Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Vigilantes, Episode 2

Episode Date: March 25, 2024

It should have been a leisurely Saturday off work for 13-year-old Mary Phagan, who was looking forward to celebrating the Confederate Memorial Day holiday. It should have been an easy day for Leo Frank, too, who hoped to leave his job at the factory early to go to the local baseball game with his wife. It should have been a carefree day for 16-year old Grace Hicks, who was enjoying a rare day off, and waiting for her friend to join her at the parade. It was anything but a beautiful, joyful, restful day.  Mary Phagan would never make it to the parade. Grace would soon be faced with an unimaginable task. And Leo Frank? Why couldn't the police get in touch with him? What happened in the basement of the pencil factory at that grisly crime scene? And who wrote that strange note? Join us for part two of this seven-episode series, The Vigilantes. Host/ Executive Producer: Sharon McMahon Supervising Producer: Melanie Buck Parks Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder  Writers: Amy Watkin, Sharon McMahon Researched by: Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, Melanie Buck Parks Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month. Every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come,

first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at opentable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Here's where it gets interesting is now available ad-free. Head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free to subscribe today. It's Saturday, April 26, 1913. Confederate Memorial Day. A southern holiday creating happy chaos in the streets of Atlanta despite the clouds and drizzle, with parades and games and what seems like the entire city out and about in their Sunday best.

Leo Frank, however, was at work in the pencil factory, finishing the week's reports. Normally, Leo was happy to scratch out numbers in his ledger books, but today he was hoping to leave early to catch the holiday baseball game with his wife, Lucille. Instead, he was stuck at work dealing with a disgruntled former employee looking for his shoes and passing out people's pay. Another of Leo's employees, a 13-year-old girl named Mary Fagan, was all dressed up and heading to the parade. She had only one store-bought dress, and this was an important enough occasion to wear it. The dress was light lavender and went well with her blue straw hat. Mary tied two bows in her hair and topped off her ensemble with a small silver purse and a parasol. She wanted to

get her week's pay before going to the parade, so she stopped by the office of the pencil factory to pick up her money. Newt Lee, the night watchman at the pencil factory, was also at work that day and had arrived early, but his boss Leo asked him to come back later. Newt, who had been born into enslavement, was understandably not eager to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, so he found a place to take an afternoon nap and then went back a few hours later to start his shift. None of these little moments, Newt arriving early, an angry employee looking for his shoes, Mary going to pick up her money, would have been significant, if not for what happened next.

I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. That day in Atlanta, the rumor was Confederate General Stonewall Jackson's widow was going to attend Atlanta's Confederate Memorial Day celebration. Atlanta was proud to have rebuilt itself after the city was captured and burned by Union forces in 1864. Stonewall Jackson was a Civil War hero who'd died for the cause, and the city was honored to greet his widow on this day set aside to remember fallen Confederate soldiers. Celebrations for Confederate Memorial Day started in 1866, and the day was intended to commemorate the Civil War and those who'd served under Robert E. Lee. Typically, Atlanta held a parade and singers performed an

opera, and Southern League baseball players were eager to compete in front of a large crowd. Mary wasn't much for opera, but she was very excited to see the parade. She had blue eyes and auburn hair, and people said that Mary was, quote, well-developed for her age, meaning she probably looked older than she actually was. She was excited to turn 14 the following month. She wore most of her hair loose down her back, which at the time was a sure sign that Mary was still a child. A woman would have worn her hair piled on top of her head. Mary had little dimples when she smiled, which was often. Some called her the prettiest girl in the neighborhood, and at least two young men wanted to date her. Her claim to fame so far in life was playing Sleeping Beauty in a pageant at First Christian Church in Atlanta.

She giggled through the rehearsals of the scene where the prince kisses Sleeping Beauty. Mary was born when her mother was 25 years old, just a few months after Mary's father died from measles. The Fagin family had farmed near Marietta, Georgia, for generations. Mary's grandfather was a respected landowner, but by the time Mary was born, the family had fallen on very hard times. Mary's mother ran a boarding house in Marietta, just about 20 miles north of Atlanta. The older children went to work in the cotton and textile mills to help put food on the table. And by older children, I mean like 10 years old. In fact, Mary was 10 when she went to work in a paper mill. Children made lower wages

than adults on average. They could be hired at around $2 per week, whereas adults expected to be paid between $6 and $7 a week. In a household like Mary's, every little bit helped. In 1913, many people in Mary's community believed that work was the center of a moral life, and so as long as one kept free from idleness, there was no room for immoral behavior. What's the saying? Idle hands are the devil's playground? Ironically, in this case, the factory itself would become the devil's playground. Factory managers also tended to believe that children were simply better suited to certain types of factory work than full-grown adults. They could replace and rethread bobbins on large textile machines, for example, by squeezing their small hands, arms, or whole bodies into crevices in the machines.

Full-grown adults could never manage to do that. By the time Mary was 12, she had left school and was working full-time. For a family as poor as Mary's, time spent at school was wasted for a child who could be making money to help put food on the table. Around that same time, Mary's mother remarried. Mary thought very highly of her stepfather, even copying a poem called My Pa from the successful Farmer magazine so she could give it to him as a gift. from the successful farmer magazine so she could give it to him as a gift. In a letter to her cousin, like a typical teenager, Mary complained about her parents,

writing that, Mama is getting where she will not let me go anywhere. And Mary talked about moving out west. But before Mary saved up money for that, her family moved to a poor section of Atlanta where Mary started working at the National Pencil Company for about 10 cents an hour. The uniquely American pencil with the attached eraser is what gave Mary employment. Her job was to attach erasers to the nearly finished pencils, and she did this for about 50 hours every week. pencils, and she did this for about 50 hours every week. Mary used something called a knurling machine to get erasers onto the pencils. She probably sat at a workbench in a long line of

young girls doing the same work, wrapping metal around the pencils and erasers and inserting them into the knurling machines where two gears circled around, pinching the metal to bite into the erasers. In 1913, in the state of Georgia, it was legal for children over the age of 10 to work 11-hour days. More than 43% of children in Georgia between 10 and 15 years old had full-time jobs. Often, these children were illiterate because they didn't attend school past the first grade. Mary, however, was fairly unique because she could read and write. That Saturday in April 1913, Mary did her chores at home, eating some bread and cabbage for breakfast before leaving early to pick up her week's pay in time to watch the Confederate Memorial Day parade.

She left home somewhere between 11.15 and 11.45 a.m. It was cloudy and misting when Mary dashed to catch a streetcar. She waved to her friend and co-worker Helen Ferguson and chatted with another friend, a 15-year-old newsboy named George Epps, once she was on board. Perry and George talked about going to the parade together, but first she headed to the pencil factory alone. The National Pencil Company building loomed over its downtown Atlanta neighborhood, extending the length of the entire block. It was called the Venable Building

because it was built by William and Samuel Venable, brothers who owned Southern Granite Company in Georgia. The name Venable was carved in the granite over the front entrance. The Venable brothers weren't just the overseers of several Atlanta buildings. They owned an entire mountain, Stone Mountain, which I'll tell you the importance of in a future episode. On the side of the building, the National Pencil Company name was painted above a huge advertisement for a supplement, SSS Tonic, meant to treat things like anemia. Its slogan was for the blood, and it was painted in huge letters on the side of the pencil factory. On this day, For the Blood was more than just an advertisement. It foreshadowed

the events that would make the Venable building infamous. The factory's logbook showed Mary picked up her pay from Leo Frank just after 12 o'clock noon. But she never showed up at the Confederate Memorial Day Parade as planned. Mary was the youngest of five children, and her family got worried when she didn't come home for supper on Saturday night. They knocked on doors, talked to neighbors, and because they didn't have a telephone, they even went to the police station to report Mary missing. It just wasn't like Mary to disappear like this. Where was she? Mary's 16-year-old friend, Grace Hicks, attended the parade and had a wonderful Saturday enjoying her day off.

Normally, she'd have been working at the pencil factory with Mary, but she had been woken up on Sunday morning around 4.30 when her brother-in-law, who was a police officer, called to say that a body had been found in the basement of the National Pencil Company. body had been found in the basement of the National Pencil Company. They suspected it might have been a factory employee, so he wondered if Grace might be able to identify who it was. Grace said she would try, so her brother-in-law picked her up and raced back to the undertakers. Several police officers watched silently as Grace walked over to the body lying on a table. When the coroner pulled the sheet back, the first thing Grace noticed was hair. Grace wasn't the only pencil factory employee directly affected by the murder. Tall, slim Newt Lee had a full mustache and wore a black work cap

with a flat top and a short bill. He was at work earlier than usual on April 26th. Newt had been asked by Leo Frank to come in at 4 p.m. instead of 6 so Leo could leave early to enjoy the holiday, but Leo still had work to do when Newt first reported for duty, so Leo said, never mind, come back at your usual time. When Newt returned, a recently fired factory worker named John Gant was there talking with Leo, arguing that he needed to get into the building to collect a pair of shoes he'd left behind. Gant was a big man, and he was very upset. behind. Gant was a big man, and he was very upset. Leo decided it wasn't worth risking a physical altercation, so he let Gant into the building just before he was ready to leave. Once Gant left, it was business as usual for Newt Lee, who walked the dark, quiet factory floors,

watching for fire and making sure no intruders entered the closed factory. Leo called the factory telephone at 7 p.m. to make sure everything was okay, concerned that John Gant might have been causing trouble, but Newt reported that everything was fine. Newt didn't usually check the basement of the factory on his rounds, since there was really nothing down there but a boiler and garbage. But he did have to go down there in the early morning hours to use the bathroom. It was the only place in the building with a toilet that black people were allowed to use. After completing the necessaries, Newt picked up his lantern to find his way back to the ladder and turned just to check that the alley door into the basement was locked.

As he turned his head, he saw a dark shape on the ground where there was usually only sawdust. As the night watchman, it was his job to notice and investigate anything unusual, so he reluctantly moved closer. It was a body. Newt ran to the phone and called the police at 3.30 a.m., saying frantically, A white woman has been killed up here. A white woman has been killed up here. Britt Craig, a reporter for the Atlanta Constitution, happened to be at the police station when the call came in. Overhearing the call, he tailed the officers and arrived at the factory along with them.

As the small group entered the pitch black basement, they had to wait for their eyes to adjust to the darkness before they could see they were in a large, windowless room with a dirt floor. There was a storage shed running almost the length of one wall. The boiler was there, along with the toilet Newt had used and some excess garbage. As the officers held up their lanterns to try to see, Newt Lee said, look out white folks, you'll step on her. Officers stopped short, realizing they'd indeed almost stepped on something, or someone. An officer muttered, dear God, when they held up their lanterns and got their first glimpses of the body. Later at the coroner's, when Grace saw the person who had died, she cried, Oh my God, that's Mary Fagan. And she collapsed from the shock. For some reason that's lost to history,

the police did not figure out where the Fagan family lived, nor did they dispatch an officer there. They left the job of contacting Mary's parents to 16-year-old Helen Ferguson, the friend Mary had waved at on her way to the factory on Saturday morning. Helen lived in the same neighborhood as Mary's family and knew they didn't have a phone. She didn't know that they'd been awake all night knocking on doors, begging police to find their daughter, and finally just simply waiting for Mary to come home. Helen arrived at the Fagin house at daybreak and spoke only one sentence. Whether that sentence was specific, like, Mary's been murdered, or vague, like I'm so sorry,

it's clear that Mary's mother immediately knew her youngest child was dead. Mary's mother collapsed on the floor when she heard. The family called a doctor who gave her a sedative to get her through this terrible day. Mary had been dead for hours. Her body was cold. She lay mostly on her left shoulder, face down in a trash-filled crater on the basement floor. Officers tried rubbing wood shavings onto her face to clean it, but eventually had to roll down one stocking over the knee in order to be sure that Newt Lee was correct when he said he was identifying a white girl. Newt had been sure, though, because her long, straight, auburn hair made identifying her race easy for him. When the police turned Mary's body over, they found a seven-foot-long, three-quarter-inch twine rope around her neck, along with a strip of fabric horned from Mary's underskirt. It was later determined that the rope had come from inside the factory. Her mouth was full of ash and sawdust. Grace Hex later said that Mary was bruised in the face somewhere and one of her teeth was knocked out.

She looked like she had been hit with something right there, running to her own face. Grace noticed a hole in Mary's head and pencil shavings all in her hair. pencil shavings all in her hair. She also noted that Mary's face was mighty near black with dirt or ash rubbed into it as if she had been dragged over the dirt floor or through cinders. Mary's best lilac dress was torn. There was a jagged gash above her left ear. Her right eye was puffy and purple. She had cuts on her face and a bite on one shoulder. The left side of her body was covered in scratches and bruising consistent with her body being dragged across the floor. Her dress was pushed above her knees and police guessed that she had been quote criminally assaulted or outraged, words that were used at the time to mean rape. Mary's hands were pinned underneath her body, but she hadn't been tied up.

Some of her fingers were out of joint, suggesting that she had fought the attacker. The police officers called Leo Frank, but no one answered the phone. This detail felt a bit strange because Leo's family was wealthy enough to have a phone inside their home, and there were four people staying there, Leo, his wife Lucille, and Lucille's parents. Of course, the phone was probably downstairs in the kitchen area. Could Leo not hear the phone? Was he such a deep sleeper? Was he unable to answer for some reason? Was he not at home? Was he avoiding their call? All of it struck the police as suspicious. The coroner arrived to examine the scene and remove the body, but not before

basically everyone there had touched it and trampled all over the area around it. Officers spotted a sliding wooden door in the basement that led to a quiet alley. This sliding door appeared to them to have been recently opened and closed. Later inspection revealed blood on it. Some reports say bloody handprints or fingerprints, and some simply just say blood. It had been forced open from the inside, and the iron bar likely used to pry it open was propped against the wall nearby, inside the basement.

There were three ways to get into and out of the factory basement. A ladder going up to the first floor through what some referred to as a trap door, an elevator operated by pulling the cables to move it up and down, and a sliding door leading into the alley. Officers saw a path from the elevator shaft to the body, indicating Mary had been dragged from the elevator to the place where they had found her. Also in the elevator shaft, which was really just a dirt floor pit where the hand-operated elevator would land when it descended, were the same sorts of garbage and debris found all over the basement. Digging through debris right in the elevator shaft,

officers found Mary's parasol, a ball of red twine, and quote, a fresh mound of human excrement that looked like someone had dumped naturally. In other words, someone had recently used the bathroom right in the elevator shaft, not in the toilet, sitting very nearby, directly under the floor of the elevator shaft. Officers ignored this unpleasant bit of potential evidence, but it seems like they should have asked more questions. Was this evidence of an outsider, someone unfamiliar with the factory in the building close to the time that Mary was killed. Maybe they didn't know there was a toilet nearby because the basement was so dark. Could it have been an employee wanting to make a small protest against the factory?

Or maybe it was a white person choosing to use the floor rather than the toilet designated for black people. No one seemed to care about answering any of these questions. A continued search of the basement turned up one of Mary's shoes and a bloody handkerchief. Her blue straw hat was in a pile of garbage. Mary's little silver purse with her pay, at least $1.20 in it, was not there. What exactly had happened in that basement? Who could have killed Mary? And why wasn't Leo Frank answering his phone? Police also found a note near the body, buried under the refuse and pencil shavings, written in pencil on white lined paper. The

writing was cursive with no capital letters or punctuation. I'll point out the misspellings as I read so that you can get a fuller sense of what the note looked like. The note said, quote, he said he would, spelled W-O-O-D, love me, land down play, like the night witch, W-I-T-C-H, did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef, S-L-E-F. He said he would love me, land down play, like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did boy his slef. Someone on the scene reported hearing Newt Lee quietly mutter, White folks, that's me. Recognizing that Night Witch probably meant Night Watch, which was his job. Police said Newt remained calm and steady through their time at the factory, but newspapers reported that he was jumpy and wildly excited. For a second time,

officers tried to reach Leo Frank's home, but again, they got no answer. There was another note near Mary's head, also buried under garbage, this one written in cursive on a National Pencil Company order sheet, again with no capital letters or punctuation. It said, Ma'am, that Negro hired down here did this. I went to make water and he pushed me down that hole, a long, tall, negro, black, that who, h-o-o, it weighs, w-a-s-e, long, slim, s-l-e-a-m, tall, negro, i, right, w-r-i-g-h-t, while play with me. Ma'am, that negro higher down here did this. I went to make water, and he pushed me down the hole, a long, tall, black Negro, that who it weighs, long, slim, tall Negro I write while play with me.

I know, it doesn't make much sense to hear these notes read, and in some ways it makes less sense to see them, because the spelling errors and ways it makes less sense to see them because the spelling errors and poor writing make them difficult to figure out. Had Mary written these notes, I write while play with me, indicates it was coming from her hand. But we know she was able to read and write, and her letters to her cousin show much stronger writing skills than these notes demonstrate. Certainly, if she was writing under distress, she wouldn't be worried about spelling and punctuation. Was she somehow left alone with enough time to find papers and a pencil to jot these things down before she died? Were they buried under the garbage because Mary hadn't

wanted her killer to see them and destroy them? Or had the killer written them to throw off suspicion and point the finger at someone else? If you've ever watched a police procedural show, you're now waiting for gloved officers to carefully pick up the notes and place them into plastic bags. Well, get ready to lose your minds over this next bit. Almost immediately, the police decided that the notes were not important, and they did not focus on them in any way. They did not investigate the notes. The notes were so unimportant to police, in fact, that Harold Ross, a writer for the Atlanta Journal, who was upset about being scooped by a rival journalist that was with the police when they saw Mary's body,

took the murder notes from the police station for a story he was working on. Yes, a journalist just walked off with the notes from the scene of a brutal murder. And truly, like I said, detectives seemed unconcerned about these notes, maybe because they felt they had already solved Mary's murder. The sergeant on the scene turned to Newtley and said, and said, you did this, or you know who did. Newtley was tall, and he did have quite dark skin, details mentioned in those murder notes police had lost track of. And he was the night watchman, after all,

one of the only people with access to the building after hours. Police arrested Newtley. Harold Ross, who would go on to found New Yorker magazine, later wrote, The murder of Mary Fagan was the most brutal crime in the annals of the South. After the unfolding of the details, the police did what they always do in Georgia. Arrested a Negro. At this point, it is 5.30 a.m. on Sunday, April 27th. Newt Lee was at police headquarters for questioning, and detectives were calling Leo Frank's house again. Still no answer at Leo's house.

At around 7 a.m., someone at the Frank home finally answered the phone, and by 7.30, lease were at their house. Leo reported feeling as if he hadn't slept because in his dreams, the phone had kept ringing. That was as close as anyone came to explaining why Leo hadn't answered their earlier calls. Apparently, the whole family said they slept through them. Leo came to the door before putting on his shirt collar and tie, and for a fastidious upper-class man like Leo, he must have felt practically naked. He also hadn't eaten anything. Police wouldn't tell him what had happened, only that he needed to come to the factory with them. Leo kept asking, what is going on? And they either dodged his questions or ignored them altogether. Leo later talked about his first interaction with the police, saying,

I asked them what the trouble was, and the man who I afterwards found out was a detective hung his head and didn't say anything. One officer said that Leo's voice was hoarse and trembling and nervous and excited. He looked to me like he was pale. He seemed to be very nervous in handling his collar. He couldn't get his tie tied and he talked very rapid. Another officer said Mr. Frank seemed to be extremely nervous. His questions were jumpy. to be extremely nervous. His questions were jumpy. His voice was a refined voice, kind of ladylike. He was rubbing his hands. He seemed to be excited. Back then, and in this context, excited likely meant something like agitated. Was Leo's nervousness an example of how easily agitated he was, how he chain-smoked when confronted with a business meeting that didn't go the way he wanted?

Or maybe Leo was guilty of something. Lucille offered everyone coffee. One officer remembered it as Leo offering coffee and assumed he was trying to delay their departure to the factory. In the end, no one had coffee or breakfast. Police asked Leo, do you know Mary Fagan? Leo said no. They said, didn't the little girl with hair hanging down her back come up to your office yesterday sometime for her money? Yes, that had happened, but Leo didn't know it was Mary Fagan.

She'd given him her employee number, not her name. When he finally got his tie on, Leo got into the police car and apparently shivered despite the spring weather. Police took Leo to the mortuary first and later reported Leo's hesitation to look at the body, and after he did, he quickly turned away. Some said he recoiled in horror. Leo couldn't have turned away very quickly, though, because he later shared a number of details from that moment, saying that the coroner removed the sheet which was covering the body and took the head in his hands, turned it over, put his finger exactly where the wound on the left side of the head was located, put his finger right on it.

I noticed the hands and arms of the little girl were very dirty, blue and ground with dirt and cinders, the nostrils, the mouth, the mouth being open, nostrils and mouth just full of sawdust and swollen, and there was a deep scratch over the left eye on the forehead. About the neck there was twine and also a piece of white rag. After looking at the body, I identified that little girl as the one who had been up shortly after noon the day previous and got her money from me. Is it possible that shivering, fumbling, hesitating, recoiling Leo was a man in a state of shock or were these signs of guilt? Leo later said, imagine awakened out of my sound sleep and a rundown in the cool of the morning

in an automobile driven at top speed without any food or breakfast, rushing into a dark passageway, coming into a darkened room, and then suddenly an electric light flashed on. And to see the sight that was presented by that poor little child, why it was a sight that was enough to drive a man to distraction. Of course I was nervous. Any man would be nervous if he was a man. The officers then took Leo to the factory where he checked his records. Yes, Mary Fagan had collected her pay from him the afternoon before. Leo gave detectives a tour of the factory and an accounting of his activities all day Saturday. When he was trying to use the elevator, which was manually

operated with cables, Leo pulled at the steel cable to get the elevator moving, but it wouldn't budge. Leo later said that it seemed to be caught and I couldn't move it. It seemed like the chain, which runs down in the basement, had slipped a cog and gotten out of gear and needed somebody to force it back. The police officers who were with Leo claimed he was anything but calm. One officer reported that when we started down the elevator, Mr. Frank was nervous, shaking all over. I can't say positively as to whether his whole body was shaking or not, but he was shaking. One of the officers, who was bigger and heavier than Leo, gave the cable a yank that got the elevator moving. Once the little group reached the

basement and stepped out of the elevator, they were overwhelmed by the horrible stench. Surely you remember what was at the bottom of that elevator shaft. The first officers on the scene hadn't collected it, and this time the elevator crushed it, releasing the noxious fumes. If you're keeping a list of evidence, so far we have two murder notes, a rope, bloody handprints or at least blood on the basement door, an iron pipe, and a pile of human waste now flattened by an elevator. According to officers, once they were in the basement, Leo didn't pay much attention to the spot where Mary's body was found, but he was upset by the blood on the door. Police then brought Leo to the station, an imposing three-story brick building

with a grand marble arched entrance with gargoyles and a windowless tower in the front center of the building. Leo answered more questions and was released. Police would have kept Leo longer to show him the murder notes, but wouldn't you know it the notes were already gone in the hands of the journalist who took them no police officers investigated mary's clothing for evidence of the murderer's identity and for weeks they allowed pretty much anyone into the factory basement to poke around. So even if they had wanted to collect fingerprints or shoe prints, the scene was quickly too compromised for reliable information. Nearly all of the physical evidence was disregarded by the police. Both notes,

the bloody door, and Mary's clothing. Leo was quoted in the Atlanta, Georgia newspaper a couple of days after the murder, remarking on the carelessness shown by the police department in not making a complete investigation as to fingerprints and other evidence before a great throng of people were allowed to enter the place. So with all of this history and the evidence in front of police that April, things weren't looking good for Newt Lee. The police did arrest a few other people. They arrested streetcar conductor Arthur Mullinax, a white man who'd supposedly been seen with Mary that night. They arrested John Gant, the fired factory employee, also a white man who'd been at

the factory at about 6 p.m. to get his shoes. And they arrested Gordon Bailey, a black elevator operator at the factory. All three of these men were briefly questioned and then released. The story of the murder dominated the headlines of every newspaper, and in the two days between Mary's murder and her funeral, nearly 10,000 people filed through the mortuary to see her body. Tuesday morning, April 29th, was Mary's funeral at the Second Baptist Church. Hundreds of people, including Leo Frank, were there to see the small white casket and sing, Nearer, My God, to Thee, while Mary's mother sobbed loudly. When a girl was murdered

at her place of work, it was the embodiment of the worst fears of tens of thousands of families who sent their daughters to work every day. Even Mary's mother was quoted in the Atlanta Georgian saying, I'm so sorry for other young girls working everywhere to think that they're all open to the same things and there's nothing to protect them. Folks sharing this collective grief became a mob, bound and determined to punish whomever they thought had committed the crime. In yet another example of yellow journalism, or tabloid journalism as it's known today, the Atlanta Constitution printed a full-page feature covering Mary's funeral, complete with photographs, and on the next page was printed an unverified story titled, A Funeral by Lamplight, claiming children employed by the National Pencil

Company were not given daylight time off to attend their friend's funeral because their boss, Leo Frank, was cruel and probably also responsible for Mary's death. was cruel and probably also responsible for Mary's death. The gist of the story was this. The outsider, the educated, wealthy, Jewish Yankee had come down to Georgia to rob southern children of their innocence by making them work at factories and, as a logical next step, murdering them in cold blood. Or maybe the murderer was Newt Lee. The kind of racism that started a civil war just a few decades earlier was alive and well after all. Remember how the newspapers and gubernatorial candidates in 1906 invented stories about scary black men in order to swing white men's votes?

Thousands of the same white people who'd indiscriminately murdered black people in the Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906 were still alive, and they believed Mary's murder was the quote-unquote typical crime of a black man. Mary was buried in the Citizen's Cemetery in Marietta. The clergyman prayed over her grave, saying, We pray that the authorities apprehend the guilty party or parties and punish them to the full extent of the law. Even that is too good for the imp of Satan that did this. Her mother broke down again, falling to her knees. According to the Atlanta Constitution, she said, she was taken away when the spring was coming, the spring that was so like her.

Oh, and she wanted to see the spring. She loved it. It loved her. Goodbye, Mary. Goodbye. It's too big a hole to put you in, though. It's so big, and you were so little, my own little Mary. Mary Fagan remained in an unmarked grave until 1915, when a local Confederate veterans organization put a six-foot marble slab there that reads, in part, Sleep, little girl. Sleep in your humble grave. Many an aching heart in Georgia beats for you,

and many a tear from eyes unused to weep has paid you a tribute too sacred for words. The evening of Mary's funeral, Leo and his wife Lucille attended a party at the Metropolitan Opera Company. The opera they were celebrating that night happened to be Puccini's Tosca, one of his most tragic. Almost everyone is dead by the end of the performance. After the party, the family played cards at home, but Leo never joined in. He sat and watched, reading the international newspapers and appearing distracted. At this point, police seemed no closer to finding the murderer than they had been the moment they first saw Mary's body, even though Newt Lee was still being held for questioning.

No Newt Lee was still being held for questioning. Multiple Atlanta newspapers were publishing several editions every day, and most of their coverage was about this murder. The newspapers were even offering rewards for information leading to the murderer's arrest. The pressure on police to track down this murderer was immense. One of Harold Ross's stories in the Atlanta Journal would turn out to be prophetic. Ross wrote that the police in the factory basement the night of Mary's murder understood something, which determined their whole course of action.

The murder of Mary Fagan must be paid for with blood. And a Negro's blood would not suffice. In our next episode, the police zero in on two suspects and the case goes to trial. There's so much more I need to share with you. Like, were the police as incompetent as they sound so far? What role will racism end up playing in this investigation and trial? Are Leo Frank and Newt Lee innocent, or are they accomplices in this awful crime? I can tell you this. Another another suspect will come into focus, one whose story will keep changing. I'll see you next time. The show is hosted and executive produced by Sharon McMahon. Our supervising producer is Melanie Buck-Parks, and our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. It's written by Amy Watkin and Sharon McMahon,

and it's researched by Kari Anton, Sharon McMahon, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Melanie Buckparks. If you enjoyed this episode and want to subscribe ad-free, head to SharonMcMahon.com slash ad-free. We'd love for you to leave us a rating or a review and be sure to hit subscribe so you'll get the next episode as soon as it's available.