Prison letters to journalist provide insight into Leo Frank

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Posted 2:47PM on Sunday, August 4, 2002

CINCINNATI - A few months before Leo Frank was hanged by a Georgia lynch mob in 1915, he was working from his jail cell to keep his story before the public and hoping to overturn his conviction in one of America's most notorious criminal cases the murder of Mary Phagan, 13 Marietta. ``I feel with you that my ultimate vindication must come, although I must confess that it is hard for me at this time to see just in which way it will come about,'' Frank wrote to journalist C.P. Connolly on Dec. 14, 1914. Connolly wrote extensively about the case that would became a rallying point for the Ku Klux Klan and helped lead to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith. That letter was one of 18 that Frank wrote to Connolly from Oct. 28, 1914, through April 6, 1915. The letters were acquired recently by the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. While not containing any startling new evidence in the case, the letters do shed more light on Frank as a person, said Gary Zola, executive director of the Marcus Center. ``These letters are significant because they give us another window into the mind of Leo Frank after his world had turned upside down, and they show that he actively participated in his own defense even while awaiting execution,'' Zola said. Frank, a Jewish businessman, was convicted and sentenced to death after a highly emotional 25-day trial in August 1913 in the beating and strangulation of Phagan an employee whose body was found in the basement of the Atlanta pencil factory that Frank managed. ``You can see in these letters written from jail, the different emotions that Frank experienced as he sat in his prison cell,'' Zola said. In the early letters, Frank praises Connolly and his articles, trying to keep the journalist on his side and urging him not to relax efforts to get the facts before the public. Frank also appeared hopeful of overturning his conviction, especially after the Supreme Court agreed to hear his appeal. ``I feel satisfied that the U.S. Supreme Court will be moved to give us some relief,'' Frank wrote on Jan. 4, 1915. ``I receive a great deal of mail and many of the writers compliment your articles in Colliers. They turned the trick!'' Later letters show a rising sense of frustration and anxiety. Frank also expressed anger toward the prosecutor and others who he believed helped frame him in a trial tainted by bigotry and questionable evidence, but he didn't give up. ``I feel very hopeful of a favorable decision,'' he wrote on April 6, 1915, three days before the Supreme Court rejected his final appeal. Connolly's grandson, who found the letters while cleaning out his late father's files and donated them to the Marcus Center, said he does not know whether his grandfather, who died in 1933, corresponded with Frank after the Supreme Court decision. ``My grandfather did believe Frank was innocent, however, and he did what he could for him by helping bring the case to national attention,'' said Frank Connolly, 69, of Shalimar, Fla. In June 1915, Georgia's governor commuted Frank's death sentence to life in prison, but a mob took him from prison and lynched him on Aug. 17, 1915. The state of Georgia pardoned Frank in 1986 after a former office boy at the pencil factory came forward and said he saw a janitor, Jim Conley, carrying Phagan's body to the basement. Conley, who died in 1962, was a chief prosecution witness during Frank's trial and the man whom Frank's lawyers pointed to as the murderer. The pardon did not address the question of Frank's guilt or innocence but was based on the state's failure to assure his civil rights and protect him while in custody. Debate over Frank's guilt or innocence continues to this day. The New York-based Anti-Defamation League, which opposes anti-Semitism and other forms of discrimination, believes Frank was innocent and welcomes the addition of the Connolly letters to the Marcus Center archives. ``Every bit of information that surfaces hopefully will contribute eventually to a complete pardon for Frank,'' said Abraham Foxman, the league's national director. Phagan's relatives remain convinced that Frank was guilty. ``He was convicted of the murder, and the 1986 pardon did nothing to change that,'' said the victim's grandniece, Mary Phagan-Kean, 48, of Marietta, Ga. Leonard Dinnerstein, a history professor at the University of Arizona in Tucson who wrote what's considered the definitive book on the case in 1968, said the Connolly letters could prove very interesting. ``People are going to believe what they want to believe, but anything that provides more insight into Frank's thoughts and emotions gives a more rounded picture of the whole case,'' Dinnerstein said. The murder, trial and lynching have inspired books, a movie, plays and a musical. Interest in the case is not likely to wane, Zola said. ``The case is one of those symbolic events that take on a life of its own,'' he said. ``It became a watershed, especially for American Jews, because it showed that the violent anti-Semitism that they had fled in other countries could happen here too.''