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

Search for:

Reading Time: 3 minutes [384 words]

Here is the translated text as follows:

298 AMERICAN STATE TRIALS.

Conley's Proof.

None of these individuals ever came forward and said Conley was there and that they were with him. Starnes—and Starnes could find a needle in a haystack, but the Lord only knows what he’d do in an acre—could not find any of these people.

Then there was that old negro drayman, old McCrary, the old peg-leg negro drayman, and thank God he was an old-timer, a "fo' de war" nigger. You know Conley, wishing to add a few finishing trimmings to his lines, said that old McCrary sent him down to the basement that Saturday morning. When the old darkey was put on the stand, he said simply, "No, bossa, I never sont him down thar." Everywhere you go, you find that Conley lied. He says he watched there one Saturday last year between 2 and 3 o'clock. Well, Schiff says he didn’t, and so do Darley and Holloway, the latter guaranteed by the state, and the little office boys, nice-looking little chaps from nice families, they all say he didn’t. Cut out Conley, and you strip the case to nothing.

Did you hear the way Conley told his story? Have you ever heard an actor who knew his Shakespearean plays, his "Merchant of Venice" or his "Hamlet"? He can wake up at any time of the night and say those lines, but he can’t say any lines of a play he has never learned. So it was with Conley. He could tell the story of the disposition of the girl’s body, and he knew it so well he could reel it off backward or forward, any old way, but when you got to asking him about other things, he always had one phrase, "Boss, ah can’t 'member dat."

They say Conley could not have made up that story. Well, I don’t know about that. There is something queer in the whole thing, you know. I couldn't climb that post over there, gentlemen. I mean I couldn't go very far up it, but if I had Professor Starnes, and Professor Black, and Professor Campbell, and Professor Rosser, and then Dean Lanford to help me, I'd go quite a way up. Well, they took a notion Mrs. White had seen the negro, and they carried Mrs. White there.

---