When Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan in 1913, the trial became a powder keg of anti-Semitism, fear, and vengeance. But what happened two years later — when a mob dragged him from prison and hanged him under an oak tree — would become one of the darkest stains on American legal history.
The Girl, the Basement, and the Accusation
On April 27, 1913, a janitor named Newt Lee entered the basement of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta and found the body of 13-year-old Mary Phagan. Her dress was torn, her skull was fractured, and a cord was wrapped around her neck. She’d come by the factory the day before to pick up her paycheck — just $1.20 for a week’s work inserting erasers into pencils.
Within hours, suspicion landed on Leo Max Frank, the 29-year-old superintendent of the factory. He was educated, Northern-born, and Jewish — three traits that made him deeply unpopular in the rising tide of Southern populism. Frank had signed Mary’s pay slip. He was among the last people known to have seen her alive. But he was also soft-spoken, socially awkward, and politically powerless. And in 1913 Georgia, that made him expendable.
A Trial Soaked in Spectacle
The case quickly exploded. The courtroom became a theatre. Journalists packed the benches. Outside, protestors chanted for Frank to hang. Inside, prosecutors built a case that rested almost entirely on the testimony of one man: Jim Conley, a Black janitor at the factory with a long rap sheet. Conley claimed Frank asked him to help hide the body. But his story changed multiple times. He initially denied knowing anything.
Then admitted to writing the strange, semi-literate notes left by the body — notes that used Mary’s voice to blame a “Negro.” Then claimed Frank dictated them. The media ran with it. So did the public. The jury — under intense public scrutiny — delivered a guilty verdict. Leo Frank was sentenced to death.
The Governor, the Mob, and the Rope
What happened next is where the story truly shifts from trial to tragedy. Two years into appeals, Georgia’s outgoing governor, John Slaton, reviewed the case. He read the trial transcripts, the changing testimonies, and the missing physical evidence. He was stunned by the holes. On June 21, 1915, Governor Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life in prison.
He called the conviction unsafe. Not a pardon. But not a death sentence either. The public didn’t care. Riots broke out. Slaton received death threats. He had to flee the state under armed guard. And in Marietta, Mary Phagan’s hometown, a secret committee of 25 men — including a former governor, a judge, and a mayor — began planning their own justice. They called themselves The Knights of Mary Phagan.
On August 16, 1915, they drove 150 miles to the prison farm where Frank was held. They cut the phone lines. Overpowered the guards. Took Frank into a car. The next morning, in the woods outside Marietta, they hanged him from a tree. Photos were taken. Sold as postcards. Crowds came to picnic under the body. No one was ever charged.
The Legacy That Never Settled
Frank’s lynching wasn’t just a gruesome footnote. It sparked a national reckoning. Outrage in the North was fierce. Jewish communities were shaken. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) had been founded just two years earlier — now, it had its rallying cry. But in the South, the aftermath was different. A group of men watched the lynching and saw power, unity, identity. Three months later, they burned a cross on Stone Mountain. The modern Ku Klux Klan was born.
Was Leo Frank Innocent?
To this day, debate simmers. Some still believe Frank was guilty — mostly locals in Marietta, where the memory of Mary Phagan remains sacred. But over the decades, mounting evidence — and decades-late confessions — have shifted the consensus.
In 1982, a former office boy at the factory, Alonzo Mann, came forward at age 83. He claimed he saw Jim Conley carrying Mary’s body alone. That Frank wasn’t even there. But he’d stayed silent, afraid for his life. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a posthumous pardon to Leo Frank. But they didn’t exonerate him. They simply acknowledged that the state had failed to protect him from mob murder. That’s all they were willing to say.
