Lynched at Midnight: How Anti-Semitism Doomed Leo Frank, Even if the Facts Didn’t
Even the prosecutor didn’t think Leo Frank had killed 13-year old Mary Phagan, but the ‘Jewish industrialist’ couldn’t get a fair trial in Georgia 100 years ago.
Exactly a hundred years ago, a mob showed up at the Milledgeville State Penitentiary in Georgia in middle of the night. Without firing a shot, they managed to leave with the most controversial criminal in America at the time. They drove him to a faraway oak grove and hung him from a tree.
The lynch was the end of a sordid trial tainted by racism, following which even the original prosecutor in the case of Mary Phagan’s murder thought Leo Frank was innocent.
The start of his story was very different. Leo Frank had been the living embodiment of the American dream.
Born in 1884 to German Jewish immigrants, he was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and studied engineering in Cornell University. He then moved to Atlanta to run a pencil factory. Shortly after his arrival, he met Lucile Selig, who came from a rich Jewish family. They married, and Frank became very involved in the Jewish community life of Atlanta, then home to the biggest Jewish community in the American south.
All that would change on April 27, 1913, with the body of Mary Phagan was discovered in the pencil factory’s basement. The 13-year old factory worker had been brutally murdered, and notes written by the killer were found near her body.
In a world where modern forensic science was only beginning, the detectives had little to rely on but their instincts - and prejudices.
The janitor did it?
The investigation focused on three people who were also at the factory that night: Leo Frank, the manager, the factory’s black janitor Jim Conley, and the night watchman Newt Lee, who had discovered the body and called the police.
Lee had an alibi, thanks to Frank’s meticulousness : he had installed a punch card system that proved Lee couldn’t have been at the basement for long enough to commit the murder. But Frank had no alibi. He had been in his office alone.
Conley, who had no alibi either, admitted to writing the notes, but claimed they were dictated to him by Frank. Conley claimed Frank had murdered Phagan and forced him to help move the body.
Actually, this was only one of several versions Conley gave the police. But this was the only one the detectives chose to believe.
Frank was arrested for murder and Conley became the State’s witness.
read more: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/jewish-world-features/1.671478