Hello and happy Saturday everyone. We are coming up on the one hundred and fifth anniversary of the murder of Mary Fagan, which led to the trial, conviction, and sentencing of Leo Frank. I was a superintendent of the pencil factory where Mary worked, and after his sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was abducted by a mob and lynched. This episode is from twenty eleven and it was recorded by previous hosts Sarah and do Blina, and as they discuss, it's covered extensively in a lot of Georgia classrooms, but often not as much in other parts of the United States and the world. So now we will hand it over to Sarah and de Blina for the trial of Leo Frank. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from houstofpworks dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm toa Blina Chocolate Boarding and I'm fair Dowdy and the story we're about to tell happened in Atlanta, actually kind of in our own backyards, but we don't feel too self conscious about telling it because this topic has been requested many times by listeners and that's not surprising. The Leo Frank trial has been called quote, one of the most shocking frame ups ever perpetuated by American law and order officials, and the story involves a Jewish man named Leo Frank being convicted, many think wrongly convicted for the murder of a young girl named Mary Fagan, and a group of men taking the law in to their own hands and trying to make sure that basically he paid the ultimate price for this. But there was much more to this story than just these acts and who was guilty or not guilty. This was a situation about industrialism and the injustices associated with it, race relations, North South tensions, so a lot of things. So it's no wonder that it caught the attention and kind of the emotions of the entire nation. But it's still a mystery too in a way to this day, people still wonder what really happened to Mary Fagan. So we're going to take a look at the crime, the evidence, the trial that ensued, But first we're going to try to talk a little bit about the man that ended up at the center of all this controversy, Leo Frank. Leo Max Frank was born in Paris, Texas in eighteen eighty four, but his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when he was very small, and he grew up there. He went to public school, the Pratt Institute, and since he was very mechanically minded, he got an engineering degree from Cornell University. Now he worked for a brief time with a few different companies, but eventually he joined the family business. He went to work for his uncle, Moses Frank, who was the principal owner of the National Pencil Company, and that company had a factory in Atlanta, and in nineteen oh seven Frank was made co owner and superintendent of that location of that factory and moved down south. So in nineteen ten he married a native Atlanton, Lucille Selig, who came from a prominent Jewish family, and by nineteen thirteen he'd been honored by the local Jewish community as one of Atlanta's most promising young businessman. So he looked like he had a great future ahead of him. And Atlanta's Jewish community wasn't as big as New York's, of course, but it was still fairly significant, and it was significant enough that Frank probably didn't feel very isolated. He probably didn't worry that much about racism. He spent most of his time working, so he seemed to be leading a fairly successful, definitely peaceful life, yes, but all of that changed. April twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen. That's when Mary Fagan, who was this strikingly beautiful blonde thirteen year old girl from Marietta, Georgia, so just outside the city, she stopped by the factory to get her pay on the way to a Confederate Memorial Day parade. And around this time, the state's economy was really undergoing a kind of change. It was going from a more agrarian economy to more of an industrial economy. So Frank's factory, like many others and Lloyd women and children to perform light labor tasks because they could be paid lower wages than men. So we're talking like five or six dollars a week is what they were taking home. So it'd saved the factory some money. And Mary was, of course one of these workers, and she was even making less than that at the time because she was part of a temporary layoff, so she had only worked one day for that entire week and was picking up a dollar twenty So she stopped by Frank's office that Saturday, and according to his story, she got her money, He paid the bill, and she left and she was never seen alive again. Around three am the next day, the night watchman Newt Lee was on his way to the Negro toilet, which was located in the factory basement, and that's where he found the body of a girl near the bottom of an elevator shaft. She was so completely covered in sawdust and grime that at first it was hard to even tell if she was white or black. Her skull was dented and caked in blood, her eyes were used, and her cheeks were cut, and a cord was wrapped around her neck. So at this point Lee calls the police. He's afraid they'll suspect him, and they come in to inspect the scene, and with the help of another worker, they identify the body as Mary Fagan. They arrested Lee right away, so his worries were correct, and incidentally, he was held without charges four months after that. But then the police went to get Frank. They wanted to take him along to see the body and question him at the site, and it was an experience that Frank did not handle smoothly as we'll see later. He was disturbed by the side of the body, and he seemed really nervous to them, So that was kind of the beginning of his problems, and they questioned him for a long time and then formally arrested him on April twenty ninth, nineteen thirteen. But things were moving along at quite a clip with this investigation because police were under a lot of pressure to find and convict a killer, and there had been a series of unsolved murders in Atlanta during the previous year and a half. So the city was really frustrated, frustrated with the police, and they wanted justice, and Mary Fagan ended up becoming a kind of symbol for them. Initial reports even said that she had been raped. That made people even more outraged. So officials moved quickly to assemble whatever clues they could that would prove Frank's guilt, and this is what they came up with. At first, they thought, well, he was really nervous the day after the murder, and that seemed suspicious. They were also suspicious by the fact that he had called Lee several times that night to see if there was any trouble, and that was something that he normally did not do. And then finally the fact that several employees came forward and said that Frank quote indulged in familiarities with a woman in his employ and a woman who ran a boarding house even claimed that Frank had called her the day of the murder, trying to arrange a room for himself and a young girl. So this is what police were initially acting on. On that last point, in particular, many of the witnesses, including the boarding house proprietress, they later recanted their accusations, but these same accusations helped Hugh Dorsey, who was a prosecutor with pretty big political ambitions, to build a case around Frank is this Jewish man who was praying on gentile girls for his own pleasure. Four weeks later, a grand jury used this information to indict Frank. But there were some more clues that came in, clues that seem a little more promising than the ones we already went over, real clues that seemed to be all but ignored. Ultimately, there were these two strange notes that were scribbled on scraps of yellow paper, and they were found near the body, and they're kind of tricky to read. Here, but one of them said, ma'am, that negro higher down here did this. I went to make water and he pushed me down that whole a long tall negro black that who it was, long slim, tall Negro, I write while play with me. And the other note, also written in this kind of difficult to follow styles, that he said he would love me land and play like the night witch did it. But that long, tall black Negro did buy hisself. So these unusual notes found near the body seem like a major, major new clue. Yeah, and obviously they're confusing because they contain some bed spelling and things like that and are hard to read, as Sarah said, but they're also contradictory. I mean, the first one sort of seems to identify the murderer, and the second kind of suggests that the writer was saying he was trying to throw suspicion elsewhere. So it was very confusing, but at least something that seems like it should have been pursued. The next piece of evidence was also found near the body, at the bottom of the elevator shaft. It was human excrement, and we're going to get into that a little more later because there are a few other clues involving that. But the likely owner of said human excrement was a black janitor named Jim Conley, and he had been seen washing blood out of a shirt at the factory after the murder. So, WHOA, that sounds like there is a whole nother potential suspect involved here. Yes, in fact, there was another suspect. Conley was working at the factory the day of the murder and even admitted to have written those two notes when police arrested and questioned him on the matter, but he claimed that Frank had dictated the notes to him. So throwing a wrench in this whole thing, right, And according to Leonard Dinnerstein in American Heritage, the grand jury wanted to reconvene and actually charge Connolly instead, but perhaps because of these political aspirations of Dorsey's and he actually became the governor later, we should throw that at that actuation, they did pay off, but he wouldn't allow this. He wouldn't allow them to reconsider this. We're not really sure how he talked them out of it, but Donnerstein suggests that quote given Southern values, they may have assumed that no attorney would base his case on the word of a black man unless the evidence was overwhelming. So basically, the grand jury just felt persuaded by Dorsey's dedication to this case. He was just so sure that Leo Frank was guilty that he was willing to believe even Jim Calmly. But regardless of how he did it, Dorsey did win out and the trial started July twenty eighth, nineteen thirteen in Atlanta. A large angry mob showed up in attendance and they were shouting things like hang the Jew. And they weren't just saying that outside the doors of the courthouse, they were saying things like that in the courtroom. So yeah, it was a really intimidating atmosphere to be in. And you have to wonder how in this environment they could have chosen an unbiased jury, I mean they did choose a jury, or how an unbiased juror would remain unbiased true, I mean, there were so many tensions going on in this scenario at the time. There were class tensions that was working class versus a factory owner race, you know, there was anti Semitism going on North versus South. Since Frank was technically a Yankee and that rubbed people the wrong way. So things seemed to be working in Dorsey's favor almost and he presented his case. He proposed that Frank killed Fagin in a workroom outside his office on the second floor, and that the body was dragged to an elevator and taken to the basement. His argument included witness testimony that there were blood spots on the floor there and hair on a lathe, but it didn't really make sense. There were a lot of holes in this approach. Here's just an example of a few things. For example, state biologist had concluded that the hair that was found on that lathe wasn't actually Fagan's. Witnesses also said that those blood spots found on the floor could have actually been paint, and the excrement that Sarah mentioned earlier would have had to have been mashed when the elevator went down. I mean, every time that the elevator went down, it completely hit everything at the bottom right. But apparently it wasn't until after the body was discovered that that actually occurred that the excrement was smashed and they smelled that telltale smell. However, Conley had said that he positive said excrement there before the murder, so it didn't add up. But the prosecution's case really revolved around Connolly's testimony almost entirely. Interestingly, though he had changed his story several times before the trial, he had even signed four different affidavits, but once he got in there, once he got up on the stand, he stuck to his account. He didn't waiver. It's very likely that he was coached to give this strong story in front of the court. But he claimed that Frank summoned him to his office that day and here's what he had to say. His eyes were large and they looked right funny, and then confessed the crime. And Conley said that Frank offered, but never gave him money to dispose of the body, and asked Connie if he could write, and once Colley said he could, Frank dictated the murder notes. So Frank, meanwhile, had two well known attorneys acting in his defense, Luther Z. Rosser and Ruben R. Arnold, and most feel that what really hurt their defense is that they weren't able to make a dent in Conley's testimony. Just they couldn't shake him. He just completely stuck to that story. Even though he had changed it quite a bit before getting into court, and even though Frank had strong character witnesses too, and alibis people to account for his whereabouts before, during, and after the murder, the jury still found him guilty on September twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen, and they only took They took less than four hours actually to deliberate what had been one of the longest trials in Georgia history, so essentially their minds were made up. Frank was sentenced to be executed on October tenth of that year, but the execution was stayed by several ultimately unsuccessful appeals on the part of his lawyers, so they made a couple of appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court when all the conviction on February seventeenth, nineteen fourteen, and another one did the same on October fourteenth, nineteen fourteen. His defense lawyers then made a habeas corpus petition to the US Supreme Court, but the court ended up denying that petition despite the fact that there were some strong descents to it. I mean Justice is Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans among them, So there were some people who who were in favor of that petition, And while all this legal stuff was going on, there were some kind of crazy developments, including witnesses taking back those accusations. We mentioned that earlier, the accusations about Frank's alleged sexual deviations, and also Conley's girlfriend came into the picture. She came into the picture and gave some testimony about Conley's own sexual perversions, so to speak. And Conley's own lawyer told Judge Rohan, who had been the trial judge, that Conley had confessed the murder to him. So that seems like a pretty damning new piece of evidence, I would say, if there's an actual confession, But that had actually come to light during the appeals process, so we should mention that it didn't really make a difference in his appeals. He would have had to get a retrial or something for that to have an effect. But the last appeal, the final appeal was made to Governor John M. Slayton, whose term was almost up by this point, and he listened to both sides, He studied the records, he visited the scene, and he also considered all these new things that we've mentioned, and after struggling with it for twelve days, so it wasn't going to take him four hours twelve days of thinking it over. Slayton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment on June twenty first, nineteen fifteen, and he knew how serious that decision was. He told his wife, it may mean my death or worse, but I've ordered the sentence commuted. And as he suspected, it was a very unpopular decision. There were demonstrations about it. There were vandalism took place against Jewish homes stores around the city, and Frank had been moved already by this point to a prison at Millageville, which was supposedly more secure, except that after Slayton's reversal of the decision, it didn't prove secure at all. No, while he was there, an inmate cut Frank's throat and they were able to save him. But while he was recovering, on August sixteenth, nineteen fifteen, a group of twenty five vigilantes from Marietta drove out to the prison, overpowered the guards and took Frank with them back to Marietta, which was a pretty long drive. So they took him back to where Mary Fagan was from, and there a lynch mob watched as they hung him from an oak tree. And all this time during the drive back and before they hung him, they truly tried to get him to confess, but he never did. He just asked for his wedding ring to be sent to his wife. So after the lynching, locals knew the identities of the men involved, but they were never prosecuted, and the men who did it even sort of used it as a rallying cry point of pride. They called themselves the Knights of Mary Fagan, and the girl's name just alone became a rally and cry for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the area. It was something that people still dwelled on even a few years after. Yeah, a few years after, and some people still debate about this up until today. I mean they still debate over whether frank was actually guilty or innocent. Many historians seem to believe in his innocence and frankly, I mean, if you look at a lot of sources for material about this case, they seemed to lean that way that he was wrongly accused. In nineteen eighty two, an old black man named Alonzo, man who worked at Frank's factory as a child, came forward and said that he'd seen Conley drag Mary Fagan's corpse to the basement, but he kept silent about it because Conley at the time had threatened to kill him. And I think he even went to his mom and told her what had happened, and she was like, don't get involved. So this didn't come to light until the eighties. On March eleventh, and nineteen eighty six, the Georgia State Board of Pardon and Paroles posthumously pardoned Frank. But as Dinnerstein's piece points out, this doesn't exactly exonerate him for the crime. It was granted quote in recognition of the state's failure to protect the person of Leo Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity of continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the state's failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds. So it was basically to give him back his civil rights in a sense. Yeah, And I thought it was interesting to talk about this case because I don't I mean, it is so often suggested to US, so I guess a lot of people do know about it, but for a podcast called Stephie Miston History Class. This is something that I have had in almost every history class. I mean, from Georgia history in middle school to high school US history to college. It's really heavily taught here in Georgia and see and I hadn't learned anything about it growing up up oh in another state. So maybe it is something that Georgia and Georgians are especially concerned with with studying and make sure we don't forget this, certainly this crime against somebody's civil liberties. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. We are at history podcasts at HowStuffWorks dot com, and then we're at Missed in the History all over social media. That is our name on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram. Thanks again for listening. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit houstuffworks dot com.

Hello and happy Saturday everyone. We are coming up on the one hundred and fifth anniversary of the murder of Mary Fagan, which led to the trial, conviction, and sentencing of Leo Frank. I was a superintendent of the pencil factory where Mary worked, and after his sentence was commuted to life in prison, he was abducted by a mob and lynched. This episode is from twenty eleven and it was recorded by previous hosts Sarah and do Blina, and as they discuss, it's covered extensively in a lot of Georgia classrooms, but often not as much in other parts of the United States and the world. So now we will hand it over to Sarah and de Blina for the trial of Leo Frank. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from houstofpworks dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm toa Blina Chocolate Boarding and I'm fair Dowdy and the story we're about to tell happened in Atlanta, actually kind of in our own backyards, but we don't feel too self conscious about telling it because this topic has been requested many times by listeners and that's not surprising. The Leo Frank trial has been called quote, one of the most shocking frame ups ever perpetuated by American law and order officials, and the story involves a Jewish man named Leo Frank being convicted, many think wrongly convicted for the murder of a young girl named Mary Fagan, and a group of men taking the law in to their own hands and trying to make sure that basically he paid the ultimate price for this. But there was much more to this story than just these acts and who was guilty or not guilty. This was a situation about industrialism and the injustices associated with it, race relations, North South tensions, so a lot of things. So it's no wonder that it caught the attention and kind of the emotions of the entire nation. But it's still a mystery too in a way to this day, people still wonder what really happened to Mary Fagan. So we're going to take a look at the crime, the evidence, the trial that ensued, But first we're going to try to talk a little bit about the man that ended up at the center of all this controversy, Leo Frank. Leo Max Frank was born in Paris, Texas in eighteen eighty four, but his family moved to Brooklyn, New York, when he was very small, and he grew up there. He went to public school, the Pratt Institute, and since he was very mechanically minded, he got an engineering degree from Cornell University. Now he worked for a brief time with a few different companies, but eventually he joined the family business. He went to work for his uncle, Moses Frank, who was the principal owner of the National Pencil Company, and that company had a factory in Atlanta, and in nineteen oh seven Frank was made co owner and superintendent of that location of that factory and moved down south. So in nineteen ten he married a native Atlanton, Lucille Selig, who came from a prominent Jewish family, and by nineteen thirteen he'd been honored by the local Jewish community as one of Atlanta's most promising young businessman. So he looked like he had a great future ahead of him. And Atlanta's Jewish community wasn't as big as New York's, of course, but it was still fairly significant, and it was significant enough that Frank probably didn't feel very isolated. He probably didn't worry that much about racism. He spent most of his time working, so he seemed to be leading a fairly successful, definitely peaceful life, yes, but all of that changed. April twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen. That's when Mary Fagan, who was this strikingly beautiful blonde thirteen year old girl from Marietta, Georgia, so just outside the city, she stopped by the factory to get her pay on the way to a Confederate Memorial Day parade. And around this time, the state's economy was really undergoing a kind of change. It was going from a more agrarian economy to more of an industrial economy. So Frank's factory, like many others and Lloyd women and children to perform light labor tasks because they could be paid lower wages than men. So we're talking like five or six dollars a week is what they were taking home. So it'd saved the factory some money. And Mary was, of course one of these workers, and she was even making less than that at the time because she was part of a temporary layoff, so she had only worked one day for that entire week and was picking up a dollar twenty So she stopped by Frank's office that Saturday, and according to his story, she got her money, He paid the bill, and she left and she was never seen alive again. Around three am the next day, the night watchman Newt Lee was on his way to the Negro toilet, which was located in the factory basement, and that's where he found the body of a girl near the bottom of an elevator shaft. She was so completely covered in sawdust and grime that at first it was hard to even tell if she was white or black. Her skull was dented and caked in blood, her eyes were used, and her cheeks were cut, and a cord was wrapped around her neck. So at this point Lee calls the police. He's afraid they'll suspect him, and they come in to inspect the scene, and with the help of another worker, they identify the body as Mary Fagan. They arrested Lee right away, so his worries were correct, and incidentally, he was held without charges four months after that. But then the police went to get Frank. They wanted to take him along to see the body and question him at the site, and it was an experience that Frank did not handle smoothly as we'll see later. He was disturbed by the side of the body, and he seemed really nervous to them, So that was kind of the beginning of his problems, and they questioned him for a long time and then formally arrested him on April twenty ninth, nineteen thirteen. But things were moving along at quite a clip with this investigation because police were under a lot of pressure to find and convict a killer, and there had been a series of unsolved murders in Atlanta during the previous year and a half. So the city was really frustrated, frustrated with the police, and they wanted justice, and Mary Fagan ended up becoming a kind of symbol for them. Initial reports even said that she had been raped. That made people even more outraged. So officials moved quickly to assemble whatever clues they could that would prove Frank's guilt, and this is what they came up with. At first, they thought, well, he was really nervous the day after the murder, and that seemed suspicious. They were also suspicious by the fact that he had called Lee several times that night to see if there was any trouble, and that was something that he normally did not do. And then finally the fact that several employees came forward and said that Frank quote indulged in familiarities with a woman in his employ and a woman who ran a boarding house even claimed that Frank had called her the day of the murder, trying to arrange a room for himself and a young girl. So this is what police were initially acting on. On that last point, in particular, many of the witnesses, including the boarding house proprietress, they later recanted their accusations, but these same accusations helped Hugh Dorsey, who was a prosecutor with pretty big political ambitions, to build a case around Frank is this Jewish man who was praying on gentile girls for his own pleasure. Four weeks later, a grand jury used this information to indict Frank. But there were some more clues that came in, clues that seem a little more promising than the ones we already went over, real clues that seemed to be all but ignored. Ultimately, there were these two strange notes that were scribbled on scraps of yellow paper, and they were found near the body, and they're kind of tricky to read. Here, but one of them said, ma'am, that negro higher down here did this. I went to make water and he pushed me down that whole a long tall negro black that who it was, long slim, tall Negro, I write while play with me. And the other note, also written in this kind of difficult to follow styles, that he said he would love me land and play like the night witch did it. But that long, tall black Negro did buy hisself. So these unusual notes found near the body seem like a major, major new clue. Yeah, and obviously they're confusing because they contain some bed spelling and things like that and are hard to read, as Sarah said, but they're also contradictory. I mean, the first one sort of seems to identify the murderer, and the second kind of suggests that the writer was saying he was trying to throw suspicion elsewhere. So it was very confusing, but at least something that seems like it should have been pursued. The next piece of evidence was also found near the body, at the bottom of the elevator shaft. It was human excrement, and we're going to get into that a little more later because there are a few other clues involving that. But the likely owner of said human excrement was a black janitor named Jim Conley, and he had been seen washing blood out of a shirt at the factory after the murder. So, WHOA, that sounds like there is a whole nother potential suspect involved here. Yes, in fact, there was another suspect. Conley was working at the factory the day of the murder and even admitted to have written those two notes when police arrested and questioned him on the matter, but he claimed that Frank had dictated the notes to him. So throwing a wrench in this whole thing, right, And according to Leonard Dinnerstein in American Heritage, the grand jury wanted to reconvene and actually charge Connolly instead, but perhaps because of these political aspirations of Dorsey's and he actually became the governor later, we should throw that at that actuation, they did pay off, but he wouldn't allow this. He wouldn't allow them to reconsider this. We're not really sure how he talked them out of it, but Donnerstein suggests that quote given Southern values, they may have assumed that no attorney would base his case on the word of a black man unless the evidence was overwhelming. So basically, the grand jury just felt persuaded by Dorsey's dedication to this case. He was just so sure that Leo Frank was guilty that he was willing to believe even Jim Calmly. But regardless of how he did it, Dorsey did win out and the trial started July twenty eighth, nineteen thirteen in Atlanta. A large angry mob showed up in attendance and they were shouting things like hang the Jew. And they weren't just saying that outside the doors of the courthouse, they were saying things like that in the courtroom. So yeah, it was a really intimidating atmosphere to be in. And you have to wonder how in this environment they could have chosen an unbiased jury, I mean they did choose a jury, or how an unbiased juror would remain unbiased true, I mean, there were so many tensions going on in this scenario at the time. There were class tensions that was working class versus a factory owner race, you know, there was anti Semitism going on North versus South. Since Frank was technically a Yankee and that rubbed people the wrong way. So things seemed to be working in Dorsey's favor almost and he presented his case. He proposed that Frank killed Fagin in a workroom outside his office on the second floor, and that the body was dragged to an elevator and taken to the basement. His argument included witness testimony that there were blood spots on the floor there and hair on a lathe, but it didn't really make sense. There were a lot of holes in this approach. Here's just an example of a few things. For example, state biologist had concluded that the hair that was found on that lathe wasn't actually Fagan's. Witnesses also said that those blood spots found on the floor could have actually been paint, and the excrement that Sarah mentioned earlier would have had to have been mashed when the elevator went down. I mean, every time that the elevator went down, it completely hit everything at the bottom right. But apparently it wasn't until after the body was discovered that that actually occurred that the excrement was smashed and they smelled that telltale smell. However, Conley had said that he positive said excrement there before the murder, so it didn't add up. But the prosecution's case really revolved around Connolly's testimony almost entirely. Interestingly, though he had changed his story several times before the trial, he had even signed four different affidavits, but once he got in there, once he got up on the stand, he stuck to his account. He didn't waiver. It's very likely that he was coached to give this strong story in front of the court. But he claimed that Frank summoned him to his office that day and here's what he had to say. His eyes were large and they looked right funny, and then confessed the crime. And Conley said that Frank offered, but never gave him money to dispose of the body, and asked Connie if he could write, and once Colley said he could, Frank dictated the murder notes. So Frank, meanwhile, had two well known attorneys acting in his defense, Luther Z. Rosser and Ruben R. Arnold, and most feel that what really hurt their defense is that they weren't able to make a dent in Conley's testimony. Just they couldn't shake him. He just completely stuck to that story. Even though he had changed it quite a bit before getting into court, and even though Frank had strong character witnesses too, and alibis people to account for his whereabouts before, during, and after the murder, the jury still found him guilty on September twenty sixth, nineteen thirteen, and they only took They took less than four hours actually to deliberate what had been one of the longest trials in Georgia history, so essentially their minds were made up. Frank was sentenced to be executed on October tenth of that year, but the execution was stayed by several ultimately unsuccessful appeals on the part of his lawyers, so they made a couple of appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court when all the conviction on February seventeenth, nineteen fourteen, and another one did the same on October fourteenth, nineteen fourteen. His defense lawyers then made a habeas corpus petition to the US Supreme Court, but the court ended up denying that petition despite the fact that there were some strong descents to it. I mean Justice is Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Evans among them, So there were some people who who were in favor of that petition, And while all this legal stuff was going on, there were some kind of crazy developments, including witnesses taking back those accusations. We mentioned that earlier, the accusations about Frank's alleged sexual deviations, and also Conley's girlfriend came into the picture. She came into the picture and gave some testimony about Conley's own sexual perversions, so to speak. And Conley's own lawyer told Judge Rohan, who had been the trial judge, that Conley had confessed the murder to him. So that seems like a pretty damning new piece of evidence, I would say, if there's an actual confession, But that had actually come to light during the appeals process, so we should mention that it didn't really make a difference in his appeals. He would have had to get a retrial or something for that to have an effect. But the last appeal, the final appeal was made to Governor John M. Slayton, whose term was almost up by this point, and he listened to both sides, He studied the records, he visited the scene, and he also considered all these new things that we've mentioned, and after struggling with it for twelve days, so it wasn't going to take him four hours twelve days of thinking it over. Slayton commuted Frank's sentence to life imprisonment on June twenty first, nineteen fifteen, and he knew how serious that decision was. He told his wife, it may mean my death or worse, but I've ordered the sentence commuted. And as he suspected, it was a very unpopular decision. There were demonstrations about it. There were vandalism took place against Jewish homes stores around the city, and Frank had been moved already by this point to a prison at Millageville, which was supposedly more secure, except that after Slayton's reversal of the decision, it didn't prove secure at all. No, while he was there, an inmate cut Frank's throat and they were able to save him. But while he was recovering, on August sixteenth, nineteen fifteen, a group of twenty five vigilantes from Marietta drove out to the prison, overpowered the guards and took Frank with them back to Marietta, which was a pretty long drive. So they took him back to where Mary Fagan was from, and there a lynch mob watched as they hung him from an oak tree. And all this time during the drive back and before they hung him, they truly tried to get him to confess, but he never did. He just asked for his wedding ring to be sent to his wife. So after the lynching, locals knew the identities of the men involved, but they were never prosecuted, and the men who did it even sort of used it as a rallying cry point of pride. They called themselves the Knights of Mary Fagan, and the girl's name just alone became a rally and cry for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan in the area. It was something that people still dwelled on even a few years after. Yeah, a few years after, and some people still debate about this up until today. I mean they still debate over whether frank was actually guilty or innocent. Many historians seem to believe in his innocence and frankly, I mean, if you look at a lot of sources for material about this case, they seemed to lean that way that he was wrongly accused. In nineteen eighty two, an old black man named Alonzo, man who worked at Frank's factory as a child, came forward and said that he'd seen Conley drag Mary Fagan's corpse to the basement, but he kept silent about it because Conley at the time had threatened to kill him. And I think he even went to his mom and told her what had happened, and she was like, don't get involved. So this didn't come to light until the eighties. On March eleventh, and nineteen eighty six, the Georgia State Board of Pardon and Paroles posthumously pardoned Frank. But as Dinnerstein's piece points out, this doesn't exactly exonerate him for the crime. It was granted quote in recognition of the state's failure to protect the person of Leo Frank and thereby preserve his opportunity of continued legal appeal of his conviction, and in recognition of the state's failure to bring his killers to justice, and as an effort to heal old wounds. So it was basically to give him back his civil rights in a sense. Yeah, And I thought it was interesting to talk about this case because I don't I mean, it is so often suggested to US, so I guess a lot of people do know about it, but for a podcast called Stephie Miston History Class. This is something that I have had in almost every history class. I mean, from Georgia history in middle school to high school US history to college. It's really heavily taught here in Georgia and see and I hadn't learned anything about it growing up up oh in another state. So maybe it is something that Georgia and Georgians are especially concerned with with studying and make sure we don't forget this, certainly this crime against somebody's civil liberties. Thank you so much for joining us for this Saturday classic. Since this is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook URL or something similar during the course of the show, that may be obsolete now. So here is our current contact information. 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