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On
Confederate Memorial Day (Georgia State Holiday), Saturday, April 26, 1913,
at 12:02pm, Mary Phagan entered Leo Frank's second floor business office at
the shuttered National Pencil Company (NPCo), asked for her pay envelope and
inquired if the metal supplies had arrived yet. Phagan was never again seen
alive, but found dead in the National Pencil Company basement by Newt Lee the
Negro nightwatchman at 3:20 am on Sunday, April 27, 1913. Lee immediately
climbed two floors & notified Atlanta Police via the wall telephone in
Leo Frank's office. It marked the beginning of what would evolve into an
embarrassing national scandal and cause celebre for the international Jewish
community. Still refusing to gather dust, the Leo Frank Case continues
smoldering as a divisive and incendiary Jewish-Gentile conflict more than a
century later.
On Sunday morning April 27, 1913, Atlanta Police went to the Selig residence
at 68 East Georgia Avenue to speak with Leo Frank, because he was the NPCo's
factory superintendent. Dressed only in a bathrobe, Lucille Selig (Leo's
wife) answered the door and invited the police into her father's rented home.
Before the officers could ask any serious questions, Leo Frank stepped out
from behind a curtain, half dressed and with a hoarse voice started asking
questions in rapid fire succession, barely giving the police a chance to
respond. Leo Frank appeared pale, nervous and was fumbling with his shirt and
collar, as he finalized getting dressed and kept insisting on a cup of
coffee. When the police finally asked Leo Frank privately, inside their Ford
Model-T squad car, if he knew his employee Mary Phagan, Leo Frank immediately
denied knowing her name and then again repeated these sentiments after being
shown her mutilated corpse at P.J. Bloomfield's mortuary. The police then
took Leo Frank from the undertakers establishment to his second floor office
at the National Pencil Company (NPCo) and asked him to check his accounting
books to determine at what time Mary Phagan had arrived and requested her
wages. Leo Frank told the police, his stenographer left at noon, then a few
minutes later his 14-year-old office boy (Alonzo Mann) left, and then Mary
Phagan walked-in, asked for her pay & then left. In good faith it gave
Atlanta police the impression Mary Phagan had arrived in Leo Frank's office
at about 12:03pm on Saturday April 26, 1913.
Leo Frank was the last known person to admit having seen Mary Phagan alive,
before she was theorized to have been killed shortly thereafter, naturally
making him a person-of-interest & possible suspect. Leo Frank, also
repeatedly told the police and detectives, he'd never left his office on
Saturday, April 26, 1913, between twelve noon and 12:45 pm.
On Monday morning April 28, 1913, Leo Frank was escorted by Atlanta's finest
to the stationhouse for routine questioning during the critical first 48
hours of the Mary Phagan murder investigation. In an interrogation room, Leo
Frank was flanked by his two elite Lawyers, Luther Zeigler Rosser and Herbert
Haas, and surrounded by a team of police, staff & detectives. Leo Frank
made a deposition concerning his whereabouts during Confederate Memorial Day,
Saturday, April 26, 1913, and about the "brief" encounter he had
with Mary Phagan at minutes after highnoon.
Leo Frank's statement was stenographed by a clean-shaven notary named Mr. Gay
C. Febuary (not "mustachioed", not "C. Gay February" with
first "r", Oney, 2003, p. 50, hardcover). The digested statement
became part of the official record at the Leo Frank trial, registered as
State's Exhibit B (Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913), the Atlanta
Constitution newspaper, August 2, 1913, published the questions & answers
of this deposition (check it out). Leo Frank changed the time of Mary
Phagan's arrival from 12:03 pm, and specifically stated that Mary Phagan had
entered his 2nd floor office on Saturday, April 26, 1913, between "12:05
pm and 12:10 pm, maybe 12:07 pm".
Monteen Stover:
What Leo Frank and his legal dream team did not know - until it was too late
- is the Atlanta Police had secretly made a major breakthrough in the Mary
Phagan murder investigation. At noon on Saturday, May 3, 1913, Atlanta Police
investigators stumbled upon a child laborer at the National Pencil Company, a
young girl who was making a second attempt to get her final pay envelope,
because exactly one week earlier on Saturday, April 26, 1913, she was
prevented from retrieving her wages at the NPCo, claiming Leo Frank's second
floor business office was deserted at the usual payoff time on Saturday at
noontime. More specifically, she told the police that based on the wall clock
at Leo Frank's office, she waited there alone for exactly five minutes
between 12:05pm and 12:10pm. With this curious and contradictory information,
Detective John R. Black, and Pinkerton Detective Harry A. Scott, approached
Leo Frank's prison cell on Sunday, May 4, 1913, and once again asked Leo
Frank if he was inside his office every minute from noon to 12:45pm, and Leo
Frank responded affirmatively, "Yes". What about between noon &
12:30 pm? Yes.
Coroner's Inquest: The Case of Mary Phagan
No time was wasted in the investigation into the circumstances of Mary
Phagan's death. On Wednesday, April 30, 1913, the Coroner's Inquest was
officially launched, it was organized by the Fulton County Coroner Paul
Donehoo and presided over by a jury of six men, each juror had been sworn in
under oath by an official magistrate. NPCo employees & associated
witnesses where subpoenaed to testify before this official government
tribunal. Leo Frank was sworn under oath and testified on May 5th & 8th,
1913.
Leo Frank reiterated that he'd never left his second floor business office at
the time Mary Phagan arrived and left. Frank then provided a newfangled claim
that metal department foreman, Lemmie Quinn, had arrived in his office at
12:20pm looking for Herbert Schiff. When asked by the tribunal why he never
told the police about this new critical alibi witness, Leo Frank responded
that he had forgotten. The Coroner and his jury were incredulous as to be
expected.
After the Coroner's Inquest Jury and Paul Donehoo visited the crime scenes at
the National Pencil Company, and completed their cross examination of more
than a 160 associated witnesses - all of whom testified under oath - the
seven man Coroner's Inquest tribunal (Coroner Paul Donehoo plus 6 jurymen),
unanimously voted in the late evening of May 8, 1913, to bind Leo Frank over
to the Fulton County Grand Jury for murder, because there was overwhelmingly
compelling evidence of his guilt. Almost the entire testimony and evidence
developments against Leo Frank revealed during the official Mary Phagan
murder investigation were conveniently left out of Steve Oney's elephantine
book, despite being independently and meticulously documented, word for word,
by Atlanta's three major newspapers: Atlanta Constitution, Atlanta Journal
and Atlanta Georgian.
Grand Jury Investigation: The Indictment of Leo M. Frank
No time was wasted by the Fulton County Grand Jury, which officially opened
up an investigation into the murder of Mary Phagan, during the conclusion of
the Coroner's Inquest. On Saturday, May 24, 1913, after a thorough two week
investigation by the Grand Jury, they unanimously voted 21 to zero, indicting
Leo Frank of strangling Mary Phagan. Amongst these 21 jurymen were several
Jews, putting serious doubt in the century long smear campaign, defamation
and blood-libel accusations against Gentiles that anti-Semitism was the prime
source of Leo Frank being suspected and indicted.
Steve Oney, makes the absurd claim, the indictment of Leo Frank occurred on
faith alone, because Hugh Dorsey gave the Grand Jury his assurances,
"that at the appropriate moment, he would reveal all" (Oney, p.
116), but that's not how a Grand Jury investigation works. A Grand Jury
doesn't vote 21 to 0 against someone because an inexperienced prosecutor
"gives them his assurances" that *after the indictment* he will
reveal all. Perhaps Oney should consider taking an 'Introduction to Law 101'
course at his Alma Matter.
Steve Oney conveniently never bothered to list all the relevant people who
did testify and who did not testify during the Grand Jury hearings, because
the indictment of Leo Frank was secured without the testimony of Jim Conley!
Nearly all of the people who testified during the Grand Jury, later testified
at the trial of Leo Frank. Fortunately, the official Leo Frank Trial Brief of
Evidence (1913) survived into the 21st century, and provides insight into
what was also revealed during the sworn testimony segment of the Grand Jury
hearings. One of the most important witnesses who testified to the Grand Jury
was Monteen Stover.
Slightly more than 2 months after the indictment of Leo Frank, his trial
began in the Fulton County Superior Courthouse on Monday morning July 28,
1913. Going into his trial, Leo Frank maintained for more than three months
that he had never left his office from noon until 12:45pm on the day of
Phagan's murder, but he would dramatically change his alibi.
The Trial of Leo Frank Presided By Judge Leonard Stickland Roan:
At the summer trial of Leo Frank accused of murdering Mary Phagan, the young
14-year old girl named Monteen Stover, who formerly worked at the National
Pencil Company, testified she had went to the factory to collect her owed
wages inside Leo Frank's business office on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at 12:05
pm, and found it unoccupied. Monteen Stover described in detail waiting
inside Leo Frank's office for five minutes until 12:10 pm, when she decided
to leave the building, because she thought the factory might have been
deserted. The defense never disputed her claim, because the National Pencil
Company's accounting and payroll books indicated she was indeed owed a pay
envelope at the usual payoff time of Saturday at noon.
Without rendering judgment, if Monteen Stover was indeed telling the truth,
she had inadvertently broken Leo Frank's murder alibi concerning his
whereabouts on that fateful Saturday. What was ironic about Monteen Stover,
is she was a positive character defense witness for Leo Frank, unlike 19
other female child laborers, employees and associates, whose testimony
suggested Leo Frank was a lecherous, licentious, lascivious, libidinous, lewd
and libertine boss (a sexual predator and serial pedophile in early 21st
century parlance).
On Monday, August 4, 1913, during the beginning of the 2nd week at the 4-week
long trial, Jim Conley testified that he'd discovered the dead body of Phagan
in the bathroom area of the second floor, after Leo Frank confessed going
with Mary Phagan to the metal room on the pretext of determining her
employment status. Jim Conley testified that Leo Frank said he assaulted Mary
Phagan in the metal room because she wouldn't have sex with him. Conley also
stated that Leo Frank asked him to move the cadaver of Mary Phagan down two
floors to the rear of the basement, opposite the furnace entryway, where
garbage was normally placed before being incinerated.
In the fallout of Jim Conley refusing to complete the cover-up of the crime,
by stuffing Mary Phagan into furnace for $200 (and thereby ostensibly
destroying the evidence), Conley instead agreed to write what became known as
the "Death Notes", pinning the bludgeoning, rape and strangulation
of Mary Phagan on a tall, dark complected, and slim Negro named Newt Lee, the
factory's graveyard shift security guard. Lee was recently employed by Leo
Frank as the factory nightwatchman less than three weeks before the murder
and thus nobody knew anything about him, he was the perfect patsy, especially
because he was African-American in a White Racial Segregationist South. The
"death notes" gambit was a clever ploy by Leo Frank to divert
suspicion from himself, because they were handwritten by his semi-literate
African-American janitor in Ebonics, and no one would likely believe he
dictated them if Conley became a stool pigeon. The "death notes"
were a diabolically genius plot that would ensure the police would suspect
Newt Lee at first as the prime suspect, and even if that failed, they would
be searching for another Negro suspect instead, but Leo Frank's racist gambit
fell apart within 48 hours into the inquiry of Mary Phagan's death and you're
going to find out why.
The major mistake of the "death notes" found scattered next to the
dead body of Mary Phagan by Atlanta Police, were that they describe her going
to "make water" in the only place she could have gone to urinate,
which was the bathroom in the metal room on the second floor. There was no
bathroom accessible on the first floor since January 17, 1913, and the toilet
closet located in the rear of the stygian basement was racially segregated
for "Negroes Only". The "death notes" became one of the
biggest blunders in the attempt to conceal the true events of the crime,
because they redirected suspicion on Leo Frank after he attempted to frame
the murder of Phagan on his "nightwatch" Newt Lee with an altered
and incriminating time-card. However, when all was said and done, nothing
would top the most sensational blunder in the legal annals of Southern
history, that happened at the trial of Leo Frank, when the defendant made his
long winded statement on the witness stand to the spellbound courtroom.
At the crescendo of the trial, Leo Frank changed his murder alibi, reversing
himself, and specifically answered the question everyone in all of Georgia
wanted to know since May 10, 1913, when Atlanta newspapers leaked evidence
about Monteen Stover:
Why had Monteen Stover found Leo Frank's office empty on Saturday, April 26,
1913, between 12:05pm and 12:10pm?
And when Leo Frank finally explained the reason why to the jury, he himself
conclusively solved the Mary Phagan murder mystery!
Three weeks into the trial on Monday afternoon, August 18, 1913, Leo Frank
mounted the witness stand at 2:15 pm. Under Georgia Code, Section 1036, Leo
Frank opted to make an unsworn statement to the judge and jury, refusing to
be examined or cross examined by defense and prosecution counselors. However,
Leo Frank answered the question everyone in all of Georgia and the South
wanted to know, by directly responding to the testimony of Monteen Stover,
about why his office was empty on April 26, 1913, between 12:05 pm and 12:10
pm.
Leo Frank contradicted his earlier assertion to the police that he never left
his office when Mary Phagan arrived their between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm, with
a shocking newfangled admission, saying he might have
"unconsciously" gone to the bathroom in the Metal Room during this
time!!
It was an astonishing, jaw dropping, and spine-tingling admission by Leo M.
Frank that left everyone in courtroom gobsmacked, because there was only one
set of bathrooms that existed on the second floor and they were located
inside the metal room - the real scene of the crime (see: Leo Frank Trial
Brief of Evidence, Defendant's Exhibit 61 and State's Exhibit A). Leo Frank
not only put himself in the metal room where all the forensic evidence
suggested Mary Phagan had been killed, but he put himself directly in the
path of the specific location Jim Conley testified to originally finding the
dead body of Mary Phagan, before she was moved to the basement. If you had
been one of the 12 men sitting in the Jury box, you would have felt cold
shivers down your spine, because Leo Frank entrapped himself beyond escape
and at the same time he solved the murder mystery of Mary Phagan.
The new perplexing explanation delivered by Leo Frank on Monday, August 18,
1913, at 2:45 pm, to the judge and jury, was considered the equivalent of a
murder confession, because the State's prosecution team spent the entire
duration of the four week long trial, building a chain of circumstantial
evidence that Leo Frank murdered Mary Phagan in the metal room on April 26,
1913, between 12:05 pm and 12:10 pm. When Leo Frank mounted the witness stand
and made his deliciously ironic admission, he essentially pitched a grandslam
to the State's prosecution team in the last inning of the trial. It was an
easy victory for the State of Georgia's prosecution team (see: Leo Frank
Trial Closing Arguments, John D. Lawson's American State Trials Volume X,
1918).
The metal room was down the hall from Leo Frank's office, and the place Mary
Phagan had toiled for more than a year at a wage of 7 and 4/11th cents an
hour (not 10 cents an hour as Oney cited, p. 5). The metal room was where Leo
Frank went to use the bathroom each and everyday, as he worked 200 feet away
in his window-front business office at the front section of the National
Pencil Company. When Leo Frank went to use the bathroom each day, between the
years time during the Spring of 1912 and 1913 that Mary Phagan was employed,
he had to immediately pass by her work station, literally within a matter of
3 to 4 feet, but Leo Frank, denied knowing Mary Phagan even at his own trial!
Leo Frank's denial of knowing his employee Mary Phagan became an
incriminating point of contention against him, because his accounting books
indicated he paid Mary Phagan her salary more than 52 times, after each 55
hour long, 6 day work week. Phagan had put in more than 2,700 hours of labor
at the factory according to Leo Frank's own hand written record books.
Flash back to the critical first 48 hours of the Mary Phagan murder
investigation:
While Leo Frank was making his deposition at the Atlanta Police Station on
Monday morning, April 28, 1913, unbeknownst to him, there was pandemonium
& morbid hysteria at his factory, because one of Frank's employees named
Robert P. Barret, discovered a bloodied tress of hair tangled on the solid
iron handle of his bench lathe, which was located in the metal room, and
moments later another female employee, Magnolia Kennedy, discovered a 5"
inch wide fan shaped blood stain on the floor of the metal room, located by
the entryway of the only bathroom set on the second floor. Barret testified
about the forensic evidence he found, and it pointed to the same conclusion
about the metal room being the scene of a heinous crime of violence &
poorly managed clean-up job. All of the evidence presented at the Leo Frank
trial kept pointing to the metal room as the real scene of the crime, but
then it all came together...
Jim Conley saying he found Mary Phagan dead in the metal room bathroom area
at the behest of Leo Frank, and Leo Frank changing his story by saying he
might have "unconsciously" gone to the bathroom in the metal room
(Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913, p.186), at the time he formerly told
the police in a deposition that Mary Phagan was inside his office with him
alone (State's Exhibit B), and at the same time Monteen Stover testified Leo
Frank's office was empty (BOE, 1913), resulted in everything coming together
at the murder trial full circle in absolute mathematical perfection &
harmony.
All of the citizenry of the Great State of Georgia, the Southern States and
all the United States of America are asking this:
How many times in the annals of United States legal history, has the defendant
accused of murder, made an admission at their own trial that amounted to an
unmistakable murder confession?
The Atlanta Constitution Newspaper March 9, 1914: Leo Frank, 17 Questions and
Answers.
If there are any doubts about Leo Frank's August 18, 1913, trial admission,
contradicting his earlier deposition to the police (State's Exhibit B, 1913),
while simultaneously solving the Mary Phagan murder mystery, consider reading
the March 9, 1914, Atlanta Constitution issue, publishing an authorized jailhouse
interview of Leo Frank, where he re-confirms his astonishing August 18, 1913,
trial testimony, about a metal room bathroom visit, specifically responding
to Monteen Stover's testimony about his office being empty between 12:05 pm
and 12:10 pm on Saturday, April 26, 1913.
Leo Frank's famous trial and jailhouse admission also debunks the
century-long blood libel allegations made by Leo Frank partisans against Hugh
Dorsey and Harry Scott that they both unscrupulously conspired for political
ambition reasons to implicate an "innocent" Leo Frank for murder.
Appeals from 1913 to 1986:
Every type and kind of appellate court or tribunal called to review the Leo
Frank trial brief of evidence from 1913 to 1915, 1982 to 1986, did not
disturb the unanimous verdict of the jury and judge that was rendered on
August 25 & 26, 1913, respectively. The Georgia Supreme Court ruled the
evidence at the Leo Frank trial sustained a conviction beyond a reasonable
doubt and that Leo Frank had a fair trial, so did the U.S. Supreme Court rule
the trial was fair. Even the corrupt Governor of Georgia, John M. Slaton, on
the last page of his 29-page highly political commutation order of June 21,
1915, stated clearly he was sustaining the decisions of the Leo Frank trial
Jury and Appellate courts.
Never in the History of the United States of America has there been a
Posthumous Pardon for a Serial Pedophile, Rapist & Strangler.
Finally, read between the lines of grotesque appeasement concerning the
highly political & shameful Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL)
sponsored Leo M. Frank posthumous pardon, issued more than seven decades
after the trial. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles refused to
exonerate Leo Frank of strangling Mary Phagan, when they posthumously pardoned
him on March 11, 1986. When the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles was
asked why they wouldn't address the issue of Leo Frank's guilt or innocence,
an official bureaucratic falsehood was given as the reason, that the legal
records of the Leo Frank trial no longer existed, but that statement is a
bald faced lie, the three major Atlanta newspapers independently published
word-for-word every prosecution & defense question and witness answer
given at the trial, and the official Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence (1913)
and Georgia Supreme Court File on Leo Frank (1913, 1914), all 1,800 pages
survived into the 21st century. We can now compare these official legal
records ratified by the defense & prosecution, with the published Atlanta
newspapers' stenographic accounts of the Leo Frank trial 'Question and Answer
testimony'. The Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence (1913) is the final
arbiter.
So Why Did the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles Lie?
We now can take a wild guess at the real reason why the board publicly lied,
the 1,800 page Georgia Supreme Court Case file reveals Mary Phagan was not
the only girl Leo Frank sadistically raped. It turns out, more than a year
before 1913, Leo Frank raped another one of his teenage employees, &
immediately after inseminating her - which ultimately caused her to get
pregnant and shipped away to a home for unwed mothers - he permanently
scarified the little girl by ferociously biting deep into the inner most
flesh of her thy adjacent to genitals (Georgia Supreme Court, 1913, 1914).
Steve Oney conveniently suppressed the details & depth of this fact in
his book (Spineless Coward). Perhaps I could jocosely suggest that Steve Oney
can sharpen his investigative reporting skills & track down whatever
happened to Leo Frank's genetic heir born from the raped teenage girl who
became a single mother. Was the baby boy born out of wedlock in late 1912
named little Leo Max Frank Jr or Leo Max Frank the Second? Did this heir ever
have any children?
One Star Instead of Zero:
Steve Oney deserves credit for one thing, he publicly dispelled a century of
lies perpetuated by Abe Foxman, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL);
the cult-like following of Leo Frank; and academic quack "Leo Frank
Intellectual Movement", about terrorizing mobs of angry people shouting
death threats at the Jury through the open windows of the trial courtroom,
"hang the Jew or we'll hang you", "lynch the sheeny" and
"crack the Jews neck" (Leonard Dinnerstein's hate crime hoax, 1966,
1967, 1968, 1987, 1991, 1999, 2008). Never once did a single newspaper report
people screaming death threats at the Jury & it was never reported by
Judge Roan, jurors, prosecution team members, Leo Frank or his legal defense
team, in any of the appeals seeking a new trial.
Why Steve Oney Only Deserves One Star:
Revisionist journalist-author Steve Oney, weaves together a fantastic collage
of unsubstantiated Leo Frank hoaxes & frauds throughout his entire book,
'and the dead shall rise' (2003), as part of his shameless efforts to re-write
history, exonerate Leo Frank of the Mary Phagan murder, & ultimately
rehabilitate the image of Leo Frank from that of a perverted, sadistic
rapist-pedophile and strangler, toward a more kinder & gentler,
mythological stoic-martyr, who was unjustly scapegoated in a vast
misunderstanding.
By cherry picking & misrepresenting enough parts of the case, the subtext
of Steve Oney's book is that an "innocent" & well educated
Ivy-League German-Jew, Leo Max Frank, was ensnared in 1913 by the real
culprit, a semi-literate & drunken stumble bum, the African-American
factory sweeper, James "Jim" Conley.
Steve Oney pretends to be mystified, downplaying the fact that Leo Frank
& Jim Conley had a personal-business relationship that was a bit too
close for comfort. Leo Frank would often goose & jolly with Jim at the
factory. Leo Frank also managed Jim's pawnshop contracts and housed them in
his safe, as Conley had a shady side business wheeling-and-dealing pocket
watches at the NPCo factory & even ripped off Mr. Arthur Pride, who
testified about it at the trial. On September 10, 1912, Conley began serving
a one month sentence for his 7th offense of public intoxication, yet Leo
Frank took him back at the National Pencil Company in early October after
Conley served only 3 weeks. Steve Oney more than once falsifies non-existent
crimes & charges that do not exist in Jim Conley's official criminal
record as an attempt to prejudice the reader. On page 120 Steve Oney claims
Jim Conley committed armed robbery, but that is not true, nor did Jim Conley
shoot a gun at his common law wife Lorena Jones. Did Steve Oney think no one
would review Jim Conley's rap sheet in the trial exhibits? Or follow Jim
Conley in the Atlanta newspapers' crime blotter after the trial from 1913
onward?
Leo Frank's Silence About Jim Conley:
Steve Oney never answers why Leo Frank knowingly refused to tell the police
Jim Conley could read and write on a basic level. Leo Frank knew for a fact
Jim Conley - an employee since 1911 - could read and write on a semi-literal
level, but he kept this information a secret until revealing it was too late
(3 weeks too late). Jim Conley worked at the National Pencil Company in
various capacities, including written inventory & stock work for Leo
Frank who vetted Conley's signed pawnshop contracts & promissory notes.
It was naturally an incriminating circumstance that Leo Frank never said a
single word about Conley to the police during the early days of the Mary
Phagan murder investigation, even though the "death notes" were
clearly written in Ebonics, and their were only 8 African-Americans out of
173 employees in total, working at the National Pencil Company factory.
Leo Frank's Bungled Racist Intrigue: More Details Oney Left out.
What Steve Oney fails to fully elaborate for the reader is the racist subplot
of the bludgeoning, rape and strangulation of Mary Phagan. Leo Frank's
botched intrigue to pin the crime on his Negro Nightwatchman, Newton
"Newt" Lee, fell apart in a matter of days using a forged time-card.
Leo Frank on Friday, April 25, ordered Newt Lee to arrive at work an hour
early, at 4:00 pm on that infamous April 26, 1913, so Leo Frank could leave
early and go to the ballgame with his Christian brother-in-law Mr. Ursenbach
(married to Lucille's older sister Rosalind Selig). Leo Frank told the police
on Sunday, April 27, 1913, that Newt Lee's time card was punched perfectly
every half hour, but the next day, on Monday, April 28, 1913, Frank gave the
police an incriminating time card that made it seem like Newt Lee had 4 hours
of unaccounted time on the evening of the murder (Defendant's Exhibit A).
Leo Frank vs. Jim Conley:
Oney points out in his book that weeks after Leo Frank & Jim Conley were
arrested, the police arranged for them to confront each other face-to-face
over the murder, Jim agreed, but Leo refused. Oney never answers the question
why an "innocent" White man would refuse to confront a Negro
accusing him of raping & strangling a 13-year old white girl, in the
context of a White racial separatist south of 1913, where the word of a Negro
janitor would never be taken over the word of an executive white man.
17 Years of Short Sighted Investigative Journalism:
Though Steve Oney claims he spent 17 years of his life, traveling around the
United States, to research & write this colorful & slangy,
thesaurus-enriched book, his analysis is mostly stagnant puddle shallow,
mellow dramatic, oozing with ego & myopic at best. Steve Oney in this
adventure tends to wear horse blinders & drives with the emergency brakes
on during his epic 700+ page journey, and as a result, he does not plumb the
depths of the Leo Frank case, or soar above it's centenarian heights like a
lucid, fearless and dispassionate researcher, looking back on the case 9
decades later, with new, lucid and penetrating eyes.
Oney never explores any of the variations & permutations, or possible
real solutions to the crime, making his book a complete & utter waste of
time. Oney never attempts to answer the myriad of "Whys" either,
leaving the reader truly frustrated, unsatisfied and unfulfilled. No real
modern 21st century forensic analysis is applied to this case by Oney,
despite the fact hundreds of pages have survived into the 21st century with
crime scene details, diagrams & autopsy descriptions by police,
detectives, undertakers and physicians, respectively, turning this book into
nothing more than a long winded journalists diatribe that is lost in a
labyrinth of toady Leo Frank partisanship, pseudo-history & shameless
omission.
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