National Pencil Company Factory Recreated Scenes of the Leo Frank Defense Version of Mary Phagan Murder

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Jewish media bosses: Albert D. Lasker, advertising magnate; and Adolph Ochs, newspaper mogul, owner of the New York Times; commissioned a small media and theater team to recreate the Leo Frank defense version of Mary Phagan’s murder. The actor playing Jim Conley is not a negro, but actually a White man in minstrel show style blackface. The battery, rape and dragging events involved in Mary Phagan’s murder were not recreated in these scenes, but implied.

The defense theory was disproved because the cuts and gashes filled with basement dirt on Mary Phagan’s face after she was dragged 140 feet didn’t show signs of bleeding, which meant she was quite dead by the time she reached the basement. The reason they knew this in 1913 and we know it today in 2013 is because blood clotting stops after a person’s heart stops beating. It meant Mary Phagan was possibly not murdered in the basement. There were also no broken bones in Phagan’s body from the defenses presumed 14 foot fall while Phagan was supposedly alive, nor blood, hair or skin on the ladder she might have hit on the way down to the dirt floor basement. There was however a gash on the back of her head that revealed a down upward blow, potentially corresponding to the solid iron handle of the bench lathe in the metal room, that was tangled with someone’s bloody hair.

See: Mary Phagan Autopsy Report