Murder: True Crime Stories - UNSOLVED: Mary Phagan 1

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

In 1913, 13-year-old Mary Phagan was strangled to death in the basement of the National Pencil Company factory in Atlanta. Although the evidence pointed to a factory worker as the killer, the site’s superintendent Leo M. Frank became the main suspect in Mary's murder. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original. For more, follow us on Tiktok and Instagram @crimehouse 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

This is Crime House. When we try to unravel a murder, it's easy to break it down into a binary, the victim and the killer. It's understandable. We need to know who the victim was, why they were chosen, and how they live their lives. And we need to understand the killer, to get inside their mind and try to fathom how they could commit such an unspeakable crime. But when you break down a murder, there's another incredibly important aspect at play. The circumstances. Because murder, and the ensuing investigation, doesn't happen in a vacuum.

After Mary Fagan was killed, the circumstances around her death, the time, and the place played a massive role in the ensuing investigation. And because of those circumstances, an innocent man may have been punished. People's lives are like a story. There's a beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories, a Crime House original. Every Tuesday, I'll explore the story of a notorious murder or murders I'll bring awareness to stories that need to be heard with a focus on those who were impacted

At crime house. We want to express our gratitude to you our community for making this possible Please support us by rating reviewing and following murder true crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. And to enhance your Murder True Crime Stories listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode ad free, and instead of having to wait for each episode of a two-part series, you'll get access to both at once. Plus, exciting bonus content. This is the first of a two-part series on the 1913 murder of Mary Fagan, a 13-year-old girl who worked at a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia.

After Mary was killed, her boss, Leo Leo Frank became the prime suspect, despite mountains of evidence that suggested he was innocent. This week we'll talk about who Mary Fagan was, what brought Leo Frank to Atlanta, and the circumstances that led to his arrest. Next week we'll talk about the trial, the aftermath, and a tragic ending that reverberates to this day. All that and more coming up. ["The Last Supper"] Hey, everyone.

Carter here. If you're enjoying the stories of murder true crime stories, the team here at Crime House has another show I think you'll love. It's called Money Crimes with Nicole Lapin. Each episode dives into the darkest corners of financial crime and sometimes ends in murder. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. On Sunday, April 27, 1913, Newt Lee was on duty at the National Pencil Factory in Atlanta, Georgia.

Lee was a night watchman and at 3 a.m. he went down to the basement to use the bathroom for black employees. As he climbed down the steps, the light from his lantern fell on something. The dead body of a little girl. Lee rushed upstairs and called the police, who arrived within minutes. At first, they couldn't identify the victim because the girl's body was too disfigured. But one of the officers on the scene had a sister-in-law who worked at the factory. By 4.30 a.m., she was at the crime scene and was able to identify the girl by the dress

she was wearing. It was her co-worker, 13-year-old Mary Fagan. But who was Mary Fagan, and how did a teenage girl from rural Georgia come to be working at a pencil factory in downtown Atlanta? Mary Fagan was born on June 1, 1899 to a family of meager means. Times were desperate, so Mary, who was white, had to leave school at an early age to join hundreds of other girls on the assembly line at Atlanta's National Pencil Factory.

She worked long hours for barely any pay. When Mary went into work to pick up her paycheck on the day she died, she was given only $1.20 for working two shifts, less than the modern equivalent of $38 for two full shifts of work. That was the world Mary Fagan was born into. In the years after the Civil War, the southern economy had unraveled, the chief reason being that they could no longer rely on slave labor. But on a larger scale, the agricultural model the South had relied upon just wasn't viable anymore in a world of rapid industrialization.

Destitute farmers and their children had no choice but to find work in factories, where they endured hard labor and excruciatingly long hours, just to return home to squalid slums ravaged with poverty and disease. Those intolerable conditions were a breeding ground for anger and resentment. There was a growing sense throughout Georgia and its neighboring states that Northerners were taking advantage of a still rebuilding South, using the opportunity to line their pockets at the workers' expense. By 1913, you couldn't find a better symbol for this resentment than the pencil factory

where Mary Fagan worked. Pay was low, the conditions were backbreaking, and perhaps worst of all, it was run by a New Yorker. And on the morning of Sunday, April 27, 1913, the day Mary's body was discovered, that resentment was about to boil over. When the police arrived in the factory's basement, there was no shortage of physical evidence to help find Mary's killer. Her body was face down, covered in grime and sawdust. Her face was matted with blood from a blow to

the head and she had been strangled with a cord that was lying near the body. A piece of cloth had been torn from her underwear, suggesting that she may have been sexually assaulted. There was also a trail in the sawdust around where her body was found, indicating she had been dragged there, and a back door leading to an alleyway had bloody fingerprints on it. But the strongest evidence was a pair of notes left near the body, which seemed to have been written by Mary herself. The first note implicated a long, tall man as the killer and declared that the night witch did it. The second was addressed to Mary's mother, or at least was meant to seem that way.

It described how Mary had gone to use the bathroom and been accosted by a black man who worked at the factory. If this second note was to be believed, Mary had spent her last few moments alive writing it. Neither piece of evidence helped matters for Newt Lee, the night watchman, who was tall, thin, and black. And Night Witch may have been a misspelling of Night Watch. With these two notes, the police had a writing sample that could have only been made by two people, Mary Fagan or the person who killed her. And even if the handwriting proved to be a dead end, fingerprinting technology had been around for decades by 1913

and had first been used in an American criminal case three years earlier. These murder notes, as they came to be known, should have been the key piece of evidence used to catch the killer. But almost from the start, the police made critical mistakes. First, they sawed off the boards on the basement's back door with the bloody fingerprints on them, but before the fingerprints could be analyzed, the boards were lost, and it seems like authorities never examined some bloody fingerprints on Mary's jacket either. As for the notes, they did play a crucial role in finding the suspect,

but not because of any physical evidence linking them to Mary's killer. Instead, the notes helped the Atlanta authorities find, in the words of a pastor at Mary's church, a victim worthy to pay for the crime. Before the sun fully rose that day, the spark of outrage over Mary Fagan's murder was already being fanned by the local media. A reporter for the Atlanta Constitution named Britt Craig had actually been at police headquarters

when Newt Lee's initial telephone call came in, and he'd gone with them to the crime scene. Mere hours after Mary's body was discovered, Craig's article ran on the front page of the Constitution's morning edition. After that, the press and their readers couldn't get enough. From that moment on, it became a race to the bottom as numerous local and regional papers rushed outdo each other's coverage. By the time Detective Starnes called the Frank household on Sunday morning, the pressure was already building on the police to find a person capable of something so monstrous, and find them fast.

Hey there, this is Carter Roy. If you're enjoying Crime House originals like Murder True Crime Stories, then you'll love our studio's newest show, Money Crimes, hosted by bestselling author and entrepreneur Nicole Lapin. Money Crimes is all about the dark side of finance and how to protect yourself from it, especially when it ends in murder. From cunning Ponzi schemes to cutthroat politics and killer con artists, you'll learn that the finance world is more dangerous than you ever imagined. Money Crimes is a Crime House original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes release every Thursday.

Just search for money crimes. And for early access and ad-free listening, be sure to subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. After 13-year-old Mary Fagan was murdered, the police wasted no time springing into action, or at least appearing to, arresting three men on suspicion of murder before the case wasn't much more than 24 hours old. First they brought in Newt Lee, the night watchman. He was questioned by Detectives John Starnes and John Black, and they subjected him to intense verbal and physical abuse. Despite all that, Lee managed to maintain his story, and they quickly let him go.

They also arrested Arthur Mullinax, a streetcar conductor who admitted to having a crush on Mary, despite being 11 years older than the 13-year-old girl. Finally, there was James Gant, a disgruntled former employee who'd stopped by the pencil factory the day Mary died to retrieve some of his belongings. All of them were questioned, but eventually released. That's because the police had already found the person they really wanted to charge with Mary Fagan's murder. Barely four hours after the body of Mary Fagan was found in the basement of the National Pencil Factory, the plant's superintendent, 29-year-old Leo Frank, was awakened by a telephone call.

It was Detective John Starnes. He informed Leo that he was needed at the factory. Leo still had no idea about the murder and tried to put the detective off. It was early and he hadn't had a chance to eat breakfast yet. But Starnes wasn't having it. He said they'd send a car. To understand what happened next, it's important to understand the role Leo Frank played in Southern society and where he came from.

Leo was born in Cuero, Texas on April 17th, 1884, but he didn't live there for long. When he was only a few months old, his parents moved their small family to New York, where he enjoyed a typical middle-class Jewish upbringing. Leo went to public school, studied art, and eventually graduated from Cornell with a degree in mechanical engineering. When he was 23, his uncle, Moses Frank, approached him with a proposition. Moses had recently invested in a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, and the plant could use someone with Leo's background and skill set. He took the job. Leo excelled in his new role, quickly rising to become a director, then a vice president, then the superintendent of the entire factory. But despite all his success,

he never felt at home in the South. He was, in many ways, the consummate outsider. As a skinny, bespeckled, Ivy League-educated Yankee, he represented everything the people of Atlanta had chosen to blame for their struggles. But most of all, he was Jewish. And although most people in the South weren't demonstrably anti-Semitic. The Confederacy's Secretary of War was notably Jewish. Leo's religion still marked him as an outsider. Perhaps that's why that morning, when police officers arrived in his living room, they thought Leo seemed nervous and agitated. After the police fetched Leo from his house, they took him straight to the mortuary, supposedly so Leo could help them identify Mary Fagan's body.

Leo would later remark that the sight shook him deeply, but Detective John Black saw something else in his worried nature. He was sure he saw a man who was confronted with the horrible evidence of his crime. And once that thought entered Detective Black's head, it took root. Nothing in the world could drive it out. After the mortuary, the police took Leo to the pencil factory. Again, their excuse was so he could help them understand the crime scene, but all they really cared about was his reaction.

And they found it telling that Leo seemed mostly concerned about the back door with the bloody handprints. Once they were done at the crime scene, the police took Leo to the police station and asked him to examine the two notes found next to Mary's body. On the way there, he couldn't stop shivering. Leo would say it was a natural reaction to what was happening.

But to the police, it was yet another sign of guilt. By the time Leo got home that night, he was thoroughly shaken. Throughout the day, he told the police his story. The day before, he was working in his office when Mary came in to collect her paycheck. He left a few hours later, and around 6pm, telephoned the night watchman, Newt Lee. Leo was troubled by his encounter with a troublesome employee named James Gant and wanted to see if everything was alright. Lee said everything was fine, so Leona's wife ate dinner and went to bed.

But the detectives weren't buying his story about a typical quiet Saturday. They wondered if Leo was lying about why he called Newt Lee. They thought that maybe he had called to see if Mary's body had been found yet. Things got worse for Leo when one of the employees at the factory came into work on Monday morning and discovered a mysterious red spot on the floor near where he worked. Believing it could be blood, the employee searched further. He found what he described as six to eight strands of hair, just a few steps away, from Leo Frank's office.

Before long, Police Chief James Beavers came to investigate this particular clue himself. He splashed a few drops of alcohol onto the red spot and when it didn't dissolve, he declared it had to be blood. The logic was tenuous at best and prejudiced at worst. A few red spots and stray strands of hair was hardly any indication of violence, especially considering the test beavers performed wasn't regarded as scientifically sound. But as far as the police were concerned, this newly unearthed evidence was another fact that led directly back to Leo Frank. Later on Monday, Detective John Black arrived at Leo's house to escort him back to the police station.

When Leo asked why, all Detective Black said was, Newt Lee has been saying something. It was at this point that the pencil factory's lawyer, Herbert Haas, arrived at police headquarters accompanied by his associate, Luther Rosser. The two attorneys were outraged that the police would even consider Leo a suspect, but the authorities weren't backing down. Even after Leo willingly stripped his clothes to show a lack of defensive wounds, they still searched the Frank home for bloodstained laundry. In the end, they didn't find any.

But the police were far from done with him, and the Atlanta media was just getting started. After Mary Fagan was murdered, it seemed like everyone wanted in on the story, including iconic newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst. Hearst owned the Atlanta Georgian and was famous for caring more about sales than facts or discretion. Just two days after Mary's death, Hearst's paper featured a front-page photograph of her battered body lying in the morgue. Many other newspapers at the time were just as cynical. They had no problem running incendiary materials, and many people close to the investigation were happy to provide them. The teenage workers at the pencil factory were eager interview subjects, and many members of the police force openly commented on the

investigation, presenting theories as facts. As such, a number of exaggerated and possibly invented stories made it into Atlanta's newspapers following the murder. In turn, those stories allowed public anger over the shocking death of a young girl to reach a breaking point. The building storm was helpful to another local media mogul, Thomas E. Watson. In the past, Watson's paper, The Jeffersonian, had been a bullhorn for his inflammatory populist views. He frequently blamed northern industrialists like Leo Frank for the South's economic issues. For Watson, any outsider was fair game, and in

the days to come, he would be Leo Frank's primary demonizer, while the circulation of his paper grew with every article he printed. With Leo Frank's name in the headlines, it was clear who the police were after. On the morning of April 29th, two days after Mary's body was found, Leo was arrested. For reasons that seemingly had more to do with personal biases than actual detective work, the investigators on Mary's case were convinced Leo was the murderer. Of course, they would have to prove it in court, and to accomplish that goal, they would turn to an unlikely source.

On the morning of May 1, 1913, four days after Mary Fagan's body was found, and two days after Leo Frank was arrested for her murder, the Atlanta police brought a black man named Jim Conley in for questioning. Conley worked as a sweeper and handyman at the pencil factory, but he was also widely known to have a criminal record and a drinking problem. And that day, someone on the factory floor spotted him trying to wash what appeared to be blood out of his shirt. But after some questioning, the police let Conley go. After all, they already had their suspect, and Conley was about to become one of their biggest assets.

The prosecutor on the case, Solicitor General Hugh Dorsey, desperately needed to secure a conviction. He had recently prosecuted two high-profile murder cases and lost both of them. The public was quickly losing confidence in his ability to keep dangerous criminals off the streets, and the Savannah Morning News predicted that if Dorsey failed to convict Mary Fagan's killer, his career would be over. Thankfully for Dorsey, he had public opinion on his side. The press had all but convicted Leo Frank for him already, painting him as a cold-blooded

killer before the trial even started. But Dorsey knew public sentiment wouldn't be enough to secure a conviction. People were ready to believe his suspect was guilty, but he would have to convince a jury, and to do that, he needed to present a motive, or even better, a witness. In Jim Connolly, he found someone who could provide both, whether it was the truth or not. When Connolly was first questioned, he'd claimed he'd been drunk on the day of the murder and that the stain on his shirt had been rust, not blood. He also claimed he couldn't read or write, meaning he couldn't have written the two

notes found near Mary's body. Ostensibly these were the reasons law enforcement never pursued a case against Connolly, but it seemed like he was more useful as a witness than as a suspect. However, that usefulness was quickly tested by Leo Frank himself. When it was mentioned in Leo's presence that Conley couldn't read or write, Leo said that wasn't true. He told the investigators that he'd received several written notes from Connolly, most of them asking for loans. The police brought Connolly back for further questioning, pressing him again about the notes found near Mary Fagan's body. All of a sudden, the handyman's

story changed. Yes, he could read and write. And yes, he had written the murder notes but They weren't his words Conley claimed that the day before the murder Leo had called him into his office and Dictated the two murder notes for Conley to write before mumbling, why should I hang under his breath? Conley signed an affidavit promising it was the truth, while still claiming that he'd never seen Mary's body or been to the factory on the day she was killed. This version of events did not

fit with the facts police already knew about the case. It made no sense that Leo, who was by all accounts a cautious and meticulous man, would take a notoriously drunk and unreliable employee into his confidence. What's more, police were convinced that the murder was a crime of passion, rather than a premeditated act as Connolly was suggesting. But Hugh Dorsey and the Atlanta police pressed on with their case against Leo. When Dorsey called a grand jury to secure an indictment, he deliberately excluded the fact that Jim Connolly was the author of the murder notes. So, Dorsey had his witness, and while Conley wasn't exactly credible, he was certainly cooperative. Now all Dorsey needed was a motive,

and once again the press was very helpful in providing one. By the time Leo was in custody, the newspapers were full of salacious rumors about him. Stories abounded about alleged affairs, secret second family, a wife in Brooklyn that he'd murdered, and accusations that he was known to pull girls off of streetcars in attempts to grop them. This last story was seemingly confirmed when a teenage newsboy named George Epps told the prosecution that he knew Mary and had ridden a streetcar with her on the morning of her death. According to him, Mary was afraid of being alone with Leo.

Epps claimed that Mary asked him to escort her home from work as often as he could, so that Leo wouldn't harass her. This was the motive Dorsey was looking for. Leo was obsessed with Mary, and if he couldn't have her, nobody could. Now, they just had to make sure Jim Conley's testimony helped them prove it. At the end of May, detectives brought Conley in for a third round of questioning. Once again, his story changed. This time, Conley claimed not only was he forced to write the two notes found next to Mary, he had actually been at the factory the day she died. He had seen her body.

He even carried it into the factory's basement and it was all under direct orders from Leo Frank. That was all the grand jury needed to hear. On May 24th, 1913, they handed down their decision. Leo Frank would stand trial for the murder of Mary Fagan. Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next week for part two of our series on the murder of Mary Fagan and the trial

of Leo Frank. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. If you like what you heard today, reach out on social media, at CrimeHouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts. And to enhance your listening experience, subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. You'll get every episode of Murder True Crime Stories ad free, along with early access to each thrilling two-part series

and exciting bonus content. We'll be back next Tuesday. Murder True Crime Stories, a Crime House original, is executive produced by Max Cutler. This episode of Murder True Crime Stories was sound designed by Ron Shapiro, written by Greg Benson, edited by Alex Benedon, fact-checked by Katherine Barner, and included production assistance from Kristin Acevedo and Sarah Carroll. Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by Carter Roy.

This is Carter Roy. If you're enjoying Crime House originals like Murder True Crime Stories, then you'll love our studio's newest show, Money Crimes. Hosted by bestselling author and entrepreneur, Nicole Lapin, this show is all about the dark side of finance and how to protect yourself from it, especially when it ends in murder. Money Crimes is a Crime House original

powered by Pave Studios. New episodes release every Thursday to search for Money Crimes. And for early access and ad-free listening, be sure to subscribe to Crime House Plus on Apple Podcasts. Thursday.