innocent man to the gallows?”
The writer of the article is Burton Rascoe. The entire article proceeds upon the idea that poor little Mary Phagan was a lewd girl; that she had been immorally intimate with two employees of the factory; that Jim Conley, drunk and hard-up, wanted her pay envelope; that he seized her, to rob her, and that he heard some one calling him, and he killed her.
Mr. Rascoe says that, ordinarily, juries are instructed that they are to assume the defendant is innocent, until he is proven guilty, but that in Frank’s case, it was just the opposite.
Mr. Rascoe says that, during the trial, men stood up in the audience and shouted to the jury: “You’d better hang the Jew. If you don’t, we’ll hang him, and get you too.”
The Chicago Tribune claims to be “the world’s greatest newspaper,” with a circulation of 500,000 for the Sunday edition.
It is therefore reasonable to suppose that at least two million people will get their ideas of the case from this special article, in which the public is told that Judge Roan allowed the audience to intimidate the jury by shouting their threats, to the jury, while the trial was in progress.
Of course, any one, who will stop and think a moment, will realize what an arrant falsehood that is.
Had any such thing occurred, the able, watchful, indefatigable lawyers who have been fighting nearly two years to save Frank’s life, would have immediately moved a mistrial, and got it.
No such incident ever has occurred, in a Georgia court-room.
And no white man in Georgia was ever convicted on the evidence of a negro!
As a specimen of the misrepresentations which are misleading so many good people, take this extract from the article in the Chicago Tribune:

It has been declared by Burns, among others, that the circumstantial evidence warranting the retention of Conley as the suspected slayer was dropped and Conley was led to shoulder the blame upon Frank in somewhat the following manner:
“What do you know about this murder?”
“Nothing.”
“Who do you think did it?”
“I don’t know.”
“How about Frank?”
“Yes. I confess. He’s the one who did it.”
“Sure he was. That’s the fellow we want.”
And forthwith Frank was locked up as a suspect.

In fact, the statements of Mr. Rascoe, like those of C.P. Connolly, are re-hashes from Wm. J. Burns.
Does not the Chicago Tribune know that Burns was expelled from the National Association of Police Chiefs?
Does not the Tribune know that Burns’ confidential man in this Frank case, Lehon, was expelled from the Chicago police force, for blackmailing a woman of the town?
Does not the Tribune know that the detectives bribed Ragsdale and Barber, the preacher and the deacon, to swear this crime onto the negro, Jim Conley?
Does not the Tribune know that the official records in the U.S. Department of Justice disclose the fact that Attorney-General Wickersham, and President Taft set aside some convictions in the Oregon land cases, upon the overwhelming evidence that Burns is a crook, and corruptly obtained those convictions?
As already stated in this Magazine, Conley’s evidence is not at all necessary to the conviction of Frank. Eliminate the negro entirely, and you have a dead case against this lewd young man, who had been pursuing the girl for nearly two months, and who, after setting a trap for her, on Memorial Day, 1913, had to use such violence to overcome her struggle for her virtue, that he killed her; and then had the diabolical cruelty to attack her character, after she was dead.
Mr. L.Z. Rosser telegraphed to a Northern newspaper a long statement in which he says—

Leo M. Frank is an educated, intelligent, normal man of a retiring, home making, home loving nature. He has lived a clean, honest, busy, unostentatious life, known by few outside of his own people. In the absence of the testimony of the negro, Jim Conley, a verdict of acquittal would have been inevitable.

If Mr. Rosser believed that Leo Frank was the pure young man and model husband, why did he sit silent while so many white girls and ladies swore to Frank’s lascivious character?
Do you suppose that any power on earth could have produced twenty white women of Atlanta who would have sworn that Dr. John E. White’s character is lascivious? Or that Judge Beverly Evans’ character is lascivious? Or that Governor Slaton’s character is lascivious?
The ex-lawyer from Montana—C.P. Connolly—says in Collier’s:

The State contended that Frank murdered Mary Phagan on the second floor of the pencil factory. There was found four corpuscles of “blood”–a mere iota–on the second floor. The girl was brutally handled and bled freely, not only from the wound in her head, but from other parts of her body.

“Four corpuscles of blood—a mere iota—on the second floor.”
That is what Connolly says. But what says the official record?
On page 26, Mr. R. P. Barrett, the machinist for Frank’s factory, testifies, that on Monday morning, early, he discovered the blood spots, which were not there the Friday before! He says—
“The spot was about 4 or 5 inches in diameter, and little spots behind these in the rear—6 or 8 in number. It was blood.”
Here we have one of Frank’s responsible employees swearing positively to a five-inch splotch of blood, with 6 or 8 smaller spots leading up to the main spot, as large as the lid of the average dinner-pail; and Connolly tells the public that “four corpuscles, a mere iota,” were all that were found!
When a man makes public statements of that kind, after having gone to Atlanta ostensibly to study the record, is he honestly trying to inform the public, or is he dishonestly trying to deceive it?
Mell Stanford swore, “These blood spots, were right in front of the ladies’ dressing room,” where Conley said he dropped the body of the girl, after Frank called on him for help.
Mrs. George Jefferson, also a worker in Frank’s place, swore that they found the blood splotch, “as big as a fan.”
Mrs. Jefferson had been working there five years. She knew paint spots when she saw them, and told of the maroon red, and red lime, and bright red, but she added, in answer to Frank’s attorney, “That spot I saw was not one of those three paints.”
She swore that the spot was not there Friday, April 25th. They found it Monday morning at about 6 or 7 o’clock. “We saw blood on the second floor, in front of the girl’s dressing room. It was about as big as a fan.”
The foreman of the metal room, Lemmie Quinn, also testified to seeing the blood spots, Monday morning. Quinn was Frank’s own witness.
J.N. Starnes, police officer, testified (page 10 of the official record) that he saw the “splotches of blood.” “I should judge the area of these spots to be a foot and a half.”
Capt. Starnes saw the splotches of blood on Monday morning, April 28th, opposite the girl’s dressing room; and they looked as if some white substance had been swept over them, in the effort to hide them.
Herbert Schiff, Leo Frank’s assistant superintendent, also swore to the blood spots. He saw them Monday morning.
These witnesses were unimpeachable. Five of them worked under Frank, and were his trusted and experienced employees. They were corroborated by the doctors who examined the chips cut out of the floor. Those blood-stained chips are exhibits “E.,” in the official record!
Yet, C.P. Connolly, sent down to Georgia to make an examination into actual facts, ignores the uncontradicted evidence, and tells the great American public, that on the second floor, where the State contends the crime was committed, there were found “four corpuscles of blood,” only “a mere iota.”
Upon consulting an approved Encyclopedia and Dictionary, which was constructed for the use of just such semi-barbarians as we Georgians, I find that the word “corpuscle” is synonymous with the word “atom.” Further research in the same Encyclopedia, leads me to the knowledge, that an atom is such a very small thing that it cannot be made any smaller. It is, you may say, the Ultima Thule of smallness. The point of a cambric needle is a large sphere of action, compared to a corpuscle. The live animals that live in the water, and sweet milk, which you and I daily drink, are whales, buffaloes, and Montana lawyers, compared to a corpuscle. The germs, microbes, and malignant bacteria, that swim around invisibly in so many harmless-looking liquids, are behemoths, dragons and Burns detectives, compared to a corpuscle.
The smallest conceivable thing—invisible to the naked eye—is what Connolly says they found, on that second floor; and they not only found one of these infinitely invisible things, but four!
I want to deal nicely with Connolly, and therefore I will say that, as a lawyer and a journalist, I consider him a fairly good specimen of a corpuscle. What he is, as a teller and seller of “The Truth about the Frank case,” I fear to say freely, lest the best Government the world ever saw arrest me again, for publishing disagreeable veracities.
Pardon me for taking your time with one more exposure of the impudent falsehoods that are being published about the evidence on which Frank was convicted. In his elaborate article in the Kansas City Star, A.B. Macdonald says—

The ashes and cinders were breathed before she died in the cellar, while she was fighting off Conley. In his drunken desperation lest she be heard and he be discovered he ripped a piece from her underskirt and tried to gag her with it. It was not strong enough. Then he grabbed the cord.
The testimony proved that cords like that were in the cellar. He tied it tightly around her neck. It was proved at the trial that a piece of the strip of underskirt was beneath the cord, and beneath the strip of skirt were cinders. That proves beyond doubt that both were put on in the cellar.
Having strangled her to death and eternal silence the negro had leisure to carry her back and hide her body at (fig. 12) where it was dark as midnight.
Then he sat down to write the notes. Against the wall opposite the boiler was a small, rude table with paper and pencil. Scattered around in the trash that came down from the floors above to be burned were sheets and pads of paper exactly like those upon which the notes were written. The pad from which one of the notes was torn was found by the body by Police Sergeant L.S. Dobbs, who so testified.

Here we have a graphic, gruesome picture of a fight between the girl and the negro, down in the cellar. He overcomes her, and in her death struggles, she breathes her nose, mouth and lungs full of ashes and cinders. The negro tears off a strip from her clothing, and binds it round her neck. “It was not strong enough. Then he grabbed the cord.”
In the next line, Macdonald tells you that the strip of clothing was so strong that it remained underneath the cord, and that, beneath this strip, were cinders. “That proves beyond a doubt that they were both put on in the cellar.”
It is sufficient to say that the evidence of Newt Lee, of Sergeant L.S. Dobbs, officer J.N. Starnes, and both the examining physicians, (Doctors Hurt and Harris) totally negatives the statement of Macdonald about the cinders under the girl’s nails, the cinders packed into her face, and the cinders breathed into her nose, mouth and lungs. There was nothing of the kind. Macdonald made all that up, himself, aided by Connolly’s imagination and Burns’ imbecility.
(See official record, pages 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and evidence of the doctors as per Index.)
But let me ask you to fix your attention on the specific statement of Macdonald, that the cord pressed down upon the strip of clothing, one being under the other, and that the cinders were under this inner choke-strip. Now, turn to page 48 of the official record, and see what Dr. Harris testified. He swore that she came to her death from “this cord” which had been tied tight around her neck. He did not say a word about any strip of clothing around her neck, under the cord, nor a word about any cinders, ashes or dust, under the cord—not one word!
Turn to page 46, and read the testimony of Dr. J.W. Hurt. He said, “There was a cord round her neck, and this cord was imbedded into the skin.” Not a word about any strip of cloth under the cord! Not a word about cinders, ashes, or dust under the cord, or on her neck.
Sergeant Dobbs after saying that “the cord was around her neck, sunk into her flesh,” added that “she also had a piece of her underclothing around her neck.” “The cord was pulled tight and had cut into the flesh and tied just as tight as could be. The underclothing around her neck was not tight!”
Sergeant Dobbs, swearing that the cord had cut into the flesh, shows that there was no cushion of cloth to keep it from doing that very thing. Not a word did he say about cinders under her nails, under the cord, under the strip of underclothing, or in her nose, mouth and lungs.
In other words, the official record shows Macdonald’s version of the evidence to be a reckless fabrication!
Can you picture to yourself, in the sane recess of your own mind, a Southern negro, raping and killing a white girl, and then dragging her body back to a place “where it was dark as midnight;” and then, after all his terrific struggle with his victim, hunting around in the trash to find a pencil and some pads—two different colors—and seating himself, leisurely, at “a small rude table near the boiler,” to scribble a few lines of information to mankind as to how he came to commit the crime?
Can you picture to yourself a common Georgia nigger, killing a white woman in that way, and then seating himself near her corpse, deep down in a dark cellar, to indulge in literary composition?
Jim Conley, you see, had not only murdered the girl down there below the surface, but was writing notes close to where the dead body lay, with the intention of carrying the notes out there to where “it was as dark as midnight,” to lay them by the dead girl’s head.
Then, he meant to get so scared that he would violently break out of the basement door, into the alley, rather than walk out, as usual, up stairs.
Macdonald doesn’t know much about Southern niggers, but he understands us white folks. Just tell us any old ludicrous yarn, and keep on telling it in the papers; and, if nobody denies it, we will all believe it.
There was not a scratch on the nose of the dead girl, and yet all these reckless writers tell the public she was held face downward by her murderer, and that her face was ground into the cinders, to smother her screams. How could the nose escape bruises in such a frightful process, and how could she fail to have cinders and coal-dust in her mouth and nose? There were none!
In the Philadelphia Public Ledger, there is a copyrighted article by Waldo G. Morse, whose legend runs, “Councillor, American Academy of Jurisprudence.” Councillor Morse begins on the Frank case, by asking a question, and quoting himself in reply—

May a mob and a Court scare away your lawyers, a sheriff lock you away from the jury which convicts you, and may the sheriff then hold and hang you? Yes, say the Georgia Courts and so also says the United States District Judge in Georgia. Says the Supreme Court of the United States: “We will hear arguments as to that, and in the meantime we will defer the hanging.”

The fancy picture of a Georgia mob, putting Rube Arnold, Luther Rosser, the Haas brothers, and the governor’s own law firm to ignominious flight, and of the sheriff ruthlessly locking Frank away from the jury—and all this being done with the hearty approval of Judges Roan and Hill, the State Supreme Court, and Federal-judge William Newman—is certainly a novel picture to adorn the classic walls of the American Academy of Jurisprudence.
Councillor Morse proceeds as follows—

This is no mere question of a single life, but one for every man. Shall you be put on trial for your life or your liberty and shall timid or careless lawyers lose or dishonest lawyers barter away your rights?
We wish for the honor of the bar and the dignity of the Court that the lawyers had stood their ground and had braved the mob and that their client had joined in the defiance, inquiring from every juror, face to face, whether the verdict of guilty was the verdict of that individual juror. Such is due process of law.

Was Rosser “timid,” in Frank’s case? I would like to see Rosser, when one of his timid spells gets hold of him.
Were Rosser and Arnold and the Haas brothers not only timid, but “careless?” Councillor Morse, spokesman for the American Academy of Jurisprudence (whatever that is) accuses these Georgia lawyers of cowardice, or culpable negligence, in their defense of Leo Frank!
What? Is nobody to be spared? Shall no guilty Georgian escape? Must the propagandists of this Frank literature slaughter his own lawyers? Is it a misdemeanor, per se, to be Georgian?
“For the honor of the bar.” Waldo Morse wishes that Rosser and Arnold, and Haas, and the governor’s law firm, “had stood their ground.” Then, they did not stand their ground, and they dishonored the bar.
That’s terrible. Surely it is a cruel thing to stand Luther Rosser up before the universe, in this tremendous manner, and arraign him for professional cowardice. What say you, Luther? Are you guilty, or not guilty?
But Waldo Morse relentlessly continues—

Might not the result have been different? Jurors have been known to change their verdict when facing the accused. We hope that the Court may declare that no man and no State can leave the issue of life as a bagatelle to be played for, arranged about and jeopardized by Court and counsel in the absence of the man who may suffer.

So, you see, Frank’s lawyers are accused, in a copyrighted indictment, of playing with their client’s life, “as a bagatelle;” and of jeopardizing that life, with a levity which showed an utter lack of a due sense of professional responsibility.
That’s mighty rough on Rosser, and Arnold, and Haas, and Governor Slaton’s law firm.
What will be your opinion of Councillor Morse, when I tell you that Frank’s lawyers did demand a poll of the jury, and each member was asked whether the verdict was his verdict, and each juror answered that it was.
And each juror, months afterwards, made written affidavit to the same effect, utterly repudiating the charges of mob intimidation.
Councillor Morse proceeds—

Shall a man charged with an infamous crime be faced by a jury of 12 men, each one ready to announce their verdict of his guilt? May he ask each man of the 12 whether the verdict be his? Yes, has answered the common law for centuries. The accused may not even waive or abandon this right.

That’s absurd. The accused may waive or abandon “this right,” and nearly every other. There are Courts in which the accused is constantly waiving and abandoning his Constitutional right to be indicted by a grand jury, and tried by a petit jury. In almost every case, the accused waives his legal right to actual arraignment, oral pleading, and a copy of the indictment. Almost invariably, he waives the useless and perfunctory right of polling the jury. If he likes, he can go to trial with eleven jurors, or less, and he may waive a legal disqualification of a juror. In fact, the accused, who can waive and abandon his right to the jury itself, can of course, waive any lesser right. This may not be good law in the American Academy of Jurisprudence, but it is good law among good lawyers.
Councillor Morse says that “for centuries” it has been the common-law right of the accused to ask each juror “whether the verdict be his.” This cock-sure statement of what the English common-law has been “for centuries,” would have had considerable weight, had the Councillor cited some authorities.
It was in 1765, that Sir William Blackstone published the first volume of his Commentaries; and at that time, the accused, in a capital case, did not even have the right to be defended by a lawyer. At that time, there were upwards of 116 violations of law, punishable by death, some of these capital offenses being petty larcenies, and others, trivial trespasses. In all those terrible cases, the accused was denied a lawyer, at common law; and these fearful conditions were not materially changed, until Sir Samuel Romilly began, his noble work of law reform, in 1808. At that time, it was death to pick a pocket, death to cut a tree in a park, death to filch from a bleachfield, death to steal a letter, death to kill a rabbit, death to pilfer five shilling’s worth of stuff out of a store, death to forge a writing, death to steal a pig or a lamb, death to return home from transportation, death to write one’s name on London bridge. Sir Samuel was not able to accomplish a great deal, before his suicide in 1818; but another great lawyer, Sir James Mackintosh, took up the work, Lord Brougham assisting. It was not until near the middle of the last century, that the Draconian code was stripped of most of its horrors, and the prisoner’s counsel was allowed to address the jury. (See McCarthy’s Epochs of Reform, pages 144 and 145. Mackenzie’s The 19th Century, pages 124 and 125.) Therefore, when any Councillor for an American Academy of Jurisprudence glibly writes about what have been the common-law rights of the accused “for centuries,” he makes himself ridiculous.
As a general rule, a prisoner may waive any legal privilege; and whatever he may waive, his attorney may waive; and this waiver can be made after the trial and will relate back to the time when he was entitled to the privilege. This waiver may be expressed, or it may be implied; it may be in words, and it may be in conduct.
In Blackstone’s Commentaries, nothing is said on the point of the prisoner’s presence, when the verdict comes in. Unquestionably, it is the better practice for him to be in court. But if his attorneys are present, and they demand a poll of the jury, expressly waiving the presence of their client, they have done for the accused all that he could do for himself, were he in court—for the prisoner is not allowed to ask the jurors any questions. The judge does that. Hence, Frank lost nothing whatever by his absence; and when he failed to make that point, as he stood in court to be sentenced and was asked by the judge, “What have you to say why sentence should not be pronounced on you?” he ratified the waiver his lawyers had made. He continued that ratification, for a whole year.
Not until after two motions for new trial had been filed, did Frank raise the point about his absence at the time the verdict came in; and, if he is set free on that point, the world will suspect that Rosser and Arnold, laid a trap for the judge.
Does it seem good law to Councillor Morse, that a man whose guilt is made manifest by the official record, should be turned loose, to go scot free, on a technical point, which involves the repudiation of his own lawyers, and the retraction of his own ratification which had lasted a year? Is there no such thing as a waiver by one’s attorneys and a ratification by one’s prolonged acquiescence?
Now before going into close reasoning on the established facts in the case, allow me to call your attention to this point:
Whoever wrote those notes that were found beside the body seems to say that she had been sexually used. “Play with me.” “Said he would love me.” “Laid down.” “Play like night witch did it,” but that long tall black negro “did (it) by hisself.”
Those words are inconsistent with a crime whose main purpose was murder. Uppermost in the mind of the man who dictated those notes, was quite another idea. Consistent with that idea, and not with murder alone, are the words “Play with me, said he would love me, laid down,” (with me) “and play like the night witch did it.”
All have claimed that the words “night witch” meant “night watch.” It may not be so. For the present, I only ask you to consider that the State’s theory all along, has been that Leo Frank was after this girl, to enjoy her sexually, and that the murder was a crime incident to her resistance.
The girl worked for Frank, and he knew her well. He had sought to push his attentions on her. She had repulsed him. She had told her friend George Epps that she was afraid of him, on account of the way he had acted toward her.
He had refused, on Friday afternoon, to let Helen Ferguson have Mary’s pay-envelope, containing the pitiful sum of one dollar and twenty cents. He thus made it necessary for Mary to come in person for it, which she was sure to do, next day, since the universal Saturday custom is, to pay for things bought during the preceding week and buy things, for the next.
Why did not Frank give Mary’s pay envelope to Helen, when Helen asked for it, on Friday? It had been the habit of Helen to get Mary’s envelope, and Frank could hardly have been ignorant of the fact.
Did he refuse to let Helen have Mary’s pay, because it was not good business?
That hypothesis falls, when we examine Frank’s own statement to the jury. On page 179 of the record, he tells the jury that Mattie Smith came for her pay-envelope on Saturday morning, the 26th of April, and she asked for that of her sister-in-law, also, “and I went to the safe….and got out the package…and gave her the required two envelopes.”
Therefore, Frank himself was in the habit of letting one employee have another’s pay envelope. On that same morning, he gave the pay-envelopes of two of the boys to their fathers, Graham and Burdette. (Page 181.)
Why did Frank make an exception of Mary Phagan, this one time? Why did he discriminate against her, and only her, that week-end?
Be the answer what it may, the girl, all diked out in her cheap little finery for Memorial Day, comes with her smart fresh lavender dress, the flowers on her hat, the ribbons on her dress, her gay parasol, and her best stockings and silk garters—comes into the heart of the great city, about noon, goes immediately to Frank’s office for her one dollar and twenty cents, is traced by evidence, which Frank dared not deny, into his office—and, is never more seen alive.
Is there any reasonable person, on the face of God’s earth, who wouldn’t say Frank must account for that girl?
When a mountain of evidence piled up, on the fact of the girl’s going to him, he then admitted that she did go to him, somewhere around 12 o’clock that day.
He says that a little girl whom he afterwards learned to be Mary Phagan, came to him for her pay-envelope.
He pretended not to know that a girl of her name worked for him, until he consulted the pay-roll! He went through the motion of looking at the pay-roll for the purpose of ascertaining whether such a human being worked in his place! After having found her name on the list, he then admitted that a girl named Mary Phagan had been working there.
What sort of impression does this make on you, in view of the fact that four white witnesses swore they had seen Frank talk to her, and that, in doing so, he called her “Mary?”
Why did Frank, when her dead body was found in the basement, feign not to know her, and say that he would have to consult the pay-roll?
The girl, dressed up for a Holiday, was in Frank’s office, at about the noon hour of that fatal day—and those two were alone!
Frank is driven to that dreadful admission. Inexorable proofs left him no option.
By his own confession, he is alone with the girl, the last time any mortal eye sees her alive!
She is in the flush of youthful bloom. She is nearly fourteen years old, buxom, and rather large for her age. She has rosy cheeks, bright blue eyes, and golden hair. She is well-made, in perfect health, as tempting a morsel as ever heated depraved appetite. Did Leo Frank desire to possess the girl? Was he the kind of married man who runs after fresh little girls? Had he given evidence, in that very factory, of his lascivious character?
The white ladies and girls whose names have already been given, swore that Frank was just that kind of a man; and neither Frank nor his battalion of lawyers have ever dared to ask those white women to go into details, and tell why they swore he was depraved!
Does it make no impression on your mind, when you consider that tremendous fact?
We start out, then, with a depraved young married man whose conduct, in that very place, is proved to have been lascivious. Did he desire Mary Phagan? Had he “tried” her? Did he want to “try” her, again?
One white girl swore that she had seen Frank with this hand on Mary’s shoulder and his face almost in hers, talking to her. One white boy swore that he had seen Mary shrinking away from Frank’s suspicious advances. Another white boy swore that Mary said she was suspicious and afraid of Frank. Another white girl swore she heard him calling her “Mary,” in close conversation.
__________________
Jews have aggressively dominated the false narrative of the Leo Frank Case since 1913, but as of 2013 you can finally learn everything the Jews have tried to censor & suppress at The Leo Frank Research Library: http://www.LeoFrank.org
 
Old March 11th, 2015 #77
LeoFrank
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How many witnesses are necessary to prove that the licentious young Jew lusted after this Gentile girl?
The record gives you four.
(See the evidence of Ruth Robinson, J.M. Gantt, Dewey Howell and W.E. Turner.)
Why, then, did she continue to work there?
She needed the money, and felt strong in her virtue: she never dreamed of violence.
She kept on working, as many poor girls do, who cannot help themselves. Freedom to choose, is not the luxury of the poor.
But let us pass on. The fatal day comes, and Mary comes, and then her light goes out—the pretty little girl who had dressed up for the Holiday and gone out, radiant with youth and health and beauty, to enjoy it, as other young girls all over the South were doing. She goes into Frank’s own private office, and that’s the last of her.
What became of her? Tell us, Luther Rosser! Tell us, Herbert Haas! Tell us, Nathan Strauss! Tell us, Adolph Ochs! Tell us, Rabbi Marx! Tell us, William Randolph Hearst!
What became of our girl?
YOUR MAN, FRANK, HAD HER LAST: WHAT DID HE DO WITH HER?
So far as I can discover, the only theory advanced by the defenders of Leo Frank, is hung upon Jim Conley. They claim that Jim darted out upon Mary as she stepped aside on the first floor, cut her scalp with a blow, rendered her unconscious, pushed her through the scuttle-hole, and then went down after her, tied the cord around her neck, choked her to death, hid the body, wrote the notes, and broke out by the basement door.
If the defense has any other theory than this, I have been unable to find it. And they must have a theory, for the girl was killed, in the factory, immediately after she left Frank’s private office. There is the undeniable fact of the murdered girl, and no matter what may be the “jungle fury” of the Atlanta “mob,” and of the “semi-barbarians” of Georgia, these mobs and barbarians did not kill the girl.
Either the Cornell graduate did it, or Jim Conley did it.
Did Jim Conley do it? If so, how, and why? What was his motive, and what was his method?
The defense claims that he struck her the blow, splitting the scalp, on the first floor, where he worked, immediately after she left Frank’s office on the second floor.
They claim that the negro then dragged the unconscious body to the scuttle-hole, and flung her down that ladder.
What sort of hole is it? All the evidence concurs in its being a small opening in the floor, with a trap-door over it, and only large enough to admit one person at a time. (It is two-feet square.)
Reaching from the opening of this hole, down to the floor of the basement, is a ladder, with open rungs.
Now, when Jim Conley hit the girl in the head, and split her scalp, they claim he pushed her through the trap-door, so that she would fall into the basement below.
But how could the limp and bleeding body fall down that ladder, striking rung after rung, on its way down, without leaving bloodmarks on the ladder, and without the face and head of poor dying Mary being all bunged up, broken and cut open, by the repeated beatings against the “rounds” of the ladder?
How could that bleeding head have lain at the foot of the ladder, without leaving an accusing puddle of blood? How could that bleeding body, still alive, have been choked to death in the cellar, leaving no blood on the basement floor, none on the ladder, none at the trap-door, none on the table where they claim the notes were written, and none on the pads and the notes?
Not a particle of the testimony points suspicion toward the negro, before the crime. He lived with a kept negro woman, as so many of his race do; but he had never been accused of any offense more grave than the police common-place, “Disorderly.” (His fines range from $1.75 to $15.00.)
He was at the factory on the day of the crime, and Mrs. Arthur White saw him sitting quietly on the first floor, where it was his business to be. After the crime, there was never any evidence discovered against him. He lied as to his doings at the time of the crime, but all of these were consistent with the plan of Frank and Conley to shield each other. Frank was just as careful to keep suspicion from settling on the negro, as the negro was to keep it from settling on Frank.
You would naturally suppose that the white man, reasoning swiftly, would have realized that the crime lay between himself and the negro; and that, as he knew himself to be innocent, he knew the negro must be guilty.
Any white man, under those circumstances, would at once have seen, that only himself or the negro could have done the deed, since no others had the opportunity.
Hence, the white man, being conscious of innocence, and bold in it, would have said to the police, to the detectives, to the world—
“No other man could have done this thing, except Jim Conley or myself; and, since I did not do it, Jim Conley did. I demand that you arrest him, at once, and let me face him!”
Did Frank do that? Did the Cornell graduate break out into a fury of injured innocence, point to Conley as the criminal, and go to him and question him, as to his actions, that fatal day?
No, indeed. Frank never once hinted Conley’s guilt. Frank never once asked to be allowed to face Conley. Frank hung his head when he talked to Newt Lee; trembled and shook and swallowed and drew deep breaths, and kept shuffling his legs and couldn’t sit still; walked nervously to the windows and wrung his hands a dozen times within a few minutes; insinuated that J.M. Gantt might have committed the crime; and suggested that Newt Lee’s house ought to be searched; but never a single time threw suspicion on Jim Conley, or suggested that Jim’s house ought to be searched.
Did the negro want to rob somebody in the factory? Could he have chosen a worse place? Could he have chosen a poorer victim, and one more likely to make a stout fight?
Mary had not worked that week, except a small fraction of the time, and Jim knew it. Therefore he knew that her pay-envelope held less than that of any of the girls!
Did Jim Conley want to assault some woman in the factory? Could he have chosen a worse time and place, if he did it on the first floor at the front, where white people were coming and going; and where his boss, Mr. Frank, might come down stairs any minute, on his way to his noon meal?
No negro that ever lived would attempt to outrage a white woman, almost in the presence of a white man.
Between the hour of 12:05 and 12:10 Monteen Stover walked up the stairs from the first floor to Frank’s office on the second, and she walked right through his outer office into his inner office—and Frank was not there!
She waited 5 minutes, and left. She saw nobody. She did not see Conley, and she did not see Frank.
Where were they? And where was Mary Phagan?
It is useless to talk about street-car schedules, about the variations in clocks, about the condition of cabbage in the stomach, and about the menstrual blood, and all that sort of secondary matter.
The vital point is this—
Where was Mary, and where was Frank, and where was Conley, during the 25 minutes, before Mrs. White saw both Frank, and Conley?
Above all, where was Frank when Monteen Stover went through both his offices, the inner as well as the outer, and couldn’t find him?
She wanted to find him, for she needed her money. She wanted to find him, for she lingered 5 minutes.
Where was Frank, while Monteen was in his office, and was waiting for him?
THAT’S THE POINT IN THE CASE: all else is subordinate.
Rosser and Arnold are splendid lawyers; no one doubts that. They were employed on account of their pre-eminent rank at the bar. I have been with them in great cases, and I know that whatever it is possible to do in a forensic battle, they are able to do.
Do you suppose for one moment that Rosser and Arnold did not see the terrible significance of Monteen’s evidence?
They saw it clearly. And they made frantic efforts to get away from it. How?
First, they put up Lemmie Quinn, another employee of Frank, to testify that he had gone to Frank’s office, at 12:20, that Saturday, and found Frank there.
But Lemmie Quinn’s evidence recoiled on Frank, hurting the case badly. Why? Because two white ladies, whom the Defendant put up, as his witnesses, swore positively that they were in the factory just before noon, and that after they left Frank, they went to a café, where they found Lemmie Quinn; and he told them he had just been up to the office to see Frank.
Mrs. Freeman, one of the ladies, swore that as she was leaving the factory, she looked at Frank’s own clock, and it was a quarter to twelve.
Mrs. Freeman testified that as she passed on up the stairs in the factory building, she saw Frank talking to two men in his office. One of these men was no doubt Lemmie Quinn. At any rate, after she had talked to the lady on the fourth floor (Mrs. White) and had come down to Frank’s office to use his telephone, the men were gone; and when she met Quinn at the café, he told her that he had just been up to Frank’s office. Hence the testimony of Mrs. Emma Clarke Freeman, and Miss Corinthia Hall, smashed the attempted alibi. And of course the abortive attempt at the alibi, hurt the case terribly.
Let me do Mr. Quinn the justice to say, that he merely estimated the time of day, by the time it would have taken him to walk from his home; and that he admitted he had stopped on the way, at Wolfsheimers, for 10 or 15 minutes—all of which is obvious guess-work. He frankly admitted that when he met Mrs. Freeman and Miss Hall at the Busy Bee Café, he told them he had just been up to Frank’s office.
Secondly, the able lawyers for the defense endeavored to meet Monteen Stover’s evidence by the statement of Frank himself. This statement is so extraordinary, that I will quote the words from the record:
“Now, gentlemen, to the best of my recollection, from the time the whistle blew for twelve o’clock until after a quarter to one when I went up stairs and spoke to Arthur White and Harry Denham, to the best of my recollection, I did not stir out of the inner office, but it is possible that to answer a call of nature or to urinate I may have gone to the toilet. Those are things that a man does unconsciously and cannot tell how many times nor when he does it.”
Here then was the second of the two desperate, but futile, attempts to account for the whereabouts of Frank, at the fatal period of time when he and Mary are both missing.
Pray notice this: Frank’s first statement made a few hours after Mary’s corpse was found, made no mention of Lemmie Quinn’s coming to the office after Hattie Hall left. The effort to sandwich Quinn between Hattie Hall and Mrs. White, was a bungle, and an afterthought. It showed he felt he must try to fill in that interval and the failure showed his inability to do it. Hence he is left totally unaccounted for, during the half-hour when the crime was committed.
Frank’s final statement—the one he made to the jury—hurt him another way: he said he was continuously in his inner office, after Hattie Hall left, whereas Mrs. Arthur White on her unexpected return to the factory surprised him in his outer office where he was standing before the safe with his back to the door. He jumped when she spoke to him, and he turned round as he answered.
He did not explain what he was doing at the safe at that time 12:35, and the State’s theory is, that he had been putting Mary’s mesh bag and pay-envelope in the safe.
The only material thing about it is, that he was out of his inner office at 12:35, and not continuously in it up to nearly 1 o’clock, as he declared he was. And he had never even attempted to explain why he was at the safe at that time.
The fact that Conley may have been missing too, is secondary, and more doubtful. Monteen did not come there to look for him. Her mind was not on Jim Conley.
Monteen’s mind was on her money and the man who had it. She went there to find Frank. She says—“I went through the first office into the second office. I went to get my money. I went in Mr. Frank’s office. He was not there.
I stayed there 5 minutes, and left at 10 minutes after 12.”
Mrs. Freeman and Miss Hall had already been there; Lemmie Quinn had already been there; and these visitors, having gone up to Frank, came down again. Next comes pretty Mary Phagan, and she goes up to Frank, and Frank receives her in his private office; and when Monteen comes up into that same office, in her noiseless tennis shoes, at 5 minutes after twelve, neither Mary nor Frank were to be heard or seen. O! where were they, THEN?
To the end of time, and the crack of doom, that question will ring in the ears and the souls of right-feeling people.
Frank says he may have unconsciously gone to the toilet. Then he has unconsciously PUT HIS FEET IN THE MURDERER’S TRACKS!
The notes make Mary Phagan go to the same place, at the same time; and the blood spots and the hair on the lathe show that she died there!
On page 185 of the official record, Frank says—
“To the best of my knowledge, it must have been 10 or 15 minutes after Miss Hall left my office, when this little girl, whom I afterwards found to be Mary Phagan, entered my office and asked for her pay envelope. I asked for her number and she told me; I went to the cash box and took her envelope out and handed it to her, identifying the envelope by the number.
“She left my office and apparently had gotten as far as the door from my office leading to the outer office, when she evidently stopped, and asked me if the metal had arrived, and I told her no. She continued her way out, &c.”
Note his studied effort to make appear that he did not even lift his eyes and look at this rosy, plump and most attractive maid. He does not even know that she stopped at his inner office door, when she spoke to him. She evidently stopped, apparently at the door; he does not know for certain; he was not looking at her to see. She spoke to him, and he to her, but he does not know positively that she stopped, nor positively where she was, at the time. He did not recognize her at all. She gave him her number, and he found an envelope to match the number, and he gave it to the little girl, whom he afterwards found to be Mary Phagan! “Found,” how? By looking at the pay-roll, and seeing that Mary’s name corresponded with the number that was on the pay envelope!
Let me pause here long enough to remind you that J.M. Gantt, Dewey Howell, W.E. Turner and Miss Ruth Robinson, all swore positively that Frank did know Mary Phagan, personally, by sight and by name.
But what follows after Mary leaves Frank’s office?
He says—“She had hardly left the plant 5 minutes when Lemmie Quinn came in.”
But Miss Corinthia Hall, and Mrs. Emma Clarke Freeman, and Quinn himself, made it plain that Quinn had already been there and gone, before they arrived.
When did they arrive? And when did they leave?
They came at 11:35 and left at 11:45! They were Frank’s own witnesses, and they demolished the Lemmie Quinn alibi and Frank’s own statement!
What can be said in answer to that? Nothing. It is one of those providential mishaps in a case of circumstantial evidence, that makes the cold chills run up the back of the lawyer for the defense.
I know, for I have had them run up my back; I know them, of old.
See if you get the full force of the point. Remember that Frank’s lawyers put up Mrs. Freeman and Miss Hall, to account for Frank at the fatal period when he seemed to be missing. Evidently, they were expected to account for Frank up to Lemmie Quinn’s arrival, and after that, Lemmie was to do the rest. But Mrs. Freeman and Miss Hall not only arrived too soon, but got there after Lemmie! When they left at 11:45, by the clock in Frank’s office, they went to the café, and who should be there but Lemmie, and Lemmie, in the innocence of his heart, said he had just been up to Frank’s office.
Mary Phagan, as all the evidence shows, was at that time on her way to the fatal trap!
The evidence of Frank’s three witnesses, Miss Hall, Mrs. Freeman and Lemmie Quinn, proves that he told the jury a deliberate falsehood when he said that Quinn was with him, after Mary Phagan left.
That’s the crisis of the case!
Desperately he tries to show where he was, after the girl came; and, desperately, he says that Quinn came after Mary left, and that Quinn knows he was there in his office, after Mary had departed.
Ah no! The great God would not let that lie to prosper!
Mrs. Freeman, Miss Hall, and Quinn put themselves in and out—there and away, come and gone, before Mary came—and where does that leave Frank?
The plank he grabbed at, he missed. The straw he caught at, sunk with him. When Lemmie Quinn fails him, he sinks into that fearful unknown of the half hour when the unexpected Monteen Stover softly comes into the outer office, goes right on into Frank’s inner office, seeking her money, and cannot find Frank!
The place is silent; the place is deserted; she waits five minutes, hears nothing, and sees nobody. Then she leaves.
Where were you, Leo Frank?
And where was our little girl?
Desperately, he says he may have gone to the closet.
Fatefully, the notes say Mary went to the closet.
Fatally, her golden hair leaves some of its golden strands on the metal lever, where her head struck, as Frank hit her; and her blood splotched the floor at the dressing room, where Conley dropped her.
What broke the hymen? What tore the inner tissues? What caused the dilated blood vessels? What laceration stained the drawers with her vaginal blood? How came the outer vagina bloody?
Who split her drawers all the way up? Who did the violence to the parts that Dr. Harris swore to?
The blow that bruised and blackened, but did not break the skin, was in front, over the eye, which was much swollen when the corpse was found. The blow that cut the scalp to the bone and caused unconsciousness, was on the back of the head.
Who struck her with his fist in the face, and knocked her down, so that, in falling, the crank handle of the machine cut the scalp and tore out some of her hair?
How did anybody get a chance to hit her in the back of the head, and not throw her on her face? Would a negro go for a cord with which to choke a white woman he had assaulted? Would a negro have remained with the body, or cared what became of it, and taken the awful risks of getting it down two floors to the basement? Would a negro have lingered by the corpse to write a note on yellow paper, and another note on white paper? Would a negro have loafed there to compose notes at all? What negro ever did such a thing, after such a crime?
Place in front of you a square piece of blank paper, longer than it is broad; an old envelope will do. This square piece of paper, longer than it is broad, will represent the floor of the building—the second floor, upon which Mary Phagan was done to death.
Draw a line through the middle of the square, from top to bottom, cutting the long square into two lesser squares. These will sufficiently represent the two large rooms into which the second floor was divided by a partition. Mark a place in the center of the partition, for the door which opens one room into the other.
Where was Frank’s office?
It was at the upper right-hand corner of the room, to your right, as the square lies lengthwise before you.
Mark off a small square at that corner, for Frank’s office.
Mark off a small square, in the left hand corner of the second room, and run a line through it, to divide this small closet, into two divisions. One of these small divisions was the water-closet of the men; the other, of the women! You cannot crumple a piece of paper in the one, without being heard in the other!
We naturally turn to Frank, and we naturally ask him—
What did Mary do, after you gave her the pay-envelope? Where did she go?
He cannot answer.
But thereupon we take it up, another way, and we ask him this question—
Where were YOU after Mary left? Did you stay in your office? Did you go anywhere, and do anything?
Now, follow the facts closely:
Frank’s own detective, Harry Scott, in his energetic efforts to find the criminal, pinned Frank down, as to where he was, after 12 o’clock.
Frank told Harry Scott, in the hearing of John Black, that he was continuously in his office, during the 45 minutes AFTER MARY HAD COME AND GONE.
The white lady, Mrs. Arthur White, returned at 12:35, and found Frank in his office, standing before the iron safe. He jumped nervously, when he heard her.
Now, then: Monteen Stover went to Frank’s office, after Mary had gone away from it, AND BEFORE MRS. WHITE CAME BACK, AT 12:35.
Where was Frank, then?
Right there, in that fateful half-hour, lies the crime.
Who is the criminal?
If Frank had been in his office, Monteen would, of course, have seen him when she went to it—and he would have seen her.
He did not see her, and therefore did not know that she had been there, until after he had told Harry Scott, positively and repeatedly, that he was in his office, THEN.
It was afterwards, when the unimpeachable Monteen told what she knew, that Frank saw how he had boxed himself up.
Then it was, that such a persistent and desperate effort was made to get Monteen’s evidence out of the way.
Then it was, that Burns in person tried first to persuade, and then to bulldoze her.
(Why don’t some of Frank’s paid champions dwell on that ugly phase of his case?)
The enormous weight which Frank’s lawyers and detectives (Burns and Lehon) attached to Monteen’s evidence, is the best proof that Monteen’s evidence clinches the guilt of Frank. When Frank told Scott and Black that he was in his office, continuously, after Mary left, he knew the vital necessity of accounting for his whereabouts, at that particular time.
He knew it, even then!
His definite, positive placing of himself, during that particular half-hour, shows that he knew it.
BUT HOW CAME HE TO KNOW IT?
If some one else made away with the girl, he did not THEN know when the deed was done.
If he was as innocent as you and I, he did not then know, any better than you and I then did, the vast materiality of his whereabouts, at any one half-hour of that fatal day.
How came he, at that time, to be so extremely careful to account for himself, for that special half-hour, and why did he lie about it?
He does not deny what he told Scott and Black; he does not accuse Monteen of a perjury for which she had no motive; he stated to the jury that he might have gone to the water-closet, on a call of nature, which he curiously said is an act that a person does “without being conscious of it.”
If Frank told Scott and Black a deliberate falsehood as to his whereabouts, that is a powerful circumstance against him.
If he was actually out of his office, just after Mary left, that, also, is a powerful circumstance against him, provided he cannot tell where he was.
If, in giving the only possible account of himself, he puts himself at the water-closet, then the crime gets right up to him, provided Mary was ravished and killed, in that same room.
Now, where was Mary ravished and killed?
The blood-marks and the hair say, in that same room!
And the notes say, in that same room!
The blood-marks tell where she was; and if Frank went out of his office, to go to the closet, he went right there!
The notes make Mary say that she went to the closet, “to make water,” and, if she did, she went right there.
If a negro seized her, raped her and killed her, he had to be right where Frank says he was, when absent from his office.
But if Frank was in his office, and Monteen is a liar without motive, how could a negro come up from the lower floor (where Mrs. White saw him,) and commit the crime, without Frank hearing, or seeing a single thing to excite his suspicion?
Where is the negro who would go that close to a white man’s office, when he knew the white man was there, to commit such a fiendish crime upon a white girl? And how did the negro, by himself, get the body from the second floor, down to the basement?
Mary’s body was found on the night of Saturday the 26th. It appeared to have been dead a long time. “The body was cold and stiff.” The notes were lying close by.
Newt Lee went on duty for the night, as usual, that Saturday night, and it was he who found the body on that night, at about 3 o’clock.
Therefore, you have a clear case of murder, on Saturday, sometime after the noon hour, and before Newt Lee came on duty as night-watchman, at 6 o’clock.
Conley was not back in the building that day, after 1 o’clock. Frank was. The record shows this.
The circumstances conclusively prove that somebody did the deed, during the half-hour following Mary’s coming to Frank’s office.
Frank admits that he is the last white person with whom she was ever seen. The blood and the notes say she was assaulted on Frank’s floor, near the closets, which she and Frank both used.
The notes make her go to the closet, to answer a call of nature, immediately after she left Frank!
She did not go up stairs; she had no work to do in the factory, that day; and if she went to the toilet at all, she went there from Frank’s office.
She never again appeared down stairs; or out of doors.
If she had gone up stairs, Mrs. White and others would have known it. If she had gone down stairs, both Frank and Conley would know it.
Yet at 12:35, Mrs. White saw Frank, but did not see the girl.
She had disappeared, during the very time that Frank disappears; and when Frank gets back into his office, at 12:35, that little girl is out there near the toilet, in the next room, choking to death.
It was Frank who was close to her; it was the negro who was down stairs.
No wonder Frank “jumped,” when Mrs. White came up, behind, and spoke.
No wonder he hurried Mrs. White out of the building, hesitated to allow J.M. Gantt to go in for his shoes, and refused to let Newt Lee enter.
By all the evidence, Frank and Jim were the only living mortals in that part of the house, at that time. Mary undoubtedly was there, at the time, by Frank’s own line of defence.

There was one short sentence Capt. J.N. Starnes’ re-direct examination, that did not rivet my special attention at first. That sentence was—
“Hands folded across the breast.”
That simple statement came back, again and again, knocking at the door, as if it were saying, “Explain me!”
How did it happen that a girl who had been raped or murdered—or both—was found with her hands folded over her breast?
How could a girl who had been knocked in the head, on the first floor, and tumbled down into the basement, through a scuttle-hole, and over a ladder, as Defendant claims, have her hands resting quietly on her bosom?
Frank’s theory represents Jim as attacking Mary on the first floor, finishing her in the basement below, then writing the notes, breaking the door, and speeding away.
That theory does not account for those folded hands.
A girl knocked on the head, into unconsciousness, and then choked to death with a cord, does not fold her own hands across her bosom. O no!
In the agony of death, her arms will be spread out. And if, hours later, those arms are found across her bosom, the little hands meeting over the pulseless heart, be sure that somebody who remembers intuitively how the dead should be treated, has put those agonized hands together!
There were the indisputable and undisputed facts: a bloody corpse, with a wound in the head, torn underclothing, privates bloody, a tight cord sunk into the soft flesh of the neck, the face blackened and scratched by dragging across a bare floor of cinders and grit, and yet when turned over and found “cold and stiff,” the testimony curtly adds—
“Hands folded across the breast.”
How did that happen? Who folded those little hands across the heart which beat no more?
In vain, I searched the evidence. Nowhere was there an explanation. In fact, nobody had seemed to be struck by that brief, clear statement of Capt. Starnes, which everybody conceded to be strictly true:
“Hands folded across the breast.”
Mind you, when she was found in the basement, she was lying on her face, not directly on her stomach, but so much so that they had to “turn her over,” to see her face, and wipe the dust and dirt off, for the purpose of recognition. (See official record, pages 7, 8 and 9.)
Lying on her face! Had to turn her over, and “the body was cold and stiff.” But the frozen hands—where were they? “Folded across the breast.”
Then, they had become rigid in that position! They had not come off the bosom, even when the body was turned over! They had remained across the breast, while the body was being dragged.
Dr. Westmoreland and Dr. Harris would probably agree, for at least one time, and both would say, as competent experts, that those hands, (to remain fixed under those circumstances,) had been placed across the girl’s bosom, before the stiffness set in.
Death froze them there!
You may read every line of the evidence on both sides, as I did, and you will not find any explanation of those folded hands—hands folded as no murdered woman’s were ever found before, except where somebody, not the murderer, instinctively followed universal custom, and folded them!
Can you escape that conclusion? No, you can’t. At least, I couldn’t, and I have been reading and trying murder cases, nearly all my life.
Then, as a last resort, in my efforts to satisfy myself about that unparalleled circumstance of the folded hands, I decided to turn to Jim Conley’s evidence, saying to myself, as I did so, “If that ignorant nigger explains that fact, whose importance he cannot possibly have known, it will be a marvelous thing.” So I turned to Conley’s evidence, searching for that one thing. On page 55, I found it. Here it is:
“She was dead when I got back there, and I came back and told Mr. Frank, and he said ‘Sh-sh!’….The girl was lying flat on her back and her hands were out, this way. I put both of her hands down, easy, and rolled her up in the cloth….I looked back a little way and saw her hat and piece of ribbon and her slippers, and I taken them and put them all in the cloth.”
The girl was lying flat on her back, hands out this way—and he illustrated. “I put both of her hands down.” Then, they were not only out, but up—as if the pitiful little victim had been pushing something, or somebody, off!
Those dead hands are fearful accusers of the white men who now say that Mary Phagan did not value her virtue.
Only the other day, there was issued by the Neale Publishing Company, a new book of war experiences, written by a Philadelphia surgeon, Dr. John H. Brinton; and he relates some vivid incidents showing the rapid action of the rigor mortis—the “instantaneous rigor,” following mortal wounds received in battle. He made a special study of the dead, on the field which the North calls Antietam. (Our name for it is, Sharpsburg.)
On page 207, Dr. Brinton speaks of the cornfield and sunken road, so famous to the literature of the War; and he says, “Dead bodies were everywhere…..Many of these were in extraordinary attitudes, some with their arms raised rigidly in the air….
I also noticed the body of a Southern soldier….The body was in a semi-erect posture….One arm, extended, was stretched forward.....His musket with ramrod halfway down, had dropped from his hand.”
This Southern soldier had been lying in the road, had half risen to load and shoot, had been shot while driving the ramrod home, and the gun had dropped; but the soldier himself remained, face to the foe, half-erect, with “one arm extended, and stretched forward.”
Brave Southern soldier! Death itself could not rob him of the proofs of his unfailing heroism.
Brave Southern girl! Death itself would not rob Mary Phagan of the proofs, that she fought for her innocence to the very last.
Shame upon those white men who desecrate the murdered child’s grave, and who add to the torture of the mother that lost her, by saying Mary was an unclean little wanton.
Jim Conley had no motive to describe her hands as being uplifted; and he, an ignorant negro, could not have realized the stupendous psychological significance of it.
Providence was against Frank in this case. The stars in their courses fought against him, as they fought against Sisera. His lawyers must have felt it.
Providence was against him, in the time of Monteen Stover’s unexpected visit to his office.
Providence was against him, in the unexpected return of Mrs. White.
Providence was against him, in the fatal break-down of his alibi.
Providence was against him, in the apparently trivial fact that Newt Lee’s call of nature, Saturday night, did not occur on any of the floors above the basement—all of which had closets—but occurred in the basement, where the closet was close to the dead girl.
Providence was against him, in the fact that Barrett worked that crank handle, the last thing on Friday evening, and was thus able to credibly swear that it had no woman’s hair on it, then.
Providence was against him, in that Stanford swept the whole floor Friday, and was thus able to credibly swear that there was no blood on it, then.
Providence was against him, when he was forced into explaining his absence from his office by unwittingly putting himself at the place of that woman’s hair and those fresh blood spots.
Providence was against him, when that cold and stiff girl was found in the basement, with “hands folded across the breast,” for that fact—apparently little—imperiously demands explanation!
And when you start out to hunt for the explanation which you know must exist, you search every nook and cranny in the case without finding it, until you read a line or two which the negro did not understand the meaning of—and which, so far as I can learn—has never been the subject of comment, on either side.
It happened to flash across me, that I had recently read something similar, in the book which Walter Neale had sent me for review; and then I saw the meaning of Mary’s hands being in such a position upward, that Jim had to put them “down.”
No negro could have invented that. No negro could have known the importance of that. Apparently, the lawyers did not pay any attention to it. Am I mistaken in doing so? Am I wrong in saying that this little fact absolutely establishes the truth of the State’s theory?
How, else, do you account for the hands folded across her breast, so rigidly that when her body had been dragged, and then turned over, the rigid posture of the hands was maintained, by the frozen muscles?
To save your life, you cannot explain it, except by saying that somebody, almost immediately after the girl’s death, put her hands in that position. She didn’t do it.
Who was that somebody?
Not the man who killed her, you may be dead sure.
But the nigger says, he did it.
Then you may stake your life on the proposition, that the nigger didn’t kill her.
Negroes who assault and murder white women, don’t loiter to fold hands, write notes, and pick up hats, ribbons and slippers.
Negroes who assault and murder white women, have never failed to hit the outer rim of the sky-line, just as quick as their heels can do it.
But as it was the nigger who put down the girl’s hands, and folded them across her breast, soon after her life went out, who did kill her?
THE ONLY OTHER POSSIBLE MAN, IS FRANK.
Was it Frank, and not the nigger, who was “lascivious,” at that factory? Twelve white women swore, “Yes.”
Was it Frank, and not the nigger, who had been after this little girl. Three white witnesses swear, “Yes.”
How many more witnesses do you want, than fifteen white ones?
And yet the Burnses, and Connollys, and Pulitzers, and Abells, and Ochses, and Thomsons and Rossers are still telling the outside world that the virtuous Frank was convicted on race prejudice, and the evidence of one besotted negro!
Was any State ever so maligned, as Georgia has been?
Let me call your attention to another little thing in the negro’s evidence which there was no need to “make up.” It is his statement that he wrote, at Frank’s dictation, four notes before Frank was satisfied. Why say four, when only two were found? The negro in testifying at the trial, knew that only two notes were found, yet he swore to writing four.
At least, I so understand his words, which were—
“He taken his pencil to fix up some notes….and he sat down and I sat down at the table and Mr. Frank dictated the notes to me. Whatever it was, it didn’t seem to suit him, and he told me to turn over, and write again, and I turned the paper and wrote again, and when I had done that, he told me to turn over and write again, and I turned over and I wrote on the next page, and he looked at that, and kinder liked it, and he said that was all right. Then he reached over and got another piece of paper, a green piece, and told me what to write. He took it and laid it in his desk.”
If that doesn’t make four notes, I don’t understand the language in the record; and if it means four, when only two were found and introduced into the case, it shows, at least, that the negro was not making up a tale to fit the known facts.
The negro said another thing that he could not have “made up,” because he does not even yet realize the meaning of it. The lawyers made no allusions to it. Jim said—“When I heard him whistle (the signal Frank had often used when he had lewd women with him) I went…on up the steps. Mr. Frank was standing up there at the top of the steps, and shivering and trembling, and rubbing his hands like this—.
He had a little rope in his hands—a long wide piece of cord. His eyes were large and they looked right funny…..
He asked me, “Did you see that little girl who passed up here a while ago?”
Jim told him he had seen two go up, and only one come down.
Mind you, Frank had not heard Monteen Stover, whose tennis shoes made no noise; and Frank knew nothing of her visit at all. When he asked Jim if he had seen that little girl, Frank meant, “Did you see the Phagan girl?”
Frank’s purpose was, to learn whether Jim had seen the little girl, who was then lying out there in the metal room, with a piece of that cord around her neck. If the negro had answered, “No, I didn’t see any girl,” Frank would never have said another word to him about her. It was only after he found out that Jim had seen her go up, but not come down, that he had to take Jim into his confidence one more time.
Much has been said about the improbability of Frank making a confidante out of a negro of low character. Does an immoral white man make a confidante out of a negro of high character? Will a respectable negro act as go-between, procurer, or watch-out man, for a white hypocrite who is one thing to his Rabbi and his Bnai Brith, and quite a different thing to the cyprians of the town?

Suppose I can show you from the official record that Frank’s lawyers knew that the murder was committed on Frank’s floor, back there where the blood and hair were found, won’t you be practically certain that they also knew Frank to be guilty?
Come along with me, and see if I don’t prove it to you:
Leo Frank employed Harry Scott, a detective, to ferret out the criminal, and Scott went into the case with great vigor. In fact, he soon showed altogether too much vigor to suit Frank, and Herbert Haas. Herbert became alarmed—why? And Herbert told Scott to first report to him, Herbert, whatever he might discover, before letting any one else know. Herbert Haas was chairman of the Frank Finance Committee, and he was one of the lawyers for the defense.
Scott did not like to be shut off from the police, and confined to a Herbert Haas investigation, and so he remonstrated with the Chairman of the Finance Committee.
But before Scott was fired, he had drawn from Frank two material statements. One was, his alleged continuous presence in his office after Hattie Hall left; and the other was, his answer to Mary Phagan, when she asked him if the metal had come.
Frank told Scott that when Mary asked him whether the metal had come, he replied, “I don’t know.” At that time, Frank was not aware of the fact that Monteen Stover could prove that he was absent from his office when Mary was being murdered.
What did Mary’s question about the metal prove? That her mind was on her work. She had lost nearly the whole week, because the supply of metal had run out. They were expecting more. If it had come, she could go back to work in that metal room, next Monday. Therefore, when she asked Frank, “Has the metal come?” her thoughts were on her work and she was eager to know whether she could return on Monday to resume it. “Has the metal come?” Equivalent to, “Will there be any work for me next week? Must I lose another week, or can I come back Monday?”
This was the meaning of the question. What was the meaning of Frank’s answer?
If he said, “I don’t know,” the girl would naturally suggest, or he would, that they go back there, to that metal room, and see.
Can you escape this conclusion? If he didn’t know whether the metal was there or not, the only way to tell for certain, was to go and look. If he was doubtful, the girl would want to go and look to see if it was there, for the girl wanted to resume her work.
Now, if that answer, “I don’t know,” were allowed to stand, Rosser realized, quick as lightning, that it led to the inevitable conclusion that the girl went back to the metal room to see about it, and was assaulted there!
Consequently, Frank not only changed his answer of, “I don’t know,” into a positive, “No;” but Rosser went at Scott, hammer and tongs, to badger him into saying that he may have been mistaken, and that Frank may have said, “No,” instead of, “I don’t know.”
But the point is this: If Rosser had not felt certain that the blood and the hair proves that Mary was killed on Frank’s floor, near Frank’s closet, and at about the time Frank puts himself at the closet, what would Rosser have cared whether Mary went to the metal room, or not?
If Jim Conley killed Mary on the first floor, or in the basement, it did not at all matter whether she went to the metal room, either with Frank, or by herself.
The strenuous effort of Rosser to escape from that answer of “I don’t know,” proves what he knows. He knows very well that the girl was killed on the second floor. Otherwise, you cannot understand why Frank was made to change his statement, and why such herculean strength was used to get a change out of Harry Scott.
The difference between “No,” and “I don’t know,” is a difference between tweedledum and tweedledee, unless Mary was murdered on Frank’s floor.
Rosser knew, just as you must now see, that if Frank told the girl, “I don’t know,” he might just as well have admitted that he and Mary went back there together, where the blood and hair were found.
The answer of, “I don’t know,”—suggesting as it did, an inspection of the room, to see about the metal—is the only plausible way to account for the girl’s being back there, unless indeed the notes speak the truth about her going to the closet.
(See Harry Scott’s evidence in record.)
Rosser’s desperate struggle to get away from the “I don’t know,” is wonderfully illuminating as to what was in Rosser’s mind. If he had placed the slightest reliance on the theory that the negro killed the girl, he would not have cared a button whether Frank went with Mary to see about the metal. If Rosser had not been absolutely certain that the girl was attacked and killed, back there, he would not have struggled so hard to keep her and Frank away from there. If Rosser had believed for a moment that Mary went on down stairs, after she left Frank, and was killed by the negro down stairs, he wouldn’t have wasted a breath over that question of whether Frank said, “No,” or said, “I don’t know.”
If the girl was killed down stairs, it would not have hurt Frank’s case in the least, if he had boldly admitted that, after telling Mary, “I don’t know,” he had gone back there with her to see. It is to be presumed that he, as well as she, wanted the work to go on; and therefore he, also, would be interested in the matter, with a view to her return on Monday.
Suppose he had said, “Yes, Mary came to my office, got her money, and we went back to the metal rom to see if the expected metal had come; and, after that, she went on down stairs, and I went back into my office, and saw no more of her.”
Where would have been the danger of his saying that? She was with him in the office; he admits that, after the evidence forces him to it; but why not go a little farther, and admit that he and she went to the metal room, before she left his floor?
Ask Rosser to tell you the answer to that question. Ask your own intelligence! What danger, was to be dreaded, in allowing Frank to say that he and Mary went to the metal room, even for one single minute?
If she was killed on the first floor—no matter who did it—there was no danger in letting Frank admit that he went to the metal room with her.
If she was killed in the basement—no matter who did it—there was no danger in the admission that she and Frank went to the metal room.
But Rosser’s desperate drive, to remove the very idea of her going to the metal room with Frank, proves the immense importance he attached to it. He could not allow it, he dared not allow it! Mary and Frank must not for an instant be allowed in the metal room, during that fatal half-hour!
WHY NOT?
Is there any possible answer, but the one? And that is—Mary’s tress of golden-brown hair is hanging out there in that room, on the crank of Barrett’s machine; and Mary’s life-blood is out there, on that recently swept floor!
Rosser said in his heart, “I dare not let Frank go there!”

When you test the theory that Conley alone did the deed, you have no evidence to rest it on. Jim never bothered those white girls, did not act like a negro who had committed the unpardonable crime on a white woman, did not try to lay suspicion on anybody, and went about his work as usual, on Monday and Tuesday.
There is absolutely no evidence against the negro, upon which the State could have made the shadow of a case.
When you test in your mind the hypothesis that Frank and Jim both committed the crime, you make some slight headway, for Jim and Frank shielded each other, until Frank was jailed. But this is not enough to implicate both, in the actual crime. It is enough to prove a common guilty knowledge of the crime, but it does not shut out the idea of Conley’s being accessory to the fact, after the deed was done.
It is only when you test in your mind the theory that Frank alone committed the crime, that all proved circumstances harmonize, and interlink to make the chain.
Twelve white girls swore that Frank had a lascivious character; and they learned what he was, inside this very factory.
One of his own witnesses, a white girl, swore to this immoral conduct, inside this very factory.
Conley mentioned the names of the white women and the white man who came into this very factory, to engage in vice with Frank, and one of these persons corroborated Conley on the witness stand.
White witnesses swore that Frank had been after little Mary, ever since March, inside this very factory.
Frank laid a trap for Mary, by forcing her to come back inside this very factory, when he might have sent her money by Helen Ferguson.
Mary walks into the trap inside that factory, and it closes on her.
God in Heaven! was guilt ever plainer, and more deliberately diabolical?
And are we to be dictated to by mass-meetings in Chicago, and by circular letters from New York and New England, when this awful crime stares us in the face?
Nothing corroborates Frank when he says that Conley alone committed the crime; and every undisputed fact is against that hypothesis.
Everything corroborates Conley, when he says that Frank did it, and he himself became mixed up in it, afterwards.
And if there is one feature of the case more convincing than another it is, that Frank was at least as careful to shield Conley from suspicion, AT FIRST, as Conley was, to shield Frank.
Until Frank himself was arrested, he tried to set the dogs on Lee and Gantt, BUT NEVER ONCE ON JIM CONLEY!
At first, Frank and Conley both acted like a pair who held a guilty secret between themselves.
Ah, it is a heartrending case. Big Money may muzzle most of the papers, hire the best legal talent, and bring remote popular pressure to bear upon our governor, but all the money in the world cannot destroy the facts, nor answer the arguments based on those facts.
Let me refer to the negro’s explanation of how it happened—my reference being confined strictly to facts where there is abundant corroboration.
Jim says he heard steps of two persons going back to the metal room; and Frank himself, states that Mary inquired about whether the metal had come, which would give her more work next week. What more natural than that Frank, when the girl asked, “Has the metal come?” should say, “Let’s go back there and see?”
What more natural than that she should go? And what more in keeping with Frank’s proved character, and his proved desire for this girl, than that he should make indecent advances to her, back there, where no one is in sight or hearing?
Jim says Frank called him by their agreed signal of stamping on the floor, and whistling, and that when he went up, Frank, looking wild and excited, told him, in substance, that he had tried the girl, that she had refused, that he had struck her, and he guessed he had hit her too hard; she had fallen, and in falling had hit something; she was unconscious.
Jim says he went back there where the girl lay, at the lathe, where her hair was found in the handle; and she was lying motionless with the cord around her neck. “The cloth was also tied around her neck, and part of it was under her head like to catch blood.”
All the witnesses swore to the strip of cloth; and the hair on the metal handle of the lathe was as fully identified as Mary’s, as hair could be under those circumstances. Frank’s own witness, Magnolia Kennedy testified that the hair looked like Mary’s; and Miss Magnolia was herself the only other girl there whose hair was at all like the golden brown of Mary Phagan’s.
Frank’s own machinist found the hair on the metal handle, and swore positively it was not there when he quit using that very machine—handle and all—Friday night, before the Saturday of the crime.
Mr. Barrett, the machinist, found the hair on the handle when he went back to the machine Monday morning. He was not at the factory Saturday. No one is shown to have been in that room Saturday. How did that long, golden-brown, woman’s hair get on that metal crank, where Barrett found it?
No girl or woman could be produced who pretended she was in the metal room on Saturday. No girl or woman could be found who could explain about the hair. Why not? Half-a-dozen of Frank’s own employees, several of them his own witnesses, swore to finding the hair, soon Monday morning; and they swore that it was not there Friday.
Why couldn’t it be accounted for?
The only answer is, Mary in falling, after Frank struck her and gave her that bruise on the eye, hit the metal handle, and it ripped her scalp and tore out some of her hair.
In no other way under the sun can that hair on the machine be explained.
Then the blood on the floor at the dressing room, some 23 feet from where the girl fell: whose blood?
All the witnesses say it was not there Friday when they quit work. Mell Stanford had swept the whole 2nd floor, and tidied up, generally; and he swore positively the blood spots were not there Friday. Barrett swore they were not there Friday. But the blood spots were there early Monday morning, seen by numbers of the employees, and denied by none. Schiff, the assistant superintendent, admitted it, Quinn admitted it, the men saw it, the women saw it, chips were cut out of the floor, and the doctors saw it.
Whose was it?
Not there Friday evening, right there Monday morning, whose was it?
If not Mary’s blood, produce your explanation! If not Mary, somebody else bled there. Who bled there, between Friday and Monday, if not Mary Phagan?
The question can not be answered, save in one way. You know quite well that if money or skill, or hard work, could have accounted for those guilty stains on that floor, the man or the woman who bled there would have been produced.
Conley says he dropped the girl on the floor, and that the blood spattered where those spots were found. Take that explanation, or go without one, for I assure you the court record offers no other. Frank in his own statement could only offer the explanation that Duffy or Gilbert when injured in the metal room, months before, might have bled there. Gilbert went on the stand and swore to his cut finger, but said none of the blood had dropped anywhere near those spots.
The futile effort to account for the blood, only deepens the significance of the fact that it was there, and adds fearful weight to the evidence of R.P. Barrett and Mell Stanford, that it was not there on Friday.
Jim says he and Frank carried the body down, in the elevator, to the basement. He says they had wrapped her up in a cloth which was taken off in the basement. He said that Frank made him promise to return to the plant, that afternoon, to help him dispose of the body, but he did not go back.
I have on purpose left out everything but the barest outline. Conley did go home and did not return, whereas Frank was back—we don’t know exactly when—and sent Newt Lee away at 4, when Newt wanted to go in and sleep.
A white man, whose character is not assailed, swears that he wanted permission to go into the factory at 6 o’clock, and that Frank not only first tried to dodge back out of sight into the gloom of the building, but lied to him about the sweeping out of the shoes, and then sent a negro to watch him.
Then the negro who was a trusted night-watchman—and whom Frank detailed to watch Gantt—swears that when he went down into the basement at 7 o’clock in the course of his regular rounds of the big building, less than an hour after Frank had gone, the light that had always been kept burning brightly there, by Frank’s own orders, had been turned down. “It was burning just as low as you could turn it, like a lightning bug. I left it Saturday morning burning bright.”
Who turned that light down?
Who went into that basement, after Newt went off duty early Saturday morning? Who was there during Saturday? What was the motive, in turning the light down and leaving it so? The motive was, to prevent Newt from seeing that corpse.
Not a single employee of the plant said that he or she had been in the basement that day. The light could not turn itself down. It was not a case of gas burning dim and low, for it burned brightly again when turned up.
Somebody turned down the light—who?
Over the telephone came the inquiry to Newt—“How is everything?” That was an hour or so after Frank had left. He had never done that before. He does not even claim that he had. But he explains it by saying he wanted to know whether Gantt had gone! What danger did he apprehend from Gantt?
Why was Gantt on Frank’s nerves? Newt swears that Frank did not mention Gantt, but simply asked. “How is everything?”
Was it not the jangling nerves and haunting suspicions, whose question really meant, “Have you found anything? Have you seen the dead girl? Is the murder out?”
Minola McKnight’s repudiated affidavit is in this terrible record, and in those statements which she verified and swore to in the presence of Mr. George Gordon, her attorney, she tells of that night of horror at Frank’s home.
You will probably suspect that if Newt Lee had not had occasion to go to the closet in the basement that night, Mary Phagan’s body never would have been found, for the going to the closet took him close to the corpse, and he saw it!
Frank did not intend for the corpse to be found; and he meant to creep back into the basement next day, and bury that girl in the dirt floor!
That door worked on a slide. It did not open, as door shutters usually do. It was locked and it was barred, usually. On Saturday night, Newt looked that way, and it was closed. He did not notice the bar, or the staple. On Sunday morning, the door was subjected to close examination. The witnesses say the staple had been drawn, and the bar taken down. But the door was completely closed!
Would a frightened, fleeing negro rapist and murderer, have pried out the staple, lifted off the bar, and then carefully, from the outside, pushed the door to, on the slide?
Why should Jim Conley break the basement door, when he could walk out, in front, on the first floor where he was sitting when Mrs. White saw him?
And why should any frightened and fleeing negro, too scared to walk out of the unlocked doors, break that door, and then carefully close it?
To me, it looks like a careful plan for somebody, to go in, without being seen. To me, it looks as if somebody, who had the run of the plant, came down there, pried out the staple, and lifted the bar, without opening the door at all. The opening was to be from the outside, next day.
Jim Conley could have unlocked that door easier than he could draw the staple. He could have lifted the bar and gone out, without violence, easier than he could go out by a burglarious breaking.
It wasn’t a question of going out; it was a question of coming in!
Do you say that Frank could have left the door unlocked, with the bar merely lifted off? The answer to that is, had he done so, he would have had to involve persons who had the keys!
To unlock from the inside, there must be an unlocker, on the inside.
Now, if Frank had unlocked the door, as well as removed the bar, the crime would have come home, right then, to one of the men who toted the keys. And a narrowing circle would have brought that search right up to him and Conley—for all the others could easily account for themselves at the exact half-hour of the crime.
Frank’s defenders claim that Conley broke open the basement door to get out.
What will you think of their sincerity and honesty, when I tell you page 21 of the agreed record shows that the negro was sitting near the front door, up stairs on the 1st floor, at about 1 o’clock, when Mrs. J.A. White passed him and went out at the front door?
What hindered the negro from walking out of the front door? The crime had been committed; the corpse was in the basement; and there was Jim sitting between the upper stairway and regular entrance door.
What need for him to squeeze through that scuttle hole, return to the basement, and break out the back way, in the alley? All he or Frank had to do, to get out, was to do what Mrs. White did—walk out. But if somebody wanted to come back around the back way, and glide into the basement unseen, then a sliding door, left in such a manner that it could be pushed back, from the outside, was necessary.
Another queer thing is, that Jim said that they left the corpse on the floor in front of the elevator, but that he flung the ribbon, hat and slippers into the trash-heap near the furnace, where Frank wanted body and all burnt that afternoon.
Now, when the body was found, it had been dragged from the elevator back to near the basement door, the ribbon, slippers and hat were at the same place, and only two notes—a white one and a yellow one—were lying near the girl’s head. Did Frank, who is a small man, drag that body away from the elevator? Did he gather up all her things and lay them by her? Did he select two of the notes, and destroy the other two? Did the other two notes go with her mesh bag and pay-envelope?
It is certainly a peculiar detail that Newt Lee, when an accident took him to the toilet near the corpse, saw the leg, first. In being dragged by the feet, and on the side face, at least one of the legs would be exposed.

Nobody but Frank and Conley are entrapped by that providential clockwork of the fatal half-hour.
Conley admits himself caught, and is being punished for it.
But it catches Frank, also; and where two criminals are involved in a crime against a white girl, the white man is the more apt to be the leader, the principal, especially in a case like this where ten white women swore to Frank’s lewd character, and three white witnesses swore that he had been after this very girl.
What is a demonstration of any man’s guilt, on circumstantial evidence? It is that degree of moral certainty which arises from the evident fact that, under those circumstances, no one else could have committed the crime.
Given a murder, and a state of facts which excludes everybody except the accused, and the accused is the guilty man, necessarily.
When it is admitted that somebody committed a crime, and the testimony shows that nobody but the Defendant could have done it, human Reason is satisfied, and so is the Law.
Let your mind rest upon one other very significant fact.
The ignorant negro who is accused of the crime, stood, a terrific cross-examination, lasting eight hours. The strongest criminal lawyer of the Atlanta bar wore himself out on Jim Conley, without damaging Jim’s evidence in the least.
On the contrary, the educated white man who is accused of the crime made a statement covering 45 large pages of closely printed matter, and refused to offer to answer one single question!
His defenders paint him as a man of intellectual gifts of which any community should be proud, as a man of spotless morals, as a man who is unjustly accused, foully convicted, and eager for vindication.
Why, then, did he shrink from a cross-examination? Why did he fear an ordeal through which the illiterate negro triumphantly passed?
In its tenderness to the accused, our law will not permit an examination of the defendant, unless he voluntarily consents. So just was the horror of our ancestors against that system of torture to compel confessions which popery had introduced into Europe, that they swung the pendulum back to the other extreme, and screened the prisoner from any question, whatever.
It is an unwise thing to give to the guilty an immunity from answering fair questions, for no innocent man could ever be hurt by it. But leaving all that out, a defendant can say—and often does say—“Ask me any fair question, and I will answer it.” Such an offer always makes a most favorable impression. The jury and the public at once begin to feel confident of the innocence of an accused, when he shows confidence in it himself.
Here was a college graduate, an intellectually superior man, environed by a terrible array of suspicious circumstances, with the whole republic looking on at his trial, with a mother and father intensely agitated, and the Hebrews of the Union, profoundly concerned.
What a magnificent opportunity for an innocent man to rise before the court and country, panoplied in the armor of conscious rectitude, and say to the State of Georgia—
“I have nothing to conceal. There are no guilty secrets in my soul. The more carefully you open my book of life, the more clearly will my innocence be seen. If I have not spoken to your satisfaction, and given a full account of myself, ask me about it! Put your questions. I am not afraid. No answer of mine can uncover a guilt that does not exist. Therefore I do not fear your questions: ask them!”
Wouldn’t that have been the attitude and the feeling of Nathan Strauss, for instance, had he been in Frank’s place?

What, then, is the net result of all this evidence, direct and circumstantial? It is this:
Leo Frank was a lecherous hypocrite, a moral pervert; a model, to Rabbi Marx, but a rake—and something more—to women would allow it;
He wanted this little girl, and the opportunity came on Saturday, April 26th, 1913;
She goes into his possession, and is found in his possession—but when she goes in, she is alive and well, and when found, she is cold and stiff, with the dried blood matted in her golden hair, and a tightly tied cord cutting into her soft neck.
Alive and dead, she is that day in Frank’s possession, and he cannot trace her out of it! To say that the negro shared that possession with him, may be true, but it does not help Frank.
At most, that gives him an accomplice, and the negro is even now being punished for that!
Mary goes into Frank’s house alive; she is soon afterwards found there, dead, cold and stiff; no mortals had the opportunity to assault and kill her, save Frank and Conley.
Say that the negro did the deed without the white man, and you cannot travel at all; no evidence whatever supports the theory.
Say that the white man did it, and then called for the negro’s help in getting rid of the body—and all the evidence harmonizes, facts link into facts, to make the iron chain of conviction.


On the great Knapp case, the fame of Daniel Webster, as a criminal lawyer, mainly rests; and in that case of circumstantial evidence the verdict of “Guilty” had no stronger support than was given to the verdict against Frank. In the Knapp case, the prosecution aided the State of Massachusetts by employing the greatest lawyer and forensic orator the American bar could boast. In the Frank case, the young Solicitor stood alone, and fought the strongest team of attorneys that money could enlist. Against Frank’s dozens of lawyers, detectives, press-agents, &c., the State of Georgia has arrayed nobody, save her regular officers of the Law.
In the Knapp case, Mr. Webster indignantly answered the friends of the defendant, who claimed that a popular clamor had been excited against the accused. He turned upon these too-zealous champions of the prisoner and exclaimed—
“Much has been said, on this occasion, of the excitement which has existed, and still exists, and of the extraordinary methods taken to discover and punish the guilty. No doubt there has been, and is, much excitement, and strange indeed were it, had it been otherwise. Should not all the peaceable and well-disposed naturally feel concerned, and naturally exert themselves to bring to punishment the authors of this secret assassination? Was it a thing to be slept upon or forgotten? Did you, gentlemen, sleep quite as quietly in your beds after this murder as before? Was it not a case for rewards, for meetings, for committees, for the united efforts of all the good, to find out a band of murderous conspirators, of midnight ruffians, and to bring them to the bar of justice and law? If this be excitement, is it an unnatural or an improper excitement?
“It is said that even a vigilance committee was appointed….They are said to have been laboring for months against the prisoner.
“Gentlemen, what must we do in such a case? Are people to be dumb and still, through fear of overdoing? Is it come to this, that an effort cannot be made, a hand cannot be lifted, to discover the guilty, without its being said, there is a combination to overwhelm innocence?
“Has the community lost all moral sense? Certainly a community that would not be roused to action, upon an occasion such as this was, a community which should not deny sleep to their eyes, and slumber to their eye-lids, till they had exhausted all the means of discovery and detection, must, indeed, be lost to all moral sense, and would scarcely deserve protection from the laws.”
Thus thundered Daniel Webster, rebuking those men of New England who blamed the people of Massachusetts for being aroused over the murder of an old man.
Great God! What would Webster have said to those New York preachers, and those Northern papers, who are so fiercely misrepresenting and denouncing the people of Georgia, for being aroused over the murder of a little girl?
Nobly expounding the purpose of the penal law, Mr. Webster said—
“The criminal law is not founded on a principle of vengeance. The humanity of the law regrets every pain it causes, every hour of restraint it imposes, and more deeply still, every life it forfeits. But it uses evil as the means of preventing greater evil. It seeks to deter from crime, by the example of punishment. This is its true, and only true main object. It forfeits the life of the murderer, that other murders may not be committed. When the guilty, therefore, are not punished, the law has, so far, failed of its purpose; the safety of the innocent is, so far, endangered. Every unpunished murder takes away something from the security of every man’s life.”
In pressing the case on Leo Frank, the State of Georgia has been free from any hostility toward a Jew; the State has sternly prosecuted him because he is a murderer.
In pressing the case against Leo Frank, we have felt none of the fury of prejudice and race hatred; we have demanded his punishment as a protection to other innocent Mary Phagans, as well as a vindication of the law, to strike terror into other Leo Franks.
We respectfully ask the other States of the Union to usurp no further jurisdiction over us than a high court of review would have—and that would be to examine the official record, as agreed upon by the attorneys on both sides, and judge us by that record.
If the sworn testimony supports the verdict of the jury, quit abusing us. If that sworn testimony not only sustains the evidence, but rendered any other verdict humanly impossible, quit talking about the semi-barbarians of Georgia, accusing them of Jew baiting, mob methods and jungle fury.
Unless Frank is entitled to immunity because he is a Jew, let the lightnings of Sinai strike him!
A married man, he was false to his young and buxom wife. A member of the Synagogue, he was false to the creed of his church. An educated Hebrew of splendid connections, he was false to the higher standards of his race. A citizen of Georgia, he was false to her Society, a canker and a pest. Subject to her laws, he broke them repeatedly, with shameless effrontery, in his place of business; and when one Gentile girl whom he lusted after persisted in repulsing him, he laid in wait for her, assaulted her, killed her, leaving her blood and her corpse in his place of business.
O my lords and gentlemen, what must we do to be saved from such men as these? Every race has them. Every State has them. Every nation has them.

Please God, I have written an argument that will vindicate our State, justify her courts, defy refutation, and stand unshaken to the end of time. That my work has been done voluntarily and without reward, or the remotest hope thereof, will not lessen its merit.
__________________
Jews have aggressively dominated the false narrative of the Leo Frank Case since 1913, but as of 2013 you can finally learn everything the Jews have tried to censor & suppress at The Leo Frank Research Library: http://www.LeoFrank.org
 
Old June 12th, 2015 #78
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The Leo Frank Case: A Pseudo-History

Published by Ann Hendon on October 5, 2012
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by Elliot Dashfield

a review of The Leo Frank Case by Leonard Dinnerstein, University of Georgia Press

IN 1963, nearly a half century after the sensational trial and lynching of Leo Frank become a national cause célèbre, a graduate student named Leonard Dinnerstein (pictured) decided to make the Frank case the subject of his PhD thesis. Three years later, Dinnerstein submitted his dissertation to the political science department of Columbia University — and his thesis became the basis of his 1968 book, The Leo Frank Case. Dinnerstein’s book has undergone numerous tweaks, additions, and revisions over the years – more than a half dozen editions have been published. His latest version, published in 2008, is the culmination of his nearly 50 years of research into the Leo Frank affair.

Readability: two out of five stars

Dinnerstein lacks eloquence. He produces flat, cardboard-colored “social history.” The language is stale, bland, and dated. If it weren’t for the fascinating topic, the book would be an intolerable and impossible-to-finish bore. I do wonder how many readers pick up this book and never finish it.

Honesty, Integrity and Reliability: one out of five stars

Given the many decades Leonard Dinnerstein has spent studying the Leo Frank case, and assuming Dinnerstein is a scholar, I find it almost impossible to understand the sheer number of conspicuous errors, misquotes, fabrications, misrepresentations, and shameless omissions made in every edition of this book from 1968 to 2008.

Examining Dinnerstein’s 1966 PhD dissertation, I discovered the probable explanation. Dinnerstein’s central thesis – and his motivation for a half century of work – is his belief that “widespread anti-Semitism” in the South was the reason Leo Frank was indicted and convicted. Dinnerstein takes this as his position – and makes it his mission to convince us of its truth – despite the consensus, among Jewish and Gentile historians alike, that anti-Semitism was virtually unknown in the South, and despite the fact every level of the United States legal system from 1913 to 1986 let stand the verdict of the 1913 Leo Frank jury trial that unanimously convicted Leo Frank of murder – and despite the fact that the Fulton County Grand Jury that unanimously indicted Leo Frank had three Jewish members.

The question that naturally arises in the mind of any unbiased reader is: What compelled these men to vote unanimously to indict and convict Frank, and what compelled our leading jurists to let his conviction stand after the most intensely argued and well researched appeals? Was it the facts, testimony, and evidence presented to them? Or was it anti-Semitism?

Was the Georgia Supreme Court anti-Semitic when it stated affirmatively that the evidence presented at the Leo Frank trial sustained his conviction? Was the United States Supreme Court anti-Semitic when its decision went against Leo Frank?

The answer can be found in the official unabridged Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913 – a legal record which Leonard Dinnerstein went to great lengths to obfuscate and distort. And Dinnerstein did not even bother telling the reader what the Georgia Supreme Court records revealed about how Leo Frank’s legal defense fund was utilized.

This is what makes every edition of Dinnerstein’s The Leo Frank Case so disappointing: In order to maintain his position of “anti-Semitism was behind it all,” he had to omit or misrepresent the most relevant facts, evidence, and testimony from the trial.

Dinnerstein’s myopic view of Jewish-Gentile relations first revealed itself in his 1966 PhD thesis. Ironically, his lack of objectivity itself seemed to propel him upward in the politically-charged worlds of academia and the mass media. That Leo Frank was innocent – and that Southern, white, anti-Semitic haters were exclusively to blame for his conviction – fit the narrative that the leaders in these fields had internalized and wished to propagate as “history.” Dinnerstein’s book was perfect for its intended market – the new intelligentsia that has come to dominate the academy. His book was also seminal in shaping the popular perception of the Leo Frank case. It helped to transform a well-documented true crime case into a semi-fictionalized myth of a stoic Jewish martyr who was framed by a vast anti-Semitic conspiracy.

Leonard Dinnerstein vs. Every Level of the United States System of Justice

Leonard Dinnerstein writes in his 2008 preface, “I have no doubts: Frank was innocent.” This statement, which sets the dominant tone of his book, goes against the majority decisions of every single level of the United States legal system. More than a dozen experienced judges – incomparably more qualified than Dinnerstein to sift the evidence – reviewed the evidence and arguments put forth by Frank’s own legal team, along with the Leo Frank trial testimony, affidavits, facts, and law pertaining to the case – and all came to the same conclusion: They sustained the guilty verdict of the jury.

If a person was subpoenaed to testify at a criminal trial involving a 29-year-old man accused of bludgeoning, raping, and strangling a 13-year-old girl, and this witness knowingly falsified and withheld evidence about the defendant – that’s called perjury. If the witness provided perjured testimony and this was later proven beyond a reasonable doubt by a trial jury, that witness would likely find himself in prison for a number of years. But when an academic spends 40 years of his life muddling facts, withholding evidence, fraudulently manipulating the official legal records and testimony of a real criminal case, we call him not perjurer, but “historian.”

I have read nearly everything written by Leonard Dinnerstein – not just his books, but his numerous magazine and journal articles. I purchased every edition of Leonard Dinnerstein’s books. I took the time to read, cross reference, and compare his works against the sources he cites in his bibliographies. The only conclusion I am able to come to is that Leonard Dinnerstein shows an unrelenting pattern of inventing facts, misquoting, dramatizing, befogging, embellishing, overstating, and oversimplifying incidents in his books. Dinnerstein’s books – supposedly non-fiction – are filled with a fairly skillful, though flat and boring, simulation of academic analysis and research. They can be, and are indeed designed to be, persuasive to those who don’t bother to read the original sources or do any fact-checking.

For those who have carefully studied the three major Atlanta dailies (Georgian, Constitution and Journal) through the years 1913 to 1915, learning about the Leo Frank case through their day-by-day accounts – and then cross-referencing them with the official legal records of the Leo Frank trial and appeals – Leonard Dinnerstein’s book is a colossal letdown, a failure, and a disgrace.

Evidence of Dishonesty

In his article in the American Jewish Archive Journal (1968) Volume 20, Number 2, Dinnerstein makes his now-famous claim that mobs of anti-Semitic Southerners, outside the courtroom where Frank was on trial, were shouting into the open windows “Crack the Jew’s neck!” and “Lynch him!” and that members of the crowd were making open death threats against the jury, saying that the jurors would be lynched if they didn’t vote to hang “the damn sheeny.”

But not one of the three major Atlanta newspapers, who had teams of journalists documenting feint-by-feint all the events in the courtroom, large and small, and who also had teams of reporters with the crowds outside, ever reported these alleged vociferous death threats. And certainly such a newsworthy event could not be ignored by highly competitive newsmen eager to sell papers and advance their careers. Do you actually believe that the reporters who gave us such meticulously detailed accounts of this Trial of the Century, even writing about the seating arrangements in the courtroom, the songs sung outside the building by folk singers. and the changeover of court stenographers in relays, would leave out all mention or notice of a murderous mob making death threats to the jury? During the two years of Leo Frank’s appeals, none of these alleged anti-Semitic death threats were ever reported by Frank’s own defense team. There is not a word of them in the 3,000 pages of official Leo Frank trial and appeal records – and all this despite the fact that Reuben Arnold made the claim during his closing arguments that Leo Frank was tried only because he was a Jew.

The patently false accusation that European-American Southerners used death threats to terrorize the jury into convicting Leo Frank is a racist blood libel, pure and simple. Yet, thanks to Leonard Dinnerstein, this fictional episode has entered the consciousness of Americans of all stations as “history” – as one of the pivotal facts of the Frank case. It has been repeated countless times, in popular articles and academic essays, on stage and on film and television, and, as the 100th anniversary of the case approaches, it will be repeated as many times again – until there is not a single man, woman, or child who is unaware of it. That is anti-history, not history. I would say shame on Leonard Dinnerstein – if I thought him a being capable of shame.

Dinnerstein, who supported himself almost his entire life by writing about anti-Semitism, would surely know better than anyone else that if such an incident had actually happened, it would have been the stuff of lurid headlines long before 1918, to say nothing of 1968. His contempt for us – his firm belief that we will not check any of his claims – is palpable.

More Deception

Leonard Dinnerstein was interviewed for the video documentary The People vs. Leo Frank (2009). In that interview, he makes statements that he must know to be untrue about the death notes found on Mary Phagan’s body.

The documentary shows us a dramatization of the interrogation of Jim Conley by the Atlanta Police in May, 1913 – and Dinnerstein then states:

“They [the Atlanta police] asked him [Jim Conley] about the notes. He said ‘I can’t read and write.’ That happened to come up in a conversation between the police and Frank, and Frank said, ‘Of course he can write; I know he can write, he used to borrow money from me and sign promissory notes.’ So Conley had not been completely honest with the police.” (The People vs. Leo Frank, 2009).

This Dinnerstein segment has been posted on YouTube and the documentary is commercially available. Notice that Dinnerstein’s clear implication is that Leo Frank blew the whistle on Jim Conley’s false claim of being illiterate, and that Frank was the instrument of this discovery. But that is a bald-faced lie.

Leo Frank was arrested on April 29, 1913 and Jim Conley was arrested two days later, on May 1. Leo Frank never admitted to the police that he knew Jim Conley could write until weeks after that fact was already known to investigators. Pinkerton detective Harry Scott was informed that Jim Conley could write by an operative who spoke to a pawnbroker – not by Leo Frank. On May 18, 1913, after two and a half weeks of interrogation, Atlanta police finally got Conley to admit he wrote the Mary Phagan death notes — but Conley revealed he did so at the behest of Leo Frank. After several successive interrogations, the approximate chain of events became clear.

Leo Frank

Leo Frank kept completely quiet about the fact that Jim Conley could read and write for more than two weeks, even though Jim Conley – working as a roustabout at the factory – had done written inventory work for Frank. Leo Frank also allowed Jim Conley to run a side business out of the National Pencil Company, wheeling and dealing pocket watches under questionable circumstances. In one of these deals, Conley was said to have defrauded Mr. Arthur Pride, who testified about it at the Leo Frank trial. Frank himself vetted and managed Conley’s pocket watch contracts, keeping them locked in his office safe. Leo Frank would take out small payments from Conley’s weekly wages and pay down the pawnshop owner’s loans. Leo Frank didn’t tell investigators he was overseeing Conley’s watch contracts until it was far too late, after the police had found out about it independently.

I encourage people to read the official Leo Frank trial Brief of Evidence, 1913, to see for themselves whether or not Leo Frank informed the police about Jim Conley’s literacy immediately after he was arrested – or if he only admitted to that fact after the police had found out about it through other means weeks later. This is something that Leonard Dinnerstein, familiar as he has been – for decades – with the primary sources in the case, must have known for a very long time. Yet in this very recent interview, he tries to make us believe the precise opposite of the truth – tries to make us believe that Frank was the one who exposed this important fact. There’s a word for what Dinnerstein is, and it’s not “historian.”

One of the Biggest Frauds in the Case

Dinnerstein knowingly references claims that do not stand up to even minimal scrutiny. For example, he uncritically accepts the 1964 hoax by hack writer and self-promoter Pierre van Paassen, who claimed that there were in existence in 1922 X-ray photographs at the Fulton County Courthouse, taken in 1913, of Leo Frank’s teeth, and also X-ray photographs of bite marks on Mary Phagan’s neck and shoulder – and that anti-Semites had suppressed this evidence.. Van Paassen further alleged – and Dinnerstein repeated – that the dimensions of Frank’s teeth did not match the “bite marks,” thereby exonerating Frank.

Here’s the excerpt from van Paassen’s 1964 book To Number Our Days (pages 237 and 238) that Dinnerstein endorses:

“The Jewish community of Atlanta at that time seemed to live under a cloud. Several years previously one of its members, Leo Frank, had been lynched as he was being transferred from the Fulton Tower Prison in Atlanta to Milledgeville for trial on a charge of having raped and murdered a little girl in his warehouse which stood right opposite the Constitution building. Many Jewish citizens who recalled the lynching were unanimous in assuring me that Frank was innocent of the crime.

“I took to reading all the evidence pro and con in the record department at the courthouse. Before long I came upon an envelope containing a sheaf of papers and a number of X-ray photographs showing teeth indentures. The murdered girl had been bitten on the left shoulder and neck before being strangled. But the X-ray photos of the teeth marks on her body did not correspond with Leo Frank’s set of teeth of which several photos were included. If those photos had been published at the time of the murder, as they should have been, the lynching would probably not have taken place.

“Though, as I said, the man died several years before, it was not too late, I thought, to rehabilitate his memory and perhaps restore the good name of his family. I showed Clark Howell the evidence establishing Frank’s innocence and asked permission to run a series of articles dealing with the case and especially with the evidence just uncovered. Mr. Howell immediately concurred, but the most prominent Jewish lawyer in the city, Mr. Harry Alexander, whom I consulted with a view to have him present the evidence to the grand jury, demurred. He said Frank had not even been tried. Hence no new trial could be requested. Moreover, the Jewish community in its entirety still felt nervous about the incident. If I wrote the articles old resentments might be stirred up and, who knows, some of the unknown lynchers might recognize themselves as participants in my description of the lynching. It was better, Mr. Alexander thought, to leave sleeping lions alone. Some local rabbis were drawn into the discussion and they actually pleaded with Clark Howell to stop me from reviving interest in the Frank case as this was bound to have evil repercussions on the Jewish community.

“That someone had blabbed out of school became quite evident when I received a printed warning saying: ‘Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy.’ The unsigned warning was reinforced one night or, rather, early one morning when I was driving home. A large automobile drove up alongside of me and forced me into the track of a fast-moving streetcar coming from the opposite direction. My car was demolished, but I escaped without a scratch….”

Dinnerstein references these pages in his book (page 158 of the 2008 edition), saying “In 1923, at the height of the Ku Klux Klan’s power, a foreign journalist, working for The Atlanta Constitution, became interested in Leo Frank and went back to study the records of the case. He came across some x-rays showing teeth indentations in Mary Phagan’s left shoulder and compared them with x-rays of Frank’s teeth; but the two sets did not correspond. On the basis of this, and other insights garnered from his investigation, the newspaperman wanted to write a series ‘proving’ Frank’s innocence. One anonymous correspondent sent him a printed note: ‘Lay off the Frank case if you want to keep healthy,’ but this did not deter him.”

Since Dinnerstein is such a lofty academic scholar and professor, perhaps he simply forgot to ask a current freshman in medical school if it was even possible to X-ray bite marks on skin in 1913 – or necessary in 2012, for that matter – because it’s not. In 1913, X-ray technology was in its infancy and never used in any criminal case until many years after Leo Frank was hanged. Was Leo Frank’s lawyer named “Harry Alexander” or Henry Alexander? Why would the famous attorney who represented Leo Frank during his most high-profile appeals say he didn’t have his trial yet?! Leo Frank was not lynched on his way to trial in Milledgeville – he wasn’t on his way to anywhere, and it happened in Marietta, 170 miles away. And it defies the laws of physics, and all logic and reason, to believe that any person driving a motor vehicle in 1922 – when there were virtually no safety features in automobiles – could suffer a direct collision with a “fast-moving streetcar” and survive “without a scratch.” Oddly, Dinnerstein says van Paassen “was not deterred” from writing the supposed series of articles, though even the hoaxer himself clearly implies that he was indeed deterred. (Even the most basic online research would also have shown that van Paassen is a far from credible source who once publicly claimed to have seen supernatural “ghost dogs” which could appear and disappear at will.)

Not only did Dinnerstein completely fail to point out the obviously preposterous nature of van Paassen’s account, but he blandly presents his claims as established historical fact.

Surely Leonard Dinnerstein has had, and continues to have, access to the primary sources in this case. Certainly he can read the official legal documents online at the State of Georgia’s online archive known as the Virtual Vault, as I have done without difficulty.

It is hard to fathom the deep contempt that Leonard Dinnerstein must have for his readers. Did he think that these official legal records, once buried in dusty government vaults, would never make their way online? Did he think that Georgia’s three major newspapers from 1913 to 1915, the Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal, and Atlanta Georgian, would never make their way online? Or does his contempt run even deeper – did he think that, online or not, none of us would ever check up on his claims?

Covering Up the Racial Strategy of the Defense

What one can most charitably call Leonard Dinnerstein’s lack of candor is apparent not only in sins of commission, but also of omission. In his book, Dinnerstein completely fails to mention the well-known strategy of Leo Frank’s defense team to play on the racial conflicts present in 1913 Georgia and pin the murder of Mary Phagan on, successively, two different African-American men.

The first victim was Newt Lee, the National Pencil Company’s night watchman. After that intrigue fell apart, Frank’s team abruptly changed course and tried to implicate the firm’s janitor – and, according to his own testimony, Frank’s accomplice-after-the-fact – James “Jim” Conley. Leo Frank’s defense team played every white racist card they could muster against Jim Conley at the trial, and continued doing so through two years of appeals. Frank’s own lawyer, addressing the jury, said “Who is Conley? Who was Conley as he used to be and as you have seen him? He was a dirty, filthy, black, drunken, lying nigger…Who was it that made this dirty nigger come up here looking so slick? Why didn’t they let you see him as he was?” Had this been said at trial by anyone other than Leo Frank’s defense attorney, it would have been thoroughly denounced by any academic with even half the normal quota of flaming outrage against white racism. But as for Dinnerstein…. Well, with only 40 years to study the case, I suppose he just overlooked it.

A Mockery

Leonard Dinnerstein’s The Leo Frank Case is a mockery of legal history. Dinnerstein intentionally leaves out volumes of damaging evidence, testimony, and facts about the case. His glaring omissions are documented in, among many other sources, the Georgia Supreme Court’s Leo Frank case file. Leonard Dinnerstein misleads the reader, rewriting the case almost at will, and incorporating long-discredited and nonsensical half-truths that would never stand up to even the most elementary scrutiny.

Dinnerstein has created a book that will be remembered by history as a shameless, over-the-top attempt to create a mythology of Leo Frank as a “martyr to anti-Semitism.” In doing that, he seems to care not at all that he may be rehabilitating the image of a serial pedophile, rapist, and strangler. To Dinnerstein, the fact that Leo Frank is Jewish, and his belief that Southern whites were anti-Jewish, are all-important realities – far more important than the facts of the case, which he presents very selectively to persuade us that his ethnocentric view is the only correct one. Leonard Dinnerstein’s partisanship borders on the pathological, and his integrity is, like Pierre van Paassen’s, essentially nonexistent.

The definitive, comprehensive, objective book on the Leo Frank case has, unfortunately, never been written. But as an antidote to Dinnerstein’s myth-making, you might want to read The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean. Although her book is amateurishly written, she did make a refreshingly honest effort to present both sides of the case in an unbiased manner.

This doesn’t mean I haven’t found errors in Kean’s book – I have – but compared to all the major Leo Frank authors (Oney, Dinnerstein, Alphin, Melnick, the Freys, and Golden) who have written about the case in the last 99 years, Mary Phagan Kean made the best and most honest attempt to be fair, balanced, and neutral, despite her belief in Leo Frank’s guilt. The same cannot be said for Leonard Dinnerstein.

I have closely studied the several thousand pages of the Leo Frank trial and appeal records (1913 – 1915), read every book (1913 – 2010) on the subject, and reviewed, more than once, the three primary Atlanta newspapers, the Journal, Constitution, and Georgian (1913 – 1915), concerning their coverage of the Leo Frank case. I believe the jury made the correct decision in the summer of 1913.

But regardless of my opinion on any matter, with which reasonable men and women may well disagree, there is no doubt whatever that the accusations of anti-Jewish shenanigans, threats, and jury intimidation at the Leo Frank trial, promoted by Leonard Dinnerstein and repeated by many others, are flat-out lies. His creation and perpetuation of such tales amounts to perjury. And his is an especially vile kind of perjury, made by one who is pathologically obsessed with anti-Semitism and who imagines persecution where none exists. His is a perjury that creates injustice not just for one victim and one perpetrator, but, by twisting and distorting our view of the past, for our entire society.

___

REFERENCES:

Leonard Dinnerstein’s original dissertation

The People v. Leo Frank by Ben Loeterman and Steve Oney (2009)

To Number Our Days by Pierre van Paassen (1964)

The Leo Frank Case (1968 first edition; and 1987, 1991, revised editions)

Further Reading:

What Really Happened?

100 Years Ago Today: The Trial of Leo Frank Begins
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...-frank-begins/

Leo Frank Trial Week One
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...rial-week-one/

Leo Frank Trial Week Two
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...rial-week-two/

One Hundred Years Ago Leo Frank Mounts the Witness Stand
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...akes-the-stand

Leo Frank Trial Week Three
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...al-week-three/

Leo Frank Trial Week Four
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...ial-week-four/

Leo Frank Trial Closing Arguments: Luther Rosser, Reuben Arnold and Frank Hooper
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...ld-and-rosser/

Closing Arguments of Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey at the Leo Frank Trial
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...icitor-dorsey/

One Hundred Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...ank-is-guilty/

Anti-Defamation League: One Hundred Years of Jewish Hate, October 1913 – 2013
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...years-of-hate/

Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies: Leonard Dinnerstein’s Pseudo-history About the Leo Frank Case
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/1...seudo-history/

Review of Tabloid Style Journalist Steve Oney’s the Dead Shall Rise: Who Really Solved the Mary Phagan Murder Case?
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/1...n-murder-case/

Did Leo Frank Confess to the Murder of Mary Phagan?
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/0...frank-confess/
__________________
Jews have aggressively dominated the false narrative of the Leo Frank Case since 1913, but as of 2013 you can finally learn everything the Jews have tried to censor & suppress at The Leo Frank Research Library: http://www.LeoFrank.org
 
Old June 12th, 2015 #79
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100 Reasons Leo Frank Is Guilty

Published by Editor on April 26, 2013
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Proving That Anti-Semitism Had Nothing to Do With His Conviction — and Proving That His Defenders Have Used Frauds and Hoaxes for 100 Years

by Bradford L. Huie
exclusive to The American Mercury

MARY PHAGAN was just thirteen years old. She was a sweatshop laborer for Atlanta, Georgia’s National Pencil Company. Exactly 100 years ago today — Saturday, April 26, 1913 — little Mary (pictured, artist’s depiction) was looking forward to the festivities of Confederate Memorial Day. She dressed gaily and planned to attend the parade. She had just come to collect her $1.20 pay from National Pencil Company superintendent Leo M. Frank at his office when she was attacked by an assailant who struck her down, ripped her undergarments, likely attempted to sexually abuse her, and then strangled her to death. Her body was dumped in the factory basement.
Leo M. Frank

Leo M. Frank

Leo Frank, who was the head of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith, a Jewish fraternal order, was eventually convicted of the murder and sentenced to hang. After a concerted and lavishly financed campaign by the American Jewish community, Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison by an outgoing governor. But he was snatched from his prison cell and hung by a lynching party consisting, in large part, of leading citizens outraged by the commutation order — and none of the lynchers were ever prosecuted or even indicted for their crime. One result of Frank’s trial and death was the founding of the still-powerful Anti-Defamation League.

Today Leo Frank’s innocence, and his status as a victim of anti-Semitism, are almost taken for granted. But are these current attitudes based on the facts of the case, or are they based on a propaganda campaign that began 100 years ago? Let’s look at the facts.

It has been proved beyond any shadow of doubt that either Leo Frank or National Pencil Company sweeper Jim Conley was the killer of Mary Phagan. Every other person who was in the building at the time has been fully accounted for. Those who believe Frank to be innocent say, without exception, that Jim Conley must have been the killer.
Jim Conley

Jim Conley

On the 100th anniversary of the inexpressibly tragic death of this sweet and lovely girl, let us examine 100 reasons why the jury that tried him believed (and why we ought to believe, once we see the evidence) that Leo Max Frank strangled Mary Phagan to death — 100 reasons proving that Frank’s supporters have used multiple frauds and hoaxes and have tampered with the evidence on a massive scale — 100 reasons proving that the main idea that Frank’s modern defenders put forth, that Leo Frank was a victim of anti-Semitism, is the greatest hoax of all.

1. Only Leo Frank had the opportunity to be alone with Mary Phagan, and he admits he was alone with her in his office when she came to get her pay — and in fact he was completely alone with her on the second floor. Had Jim Conley been the killer, he would have had to attack her practically right at the entrance to the building where he sat almost all day, where people were constantly coming and going and where several witnesses noticed Conley, with no assurance of even a moment of privacy.

2. Leo Frank had told Newt Lee, the pencil factory’s night watchman, to come earlier than usual, at 4 PM, on the day of the murder. But Frank was extremely nervous when Lee arrived (the killing of Mary Phagan had occurred between three and four hours before and her body was still in the building) and insisted that Lee leave and come back in two hours.

3. When Lee then suggested he could sleep for a couple of hours on the premises — and there was a cot in the basement near the place where Lee would ultimately find the body — Frank refused to let him. Lee could also have slept in the packing room adjacent to Leo Frank’s office. But Frank insisted that Lee had to leave and “have a good time” instead. This violated the corporate rule that once the night watchman entered the building, he could not leave until he handed over the keys to the day watchman. Newt Lee, though strongly suspected at first, was manifestly innocent and had no reason to lie, and had had good relations with Frank and no motive to hurt him.

4. When Lee returned at six, Frank was even more nervous and agitated than two hours earlier, according to Lee. He was so nervous, he could not operate the time clock properly, something he had done hundreds of times before. (Leo Frank officially started to work at the National Pencil Company on Monday morning, August 10, 1908. Twenty-two days later, on September 1, 1908, he was elevated to the position of superintendent of the company, and served in this capacity until he was arrested on Tuesday morning, April 29, 1913.)
Newt Lee

Newt Lee

5. When Leo Frank came out of the building around six, he met not only Lee but John Milton Gantt, a former employee who was a friend of Mary Phagan. Lee says that when Frank saw Gantt, he visibly “jumped back” and appeared very nervous when Gantt asked to go into the building to retrieve some shoes that he had left there. According E.F. Holloway, J.M. Gantt had known Mary for a long time and was one of the only employees Mary Phagan spoke with at the factory. Gantt was the former paymaster of the firm. Frank had fired him three weeks earlier, allegedly because the payroll was short about $1. Was Gantt’s firing a case of the dragon getting rid of the prince to get the princess? Was Frank jealous of Gantt’s closeness with Mary Phagan? Unlike Frank, Gantt was tall with bright blue eyes and handsome features.
J.M. Gantt

J.M. Gantt

6. After Frank returned home in the evening after the murder, he called Newt Lee on the telephone and asked him if everything was “all right” at the factory, something he had never done before. A few hours later Lee would discover the mutilated body of Mary Phagan in the pencil factory basement.

7. When police finally reached Frank after the body of Mary Phagan had been found, Frank emphatically denied knowing the murdered girl by name, even though he had seen her probably hundreds of times — he had to pass by her work station, where she had worked for a year, every time he inspected the workers’ area on the second floor and every time he went to the bathroom — and he had filled out her pay slip personally on approximately 52 occasions, marking it with her initials “M. P.” Witnesses also testified that Frank had spoken to Mary Phagan on multiple occasions, even getting a little too close for comfort at times, putting his hand on her shoulder and calling her “Mary.”

8. When police accompanied Frank to the factory on the morning after the murder, Frank was so nervous and shaking so badly he could not even perform simple tasks like unlocking a door.

9. Early in the investigation, Leo Frank told police that he knew that J.M. Gantt had been “intimate” with Mary Phagan, immediately making Gantt a suspect. Gantt was arrested and interrogated. But how could Frank have known such a thing about a girl he didn’t even know by name?

10. Also early in the investigation, while both Leo Frank and Newt Lee were being held and some suspicion was still directed at Lee, a bloody shirt was “discovered” in a barrel at Lee’s home. Investigators became suspicious when it was proved that the blood marks on the shirt had been made by wiping it, unworn, in the liquid. The shirt had no trace of body odor and the blood had fully soaked even the armpit area, even though only a small quantity of blood was found at the crime scene. This was the first sign that money was being used to procure illegal acts and interfere in the case in such a way as to direct suspicion away from Leo M. Frank. This became a virtual certainty when Lee was definitely cleared.
A few members of Mary Phagan's family; originally published in the Atlanta Georgian

A few members of Mary Phagan’s family; originally published in the Atlanta Georgian
Mary Phagan and her aunt, Mattie Phagan

Mary Phagan and her aunt, Mattie Phagan

11. Leo Frank claimed that he was in his office continuously from noon to 12:35 on the day of the murder, but a witness friendly to Frank, 14-year-old Monteen Stover, said Frank’s office was totally empty from 12:05 to 12:10 while she waited for him there before giving up and leaving. This was approximately the same time as Mary Phagan’s visit to Frank’s office and the time she was murdered. On Sunday, April 27, 1913, Leo Frank told police that Mary Phagan came into his office at 12:03 PM. The next day, Frank made a deposition to the police, with his lawyers present, in which he said he was alone with Mary Phagan in his office between 12:05 and 12:10. Frank would later change his story again, stating on the stand that Mary Phagan came into his office a full five minutes later than that.

12. Leo Frank contradicted his own testimony when he finally admitted on the stand that he had possibly “unconsciously” gone to the Metal Room bathroom between 12:05 and 12:10 PM on the day of the murder.
Floor plan of the National Pencil Company - click for high resolution

Floor plan of the National Pencil Company – click for high resolution

13. The Metal Room, which Frank finally admitted at trial he might have “unconsciously” visited at the approximate time of the killing (and where no one else except Mary Phagan could be placed by investigators), was the room in which the prosecution said the murder occurred. It was also where investigators had found spots of blood, and some blondish hair twisted on a lathe handle — where there had definitely been no hair the day before. (When R.P. Barret left work on Friday evening at 6:00 PM, he had left a piece of work in his machine that he intended to finish on Monday morning at 6:30 AM. It was then he found the hair — with dried blood on it — on his lathe. How did it get there over the weekend, if the factory was closed for the holiday? Several co-workers testified the hair resembled Mary Phagan’s. Nearby, on the floor adjacent to the Metal Room’s bathroom door, was a five-inch-wide fan-shaped blood stain.)
The Metal Room, where the blood spots and hair were found; and the basement of the National Pencil Company, where Mary Phagan's strangled and dragged body was found.

The Metal Room, where the blood spots and hair were found; and the basement of the National Pencil Company, where Mary Phagan’s strangled and dragged body was found
Artist's representation of the hair found on the lathe handle

Closeup of the artist’s representation of the hair found on the lathe handle

14. In his initial statement to authorities, Leo Frank stated that after Mary Phagan picked up her pay in his office, “She went out through the outer office and I heard her talking with another girl.” This “other girl” never existed. Every person known to be in the building was extensively investigated and interviewed, and no girl spoke to Mary Phagan nor met her at that time. Monteen Stover was the only other girl there, and she saw only an empty office. Stover was friendly with Leo Frank, and in fact was a positive character witness for him. She had no reason to lie. But Leo Frank evidently did. (Atlanta Georgian, April 28, 1913)

15. In an interview shortly after the discovery of the murder, Leo Frank stated “I have been in the habit of calling up the night watchman to keep a check on him, and at 7 o’clock called Newt.” But Newt Lee, who had no motive to hurt his boss (in fact quite the opposite) firmly maintained that in his three weeks of working as the factory’s night watchman, Frank had never before made such a call. (Atlanta Georgian, April 28, 1913)
Three-dimensional diagram of the National Pencil Company headquarters in the Venable building

Three-dimensional diagram of the National Pencil Company headquarters in the Venable building

16. A few days later, Frank told the press, referring to the National Pencil Company factory where the murder took place, “I deeply regret the carelessness shown by the police department in not making a complete investigation as to finger prints and other evidence before a great throng of people were allowed to enter the place.” But it was Frank himself, as factory superintendent, who had total control over access to the factory and crime scene — who was fully aware that evidence might thereby be destroyed — and who allowed it to happen. (Atlanta Georgian, April 29, 1913)

17. Although Leo Frank made a public show of support for Newt Lee, stating Lee was not guilty of the murder, behind the scenes he was saying quite different things. In its issue of April 29, 1913, the Atlanta Georgian published an article titled “Suspicion Lifts from Frank,” in which it was stated that the police were increasingly of the opinion that Newt Lee was the murderer, and that “additional clews furnished by the head of the pencil factory [Frank] were responsible for closing the net around the negro watchman.” The discovery that the bloody shirt found at Lee’s home was planted, along with other factors such as Lee’s unshakable testimony, would soon change their views, however.

18. One of the “clews” provided by Frank was his claim that Newt Lee had not punched the company’s time clock properly, evidently missing several of his rounds and giving him time to kill Mary Phagan and return home to hide the bloody shirt. But that directly contradicted Frank’s initial statement the morning after the murder that Lee’s time slip was complete and proper in every way. Why the change? The attempt to frame Lee would eventually crumble, especially after it was discovered that Mary Phagan died shortly after noon, four hours before Newt Lee’s first arrival at the factory.

19. Almost immediately after the murder, pro-Frank partisans with the National Pencil Company hired the Pinkerton detective agency to investigate the crime. But even the Pinkertons, being paid by Frank’s supporters, eventually were forced to come to the conclusion that Frank was the guilty man. (The Pinkertons were hired by Sigmund Montag of the National Company at the behest of Leo Frank, with the understanding that they were to “ferret out the murderer, no matter who he was.” After Leo Frank was convicted, Harry Scott and the Pinkertons were stiffed out of an investigation bill totaling some $1300 for their investigative work that had indeed helped to “ferret out the murderer, no matter who he was.” The Pinkertons had to sue to win their wages and expenses in court, but were never able to fully collect. Mary Phagan’s mother also took the National Pencil Company to court for wrongful death, and the case settled out of court. She also was never able to fully collect the settlement. These are some of the unwritten injustices of the Leo Frank case, in which hard-working and incorruptible detectives were stiffed out of their money for being incorruptible, and a mother was cheated of her daughter’s life and then cheated out of her rightful settlement as well.) (Atlanta Georgian, May 26, 1913, “Pinkerton Man says Frank Is Guilty – Pencil Factory Owners Told Him Not to Shield Superintendent, Scott Declares”)

20. That is not to say that were not factions within the Pinkertons, though. One faction was not averse to planting false evidence. A Pinkerton agent named W.D. McWorth — three weeks after the entire factory had been meticulously examined by police and Pinkerton men — miraculously “discovered” a bloody club, a piece of cord like that used to strangle Mary Phagan, and an alleged piece of Mary Phagan’s pay envelope on the first floor of the factory, near where the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, had been sitting on the fatal day. This was the beginning of the attempt to place guilt for the killing on Conley, an effort which still continues 100 years later. The “discovery” was so obviously and patently false that it was greeted with disbelief by almost everyone, and McWorth was pulled off the investigation and eventually discharged by the Pinkerton agency.
W.D. McWorth

W.D. McWorth

21. It also came out that McWorth had made his “finds” while chief Pinkerton investigator Harry Scott was out of town. Most interestingly, and contrary to Scott’s direct orders, McWorth’s “discoveries” were reported immediately to Frank’s defense team, but not at all to the police. A year later, McWorth surfaced once more, now as a Burns agency operative, a firm which was by then openly working in the interests of Frank. One must ask: Who would pay for such obstruction of justice? — and why? (Frey, The Silent and the Damned, page 46; Indianapolis Star, May 28, 1914; The Frank Case, Atlanta Publishing Co., p. 65)
City Detective Black, left; and Pinkerton investigator Harry Scott, right

City Detective Black, left; and Pinkerton investigator Harry Scott, right

22. Jim Conley told police two obviously false narratives before finally breaking down and admitting that he was an accessory to Leo Frank in moving of the body of Mary Phagan and in authoring, at Frank’s direction, the “death notes” found near the body in the basement. These notes, ostensibly from Mary Phagan but written in semi-literate Southern black dialect, seemed to point to the night watchman as the killer. To a rapt audience of investigators and factory officials, Conley re-enacted his and Frank’s conversations and movements on the day of the killing. Investigators, and even some observers who were very skeptical at first, felt that Conley’s detailed narrative had the ring of truth.

23. At trial, the leading — and most expensive — criminal defense lawyers in the state of Georgia could not trip up Jim Conley or shake him from his story.

24. Conley stated that Leo Frank sometimes employed him to watch the entrance to the factory while Frank “chatted” with teenage girl employees upstairs. Conley said that Frank admitted that he had accidentally killed Mary Phagan when she resisted his advances, and sought his help in the hiding of the body and in writing the black-dialect “death notes” that attempted to throw suspicion on the night watchman. Conley said he was supposed to come back later to burn Mary Phagan’s body in return for $200, but fell asleep and did not return.

25. Blood spots were found exactly where Conley said that Mary Phagan’s lifeless body was found by him in the second floor metal room.

26. Hair that looked like Mary Phagan’s was found on a Metal Room lathe immediately next to where Conley said he found her body, where she had apparently fallen after her altercation with Leo Frank.

27. Blood spots were found exactly where Conley says he dropped Mary Phagan’s body while trying to move it. Conley could not have known this. If he was making up his story, this is a coincidence too fantastic to be accepted.

28. A piece of Mary Phagan’s lacy underwear was looped around her neck, apparently in a clumsy attempt to hide the deeply indented marks of the rope which was used to strangle her. No murderer could possibly believe that detectives would be fooled for an instant by such a deception. But a murderer who needed another man’s help for a few minutes in disposing of a body might indeed believe it would serve to briefly conceal the real nature of the crime from his assistant, perhaps being mistaken for a lace collar.
Mary Phagan autopsy photograph

Mary Phagan autopsy photograph

29. If Conley was the killer — and it had to be Conley or Frank — he moved the body of Mary Phagan by himself. The lacy loop around Mary Phagan’s neck would serve absolutely no purpose in such a scenario.

30. The dragging marks on the basement floor, leading to where Mary Phagan’s body was dumped near the furnace, began at the elevator — exactly matching Jim Conley’s version of events.

31. Much has been made of Conley’s admission that he defecated in the elevator shaft on Saturday morning, and the idea that, because the detectives crushed the feces for the first time when they rode down in the elevator the next day, Conley’s story that he and Frank used the elevator to bring Mary Phagan’s body to the basement on Saturday afternoon could not be true — thus bringing Conley’s entire story into question. But how could anyone determine with certainty that the “crushing” was the “first crushing”? And nowhere in the voluminous records of the case — including Governor Slaton’s commutation order in which he details his supposed tests of the elevator — can we find evidence that anyone made even the most elementary inquiry into whether or not the bottom surface of the elevator car was uniformly flat.

32. Furthermore, the so-called “shit in the shaft” theory of Frank’s innocence also breaks down when we consider the fact that detectives inspected the floor of the elevator shaft before riding down in the elevator, and found in it Mary Phagan’s parasol and a large quantity of trash and debris. Detective R.M. Lassiter stated at the inquest into Mary Phagan’s death, in answer to the question “Is the bottom of the elevator shaft of concrete or wood, or what?” that “I don’t know. It was full of trash and I couldn’t see.” There was so much trash there, the investigator couldn’t even tell what the floor of the shaft was made of! There may well have been enough trash, and arranged in such a way, to have prevented the crushing of the waste material when Frank and Conley used the elevator to transport Mary Phagan’s body to the basement. In digging through this trash, detectives could easily have moved it enough to permit the crushing of the feces the next time the elevator was run down.

33. The defense’s theory of Conley’s guilt involves Conley alone bringing Mary Phagan’s body to the basement down the scuttle hole ladder, not the elevator. But Lassiter was insistent that the dragging marks did not begin at the ladder, stating at the inquest: “No, sir; the dragging signs went past the foot of the ladder. I saw them between the elevator and the ladder.” Why would Conley pointlessly drag the body backwards toward the elevator, when his goal was the furnace? Why were there no signs of his turning around if he had done so? If Mary Phagan’s body could leave dragging marks on the irregular and dirty surface of the basement, why were there no marks of a heavy body being dumped down the scuttle hole as the defense alleged Conley to have done? Why did Mary Phagan’s body not have the multiple bruises it would have to have incurred from being hurled 14 feet down the scuttle hole to the basement floor below?

34. Leo Frank changed the time at which he said Mary Phagan came to collect her pay. He initially said that it was 12:03, then said that it might have been “12:05 to 12:10, maybe 12:07.” But at the inquest he moved his estimates a full five minutes later: “Q: What time did she come in? A: I don’t know exactly; it was 12:10 or 12:15. Q: How do you fix the time that she came in as 12:10 or 12:15? A: Because the other people left at 12 and I judged it to be ten or fifteen minutes later when she came in.” He seems to have no solid basis for his new estimate, so why change it by five minutes, or at all?

35. Pinkerton detective Harry Scott, who was employed by Leo Frank to investigate the murder, testified that he was asked by Frank’s defense team to withhold from the police any evidence his agency might find until after giving it to Frank’s lawyers. Scott refused.

36. Newt Lee, who was proved absolutely innocent, and who never tried to implicate anyone including Leo Frank, says Frank reacted with horror when Lee suggested that Mary Phagan might have been killed during the day, and not at night as was commonly believed early in the investigation. The daytime was exactly when Frank was at the factory, and Lee wasn’t. Here Detective Harry Scott testifies as to part of the conversation that ensued when Leo Frank and Newt Lee were purposely brought together: “Q: What did Lee say? A: Lee says that Frank didn’t want to talk about the murder. Lee says he told Frank he knew the murder was committed in daytime, and Frank hung his head and said ‘Let’s don’t talk about that!'” (Atlanta Georgian, May 8, 1913, “Lee Repeats His Private Conversation With Frank”)

37. When Newt Lee was questioned at the inquest about this arranged conversation, he confirms that Frank didn’t want to continue the conversation when Lee stated that the killing couldn’t possibly have happened during his evening and nighttime watch: “Q: Tell the jury of your conversation with Frank in private. A: I was in the room and he came in. I said, Mr. Frank, it is mighty hard to be sitting here handcuffed. He said he thought I was innocent, and I said I didn’t know anything except finding the body. ‘Yes,’ Mr. Frank said, ‘and you keep that up we will both go to hell!’ I told him that if she had been killed in the basement I would have known it, and he said, ‘Don’t let’s talk about that — let that go!'” (Atlanta Georgian, May 8, 1913, “Lee Repeats His Private Conversation With Frank”)

38. Former County Policeman Boots Rogers, who drove the officers to Frank’s home and then took them all, including Frank, back to the factory on the morning of April 27, said Frank was so nervous that he was hoarse — even before being told of the murder. (Atlanta Georgian, May 8, 1913, “Rogers Tells What Police Found at the Factory”)
Boots Rogers

Boots Rogers

39. Rogers also states that he personally inspected Newt Lee’s time slip — the one that Leo Frank at first said had no misses, but later claimed the reverse. The Atlanta Georgian on May 8 reported what Rogers saw: “Rogers said he looked at the slip and the first punch was at 6:30 and last at 2:30. There were no misses, he said.” Frank, unfortunately, was allowed to take the slip and put it in his desk. Later a slip with several punches missing would turn up. How can this be reconciled with the behavior of an innocent man?

40. The curious series of events surrounding Lee’s time slip is totally inconsistent with theory of a police “frame-up” of Leo Frank. At the time these events occurred, suspicion was strongly directed at Lee, and not at Frank.

41. When Leo Frank accompanied the officers to the police station later on during the day after the murder, Rogers stated that Leo Frank was literally so nervous that his hands were visibly shaking.

42. Factory Foreman Lemmie Quinn would eventually testify for the defense that Leo Frank was calmly sitting in his office at 12:20, a few minutes after the murder probably occurred. As to whether this visit really happened, there is some question. Quinn says he came to visit Schiff, Frank’s personal assistant, who wasn’t there — was he even expected to be there on a Saturday and holiday? — and stayed only two minutes or so talking to Frank in the office. Frank at first said there was no such visit, and only remembered it days later when Quinn “refreshed his memory.”

43. As reported by the Atlanta Georgian, City detective John Black said even Quinn initially denied that there was such a visit! “Q: What did Mr. Quinn say to you about his trip to the factory Saturday? A: Mr. Quinn said he was not at the factory on the day of the murder. Q: How many times did he say it? A: Two or three times. I heard him tell Detective Starnes that he had not been there.” (Atlanta Georgian, May 8, 1913, “Black Testifies Quinn Denied Visiting Factory”)

44. Several young women and girls testified at the inquest that Frank had made improper advances toward them, in one instance touching a girl’s breast and in another appearing to offer money for compliance with his desires. The Atlanta Georgian reported: “Girls and women were called to the stand to testify that they had been employed at the factory or had had occasion to go there, and that Frank had attempted familiarities with them. Nellie Pettis, of 9 Oliver Street, declared that Frank had made improper advances to her. She was asked if she had ever been employed at the pencil factory. No, she answered. Q: Do you know Leo Frank? A: I have seen him once or twice. Q: When and where did you see him? A: In his office at the factory whenever I went to draw my sister-in-law’s pay. Q: What did he say to you that might have been improper on any of these visits? A: He didn’t exactly say — he made gestures. I went to get sister’s pay about four weeks ago and when I went into the office of Mr. Frank I asked for her. He told me I couldn’t see her unless ‘I saw him first.’ I told him I didn’t want to ‘see him.’ He pulled a box from his desk. It had a lot of money in it. He looked at it significantly and then looked at me. When he looked at me, he winked. As he winked he said: ‘How about it?’ I instantly told him I was a nice girl. Here the witness stopped her statement. Coroner Donehoo asked her sharply: ‘Didn’t you say anything else?’ ‘Yes, I did! I told him to go to h–l! and walked out of his office.'” (Atlanta Georgian, May 9, 1913, “Phagan Case to be Rushed to Grand Jury by Dorsey”)

45. In the same article, another young girl testified to Frank’s pattern of improper familiarities: “Nellie Wood, a young girl, testified as follows: Q: Do you know Leo Frank? A: I worked for him two days. Q: Did you observe any misconduct on his part? A: Well, his actions didn’t suit me. He’d come around and put his hands on me when such conduct was entirely uncalled for. Q: Is that all he did? A: No. He asked me one day to come into his office, saying that he wanted to talk to me. He tried to close the door but I wouldn’t let him. He got too familiar by getting so close to me. He also put his hands on me. Q: Where did he put his hands? He barely touched my breast. He was subtle in his approaches, and tried to pretend that he was joking. But I was too wary for such as that. Q: Did he try further familiarities? A: Yes.”

46. In May, around the time of disgraced Pinkerton detective McWorth’s attempt to plant fake evidence — which caused McWorth’s dismissal from the Pinkerton agency — attorney Thomas Felder made his loud but mysterious appearance. “Colonel” Felder, as he was known, was soliciting donations to bring yet another private detective agency into the case — Pinkerton’s great rival, the William Burns agency. Felder claimed to be representing neighbors, friends, and family members of Mary Phagan. But Mary Phagan’s stepfather, J.W. Coleman, was so angered by this misrepresentation that he made an affidavit denying there was any connection between him and Felder. It was widely believed that Felder and Burns were secretly retained by Frank supporters. The most logical interpretation of these events is that, having largely failed in getting the Pinkerton agency to perform corrupt acts on behalf of Frank, Frank’s supporters decided to covertly bring another, and hopefully more “cooperative,” agency into the case. Felder and his “unselfish” efforts were their cover. Felder’s representations were seen as deception by many, which led more and more people to question Frank’s innocence. (Atlanta Georgian, May 15, 1913, “Burns Investigator Will Probe Slaying”)
"Colonel" Thomas Felder

“Colonel” Thomas Felder

47. Felder’s efforts collapsed when A.S. Colyar, a secret agent of the police, used a dictograph to secretly record Felder offering to pay $1,000 for the original Coleman affidavit and for copies of the confidential police files on the Mary Phagan case. C.W. Tobie, the Burns detective brought into the case by Felder, was reportedly present. Colyar stated that after this meeting “I left the Piedmont Hotel at 10:55 a.m. and Tobie went from thence to Felder’s office, as he informed me, to meet a committee of citizens, among whom were Mr. Hirsch, Mr. Myers, Mr. Greenstein and several other prominent Jews in this city.” (Atlanta Georgian, May 21, 1913, “T.B. Felder Repudiates Report of Activity for Frank”)

48. Felder then lashed out wildly, vehemently denied working for Frank’s friends, and declared that he thought Frank guilty. He even made the bizarre claim, impossible for anyone to believe, that the police were shielding Frank. It was observed of Felder that “when one’s reputation is near zero, one might want to attach oneself to the side one wants to harm in an effort to drag them down as you fall.” (Atlanta Georgian, May 21, 1913, “T.B. Felder Repudiates Report of Activity for Frank”)

49. Interestingly, C.W. Tobie, the Burns man, also made a statement shortly afterward — when his firm initially withdrew from the case — that he had come to believe in Frank’s guilt also: “It is being insinuated by certain forces that we are striving to shield Frank. That is absurd. From what I developed in my investigation I am convinced that Frank is the guilty man.” (Atlanta Constitution, May 27, 1913, “Burns Agency Quits the Phagan case”)

50. As his efforts crashed to Earth, Felder made this statement to an Atlanta Constitution reporter: “Is it not passing strange that the city detective department, whose wages are paid by the taxpayers of this city, should ‘hob-nob’ daily with the Pinkerton Detective Agency, an agency confessedly employed in this investigation to work in behalf of Leo Frank; that they would take this agency into their daily and hourly conference and repose in it their confidence, and co-operate with it in every way possible, and withhold their co-operation from W.J. Burns and his able assistants, who are engaged by the public and for the public in ferreting out this crime.” But what Felder failed to mention was that the Pinkertons’ main agent in Atlanta, Harry Scott, had proved that he could not be corrupted by the National Pencil Company’s money, so it is reasonable to conclude that the well-heeled pro-Frank forces would search elsewhere for help. The famous William Burns agency was really the only logical choice. To think that Felder and “Mary Phagan’s neighbors” were selflessly employing Burns is naive in the extreme: It means that Frank’s wealthy friends would just sit on their money and stick with the not at all helpful Pinkertons, who had just fired the only agent who tried to “help” Frank. (Atlanta Constitution, May 25, 1913, “Thomas Felder Brands the Charges of Bribery Diabolical Conspiracy”)

51. Colyar, the man who exposed Felder, also stated that Frank’s friends were spreading money around to get witnesses to leave town or make false affidavits. The Atlanta Georgian commented on Felder’s antics as he exited the stage: “It is regarded as certain that Felder is eliminated entirely from the Phagan case. It had been believed that he really was in the employ of the Frank defense up to the time that he began to bombard the public with statements against Frank and went on record in saying he believed in the guilt of Frank.” (Atlanta Georgian, May 26, 1913, “Lay Bribery Effort to Frank’s Friends”)

52. When Jim Conley finally admitted he wrote the death notes found near Mary Phagan’s body, Leo Frank’s reaction was powerful: “Leo M. Frank was confronted in his cell by the startling confession of the negro sweeper, James Connally [sic]. ‘What have you to say to this?’ demanded a Georgian reporter. Frank, as soon as he had gained the import of what the negro had told, jumped back in his cell and refused to say a word. His hands moved nervously and his face twitched as though he were on the verge of a breakdown, but he absolutely declined to deny the truth of the negro’s statement or make any sort of comment upon it. His only answer to the repeated questions that were shot at him was a negative shaking of the head, or the simple, ‘I have nothing to say.'” (Atlanta Georgian, May 26, 1913, “Negro Sweeper Says He Wrote Phagan Notes”)
The mysterious death notes - click for high resolution

The mysterious death notes – click for high resolution

53. When Jim Conley re-enacted, step by step, the sequence of events as he experienced them on the day of the murder, including the exact positions in which the body was found and detailing his assisting Leo Frank in moving Mary Phagan’s body and writing the death notes, Harry Scott of the Pinkerton Detective Agency stated: “‘There is not a doubt but that the negro is telling the truth and it would be foolish to doubt it. The negro couldn’t go through the actions like he did unless he had done this just like he said,’ said Harry Scott. ‘We believe that we have at last gotten to the bottom of the Phagan mystery.’ (Atlanta Georgian, May 29, 1913 Extra, “Conley Re-enacts in Plant Part He Says He Took in Slaying”)
The last section of Jim Conley's startling affidavit

The last section of Jim Conley’s startling affidavit
Conley's story diagrammed in the Atlanta Georgian - click for high resolution

Conley’s story diagrammed in the Atlanta Georgian – click for high resolution

54. In early June, Felder’s name popped up in the press again. This time he was claiming that his nemesis A.S. Colyar had in his possession an affidavit from Jim Conley confessing to the murder of Mary Phagan, and that Colyar was withholding it from the police. The police immediately “sweated” Conley to see if there was any truth in this, but Conley vigorously denied the entire story, and stated that he had never even met Colyar. Chief of Police Lanford said this confirmed his belief that Felder had been secretly working for Frank all along: “‘I attribute this report to Colonel Felder’s work,’ said the chief. ‘It merely shows again that Felder is in league with the defense of Frank; that the attorney is trying to muddy the waters of this investigation to shield Frank and throw the blame on another. This first became noticeable when Felder endeavored to secure the release of Conley. His ulterior motive, I am sure, was the protection of Frank. He had been informed that the negro had this damaging evidence against Frank, and Felder did all in his power to secure the negro’s release. He declared that it was a shame that the police should hold Conley, an innocent negro. He protested strenuously against it. Yet not one time did Felder attempt to secure the release of Newt Lee or Gordon Bailey on the same grounds, even though both of these negroes had been held longer than Conley. This to me is significant of Felder’s ulterior motive in getting Conley away from the police.'” Are such underhanded shenanigans on the part of Frank’s team the actions of a truly innocent man? (Atlanta Georgian, June 6, 1913, “Conley, Grilled by Police Again, Denies Confessing Killing”)

55. Much is made by Frank partisans of Georgia Governor Slaton’s 1915 decision to commute Frank’s sentence from death by hanging to life imprisonment. But when Slaton issued his commutation order, he specifically stated that he was sustaining Frank’s conviction and the guilty verdict of the judge and jury: “In my judgement, by granting a commutation in this case, I am sustaining the jury, the judge, and the appellate tribunals, and at the same time am discharging that duty which is placed on me by the Constitution of the State.” He also added, of Jim Conley’s testimony that Frank had admitted to killing Mary Phagan and enlisted Conley’s help in moving the body: “It is hard to conceive that any man’s power of fabrication of minute details could reach that which Conley showed, unless it be the truth.”

56. On May 8, 1913. the Coroner’s Inquest jury, a panel of six sworn men, voted with the Coroner seven to zero to bind Leo Frank over to the grand jury on the charge of murder after hearing the testimony of 160 witnesses.

57. On May 24, 1913, after hearing evidence from prosecutor Hugh Dorsey and his witnesses, the grand jury charged Leo M. Frank with the murder of Mary Phagan. Four Jews were on the grand jury of 21 persons. Although only twelve votes were needed, the vote was unanimous against Frank. An historian specializing in the history of anti-Semitism, Albert Lindemann, denies that prejudice against Jews was a factor and states that the jurors “were persuaded by the concrete evidence that Dorsey presented.” And this indictment was handed down even without hearing any of Jim Conley’s testimony, which had not yet come out. (Lindemann, The Jew Accused: Three Anti-Semitic Affairs, Cambridge, 1993, p. 251)

58. On August 25, 1913, after more than 29 days of the longest and most costly trial in Southern history up to that time, and after two of South’s most talented and expensive attorneys and a veritable army of detectives and agents in their employ gave their all in defense of Leo M. Frank, and after four hours of jury deliberation, Frank was unanimously convicted of the murder of Mary Phagan by a vote of twelve to zero.
The jurors in the Leo Frank case

The jurors in the Leo Frank case
Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold headed Frank's defense team,

Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold headed Frank’s defense team.

59. The trial judge, Leonard Strickland Roan, had the power to set aside the guilty verdict of Leo Frank if he believed that the defendant had not received a fair trial. He did not do so, effectively making the vote 13 to zero.

60. Judge Roan also had the power to sentence Frank to the lesser sentence of life imprisonment, even though the jury had not recommended mercy. On August 26, 1913, Judge Roan affirmed the verdict of guilt, and sentenced Leo Frank to death by hanging.
Judge Leonard Strickland Roan

Judge Leonard Strickland Roan

61. On October 31, 1913, the court rejected a request for a new trial by the Leo Frank defense team, and re-sentenced Frank to die. The sentence handed down by Judge Benjamin H Hill was set to be carried out on Frank’s 30th birthday, April 17, 1914.

62. Supported by a huge fundraising campaign launched by the American Jewish community, and supported by a public relations campaign carried out by innumerable newspapers and publishing companies nationwide, Leo Frank continued to mount a prodigious defense even after his conviction, employing some of the most prominent lawyers in the United States. From August 27, 1913, to April 22, 1915 they filed a long series of appeals to every possible level of the United States court system, beginning with an application to the Georgia Superior Court. That court rejected Frank’s appeal as groundless.

63. The next appeal by Frank’s “dream team” of world-renowned attorneys was to the Georgia Supreme Court. It was rejected.

64. A second appeal was then made by Frank’s lawyers to the Georgia Supreme Court, which was also rejected as groundless.

65. The next appeal by Frank’s phalanx of attorneys was to the United States Federal District Court, which also found Frank’s arguments unpersuasive and turned down the appeal, affirming that the guilty verdict of the jury should stand.

66. Next, the Frank legal team appealed to the highest court in the land, the United States Supreme Court, which rejected Frank’s arguments and turned down his appeal.

67. Finally, Frank’s army of counselors made a second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court — which was also rejected, allowing Leo Frank’s original guilty verdict and sentence of death for the murder by strangulation of Mary Phagan to stand. Every single level of the United States legal system — after carefully and meticulously reviewing the trial testimony and evidence — voted in majority decisions to reject all of Leo Frank’s appeals, and to preserve the unanimous verdict of guilt given to Frank by Judge Leonard Strickland Roan and by the twelve-man jury at his trial, and to affirm the fairness of the legal process which began with Frank’s binding over and indictment by the seven-man coroner’s jury and 21-man grand jury.

68. It is preposterous to claim that these men, and all these institutions, North and South — the coroner’s jury, the grand jury, the trial jury, and the judges of the trial court, the Georgia Superior Court, the Georgia Supreme Court, the U.S. Federal District Court, and the United States Supreme Court — were motivated by anti-Semitism in reaching their conclusions.

69. Even in deciding to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment, Governor John Slaton explicitly affirmed Frank’s guilty verdict. He explained that only the jury was the proper judge of the meaning of the evidence and the veracity of the witnesses placed before it. He said in the commutation order itself: “Many newspapers and non-residents have declared that Frank was convicted without any evidence to sustain the verdict. In large measure, those giving expression to this utterance have not read the evidence and are not acquainted with the facts. The same may be said regarding many of those who are demanding his execution. In my judgement, no one has a right to an opinion who is not acquainted with the evidence in the case, and it must be conceded that those who saw the witnesses and beheld their demeanor upon the stand are in the best position as a general rule to reach the truth.”

70. In May of 1915, the Georgia State Prison Board voted two to one against a clemency petition — which, even if successful, would not have changed the guilty verdict of Leo M. Frank.

71. In 1982 Alonzo Mann, who in 1913 at 13 years old had been the office boy for the National Pencil Company, made a sensation in the press by denying the sworn testimony he had made at the Leo Frank trial, and stating his belief that Jim Conley was the real killer of Mary Phagan. In 1913, Mann had testified that he left the office on the day of the murder at 11:30 AM. In 1982, he changed the time and told a quite different story, as follows:

Mann said that he left the factory at noon, half an hour later than in his testimony. It was Confederate Memorial Day and a parade and other festivities were scheduled. Mann was to meet his mother, he says, but could not find her and “returned to work” shortly after noon. When he entered the building, he says, he saw Jim Conley carrying the limp body of a girl on the first floor: “He wheeled on me and in a voice that was low but threatening he said ‘If you ever mention this I’ll kill you.'”

Mann claims he then left the building and ran home, telling his mother what he’d seen. Mann says that his parents advised him to keep silent to avoid publicity. And he did keep silent for many, many years. (Jim Conley is reported to have died in 1957 — another report says 1962 — and presumably his death threat did not survive his demise.)

There are several problems with Mann’s story. First, if true, it proves only that at some point Conley was carrying Phagan’s body by himself, without Frank’s help. Conley already admits this — though he says that he found the body too heavy for himself alone while still on the second floor, and that the elevator brought them directly to the basement. So Mann’s story really doesn’t address anything except two minor details of Conley’s testimony, neither of which are determinative of guilt. (Mann was poor, suffering with a heart condition, and facing considerable medical expenses when he “went public” with his claims.)

72. Why would a 13-year-old Alonzo Mann “return to work” on a holiday if he didn’t have to? And why “return to work” if he apparently wasn’t even scheduled to do so? Were office boys permitted to make their own hours in 1913? When other workers — such as Mary Phagan, for example — hadn’t sufficient supplies in their department, they were immediately laid off until the supplies came in. Surely such economy would dictate that office boys would only come in when authorized and asked to do so.
Alonzo Mann in 1913

Alonzo Mann in 1913

73. If Alonzo Mann had such a definite appointment to meet his mother in town — so definite as to cause him to return to work after just a few minutes when he failed to immediately find her — why, then, was she waiting at home just a few minutes after that?

74. Why would white parents, like Alonzo Mann’s, in the racially conscious and segregated Atlanta, Georgia of 1913, tell their white son not to tell the police about a guilty black murderer, when the result of not telling the police would ultimately result in an innocent, clean cut, white man, Leo Frank — the man who gave their son a highly prized job — going to gallows as an innocent man?

75. And why would Alonzo Mann’s parents then allow their 13-year-old son to report to work at the huge and cavernous National Pencil Company factory on Monday morning, April 28, 1913 — two days after he was threatened with death by a murderer carrying a dead or dying white girl on his shoulder — knowing that the murderer would still be there, and knowing that there were many dark and secluded places in said factory where their son might come to harm? Jim Conley reported back to work that Monday, as did Alonzo Mann and the approximately 170 other employees, who were naturally expected to be back at work after the holiday weekend. Jim Conley was not arrested until the first day of May.

76. If Alonzo Mann really walked in on Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan’s body a few minutes after noon, and then turned around and left the building, why didn’t he see Monteen Stover?

77. If Jim Conley really attacked Mary Phagan at the foot of the stairs as Alonzo Mann suggests, why didn’t Leo Frank hear her scream or any sounds of a struggle? He was only 40 feet away.

78. Several witnesses — for both the prosecution and the defense — testified that they saw Jim Conley sitting, doing nothing, in the dark recesses of the lobby of the National Pencil Company on the morning of the murder. Does this fit the contention of the prosecution that Frank requested Conley’s presence on that day, as he had on others, so Conley could be a lookout while Frank was “chatting” with a teenage girl? Or does it make more sense to believe that Conley really believed he could get away with loafing on company property without permission all morning? Did black janitors in 1913 also have the right to make their own working hours, even on a holiday when there would have been little call for their services — and then, after showing up for “work,” not work at all?

79. Does it really make sense that the somewhat literate and fairly intelligent Jim Conley, a black man in the extremely race-conscious and white-dominated Atlanta of 1913, where lynch law often reigned supreme, actually thought he could get away with attacking and killing a white girl just a few feet away from the unlocked front door of the factory where he worked, in the highest-traffic area of the building? And does it make sense that he would do so for $1.20 — Mary Phagan’s entire pay — as the defense alleged? If Conley was plotting to rob someone, does it make sense that he would choose such a place to do so — or choose from a pool of potential victims considerably poorer than he was?

80. The fatal Saturday was a holiday. Jim Conley had been paid his $6.05 salary the evening before. By his standards, he had plenty of money — and it would have been very hard to drink it down very much on Friday, at a nickel a pint in those days. Conley was a man who liked his beer and billiards, and the town was wide open for that kind of fun all day. Why was he there at the factory, then? He certainly wouldn’t have wanted to be there, doing apparently nothing for hours on end. He also ran the risk of being disciplined if he was loafing there without permission. He was manifestly not sweeping, his ostensible job, on that day — he was just sitting, watching. The only reasonable explanation is that his boss, Leo Frank, had asked him to be there for that very purpose.

81. The relationship of Leo Frank and the National Pencil Company to Jim Conley was a strange one. Why was Jim Conley’s sweeper’s salary much higher — $6.05 versus $4.05 — than the average of the white employees, many of whom were skilled machine operators? Could it be that Conley served a very important but secret purpose for Leo Frank, exactly as the prosecution alleged? Could he have had knowledge that could potentially hurt Leo Frank, justifying Frank granting him special privileges?

82. According to a female National Pencil Company employee, Jim Conley was once caught “sprinkling” (urinating) on the pencils, surely a very serious offense. But Conley was never fired. (Trial Testimony of Herbert George Schiff, Brief of Evidence, Leo Frank Trial, August, 1913) Again, could it be that James Conley served a very important but secret purpose for Leo Frank, and could he have possessed knowledge that could damage Frank?

83. According to fellow employee Gordon Bailey (Leo Frank trial, Brief of Evidence, August, 1913) Jim Conley was not always required to punch the time clock. Why would the “Negro sweeper,” as they called him, surely the lowest-ranking employee in the pencil factory hierarchy, be given such an unprecedented privilege by Leo M. Frank? Why was Jim Conley the only person out of the 170 factory employees who didn’t have to punch the time clock — unless Jim Conley was more than meets the eye?

84. In 1983, the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith (ADL), along with other Jewish groups, spearheaded a campaign to get the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles to issue a posthumous pardon to Leo Frank, basing their case largely on the 1982 statement of Alonzo Mann. The Board found that Mann’s statement added no new evidence to the case. They also noted that Governor Slaton in his 1915 commutation decision had already considered that the elevator may not have been used to move Mary Phagan’s body, but nevertheless he upheld Frank’s conviction. The ADL’s petition was denied and Leo Frank’s guilty verdict was affirmed.

85. The ADL and other Jewish groups filed again in 1986 for Leo Frank to be pardoned by the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles. This time the Jewish groups claimed that, because the state of Georgia had failed to prevent the lynching of Leo Frank after his sentence was commuted by Governor Slaton, Leo Frank’s rights had been violated and he should be pardoned on that basis alone. A great deal of pressure was applied to the Board via sensational stories, editorials, and even fictionalized accounts in the media. With this far more limited claim — that Frank was not protected from lynching as he ought to have been — the Board was compelled to agree. But the Board would not and did not exonerate Leo Frank of his guilt for the strangulation death of Mary Anne Phagan on April 26, 1913. His conviction for her murder still stands.

86. Lucille Selig Frank, Leo Frank’s wife, is known as a fiercely loyal spouse who passionately defended her husband against charges both criminal and moral, and stood by his side during his trial and appeals. There are some indications, however, that she may have early on during the Mary Phagan case believed that her husband had not been entirely faithful and had in fact killed Mary Phagan, probably believing it to be accidental. Long after her husband’s death, she may have returned to those views.
Mrs. Leo Frank in 1913

Mrs. Leo Frank in 1913: Is it conceivable that her 29-year-old husband, surrounded every working day by over 150 young women and teenage girls over which he had absolute authority, was unfaithful?

State’s Exhibit J at Leo Frank’s trial consisted of an affidavit by Minola McKnight, the Frank’s black cook. Mrs. McKnight first came to the attention of the authorities when her husband told police that his wife had heard some startling revelations while working at the Frank residence the evening of the murder — namely, that Leo Frank had drunkenly and remorsefully admitted to his wife that he and a girl “had been caught” at the factory, that he “didn’t know why he would murder” her, and that he asked his wife Lucille to get him a pistol so he could kill himself.

These are Minola McKnight’s own words from the affidavit: “Sunday, Miss Lucille 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… Miss Lucille said Sunday that Mr. 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… 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 Lucille gave me a hat.”

(Leo Frank admitted that he bought a box of chocolates for his wife on the way home on the evening of the day of the murder.) Minola McKnight would tell a different story after she was back in the Frank household, however. She then repudiated her affidavit and said police had coerced it from her. But neither she nor anyone else has given a credible motive for Minola’s husband to have lied.

After Leo Frank’s arrest, Lucille did not visit her husband for some thirteen days, after which she began her loyal and indomitable defense of him. What made her wait? Leo Frank’s explanation was that Lucille had to be “physically restrained” because she wanted so badly to be locked up with him in jail. Judge for yourself the credibility of this explanation against that offered in State’s Exhibit J.

Lucille Frank died in 1957, and in her will she specifically directed that she be cremated and thus not buried next to, or with, her first and only husband, Leo Frank — even though a plot had already been provided for her next to him.

87. Leonard Dinnerstein is an author who has made almost his entire career writing about anti-Semitism, with a special concentration on proving that Leo Frank was a victim of anti-Semitism. His book, The Leo Frank Case, is promoted as a canonical work — and is one of the main sources for the claims that 2) anti-Semitism was pervasive in 1913 Georgia and 2) that anti-Semitism was the major factor in the prosecution and conviction of Frank.

Both of these claims are hoaxes, as shown by Elliot Dashfield writing in The American Mercury: “Dinnerstein makes his now-famous claim that mobs of anti-Semitic Southerners, outside the courtroom where Frank was on trial, were shouting into the open windows ‘Crack the Jew’s neck!’ and ‘Lynch him!’ and that members of the crowd were making open death threats against the jury, saying that the jurors would be lynched if they didn’t vote to hang ‘the damn sheeny.’

“But not one of the three major Atlanta newspapers, who had teams of journalists documenting feint-by-feint all the events in the courtroom, large and small, and who also had teams of reporters with the crowds outside, ever reported these alleged vociferous death threats. And certainly such a newsworthy event could not be ignored by highly competitive newsmen eager to sell papers and advance their careers. Do you actually believe that the reporters who gave us such meticulously detailed accounts of this Trial of the Century, even writing about the seating arrangements in the courtroom, the songs sung outside the building by folk singers, and the changeover of court stenographers in relays, would leave out all mention or notice of a murderous mob making death threats to the jury?

“During the two years of Leo Frank’s appeals, none of these alleged anti-Semitic death threats were ever reported by Frank’s own defense team. There is not a word of them in the 3,000 pages of official Leo Frank trial and appeal records – and all this despite the fact that Reuben Arnold [Frank’s attorney] made the claim during his closing arguments that Leo Frank was tried only because he was a Jew… Yet, thanks to Leonard Dinnerstein, this fictional episode has entered the consciousness of Americans of all stations as ‘history’ – as one of the pivotal facts of the Frank case.”

88. In his book attempting to exonerate Frank, Leonard Dinnerstein knowingly repeats the preposterous 1964 hoax perpetrated by “hack writer and self-promoter Pierre van Paassen” (Dashfield, The American Mercury, October 2012):

“Van Paassen claimed that there were in existence in 1922 X-ray photographs at the Fulton County Courthouse, taken in 1913, of Leo Frank’s teeth, and also X-ray photographs of bite marks on Mary Phagan’s neck and shoulder – and that anti-Semites had suppressed this evidence. Van Paassen further alleged – and Dinnerstein repeated – that the dimensions of Frank’s teeth did not match the ‘bite marks,’ thereby exonerating Frank… Since Dinnerstein is such a lofty academic scholar and professor, perhaps he simply forgot to ask a current freshman in medical school if it was even possible to X-ray bite marks on skin in 1913 – or necessary in 2012, for that matter – because it’s not. In 1913, X-ray technology was in its infancy and never used in any criminal case until many years after Leo Frank was hanged.” Furthermore, there is no hint anywhere in the massive official records of the Leo Frank trial and appeals of any “bite marks.” If Leo Frank is manifestly and truly innocent, why do his supporters have to engage in such outrages against truth?

89. Far from being a region rife with hatred for Jews, the South in general and Atlanta in particular were regarded by Jews as a haven and as a place nearly free from the anti-Semitism they suffered in other parts of the nation and the world. Even today, and even after Jewish-gentile relations there were strained by the Frank case and by Jewish support for the civil rights revolution, the Christians who form most of the population of the South are stoutly pro-Jewish. The South is the center of Christian Zionism and American support for the Jewish state of Israel.

90. Harry Golden wrote in the American Jewish Committee’s magazine Commentary that early “Bonds for Israel” salesmen would purposely seek out Southern Christians, since they were almost all passionately pro-Jewish and pro-Israel. When Southerners were asked about their reasons for supporting Zionism, Golden said that a typical Southerner’s response was “It’s in the book!” — meaning, of course, the Bible. This attitude had deep roots and certainly did not materialize in 1948.

91. The writer Scott Aaron gives insight into Southern attitudes toward Jews when he says: “In the race-conscious South of 1913, Jews were considered white. In fact, in the newspapers of Atlanta before, during, and after the trial of Leo Frank for the murder of Mary Phagan, Frank was referred to as a ‘white man’ on innumerable occasions by reporters, witnesses, African-Americans, fellow Jews, pro-Frank partisans, and anti-Frank polemicists. Jews, furthermore, were not known for violent acts or crimes, nor feared as violators of white women. If anything, they were seen as an unusually industrious, intelligent, and law-abiding segment of society, even if they were a bit peculiar in their religious views.

“Marriage between Jews and Christians might have raised a few eyebrows in both communities – just as did intermarriage between members of widely different Christian denominations – but it was far from unknown, and such couples were not ostracized. In fact, Leo Frank’s own brother-in-law, Mr. Ursenbach, with whom he canceled an appointment to see a baseball game on the day Mary Phagan was killed, was a Christian.

“If there was prejudice against Leo Frank in 1913 Atlanta, it was almost certainly not because he was a Jew. He was, however, a capitalist, a business owner, a manager, an employer of child labor, and a Northerner with an Ivy League education. He also came to be known during the course of the trial as sexually profligate. These facts probably did count against him.”

92. Aaron also cites a study funded and published by a Jewish group: “John Higham, in his ‘Social Discrmination Against Jews 1830 – 1930,’ a work commissioned by the American Jewish Committee, called the South ‘historically the section least inclined to ostracize Jews,’ and drew attention to the ‘striking Southern situation’ of almost no discrimination against Jews there. True, Jewish-Gentile relations had somewhat declined there by the mid-twentieth century, and the massive campaign during the Frank appeals to paint his prosecution, and the South generally, as anti-Semitic — and the eventual creation of the Anti-Defamation League in the wake of Frank’s death — played their part in this change…

“But the aftermath of the Frank trial had no part, of course, in the attitudes of the people of Atlanta on the day Mary Phagan was murdered. All things considered, the South in general and Atlanta in particular seem to have been, if anything, safe havens for Jews where they might escape from the anti-Semitism that was rampant around the beginning of the last century.”

93. Southern attitudes toward Jews can be further gauged by the fact that, during the Civil War, Southerners made a Jew their Secretary of the Treasury: Judah P. Benjamin was the first Jewish appointee to any Cabinet position in any North American government. Benjamin also served as Attorney General, Secretary of State, and Secretary of War for the Confederate States of America. He was so highly regarded that his portrait graced the paper money of the South. Meanwhile, around the same time, Northern general Ulysses S. Grant issued an order physically expelling all Jews from the parts of the South under his control, even demanding that they leave a huge multi-state area “within 24 hours.”

The claim that a pervasive and vicious anti-Semitism was the real reason for the prosecution and conviction of Leo Frank is an absurd lie and a fantastic misrepresentation of history. Nevertheless, it is now the stuff of innumerable works of alleged scholarship, drama, and fiction, and is viewed by naive students who are exposed to such works as the central “truth” of the case. If Leo Frank were innocent, why would his supporters have to fabricate such blatant impostures and engage in emotional blackmail on a colossal scale?

94. Researcher Allen Koenigsberg states that some of the most intriguing and important parts of Minola McKnight’s sworn affidavits have, for some reason or other, been completely omitted from the current literature on the Frank case:

“One of the most intriguing circumstances in the pre-trial development of this case involved a document signed by the black cook in the Frank/Selig household (Minola McKnight). Frank’s attorneys would long argue that it was coerced by the police as a result of ‘third degree methods.’ Since 1913, it has never been shown in its entirety, and we are glad to present it here [ http://www.leofrankcase.com/ ]. Also unmentioned in the last nine decades is the sequence of events that led up to its appearance. Minola would make three affidavits in all (May 3rd, June 2nd and 3rd), but her overnight incarceration was specifically caused by her husband Albert’s statement made on May 26, and notarized on June 2nd [ also at http://www.leofrankcase.com/ ]. This description of events has never been cited, with only an oblique reference in the Samuels’ Night Fell on Georgia (1956).
The Albert McKnight affidavit

The Albert McKnight affidavit

“The most striking sentence (and odd omission) is shown here for the first time: ‘Mrs. Frank had a quarrel with Mr. Frank the Saturday morning of the murder she asked Mr. Frank to kiss her good bye and she said he was saving his kisses for _______ and would not kiss her.‘ Readers may wish to consider its authenticity, as new light is shed on why Leo Frank ‘so thoughtfully’ bought his wife a box of chocolates from Jacobs’ Pharmacy just before returning home at 6:30 PM on April 26th.” (LeoFrankCase.Com, Retrieved 2012).

95. Much has been made of the fact that Jim Conley’s attorney, William M. Smith, eventually believing his own client to be guilty, made an analysis of the language used by Conley on the stand and, comparing it to the language used in the death notes, concluded that the real author of the notes was Conley. Therefore, Smith’s theory went, the notes had not been dictated by Leo Frank as Conley had testified. Many greeted this “revelation” with well-deserved derision. Few believed that Frank would have insisted that Conley copy his language exactly, word for word (though Hugh Dorsey made the mistake of suggesting this was so in his closing arguments). In fact, the death notes would serve their intended purpose — to place blame for the murder on a black man — much more effectively by being written in the natural language of an authentic speaker of Southern black dialect, and surely that is a fact that no intelligent murderer would fail to see and act upon.

96. In his book, A Little Girl Is Dead, writer Harry Golden, though not incapable of objective journalism (for example, he once reported that Southerners had unusually favorable attitudes to Jews), may have perpetrated the most outrageous hoax in the Frank case. Golden claimed that Jim Conley had made a deathbed confession to the murder of Mary Phagan. But famed pro-Frank researcher and author Steve Oney (very charitably) says of Golden that this was “wishful thinking.”
Harry Golden

Harry Golden

Oney went to great lengths to follow up on Golden’s claim: “Over the last few years legal aides have rifled through microfilm files in libraries across the South searching for news of Conley’s confession. They have found nothing.” (Oney, “The Lynching of Leo Frank,” Esquire, September 1985)

97. It seems unlikely that Hugh Dorsey was motivated by anti-Semitism in his prosecution of Leo Frank, considering that a partner in his law firm was Jewish. It’s preposterous to even have to ask the question, but if Dorsey hated Jews enough to send one to the gallows as an innocent man, why would he tolerate — and proudly claim, as he did at trial — such a close association with a Jewish man? And, if Dorsey was guilty of such vicious malice against Jews, why would his partner continue the association himself? (Closing arguments of Hugh Dorsey, Leo Frank trial)

98. Why did the Leo Frank defense team, consisting of some of the most skilled attorneys in the state, refuse to cross-examine 20 young women and girls who testified that Frank had a bad moral character? Under Georgia law, the prosecution was only allowed to use these witnesses’ testimony to enter the general fact that Frank’s character was bad. Under cross-examination, though, the defense could have forced the girls and women to give specific reasons and relate specific incidents that supported their opinion, and trip them up if they could. Why, then, did they not do so? The only reasonable answer: They knew Leo Frank’s character, and they did not dare allow any specifics to go before the jury.

99. One of the most bizarre hoaxes in the Phagan case was that surrounding insurance salesman W.H. Mincey. On the afternoon of the murder, Mincey claimed that Jim Conley, on the public streets of Atlanta and with no prompting — and for no apparent reason whatever — confessed to murdering a girl that very day.

According to the contemporary book The Frank Case, p. 66: “Mincey asserted that late in the afternoon he was at the corner of Electric avenue and Carter streets, near the home of Conley, when he approached the black, asking that he take an insurance policy. The negro told him, he said, to go along, that he was in trouble. Asked what his trouble was, Mincey swore that Conley replied he had killed a girl. ‘You are Jack the ripper, are you?’ said Mincey. ‘No,’ he says Conley replied, ‘I killed a white girl and you better go along or I will kill you.'”

That this tale could be accepted by any man in possession of his reason is doubtful, but nevertheless the Frank defense team seriously asserted in court their intention to call Mincey as a witness. They withdrew him, however, after the prosecution was said to have discovered Mincey’s problematic relationship with the truth and had 25 witnesses prepared to impeach him — and furthermore intended to produce copies of several books Mincey had written on the subject of “mind reading.”

100. Mary Phagan’s grand-niece, Mary Phagan Kean, relates in her book The Murder of Little Mary Phagan that her grandfather William Joshua Phagan, Jr. (Mary Phagan’s brother) confronted Jim Conley in private in 1934, and was ultimately convinced that the former factory sweeper was telling the truth. At times so emotionally moved that he could barely hold back tears, William Phagan finally told Conley that he believed him — and said that, if he had thought he was lying, “I’d kill you myself.” After the intense meeting was over, Jim Conley and Mary Phagan’s brother went out for a drink.
Mary Phagan

Mary Phagan

In truth, there are more — far more — than 100 reasons to believe that Leo Frank was guilty of murdering Mary Phagan. There are far more than 100 reasons to believe that the claim of widespread “Southern anti-Semitism,” virtually promoted as gospel today, is a complete and malicious fraud. There are far more than 100 reasons to believe that Frank’s defenders have used perjury, fraud, and outright hoaxes to impose their view of the case on an unsuspecting public.

I urge each and every one of you to read the original source materials I have catalogued in the Appendix which follows this article. Only by seeing what the jury saw — by reading what the people of Atlanta read as events unfolded — uncensored and without the nuance and spin of modern authors who are, with but a very few exceptions, uniformly dedicated to one side — can you truly understand the tragedy of little Mary Phagan and the whirlwind her death unleashed.

In my opinion, the most horrible imposture, the real injustice, in the Frank case as it stands today is that millions of trusting men and women, children and students, all across the world have been forcefully imprinted, by a relentless multimillion-dollar media campaign, with the idea that Leo Frank — the monster who almost certainly abused and strangled bright and beautiful Mary Anne Phagan to death — is the “real victim” in this case.



APPENDIX

_________

Full archive of Atlanta Georgian newspapers relating to the murder and subsequent trial

The Leo Frank case as reported in the Atlanta Constitution

The Leo Frank Case (Mary Phagan) Inside Story of Georgia’s Greatest Murder Mystery 1913

The Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan Kean

American State Trials, volume X (1918) by John Lawson

Argument of Hugh M. Dorsey in the Trial of Leo Frank

Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error. In Error from Fulton Superior Court at the July Term 1913, Brief of Evidence



What Really Happened?

100 Years Ago Today: The Trial of Leo Frank Begins
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...-frank-begins/

Leo Frank Trial Week One
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...rial-week-one/

Leo Frank Trial Week Two
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...rial-week-two/

One Hundred Years Ago Leo Frank Mounts the Witness Stand
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...akes-the-stand

Leo Frank Trial Week Three
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...al-week-three/

Leo Frank Trial Week Four
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...ial-week-four/

Leo Frank Trial Closing Arguments: Luther Rosser, Reuben Arnold and Frank Hooper
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...ld-and-rosser/

Closing Arguments of Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey at the Leo Frank Trial
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...icitor-dorsey/

One Hundred Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/0...ank-is-guilty/

Anti-Defamation League: One Hundred Years of Jewish Hate, October 1913 – 2013
http://theamericanmercury.org/2013/1...years-of-hate/

Professor Emeritus of Judaic Studies: Leonard Dinnerstein’s Pseudo-history About the Leo Frank Case
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/1...seudo-history/

Review of Tabloid Style Journalist Steve Oney’s the Dead Shall Rise: Who Really Solved the Mary Phagan Murder Case?
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/1...n-murder-case/

Did Leo Frank Confess to the Murder of Mary Phagan?
http://theamericanmercury.org/2012/0...frank-confess/

Atlanta Constitution Newspaper (1913 – 1915):
http://archive.org/details/LeoFrankC...aper1913To1915

Atlanta Georgian Newspaper (April – August, 1913):
http://archive.org/details/AtlantaGe...ilToAugust1913

Atlanta Journal Newspaper (April – August, 1913):
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ADL: 100 Years of Hate

Published by Editor on October 20, 2013
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by Valdis Bell

TODAY MARKS THE 100th anniversary of the largest and most-well funded hate and defamation group in the history of mankind: the Anti-Defamation League, or “ADL.” The organization was originally called the “Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith” after its parent group, the Jewish fraternal order B’nai B’rith (meaning “Sons of the Covenant,” or, literally, “Sons of the Cut” — referring to circumcision). (ILLUSTRATION: Abraham Foxman, director of the ADL)

The ADL was founded in the immediate aftermath of the conviction of Atlanta B’nai B’rith President Leo Frank for the strangulation and sex murder of a 13-year-old factory girl, Mary Phagan. The international Jewish community did not believe that Frank should have been convicted. They had mounted a huge press, publicity, legal, and lobbying campaign to convince officials and the public that a Black man, James Conley, was the real killer. But the evidence against Frank was so strong — and the evidence against Conley so thin — that the Southern, all White, and doubtless philo-Semitic (like most of the Christian South) jury unanimously convicted Leo Frank and sentenced him to hang. Two months after Frank’s conviction, on October 20, 1913, the ADL was formed. To this day, the ADL and its allies promote the fiction that Frank’s conviction was a result of “anti-Semitism” and use the case a rallying cry to garner support and funding. (“100 Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty,” The American Mercury, 26 April 2013)

The ADL operates as a private intelligence agency, sending spies, infiltrators, disruptors, and agents provocateurs into the camps — both Jewish and non-Jewish — of those who disagree with its radically pro-Israel and Jewish supremacist agenda. Also like an intelligence agency, it maintains a huge database containing personal information on politicians, writers, dissidents, activists, publishers, bloggers, and even unaffiliated private citizens so that — should any of these people “get out of line,” in the opinion of the ADL — they can be threatened, “exposed,” blackmailed, and thus silenced with maximum effectiveness.

Roy Bullock
Roy Bullock

In 1993, an ADL operative, Roy Bullock, was caught corrupting police officials and illegally obtaining police files to add to the ADL’s dossiers on “thought criminals” Left and Right. Despite this, the ADL audaciously uses its money and influence to “educate” law enforcement officials through a subsidiary called the “Law Enforcement Agency Resource Network” (LEARN), which uses persuasive techniques to convince police authorities that individuals and groups that the ADL dislikes are dangerous criminals — and that the ADL and its allies are public-spirited, beneficial groups.

Ironically, considering its name, one of the main techniques used by the ADL, and for which its massive intelligence archive is most useful, is public defamation of those who the ADL has declared are its enemies.

The ADL is headquartered in New York City and has 29 offices in major cities in the United States, one in Israel, and two known offices in other countries. Abraham Foxman has been “national director” of the group since 1987. It has an admitted annual U.S. budget of $55 million, with listed assets in 2011 of $171 million.

The Bullock Case

In 1993, an ADL agent named Roy Bullock, a San Francisco art dealer and fairly well-known in the homosexual community there, whose specialty was the infiltration of patriotic, Arab-American, and other organizations on behalf of the League, was found to have in his possession illegally obtained and highly private and personal data on his targets — data which could only have been obtained from police and other confidential government files; data that was also discovered in the files of the ADL itself when police raided ADL headquarters in San Francisco and Los Angeles as result of Bullock’s exposure.

According to the Los Angeles Times of 9th April, 1993, “Police on Thursday served search warrants on the Anti-Defamation League here and in Los Angeles, seizing evidence of a nationwide intelligence network accused of keeping files on more than 950 political groups, newspapers, and labor unions and as many as 12,000 people.

“Describing the spy operations in great detail, San Francisco authorities simultaneously released voluminous documents telling how operatives of the Anti-Defamation League searched through trash and infiltrated organizations to gather intelligence an Arab-American, right-wing, and what they called “pinko” organizations….

“…Police allege that the organization maintains undercover operatives to gather political intelligence in at least seven cities, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“Groups that were the focus of the spy operation span the political spectrum, including such groups as the Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance, Greenpeace, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the United Farm Workers, and the Jewish Defense League. Also on the list were Mills College, the board of directors of San Francisco public television station KQED, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian newspaper.

“People who were subjects of the spy operation included former Republican Representative Pete McCloskey, jailed political extremist Lyndon LaRouche and Los Angeles Times correspondent Scott Kraft, who is based in South Africa….

“…In addition to allegations of obtaining confidential information from police, the Anti-Defamation League could face a total of 48 felony counts for not properly reporting the employment of its chief West Coast spy, Roy Bullock, according to the affidavit filed to justify the search warrant.” (“ADL Vows to Cooperate With Spy Investigation,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1993)

I’ll interrupt the article to inform you that those 48 felony counts were somehow suppressed and the ADL was never prosecuted. A sweetheart deal was worked out in 2000 under which the ADL admitted no wrongdoing, paid an out-of-court settlement — of under $200,000 — part of it for legal fees and the rest to “charitable groups” which “fight hate” (in other words, the kind of groups the ADL would support anyway — one such group was the “Hate Crimes Reward Fund”), issued a weak apology for dealing with “fact finders” who had violated the law, supposedly without the knowledge of the ADL, and then had the unbelievable audacity to reaffirm their “right” to spy on any group and anyone just as they always have!

Continuing:

“The Anti-Defamation League disguised payments to Bullock for more than 25 years by funneling $550 a week to Beverly Hills attorney Bruce I. Hochman, who then paid Bullock, according to the documents released in San Francisco. Hochman, a former president of the Jewish Federation Council of Greater Los Angeles and one of the state’s leading tax attorneys, will be out of the city until late next week and could not be reached for comment, his office said.

“Until 1990, Hochman, a former U.S. prosecutor, also was a member of a panel appointed by then-Senator Pete Wilson to secretly make initial recommendations on new federal judges in California. Hochman is a former regional president of the Anti-Defamation League….

“David Lehrer, executive director of the Los Angeles ADL office, said the organization has not violated the law….

“…But in an affidavit filed to obtain warrants for Thursday’s searches, San Francisco police allege that ‘ADL employees were apparently less than truthful’ in providing information in an earlier search conducted without a warrant….

“…The police affidavit contends that Lehrer had sole control of a secret fund used to pay for ‘fact-finding operations.’ Lehrer, according to the documents, signed checks from the account under the name ‘L. Patterson.’…

“…League officials will not confirm or deny whether Bullock was an employee and have said they simply traded information with police departments about people who might be involved in hate crimes.”

I’ll add here that the category of crime called “hate crimes” was virtually invented by the ADL. The purpose of such laws is to add extra penalties for acts which are already crimes under existing statutes — like murder, assault, etc. — if the perpetrator can be shown to have held prejudiced or “hateful” views which might have motivated his actions. Under “hate crime” laws, American citizens would receive different sentences for the same crime, depending on whether or not their thoughts are “Politically Correct” on issues relating to homosexuality, race, nationality, and politics. That such laws might have a chilling effect on free speech — for a thoughtful person would now realize that his every utterance on “sensitive” topics might someday be used against him in a court of law, should he be required to defend himself with force someday or even have an argument with a member of a “protected class” — was probably the ADL’s intention all along.

Enter Tom Gerard

From the Los Angeles Times, 13th April, 1993:

” To the outside world, Roy Bullock was a small-time art dealer who operated from his house in the Castro District. In reality, he was an undercover spy who picked through garbage and amassed secret files for the Anti-Defamation League for nearly 40 years.

“His code name at the prominent Jewish organization was Cal, and he was so successful at infiltrating political groups that he was once chosen to head an Arab-American delegation that visited Representative Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) in her Washington, D.C. office.

“For a time, ‘Cal’ tapped into the phone message system of White Aryan Resistance… …From police sources, he obtained privileged, personal information on at least 1,394 people. And he met surreptitiously with agents of the South African government to trade his knowledge for crisp, new $100 bills.

“These are among the secrets that Bullock and David Gurvitz, a former Los Angeles-based [ADL] operative, divulged in extensive interviews with police and the FBI in a growing scandal over the nationwide intelligence network operated by the Anti-Defamation League….

“Transcripts of the interviews — among nearly 700 pages of documents released by San Francisco prosecutors last week — offer new details of the private spy operation that authorities allege crossed the line into illegal territory.

“At times, the intelligence activities took on a cloak-and-dagger air with laundered payments, shredded documents, hotel rendezvous with foreign agents and code names….

“On one occasion, Gurvitz recounts, he received a tip that a pro-Palestinian activist was about to board a plane bound for Haifa, Israel. Although the Anti-Defamation League publicly denies any ties to Israel, Gurvitz phoned an Israeli consular official to warn them. Shortly thereafter, another [Israeli government] official called Gurvitz back and debriefed him.

“The court papers also added to the mystery of Tom Gerard, a former CIA agent and San Francisco police officer accused of providing confidential material from police files to the Anti-Defamation League… …Bullock said it was Gerard who sold official police intelligence. Bullock said he split about $16,000… evenly with Gerard, telling him at one point, ‘I may be gay, but I’m a straight arrow.’…

“Gerard fled to the Philippines last fall after he was interviewed by the FBI, but left behind a briefcase in his police locker. Its contents included passports, driver’s licenses, and identification cards in 10 different names; identification cards in his own name for four different embassies in Central America; and a collection of blank birth certificates, Army discharge papers, and official stationery from various agencies.

“Also in the briefcase were extensive information on death squads, a black hood, apparently for use in interrogations, and photos of blindfolded and chained men.

“Investigators suspect that Gerard and other police sources gave the ADL confidential driver’s license or vehicle registration information on a vast number of people, including as many as 4,500 members of one target group, the Arab-American Anti-Discrimination Committee.

“Each case of obtaining such data from a law enforcement officer could constitute a felony, San Francisco Police Inspector Ron Roth noted in an affidavit for a search warrant.” (“New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation Emerge,” Los Angeles Times, 13 April, 1993)

Now we’re up to 4,500 felonies. Was the ADL brought to justice for even one of them? No. And what was revealed in the Gerard case was just the work of one ADL operative — and one group which the ADL had targeted! Evidence seized from Bullock’s computer indicate that the ADL was using him to compile data on individuals belonging to over 950 groups – and Bullock is just one agent. The rest of that iceberg must be most impressive.

As for Gerard himself — whom the ADL had sent on an all-expenses-paid trip to Israel two years before his arrest — he pleaded no contest to a misdemeanor charge of unauthorized use of a police computer and was sentenced to three years’ probation, 45 days in jail, and a $2,500 fine.

The New York Daily News for 9th April, 1993 informs us that these were no “rogue” agents — the illegal spying was controlled directly from the ADL’s central office in New York City:

“Police in San Francisco and Los Angeles yesterday seized documents from a prominent Jewish-American organization accused of amassing confidential information — sometimes illegally — on thousands of people in the United States.

“The alleged operation was directed from the New York City offices of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, ABC News reported last night.

“The ADL has long been one of the most respected civil rights organizations in the country, tracking hate crimes and exposing prejudice.

“But ABC said that for several decades the spying operation has snooped into the records and activities of more than 10,000 people in the United States, including many who simply opposed the policies of Israel and South Africa….

“The report identified the leader of the intelligence ring as Irwin Suall.

“Sources told the Daily News that Suall is one of about 15 people in the ADL’s research department in Manhattan. Neither Suall or other ADL officials could be reached for comment.

“‘We’re talking about the use of information from Department of Motor Vehicles files, other confidential files of state and local agencies, illegally furnished and illegally received by private agencies,’ San Francisco District Attorney Arlo Smith told ABC.” ( Mark Mooney, New York Daily News, 9 April, 1993)

Irwin Suall, the former National Secretary of the Socialist Party of America, was the chief of the “fact-finding” (that is, espoionage) division of the ADL from 1967 to 1997. According to the Baltimore Sentinel for September, 1993 “In a memo dated July, 1992, Suall praised Roy Bullock as “our number one investigator” — just months before Bullock’s illegal activities were exposed. (“Is the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Spying on You?”, Bill Hughes, Baltimore Sentinel, September 1993)

According to the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, the ADL offered money to corrupt law enforcement officers and officials in return for illegally-obtained personal information that was supposed to have been destroyed. How many of these corrupt officials were never prosecuted, and how many were recruited during the “educational” conferences, and trips to Israel, arranged for them by the ADL’s law enforcement liaison division? The Report states:

“After COINTELPRO, a still-controversial FBI operation to destabilize black nationalist and other groups in the ’60s and ’70s, the FBI, state and local law enforcement authorities were ordered out of the business of gathering information about legitimate political activity by American citizens. But in some major American cities, law enforcement files relating to legitimate and Constitutionally protected political activities that had been ordered destroyed instead found their way to the offices of the ADL, which quickly became a clearinghouse for such illegally obtained and illegally retained information.

“The absence of the FBI, state, and local police investigators in the field therefore created a void the ADL rushed to fill, with remarkable success, by increasing its in-house ‘fact-finding’ assets and capabilities and developing enhanced working relationships with ‘official friends” — government officials, investigators, and intelligence officers. Some of these were the officials who had not destroyed files of illegally obtained materials, or had made private copies of the official files before they were destroyed in compliance with the court order.

“The ADL favored many of its ‘official friends’ with expense-paid trips to Israel, where they met with and were entertained by friendly officers of Israel’s espionage and counter-intelligence organizations, Mossad and Shin Bet, thus creating a major conduit for the flow of sensitive and useful U.S. domestic political intelligence to Israel’s spymasters in Tel Aviv.” (“Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1999)

Despite its obvious — and admitted — ties with the state of Israel, and its agenda of advancing Israel’s policy objectives, and gaining power to blackmail or otherwise intimidate perceived enemies of Israel, the ADL has never been required to register as a foreign agent as other, far more benign, organizations have been required to do.

Arnold Forster, right, with Yitzhak Shamir
Arnold Forster, right, with Yitzhak Shamir

ADL’s former National Director Benjamin Epstein, in an internal letter disclosed during discovery proceedings in a lawsuit against the ADL in 1970, spoke with pride about the close cooperation that existed between the ADL and Israel’s intelligence apparatus. In his 1988 autobiography, ADL general counsel Arnold Forster specifically named the Mossad as as having a close connection with the League . The Mossad routinely engages in political assassinations of those it deems to be “Israel’s enemies” around the world. (Square One, Arnold Forster. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988)

More Than Just Spying?

According to investigator William Norman Grigg, Bullock did much more than spy for his ADL bosses: “In 1993, it was discovered that Roy Bullock had been attempting to arrange a political marriage between the Institute for Historical Review, a holocaust revisionist organization, and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (AADC) so the ADL could ‘out’ [AADC] members as neo-Nazis.” (William Norman Grigg, “ADL Campaign Against Tolerance,” New American, September 19, 1994)

But it wasn’t just Bullock, and it wasn’t just setting victims up for bigger and better smears. One ADL agent provocateur had a role as a leader and speaker for groups targeted by the ADL — doubtlessly steering the clueless radicals in directions helpful to the ADL agenda and against their own interests. And he also staged completely phony “extremist incidents” for the media to inflame fears of “racism” and “anti-Semitic” violence.

Investigative journalist Laird Wilcox tells us: “James Mitchell Rosenberg, a career infiltrator for the Anti-Defamation League, regularly attended and was a speaker at Ku Klux Klan rallies and meetings of the Mountain Church in Cohoctah, MI, considered a gathering place for neo-Nazis of all kinds. For the benefit of television reporters, Rosenberg also posed as a leader of a para-military group called the ‘Christian Patriot’s Defense League’ which was the subject of a breathless exposé entitled ‘Armies of the Right.’ In 1981, Rosenberg and an associate were arrested on a New York City rooftop and charged with carrying an unregistered rifle. The two were posing as paramilitary extremists for a photographic fabrication exaggerating the threat from the far right. The charges were subsequently dropped at the request [of] the ADL’s Irwin Suall, Rosenberg’s direct supervisor.” (The Watchdogs, Laird Wilcox, Editorial Research Service, Olathe, Kansas, 1998)

And these are just the ADL agents who have come to public attention and been exposed in the newspapers. Do you really believe that they were rare, exceptional cases? Or were they part of a much, much larger coordinated operation? With its multimillion-dollar budget and cozy relationship with corrupt law enforcement officials — and with murderous intelligence agencies and their unfathomably deep pockets — how many undiscovered agents does the ADL employ, and what might their functions be?

Seeing Anti-Semitism Where There Is None

In Denver, Colorado in 1994, an argument over pets and garden plants betweeen two couples — next door neighbors — became the focus of ADL public relations and legal action because of the alleged “anti-Semitism” of one of the couples toward the other, who were Jewish.

Candace and Mitchell Aronson were the Jewish neighbors of William and Dorothy Quigley.

The Aronsons used a VHF scanner radio to listen in on the cordless telephone conversations of the Quigleys. They heard Mrs. Quigley discuss with a friend — it turns out, in joking tones — a possible campaign to drive the Aronsons from the neighborhood by frightening them with “pictures of ovens” and throwing gas at one of the Aronson’s children. Mrs. Quigley was also heard “wishing that the Aronsons would be killed in a suicide bombing.” Although the conversations were obviously facetious, and at one point Mrs. Quigley even said she was saying some “sick” things, the Aronsons decided to contact the Denver office of the ADL.

Upon the advice of the ADL, the Aronsons began recording the Quigleys’ private telephone conversations — an illegal act. Astoundingly, ADL attorneys then advised the Aronsons to use the illegal recordings as the basis for a federal civil lawsuit against the Quigleys for “ethnic intimidation.” Meanwhile, the ADL defamation and PR machine geared up to “expose” yet another “anti-Semitic incident” and, not coincidentally, totally ruin the Quigleys’ lives.

Saul Rosenthal, Regional Director of the ADL, appeared at a news conference describing the Quigleys as engaging in “a vicious anti-Semitic campaign.” Rosenthal also appeared in local media making the same claims, and succesfully urged local prosecutors to use the tape recordings in filing criminal charges against the Quigleys.

The Quigleys became pariahs in their own community, receiving so many threats that they felt compelled to hire security guards. Animal feces was sent to their home. Mr. Quigley’s lost his job at United Artists. The family had to drive long distances to shop in stores where they would not be recognized.

However, the cases against them quickly began to fall apart. The local prosecutor dropped the charges upon hearing the obviously non-threatening nature of the conversations. He even apologized to the Quigleys and publicly stated that the accusations against them were untrue. The federal case was dead because the recordings were themselves illegal and therefore inadmissible,

The Quigleys countersued the ADL, Rosenthal, the Aronsons, and two ADL volunteer attorneys. Ultimately the Quigleys received a judgement of some $12 million, including interest, in their favor for the devastation that the Aronsons and the ADL had caused in their lives. (By the way, the Quigleys employed a Jewish lawyer, Jay Horowitz, to argue their case.)

Meyer Lansky
Meyer Lansky

The ADL probably lost this one case only because they were not fully conversant with wiretap law. Had they not tripped up on that technicality, they, their well-funded attorneys, and their massive PR machine (aided by an ADL-friendly media) would have prevailed and the Quigleys would have been forgotten, impoverished, possibly imprisoned, and without recourse. How many other cases have there been? — how many unsung victims of the ADL have suffered that fate — or worse?

Crime Connections

The ADL operates much like an organized crime gang, as their intimidation and in-your-face life-ruining tactics make clear. And that’s not just a result of “overzealousness” or an unreasoning fear of persecution. The ADL has direct connections to numerous notorious crime figures:

Moe Dalitz
Moe Dalitz

Meyer Lansky, one of the architects of modern organized crime in the United States and connected woth “Murder, Incorporated,” was a strong supporter of and donor to the ADL. His granddaughter, Mira Lansky Boland, was an ADL official — ironically, her position is listed as “liaison to law enforcement.” She arranged expense-paid luxury tours to Israel, the world capital of sex trafficking, for certain key law enforcement officials who had “something to offer” the ADL in return — among them Tom Gerard.

Moe Dalitz, organized crime boss of Las Vegas, was a long-time supporter of the ADL and a close friend of Meyer Lansky. In 1982, Dalitz received the “Torch of Liberty” award from the ADL.

Theodore Silbert, mafia front man worked simultaneously for the ADL and the Sterling National Bank (a mafia operation controlled by the Lansky syndicate).

Michael Milken, convicted financial criminal of “junk bond” fame, was a major contributor to the ADL.

Marc Rich
Marc Rich

Marc Rich, international fugitive and financial criminal was hiding out in Switzerland to avoid prosecution for his crimes when he wrote a check for $100,000 to the ADL, who then proceeded to pull the necessary strings. He was then pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day in office. Rich later admitted he had worked with the ADL-linked Mossad for years, and Israeli officials also intervened on his behalf with Clinton.

Jewish Critiques

The ADL routinely smears those who have criticized its goals and methods by calling them “anti-Semites” — an amazing, invented word, by the way: No other ethnicity, so far as I know, has created a comparable neologism to demonize, isolate, and ostracize its critics. But so outrageous has been the behavior of the ADL that it has garnered much criticism from Jewish writers, activists, and dissenters from the “mainstream” Jewish establishment.

Noam Chomsky, leftist Jewish activist and Professor of Linguistics at MIT on the ADL: “[O]ne of the ugliest, most powerful pressure groups in the U.S… Its primary commitment is to use any technique, however dishonest and disgraceful, in order to defame and silence and destroy anybody who dares to criticize the Holy State (‘Israel’)…” “[The ADL is] engaged in surveillance, blacklisting, compilation of FBI-style files circulated to adherents for the purpose of defamation, angry public responses to criticism of Israeli actions, and so on. These efforts, buttressed by insinuations of anti-Semitism or direct accusations, are intended to deflect or undermine opposition to Israeli policies…”

Robert Friedman, liberal Jewish journalist, says of the ADL: “[T]he largest private spy agency in America… Through its 31 offices across the country, the ADL monitors school curricula, library acquisition lists, and public conferences and symposiums, working behind the scenes to stifle intellectual freedom.” (Robert I. Friedman, “The Jewish Thought Police”, Village Voice, July 27, 1993)

Norman Finkelstein, Jewish author and academic, says of the ADL’s long-time director Abraham Foxman that he is “a hoodlum and a thug.” (Defamation, video documentary, 1999 — see link in references)

Monty Warner, conservative Jewish writer and director of the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, says that “the ADL has devolved into an opportunistic, intolerant, grief-grubbing stench” and says of ADL boss Abraham Foxman that he is “a disgrace to my religion.”

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition, a Jewish religious group called ADL leader Abraham Foxman “Our own worst enemy.” Toward Tradition said it picked Foxman “from among other representatives of the Anti-Semitism industry” because of his pivotal role in former president Clinton’s pardon of fugitive Jewish financial criminal Marc Rich: “After the ADL received a $100,000 check from the Rich Foundation, Foxman wrote to Bill Clinton urging the pardon.”

Midge Decter, Dennis Prager, and 75 prominent Jewish writers and leaders issued a public statement in 1994 charging the ADL with “engaging in defamation” in the ADL’s attacks on rightists and Christians, routinely using “such discreditable techniques as insinuation and guilt by association” by finding and publicizing “links” between its targets and allegedly more radical (read: already smeared) figures in its voluminous dossiers of personal information obtained largely through espionage.

Steve Zeltzer, Jewish labor activist and himself a victim of ADL spying, states of the ADL: “They have always had enemies lists, and they have always wanted to control the flow of information.”

The ADL and the post-9/11 National Security State

Post-9/11 hysteria led Americans into illegal and unjustified wars in the Middle East and has brought us such unconstitutional erosions of our rights as the misnamed Patriot Act and its secret laws, secret courts, secret trials, and secret prisons; the massive illegal spying operations of the NSA and other agencies; and the maintenance of a “kill list” under which anyone on Earth can be marked for death by the President. Within months after the attacks, the ADL had already organized conferences to “help” the secret police take advantage of their new ill-gotten powers — as this ADL press release makes clear:

ADL Press Release – June 6, 2002

More than 500 representatives of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies were briefed on extremist and terrorist threats during a daylong conference co-sponsored by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The May 31 program, held at the FBI Academy in Quantico, VA, was an outgrowth of ADL’s longtime involvement in providing information and training to law enforcement on threats posed by extremists. The conference, “Extremist and Terrorist Threats: Protecting America After 9/11? included presentations from ADL, FBI and other nationally recognized experts on extremist groups, investigative techniques, counterterrorism strategies, domestic security and threat assessment.

“Now more than ever, law enforcement must have the resources and know-how to prevent future acts of terrorism,” said Abraham H. Foxman, ADL National Director. “In order to assess threats against the United States, law enforcement must have credible information about domestic and foreign extremists whose rhetoric promotes violence. Through our network of regional offices and our experts in the field, ADL is uniquely suited to aid in the war against terrorism. This conference was an opportunity for law enforcement and extremism watchdogs to compare notes and forge alliances.”

Somehow I doubt that Roy Bullock’s name was brought up at the meeting.

Rabbi Spitz’s Vision

Rabbi Spitz
Rabbi Spitz

It seems that the “Anti-Defamation League” has taken to heart the words of Rabbi Leon Spitz, writing in The American Hebrew of March 1, 1946: “American Jews too must come to grips with our contemporary anti-Semites. We must fill our jails with anti-Semitic gangsters, we must fill our insane asylums with anti-Semitic lunatics, we must combat every alien Jew-hater, we must harass and prosecute our Jew baiters to the extreme limits of the laws, we must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish to dare to become ‘fellow-travelers’.” (“Glamorous Purim Formula,” Rabbi Leon Spitz, The American Hebrew, March 1, 1946)

Spitz is speaking in coded language, but the veil is rather thin. He’s not talking about prosecuting criminals per se, for the whole force of law enforcement was already doing that when he spoke.

He’s calling for for especially intense scrutiny of perceived “anti-Semites” by law enforcement, and the use of any and all technical violations that might be discovered to prosecute them. In our law-happy society, it’s doubtful that anyone could escape such close scrutiny unscathed — Google the Internet meme “three felonies a day” if you don’t believe me.

He doesn’t actually believe that gangsters are disproportionately “anti-Semitic” — in fact, no one has ever alleged that. What he’s saying is that the perceived enemies of the Jewish people should be criminalized in the public mind and in the minds of law enforcement officers so that they will be treated like gangsters. And that, in fact, is what the ADL has done, with their close liaisons with police (and secret police) authorities, alerting them to the “dangers” of patriot militia “hate groups,” traditionalist religious groups, alleged “neo-Nazis,” and the like — those whom the ADL sees as vociferous critics of Israel or Jewish power. In fact, few of these groups have any desire to harm Jews in any way, though they may criticize the ADL, Israel, or other parts of the Jewish establishment.

Criticism of Jews as Jews, or public doubt of their tales of suffering in World War 2, is a prosecutable offense in some countries today, in part due to the lobbying activities of the ADL and its allies.

Spitz doesn’t actually believe that his perceived enemies are insane, and therefore belong in asylums. (Elsewhere in his article he credits them with only with avarice, jealousy, and hatred.) He is intimating, though, that they will by some means be redefined as insane and literally fill the asylums. The mass media, heavily influenced by the ADL and disproportionately staffed with Jews, do present caricatured portraits of “conspiracy theorists” and “racists” who dislike Jews, and it is often implied that they are lunatics, “evil geniuses,” or some dangerous mix of the two. Critics of Jewish power today are never, to my knowledge, ever presented in a sympathetic manner by the media.

When Rabbi Spitz tells his fellows that “we must harass and prosecute our Jew baiters to the extreme limits of the laws, we must humble and shame our anti-Semitic hoodlums to such an extent that none will wish to dare to become ‘fellow-travelers’,” he is telling us that the laws must be stretched to their “extreme limits” to prosecute — and harass! — those who criticize Jews in order to “humble” them and shame them — that is, ruin their reputations — so that no one will dare to join them, publicly share their opinions, or value their friendship. This has nothing to do with enforcing the laws equally for all — and everything to do with destroying lives and suppressing the freedom to speak and organize through pure intimidation. Though The American Hebrew was not an ADL publication, and I don’t know if the good rabbi supported the ADL, I think it’s fair to say that his view represented a significant and influential strain in American Jewish thought in the aftermath of World War 2, a strain eagerly taken up by the ADL. Spitz’s hatefully poetic words are in the League’s spirit, and, considering the League’s ongoing, lavishly-funded, and largely successful defamation of those they label “anti-Semites,” perhaps Rabbi Spitz should be regarded as a kind of latter-day prophet, with the ADL his Heavenly Host of Hate.

References

“100 Reasons Leo Frank is Guilty,” The American Mercury, 26 April 2013

“ADL Vows to Cooperate With Spy Investigation,” Los Angeles Times, 9 April, 1993

“New Details of Extensive ADL Spy Operation Emerge,” Los Angeles Times, 13 April, 1993

“Police Seize Documents from Jewish Group,” Mark Mooney, New York Daily News, 9 April, 1993

“Is the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith Spying on You?”, Bill Hughes, Baltimore Sentinel, September 1993

“Los Angeles Court Hands Down Final Judgment in Anti-Defamation League Illegal Surveillance Case,” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, December 1999

Square One, Arnold Forster. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1988

“ADL Campaign Against Tolerance,” William Norman Grigg, New American, September 19, 1994

The Watchdogs, Laird Wilcox, Editorial Research Service, Olathe, Kansas, 1998

“The Jewish Thought Police,” Robert I. Friedman, Village Voice, July 27, 1993

“Glamorous Purim Formula,” Rabbi Leon Spitz, The American Hebrew, March 1, 1946
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Jews have aggressively dominated the false narrative of the Leo Frank Case since 1913, but as of 2013 you can finally learn everything the Jews have tried to censor & suppress at The Leo Frank Research Library: http://www.LeoFrank.org
 
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