Although Conley offered several different stories, most people felt Conley wasn’t bright enough to make up such a story unless it was true. William Burns himself had expressed an interest in the developing mystery. The Battered Clothing of Mary Phagan, who was murdered at around noon on Saturday, April 26, 1913. An earlier movie version of the case, with the names changed, was directed by Mervyn LeRoy in 1937 and titled They Won't Forget, starring Claude Rains and Lana Turner. She intended to pick up her paycheck then join her neighbors for a big party -- Confederate Memorial Day. Legal haggling, including a rejection of Leo Frank's appeal for a new trial by the Supreme Court of the United States of America forced postponement of the hanging a number of times. During the evening of July 17, 1915, another prisoner named William Creen nearly killed Frank with a butcher knife. According to Leo Frank, in a shuttered factory, Mary Phagan walked into his second floor inner office at 12:02 PM, but Frank claimed he did not know her name at the time. One employee, 13-year-old Mary Phagan, stopped by to obtain her wages and what happened to her that day had lasting repercussions for Georgia, the South, and the entire United States. He said he then helped Frank cover up the murder. Because the death of Leo Frank was still vivid in the minds of Georgians, he felt these men would be important to the success of the organization. The police had arrested a third man for killing Mary Phagan, a teenager who worked for the National Pencil Company in Atlanta. The trial was packed with Watson’s followers and readers of his racist newspaper, Jeffersonian. Simmons then declared the founding of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. On April 27, 1913, a … Jim Conley was found guilty of being an accomplice and sentenced to a chain gang for a year. He then finished work and went home. After Frank's legal appeals failed, the governor of Georgia commuted his death sentence to life imprisonment on June 21, 1915, destroying his own career in the process. Little Mary Phagan is not forgotten. On August 4th, 1913, Jim Conley's testimony visibly shook the jury. County: Fulton CountyCobb CountyAbout North Georgia Feature ArticlesGeneral articles about North GeorgiaGeorgia HistoryArticles about North Georgia history and the state in general. Politically, it seemed an unlikely match: Shriver, then a co-anchor for the CBS ...read more, In an effort to resolve several problems in Asia, including the war between the French and Vietnamese nationalists in Indochina, representatives from the world’s powers meet in Geneva. Newspapers were having a field day with the trial, blaring details of testimony, always searching to beat each other with new evidence that would convict or exonerate Leo Frank. 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The next day, Phagan’s body was found by an African American worker, Newt Lee, in the basement of the factory. Frank’s legal team appealed the sentence and after a lengthy process the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. Before he took his final breath, he pleaded that his wedding ring be given to his wife. As reported in the 1913 Atlanta Georgian, the state’s standards regarding children workers were the worst in the country, with employers hiring children as young as 10. The homicide of Mary Phagan was a case of child labor exploitation & a trigger for anti-Semitism Jul 3, 2018 Larissa Harris On April 26, 1913, most of the shops and businesses in the Southern states were closed as it was Confederate Memorial Day, a day on which people pay public respect and honor to the armed forces of the Confederacy. Leo Frank's guilt of this sex murder was proven with near certainty using forensic evidence (Mary Phagan's blood and hair found in … The crime scene was rich with clues including two notes purportedly written by Phagan during the attack. According to Frank, on April 26th, Mary Phagan arrived at the office, collected her wage and left. The second suspect was the company’s sweeper, another African American named Jim Conley, who had been at the factory on the day she disappeared, but initially denied any wrongdoing.