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Thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan lived in the poor section of Atlanta, Georgia, but she dressed up like a high-society girl on the morning of Saturday, 26 April 1913, Confederate Memorial Day. Even though the War Between the States had been fought thirty-five years before her birth, Mary was excited to celebrate the event. There would be a parade and fireworks, and rumor had it that the widow of the great Confederate General Stonewall Jackson would actually attend!
After doing her morning chores and eating a breakfast of leftover cabbage and bread, Mary put on a pretty store-bought violet dress that accentuated her already well developed figure. This was a holiday--a day when a little innocent flirting with boys would be fun. She carefully fixed a pair of bows in her thick auburn hair, then topped off the outfit with a blue straw hat that brought out the blue in her bright eyes. Her mother stood on the front porch watching Mary go, and noticed her daughter's excitement: "She had dimples in her cheeks."
Clutching her silver mesh purse and a black parasol, Mary hurried through misty rain to catch the streetcar at 11:45. Sixteen-year-old Helen Ferguson remembered waving at Mary as she rode toward town. And George Epps, a fifteen-year-old newsboy, said he'd talked to her on the streetcar about watching the parade together.
But Mary had to make one stop before she could celebrate: she had to pick up her pay. Mary worked at the National Pencil Company with more than a hundred other teenage girls. Because of a supply shortage of metal used to make pencil caps, she had only worked two shifts during the past week, but Mary wanted the $1.20 she had earned. Around noon that Saturday, she crossed beneath the granite facade of the National Pencil Company building to enter the factory.
Mary Phagan never left the building alive.
And she was not the only person to die.
When the telephone rang at 7:00 Sunday morning, twenty-nine-year-old Leo Frank felt a trace of unease. He had dreamed the telephone had rung in the middle of the night, and now its ringing came far too early for a social call. He lifted the receiver reluctantly.
"Is this Mr. Frank, superintendent of the National Pencil Factory?" It was Detective Starnes.
When Leo Frank answered yes, the detective told him he had to come to the factory immediately. Leo objected, saying he hadn't had his breakfast yet, but Starnes insisted he would send a patrol car.
The car arrived quickly, and Leo's wife, Lucille, invited the policemen to enter the home she and Leo shared with her parents. Leo came downstairs, only partially dressed. He questioned Detective Black and Boots Rogers with nervous distress, asking what had happened at the factory and whether the night watchman had reported anything.
Detective Black interrupted him. "Mr. Frank, you had better get your clothes on and let us go to the factory and see what has happened."
To the detective, Leo's behavior seemed suspicious as he struggled with his tie. "His voice was hoarse and trembling and nervous and excited," Black recalled. Boots Rogers also thought Leo looked nervous, and his questions were jumpy. But the police officers weren't particularly reassuring. Leo later remembered, "I asked them what the trouble was and the man who I afterwards found out was Detective Black hung his head and didn't say anything."
A four-person conversation that was part of a police investigation should have been simple to document. But the confusion that would mar every step of the attempts to find out what had happened to Mary Phagan began that morning with the initial conversation between the police officers and the Franks. Leo, Lucille and Boots Rogers recalled that Leo's wife offered everyone coffee, perhaps hoping that Southern hospitality would calm the tension. But Detective Black remembered that Leo suggested the coffee. To the detective, it sounded as if the superintendent wanted to delay going to the factory.
The police asked Leo, in front of his wife, if he knew Mary Phagan. He told them he didn't. Then they asked, "Didn't a little girl with long hair hanging down her back come up to your office yesterday sometime for her money?" Leo agreed that a girl had indeed come to his office for her pay, but said he didn't know her name was Mary Phagan. He had issued the $1.20 she had earned based on her employee number, not her name. Then he finished dressing and left with the officers, without any breakfast or coffee.
All three men agreed that they drove to the mortuary to view the body. Leo recalled looking closely at the girl and identifying her, but both Black and Rogers remembered the superintendent hanging back, then turning away nervously before they left to go to the factory.
Detective Black observed everything Leo did with a suspicious eye. Trying to answer police questions, the superintendent fumbled through pay records to confirm that Mary Phagan was the girl he had paid on Saturday. When asked to take the group down to the basement, Leo asked again for coffee before struggling with the power switch and the cables of the manual elevator. In the end, an employee had to work the elevator. Black saw the superintendent's nervousness and his requests for coffee as attempts to delay the moment when he would have to look at the scene of the crime. Once they reached the basement, Black thought it was significant that Leo paid little attention to the sawdust and cinders where police told him the body had lain, but was distressed by the forced door with the bloody handprints.
Then they all drove to the police stationhouse, where officers wanted Leo to examine the two notes found beside Mary's body. Despite the mild weather, Leo shivered uncontrollably as he sat in the front seat of the police car, adding to Detective Black's suspicion.
Leo felt he was only reacting naturally to police suspicion and a horrifying murder. Later he would say, "[I]magine, awakened out of my sound sleep, and a run down in the cool of the morning in an automobile driven at top speed, without any food or breakfast, rushing into a dark passageway, coming into a darkened room, and then suddenly an electric light flashed on, and to see the sight that was presented by that poor little child; why, it was a sight that was enough to drive a man to distraction. Of course I was nervous; any man would be nervous if he was a man."
Copyright ©2010 by Elaine Marie Alphin
