Leo Frank

Leo Frank was a New York-born Jew who moved to Marietta, Georgia. In 1913 he was the superintendent of the National Pencil Co. , which was partly owned by his uncle, when he was arrested for the rape and murder of a local girl employed at the factory, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been raped and strangled and her body found in the factory's cellar on August 26. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive. When authorities were told about rumors that he had been seen flirting with the young Phagan, he was regarded as the chief suspect and shortly thereafter arrested. Prosecutors, along with local and state politicians, cast him as a rich, arrogant Yankee Jew who had come to the South to prey on young Christian women. A former member of the US House of Representatives used the specter of Jewish predators "ravaging our little girls" to help revive the Ku Klux Klan. Frank, to no one's surprise, was found guilty of rape and murder and sentenced to death, even though there was little actual evidence to connect him to the crime.

In 1915 Georgia Gov. John Slaton, after investigating the case himself, came to the conclusion that Frank had been unjustly convicted and that the trial had been rigged against him from the beginning. He commuted Frank's sentence from death to life imprisonment. Local citizenry, however, were outraged. A large mob of at least 1000 people surrounded Slaton's home, shouting and protesting his action, some of them urging the crowd to break into the house and lynch the governor.

In August of 1915 a group of approximately 30 armed men calling itself "The Knights of Mary Phagan" broke into the prison where Frank was being held, tied up the warden and guards and kidnapped Frank. They drove him 150 miles to a place called Frey's Gin, near Mary Phagan's home, and before a shouting, angry crowed, hanged him from a tree. After his dead body was cut down, members of the crowd stomped on and otherwise mutilated it, while others took pictures and some even took bits of the rope that was used to hang him and sold them as souvenirs. Many of the members of the lynch mob were known to people in the area, including authorities, but local newspapers never used their names in stories about the lynching and none were prosecuted for or even charged with the crime. Among the lynch mob were a former Georgia governor, several local police officers and sheriff's deputies, a Superior Court judge, the Sheriff of Cobb County, several prominent businessmen, a future District Attorney and a future mayor of Marietta. Frank's mutilated body was driven to Atlanta and turned over to an undertaker. A crowd of several thousand showed up at the establishment, demanding to see his body to ensure that he had indeed been hanged. When The Undertaker refused, the crowed threatened to break into the business and see for itself, and began throwing bricks and rocks through the windows. The Undertaker relented and let the crowd file past the body, many of them spitting on it.

In the early 1980s a re-investigation of the case determined that Mary Phagan had in fact been raped and murdered by the company's janitor, a black ex-convict named Jim Conley, who police at the time had initially suspected but let go when they turned their attention to Frank.

In 1986 he was pardoned by the Georgia Board of Pardons.