Killers were last link in 'state-sponsored crime'
Q & A / STEVE ONEY, author of 'And the Dead Shall Rise'

	PHIL SKINNER / Staff Lynching victim Leo Frank is buried in Brooklyn, but his wife's ashes are buried in an unmarked grave in the Jewish section of Atlanta's Oakland Cemetery. She died in 1957.

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

More than 70 years after Leo Frank was lynched near Marietta, author Steve Oney went to see an elderly lawyer in Florida as part of his research for a book about the crime.

Oney got right to the point: "I think your dad was involved in this lynching."

The old man, who had suspected as much, started crying.

As Oney discovered time and again, the Frank saga has not lost its power to haunt.

Frank was convicted in 1913 of strangling a teenage girl from Marietta Mary Phagan. He was Jewish and came from New York, and his fate soon became an intensely publicized national drama, bringing charges of anti-Semitism down on Georgia. When the governor commuted his death sentence in 1915, angry Mariettans abducted Frank from a state prison and hanged him from an oak tree in Cobb County.

Oney, 49, a former writer for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, spent 17 years working on what he hoped would be the definitive history of the Phagan murder and the Frank lynching. His book discloses a wealth of new information about the lynching conspiracy and what led up to it. He talked about the case from his Los Angeles home.

 

Q: Do you think Frank's conviction and lynching were primarily motivated by religious prejudice?

A: It was a story of anti-Semitism among other things. Yes, Frank's religion was a deep mark against him. Yes, there was latent anti-Semitism out in the state that was played upon by devious people. But there were so many other issues. Class anxiety and regional tension were just as important.

When Frank was lynched, Georgians were closer to the era of the Civil War than we are to the era of World War II. The fact that Frank was a Northerner and that his support came mostly from Northern newspapers had as much to do with this as the fact that he was a Jew.

 

Q: Why do people keep writing books and plays about this?

A: The Frank case continues to fascinate for a lot of reasons. First, it's a double unsolved murder. Who killed Mary Phagan? Who lynched Leo Frank?

Both of these people are stand-ins for much larger social forces at work in the South at the time, forces that were in collision. The Frank story is a way of looking at how the Old South became the New South. You see that especially in the two entities the case helped spawn: the Anti-Defamation League and the revived Ku Klux Klan.

	Family photo Attending Mary Phagan's funeral in 1913 are (from left) Ollie Mae Phagan, her sister; Fanny Phagan Coleman, her mother; J.W. Coleman, her stepfather; Benjamin Phagan, her brother; and Lizzie Phagan, her aunt.

Q: What do we know about Phagan?

Jews defame Mary

By the age of thirteen, Mary Phagan was already a four-year veteran of the workforce, having had two other factory jobs before starting work at the pencil factory. She was a beautiful girl, and the search for her murderer was later to reveal more than one boy who had been smitten by her blue eyes and precociously well developed figure. She was only 4 feet 11 inches (150 cm) tall, but still might have been able to pass for being as old as eighteen.^[1] Her family were country people who had moved to the city, known as "crackers" in local parlance.

A: She was a 13-year-old cracker girl, very pretty, very flirtatious. Her family lived in Cobb County near where the Big Chicken is today. They moved to Atlanta, to the Bellwood neighborhood, which was off Bankhead Highway just west of downtown. She was only a 10-minute trolley ride from her job at the pencil factory.

Q: What exactly happened to her when she stopped by the factory that Saturday to pick up her pay?

A: She was attacked, strangled and left in the basement. I think she was anally sodomized, but we'll never know for certain. The physical evidence disappeared years ago.

Q: Why did the authorities target Frank as their main suspect?

A: His behavior when the police arrived at his house on the morning the body was discovered was so fidgety, so seemingly incriminating, that they immediately fixated on him. Frank would be arrested even today, because he was the last person who admitted to seeing Mary Phagan alive.

Q: The state's star witness against Frank was Jim Conley, the janitor and elevator operator at the factory. What do we know about him?

A: He was a 29-year-old guy from Vine City who had been arrested for numerous misdemeanors and had served time on the chain gang. He had a bad drinking problem. He was a pretty tough character.

Conley was arrested several days after the murder when a worker at the factory saw him washing red stains out of his shirt. He said it was rust. Unfortunately, the police let the shirt get away and never tested it to see whether the stains were actually blood.

Conley sat in jail for a month with no charges filed against him. He wasn't considered a suspect because he said he couldn't write. [Two handwritten notes about the murder had been found near the body.] As it turned out, he was extremely literate; he was just passing himself off as a fool to stay out of the line of fire. When the police realized it, he said that he had been lying about the writing. He said he'd taken the notes as dictation from Frank, who had killed Phagan when she resisted his advances.

It's hard to believe anyone believed that story.

 

Q: Why did the authorities buy it?

A: This is where the anti-Semitism starts to come in. I think there was a ground level of it involved in the police department's pursuit of Frank. He was absolutely foreign to their experience. He was a Jew, a Yankee, a high-strung intellectual who listened to Strauss waltzes. Simultaneously, there were dozens of stories from former employees accusing Frank of what today would be called sexual harassment. These two volatile undercurrents bound together in the minds of the investigators and prosecutors and led them to form a very strong negative opinion.

 

Q: Did Conley's testimony convict Frank?

A: Some people will say that there was strong evidence against Frank, that he was the last person to see Phagan alive, that he had time and motive, that his behavior afterward was incriminating. But I think he would have been acquitted if Conley had not stood up and told such a spellbinding account.

 

Q: Did Frank get a fair trial?

A: It was in no way a fair trial. It would be declared a mistrial very quickly by today's standards.

 

Q: On what grounds?

 

Leo Frank in girl's dressing rooms

A: There were spontaneous eruptions and disruptions in the courtroom. A lot of people have written that there was a crowd outside shouting, "Hang the Jew!' I was unable to find a single source that supported that. But the hostility to Frank was palpable.

Not only that, but a lot of extraneous evidence about his sexual behavior was admitted. Frank was really tried of two crimes: murder and sexual perversity. When Conley started talking about Frank's sexual behavior during his testimony, Frank's lawyers not only didn't move to strike, they chose to cross-examine him on it. That was a critical error. The defense later called numerous character witnesses, but the prosecution was then able to call rebuttal witnesses. These were by and large young women who had worked at the factory who said Frank had forced himself on women and made insinuating comments and barged into dressing rooms while the girls were undressed. It was a nightmare for the defense.

 

Q: Did Frank get competent legal representation?

A: His lead attorney, Luther Rosser, was one of the best lawyers in Atlanta. But he was a bully who believed he could run over anyone who got in his way, especially a black man like Conley. Rosser ended up getting caught in the brier patch.

 

Q: The jury convicted Frank on the second ballot. Was that a reasonable verdict?

A: Yes, I can see it happening.

I don't know what I would have done if I had been on that jury. All I can tell you is that when I was writing the book, I would come into the kitchen at the end of the day and tell my wife that Leo Frank was guilty -- especially when I was reading Conley's testimony. It was so mesmerizing and specific, I'd think: He could not make this up. Then I'd walk into the kitchen the next week and say, "Leo Frank is innocent. This is a completely trumped-up case."

In the end, though, so much of the prosecution's case doesn't hold water. I think you can tell by the end of the book that I'm pretty certain Frank was innocent.

 

Q: So who killed Mary Phagan?

A: I'm 95 percent certain Conley did it.

A year or so after the trial, Conley's lawyer, William Smith, conducted a study of the murder notes and became convinced they were the original composition of his former client. There are other things, too. During the trial, the prosecution said that Frank had assaulted Phagan outside his office on the factory floor and that she'd struck her head against a lathe, where some of her hair had been found. It turned out that the hair did not come from Phagan's head, and the prosecutor, Hugh Dorsey, knew it and withheld that information from the defense. The key physical evidence from the supposed crime scene was fallacious. To me, that's incredibly damning.

 

Q: How did Frank's fate become a national cause?

A: The rabbi at the Temple, David Marx, took a train to New York about a week after the conviction to meet with editors of The New York Times and with Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee. By early 1914, Marshall and Adolph Ochs, the publisher of the Times, decided to put their full forces to work for Frank. The Times' behavior in the Frank case was stunning. They lost all objectivity. They published dozens of stories, most of them quoting sources only from the defense camp, and they ran six or seven major editorials a month attacking the prosecution.

 

Q: How did Georgia react to all the attention?

A: It caused a backlash. The publicity exacerbated raw wounds in the South and made Georgians feel this big Northern newspaper was dictating to their courts and people.

This is where the great populist politician Tom Watson came into full cry. He seized on what he saw as offensive coverage and reprinted it in his newspaper, the Jeffersonian. There he was every week showing Georgians what the rest of the world was writing about them, alongside his comments. Within months, the entire state was whipped up to a fever pitch.

 

Q: Would Frank have been lynched without Watson's fulminations?

A: I don't think so. I think Frank would have served a long portion of his sentence and at some point there would have been a move to exonerate him.

 

Q: Which brings us to the lynching. This wasn't a mob that hanged Frank, was it?

A: No, it was a brilliantly orchestrated raid on a state institution conducted by people hand-chosen by some of the most elite citizens of Marietta. The lynching was conceived by Cobb Countians and run by Cobb Countians, but the skids were greased in the state Capitol. You could say that the lynching of Leo Frank was a state-sponsored crime.

 

Q: How so?

A: John Tucker Dorsey, one of the masterminds of the lynching, was a freshman state legislator from Marietta who was appointed without any experience as chairman of the penitentiary subcommittee. That gave him power over the people who worked at the prison in Milledgeville [where Frank was sent after Gov. John Slaton commuted his death sentence] and over the three commissioners who administered the prison system. Dorsey served as the lynch party's point man to run this plan through the Legislature.

It was a carrot-and-stick scheme. The carrot was the release of funding to build a new wing at the prison. The stick was a typhus epidemic there. The Legislature sent the prison committee to Milledgeville to investigate, and it was made clear that if prison officials didn't allow the lynch party in, they would be tarred with the unsanitary conditions that led to the typhus outbreak. They had 'em coming and going.

 

Q: Why weren't any lynchers ever prosecuted?

A: There was no federal jurisdiction for this in 1915. The FBI didn't even exist. The Cobb grand jury that dispensed of the lynching was presided over by one of the planners. Once that mockery of justice had been concluded, there was no official venue for bringing the lynch party members to trial. They were off scot-free.

	File Lucille Frank sits behind her husband, Leo, in the courtroom during his trial. She became embittered and reclusive after he was lynched in 1915.

Q: Lucille Frank, Leo's widow, never really got over it, did she?

A: She was only 27 when her husband was lynched, and she turned her hurt inward. She became an embittered and somewhat reclusive soul. But the saddest thing about her is what happened after her death.

Lucille Frank died in 1957 and her body was cremated. She wanted her ashes scattered in a public park, but there was a statute in Atlanta that outlawed such a practice. So Patterson's funeral home kept the ashes in a cardboard box for several years.

In that period, the Temple was bombed, and Atlanta's Jewish community had a revival of the fear and anxiety that had oppressed it after the Frank lynching. In the early '60s, while this new wound was fresh, someone at Patterson's called Alan Marcus, Lucille's nephew, and said they needed to dispose of the ashes. He didn't know what to do with them; he didn't want to have a public burial ceremony for fear of renewed hostilities.

So he and his brother went to Oakland Cemetery one day at dawn with some garden tools, and in a private ceremony they buried Lucille Frank's ashes between the tombstones of her parents in the Jewish section. And there they remain, unmarked.

To me, that tells you exactly what the Frank lynching did to Atlanta's Jewish community.

 

Q: In 1982, Alonzo Mann, an elderly man who had worked at the pencil factory as an office boy, came forward to say that he had seen Jim Conley carrying Mary Phagan's body. Mann's story was widely seen as exonerating Frank. Did it?

A: No. And I say that as someone who at the time thought it did. Mann's story was incredibly dramatic, and I believe it. However, both the defense and the prosecution were in accord that Conley had carried Mary Phagan's body.

 

Q: Mann's story prompted an application to pardon Frank posthumously, but the state parole board turned it down. What do you think of that decision?

A: The state did the proper thing in not pardoning Leo Frank. In and of itself, Mann's statement was not enough to overturn the conviction. The second application, which led to a compromise decision in which the state in essence apologized for not protecting Frank's constitutional rights, is a different matter. Based on what I have discovered about how the state is implicated in Frank's lynching, that apology seems a little weak. Certain people in the state government not only took an active role in denying Leo Frank his constitutional rights; they denied him his life.

Frank with children

So testified Conley for the prosecution.  He had been convincing.  His account had been so vivid, particularly in his description of Frank’s previous sexual encounters, that the judge asked women and children to leave the courtroom, so that they would not hear Conley’s graphic description of Frank’s numerous sexual escapades with factory girls.  The newspapers considered some of Conley’s testimony unsuitable for a family paper, and omitted portions of his narrative.

It was now the defense’s turn with Conley.  For sixteen hours --- spread over three days --- Rosser and Arnold cross-examined Conley, getting him to admit that he had lied in his previous depositions.  They questioned his memory, but they were unable to force him to make a major misstatement.  Curiously, the defense allowed Conley to elaborate his graphic descriptions of Frank’s sexual encounters while he was Frank’s lookout.  What made this tactic damaging is that the defense, after their cross-examination, recognizing their error belatedly, moved that Conley’s descriptions of Frank’s assignations be stricken from the record.  The prosecution objected, and the judge, Leonard Roan, rejected the motion.  In effect, this damaging tactic was supportive of the dismal fact that the defense had been unable to break Conley’s story.  The crowd in the courtroom burst out in loud applause when the judge delivered his ruling on the motion to suppress.

Dorsey’s cross-examination of the defense witnesses centered on Frank’s alleged lascivious behavior, and, no matter how they responded, Dorsey was able to remind the jury of Conley’s vivid testimony.  At one point, Dorsey implied that Frank was a homosexual, and asked another witness whether it was true if he had seen Frank fondle a young girl’s nipples

Prosecutor Leo Dorsey faced defense attorneys Luther Rosser and Reuben Arnold in the trial that began on July 28, 1913. Dorsey built a strong case against the accused murderer. Frank claimed to be in his office at the time the murder but another worker contradicted this, saying she visited his office at 12:05pm and he was not there. Testimony was introduced indicating that Frank made "improper" advances to some of Phagan's co-workers.

In this statement and at the trial, Conley attributed two statements to Frank that seem unnatural for him to have uttered. He said that Frank had previously told him that Frank wasn't "built like other men," an apparent reference to Conley's vague understanding of the Jewish custom of circumcision, and an unlikely confidence from Frank to his negro janitor.

Frank preformed oral sex on boys

One of Frank's supposed mistresses testified that she had never had sex with him, but was also caught in a lie on the stand regarding a previous run-in with the law on a fornication charge. The prosecution insinuated that Frank was homosexual, and that an office boy who testified for the defense had been having sex with Frank.

Dorsey asked one witness, "Didn't you hear about twelve months ago of Frank kissing girls and playing with the nipples of their breasts?" At this, Frank's mother jumped up and began yelling at the prosecutor. Her exact words were difficult to hear clearly in the ensuing uproar, but it was widely reported that she called Dorsey a "Gentile dog" or a "Christian dog;" this incident helped to crystallize anti-Semitic sentiment in Atlanta, and hardened feelings against Frank among the public. Defense witnesses testified that there were too many people in the factory on Saturdays for Frank to have had trysts there, and it was pointed out that the windows of Frank's office lacked curtains. A large number of female factory workers testified for the defense in favor of Frank's good character when it came to women, but a long series of workers called by the defense said that he had behaved with impropriety in the women's dressing room; some of these witnesses vigorously contradicted each other.

July 29, 1913 - this was the second day of the trial of Leo Frank. Newt Lee, the night watchman who discovered Mary Phagan's body, concluded his testimony by repeating his story for the defense. Altogether Lee spent  four hours and forty-five minutes on the stand. The next witness was police Sgt. L.S. Dobbs, who took Lee's phone call and rushed to the factory. He said he found the body in the basement, face down, with a cord tied tightly around the neck, and a pair of women's underpants tied loosely around the neck. The back of the head was covered in blood. He also found two notes, her shoes, and  a trail where the body was dragged to its location. Detective John Starnes then took the stand. He had called Leo Frank to inform him of the murder, and said Frank appeared extremely nervous when he arrived at the factory. The highlight of the day was strong verbal clashes between solicitor Hugh Dorsey (prosecuting the case) and defense attorney Luther Rosser over Rosser's attempts to discredit the testimony of Starnes.

During his cross-examination of Leo Frank’s mother, he asked her what business her husband was in, and after her reply, snidely retorted: “Ah, he’s a capitalist then?”  While cross-examining four male defense witnesses, Dorsey with diabolical slyness asked questions insinuating that Frank was a homosexual.  And during his closing arguments, Dorsey “both denounced Frank’s character and emphasized his Jewishness and wealth,” Oney reminds us.  As historian Leonard Dinnerstein puts it: “In 1913, when Hugh Dorsey prosecuted Leo Frank, he convinced many people that his primary concern was with his political reputation and not with obtaining justice.” In the words of an editor of The Atlanta Constitution, in the Frank case Dorsey “deliberately set about to stir up the hate-pack in a cynical bid for political notoriety and power.”  Oney calls Dorsey “cool and mockingly predatory,” “[a]droit, brazen, poker-faced,” and full of “native cunning.”  In 1920 Dorsey ran for the U. S. Senate, but was defeated by Tom Watson.  From 1935 to 1948 Hugh Dorsey was a judge of the Superior Court of Fulton County.

Frank murders the girl

http://tennessean.com/government/special/nojustice/

...[P]olice suspicions quickly settled on Leo Frank, principally owing to his behavior when they arrived at his house early Sunday morning to notify him of Mary Phagan's murder. It was a time when much melodramatic import was placed on particulars of manner, and police would later testify that Frank paced about his front parlor "nervous" and "excited," blurting questions as he twisted his hands, his voice "hoarse and trembling."…

The murder notes, though, remained something of a puzzle until the factory's twenty-nine-year-old black sweeper, James Conley, was also arrested when seen at the factory's water cooler trying to wash out red stains from a work shirt. ... Conley ... finally professed that Frank, after killing the girl on the factory's second floor in a ravishment attempt gone awry, had enlisted his aid in transporting her body in the elevator down to the basement, and then dictated to him the murder notes, with the rather

Conley was characterized by the defense, "a plain, beastly, drunken, filthy, lying [epithet] ...fired with lust...." In fact, the racial derision of Conley was heartily participated in by all parties, including the press, one reporter pointing out, "Conley isn't a cornfield negro. He's more of the present-day type of city darkey," and even The New York Times would eventually describe him as a "drunken, lowlived, utterly worthless...black human animal."

Description of Phagan in basement

Phagan has been strangled with a seven-foot length of cord tied in a slipknot still tightly wrapped around her neck. (Quantities of cord of this character are found throughout the building.)  Her tongue is swollen and protruding.  She has soot on her face, dirt in her eyes, and cinders in her mouth and nostrils.  She has a black eye, there are wounds on her scalp and below the knee and scratches on the elbow, and her clothing has been torn.  There is fresh blood in her underclothing, and she appears to have been raped vaginally or anally.  She has also been robbed: her purse containing the $1.20 is missing.

Jew in prison

The Lynching of Leo Frank Marietta mob completes its mission PHIL SKINNER / Staff The battered jail infirmary door that a lynch mob broke down to abduct Leo Frank in 1915 is part of a collection at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum.   Related: • First excerpt from "And the Dead Shall Rise" • Second excerpt from "And the Dead Shall Rise" • Q & A with author Steve Oney MEET THE AUTHOR Steve Oney will discuss "And the Dead Shall Rise" at 7:30 p.m. Oct. 7 at the Rialto Center for the Performing Arts, 80 Forsyth St., Atlanta. Tickets, $10, are available at 404-651-4727 or at http://www.rialtocenter.org/. Oney also will speak at 7 p.m. Oct. 8 at the Marietta Museum of History (the lecture is filled up, but a book signing afterward is open to the public); 7:30 p.m. Oct. 9 at the DeKalb History Center in the old courthouse on the square in Decatur; and at noon Oct. 10 at the University of Georgia Chapel, Athens.   From "And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank" by Steve Oney, to be published by Pantheon Books in October. Copyright 2003 by Steve Oney. In the height of summer 1913, Leo M. Frank was tried for the murder of Mary Phagan, 13, who worked for 10 cents an hour at the pencil factory that Frank ran in downtown Atlanta. A new book, "And the Dead Shall Rise," by Steve Oney, offers the most definitive account yet of the murders of Phagan and of Frank. This third excerpt from Oney's book comes from Chapter 21, "The Lynching of Leo Frank." [Seven carloads of men from Marietta used inside information to mount a precision raid on the state prison farm in Milledgeville, where Leo M. Frank was being held. The kidnappers, soon to be lynchers, had even arranged to have all telephone lines leading from the prison, and nearly all the lines from Milledgeville, cut in advance. The raiders knew that Frank was not in the general prison population; after awakening and subduing top prison officials, they headed directly for the room adjacent to the warden's office where the star inmate was billeted.] The group found Frank awake but still in bed, wearing his monogrammed white nightshirt. When he asked if he could dress, he was pointedly informed that where he was going, he wouldn't need clothes. He was then handcuffed and escorted to the stairs. There, two men took him by the arms, two by the legs and another by the hair, dragging him outside and throwing him into the rear of one of the waiting cars. As Frank, moaning from the rough treatment, stared up at his captors, they dangled the thick manila rope they'd carried with them in his face. With that, the Mariettans' work at the farm was finished. As they piled back into their automobiles, one of their lieutenants announced that they intended to take Frank to Cobb County and hang him over Mary Phagan's grave. On the heels of this declaration, [a prison official] asked to be uncuffed, but when told he'd have to accompany the party, he retorted, "Damned if I go anywhere with you." Whereupon [one of the raiders] bellowed, "All right, boys; make for the swamps," and the seven cars, lights now blazing, sped off. All told, the vigilantes had needed but 10 minutes to abduct the nation's most celebrated prisoner. Astonishingly, not a shot was fired. In the raid's immediate aftermath, [prison officials] quickly discovered the phone lines into Milledgeville had been cut. Similarly, the gas line of [the warden's] car had been slit. Eventually, some Negro inmates awakened the farm bookkeeper, who found a vehicle in working order and drove into town with the news -- yet here, too, [Marietta electrician] "Yellow Jacket" Brown had done his job, severing not just the phone lines leading to the homes of state militia captain J. H. Ennis and Baldwin County sheriff S. L. Terry but all except one of the long-distance lines connecting Milledgeville to the outside world. That lone line led to Augusta. Thus around midnight -- two hours after the lynch party had departed -- a bulletin was finally transmitted, and officials in counties that lay on the direct route between the farm and Marietta were alerted. Soon, Fulton County deputies were patrolling the highways leading into Cobb County. . . . By this juncture, of course, the caravan bearing Leo Frank had disappeared into the night, although not as utterly as its leaders had hoped. At the Little River, an unbridged stream 10 miles north of Milledgeville, the vigilantes lost precious time when they were unable to locate the home of a ferry operator. But far from panicking, the men used the delay to cut phone lines at surrounding country stores and fire rounds of ammunition into the woods. The salvos were heard throughout the area, diverting an initial posse from Milledgeville and prompting early reports -- bannered atop the Georgian's first extra -- that Frank had been shot to death. Yet such wasn't the case, for once the group finally negotiated the river, they pressed ahead at a steady clip, their charge sitting quietly between young Luther and Emmet Burton in the second car, his shirt luminous among the galluses and wool hats. After barreling through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, the Mariettans plunged north into the backroads briar patch of such rural counties as Jasper, Newton, Walton and Barrow, keeping far to the east of Atlanta. It remains unclear whether this had always been the intended route or whether the group's leaders changed on the fly, responding to a tip from some sympathizer along the way who alerted them to the fact that the main roads were being watched. Whichever, the choice was inspired, allowing the men to outflank any pursuers. With arrogant impunity, they raced over 100 miles through the cotton fields of middle Georgia, their passage witnessed only by the random darkened farmhouse, evidenced only by the cloud of red dust billowing in their wake. Somewhere during the trip, the occupants of Frank's car briefly engaged him in conversation. Citing a source whose bona fides were "beyond all question," the Associated Press later reported its gist: "Is there anything you would like to say before your execution?" At first there was no reply. Then, slowly and perhaps painfully, the recently wounded man shook his head. "No," he said. The word was scarcely audible above the throb of the engine. For a long time following the only sound was that of the automobiles. Then Frank was asked if he had killed the Phagan girl, and the captors say he made no reply. This question was not repeated again until near the journey's end, and again, it is said, there was no reply. The final interrogation was: "Is there nothing you wish to say?" "No." These four questions constituted the sole conversation in the death car as it sped along the miles which were steadily bringing Frank nearer to Cobb County. The party made excellent time, and about daybreak it reached Alpharetta, 20 miles northeast of Marietta, which meant it would be approaching its destination as if returning not from Milledgeville but from the North Georgia mountains. Exactly what happened in Alpharetta -- in 1915, the seat of now-defunct Milton County -- is uncertain. Subsequently, Judge Newt Morris and a young protege from Canton named John Wood contended that since the Blue Ridge Circuit Court was slated to convene there later that morning, they simply happened to be up and about when the group came through. A more likely scenario is that Morris and Wood had awakened at that hour for the purpose of joining the party on the last leg of its trip. Regardless, the two -- traveling in Wood's Model T -- weren't far behind the group as they left Alpharetta, tore through Roswell, then turned onto Roswell Road, along which they proceeded until they reached Frey's Gin, where Leo Frank's journey would conclude. Though Frey's Gin was two miles east of Marietta, there can be little doubt that the vigilance committee -- the vow to hang Frank above Mary Phagan's grave notwithstanding -- had always intended to lynch him here. Later, there would be talk suggesting that fear of being caught by the rising sun had prompted the party to pull up shy of its objective, but like so much that would come out of Cobb County, such talk was calculated to obscure the truth. And the truth was that the gin belonged to the man -- former Sheriff William Frey -- who had tied the noose. Moreover, waiting at the site was a piece of furniture essential to the job: a table. Finally, the location was not without its symbolic resonance, in that it faced the Benton homeplace where little Mary, prior to moving to Atlanta, had lived and where her kinfolk still resided. Frey's Gin was surrounded by a grove of trees, and it was into this small woods that Frank's captors marched him. The doomed man, his bare toes sliding over moist grass, never faltered. According to the most authoritative report, "he behaved throughout with a calmness and dignity and an utter lack of panic." After walking 200 feet, the group stopped before a sturdy oak, and someone looped the business end of the manila rope over a high limb. Meantime, the table that would serve as the platform was put into position. While these preparations were being made, Frank apparently asked for and was granted permission to write a note to Lucille, jotting a few sentences in a foreign language some thought to be Yiddish but was almost certainly German. Then -- speaking either in response to a specific question or to himself; the accounts vary -- he uttered what amounted to a final statement: "I think more of my wife and my mother than I do of my own life." The remark's authenticity is evidently indisputable. (Although as one reporter noted: "In telling this story it must be remembered that we have not Frank's version and never will have it. We have only the lynchers' word for it.") Its meaning, however, is ambiguous. Whether, as admirers subsequently asserted, Frank was voicing a noble sentiment, or, as detractors countered, he was skirting the truth for fear of devastating his family, no one can say. As it had been in the beginning, so it was at the end. With soft morning sunlight dappling the late-summer foliage, the vigilantes blindfolded Frank, bound his feet together, cinched a khaki cloth around his exposed lower torso, lifted him onto the table and placed the noose over his head. After agreeing to return Frank's wedding band to Lucille, a man identified in most reports as simply "the leader" pronounced the court's sentence and kicked over the table. The time was 7:05. The man was Judge Newt Morris. The first witnesses to arrive on the scene -- or so the cover story had it -- were William Frey, a friend of Frey's from Augusta named Walter Yaun, Marietta Journal editor Josiah Carter Jr., and merchant Gus Benson. Supposedly, Frey and Yaun had been in his yard picking peaches when the caravan hurtled by, and though the ex-sheriff said he caught a glimpse of Frank and suspected "something was doing," he claimed that he initially did nothing. In fact, Frey said he changed clothes and ate breakfast before driving into Marietta. There, he maintained, he met Carter, who informed him the cars never made it to the cemetery, and Benson, who told him he'd seen them turn "on the road there by your gin." Only then, Frey said, did he realize a lynching might have occurred on his property. Only then, he said, did he return home, walk into the grove, and spy the body. "Yonder it is," Frey said he exclaimed, and for all his account's bald-faced absurdities, yonder it indeed was. Leo Frank, head snapped back, chin resting in the noose's bottom coil, dangled from above. Though half an hour had elapsed since the deed was done, his body was still warm, for unlike those wretches dropped through the gallows' trapdoor in a putatively humane hanging, Frank had not died instantly. Rather, he had slowly suffocated, struggling so ferociously he'd ripped open his neck wound. Blood oozed down his shirtfront. As the Constitution would grimly note: "He undoubtedly flayed the air." . . . Agitated locals had been congregating on the [Marietta] square since dawn. It was to this audience that an allegedly anonymous source -- speaking by phone to Deputy Sheriff Hicks, who had himself made the trip to Milledgeville -- broke the news: "Leo Frank's hanging to a limb down here near Frey's Gin. Retribution!" And so the spectacle began. From Marietta, from neighboring farms and villages, and finally, from Atlanta, they came. Observed the Atlanta Journal's Rogers Winter: "They swarmed the road from both directions. They seemed to rise up out of the ground, so fast they came. The automobiles came careening, recklessly disregarding life and limb of occupants. Horse-drawn vehicles came at a gallop. Pedestrians came running. "The vehicles stopped in the road at the grove and soon packed the road and overflowed into the fields. As the vehicles would stop, their occupants would jump out and run to the grove, bending forward, panting, wild-eyed. "Women came. Children came. Even babes in arms." By 8:30, over 1,000 people had gathered, and scores more were arriving each minute. Initially, at least, the gawkers conducted themselves with a degree of restraint. Noted the Georgian's 0. B. Keeler: "In a terrible way it was like some religious rite. Watching the curiously reverent manner of those people, a manner of thankfulness and of grave satisfaction, it was borne in with tremendous force what the feeling must be on those Cobb County men and women toward the man who they believed had slain Mary Phagan. "The journey to Frey's Gin was a sort of dreadful pilgrimage. "I couldn't bear to look at another human being, hanging like that," said one woman. "But this, this is different. It is all right. It is the justice of God." "Among the men there was evident a grim and terrible satisfaction. " 'They did a good job,' " was the comment, spoken in many tones, but with a curious inflection that was always the same. " 'A good job.' "

http://www.gpb.org/GeorgiaStories/topicsHomepg.jsp?sub_id=060&studstatus=1&educstatus=1

This document is an incomplete list of the men who planned and carried out the kidnapping and lynching of Leo Frank in August of 1915.

The document (used with permission) is part of the Leo Frank collection and is housed in the Special Collections Department, Robert W. Woodruff Library of Emory University. Although the document is unsigned, the identity of the author is known to me; however, because of the nature of this list, I have decided not to disclose its author at this time. *(*SEE ADDENDUM TO THIS PAGE FOR RECENT ADDITIONS TO THIS INFORMATION)

Franks lynch party

Leo Max Frank (1884-1915) was the manager of the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia, from the time of its establishment sometime in 1909. On April 26, 1913, one of his employees, a young girl named Mary Phagan, was brutally murdered in the factory. Frank was convicted of this crime in the summer of 1913 and sentenced to be hanged. For most of the next two years, Frank’s lawyers appealed the death sentence, twice to the United States Supreme Court, but to no avail. In June 1915, shortly before he was to leave office, Governor John M. Slaton commuted Frank’s death sentence to life in prison. About two months later, Frank was kidnapped from the state prison farm at Milledgeville, transported about 175 miles to Cobb County, original home of Mary Phagan, and lynched near a place called Frey’s Mill on the morning of August 17, 1915. None of the lynchers of Frank was ever tried for the murder of Frank, much less convicted; in fact the identity of the lynchers has remained a closely-guarded secret. [2]

The list itself contains twenty-six names, two less than contemporary accounts claimed as having taken part in the lynching.[3] Some of these names are of people who will very likely never be identified, unless someone with special knowledge of the lynching comes forward.  In some cases only surnames are given, and in others the names are so common, that there are likely to have been several persons among the thousands of males living in Cobb County at that time with that name.[4] Nevertheless, nine of the lynch mob members, including all but one of those listed as being either a “leader” or a “planner” can be identified with confidence. The two “leaders” were identified as Judge Newton Morris and George Daniels.

Newton Augustus Morris (1869-1941) was, according to his obituary in the Marietta Daily Journal, a “leader in the Democratic party in Georgia.” He served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1898 to 1904, during which time he was speaker pro tem (1900-1901) and then speaker (1902-1904), after which he served two terms as judge on the Blue Ridge Circuit (1909-1912, 1917-1919), the Georgia court circuit that included Cobb County. [5] Morris was credited with preventing the mutilation of Frank’s body after the lynching. According to newspaper accounts, Morris rushed to the scene of the lynching as soon as he heard about it, and once there, he “interceded and pleaded with everyone to permit Frank’s remains to be sent home to his parents for a decent burial.” While Frank’s body was being removed, one member of the crowd, who had earlier wanted to burn Frank’s body, began stomping on the corpse; Morris was able to stop this, which enabled the undertakers to remove Frank’s body to a funeral home in Atlanta. [6] The other man listed as being a leader is George Daniels. Research in contemporary documents has failed to turn up a man by that name, though two persons with the name George Daniel (or Daniell) have been identified, whose age was similar to those of the other lynchers. George Daniels is the only one on the list that is identified as being a member of the Ku Klux Klan. [7]

The following three men are listed as being “planners”: Herbert Clay, M. M. Sessions, and John Dorsey. Of the three, the best known was Eugene Herbert Clay (1881-1923). Son of United States Senator Alexander Stephens Clay, and older brother of four-star General Lucius D. Clay, who served as Allied High Commissioner of Germany from 1945-1949, Herbert Clay was mayor of Marietta (1910-1911) and solicitor general (i.e. district attorney) of the Blue Ridge judicial circuit (1913-18). In this capacity Clay should have prosecuted the lynchers of Frank, a bitter irony, as he himself was a planner of the lynching and may well have taken part in the lynching. He was subsequently elected to the Georgia State Senate and served as its president in the years 1921-1922; he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives the following year but died in an Atlanta hotel, a few days before the opening of the 1923 session. [8] Clay is the only lyncher whose identity as such has appeared in print.[9]

Born in neighboring Cherokee County, Moultrie McKinney Sessions (1863-1927) moved to Marietta as a child and lived there for the rest of his life. Son of a prominent judge, Sessions received his legal training in a law office and became a lawyer while still a minor. A successful lawyer and financier, he founded Sessions Loan and Trust Co. in 1887. Although active in civic organizations, Sessions does not appear to have held any elected political office.[10]

Also a lawyer, John Tucker Dorsey (1876-1957) moved to Marietta in 1908, after graduation from the University of Georgia and practicing law in Gainesville, Georgia. According to his obituary in the Marietta Daily Journal, Dorsey was active in many civic activities and served in the Georgia House of Representatives (1915-1917, 1941-1945), as solicitor general of the Blue Ridge Circuit (1918-1920), and as ordinary of Cobb County from 1948 until his death. Dorsey represented the state of Georgia at the Coroner’s Jury that met to investigate the lynching of Frank. [11]

Of the remaining twenty or so lynchers, five more have been identified with confidence, these being the following: Gordon Baxter Gann (1877-1949), attorney, mayor of Marietta (1922-25, 1927-29) and member of the Georgia House of Representatives (1919-1922). Gann served as “special attorney” for coroner John A. Booth at the Coroner’s Jury, investigating the Frank lynching. [12] John Augustus (Gus) Benson (1873-1960) operated the Benson Brothers Mercantile Co., which was located on the square in Marietta from 1908 to 1933. Benson testified at the Coroner’s Jury that though he saw several automobiles near Frey’s gin on the morning of Frank’s lynching, he did not recognize anyone in any of the automobiles.[13]

William J. Frey (about 45 years old in 1915) sheriff of Cobb County (1903-1909). Frey’s mill (or gin), the location of the lynching of Frank, was owned by Frey. After his name on the list is the notation: “doubled as hangman.” Like Benson, Frey testified at the Coroner’s Jury that, though he saw several cars near his gin on the morning of the lynching, he could not identify any occupants of these automobiles. Frey also testified that after seeing the cars, he ate breakfast then drove into Marietta, and oddly enough went “to the cemetery where Mary Phagan is buried” and then drove back to the gin where he found “the body of Frank hanging [and he stated that] I looked at him but didn’t put my hands on him.” [14]

Circero Holton Dobbs (1880-1954) operated a grocery store in Marietta for 25 years and later the Dobbs Barber Shop. (He did not serve as mayor of Marietta, as the list would indicate; it was rather Evan Protho Dobbs, presumably a relative, who did so for two terms and was mayor at the time of the lynching of Frank).[15] Ralph Molden Manning (1877-1940) worked as a “contractor and road builder” much of his life and was, at the time of his death, “supervisor of street work for the city of Canton” in neighboring Cherokee County.[16]

The identification of a third of the lynch mob certainly bears out the claim that at least some of its members were prominent citizens of Cobb County, and a few were known state-wide. Included are a former speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives and president of the Georgia State Senate, and other members of the Georgia House of Representatives and Senate, mayors of Marietta, as well as judges, prosecutors, and other members of the local judiciary. Furthermore, this research offers an explanation for the failure of the criminal justice system to prosecute Frank’s murderers, for a member of the lynch mob was also the solicitor general for the Blue Ridge Circuit, the person responsible for the prosecution of the lynchers.[17]

The three newly identified lynchers, all from Cobb County, are:
 

George Exie Daniel (1881-1970) Daniel owned and operated a jewelry store on Marietta Square for 40 years and was a charter member of the Marietta Country Club.

Joseph M. Brown (1851-1932) Brown, the son of Georgia’s Civil War governor, was himself Governor of Georgia in 1909-1911 and 1912-1913.  As governor, he was the immediate predecessor of John M. Slaton.

Bolan Glover Brumby (1876-1948) Brumby owned a furniture manufacturing company, the Marietta Chair Company.

Oct. 7, 2003    Steve Oney’s book, And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank, the definitive work on the Leo Frank case, is published.  The books names 26 of Leo Frank’s lynchers.  The lynchers include a former governor, a district attorney, a judge, a state legislator, a mayor, a sheriff, a former sheriff, and various prominent lawyers and businessmen.

Pick up pay

May 15, 1983   Randall Evans, a former judge on the Georgia Court of Appeals, publishes a statement on the Leo Frank case in The Augusta Chronicle-Herald, claiming that the evidence of Frank’s guilt “was overwhelming,” describing the commutation of Frank’s sentence as “the rape of the judicial process by [Gov. John M.] Slaton,” and deriding the proposed posthumous pardon of Frank as “completely ridiculous.”