The sex-murder of the century happened on this day in 1913 on the second floor of the National Pencil Company building in Atlanta, a sweatshop where child laborers, mostly young girls, spent their youth making pencils, earning only pennies an hour.
13-year-old Mary Phagan was one such girl. She came that day to the office to collect her pathetically meager $1.20 pay. There she met the sweatshop’s boss and part-owner, Leo Frank, in his office on the second floor. Frank was also the president of the Atlanta chapter of the B’nai B’rith, a Jewish organization that would spawn the ADL later that same year. Yes, the same ADL we know today.
It was a holiday and no one else was working on that entire floor. Frank used a pretext to lure Mary to the work area in the back. He closed the doors behind them as they walked.
Near the rear wall, standing in front of a metal lathe next to the toilet entrance, Leo Frank did to Mary Phagan what he, according to numerous witnesses, had often done before with his teenage girl employees: He attempted to take sexual liberties with her. She resisted. Frank knocked her down forcibly, hitting her in the eye and striking her head against the unyielding metal lathe, opening a bloody gash. While she was stunned, he pulled her garments up above her waist and raped her right on the red-stained floor in front of the toilet, as she was lying in her own flowing blood.
When he was “done,” seeing the blood and doubtlessly realizing his predicament should Mary tell others of his actions, he found a piece of the twine used to pack supplies in his factory, wound it tightly around her neck, and strangled her to death. He then tore off a piece of her lace underwear, placed it around her neck as if it were a lace necklet — making sure it covered the marks of the strangling.
He then summoned the factory’s Black sweeper, Jim Conley, to enlist his aid in the moving and, he hoped, the burning of Mary Phagan’s body. Conley knew that Frank liked to “chat” in private with the prettier of his young girl employees, as he had kept watch for Frank on several occasions while such “chatting” took place. And, in fact, he was keeping watch for him near the factory’s first-floor entrance at that very moment. Frank told Conley that he had struck the girl and accidentally killed her. Frank was hoping the lace “necklet” might serve to conceal the strangling — at least conceal it from Conley. It could never fool police investigators. Conley and Frank moved Mary’s body to the basement.
After Mary's body was discovered, Frank and his legal team tried to frame the Black night watchman, Newt Lee, for the murder. Among other things, they forged his time card, and planted a fake bloody shirt at his residence. When that framing attempt failed, they tried to frame Jim Conley (and, 113 years later, Frank's advocates are still trying to frame him). They planted a fake “bloody club” and a forged "Mary Phagan pay envelope" near the place where Conley kept watch for Frank that day. But that forgery was exposed, too. The true evidence kept building up, and the proof was overwhelming that Frank was the killer. He was convicted and sentenced to death.
But Frank had something that ordinary defendants, Black or White, never have. He was not an “ordinary citizen.” He was an important official of the city's Jewish community — the head of the Atlanta division of the B’nai B’rith. He had the massive power, money, media ownership, and political influence of the organized Jewish community nationwide behind him. They refused to let the verdict stand. They funded a multimillion-dollar legal and PR campaign to get him a new trial, to make millions of gullible people believe he was innocent and a saint-like “victim of anti-Semitism,” and to get his sentence commuted. They were only partially successful. All his numerous and expensive appeals, which went all the way up to the US Supreme Court, failed. But they continue the propaganda campaign to this very day.
Never forget the life and death of Mary Phagan. Never forget that Leo Frank abused and raped her and then ended her young life. Never forget that he tried to frame two innocent Black men for the crime. And never forget that the media and the academic establishment have lied to you about this case for 113 years.
