Thread by @Timayenis

ADL & The Leo Frank Case
Thread 🧵:

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) was founded by B'nai B'rith in 1913 to protect Leo Frank. They still claim that Frank was innocent and a victim of Antisemitism. In this thread, I will examine the facts of the case about whether Frank was guilty or innocent.

13 year-old Mary Phagan was a sweatshop laborer for Georgia’s National Pencil Company. On Saturday, April 26, 1913, Mary went to the facotry to collect her $1.20 pay from the Company's superintendent, Leo M. Frank, at his office.

She was attacked by an assailant who struck her down, ripped her undergarments, likely attempted to sexually abuse her, and then strangled her to death. Her body was dumped in the factory basement.

Superintendent Leo Frank, who was the head of Atlanta’s B’nai B’rith, was eventually convicted of the murder and sentenced to hang. After a concerted and lavishly financed campaign by the American Jewish community, Frank’s death sentence was commuted to life in prison.

On August 16, 1915, Leo Frank was snatched from his prison cell by citizens outraged about the commutation order and was hanged facing the direction of the house where Phagan had lived. None of the lynchers were ever prosecuted or even indicted for their "crime".

Let’s start by examining the facts of the case. Firstly, only Leo Frank had the opportunity to be alone with Mary Phagan, and he admitted he was alone with her in his office when she came to get her pay, in fact he was completely alone with her on the second floor.

Frank was nervous when Newt Lee (factory’s night watchman) arrived and insisted that he had to leave and “have a good time”. This violated the corporate rule that once the night watchman entered the building, he could not leave until he handed over the keys to the day watchman.

After Frank returned home in the evening after the murder, he called Newt Lee on the telephone and asked him if everything was “all right” at the factory, something he had never done before. A few hours later, Lee would discover the body of Mary Phagan in the factory's basement.

Policeman Boots Rogers, who drove the officers to Frank’s home and then took them all, including Frank, back to the factory on the morning of April 27, said Leo Frank was extremely nervous and asked suspicious questions even before being told of the murder.

Early in the investigation, while both Leo Frank and Newt Lee were being held and some suspicion was still directed at Lee, a bloody shirt was “discovered” in a barrel at Lee’s home. Investigators became suspicious after the examination of the shirt.

Leo Frank made hypocritical statements like this one about the investigation while he was the factory superintendent, who had total control over access to the factory and crime scene and was fully aware that evidence might be destroyed and still allowed it to happen.

Almost immediately after the murder, pro-Frank partisans with the Pencil Company hired the Pinkerton detective agency to investigate the crime. But even the Pinkertons, being paid by Frank’s supporters, eventually were forced to come to the conclusion that Frank was guilty.

Same with the Burns Agency man, he had also come to believe in Frank’s guilt: “It is being insinuated by certain forces that we are striving to shield Frank. That is absurd. From what I developed in my investigation, I am convinced that Frank is the guilty man.”

Jim Conley (the factory's sweeper) told the police two obviously false narratives before finally breaking down and admitting that Leo Frank offered him some money to help him move the body of Mary Phagan to the elevator.

Jim Conley also confessed in authoring, at Frank’s direction, the “death notes” found near the body in the basement. These notes, ostensibly from Mary Phagan but written in semi-literate Southern black dialect, in an attempt to portray the night watchman (Newt Lee) as the killer.

Blood spots were found exactly where Jim Conley said he dropped Mary Phagan’s body while trying to move it. Conley could not have known this. If he was making up his story, this is a coincidence too fantastic to be accepted.

When Conley re-enacted the sequence of events, Harry Scott of the Pinkerton Agency stated: “There is no doubt that the negro is telling the truth, it would be foolish to doubt it. The negro couldn’t go through the actions like he did unless he had done this just like he said.”

The official record shows Leo Frank confessed to murdering Mary Phagan three times, though he would deny all three. Read more in this article by the American Mercury: theamericanmercury.org/2012/09/did-le…

On August 25, 1913, in the longest and most costly trial in Southern history, after 2 of South's most talented and expensive attorneys and numerous detectives and agents gave their all in defense of Leo M. Frank, Frank was unanimously convicted of the murder by a vote of 12 to 0.

Many Jewish historians have written books to "prove" the innocence of Leo Frank. Writer Herschel Goldhirsch (Harry Golden) may have perpetrated the most outrageous hoax in the Frank case. Golden claimed that Jim Conley had confessed to the murder of Mary Phagan, multiple times!

Mary Phagan’s grand-niece, relates in her book that her grandfather William Joshua Phagan, Jr. (Mary Phagan’s brother) confronted Jim Conley in private in 1934, and was ultimately convinced that the former factory sweeper was telling the truth.

In this thread, I posted a few basic facts about the case. If you are interested in further research, I suggest visiting the two sites linked below:

Leo Frank Case Archive:
Leo Frank Research Library: leofrank.org
leofrank.info

Lastly, I would like to thank @PhaganJustice for the enormous help with this thread. I highly recommend you to follow the account and visit her site: littlemaryphagan.com

In Μemoriam: Mary Phagan (June 1, 1899 – April 26, 1913)