On This Day in History: August 17

The murders of Mary Phagan and Leo Frank

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When I was 13, I was suffering through the utter horribleness that is eighth grade. When Mary Phagan was 13, she was working 55 hours a week for 10 cents an hour for the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Georgia. All day long she operated a machine that inserted erasers into the ends of pencils. Until she got murdered. But then her murderer got murdered. Except he wasn’t really the murderer. The actual murderer got away with it. 

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 17, 1915--

Leo Frank was a Jewish man and an engineer who was the superintendent at the pencil factory. Mary had left school at the age of 10 to work for a living because what the fuck are child labor laws? Sounds like commie bullshit to me. In April of 1913 the night watchman found Mary’s beaten, strangled, and possibly raped body in the basement. He called the police, and the police totally pooched the investigation. 

Several suspects were investigated, but janitor Jim Conley lied his ass off and pointed the finger at Leo Frank, saying Frank killed her then bribed Conley to help cover it up and blame it on the night watchman. Conley must have been convincing, because Frank was the one put on trial and Conley only got a year as an accomplice after the fact. People wanted to believe the story of the evil Jew murdering the innocent white girl. 

The trial was a media shitshow attracting large crowds. The people thirsting for Frank’s blood intimidated both witnesses and jurors. So of course they convicted Frank and he was sentenced to hang. Then there were a couple of years of appeals and in June of 1915 the governor said fuck it let’s not actually hang the poor bastard, just let him rot in prison forever. The people were ever so pissed. They wanted Frank to stretch. 

The antisemitic media coverage had a lot to do with public reaction to the entire trial and the commutation of Frank’s sentence. And so, the public decided to get their own brand of justice. What followed was like a fucking heist movie. You know the type where you get people together with various skills? In this case what they were robbing was a prison, and the loot was Leo Frank. They had an electrician to cut the power to the prison, a mechanic for the vehicles, a locksmith, and of course a fucking hangman. The ringleader was a former governor of Georgia. Also involved was the former mayor of Marietta, along with both former and current sheriffs. They abducted Frank from the prison, drove him 175 miles to a site near Marietta, and hung him from a tree on the morning of August 17, 1915. In the aftermath, half of Georgia’s Jewish population said fuck this place and moved away.

Most historians believe that it was janitor Jim Conley who was the real murderer of Mary Phagan.

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