Phagan Family Newsletter Number Four

Former governor Roy Barnes Claims Leo Frank Did Not Kill Mary Phagan. He Insists that the Century-Old conviction was “wrong”.

What Roy Barnes doesn’t want you to know:

107 years ago, Leo Frank, the general superintendent of an Atlanta pencil factory, targeted my great aunt, 13-year-old Mary Phagan—just like he had targeted 20 other young girls who worked there at the National Pencil Company. He attempted to rape her and she resisted. He beat her and then strangled her. Now former governor Roy Barnes and the Anti-Defamation League want to exonerate Leo Frank and claim that an African-American man was the “real killer.” We must assure every reader that no one on earth wanted Mary’s murderer to be convicted and sentenced for this horrific crime more than the Phagan Family. Over many years we have devoted many hours of research and published a book on this historic case.

Without question or doubt, Leo Frank murdered Little Mary Phagan. In recent interviews and lectures Roy Barnes, who is an attorney, has exhibited a truly embarrassing lack of knowledge about critical details of the case. He has misstated the evidence and invented “evidence” that does not exist. He tells his audiences to read books that actually disprove his own point of view. Barnes seems unaware that most of the things he believes about the case are pure propaganda direct from Frank’s public relations team. Fulton County District Attorney, Paul Howard, has taken on Roy Barnes as a “consultant” in the newly formed Conviction Integrity Unit (CIU). In fact, Barnes says he is the one who brought the Leo Frank case to D.A. Paul Howard, who then set up the CIU for the express purpose of exonerating the rapist-murderer of my great aunt, Mary Anne Phagan (1899-1913)! For over a century, propaganda has masqueraded as “new evidence”: there have been plays, articles, books, videos, movies, podcasts, dramas, claims of death-bed confessions, mysterious bite marks and teeth x-rays (no evidence), and claims of anti-Semitic pogroms (no evidence). Instead of actually examining the trial record, Roy Barnes cobbles together all of the propaganda and pushed it on Paul Howard, the media, and the public as “truth.”

Let’s look at just some of Barnes’s most glaring “misstatements” and then present what the actual evidence shows. If, after this clear correction, Barnes and his associates (and the media) continue pushing their lies and falsehoods, then we can safely attribute their actions to willful and open deception. Here are just a few of Roy Barnes’s many public False Statements and Factual ERRORS:

Roy Barnes’s False Statements

The Factual CORRECTIONS

“I’m convinced through the reading not only did he not get a fair trial, he was not guilty. The case just simply was wrong.” “‘There’s no question he didn’t get a fair shot,’ Barnes said....There is substantial reasonable doubt as to whether Frank was guilty.’”
Roy Barnes recently told some law students that “If you get interested in this case,” they should read the book by author Steve Oney. But when asked if the trial jury “ignored the facts in the case,” Oney responded, “No, I think there was a reasonable case against Leo Frank.” Even Gov. John Slaton, who (under political pressure) commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment, wrote: “The Supreme Court…determined as a matter of law, and correctly in my judgment, that there was sufficient evidence to sustain the [guilty] verdict.”

“And there were just mobs of people. And as the jury would go [to] the courthouse every day, the mob would scream, ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!’”

Here, again, Steve Oney is clear: “[I]t didn’t happen. It was something that someone wrote a couple of years after the crime, and then it got stuck into subsequent recountings of the story….Jews were accepted in the city, and the record does not substantiate subsequent reports that the crowd outside the courtroom shouted at the jurors: ‘Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you.’”

In the book Night Fell on Georgia, by Charles and Louise Samuels, they write: “Leo Frank was a Jew, but at the time there was little, if any anti-Semitism in Atlanta.” The Breman Museum stopped making the false claim of anti-Semitic chants. Only Roy Barnes and his ADL cohorts continue that propaganda.

“Oliver Wendall Holmes and Charles Evans Hughes (Supreme Court justices) wrote [about how there was a mob outside where somebody would sit in the window] and holler what the testimony was. And there would be a roar of approval or boo of disapproval.”

After losing 12 successive court appeals Frank’s lawyers went to the US Supreme Court, which REFUSED his 13th appeal. In a statement, Holmes and Hughes simply affirmed that generally trials should not be carried out under mob rule. The Justices never actually reviewed the Frank trial. Indeed, as Governor Slaton pointed out, the case record shows there were no anti-Semitic mobs in or outside the courtroom. The murder trial, conducted by Judge Leonard S. Roan, was in fact orderly, and the Supreme Court found in the trial “no error of law.”

“They had one of the main witnesses on his deathbed to recant, this was back in the 70s.”

Roy Barnes simply made that up. Perhaps he is referring to Alonzo Mann, whom I actually interviewed in my home on July 19, 1983, for four hours. Mr. Mann was a very nice elderly gentleman but he has told so many different stories to detectives, to the court, to reporters, to Georgia officials—even things that conflict with Leo Frank’s story—that even Barnes’s expert author Steve Oney has said: “You can’t reverse an 80-year-old conviction based on the wavering memory of an 85-year-old man.”

Pardon and Parole Board issued a posthumous pardon…based on a procedural process that he was not afforded a fair trial based on the flimsiest of evidence.” An untrue by the Board.

After the first attempt to pardon Frank was denied in 1982, the Georgia Pardon and Parole Board met in secret with Jewish organizations to devise a way to “Pardon” Leo Frank. And to this day those negotiations and documents are considered to be a “Confidential State Secret”! Even so, nowhere in this secret 1986 “pardon” (which, very strangely, is not even on official government letterhead) does it state that Leo Frank did not have a fair trial. In fact, the pardon does not acknowledge any crime for which a pardon is necessary. Nor does it absolve Leo Frank of his crime.

“Anti-Semitism is absolutely not the reason for this libel that has been framed against me. It isn’t the source nor the result of this sad story.” —Leo Frank

“Tom Watson had a newspaper called the Jeffersonian weekly and he printed headlines in red and it was scandalous ... reporting in the trial that occurred every day.” - Roy Barnes

The fact is Tom Watson did not write ANYTHING at all about the trial until 1914, seven months after Leo Frank had been convicted! So Watson had absolutely NO EFFECT on the trial or the verdict. In fact, Frank himself tried to hire Watson to be his attorney. Watson declined.

“Judge Roan, who had presided over the trial and wrote Gov. Slaton a letter saying ‘if I had the power…I would have probably ran in a new trial….’ [H]e didn’t think he had the power at the time—he was wrong—and Governor Slaton tells him yeah you could have done that.” This is simply made up by Barnes. There is no such letter; there is no proof of
this Letter having ever existed. Judge Roan presided over the entire trial. He had “the power” to call a mistrial, to annul the verdict, to impose a life sentence, instead of capital punishment. He CHOSE to sentence Leo Frank to death by hanging! Judge Roan rejected the Leo Frank defense team's petition for a new trial on 107 grounds.

Roy Barnes and his associates are hell-bent on exonerating Leo Frank and convicting a long-deceased African-American man named James Conley, who is not able to defend himself.

Conley is THE SECOND African American that Frank tried to pin his crime on! Though he poses as an expert in the case, Roy Barnes seems totally unaware that:

• 5 members of the Grand Jury that indicted Leo Frank were Jewish;

• the Grand Jury indicted Leo Frank WITHOUT the testimony of James Conley;

• all three Atlanta daily newspapers had Jewish editors throughout the Leo Frank case.

Even though Roy Barnes has little knowledge of the facts of this case, the State of Georgia has actually employed him as a consultant in the Mary Phagan murder case! This is a travesty. He says, “The ghost of Leo Frank walks among us today.” Well, D.A. Paul Howard, What about justice for a little girl named Mary Phagan?!

Pennsylvania College Rejects Biased Leo Frank Play

Students at Point Park University in Pittsburgh have rejected the Alfred Uhry play PARADE and the school has CANCELLED its performance. For years Uhry, the writer of the movie Driving Miss Daisy, has promoted PARADE as the “true story” of the Leo Frank case. It is not. Its sole purpose is to falsely place blame for the murder of Little Mary Phagan on an African-American man named James Conley. According to the Jewish Chronicle, “some Point Park students...took issue with the show’s conclusion that implies that Jim Conley, a black janitor and Frank’s main accuser, was the actual perpetrator of the crimes...” Students at Point Park determined that they would not be a part of racist propaganda. Will the Fulton County Conviction Integrity Unit do the same?

Keys To Leo Frank’s Prison Cell Discovered?

The Breman Museum claims that they have found the keys to Leo Frank’s cell at Milledgeville Prison in Georgia. But the FACT is Leo Frank lived such a charmed life in prison that the keys may have metaphorically belonged to him! Most inmates at the Milledgeville Prison Farm, slept in barracks, not cells. No other inmate in the history of MILLEDGEVILLE PRISON had an experience like Leo Frank. His letters home during the first few weeks, wrote author Leonard Dinnerstein, “resemble those from a child vacationing at a summer camp.” In one letter Frank writes: “We get the finest Elberta peaches and watermelons here, grown on the Farm. The apples are stewed for me. I also sleep well.”

He received gifts of an Ingersoll watch, a shaving mirror, a box of cigars, chocolate cake, plenty of books, a footlocker that “overflowed” with tins of crackers and sardines, packs of cigarettes and gum.

A friend brought him toilet and shaving articles including “bath and face towels.” He received a shipment of phonograph records, which he played on the warden’s own Victrola machine. He was exasperated one day, complaining, “You know I have so much mail and I like to keep things clear and orderly.” Frank sat at “a big roller top desk” where he spent his days preparing his correspondence. He was even able to offer postal services to his wife back in Atlanta: “Let me know if you need some stamps, and I can send you some, so you can write to me.” He received daily deliveries of newspapers, which he read each morning in his robe. He even carried on a card game by mail with the bridge writer for the New York Times! He exercised with a set of dumbbells in an area by his cell. There is much more on Frank’s prison conditions in the recently published book by the Nation of Islam (now banned on Amazon, it was banned during Black History Month, February 2019).

Please contact Mary Phagan-Kean at her Seeking Justice For Mary Phagan Website: http://www.LittleMaryPhagan.com

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Permission granted by Mary Phagan Kean to publish this version of the Phagan Family Newsletter.