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

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Reading Time: 3 minutes [404 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

LEO WM. FRANE, 335

You say it's foolish, ridiculous, and a silly piece of business—a great folly. But murder will out, and Providence directs things in a mysterious way. Not only that, as Judge Bleckley says, "Crime, whenever committed, is a mistake in itself; and what kind of logic is it that will say that a man committed a crime, which is a great big mistake, and then in an effort to cover it up, won't make a smaller mistake?" There's no logic in that position. The man who commits a crime makes a mistake, and the man who seeks to cover it up nearly always makes a little mistake as well. And this man here, by these notes purporting to have been written by little Mary Phagan, by the verbiage and the language and the context, in trying to fasten it on another, as sure as you are sitting in this jury box, "has indelibly fastened it on himself." These gentlemen saw the significance of the difference between Scott's evidence when he was before the Coroner—and he wasn't quizzed there particularly about it—"I told her no," and "I told her I didn't know." To tell that little girl "No" would have given her no excuse, according to their way of thinking, to go back to see whether that metal had come or not, but to tell her "I didn't know" would lure her back into the snare where she met her death. And your own detective, Scott, says, after he gave the thing mature deliberation, that this man on the Monday evening—and he was so anxious about getting a detective that he had that man Schiff telephone three times, three times, three times, three times—remember that—so anxious was he. Scott says, after thinking over the matter, that Leo M. Frank told that girl that he didn't know whether the metal had come or not, and she went back there to see about the metal, and he followed her back there.

I'll tell you another thing: that old Starnes and Campbell and Rosser, and even Newport Lanford, if he had been called in, and even if I had been called in, to save my life, could not have known that the very word that Leo M. Frank used, according to Jim Conley when Conley says Frank told him, "I'm going to chat with a girl," would have been used exactly.

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