311 Sheet – American State Trials 1918 Volume X Leo Frank Document

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [388 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO M. FRANK. 219

The detectives told Conley to swear to this and to swear to that, but they made the suggestions, and Conley knew whom he had to please. He knew that when he pleased the detectives, the rope knot around his neck grew looser. In the same way, they made Conley swear about Dalton, and in the same way about Daisy Hopkins. They didn't ask him about the mesh bag. They forgot that until Conley got on the stand. That mesh bag and that pay envelope furnish the true motive for this crime, too, and if the girl was ravished, Conley did it after he had robbed her and thrown her body into the basement. Well, they got Conley on the stand, and my friend Dorsey here asked Conley about the mesh bag, and he said, yes, Frank had put it in his safe. That was the crowning lie of all!

Well, they've gone on this way, adding one thing and another thing. They wouldn't let Conley out of jail; they had their own reasons for that, and yet I never heard that old man over there (pointing to the sheriff) called dishonest. He runs his jail in a way to protect the innocent and not to convict them in this jail.

Gentlemen, right here a little girl was murdered, and it's a terrible crime. The Phagan tragedy, the crime that stirred Atlanta as none other ever did.

We have already got in court the man who wrote those notes, and the man who by his own confession was there; the man who robbed her, and, gentlemen, why go further in seeking the murderer than the black brute who sat there by the elevator shaft? The man who sat by that elevator shaft is the man who committed the crime. He was full of passion and lust; he had drunk mean whiskey, and he wanted money at first to buy more whiskey.

[Mr. Arnold asked the sheriff to unwrap a chart which had previously been brought into court. It proved to be a chronological chart of Frank's alleged movements on Saturday, April 26, the day of the crime, and Mr. Arnold announced to the jury that he would prove by the chart that it was a physical impossibility for Frank to have committed the crime.]