Monday, 28th April 1913 3 Youths Seen Leading Along a Reeling Girl

Atlanta Georgian

Monday, April 28th, 1913

E. S. Skipper Tells Police He Saw Lads Urging Her Down Street Night of Crime.

The story of three men leading a weeping, unwilling girl on Forsyth Street Saturday night is being sounded to its depths to-day by Atlanta policemen in their efforts to unravel the mystery of Mary Phagan's death.

The story is told by E. S. Skipper, of 224 1-2 Peters Street. He declared that on Saturday night about 10 o'clock he saw a girl whose appearance fitted the description of the girl-victim. Three men were with her, all of them young and flashily dressed.

The girl was reeling slightly, Skipper declares, as if rendered dizzy by drugs. She was crying, and time and again lagged behind her companions, as if she feared to go farther. Each time they insisted and she seemed powerless to resist them.

Skipper declared that he can identify the three men. He followed in their wake when first he saw the party on Pryor Street, near Trinity Avenue. At Trinity they turned toward Whitehall, he said, the men urging the girl to accompany them. Down Whitehall to Forsyth he accompanied them, and saw them turn north toward Mitchell Street. There he left them, going toward the Terminal Station, his original destination.

Skipper said that the girl did not appear intoxicated, but merely sick and pitifully weak.

Following closely on the heels of his story came to the police to-day the statement of Adam Woodward, night watchman in the Williams Livery Stable, 35 Forsyth Street, three doors from the factory building. He told the detectives that about 11 o'clock he heard a woman scream several times, but, considering it the cry of a merrymaker, paid no attention to it.

The time specified in the statement of the night watchman links closely with that of the occurrences in Skipper's story and, according to policemen, lends color to the theory that the three men he saw were the men who lured little Mary Phagan to her death.

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