The sloppy investigation also left untested bloody fingerprints on a basement door and on the dead girl's jacket. When the elevator descended to the basement, the foul odor that was released eliminated doubts as to the nature of the substance. Detectives seemed even less interested in another piece of evidence that would influence later assessments of guilt: a human feces ("something that looked like a person's stool," as it was later described) at the bottom of the elevator shaft near where the body was found.
#Festify unexpected character ecountered trial
One seemed to identify the murderer ("a long tall negro black that hoo it wase"), while the other suggested that the writer was told by the actual murderer to throw suspicion elsewhere ("he said he would love me.play like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did buy his slef.") Oddly, detectives initially paid little attention to the notes, which would later play a critical role in the trial and its subsequent review by the governor, and focused more on other physical evidence. The crime scene investigation turned up two puzzling notes scrawled on scraps of yellow paper. Atlanta's mayor told police: "Find this murderer fast, or be fired!" Ten thousand mourners lined up to view Phagan's body and an angry citizenry demanded that the young girl's murder be avenged.
The Mary Phagan murder unleashed a pent-up frustration with the pathological conditions of the city. Child labor laws were widely ignored and children worked for as little as 22 cents a week. Within the previous decade, Atlanta had experienced a serious race riot and recorded the highest arrest rate of any major city in the country. The murder of Mary Phagan shocked a city already reeling from crime, violence, and desperate working conditions.
A worker at the factory called to the scene identified the body: "Oh my God! That's Mary Phagan." A piece of jute rope was wrapped around her neck. Her skull was dented and caked with blood. The body was that of a thirteen-year-old girl. on April 27, 1913, Newt Lee, the night watchman for the National Pencil Factory, carried a lantern with him to the factory basement to help him light his way to the "Negro toilet." When his light fell upon a prone human form, Lee called Atlanta police, who arrived ten minutes later. The case ultimately drew the attention of the United States Supreme Court and the Governor of Georgia, but neither the Constitution nor a Governor's commutation could spare Frank a violent death at the end of a rope strung from a Georgia oak tree.Īround 3 a.m. Unfortunately, it now seems, events and the South's anti-Semitism conspired to lead to the conviction of the wrong man, the factory's Jewish superintendent, Leo Frank. The discovery of the body of a thirteen-year-old girl in the basement of an Atlanta pencil factory where she had gone to collect her pay check shocked the citizens of that crime-ravaged southern city and roused its public officials to find a suspect and secure a conviction. The National Pencil factory, site of the murder of Mary Phagan
0 kommentar(er)
