‘An Innocent Man Was Lynched’: Reporting exonerated Leo Frank in the murder of Mary Phagan – Tennessean

Posted By on February 21, 2020

In 1982, Tennessean reporters led efforts to posthumously exonerate Leo Frank, who was wrongfully convicted of killing Mary Phagan in 1913 in Atlanta. Frank, a Jewish factory manager, was lynched amid a wave of anti-Semitism after his conviction.

On Sunday,March 7, 1982, The Tennessean printed a10-page special section titled "Justice Betrayed: A Sin of Silence," in which a key witness in the Leo Frank case, Alonzo Mann, said false testimony led to Frank's conviction.

The main story from that special section, written by Jerry Thompson, Robert Sherborne and Frank Ritter under the headline "An Innocent Man Was Lynched," is republished here.

Leo Frank, convicted in 1913 and lynched in 1915 in one of the most notorious murder cases in American history, was innocent, according to a sworn statement given by a witness in the case.

Leo Frank(Photo: Tennessean archives)

The testimony used to convict Frank was perjured, and the real killer of 14-year-old Mary Phagan was the man who gave that false testimony, the witness has disclosed to The Tennessean.

Alzono Mann of Bristol, Va., is the witness. Now 83 and ailing with a heart condition, he was Frank's office boy in 1913 at the National Pencil Co. factory in Atlanta. It was there on Confederate Memorial Day in April that little Mary Phagan was slain when she went to collect the $1.20 she was owed for 10 hours of work the previous Monday.

"Leo Frank did not kill Mary Phagan," Mann said. "She was murdered instead by Jim Conley."

Mann's memory is not perfect when he is recalling people, places and events of nearly 70 year ago. But he remembers vividly the confrontation with Jim Conley, who had the limp form of Mary Phagan in his arms.

Mary's battered body was found face down on a pile of sawdust shavings in the factor basement. A cord was knotted around around her neck and there was massive bleeding from a deep wound to her head. Cinders were found under her fingernails, showing she had clawed the ground in her struggles. Her underclothing was ripped but there was no evidence indicating she had been raped.

The slaying shocked Atlanta and, after an investigation, police arrested Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the factory. The prosecution's star witness was Jim Conley, who worked at the factory as a sweeper. He said Frank committed the murder.

But Mann has told The Tennessean that he saw Conley on the day of the murder with the limp body of Mary Phagan in his arms. He believed he saw this only moments after Mary had been knocked unconscious, but apparently before she was murdered. And he believes that if he had yelled out, he might have saved Mary's life.

But Mann says he did not yell out, and that Conley told him:

"If you ever mention this, I'll kill you."

He was frightened and ran out, Mann says. After riding a trolley home, he told his mother what had happened. She directed him to remain silent and told him not to get involved. He obeyed her.

Visiting Mary Phagan's grave for the first time, Alonzo Mann reads the tombstone inscription. This photo ran in a special section about the killing of Phagan and lynching of Leo Frank in The Tennessean on Sunday, March 7, 1982.(Photo: Nancy Warnecke / Tennessean archives)

Mann's statement puts him in direct conflict with the testimony to which Conley swore during the trial. Conley testified he was ordered by Frank to dispose of Mary Phagan's body by burning in the basement's furnace. He said he and Frank were together the whole time they took the body from the second floor of the factory directly to the basement, using the elevator. He said he was not on the first floor with the body.

Mann, however, says he saw Conley along with Mary Phagan on the first floor of the building, standing near the trapdoor that led to the basement. It later became apparent after the trial that the elevator did not go to the basement that day. This fact was cited as crucial by Georgia Gov. John Slaton when he commuted Frank's sentence in 1915 to life imprisonment.

There is no way that what Mann says today can be reconciled with the version of events which Conley related in court in 1913. Either Conley lied then, or Mann is lying now.

Mary Phagan(Photo: Tennessean archives)

Because of the historical significance of what Mann is saying, The Tennessean asked him to submit to both a lie detector test and a psychological stress evaluation examination procedures designed to determine if someone is lying. The tests were given by the Ball Investigative Agency here, and investigator Jeffery S. Ball provided the newspaper with a formal statement saying Mann responded truthfully to every question he was asked.

The Tennessean, after an extensive investigation which included the examination of files and records in several states and interviews with people knowledgeable about the case, concluded that Mann's story needed to be made public.

This is the first time that Mann has spoken publicly about what he knows of the brutal murder which led to the most blatant display of anti-Semitism in the nation's history and to a revival of the Ku Klux Klan an irony because Conley, the chief witness, was a black man.

Mann says he told relatives and friends about what he knew. Once, while in the Army, he got into a fight with another soldier who disputed his statement that it was Conley and not Frank who killed Mary Phagan. And he once tried to tell his story to an Atlanta reporter.

For nearly 70 years his story has been a secret, and it has preyed on his mind. Now that he perhaps does not have long to live, it is vitally important that the truth come out, he told The Tennessean.

"I was the world to know the truth, Mann, explained in a series of interviews with the newspaper. "The testimony which Conley gave at the trial to convict Frank was a lie from the beginning to the end."

Jim Conley(Photo: Tennessean archives)

That trial, surrounded by mob hysteria and violent anti-Jewish sentiment, was the most sensational in Atlanta's history. No other trial even comes close, except perhaps that of Wayne Williams, convicted a week ago in the deaths of two young Atlanta blacks and suspected of being the mass murderer who terrorized Atlanta for months.

Although Mary Phagan was not raped, Frank was denounced as a sexual pervert; however, Conley was the only witness to suggest that.

The start prosecution witness made four separate statements to police in connection with the case, the first one saying nothing to implicate Frank. However, each of the three statements that followed increasingly involved Frank.

During the trial, it was the fourth and last statement that that formed the basis for Conley's court testimony. On cross-examination he repeatedly acknowledged that he had made numerous mistakes in his earlier statements to police, but efforts by the defense to break down his tale were largely unsuccessful.

Frank was found guilty and sentenced to hang, but appeals delayed the execution. Two years later his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the case had created a furor across the nation. At that point August 1915 a group of vigilantes stormed the prison where Frank was being held, abducted him and lynched him.

Four black had been lynched in Georgia in the month before.

Although he possessed information in 1913 which he believes would have cleared Frank, Alonzo Mann did not tell authorities what he knew. He says he did not speak out because Conley threatened to kill him if he did and because his mother and father convinced him he should keep silent.

Now, finally, he has come forward with his story.

Alonzo Mann in 1982.(Photo: Tennessean archives)

"I wish I had done it differently," he says. "I wish I had told what I knew. But I never thought Mr. Frank would be convicted. And once he was convicted, I was sure he would eventually get out of it. I knew he was not guilty.

"I never fully realized until I was older that if I had told what I new Leo Frank would have been acquitted and gone free. Instead he was imprisoned. After he was convicted, my mother told me there was nothing we could do to change the jury's verdict. My father agreed with her. I continued to remain silent. Later, Frank was lynched by a mob from Marietta, Ga. I know, of course, that because I kept silent Leo Frank lost his life.

"I have spent many nights thinking about that. I have learned to live with it.

"At last I am able to get this off my heart. I believe it will help people to understand that courts and juries can make mistakes."

Mann first told his story to Tennessean reporter Jerry Thompson. Over a period of several weeks he repeated it many times to a team of Tennessean staff members including reporter Robert Sherborne. The reporters and the Tennessean chief librarian, Sandra Roberts, then began a thorough investigation of the Mary Phagan-Leo Frank case, checking the information which Mann had given to see whether it challenged the historical record.

Alonzo Mann's story is vastly important because it corrects history and it also makes history. Many legal scholars and writers who have researched the case have come away convinced that Frank was innocent and that a tragic miscarriage of justice occurred in Atlanta in 1913.

And many who have examined the case have suspected that it was Jim Conley who murdered Mary Phagan. At least three persons later were quoted as saying he confessed to them he was the killer.

An artist's interpretation of the confrontation between Alonzo Mann, then 14, and Jim Conley, holding the limp form of Mary Phagan on the first floor of the National Pencil Co. This drawing appeared in the March 7, 1982, edition of The Tennessean.(Photo: Drawing by Pat Mitchell / Tennessean archives)

Researchers and scholars have speculated in books and articles over the years as to how the murder might have occurred.

But what has always been lacking has been that crucial piece of evidence the eyewitness account to refute Conley. Mann's testimony today, contained in a sworn affidavit accompanying this story, provides that vital evidence.

Mann was called as a witness for the defense at the trial of Frank, but he testified he left the factory at or shortly before noon on the day of the murder. He was not asked if he returned, and he did not volunteer that key piece of information. Nor did he tell anything else that he knew of the crime.

Had he spoken out then, the course of history in the South could have dramatically different. The aftermath of that crime shocked the region.

The murder of Mary Phagan and the trial of the man accused of killing her had immediate consequences. Members of the mob that lynched Frank were active in the rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan The wave of anti-Semitism which swept the South as a result of the case led to creation of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.

The chief prosecutor in the Frank case, HughDorsey, was elected governor; Tom Watson, whose newspaper condemned Frank as "a Jew Sodomite," was elected to the US. Senate. Gov. Slaton was exiled to political obscurity.

It all started with Mary Phagan's staying.

Atlanta police, under extreme pressure to solve the case, accused Leo Frank of having murdered Mary Phagan. Sex was implied as the motive.

The evidence was flimsy and circumstantial except for the detailed testimony of the prosecution's chief witness, Jim Conley.

Frank, 29, was from New York and was Jewish a Yankee Jew. Georgians, in the main, disliked Northerners and distrusted Jews. During the trial hundreds of people gathered in the street outside the courthouse, and there were frequent catcalls of "Kill the Jew!"

The family of Mary Phagan, like many others in Georgia, had moved to Atlanta from the farm to seek a better life. In those days it was not unusual for a girl as young as Mary Phagan who was within about five weeks of her 14th birthday to work full time. She worked for 12 cents an hour, fitting metal tips on the end of pencils.

Mary was a beautiful girl 4 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing about 105 pounds. She had long, reddish-blond hair that hung down her back when it was not braided.

The community was outraged by her murder. In life she had been anonymous. In death she became a symbol of Southern womanhood.

She became a symbol of all those Georgians who felt they had been victimized by the system. If Mary Phagan became the symbol of ravished innocence, Leo Frank became a symbol of all that was perceived to be wrong with the South of 1913 lust and perversion, greed and exploitation.

Before Atlantapolice finally decided on Frank as their prime suspect, they arrested six other persons,including Conley, in connection with the murder. In retrospect it appears investigators ignored evidence which pointed compellinglytoward Conley's guilt.

Scholars who have studied the events of 1913 in Atlanta have tried to figure out why this happened. Some have thought they found the answer in the words of the late Lutheran Otterbein Bricker, pastor of First Christian Church in Bellwood, Ga., who was Mary Phagan's minister. Some 10 years after her death, in a letter to a friend, he wrote:

"When the police arrested a Jew, and a Yankee Jew at that, all of the inborn prejudice against the Jews rose up in a feeling of satisfaction, that herewould be a victim worthy to pay for the crime. From that day on, the newspapers were filled with the most awful stories, affidavits and testimonies, which proved the guiltof Leo M. Frank beyond the shadow of a doubt.

"The police gotprostitutes and criminals, on whom they had something, to swear anything and everything they wanted them to swear to. And reading these stories in the paper day by day,there was no doubt left in the mind of the general public but that Frank was guilty. And the whole city was in a frenzy. We were all mad crazy, and in a blood frenzy. Frank was brought to trial in mob spirit. One could feel the waves of madness which swept us all."

So Frank was convicted. The court sentenced him to hang. His numerous appeals wound their way through the courts for another two years.

The commutation of his death sentence to life in prison by then-Gov. Slaton came five days before expiration of Slaton's term of office. It was an act of amazing courage. But it caused an uproar in Georgia. Armed mobs roamed the streets of Atlanta for days as Jewish store owners closed their businesses and hid behind boarded-up doors and windows. Some fled permanently from the city.

At one point a crowd of some 5,000 persons,armed with revolvers, rifles, saws, hatchets and dynamite, surrounded the governor's mansion. They were routed by the state militia before they could do harm to Slaton.

Within day of the announcement of the commutation order, a group of about 75 men, calling themselves the Knights of Mary Phagan, met at the site of the little girl's grave and vowed to avenge her death. Twenty-five of them were picked to exact vengeance against Frank.

Late one night a couple of weeks later, the vigilantes stormed the prison farm at Milledgeville, Ga.,where Frank was being kept. Frank was sleeping. He was dragged from bed, handcuffed, tossed into a car and driven 175 miles to an oak grove just outside Marietta within a stone's throw of where Mary Phagan was born.

There they knotted Frank's neck in a noose and hanged him from an oak branch facing in the direction of the Phagan home.

No one was ever arrested for the lynching of Leo Frank. A grand jury, called to investigate the case, failed to indict anyone. Tom Watson, a formidable political figure who controlled the populist movement in the state by preaching hatred of Jews, Catholics and blacks, wrote in his paper, The Jeffersonian:

"In putting the Sodomite murderer to death, theVigilance Committee has done what the Sheriff would have done if Slaton had not been of the same mold as Benedict Arnold. LET JEW LIBERTINES TAKE NOTICE! Georgia is not for sale to rich criminals."

The Mary Phagan-Leo Frank case was over. The murder had been avenged and that was the end of that. Or, so some thought at the time.

But it was not over. Today, nearly70 years later, the case still lives.

"I believe in the sight of God that Jim Conley killed Mary Phagan," says Alonzo Mann, who has brought the case back to life.

"There will be some people who will be angry at me because I kept all this silent until it was too late to save Leo Frank's life. They will say that being young is no excuse. They will blame my mother. The only thing I can say is that she did what she thought was best for me and the family.

"Other people may hate me for telling it. I hope not, but I am prepared for that, too. I know that I haven't a long time to live. All that I have said is the truth.

"When my time comes, I hope that God understands me better for having told it. That is what matters most."

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'An Innocent Man Was Lynched': Reporting exonerated Leo Frank in the murder of Mary Phagan - Tennessean

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