Preface – Leo Frank Case: The 1913 Murder of Little Mary Phagan by Mary Phagan-Kean, Second Revised Edition, April 26, 2025

Word Count: 1554 Words, Reading Time: 6 Minutes

Last Updated on April 17, 2024 by Mary Phagan

It has been 37 years since the first book was published in 1988. The original version included the bibliography, but Horizon Press chose not to publish the bibliography. This revision now includes the original and updated bibliography.

Much of the information published on the case since 1987 then has been distorted by Broadway, Hollywood, journalism and academic propaganda which have profited from retelling these related historical events about Georgia's past in a biased and slanted matter to present Leo Frank and the Jewish community as central victim of this true crime when in fact Mary Phagan was the true victim.

Bill Kinney, known authority of the Leo Frank lynching spoke in 1990 to the Marietta Rotary Club:

"What modern day journalists write about the Frank Case; they lose sight it happened 77 years ago. They try to relate and equate it to today's Cobb County.

Many of us who have studied the trial transcript believe the jury had little choice from the evidence presented except to convict Frank.

If the Frank evidence were put out to a jury today, Frank probably still would be found guilty."

The Phagan family has no objection to anyone expressing their opinions about the Frank case, but we do insist that organizations and personal campaigns not distort the truth
and facts to use this case for their own political purposes. For over 100 years, each passing decade brought with it “new historical evidence” falsely claiming to exonerate Leo Frank. The Phagan family has stated since 1982 that if there were clear-cut evidence to clear Frank of this heinous crime, we
would come forward and ask for exoneration. However, such historical evidence has never come to light. Rather, there are considerable data, extensive documentation, revealing
archival material, and legal, court, and government records that only support and even strengthen the guilty verdict.

During the Pandemic [November 16, 2019 - May 5, 2023, The World Health Organization (WHO) declared the outbreak a public health emergency of international concern (PHEIC) on 30 January 2020, and assessed the outbreak had become a pandemic on 11 March 2020. The WHO ended the PHEIC on 5 May 2023.]

Georgia Governor Kemp signed an executive order for mandatory "Shelter in Place for Georgians" due to COVID-19 from 6 p.m. on Friday, April 3 through Monday, April 13, 2020, and extended to April 30, 2020. [Press Release, Georgia Governor, Brian P. Kemp, Office of the Governor]

April 30, 2020

[Press Release, Georgia Governor, Brian P. Kemp, Office of the Governor]

"To protect vulnerable populations, I will sign an order today requiring medically fragile and elderly Georgians to continue to shelter in place through June 12, 2020.

During Shelter in Place I continued my research and verified my oral history with written evidence and discovered that there was fabrication of data and misrepresentation of historical sources and academic malefance [hoaxes]many of the books written by Jewish revisionists/authors [someone who examines and tries to change existing beliefs about how events happened or what their importance or meaning by deliberately and purposely using deceitful, dishonest, fraudulent, underhanded, hiding information secret from public knowledge] with regards to the murder of my great-aunt Mary Phagan.

Hoaxes/Misrepresentation of historical sources and fabricating data:

Hang the Jew; Anti-Semitism; mobs

Fair Trial

Plants by Defense

Sexual Assault

Bitemarks

Murder Notes

Shit in the Shaft

Exodus of Jews

Appeals

Slaton

Knights of Mary Phagan

Judges: I am one of the few.......

Movies/Plays

Smearing of Mary Phagan

These Hoaxes of historical revisionism are a reinterpretation of historical accounts: distortion of the historical record such that events appear to have occurred and/or impacted history in a way that is it a drastic disagreement with the historical record and usually meant to advance a socio-political view or agenda. [definition of historical revisionism]

Frank’s death is often called a “lynching” but technically, it was not. Lynching refers to extrajudicial punishment, meaning the victim was never convicted of a crime.[1] Leo Frank was indicted by a grand jury that included four Jewish members and was tried and convicted by a 12-man jury and the death sentence was imposed by the judge. His lawyers appealed his case to the highest levels of the US court system and was denied each time. The Georgia Board of Prisons, the agency responsible for recommending commutation of sentences, recommended that Frank’s sentence NOT be commuted but the governor, who was part of the firm representing him, took it upon himself to commute Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment only four days before the end of his term. Slayton claimed he was correcting Judge Roan’s mistake. The judge had recently passed away but he had allegedly written a letter just before his death in which he said he wasn’t convinced of Frank’s guilt.[2] Yet he had pronounced the death sentence on Frank rather than taking a position of clemency and sentencing him to life and had several chances to amend the sentence or grant Frank’s request for a new trial.

In the decades since Frank died, a number of authors, nearly all Jewish, have written books and articles about the case and in nearly every case, they’ve proclaimed that Frank was an innocent man who was accused and convicted solely because he was Jewish – even though Frank himself said that wasn’t the case. [1] Some sources claim a lynching is any killing carried out by someone other than law enforcement but this goes against the original meaning of the word, which is that it was punishment without a trial. The word comes from actions carried out during the Revolutionary War when two brothers named Lynch imprisoned suspected Torys without a trial.

[2] Judge Roan’s family believed the letter was a forgery. The doctor who ran the New York sanitorium where he was being treated swore in an affidavit that he had been of sound mind when he dictated the letter to a staff member.

Jews, mostly in the North, claimed Frank was accused because of (nonexistent) antisemitism. It is an established fact that hostility toward Jews was nonexistent in the South. Hugh Dorsey pointed out in his closing argument that one of the highest ranking officials in the Confederate government, Judah P. Benjamin, was Jewish. This was before any Jew had held any important office in the United States. Since then, Jews had been elected to office in the South, including as mayor of Atlanta, and owned popular businesses. Actions of mostly Northern Jews AFTER Frank was convicted actually spawned resentment toward Jews in Atlanta and throughout Georgia that hadn’t existed before. Albert Lasker even admitted as much. Various authors, often referred to as “historians” and mostly Jewish have attempted to exonerate Frank but did so by ignoring or not being aware of evidence that he was a sexual harasser at best and a pervert at worst. Even those defending him, one of whom was Lasker, felt upon first meeting him that he was a pervert or possibly a homosexual.

Frank defenders thought they finally had the evidence they needed to exonerate Frank in 1982, sixty-nine years after Mary Frank was killed, when Alonzo Mann, the office boy at the time of Mary Phagan’s murder, told reporters from the Nashville Tennessean that he had seen Jim Conley carrying the body of a girl and that it was on the first floor, not the second. Mann claimed that this proved that Conley had lied. However, it didn’t prove anything and the Georgia Board of Pardons said as much when the Jewish Antidefamation League, which was founded by Frank supporters, attempted to have him pardoned. Mann had testified at the trial and said that he had left before noon and hadn’t come back. His “new evidence” was that he had gone back to the factory and had encountered Conley carrying a girl, then had fled when Conley threatened to kill him. He claimed he told his parents and they told him to keep his mouth shut. Mann also claimed he had worked at the factory for “several months” when he had actually only worked there for less than a month when Mary Phagan was killed.

A number of explanations have been offered for Mann’s claim. In my opinion, I believe he inserted himself into a tragedy even though he wasn’t a part.

. Nevertheless, Frank supporters and journalists reported that Mann had exonerated Frank of the murder – he hadn’t.

After the ADL attempt to have Frank pardoned due to Mann’s claims failed, the Georgia ADL decided to try a new tact. They managed to convince the state board of pardons to pardon Frank on the basis that the state had failed to protect him and he had been lynched, thus preventing him from continuing his efforts to prove his “innocence.” Without informing the Phagan family that such an effort was underway, the board of pardons issued a pardon of Leo Frank on the basis of him having been deprived of the ability to establish his innocence without establishing that he was innocent of the crime. That seems to be where things stand now, although the ADL and other Jewish leaders with the support of certain Georgia politicians and others continue to press for exoneration of the killer continues today. It’s all based on defense claims without a shred of new evidence to prove that Frank did not kill little Mary Phagan.