Leo Frank’s Lynching: A Jewish Man Was Wrongfully Convicted Then Killed

Before dawn on August 17, 1915, a mob of vigilantes kidnapped successful Jewish-American industrialist Leo Frank from the Milledgeville state prison and drove him across the state to Marietta, Ga., where they hanged him.

Two years earlier, Frank had been convicted of killing 13‑year‑old Mary Phagan who worked for him at Atlanta’s National Pencil Company.

Nobody was ever charged with Frank’s lynching, and the case remains one of Georgia’s most notorious.

“Frank was taken out of prison without a shot being fired and driven back to Marietta to be lynched. Most lynchings [at the time] were spontaneous; this one was carefully organized,” Sandra Berman, founding archivist of Atlanta’s William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum, tells A&E Crime + Investigation. Berman spent decades collecting and compiling original documents from the case and curating one of the country’s largest archives on Jewish history.

It all began on Saturday, April 26, 1913—Confederate Memorial Day. Thirteen-year-old Mary stopped by the factory to pick up her paycheck from Frank, who was her superintendent.

At 3:30 a.m. the next morning, Mary was found dead in the factory basement by night watchmen Newt Lee. News of her murder spread quickly, including rumors that she’d been sexually assaulted.

Right away, police arrested Lee for the crime but later let him go. They also arrested a streetcar driver who’d seen Mary the night before she died, as well as a streetcar conductor, bookkeeper and elevator operator at the pencil factory.

Then the investigation turned to Jim Conley, a Black janitor at the pencil factory, who police suspected wrote two notes left by Mary’s body. Conley, who was known as a heavy drinker, gave police four different statements, including one that he’d helped Frank move the girl’s body. But Conley was never arrested or charged in connection to her murder. Instead, he became the state’s main witness against Frank in his murder trial.

Frank was eventually indicted for Mary’s murder and went to trial July 28, 1913. Prosecuting attorney Hugh Dorsey theorized that Frank killed Mary and had Conley write the “murder notes” to blame the crime on Lee.

The evidence was circumstantial and relied almost solely on Conley’s testimony.

Frank’s defense team claimed Conley was the real murderer and hoped to discredit his testimony. It didn’t work.

On August 25, the jury of all white men convicted Frank of Mary’s murder, and he was sentenced to death by hanging.

Most Atlantans were happy with the verdict, even though newspapers around the country had printed lurid details from the trial about race, class, religion and sex that prioritized emotion over evidence.

“These articles tapped into fears and prejudices about Jews, Blacks and poor white Southerners,” Leo Frank historian Steve Oney tells A&E Crime + Investigation.

Adolph Ochs, publisher of The New York Times, made Frank’s exoneration his personal cause, enraging many Georgians who despised being told what to do by a northerner.

“It’s one of the few instances in The New York Times’ history where it adopted advocacy journalism, as opposed to just reporting the news,” And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank author Oney says.

Simultaneously, Tom Watson, the populist newspaper editor of The Jeffersonian, waged a war against Frank’s innocence, using the paper to counter the writings of The New York Times. According to the Anti-Defamation League, Watson’s reporting became openly antisemitic, depicting Phagan “as a ‘pure little Gentile victim’ defiled by a money-grubbing, sexually perverted New York Jew.”

Watson also pushed for the prison commission to obey the court’s death sentence.

Meanwhile, Frank’s defense team frantically filed two appeals to the Georgia Supreme Court. Both were denied. A third appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was also denied in a 7-2 vote, with the two dissenting justices writing Frank never got due process.

Frank’s final plea was for a commutation from outgoing Governor John Slaton, who, after meticulous review, claimed Frank did not get a fair trial and reduced his sentence from death to life in prison.

Many Atlantans became enraged because they believed Frank got a fair trial, Bermans says: “The governor commuting Frank’s death sentence destroyed their faith in the legal system.”

Soon after, a group of men were concocting their own plan to seek the justice they believed was due. “The conspiracy to abduct Frank from the prison and lynch him involved some of the most powerful people in Marietta, state legislators and state prison officials,” Oney says.

According to Oney, on August 16, 1915, 25 men left Marietta in a convoy. They had several guns, wire cutters, explosives and a noose.

Without resistance from the Milledgeville prison guards, they walked right inside, handcuffed Frank and dragged him into one of the waiting cars. The convoy drove Frank nearly 150 miles around of the city of Atlanta to avoid police. Once in Marietta, the men dragged Frank from a vehicle, bound his feet together and placed a noose over his head.

Frank, still protesting his innocence, was blindfolded and forced on a table beneath a large oak tree and hanged.

Atlanta’s Jewish community was in shock. Many Jewish residents moved away from Atlanta. Others stopped practicing Jewish rituals, like standing under the chuppah at wedding ceremonies. “It became a closed subject,” Bermans says. “No one talked about the Frank case. The community just went underground.”

Nobody was ever arrested or prosecuted for Frank’s lynching. Few even pushed for the men to be brought to justice. Some newspapers publicly condemned the lynching, including the Atlanta Constitution, which denounced “mob law” and criticized the breakdown of legal order.

Meanwhile, The Jeffersonian’s Watson stepped up its incendiary coverage of Frank and the Jewish community, even calling for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, which disbanded in the 1870s.

The case also catalyzed organizations of the day, advocating for and against racial violence. The Anti‑Defamation League formed in 1913 to combat antisemitism and other types of bigotry, with Frank’s case playing “a big part in the organization’s early history,” Berman says.

Other men, including several in the lynching party, answered Watson’s call and gathered on Stone Mountain in 1915 to resurrect the Ku Klux Klan, linking Frank’s death directly to the rebirth of organized white supremacy in the South, Berman notes.

In the 1980s, Frank’s case was resurrected again when 83-year-old Alonzo Mann testified he saw Conley carrying Mary’s dead body into the basement of the pencil factory when he worked there as a boy. In 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles issued Frank a posthumous pardon, though Berman says it didn’t address the question of his innocence or guilt; only that the state of Georgia failed to protect him.

Berman says the situation remains a case study in what happens when antisemitism “goes amok.”

Oney thinks the public will never know the full truth behind Mary’s death. “But the greater mystery is how a group of people broke a criminal out of the state prison and drove him miles away, lynched him at dawn and were never arrested,” he continues. “It's the only lynching I've ever heard of where the victim was in a state prison.”