Ten Negro witnesses and prospective witnesses, along with Jim Conley as the campaign’s ultimate target and Minola McKnight as a State-side counterpoint, examined within the post-conviction publicity campaign surrounding Leo Max Frank after his 1913 conviction, using the sworn Georgia Supreme Court record and the Atlanta, Chicago, and New York press of 1913 and 1914.
By David Wayne and Jack Harlan, Sept 22, 2026
PREFACE: Ten Negroes at the Center of the New-Trial Drive
Ten Negroes, residents of Fulton County, Georgia, and two others from cities far beyond Georgia’s borders, stand at the center of the surviving record of the defense’s campaign to overturn the verdict, publicly vindicate Leo Max Frank, and build new evidence after his August 1913 conviction for the murder of Mary Phagan: Annie Maud Carter, Albert McKnight, Ivey Jones, Eugene Perry, Mary Rich, Aaron Allen, William Calhoun, Mark Wilson, Frank Reese, and Fred Perkerson. An eleventh, Jim Conley, was not pursued for an affidavit against himself but was, by the sworn account of two of others, the person the whole effort was ultimately aimed at breaking. A twelfth, Minola McKnight, appears here for a different reason: her arrest by the State’s own investigators in June 1913, a full year before the Burns campaign began, is the clearest contemporary evidence that pressure on Negro witnesses in this case did not run in only one direction.
Period Terminology: Negro, Negress, and Colored | Modern Terminology: Black and African American
The Atlanta newspapers of 1913 and 1914 did not describe these witnesses as Black or African-American. Across the Georgia press, The New York Times, and the sworn Georgia Supreme Court record from the same period, the ordinary terms were Negro, Negress, and colored. This research treatment preserves this period vocabulary in every direct quotation and also uses it deliberately in the title and narration for historical purposes. Sanding the original language out of quotations would misrepresent what the newspapers and court records actually say contemporaneously. Removing the same vocabulary from the surrounding discussion would also blur an important feature of the historical record and the language through which newspapers, lawyers, witnesses, and courts described the people examined in this study. And so it begins.
THE WILLIAM J. BURNS DETECTIVE AGENCY AND DEFENSE MACHINERY
The Frank defense investigation did not run through a single channel, but a delta. It was a multilayer war machine. Much of the face-to-face, ground-level campaign operated through William J. Burns’s Atlanta agency, and through men working under him, alongside him, or elsewhere on Frank’s behalf: Dan S. Lehon, C. W. Burke, C. A. Isom, J. W. Wrenn, Dr. George Wrenn, and Atlanta attorney Stiles Hopkins.
Deeply involved in the wider operation was the elite powerhouse law office of Rosser, Brandon, Slaton and Phillips, one of the principal legal centers from which Frank’s defense strategy was organized and pursued. Not everyone within the network of circles worked directly for Burns or drew a salary from his agency. George Wrenn, in particular, belonged to the broader network working on Frank’s behalf rather than to Burns’s payroll, an important point in reconstructing how this sprawling operation actually worked.
The Frank defense moved on several major and minor fronts at once. In some places, its battle lines were drawn through tightly coordinated legal and investigative work. Elsewhere, it functioned through a looser network of lawyers, private detectives, field operatives, intermediaries, supporters, associates, and newspaper contacts. It became a sprawling piece of human machinery centered in Atlanta but reaching outward into New York, Illinois, Louisiana, and other parts of the country.
Lawyers, clerks, stenographers, secretaries, and other staff worked feverishly from the seventh-floor offices of Rosser, Brandon, Slaton and Phillips in Atlanta’s historic Grant Building.
Burns men and other operatives worked the streets, tracking down trial witnesses and prospective witnesses, while actively hunting for possible new affiants. Investigators searched for people whose testimony might aid Frank and aggressively pursued repudiations, recantations, and fresh affidavits tending to exculpate him, weaken the State’s case, or otherwise advance his uphill struggle.
Meanwhile, journalists sat in smoky press rooms, pecking away at typewriters and feeding page after page, story after story, into newspaper columns and the broader press organs of a widening national publicity campaign gathering force alongside the bustling legal and investigative enterprise.
It was a multifaceted, multi-front campaign involving different people, methods, cities, and institutions, but all of these moving parts served a common purpose: to overturn Frank’s conviction through the appellate courts, while waging a parallel campaign in the court of public opinion, seeking to persuade the American public of his innocence and of the claim that he had been wrongfully convicted.
NEGRO WITNESS BY NEGRO WITNESS: THE APPROACHES AND DENIALS
What each Negro witness said about being approached by Frank agents, and what the defense swore in reply, survives in two voluminous bodies of evidence. One is the daily press covering Frank’s extraordinary motion for a new trial in the spring of 1914, with reports reprinted or independently published as far away as Chicago and New York. The other is the sworn affidavit record preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court case file for Frank v. State of Georgia. Both are quoted directly below, witness by witness, in roughly the order each dispute began. The defense denials, explanations, and competing affidavits appear alongside the accusations, so neither side is allowed the final word without both being heard.
What follows advances a forceful claim, grounded directly in the sworn record. Frank’s post-trial defense operation repeatedly used trickery, deception, inducements, pressure, and disputed affidavits in its dealings with Negro witnesses and prospective witnesses whose words might help set aside the guilty verdict against the prisoner under sentence of death. Investigators admitted in their own recorded words to using false pretexts to get a witness talking, only later revealing what they really wanted.
Defense stenographers prepared affidavits for witnesses to sign, and several of those witnesses later disputed, under oath, what appeared in the documents carrying their names and signatures. In some episodes, witnesses swore portions of the affidavit had been added, changed, or otherwise altered after they had signed it. The dispute, therefore, was not always simply over whether a witness remembered differently later. In several instances, the sworn accusation went directly to whether the document ultimately presented as the witness’s affidavit was the same document, in substance, which the witness believed he had signed.
Jobs worth far more than a witness normally earned were offered alongside requests for cooperation. Money, cigars, meals, and other benefits appeared around desired testimony. Investigators pursued confession stories from men who told them directly such stories would be lies. A witness who had already supplied useful testimony was moved out of Georgia. Defense investigators repeatedly gained access to Frank in his jail cell and to trusties inside the jail. A body of correspondence surfaced which the State openly accused the defense of manufacturing. And the hunt for Negro witnesses crossed three states and reached into a chain gang, searching for anyone whose word might contradict, discredit, or damage Jim Conley.
No single episode, standing alone, proves the broader case against the defense operation or establishes every accusation made against it. Nor does the argument depend upon one witness, one disputed affidavit, one investigator, or one alleged act of deception carrying the entire weight. The strength of the argument is cumulative. Put the episodes beside one another. Read the affidavits against the repudiations. Read the investigators’ explanations against the witnesses’ sworn accounts. Follow the jobs, money, meals, cigars, disputed affidavits, confession stories, recantations, movements of witnesses, and repeated attempts to weaken Jim Conley. The same kinds of methods begin appearing again and again, involving different people, different places, different tactics, different forms of trickery, and different dates.
Each episode is important on its own because each preserves a specific encounter involving identifiable people, places, dates, methods, promises, denials, contradictions, and sworn statements. Each gives us another close view of how one part of the defense operation worked when investigators dealt directly with a witness or prospective witness. Some episodes involve disputed affidavits. Others involve inducements, alleged deception, attempted recantations, confession stories, offers of employment, movement of witnesses, or efforts to produce testimony damaging to Jim Conley. Viewed separately, each episode tells its own story. Read together, they form something much larger: a pattern operating both at the high strategic level and at the low, street-level tactical level.
And it is this recurring pattern of method, preserved not through later hindsight but in the newspapers, affidavits, and sworn legal record of 1913 and 1914, which the witness-by-witness examination below sets out to document.
NAMING THE PATTERN
Read across these episodes, a pattern emerges that goes beyond ordinary disagreement over facts. The seven names below are not period language, and only one of them, subornation of perjury, is an actual legal term. The rest are this essay’s own labels for tactics that recur across more than one witness in the sworn record, offered so the pattern can be seen and discussed as a whole rather than encountered piecemeal, case by case. Each is defined once here, with its own sourced example, and marked again with a small header at the point in the record where it occurs.
THE PRETEXT INTERVIEW
Approach a witness under a false cover story, get him talking about the day of the murder before he understands why, and reveal the real subject only afterward, if at all. J. W. Wrenn’s own affidavit admits using this method on Ivey Jones, posing as an investigator of a railroad accident that never happened. [9] Eugene Perry describes an unnamed man using the identical opening on him a short time later. [28]
THE MISDESCRIBED PAPER
Put a document in front of a witness while misstating, or simply not stating, what it actually says. The paper shown to Eugene Perry a week after his pretext interview already had the wrong hour and left out Jim Conley’s name; Perry caught both errors himself before refusing to sign. [28] Frank Reese, who could not read, was told the paper George Wrenn brought to his house concerned old notes carried between Conley and Annie Maud Carter, not a confession, and he refused to sign until he understood what it was. [21]
THE POST-SIGNATURE REWRITE
Alter a sworn document’s wording after the witness has already signed it. Albert McKnight told The Atlanta Constitution that statements blaming his former employers had been added to his affidavit only after his own signature was already on it. [8]
THE MANUFACTURED CONFESSION
Offer money or a lighter sentence for a confession, or a claim of overhearing one, that did not happen as described. George Wrenn is sworn to have proposed exactly this to Frank Reese and Fred Perkerson, offering them a share of money from “the Jews” for a fabricated Conley confession, [20, 23] and, by the same two men’s sworn accounts, made a version of the same offer to Conley himself. [24]
THE SUBSTITUTE WITNESS
When one witness would not hold up a story or refused it outright, go find another Negro person willing to supply the same account. Jimmie Wrenn, by John Shields’s own sworn word, asked Shields directly whether he knew a Negro woman who would swear to the same story Shields himself had already refused to sign. [30]
INDUCEMENT IN PLAIN SIGHT
Money, a job, or visible cash, offered or displayed to move a witness toward a statement he had already sworn was false. Aaron Allen described a room with a pile of money laid out where he could see it; [14] Albert McKnight described a Pullman job worth several times his ordinary wages. [5]
REMOVAL AFTER COOPERATION
Once a witness’s cooperation is secured, move her out of the state before anyone else can question her. Annie Maud Carter testified that Burns told her to leave Atlanta after she signed her affidavit, and a Fulton County judge found the circumstances serious enough to summon Burns and Dan Lehon to answer for it in open court. [3]
None of this is this essay’s own characterization dressed up as fact. Under Georgia law, procuring or inducing a witness to actually commit perjury or false swearing is the crime of subornation of perjury, codified today at Georgia Code Section 16-10-72 [48]. The statute’s own language requires that the person induced actually commit the underlying offense; where a witness refused and no false statement resulted, the more precise term is attempted subornation, a distinction this essay observes rather than blurs. A second, broader statute covers conduct that falls short of completed subornation. Georgia Code Section 16-10-93, Influencing Witnesses, reaches anyone who, intending to deter or influence testimony, communicates a threat or offers or delivers a benefit, and separately reaches intimidation, threats, corrupt persuasion, or misleading conduct aimed at a witness’s testimony or cooperation. [56] Only the present section numbers and some of the current wording of these two statutes postdate 1913 and 1914. Subornation of perjury itself was already a chargeable offense under Georgia law at the time, not a standard applied to this record after the fact, which is exactly why a Fulton County grand jury could indict, and did indict, members of the defense’s own investigative team on subornation-related charges: C. W. Burke and Jimmie Wrenn in June 1914, and Dan S. Lehon, alongside Carlton C. Tedder and attorney Arthur Thurman, on a separate subornation charge that went to trial and ended in acquittal in February 1915. [57] Those charges, and the sworn evidence behind them, are examined witness by witness below and again in the closing section of this essay. Influencing Witnesses is a newer and broader statute, and no comparable charge was brought against anyone in this record under it; it is cited here for the narrower purpose of showing that intimidating a witness or offering a benefit for testimony is conduct Georgia law has independently treated as serious, on its own terms, not a standard this essay invented.
Read in sequence rather than case by case, these episodes trace a single continuous chronology. It begins on June 2 and 3, 1913, a full year before Burns’s own investigation, when Solicitor Hugh M. Dorsey, acting on information reported to have come from her husband Albert McKnight, had Minola McKnight arrested and questioned for more than an hour, and she signed the statement that became State’s Exhibit J the next day. The Burns-era events proper begin on December 7, 1913, when an unidentified man arriving with a group Carter called the Kline boys, allegedly offered her a vial of poison for Conley’s jail food. On January 19, 1914, C. W. Burke obtained the affidavit from Albert McKnight that weakened his trial testimony against Frank, and on February 5 Burke instructed J. W. Wrenn to locate Ivey Jones, whom Wrenn then approached under a false pretext about a railroad accident. Frank’s extraordinary motion became public on March 27, 1914, when The Atlanta Journal reported Mary Rich’s and Ivey Jones’s changed statements. On April 14, Rabbi David Marx, Lucile Selig Frank, and Dan Lehon called on Mary Rich and asked her to sign an affidavit about seeing Conley near the factory; five days later, on April 19, Albert McKnight publicly repudiated his own repudiation, telling The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution that Burke had held out a better-paying job. Annie Maud Carter signed the affidavit the defense would submit with Frank’s motion on April 23, the date its own witnesses swore to and the same day’s Atlanta Journal independently confirmed, though the affidavit itself carries the later printed date of April 25. On May 5, The Atlanta Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, The Atlanta Georgian, and The New York Times all reported accusations from Aaron Allen, Mary Rich, Ivey Jones, Frank Reese, and Fred Perkerson on the same day, and on May 6 The Atlanta Journal and The New York Times reported Stiles Hopkins’s account of William Calhoun’s Chicago affidavit and George Wrenn’s sworn denial of the Reese and Perkerson accusations. Carter testified in Judge Benjamin H. Hill’s court on May 9 that Burns had told her to leave Atlanta, and the judge summoned Burns and Lehon to answer a contempt citation; on May 27, The Atlanta Constitution reported Carter’s further accusation that Lehon had given her small sums of money and induced her to swear against Conley. The chronology closes, for now, on June 14 and 15, 1914, when The Atlanta Constitution reported that Minola McKnight had been severely cut across the face by an assailant she declined to identify.
MAGNOLIA MINOLA MCKNIGHT: A STATE-SIDE COUNTERPOINT FROM JUNE 1913
Selig residence, June 1913 to slashing attack, June 1914
Contemporary newspapers called Minola McKnight a Negro cook and Negro servant. She belongs in this record for a reason distinct from every witness that follows: the pressure described in her case came from the State, not from Frank’s defense, and it predates the Burns investigation by roughly a year.
Albert McKnight is where this episode begins, not Minola herself. The Atlanta Georgian reported on Monday, June 2, 1913, the day of her arrest, under the headline “Negro Cook at Home Where Frank Lived Held by the Police,” that the tip behind it had come from her own husband: “Information leading to the woman’s arrest is said to have come from statements made by her husband, Albert McKnight.” The paper was explicit that what Albert had told detectives was itself secondhand, his account of a private conversation with his wife rather than his own direct knowledge: “According to report, Albert is said to have informed detectives of a statement made by his wife to the effect that Frank did not return to his home until midnight on the night of the murder.” The same article relayed a second detail the same way: “The negro woman is also declared to have said that Mrs. Frank complained the following morning that Frank kept her awake that night by his extreme nervousness.” [45] Neither claim is Albert’s own sworn affidavit. Both are his report, to detectives and then to a newspaper, of what his wife had privately told him.
The sequence is worth pausing on before Minola’s own sworn word enters this record. A private conversation between husband and wife became, through Albert, a set of claims about the Franks’ movements and demeanor on the night of the murder; those claims reached Solicitor Dorsey’s detectives before Minola herself had said a word to any investigator; and her arrest followed the same day, on the strength of what her husband had reported her saying rather than anything she herself had sworn. The same article went on to describe the questioning that followed in Dorsey’s office as “the severest sort of grilling,” two hours of “rapid-fire questioning” that left her so distressed her “shrieks and protestations could be heard through the closed door.” [45] The pattern recurs almost exactly a year later. In April 1914, it would again be Albert, not Minola, telling a newspaper what he said his wife had privately confided to him, this time that her signed statement against Frank had been true after all, a claim examined on its own terms in the Albert McKnight section below. In both episodes, the public record of what Minola McKnight believed or said arrives filtered through her husband’s account of a private conversation, not through her own sworn word.
Sworn trial testimony closes most of the gap the June 2 newspaper account leaves open. R. L. Craven, a co-worker of Albert McKnight’s at the Beck and Gregg Hardware Company, testified for the State in rebuttal that Albert had asked him to help get Minola released after her arrest, and that he and a colleague, E. H. Pickett, had gone to the McKnights’ home “the latter part of May.” Albert was there. On June 3, by Craven’s own sworn account, he and Pickett “questioned her first as to the statements Albert had given me.” Craven then described, under oath, exactly what those statements were: that Frank had come home Saturday and stayed about ten minutes before catching a car, and that Albert had said Minola overheard Mrs. Frank tell Mrs. Selig that Frank “didn’t rest well,” came home drinking, made her get out of bed and sleep on a rug, and wanted her to hand him his pistol “to shoot his head off,” because “he had murdered somebody.” Only after Craven put those claims to her, in his own words, did Minola “finally” tell “everything that was in that affidavit.” [52] A written record of those statements survives. It is not part of the Brief of Evidence Craven testified from; it is Exhibit A to the State’s own counter-showing against Frank’s 1914 extraordinary motion for a new trial, sheets 1603 and 1604 of the Georgia Supreme Court record, printed as pages 89 and 90. A State witness named R. L. Graham explained on the preceding sheets how it came to be written. He said he overheard Albert talking about Frank, began questioning him, and wrote down what Albert told him. He then arranged for a man named Angus Morrison to listen, unseen, while Albert repeated the same account. Graham read the written statement back to Albert, who said it was all true, and Albert later swore to it. Dated Monday, May 26, 1913, with an attestation noted for Monday, June 2, the document survives torn and partly illegible in places. The Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project reconstructed it from that damaged original. [53] It reads, in Albert’s own words as preserved on the document:
“I, Albert McKnight, was at Mr. Leo M. Frank’s home on East Ga. Ave. the Saturday the girl was murdered at the Pencil factory on Forsyth St. My wife Minola is cooking for Mr. Frank and has been for about two years. I was in the kitchen about 12 o’clock this same Saturday that they say the girl was murdered.
The door bell rung and my wife Minola went to the door. When she come back in the kitchen I asked her who it was at the door and she said Mr. Frank. She asked him if she must fix his dinner now and he said he did not want any. He did not go upstairs to see his wife as she asked what went with Mr. Frank, wasn’t that him [a portion of the original is crossed out or overwritten and is not reconstructed here] now. Mr. Frank left the house in about five minutes. I saw him go out of the house and catch the Georgia Avenue car. I was at the house from about 9 A.M. Saturday on until about 3 P.M.
I went back to Mr. Frank’s house the next morning Sunday. When I went in the kitchen my wife said what do you think Mrs. Frank said Mr. Frank said he had killed somebody and that he rolled and tumbled all night and said he could see it looking at him and to give him his damn pistol and let him shoot his damn head off; what made me do it, a man like me, I must be crazy. Mrs. Frank asked her father and mother if they thought he had really killed some one. He had been drinking, he made me get out of bed and sleep on the rug by the bed. This was told at the breakfast table Sunday morning and my wife was listening from the kitchen.
Then Mrs. Frank was only paying my wife $3.50 per week up to the Saturday of the murder and they told her if she would not talk they would pay her $7.00 per week and she would not have to work as late as she had been doing. And for her to say nothing at court but what they told her to say. They gave her $5.00 extra the day she went to court. They are paying my wife money all along as she is buying lots of dresses and has money all the time. I can tell Mr. Frank has done something as they act strange. Mrs. Frank tells Magnolia every day not to forget what to say if they come for her to go to court again. Mrs. Frank had a quarrel with Mr. Frank the Saturday morning of the murder she asked Mr. Frank to kiss her good bye and she said he was saving his kisses for a [a word is crossed out in the original and illegible] and would not kiss her. Magnolia also heard Mrs. Frank say she would never live with him again for she know he had killed that girl and that they had the right man and ought to break his neck.”
Albert McKnight, Exhibit A, Georgia Supreme Court appeals file, dated May 26, 1913, signed by Albert McKnight and witnessed by R. L. Craven and A. Morrison [53]
Magnolia was Minola’s given name; the affidavit uses it where the rest of this record uses the name the newspapers and the trial record settled on. Two short passages in the original are damaged beyond recovery, one word after “wasn’t that him,” another after “saving his kisses for a.” Both are marked here rather than guessed at.
This document and Albert’s own sworn trial testimony do not describe the same events. On the stand, sworn for the State, the whole of what he said on the point was far shorter and far tamer: “My wife is Minola McKnight. She cooks for Mrs. Selig. Between 1 and 2 o’clock on Memorial Day I was at the home of Mr. Frank to see my wife. He came in close to 1:30. He did not eat any dinner. He came in, went to the sideboard of the dining room, stayed there a few minutes and then he goes out and catches a car.” [54] The timing shifted too. Exhibit A puts Albert in the kitchen “about 12 o’clock”; his trial testimony puts Frank’s arrival “close to 1:30.” The two statements are not flatly incompatible, Exhibit A also has Albert in the house from about 9 A.M. to 3 P.M., a window wide enough to hold both times, but the shift in his own retelling is worth naming rather than smoothing over. No confession, no pistol, no rug, and no money appear anywhere in that testimony. Exhibit A may well be the document Craven was recalling when he testified to “the statements Albert had given me.” What it is not is something Albert repeated under oath in front of a jury. A reader weighing what Albert McKnight had to say about this case should hold Exhibit A and his trial testimony side by side and notice how little of one survives in the other, rather than treat the two as a single, consistent account.
It was Minola’s own affidavit, not her husband’s report of her, that would matter at trial. She was the cook in the household of Emil and Josephine Selig, where Leo and Lucile Frank lived, and on that same Monday, June 2, 1913, she was taken into custody on Solicitor General Hugh M. Dorsey’s order. The Atlanta Journal of Tuesday, June 3, 1913, under the headline “Attorney Retained for Negro Servant at Frank’s Home,” reported she had been questioned for more than an hour by Dorsey and detectives Campbell and Starnes, with her husband, Albert McKnight, present, and that she grew hysterical during the examination, led from the solicitor’s office to the police patrol wagon weeping and saying she feared she would hang despite knowing nothing. [33] Attorney George Gordon was retained on her behalf and, the same article reported, was “seriously considering the matter of seeking a writ of habeas corpus for the McKnight woman.” [33] The next day she signed the statement that became State’s Exhibit J at Frank’s trial.
The Atlanta Constitution corroborated the arrest independently that same day, June 3, 1913, under the headline “Leo Frank’s Cook Put Under Arrest.” It identified her as “cook and servant in the Leo Frank household” and reported that she “hysterically created a scene at Pryor and Mitchell streets,” sobbing and moaning “that ‘they were going to hang her for something she knew nothing about.'” The paper described her as held “under a charge of suspicion” and reported that she would “likely be used as a witness against her suspected employer,” adding that “she has told a number of conflicting stories, and for this reason the solicitor ordered her confinement until time of trial.” [35] The next day, Wednesday, June 4, 1913, The Atlanta Journal printed her affidavit in full under the headline “Sensational Affidavit Made by Minola M’Knight, Negro Cook at Home of L. M. Frank,” identifying her as “Minola McKnight, the negro servant at the home of Mr. and Mrs. Emil Selig,” and noting that it had been “sworn to and subscribed” the day before, June 3, 1913. [36]
This episode is included here not as an accusation against Frank’s defense but as its opposite: contemporary, sworn, dated evidence that an African American domestic worker in this same case had already been arrested, held, and intensively questioned by the prosecution’s own investigators, a full year before Burns, Burke, and the Wrenns began their post-trial search for Negro witnesses. When Burns later argued that Carter needed to be moved out of Atlanta to protect her from Atlanta detectives, or when Rosser argued that repudiating witnesses had been exposed to the power of the State, Minola McKnight’s arrest is the concrete episode that gave those arguments their force. It does not excuse anything the defense’s own investigators are shown, in their own sworn papers, to have done. It does mean the pressure on Negro witnesses in this case ran in more than one direction.
The affidavit itself closes with its own colloquy on voluntariness, and the two halves of that colloquy sit uneasily together. Asked whether she had failed to tell the solicitor everything the day before because Lucile Frank and others had told her not to talk about what happened at the Selig home, McKnight answered, “Yes, sir.” Asked whether that was also why she would rather have been locked up the previous night than talk, she again answered, “Yes, sir.” The very next question asked whether anyone present, her husband’s employers or Dorsey himself, had influenced or threatened her in any way, and she answered, “No, sir,” before confirming she had made the statement of her own free will. A witness who has just said she would rather sit in jail than talk, and that she had been told not to talk, is not obviously the same witness who then affirms, two questions later, that nothing about the process involved any pressure at all. [46]
Minola McKnight did not let the affidavit stand. Called as a defense witness during the trial’s third week, in mid-August 1913, she disavowed it on the stand. “None of the things in that statement is true,” she testified. “It’s all a lie.” She said she had signed it to get out of jail, and added, “They made me sign that statement, but it was a lie… They told me if I didn’t sign it they were going to keep me locked up.” [47] She went further than disowning the paper. She denied ever telling her husband the things he had reported her saying in the first place: “I had never told him anything of the kind,” she testified, and said it plainly, “my husband was lying.” [49] Contemporaries were skeptical of the recantation, and that skepticism belongs in the record alongside her words rather than being written out of it. What is not in dispute is that a Negro domestic worker swore two contradictory accounts under oath about the same statement, once in a solicitor’s office in June 1913 and once on a witness stand in August 1913, and both versions survive for a reader to weigh.
A year later, the Atlanta press reported a second episode involving Minola McKnight, this time as the person injured rather than as a subject under investigation. The Atlanta Constitution of Monday, June 15, 1914, under the headline “Minola M’Knight Mysteriously Cut,” with the subheading “Witness in the Frank Case Refuses to Tell How She Was Injured,” reported that she had been “severely cut across the face last night by a party whose name the woman refused to disclose,” at her residence in the rear of 383 Washington Street, the home of Louis Pickard. The report described a five-inch wound, said police officers were summoned to the scene and found a physician already attending her, and again identified her and her husband, Albert McKnight, as witnesses in the Frank trial. [42] The article names no assailant, states no motive, and draws no connection between the injury and the Frank case; it reports only that McKnight, asked how she had been hurt, declined to say.
C. P. Connolly’s 1915 book on the case, written from a standpoint openly sympathetic to Frank, independently records the same assault in a single unadorned sentence: “Subsequently Minola McKnight was also assaulted and knife-slashed in her lonely little shack. But she, too, survived.” Connolly gives no date, no assailant, and no citation of his own, and the sentence follows immediately after his account of Frank’s conviction, the Georgia Supreme Court’s refusal to intervene, and Albert McKnight’s repudiation of his trial testimony, placing the episode in 1914 rather than 1913, consistent with the Atlanta Constitution’s dating rather than the undated claim found elsewhere. [43] The same passage also states that Albert McKnight was separately beaten into insensibility and hospitalized for weeks around the same time, a claim no contemporary Atlanta newspaper consulted for this essay corroborates, and it is not repeated here on that basis.
ANNIE MAUD CARTER
Fulton County Jail, October 1913 to May 1914
Carter was a Negro woman, the word both the Atlanta press and the Georgia Supreme Court’s own file used for her throughout this record; The New York Times called her a colored woman. She spent six months inside the Fulton County Jail while Jim Conley was held there on the charge of being an accessory after the fact to Mary Phagan’s murder. “I was in the Fulton County jail six months,” she testified under oath. “I went there last October, and Jim Conley was in jail when I was put in jail.” [1]
Of the witnesses examined here, Carter’s case reaches furthest into the investigation. It spans an alleged attempt to have her poison Conley’s food in December 1913, an affidavit she signed for the defense the following April, a courtroom appearance in May that put Burns and Dan Lehon under a Fulton County judge’s contempt citation, and a further accusation later that same month against Lehon personally.
The poison episode survives only in Carter’s own sworn account, reproduced in the Legacy Project’s history of the case, and it is worth reading in her words rather than around them. Describing an encounter on the jail’s second floor, she named the day, the man, and what he asked of her:
“The first Sunday in December, I was sitting on the second floor, and a Jew came up. Mr. Frank was out there and three or four more Jews. Mr. Pappenheimer was there with him too. This Jew asked me was I out all the time, and I said yes, and he said, I want to see you, and I said all right, and he said, do you know how to get rich right quick… I want you to take this little vial and put a drop in his food and give it to him, and I will guarantee you will have a pot of money… I said he ain’t done nothing to me, and he said, I know, but it is our man he has got… and what do you care about a negro hanging, all you want is money, and I said I don’t want the money, and he said if you refuse the money you are a damn fool, and walked off. I don’t know his name, but he comes up there with Kline boys. He has black hair and his hair stands up and his hat pulled down on one side.” (Annie Maud Carter, sworn testimony, quoted in Phagan-Kean (2025), Chapter 6) [1]
The first Sunday in December, 1913, fell on December 7. Carter could not give a name for the man who approached her, only a description and the company he kept: black hair standing up, a hat pulled down on one side, and a party she identified as the Kline boys. She placed Leo Frank himself nearby that day, with several other men, along with a man she named as Pappenheimer.
This episode does not rest on a single telling. The Atlanta Journal reported it independently on Tuesday, May 5, 1914, in the same article covering Aaron Allen’s testimony, describing “a black-haired man whom she doesn’t know” who stopped Carter and asked “if she didn’t want to get rich quick,” then told her, “Take this little bottle, and be mighty careful for it’s very powerful, and put a drop or two in Conley’s food when you are bringing it to him.” [14] The New York Times carried the same accusation the next day, Wednesday, May 6, 1914, under its own subheading, “Poison Plot Against Conley?”, reporting that Carter “had seen him in company with a man by the name of Pappenheimert, and that he had come to Frank’s cell with the Kline boys.” [17] The two contemporary tellings differ in phrasing from Carter’s own courtroom account as preserved in the Legacy Project’s history of the case, which is to be expected of separate transcriptions of the same testimony, but they agree on the essential elements: an unnamed man, a small bottle or vial, an instruction to drug Conley’s food, and a promise of quick money.
It is worth noting, too, that when George Wrenn later swore his own denial in the case, he specifically addressed Carter’s confession-gathering efforts, saying he had not told her to pursue one and had not learned of her attempt until her affidavit surfaced at the hearing, which shows the defense itself treating her account as a live question rather than a rumor to be ignored.
Carter’s testimony went further than the poison plot. She also disputed how the letters Conley wrote her from his cell had been characterized once they became evidence. “There was nothing vulgar in either one of the letters he wrote me,” she said, adding that “if there is anything vulgar in any of those letters he wrote, it has been put in there since he wrote them to me by somebody else.” [1] By her account, Conley had also told her directly what he believed about the murder: “Yes, I know Mr. Frank killed that girl.” [1]
When Carter signed the formal affidavit that the defense would submit with Frank’s extraordinary motion for a new trial, on April 23, 1914, the people present for her signature asked her directly, on the record, whether anyone had paid her for it. Their own sworn account, preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court’s case file, states plainly: “Some of us questioned the said Annie Maud Carter and asked her whether she had received any money or promise of reward of any character and she answered that she had not.” [2]
The record does not agree with itself on the date of that signing, and where a date conflict like this arises, this essay gives sworn legal testimony priority over newspaper reporting in deciding it. Here the conflict sits inside the legal record itself, across two pages of the same rebuttal affidavit. Its own witnesses, Rabbi David Marx, Isaac Haas, Isaac Schoen, B. Wildauer, J. O. Knight, and Otto Schwab, swore under oath that they were present with Carter in the offices of Herbert J. and Leonard Haas on April 23, 1914, when she came in and made her statement. [50] The Atlanta Journal’s independent report of the same episode, on May 5, 1914, corroborates that date, April 23, both for the Haas-office session and for a separate, earlier affidavit Carter gave “before the city detectives” that same day. [14] The only mention of April 25 anywhere in the sources consulted for this essay is the affidavit document’s own printed dateline, on the following page of the same file. [2] Weighed against the witnesses’ own sworn account of when they were present, corroborated independently by the newspaper, that bare dateline does not carry the same evidentiary weight. This essay therefore treats April 23, 1914 as the date of the Haas-office session itself, while noting that the affidavit produced from it carries the later date of April 25.
TACTIC: REMOVAL AFTER COOPERATION
Two weeks later, Carter’s situation became a matter for a Fulton County courtroom in its own right. On Saturday, May 9, 1914, The Atlanta Journal reported, under the headline “Burns And Lehon Are Summoned On Contempt Charge,” that Judge Benjamin H. Hill had cited William J. Burns and Dan Lehon to explain why Carter had been sent out of the state after giving her affidavit. Asked why she left Atlanta, Carter told the court, “Mr. Burns told me to go.” [3] She said an operative Burns called “Dr. White” had accompanied her out of Georgia, that Lehon had told her her expenses would be covered, and that she had traveled through Union City and Montgomery before reaching New Orleans and Chicago. Asked about money of her own, she said, “I was given five dollars to spend.” [3] Judge Hill ordered her returned to his jurisdiction and directed Burns and Lehon to appear the following Tuesday to answer for having removed her.
The citation itself did not go unresolved. The Atlanta Journal reported on Tuesday, May 26, 1914, under the headline “Burns’ Men Fight Effort To Shut Up Offices In Atlanta,” that Judge Hill dismissed the contempt rule that same morning. His own order, as the paper quoted it, found that in taking Carter out of the jurisdiction after she had made her affidavit, “the two respondents were in technical contempt of court,” but concluded that since Burns and Lehon had by then returned her to Georgia and she was again “subject to legal process,” “they have purged themselves of contempt,” and an order was drawn dismissing the rule. [51] That finding does not touch Carter’s later accusation that Lehon paid her small sums and induced her testimony against Conley; it resolves only the narrower question of removing a witness from the court’s own jurisdiction, and on that narrower question, Burns and Lehon were found in technical contempt before the citation against them was dismissed, not simply cleared of the matter outright.
Carter’s dealings with the defense did not end with her return. On Wednesday, May 27, 1914, The Atlanta Constitution reported on Dan Lehon’s own court appearance, under the headline “Lehon Is Fined $100 And Costs And Bound Over.” The paper, again calling her “the Negress,” reported that Carter had made further sensational charges against Lehon at the hearing, testifying that he had “upon several occasions given her small moneys” and that she had been “induced to swear against Jim Conley.” [4] The fine itself rested on a separate legal basis, and the distinction matters. The same article reports that Lehon was fined and bound over “for violating sections 2025, 2026 and 2027 of the city code, prohibiting the operating of private detectives in the city without first securing the consent of the board of police commissioners.” [4] Carter’s bribery and inducement accusation against Lehon was aired at the same hearing, but the newspaper does not report it as the legal ground for his conviction, and no source located in this audit shows a separate judicial finding resolving that accusation one way or the other.
Set side by side, Carter’s own account, that Burns told her to leave Atlanta after she gave her affidavit, that her travel was arranged and paid for, that she was given five dollars in spending money, and that Lehon later gave her small sums and induced her to swear against Conley, does not sit easily beside the defense’s own sworn account from April 23, that witnesses to her affidavit questioned her directly at the time she signed it and that she denied receiving any money or promise of reward for making the statement.
The three records need not be read as flatly contradicting one another. The April 23 questioning concerned whether Carter had been paid to make the affidavit itself; her May 9 testimony concerned what happened to her afterward, once she had already given it; and her May 27 accusation against Lehon specifically alleged ongoing small payments and inducement to testify against Conley, a claim aired at the same May 27 hearing where Lehon was fined, though the fine itself rested on the separate charge of operating as an unlicensed private detective, not on a judicial finding about Carter’s accusation.
What is not in dispute is that an important defense witness against Jim Conley left Georgia under arrangements made by Burns and Lehon, that a Fulton County judge considered the circumstances serious enough to summon both men on a contempt charge, that Lehon was in fact fined one hundred dollars and bound over on the licensing charge, and that Carter’s own account of the poison approach, whatever independent confirmation for it does or does not exist, was sworn testimony rather than a rumor repeated after the fact.
The same Fulton County Jail testimony that places Jim Wrenn, C. W. Burke, and George Wrenn at Frank’s cell wing also reaches Carter directly, and it cuts in a different direction from her own account. Willis J. Gilbert, the inside jail guard, swore he had never personally seen Carter inside Conley’s cell wing, but that she “requested me to allow her to go into Conley’s cell wing,” and that he refused: “I told her that I would not allow her to do so, and if she was ever in there, it was without my knowledge.” [31]
Gilbert also swore he had “seen Dr. George Wren and Annie Maud Carter talking very frequently and generally up in the medicine room,” placing her in repeated contact with the same George Wrenn named elsewhere in this record by Reese and Perkerson. [31] Gilbert did not stop at describing what he had seen. He added his own judgment of Carter’s honesty: “Her general character and reputation are bad and I would not believe her on oath.” [31] That is a jail guard’s sworn opinion of a State witness whose evidence had already become useful to the defense, not an independently established fact about Carter, and it is included here for the same reason every other sworn statement in this record is: because it exists, it is dated, and it bears directly on how contemporaries close to the case described her.
Lehon’s own legal exposure in this case was not limited to Carter’s accusations or the unlicensed-detective charge. A Fulton County jury separately tried him, along with Carlton C. Tedder and attorney Arthur Thurman, on a charge of subornation of perjury arising from a different episode entirely: procuring affidavits from the Reverend C. B. Ragsdale, a former Atlanta pastor, and R. L. Barber, in which the two men swore they had overheard Jim Conley tell another, unnamed Negro man that he had killed the girl in the pencil factory. Neither Ragsdale nor Barber was Negro himself, and the record consulted for this essay never names or otherwise identifies the second man Conley was said to have confessed to. Ragsdale and Barber later repudiated their own affidavits, and on February 4, 1915, a jury returned a verdict of not guilty against Lehon, Tedder, and Thurman. [57] The acquittal settles the criminal charge against the three defendants. It settles nothing about what, if anything, actually passed between Conley and the man the affidavits described, since the two people who claimed to have overheard it disowned their own sworn account of it before the case was over.
THE CARTER-CONLEY LETTERS AND THE FORGERY CHARGE AGAINST GEORGE WRENN
Fulton County Jail and the Georgia Supreme Court file, spring 1914
Carter’s own sworn testimony, quoted above, denied that anything vulgar appeared in the letters Conley wrote her. The letters themselves, and their sheer volume, became a separate and hotly disputed part of the record in their own right. The Atlanta Georgian, reporting Friday, May 1, 1914, under the headline “Evidence Is Recorded Against Conley,” described Carter’s own account of the correspondence’s frequency: she “asserted she received two and three letters every day, sometimes of six, seven and as high as ten pages each, from Conley, and that she wrote to him about three times a week.” [38] By the time Frank’s extraordinary motion reached the Georgia Supreme Court, the defense had assembled a substantial physical exhibit from that correspondence: “The defense offered 22 sheets which the Carter woman said she wrote to Conley, and 27 sheets which she said Conley wrote to her, as evidence.” [38]
The State’s own response to that exhibit, preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court’s case file, did not just dispute the letters’ content. It accused the defense of fabricating them outright, and named a specific author.
Answering Frank’s motion, the State said it would rest “on the statement of Annie Maud Carter herself, as contained in an affidavit introduced by the State, to the effect that whatever letters she did receive from said Conley did not have the vile and filthy language as contained in the notes set up by the movant Frank,” and went further: “the State insists that said notes are forged and manufactured by means of a conspiracy engineered by a convict in the Fulton County jail at that time, viz, George Wrenn.” [37] This is the State’s own accusation, argued inside Frank’s own appeal, not a judicial finding; the defense answered it with handwriting testimony supporting the letters’ authenticity, and no ruling in this record settles the dispute either way. It belongs here regardless, because it places George Wrenn, the same man Reese and Perkerson separately accused of soliciting a fabricated jail confession, at the center of a second and independent accusation of manufacturing evidence in the same case.
The jail’s own physical layout gives that accusation a concrete setting. Frank Reese’s sworn statement, the same affidavit in which he described Wrenn’s confession proposal, also placed Wrenn and Carter in direct, repeated contact: “I have seen Dr. Wren and Annie Maud Carter talking together very often but do not know what was said between them,” Reese swore, adding that he “saw Annie Maud Carter go to Conley’s cell wing once” but never saw her actually enter it, only “stand in front of the door and talk.” [20]
Reese went further in the same statement, describing a specific exchange he said he witnessed directly: “I saw Dr. Wren at one time give Annie Maud Carter a note or rather he throw her one from the second floor and she carried this same note that Dr. Wren had thrown her and she pitched the note into Conley through the door to his cell wing.” [21] Reese’s account does not say what the note contained and does not prove any connection to the letters later offered in Frank’s appeal. It does establish, in the sworn words of one of Wrenn’s own accusers, that Wrenn and Carter were seen passing paper between them near Conley’s cell, the same physical channel the State’s forgery accusation presumes.
William J. Burns’s own testimony, given under Solicitor Dorsey’s questioning at the May 2, 1914 hearing, adds a further link between Wrenn and the letters themselves. Asked about the notes, Burns testified that “the notes had been furnished him by C. W. Burke and that the first translation had been made by George Wrenn, who formerly was in the Tower.” [41] Dorsey pressed further, asking Burns directly, “Was there any report made to you of what was going on in the jail between George Wrenn and others?” Burns answered that he had received no such reports. [41] By Burns’s own account, Wrenn was not simply someone with access to Conley’s cell wing; he was the person who produced the working version of the Carter-Conley correspondence that the defense’s own lead investigator relied on, the same correspondence the State later called forged.
ALBERT MCKNIGHT
Atlanta, August 1913 to April 1914
Contemporary newspapers repeatedly called McKnight a Negro, and The Atlanta Constitution’s own subtitle identified him as a “Negro Witness for Prosecution.” The Georgia Supreme Court’s file likewise describes him in an April 14 defense affidavit as “a negro man” named Albert McKnight, so his identity as a Negro witness is not an inference drawn from later biography. It appears directly in the contemporary legal papers themselves.
McKnight’s trouble with the defense began well before Burke ever approached him. He testified for the State at Frank’s trial in August 1913, and what he said then became a dispute in its own right. He told the jury he had been at the Selig home to see his wife, that Frank came in close to 1:30, went to the dining room sideboard, stayed a few minutes, and left. Asked how long Frank remained, he answered, “Five or ten minutes,” and said he had watched through the sideboard’s own mirror from the kitchen, then followed Frank out and saw him board a Georgia Avenue car at Pulliam Street. [54] He was blunt about what he had seen: “I certainly saw Mr. Frank that day, from the kitchen where I was sitting.” [54]
TACTIC: ATTACKING A WITNESS’S LINE OF SIGHT
The defense did not simply deny what McKnight said he saw. It built a physical case against his ability to have seen it at all, taking photographs of the Selig kitchen and dining room and preparing a diagram meant to show that no one standing where McKnight placed himself could have seen the sideboard through its mirror. When he was recalled in rebuttal, the argument shifted from what he had seen to whether the room still looked the way it had in April. Contemporary Atlanta papers covered the exchange under headlines such as “Sideboard in Leo Frank’s Home Moved, Asserts Husband of Cook.” [53] Prosecutor Frank Hooper told the court he meant to show the sideboard had been moved since the murder, and Luther Rosser asked McKnight directly whether he had personally watched anyone move it. He had not. “No,” he answered, “but it ain’t now where it was then.” [53] Asked whether he was simply relying on the defense’s own diagram, he said, “I’m going by where you say it is.” [53] His sworn testimony in the Brief of Evidence preserves the same point in more careful language: “This sideboard (Defendant’s Exhibit 63) sets more this way than it was at the time I was there,” and, under cross-examination, “I don’t know if the sideboard was changed, but it wasn’t setting like that is in the corner.” [55] He never claimed to have watched the furniture get moved. His claim was narrower and harder to disprove: the defense’s own reconstruction did not match what he remembered.
Josephine Selig herself testified the sideboard sat on rollers and was sometimes shifted when the room was cleaned, though she said it was always put back afterward. That left the physical question genuinely open. A photograph or a diagram built months after the murder could not, by itself, settle whether the one piece of furniture the whole dispute turned on had stood in the same place on April 26 that it stood in when the defense measured it. Solicitor Dorsey used that opening in his closing argument, telling the jury the defense had sent a photographer out to try to disprove McKnight and pointing to the sideboard’s rollers as the reason its certainty could not be trusted. [53] Whatever the jury made of McKnight’s line of sight, it had become something the State leaned on directly in front of them, not a detail buried in the transcript.
On January 19, 1914, months after that trial testimony, C. W. Burke obtained an affidavit from him that weakened or repudiated portions of that testimony. McKnight’s own later sworn account, preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court’s file, describes Burke’s persistence in securing it: “Mr. Burke keeps after me,” the statement reads, and it records a heated confrontation in which McKnight insisted his trial testimony had been the truth and Burke answered, “that is a damned lie, you know it ain’t the truth, why don’t you tell me the truth now, your wife has told me that you told her it wasn’t the truth.” [6] McKnight denied telling his wife any such thing, and the same record shows him telling Burke that no one, meaning his former employer R. L. Craven, had “promised him nothing” and that he had made his first affidavit “of his own free will.” [6]
McKnight then repudiated the repudiation. On Sunday, April 19, 1914, The Atlanta Journal, page 1, column 6, published “Albert M’Knight Now Repudiates His Recent Story,” reporting that Chief of Detectives Newport Lanford said the “Negro” had sought protection at police headquarters. [5] McKnight gave the paper a specific explanation for why he had signed Burke’s affidavit in the first place: “Captain Burke came to me after the trial, and asked me if I didn’t want a Pullman job paying $40 a month and tips, which would bring it up to $100. That was the way he got around me.” [5] McKnight’s own stated wages at the time were about twenty-eight dollars a month, so the job he described would have brought him roughly three and a half times his ordinary income.
TACTIC: THE POST-SIGNATURE REWRITE
The same Sunday, The Atlanta Constitution ran “Testimony He Gave At Trial Was True, Declares M’Knight,” page 1, column 6, under the subheadline “Negro Witness For Prosecution Now Repudiates Affidavit He Gave To Leo M. Frank’s Attorneys.” [8] McKnight told the Constitution, “I signed that affidavit that Mr. Burke brought me just because I wanted to get rid of him,” and insisted, “What I said on the stand was the truth.” [8] He said statements blaming his former employers, Roy Craven and C. C. Pickett, for having “framed” his trial testimony had been added to the affidavit after he signed it, and that he had gone to police headquarters after being, in the paper’s words, pestered by Burke.
The same Constitution article reported one further detail about Minola McKnight herself, though it did not come from her own mouth, and it belongs alongside her own two sworn accounts described above. Albert told the paper his wife had “told him after the trial” that the affidavit she had signed against Frank at police headquarters before the trial, the same one she denounced on the stand as “all a lie,” “was true.” [8] The Atlanta Journal covered the same April 19 interview at comparable length that same day, including the Pullman-job explanation quoted above, but its own report contains no mention of Minola McKnight or of any private conversation between her and Albert. [5] The claim rests on the Constitution’s account alone. If Albert’s account is accurate, it adds a third position to a record that already held two contradictory sworn ones: the original June 1913 affidavit, her August 1913 courtroom recantation of it, and now, by her husband’s telling, a private reversal back toward the original statement at some point after the trial. The paper gave no date for that conversation beyond “after the trial,” and reported it only as Albert’s own account of what his wife had privately told him. It was not a new affidavit from Minola McKnight herself, she never swore to it, and nothing in the record independently confirms she said it. Albert also had his own stake in reporting it: the same article in which he described his wife’s private reversal was the article in which he was defending his own truthfulness, against his own signed, since-repudiated affidavit for the defense, so a claim that his wife had privately confirmed her original story also strengthened the version of events he himself was arguing for that day.
That is not a dispute over interpretation. It is McKnight’s own sworn account that the wording of a document he had already signed was changed afterward, without his knowledge or consent. Altering a sworn statement’s language after the signature is on it is not a gray area. It is manufacturing false testimony under a real witness’s name.
The defense answered in kind, and at length. Burke’s own affidavit in the Georgia Supreme Court’s file states that he “had promised him nothing, or made any inducement to him of any kind for making his affidavit,” and attributes McKnight’s original change of story to conscience, saying McKnight felt he had “lied about Frank” and was sorry for it. [7]
McKnight’s own wife, Minola McKnight, swore a corroborating statement: “C. W. Burke did not make any promise of reward of any kind to my husband for making said affidavit,” and separately said McKnight had told her he was glad he had made it. [7] Several more people were brought forward with the same account. Dan Lehon swore McKnight “declared the affidavit he gave Burke was true in every respect and held up his hand and swore to it.” [14] William J. Burns swore that when questioned, McKnight “stuck to the affidavit made for Burke and asserted positively Burke had not offered him any reward.” [14]
A Dr. Thomas Hancock and a Charles Phillips Jr. separately swore McKnight told each of them the same thing, that the Burke affidavit was the truth and no inducement had been offered, and a man named Fred Lynn swore McKnight was ready to sign another affidavit saying so. [14] Burke did not deny trying to help McKnight afterward. His own affidavit describes offering to speak to a Mr. Schoen, who ran a guano factory, about work for McKnight, while insisting the job talk followed the affidavit rather than paying for it. [7]
McKnight’s own account and the defense’s own sworn account do not match. He said Burke held out a Pullman job paying far more than his existing wages, and that this prospect was, in his own words, how Burke got around him into signing an affidavit he later disowned. Burke and Minola McKnight, for their part, swore that Burke promised nothing and made no inducement of any kind, and Minola McKnight’s own sworn statement corroborated that no promise of reward was made to her husband.
McKnight is a difficult witness to weigh cleanly. He changed his position more than once, and The Atlanta Journal itself treated him as unreliable on that account. What survives regardless of that difficulty is Burke’s own sworn record of having pressed McKnight repeatedly for an affidavit and of having told him, to his face, that his sworn courtroom testimony was a lie, alongside McKnight’s specific and consistent description, given to two separate newspapers on the same day, of the job he said had been dangled in front of him.
One detail links Albert McKnight’s sworn account back to his wife’s, on opposite sides of the case and a year apart. Minola McKnight’s June 1913 affidavit ends with her confirming, in the interrogator’s own words, that she had made it “of your own free will and accord.” [46] Albert McKnight’s own account of the Burke affidavit uses the identical formula: he had made it “of his own free will.” [6] Both statements were taken by people with a direct interest in the outcome, from a Negro witness under active pressure, and both close by having the witness affirm, in almost the same words, that no pressure had been applied. That does not prove either statement was actually coerced. It does show that a sworn affirmation of voluntariness, standing at the end of the document rather than woven through it, was evidently a routine feature of how statements were taken from Negro witnesses in this case, on both sides of it, and a formula like that proves only that the formula was used.
IVEY JONES
Atlanta, February to May 1914
The Georgia Supreme Court’s own case file identifies Jones explicitly as “a negro truck driver who appeared as a witness for the State.” The New York Times later referred to him simply as “the negro, Ivey Jones,” and The Atlanta Constitution called him “the Negro” as well. The Atlanta Georgian, on Friday, March 27, 1914, page 6, went further still, identifying him by name and relation in a single line: “Ivey Jones, a negro and cousin of Jim Conley.” [26]
TACTIC: THE PRETEXT INTERVIEW
Jones is important to this record for a reason distinct from money or travel: the defense’s own sworn papers admit that investigators deceived him outright during the interview that produced his changed account. On or about February 5, 1914, C. W. Burke instructed J. W. Wrenn to find Jones, and Burke’s own affidavit describes the assignment in those terms. [9] Wrenn’s own affidavit, filed in the same case file, does not deny the method. “At the instructions of C. W. Burke I called on Ivey Jones at the railroad freight depot,” Wrenn swore. “I represented to Ivey Jones that I was” investigating a railroad accident, inventing an injured man who had supposedly named Jones as a witness, in order to ask Jones about his own movements on Memorial Day, April 26, 1913, the day of Mary Phagan’s murder. [9]
Wrenn explained his own reasoning for the ruse without apology: “This pretense of looking into an accident was adopted… for the reason that I believed that if Ivey Jones’ mind was taken away from all matters connected with the Frank case, he would tell the truth.” [9] Burke’s own affidavit goes further than admitting the assignment. He swore he personally turned Wrenn’s field notes into the document Jones ultimately signed: “Burke dictated from said notes the affidavit already introduced, dated February 6, 1914.” [9] By the lead investigator’s own account, he did not just order the deception carried out. He wrote the affidavit that came out of it.
By Friday, March 27, 1914, when Frank’s extraordinary motion became public, The Atlanta Journal reported that Jones, an employee of a wholesale grocery company, would now testify that he had not seen Conley on the day of the murder, reversing what he had told the jury at trial. [10]
The reversal did not hold. By early May, Jones had turned again. On Tuesday, May 5, 1914, The New York Times, page 4, under the headline “Frank Affidavits False, Says Dorsey,” reported that “an affidavit of the negro, Ivey Jones” had been branded a forgery. [11] The Atlanta Constitution, the same day, in “Return Of Negress Ordered By Judge Monday Morning,” likewise called Jones “the Negro” and reported his sworn accusation that the affidavit submitted in his name was false. [12] The same New York Times article reported that Jones did not stand alone in his account: “Affidavits from Conley and another negro, Eugene Perry, corroborated Jones in his story of meeting Conley shortly after 1:30 o’clock on April 26, 1913.” [11] Perry’s own sworn statement survives in the same Georgia Supreme Court file immediately after Jones’s, and it turns out to describe a deception strikingly similar to the one made on Jones himself; his account follows in its own section below.
The defense denied that Jones’s signature or the final document had been forged. Burke and Wrenn described a later, separate signing at which they said Jones heard the affidavit read aloud, corrected one detail, and then swore to it and signed it in the ordinary way.
Jones’s own account and the defense’s own sworn account point in opposite directions. Jones said the affidavit attributed to him, reversing his trial testimony about seeing Conley, was a forgery he never knowingly swore to. The defense’s own sworn account holds instead that Jones heard the affidavit read to him, corrected a detail, and swore to and signed it himself in a proper signing separate from the earlier pretext interview.
Whatever the forgery accusation is ultimately worth, it sits beside a fact the dispute cannot touch: the defense’s own investigator swore, in his own words, to posing as a railroad claim agent and inventing an accident in order to question a Negro witness for the State without telling him why he was really being asked about his movements on the day of the murder. That is not Dorsey’s characterization of the investigation. It is the investigator’s own sworn description of it. Approach a witness under one pretext, then present him with a document about an entirely different matter, and the result is a bait-and-switch affidavit by design, whatever a jury eventually made of the paper it produced.
EUGENE PERRY
Atlanta, spring 1914
The New York Times called Perry “another negro” alongside Jim Conley and Ivey Jones. The Georgia Supreme Court’s own file records his statement under the heading “Eugene Perry (‘Buddy Brooks’), Sworn for the State,” giving both his given name and the name he apparently went by.
TACTIC: THE PRETEXT INTERVIEW
Perry’s sworn account, preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court file on the pages immediately following Ivey Jones’s own statement, describes a deception nearly identical to the one Wrenn admitted using on Jones. Perry swore he had known Jones for about six years and Conley since Conley was a child, and he placed the two men together at the corner of Hunter and Haynes Streets at 2:15 in the afternoon on April 26, 1913, the day of the murder. [27] A small, young, clean-shaven man approached him, Perry said, first asking about a railroad accident he knew nothing of, then asking whom Perry had met that day. Perry told him he had met both Jones and Conley. [28]
TACTIC: THE MISDESCRIBED PAPER
The same man returned about a week later with a paper already written out, and Perry’s own words describe what happened next: “The paper said that I met Ivy Jones on the corner of Hunter and Haynes Streets about 3 o’clock, and I said ‘No, it was 2:15 o’clock. You ain’t got Jim Conley’s name there and I told you I met both of them, Conley and Jones.'” [28] The man penciled in a correction, restoring Conley’s name and the earlier time, then asked Perry to sign. Perry refused. “He said he was going to have me subpoenaed to the Superior Court if I didn’t sign it and I said I didn’t care for I didn’t want to sign it,” Perry swore. “I never signed any paper for him at all.” [28]
Perry’s sworn account did more than corroborate Jones in the newspapers. It placed a second Negro witness inside a nearly identical pretext-interview method: the same railroad-accident story, followed weeks later by a prepared document. The interviewer’s identity is not established anywhere in the sources consulted for this essay, so he is described here only as Perry described him, not presumed to be the same man who approached Jones or a named defense investigator. What the record does establish is what happened to the document itself: it initially omitted Conley’s name and gave the wrong hour, favorable to the defense’s version of the day, and it was Perry himself, not the interviewer, who forced both corrections before still refusing to sign. Read beside Jones’s affidavit, Perry’s statement suggests the railroad-accident approach was not a single improvisation but a technique tried more than once on Negro witnesses who could place Conley at a particular time and place.
MARY RICH
Near the National Pencil Company factory, before March to May 1914
Newspaper usage for Rich varied by paper. The Atlanta Journal called her a “negro proprietress.” The Atlanta Georgian called her a “negro woman.” The New York Times called her a “colored woman.” The Atlanta Constitution used “Negress.” She sold food near the National Pencil Company factory, and her importance to the defense turned on a supposed sighting: an affidavit attributed to her would have placed Jim Conley near the rear of the factory in the middle of the afternoon on Saturday, April 26, 1913, the day Mary Phagan was killed, later than the State’s own timeline allowed for him to have been there.
Rich’s affidavit was already part of Frank’s extraordinary motion by the time it became public. On Friday, March 27, 1914, The Atlanta Journal, page 1, column 2, published “Frank’s Motion Is Made Public: Many Of State’s Witnesses Change Their Testimony,” with the subheading “Negro Woman Testifies She Saw Conley.” [10] The paper described Rich as the “negro proprietress of an eating house for negroes” near the factory, and reported the affidavit’s own claim that Jim Conley “come running out of the alley back of the factory about 2:15 o’clock” on the day of the murder, “bought a 20-cent lunch, ate it, and left, going back toward the mouth of the alley.” [10]
Between that filing and Rich’s outright repudiation, her account surfaced once more, in a considerably narrower form. The Atlanta Journal of Wednesday, April 22, 1914, in an article headlined “Frank Hearings Postponed; Burns Says Conley Guilty,” reported a deposition from Rich that fell well short of the alley sighting already on file. The paper described Conley coming to her “on a day which he told her was a holiday and which she thinks was Memorial Day, between 2 o’clock and 2:30 in the afternoon,” and reported that he “bought a 20-cent lunch from her, promising to pay on Monday, but he hasn’t paid yet.” [40]
On the point that mattered most, the article was explicit: “The woman declared that she did not remember where Conley came from nor where he went to,” a gap the same article set directly against the stronger account already filed: “In the motion, it has been stated that she saw him come out of an alley behind the factory and go back into it.” [40] Read in sequence, the record now shows three successive versions of what Rich was prepared to say: the extraordinary motion’s account of Conley emerging from and returning to the alley, filed March 27; a deposition three and a half weeks later in which she would confirm only the lunch and the approximate time, with no memory of where Conley came from or went; and, two weeks after that, her outright denial that she had ever made the alley claim at all.
Six weeks after the motion’s filing, Rich disowned the story attributed to her outright. On Tuesday, May 5, 1914, The Atlanta Constitution, in the same article headlined “Return Of Negress Ordered By Judge Monday Morning,” reported that Rich had denied ever making the affidavit the defense had submitted in her name. “The affidavit was not true, and I refused to sign it,” she said, adding, “I could not tell a lie.” [12] Rich told the paper that Lucile Selig Frank, Rabbi David Marx, and two other men had come to see her about it, and that Lucile Frank had told her that signing would “take the rope from around my husband’s neck.” [12]
She named C. W. Burke as one of the men present, and said he handed her a fragment of paper and told her, “You keep this paper… so that you will know it when you see it again.” [12] She said she later showed the fragment to a man named F. J. Wellborn and eventually carried it to Solicitor General Hugh Dorsey’s office. The New York Times carried Rich’s repudiation the same day, describing her as “the colored woman” who had refused to sign a statement she said was untrue. [11]
The Georgia Supreme Court’s own case file preserves Rich’s sworn denial in nearly the same words: “I never told anybody at any time or place… I saw Jim Conley come out of the alley.” [13] The same page of the record carries a supporting affidavit from E. H. Wellborn, who swore he witnessed part of the exchange and heard Lucile Frank tell Rich that signing the affidavit would take the rope from around her husband’s neck, and that Rich answered, “I could not tell a lie,” and would not sign. [13]
The defense did not let Rich’s denial stand unanswered. Rabbi David Marx made his own sworn affidavit, filed in the same hearing, giving a different account of an April 14 visit. According to Marx, he, Lucile Frank, and Dan Lehon called on Rich that day, showed her the affidavit marked “Exhibit A1,” and she told them in their presence that the affidavit was true, with one correction: the time should read 2:30 rather than 2:15. [14]
Marx went further when The New York Times reached him the following day. “Her statement is a deliberate falsehood,” he told the paper, insisting that Rich “declared that Jim Conley had bought a 20-cent lunch a little before 2:30 o’clock on the afternoon of that day, and at the place where she has her stand, which is near said alley.” [17] Read against Rich’s own words, Marx’s version narrows the dispute rather than resolving it: both sides now agree Conley bought a twenty-cent lunch near Rich’s stand that afternoon, and the argument turns on the direction he came from and went back to, and on whether Rich ever authorized the fuller alley account the defense submitted in her name.
Rich’s own account and Marx’s sworn account cannot both be right. Rich, testifying on May 5, said the affidavit attributed to her was never true, that she refused to sign it when Lucile Frank and Rabbi Marx visited her, and that she told them plainly she could not tell a lie. Marx swore instead that Rich told the visiting party the affidavit was true except for the time of day, which she corrected from 2:15 to 2:30, rather than denying its substance outright.
Between Rich’s flat denial, corroborated by Wellborn, and Marx’s sworn account of a substantive agreement with only a time correction, the two records cannot both be complete descriptions of the same conversation. Both, however, are sworn statements entered into the same case file, made by named people willing to attach their word to what they said happened inside Rich’s home that April.
AARON ALLEN
Indianapolis and Chicago, spring 1914
The Atlanta Journal used both words for him in a single article: it introduced “the affidavit of Aaron Allen, colored,” and a few paragraphs later called him “Aaron Allen, negro.”
TACTIC: INDUCEMENT IN PLAIN SIGHT
Allen’s importance to the investigation lay in what Burns’s agents hoped he could say about Jim Conley: specifically, that Conley had confessed the murder to him directly while the two were confined together. On Tuesday, May 5, 1914, The Atlanta Journal reported Allen’s sworn allegations under the headline “Aaron Allen Swears He Was Left In Burns’ Office With Pile Of Money,” in an article covering several sensations Solicitor Dorsey had raised at the Frank hearing. [14] According to Allen’s own account, a man calling himself O’Neal had come to him in Indianapolis and asked him to travel to Chicago to help “catch a certain negro,” and Allen was later brought to Burns’s office and put in a room where, in his words, “a big pile of money, greenbacks and silver, was scattered on the table.” He said he examined it without touching it: “I looked at that pile of money and tried to figure out how much there was of it, but I never touched it.” [14]
Allen’s own sworn statement, preserved in the Georgia Supreme Court’s file, records a direct exchange with Burns over what was being asked of him. “Mr. Burns, do you want me to tell you the truth or to tell you a story?” Allen asked, to which Burns is recorded answering, “Mr. Allen, we don’t ask anybody to tell us lies, but the plain truth.” [15] Allen maintained throughout that he had never known Conley and had never spoken with him about the murder.
A second sworn affidavit in the same case file, from C. A. Isom, corroborates and extends Allen’s account from the investigator’s own side. Isom swore that Allen did not know Conley and had never spoken with him, and that when he reported this to Burns, Burns told him, “you can make him come across.” [16] Isom went back to Allen, who eventually told him plainly what he would and would not do: “I will make that affidavit,” Allen is recorded telling Isom, “but it will be a lie.” [16]
Isom’s own affidavit also records what Burke told him before he ever approached Allen. Burke instructed him, Isom swore, that Allen “was sore with Burns’ men and didn’t know those men and that if it took any dinners, cigars and setting up, for me to use whatever money was necessary” to bring him around. [19] The May 5, 1914 Atlanta Journal article that first reported the pile of money in Burns’s office supplies a still more direct exchange on the same point. According to Allen, Isom told him there was “a lot of money in it for him” if he supplied the wanted account, and that it would be “a feather in the cap of each” of them. [14] Burns himself, by Allen’s account, did not let the matter rest with a request for the plain truth. He “shook his finger in my face and said, ‘You know something and won’t tell.'” [14]
The story reached the national press the following day. On Wednesday, May 6, 1914, The New York Times reported Allen’s account, describing “a great pile of money in silver and greenbacks spread out on the table, which he swore he never touched,” under the headline “May Call Burns Before Grand Jury.” [17]
Allen’s own account and what the investigators’ own sworn record shows do not line up neatly either. Allen said he never knew Jim Conley and was asked, repeatedly, to swear to a confession he said never happened, while a table of cash sat in front of him that he chose not to touch. Burns’s recorded words to Allen directly, asking for the truth, differ from Burns’s recorded instruction to Isom about Allen behind his back, to “make him come across,” and Isom’s own affidavit corroborates that Allen refused rather than fabricated, reporting that refusal rather than concealing it.
Allen’s case differs from Rich’s in one important respect: the sworn record of the pressure applied to him comes not only from Allen but from the investigator assigned to him. Isom’s own affidavit does not deny that he kept working on Allen at Burns’s direction; it corroborates that Allen was pursued for a specific story and that he told his pursuer, to his face, that the story would be a lie, and it places in Burns’s own mouth an instruction to Isom that reads very differently from what Burns is recorded telling Allen himself. Allen’s absence from Atlanta also reached his own household. The same May 5, 1914 article that carried his sworn allegations reported a separate affidavit from his wife, “Kate Allen, a negress,” who lived on Piedmont Avenue and had gone to a Decatur Street pawnbroker, Jake Jacobs, worried about her husband’s disappearance from the city; Jacobs told her he would see Allen brought back at no cost to her. [14] Kate Allen made no accusation of her own against the investigators, but her affidavit shows that Aaron Allen’s removal to Indianapolis and Chicago was serious enough to draw his wife into the record as well.
Burns himself was questioned about the Allen episode under oath the following week. The Atlanta Georgian’s account of the May 2, 1914 hearing, headlined “Detective On Stand, Tells Of Probe,” reports Solicitor Dorsey pressing Burns on whether he had Isom “get a statement from Aaron Allen, a negro in Chicago, who was supposed to have acted as a stool pigeon for the police at the county jail.” [41] Burns’s own account, as reported, confirmed the outline of Allen’s story while disputing its worst details: “he had an employee named O’Neill in Chicago who had gone to Indiana to get Allen, who was sick at the time.” The same article records Burns denying that Allen was abused, denying that any money had been paid to him, and denying that Isom had paid Allen “$100 in his behalf for a false story.” [41]
Burns’s own sworn deposition, preserved in the same Georgia Supreme Court case file, gives that denial in fuller and more specific terms: “No such thing ever happened as some money being put out on a table in the room where Aaron Allen was, where he could see it, and nobody else in there. I didn’t pay Allen anything.” Asked directly about Isom, Burns swore, “I don’t know that Charles Isom was paid $100. through my agency to go up there and get that negro Aaron Allen and get from him a statement favorable to Frank. I never heard tell of it.”
The same deposition supplies the one sworn duration figure anywhere in this record: “It is not true that I had Isom there for the purpose of getting a statement from Allen after I had interviewed Allen myself for three days.” Three days of Burns’s own questioning is not the same claim as the “five days” or the “$15” payment that appear in later, uncited retellings of this episode, and no contemporary source located for this essay confirms either of those two later figures. The same deposition also contains a tension worth noting rather than resolving: elsewhere in it, Burns denies having “take[n] Aaron Allen from Indianapolis to Chicago at all,” saying “I didn’t know he was there at all,” a claim that sits uneasily beside his own acknowledgment, in the same document, of employing O’Neal and of personally interviewing Allen for three days. [44]
WILLIAM CALHOUN, MARK WILSON, AND WHATLEY
Chicago and beyond, spring 1914
Stiles Hopkins’s own affidavit called Calhoun “a negro named Calhoun.” The Georgia Supreme Court’s file groups him with the other men C. A. Isom was sent to find, together described in Isom’s own affidavit as “these negroes.” Of the three, Calhoun’s case is the thinnest as evidence of financial inducement, and it should not be overstated.
C. A. Isom swore that Burke paid him three dollars a day while he searched for Negro prospective witnesses, plus a further hundred dollars for expenses on a trip to Chicago. [19] Isom’s own words describe the scope of that search: “I found and reported that Mark Wilson had gone to Virginia. I found out at the home of William Calhoun that he was at 4238 Wabash Avenue, Chicago… I found that Whatley had been in the chaingang. I went to the chaingang and found that he had just gotten out.” [19]
Burke believed Calhoun might know something bearing on Conley’s account of the factory’s basement door, and detectives had reportedly confronted Calhoun and Conley together once before, though Calhoun said at that time that he did not know Conley. Isom’s own sworn account, preserved a page later in the same Georgia Supreme Court file, describes what he overheard when Burns confronted Calhoun directly in Chicago: “While I was in Burns’ office talking to Allen, on the day I got to Chicago, Burns was talking to William Calhoun in the next room… When he opened the door I recognized Burns’ voice and saw Calhoun, and I heard Burns say: ‘You are a damn liar, you bastard, you!'” [25] Isom went on to say that Calhoun, for his part, denied to Burns that Atlanta detectives had ever questioned him about Conley and denied knowing Conley at all. The Atlanta Journal independently summarized the same confrontation the same week, reporting that Isom had heard Burns curse Calhoun and call him a liar. [14]
Calhoun was eventually interviewed in Chicago. On Wednesday, May 6, 1914, The Atlanta Journal, reporting on the close of arguments before Judge Hill under the headline “Judge Hill Denies Motion As Defense Closes Arguments,” carried an affidavit from attorney Stiles Hopkins describing his own trip to Chicago on the defense’s behalf. Hopkins acknowledged that an affidavit had been taken there from “a negro named Calhoun,” but said its “contents… were of doubtful relevancy to the extraordinary motion for a new trial,” which was why it was never read into the hearing record. [18]
No comparable evidence has been located showing that Calhoun, Wilson, or Whatley were personally offered money for favorable testimony, and Wilson and Whatley left no surviving accusation of their own in this record at all. What the record shows for all three is an organized, paid search, three dollars a day for the investigator doing the looking, a hundred dollars for one trip alone, conducted across state lines and, in Whatley’s case, as far as the chain gang he had just been released from. Calhoun’s own statement was obtained and then set aside by the defense’s own lawyer as not useful enough to submit.
FRANK REESE AND FRED PERKERSON
Fulton County Jail, spring 1914
The Atlanta Georgian called Reese “a negro trusty at the jail.” Reese’s own affidavit, in turn, called Perkerson “a colored man,” and a Fulton County jail employee described both men together as “negro prisoners” who had served as trusties. Their racial identity, like the others in this record, is stated inside the sworn court papers themselves rather than assumed from outside them.
TACTIC: THE MANUFACTURED CONFESSION
Reese and Perkerson were trusties at the Fulton County Jail, with the freedom of movement that position allowed, and both swore that a man they identified as Dr. George Wrenn repeatedly approached them there with a proposal: that the two of them go into Jim Conley’s cell wing, come back out, and claim that Conley had confessed the murder to them. Reese’s own affidavit records Wrenn’s inducement in his own words: Wrenn “would keep me in cigars to smoke” and spoke of getting “lots of money from the Jews” for the story. [20] Perkerson’s parallel account describes the same proposal in fuller terms: “Both of us could go into Conley’s cell wing together and then come out and say Conley had confessed to us that he had killed the girl,” Wrenn is recorded telling them, adding that they could “get lots of money” from “the Jews” for doing so. [23] Both men said they refused.
The two trusties also swore that Wrenn went further and approached Jim Conley himself with a related proposal. Perkerson’s affidavit records Wrenn telling Conley directly that “the thing for him to do when he got his sentence was for him to take the murder on himself and in this way free Mr. Frank,” suggesting Conley would receive only a short additional sentence and would “get a lot of money” for it. [24] By both men’s account, Conley refused this proposal as well.
TACTIC: THE MISDESCRIBED PAPER
Reese’s account did not end when he left the jail. He swore that Wrenn later came to his house early one morning carrying a long white paper and asked him to sign it, offering car fare and whiskey. Reese, who could not read, refused to sign anything he did not first understand. “I cannot read or write,” his affidavit states, “and I told him I wanted to wait and see what the paper was, he wanted me to sign.” [21] He was told, according to the same record, that the paper concerned notes Reese had once carried between Conley and Annie Maud Carter, not a confession.
News of both men’s accusations reached national readers within days. The Atlanta Georgian, in its Tuesday, May 5, 1914 extra edition, front page, headlined “New Affidavits Charge Bribery,” identifying “Frank Reese, a negro trusty at the jail,” among the accusers. [22] The same day, The New York Times, in “Frank Affidavits False, Says Dorsey,” carried the Reese and Perkerson accusations under its own subheading, “Charge Plot To Trap Conley.” [11]
George Wrenn answered the accusations both in the press and under oath, in stronger language each time. The same Tuesday, May 5, 1914 edition of The Atlanta Constitution that reported Rich’s and Jones’s accounts also ran, on page 2, column 4, an article headlined “Perkerson And Frank Reeves Lied, Asserts George Wrenn.” Reached by telephone, Wrenn called the accusation a “damnable lie,” telling the paper plainly, “This Perkerson and Frank Reeves have lied.” [12] He did not deny visiting Frank in his jail cell. He explained those visits by his own occupation, saying he went “in the capacity of hospital interne and to borrow papers from him,” and the same article noted that he was connected with his brother, Jimmie Wrenn, “in certain angles of the evidence.” [12]
Perkerson’s own affidavit went further than Wrenn’s account allowed, alleging that C. W. Burke, Jimmie Wrenn, and George Wrenn had “often conferred with Leo Frank in Frank’s cell in the Tower,” a claim that remains Perkerson’s sworn allegation rather than an independently established fact. [12] That allegation does not stand alone. A separate sworn statement in the Georgia Supreme Court’s own file corroborates the underlying access.
The witness was Willis J. Gilbert, who identified himself as “connected with the sheriff’s force in charge of the prisoners at the jail, serving as inside guard,” and who testified to knowing George Wrenn’s brothers, including Jim Wrenn, who came to see his brother “very often.” Gilbert then described what he had personally witnessed: “I have seen Jim Wren and a Mr. C. W. Burke come in there last week and they went in together to see Mr. Frank in his cell wing,” he swore, adding that he had “seen Mr. Burke call Dr. George Wren off to one side and talk with him privately upon one occasion” and had “seen Dr. George Wren visit Mr. Frank’s cell wing very often.” [31] The same case file identifies George Wrenn as Jimmie Wrenn’s brother in its own words, independent of any newspaper account: “This said George Wrenn or Dr. Wrenn” is described as “the brother of Jimmie Wrenn,” with Jimmie Wrenn named as “the man who has been assisting C. W. Burke.” [32]
The next day, in the sworn affidavit reported in The Atlanta Journal’s May 6, 1914 account of the close of arguments before Judge Hill, Wrenn repeated his denial in more formal terms: he “denied positively that he ever offered these Negroes any reward to get a confession from Conley, or that he even talked to them about getting a confession from Conley.” [18] The same affidavit addressed Carter’s poison-plot testimony as well, with Wrenn saying he had not told her to pursue a confession from Conley and had not known she was attempting to obtain one until he read her own affidavit at the hearing. [18]
Reese’s and Perkerson’s own account and Wrenn’s sworn account leave little room for compromise. The two men said Wrenn repeatedly proposed a paid, fabricated Conley confession, made the same proposal to Conley directly, and later sought Reese’s signature on a document Reese, unable to read, refused to sign until its purpose was explained. Wrenn swore in response that he never offered either man a reward for a confession and never discussed obtaining one with them, and that he was unaware of Carter’s own confession-gathering efforts until her affidavit appeared at the hearing.
Conley himself occupies a different place in this record than the other people described here. He was not pursued for an affidavit about someone else’s guilt; by Reese’s and Perkerson’s own sworn accounts, he was the person the proposal was ultimately made to, asked to accept responsibility for Mary Phagan’s murder in exchange for a lighter sentence and money, and, by the same accounts, he refused. Reese told The Atlanta Constitution as much in his own words: “I have heard Dr. Wrenn telling Conley that he had been tried, and that he could take the Mary Phagan murder on himself and that it would free Mr. Frank.” [12] Contemporary papers called Conley, as they called the others in this record, a Negro; The New York Times described him on May 5, 1914, as “the negro, Jim Conley.” Whatever else is contested in this record, Reese and Perkerson agree, independently of one another, that the final target of the jail proposal was Conley’s own confession to a crime he had always denied committing, not only another witness’s story about him.
AN UNNAMED CORROBORATOR IN THE RAGSDALE AFFIDAVIT
Fulton County, disclosed May 1914
TACTIC: THE SUBSTITUTE WITNESS
JOHN SHIELDS AND AN UNNAMED BLACK WOMAN SOUGHT AGAINST CONLEY
National Pencil Company, spring 1914
Shields’s own race is not established by any source located in this audit, and he is not counted here among the Negro witnesses. What he swore to, however, bears directly on this record: an attempt to recruit a Negro woman as a fabricated witness against Jim Conley.
Shields told the Georgia Supreme Court he had worked at the National Pencil Company since May 1913 and knew both C. W. Burke and Jimmie Wrenn, describing the two men as “constantly around the National Pencil Factory for the last several months, working on the Frank case.” [29] His sworn statement goes on to describe repeated pressure from Jimmie Wrenn to sign an affidavit accusing Conley of a degrading sexual act, an accusation Shields swore was false. “I refused every time because it was a lie,” Shields stated, adding that Wrenn offered to “dress me up and send me to Cincinnati or anywhere else I wanted to go” if he would sign. [30] Shields said there was not, in his own words, “a word of truth in it,” and refused. [30]
TACTIC: THE SUBSTITUTE WITNESS
Wrenn did not stop there, by Shields’s account. According to Shields’s own sworn statement, Wrenn then asked him directly whether he knew “a negro woman” who could be found to swear to the same kind of story against Conley. [30] Shields said he did not, and no such woman is named anywhere in the surviving record. J. W. Wrenn denied the entire episode under oath. The Atlanta Journal of Tuesday, May 5, 1914, reported his affidavit denying “he ever tried to induce John Shields[] to swear that Conley is a pervert or that he tried to get Shields to find a negro woman who would give such testimony.” [14]
This episode is not about a witness who was pressured into a false statement against Conley. It is about a witness who refused, and whose refusal happens to preserve, in his own sworn words, a specific request for a Negro woman willing to give testimony he himself called a lie. Whether such a woman was ever approached, and who she might have been, does not survive anywhere in this record.
Jimmie Wrenn’s conduct toward Shields did not stand alone as an isolated complaint against him. On Friday, June 19, 1914, The Atlanta Journal, page 2, column 4, reported that a Fulton County grand jury had indicted Wrenn himself for attempted subornation of perjury, the same charge already lodged against Burke the day before, this time involving a white trial witness named Helen Ferguson. [34] Ferguson told the grand jury that Wrenn, using an assumed name, had courted her and promised to marry her if she changed her testimony, and that he had at one point introduced Burke to her as his own father. [34]
The Atlanta Constitution’s own report the same day, under the headline “Burke Indicted for Perjury Subornation,” independently corroborated the account, identifying the witness as “Helen Ferguson, the girl witness for the prosecution,” describing the alleged marriage offer, reporting an attempt to change her testimony “upon a visit to the office of Luther Z. Rosser,” Frank’s own lead trial attorney, and noting that Burke furnished a “bond of $2,500” in the matter. [39] Ferguson is outside the scope of this essay, since no source consulted here identifies her as Negro, but the indictment itself belongs in any full accounting of Jimmie Wrenn, since it shows the same man accused, within the same several weeks, of two separate and independently sworn attempts to manufacture false testimony through personal inducement, one aimed at a Negro jail trusty asked to find a Negro woman willing to lie about Conley, the other aimed at a white factory witness offered marriage under a false name.
WHAT THE RECORD SHOWS, TAKEN TOGETHER
The repertoire named at the outset of this essay, admitted false pretexts, prepared and disputed affidavits, job-based inducements, cash and hospitality surrounding desired testimony, confession stories sought from witnesses who said they would be lying, a witness removed from Georgia after her cooperation was secured, direct access to prisoners and jail trusties, disputed correspondence, and a multistate search for Negro witnesses who could damage Jim Conley, is not a summary imposed on the record from outside it. It is what the witnesses themselves, and in several instances the defense’s own investigators, described under oath.
Set beside one another, these cases resist a single verdict, and the record does not support one. Aaron Allen was pursued for a story about a Conley confession that he said, under oath and to the investigator’s own face, would have been false, while Burns’s recorded instruction to Isom behind Allen’s back, to make him “come across,” reads differently than Burns’s recorded words to Allen in person. Mary Rich denied ever giving the story attributed to her and was corroborated by a witness to the conversation, while Rabbi Marx, under his own oath, swore she had confirmed the story with only a small correction. Ivey Jones was deceived by the defense’s own admitted use of a false railroad-accident pretext before his account of the murder day ever changed.
Albert McKnight described a Pullman job dangled in front of him worth several times his ordinary wages, and separately preserved, in his own sworn words, Burke calling his truthful trial testimony “a damned lie” to his face. He also swore that the words of the affidavit he signed were changed after his signature was already on it. Annie Maud Carter gave the defense an affidavit useful against Conley, was sent out of Georgia afterward with her expenses paid and five dollars in her pocket, later accused Lehon of giving her small sums and inducing her testimony at a hearing where Lehon was in fact fined, though on the separate charge of operating as an unlicensed private detective, and separately swore that months earlier, in the Fulton County Jail, an unnamed man traveling with a group she called the Kline boys had offered her poison for Conley’s food, an approach independently reported the same week in the Atlanta press.
The letters exchanged between Carter and Conley became their own dispute: the defense entered twenty-two sheets attributed to Carter and twenty-seven attributed to Conley, and the State answered by accusing the defense of forging them through “a conspiracy engineered by” the same George Wrenn accused elsewhere in this record, while Reese’s own sworn affidavit placed Wrenn and Carter passing notes near Conley’s cell. William Calhoun, Mark Wilson, and a man named Whatley were tracked down as part of the same paid, organized search, William J. Burns cursed Calhoun to his face and called him a liar and a bastard by Isom’s own sworn account, and Calhoun’s statement, once obtained, was set aside by the defense’s own lawyer as not worth using.
Frank Reese and Fred Perkerson independently swore that a man in the wider defense orbit proposed a paid, fabricated confession to them and, by their account, to Conley himself, both accusations Reese repeated to a second newspaper, and that man told the press flatly that they had lied before denying all of it under his own oath, while also acknowledging he had visited Frank in his cell and had a brother, Jimmie Wrenn, connected to the case.
Ivey Jones, for his part, was not left without a parallel: a second Negro man, Eugene Perry, was approached under nearly the same railroad-accident pretext, and his own sworn account describes catching the resulting paper in an outright factual error, correcting it, and refusing to sign anyway. John Shields, who is not himself counted among the Negro witnesses here, swore in his own words that Jimmie Wrenn asked him to find a Negro woman willing to give false testimony against Conley, a request Shields said he could not answer because he knew of no such woman. And Minola McKnight’s June 1913 arrest, a full year before any of this began, stands as this record’s clearest reminder that Negro witnesses in the Frank case faced pressure from the State as well as from the defense, a pattern the Atlanta press revisited a year later when it reported she had been cut across the face by an assailant she declined to name.
None of this requires treating every dollar spent or every mile traveled as proof of a crime. It does establish, in the witnesses’ own sworn words and in the sworn words of the men who approached them, that Frank’s post-trial investigators went looking for Negro witnesses across Atlanta, Indianapolis, Chicago, and Virginia who could help the defense against Jim Conley, and that money, job offers, and deception were used in the attempt to move several of those witnesses off their sworn testimony. Allen, Rich, McKnight, Jones, Reese, and Perkerson did not simply disagree with the defense’s investigators about a detail. Each of them said, under oath, that someone acting for the defense tried to get them to swear to something false, or altered what they had already signed. Where a witness refused and no false statement resulted, as Allen, Reese, and Perkerson swore of themselves, the precise legal term is attempted subornation of perjury, since Georgia’s own statute reaches a person who procures or induces another actually to commit perjury or false swearing, not just an unsuccessful attempt at it. This essay uses that distinction rather than treating every instance as interchangeable. Fulton County grand juries nonetheless did indict members of the defense’s own investigative team on subornation-related charges arising from this same pattern of conduct, C. W. Burke and Jimmie Wrenn among them, for the tactic of personal inducement through a false identity, used against a different witness, Helen Ferguson, that same June.
Three specific tactics run through these cases, and none of them is a matter of interpretation. The first is the bait-and-switch affidavit: approach a witness under a false pretext, a railroad accident that never touched him, and only afterward reveal that the paper he is being asked to sign concerns the Conley case, the method used on Jones, Perry, and Reese. The second is altering a sworn document’s wording after the witness had already signed it, the tactic McKnight himself described. The third is straightforward inducement, money, a job, or cash left where a witness could see it, aimed at moving a witness off testimony already given under oath, the pattern behind Allen, Carter, and Reese and Perkerson alike. Each is a different route to the same destination: a false statement sworn to under a real witness’s name.
Carter’s case shows a witness who did cooperate with the defense being moved out of the state once her cooperation was secured, under circumstances a sitting judge found serious enough to summon William J. Burns and Dan Lehon to answer for in open court, with Lehon ultimately fined at a related proceeding, though on the separate charge of operating as an unlicensed private detective rather than on Carter’s own accusation of inducement. None of these accounts are later reconstructions. They were sworn to and printed while the case was still being argued, in The Atlanta Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, The Atlanta Georgian, The New York Times, and in the case file the Georgia Supreme Court itself preserved.
REFERENCES
[1] Phagan-Kean, M. (2025). Leo Frank case: The 1913 murder of little Mary Phagan (2nd rev. ed.), Chapter 6: Sentencing and aftermath. Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project. https://www.maryphagan.org/chapter-6-sentencing-and-aftermath/
[2] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Rebuttal affidavit concerning Annie Maud Carter’s affidavit, page 1765. https://www.maryphagan.com/1765-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[3] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, May 9). Burns and Lehon are summoned on contempt charge, p. 1, col. 7. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-09-burns-and-lehon-are-summoned-on-contempt-charge-the-atlanta-journal/
[4] The Atlanta Constitution. (1914, May 27). Lehon is fined $100 and costs and bound over, p. 3. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-27-lehon-is-fined-100-and-costs-and-bound-over-the-atlanta-constitution/
[5] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, April 19). Albert M’Knight now repudiates his recent story, p. 1, col. 6. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-04-19-albert-m-knight-now-repudiates-his-recent-story-the-atlanta-journal/
[6] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Sworn statement of Albert McKnight, page 1600. https://www.maryphagan.com/1600-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[7] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavits of C. W. Burke and Minola McKnight concerning Albert McKnight, page 1741. https://www.maryphagan.com/1741-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[8] The Atlanta Constitution. (1914, April 19). Testimony he gave at trial was true, declares M’Knight, p. 1, col. 6. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-04-19-testimony-he-gave-at-trial-was-true-declares-m-knight-the-atlanta-constitution/
[9] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavits of C. W. Burke and J. W. Wrenn concerning Ivey Jones, page 1761. https://www.maryphagan.com/1761-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[10] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, March 27). Frank’s motion is made public: Many of State’s witnesses change their testimony, p. 1, col. 2. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-03-27-frank-s-motion-is-made-public-many-of-state-s-witnesses-change-their-testimony-the-atlanta-journal/
[11] The New York Times. (1914, May 5). Frank affidavits false, says Dorsey, p. 4. https://www.maryphagan.com/the-new-york-times-1914-may-5-frank-affidavits-false-says-dorsey-the-new-york-times-p-4/
[12] The Atlanta Constitution. (1914, May 5). Return of Negress ordered by judge Monday morning, p. 1, col. 5. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-05-return-of-negress-ordered-by-judge-monday-morning-the-atlanta-constitution/
[13] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavits of Mary Rich and E. H. Wellborn, page 1627. https://www.maryphagan.com/1627-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[14] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, May 5). Many sensations sprung by Dorsey at Frank hearing, p. 1, col. 7. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-05-many-sensations-sprung-by-dorsey-at-frank-hearing-the-atlanta-journal/
[15] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Sworn statement of Aaron Allen, page 1674. https://www.maryphagan.com/1674-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[16] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of C. A. Isom concerning Aaron Allen, page 1732. https://www.maryphagan.com/1732-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[17] The New York Times. (1914, May 6). May call Burns before grand jury. https://www.maryphagan.com/the-new-york-times-1914-may-6-may-call-burns-before-grand-jury-the-new-york-times/
[18] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, May 6). Judge Hill denies motion as defense closes arguments, pp. 1, 3. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-06-judge-hill-denies-motion-as-defense-closes-arguments-the-atlanta-journal/
[19] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of C. A. Isom concerning C. W. Burke’s instructions regarding Aaron Allen, and concerning William Calhoun, Mark Wilson, and Whatley, page 1731. https://www.maryphagan.com/1731-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[20] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Frank Reese concerning George Wrenn, page 1661. https://www.maryphagan.com/1661-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[21] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Frank Reese concerning George Wrenn, continued, page 1662. https://www.maryphagan.com/1662-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[22] The Atlanta Georgian. (1914, May 5). New affidavits charge bribery, extra ed., p. 1. Georgia Historic Newspapers.
[23] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Fred Perkerson concerning George Wrenn, page 1724. https://www.maryphagan.com/1724-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[24] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Fred Perkerson concerning George Wrenn and Jim Conley, continued, page 1725. https://www.maryphagan.com/1725-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[25] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of C. A. Isom concerning William J. Burns’s confrontation with William Calhoun in Chicago, page 1733. https://www.maryphagan.com/1733-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[26] The Atlanta Georgian. (1914, March 27). 3 swear to alibi for Frank, p. 6. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-03-27-3-swear-to-alibi-for-frank-the-atlanta-georgian/
[27] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Statement of Ivey Jones and beginning of the affidavit of Eugene Perry (“Buddy Brooks”), page 1638. https://www.maryphagan.com/1638-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[28] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Eugene Perry, continued, page 1639. https://www.maryphagan.com/1639-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[29] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of John Shields concerning C. W. Burke and Jimmie Wrenn, page 1666. https://www.maryphagan.com/1666-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[30] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of John Shields, continued, page 1667. https://www.maryphagan.com/1667-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[31] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Willis J. Gilbert, inside guard on the sheriff’s jail force, concerning Burke, Jimmie Wrenn, George Wrenn, and Frank’s cell wing; identification of Frank Reese and Fred Perkins as Negro trusties; and testimony concerning Annie Maud Carter’s request to enter Conley’s cell wing, her conversations with George Wrenn, and Gilbert’s own assessment of her character, pages 1663-1664. https://www.maryphagan.com/1663-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/ ; https://www.maryphagan.com/1664-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[32] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Identification of George Wrenn as Jimmie Wrenn’s brother and Jimmie Wrenn’s connection to C. W. Burke, page 1723. https://www.maryphagan.com/1723-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[33] The Atlanta Journal. (1913, June 3). Attorney retained for negro servant at Frank’s home. https://www.maryphagan.com/1913-06-03-attorney-retained-for-negro-servant-at-franks-home-the-atlanta-journal/
[34] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, June 19). Indictment is returned against Jimmy Wrenn, p. 2, col. 4. https://www.leofrank.com/atlanta-journal/1914-06-19-indictment-is-returned-against-jimmy-wrenn/
[35] The Atlanta Constitution. (1913, June 3). Leo Frank’s cook put under arrest. https://www.maryphagan.com/pdf-files/archive-atlanta-constitution/atlanta-constitution-june-03-1913-tuesday-16-pages-combined.pdf
[36] The Atlanta Journal. (1913, June 4). Sensational affidavit made by Minola M’Knight, Negro cook at home of L. M. Frank. https://www.maryphagan.com/1913-06-04-sensational-affidavit-made-by-minola-mknight-negro-cook-at-home-of-l-m-frank-the-atlanta-journal/
[37] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. The State’s response to Frank’s extraordinary motion concerning the Carter-Conley letters and its forgery accusation against George Wrenn, page 1495. https://www.maryphagan.com/1495-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[38] The Atlanta Georgian. (1914, May 1). Evidence is recorded against Conley. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-01-evidence-is-recorded-against-conley-the-atlanta-georgian/
[39] The Atlanta Constitution. (1914, June 19). Burke indicted for perjury subornation, p. 10. https://www.leofrank.org/enright-archive/atlanta-constitution-1914-06-19-burke-indicted-for-perjury-subornation.pdf
[40] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, April 22). Frank hearings postponed; Burns says Conley guilty. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-04-22-frank-hearings-postponed-burns-says-conley-guilty-the-atlanta-journal/
[41] The Atlanta Georgian. (1914, May 2). Detective on stand, tells of probe. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-02-detective-on-stand-tells-of-probe-the-atlanta-georgian/
[42] The Atlanta Constitution. (1914, June 15). Minola M’Knight mysteriously cut, p. 5. https://www.leofrank.com/atlanta-constitution/1914-06-15-minola-m-knight-mysteriously-cut/
[43] Connolly, C. P. (1915). The truth about the Frank case (p. 71). https://archive.org/details/the-propaganda-truth-about-the-leo-frank-case-1915
[44] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Deposition of William J. Burns, sworn for the State, in the State’s response to Leo M. Frank’s appeal, concerning Aaron Allen and C. A. Isom. https://archive.org/details/99-william-j-burns-affidavit-state-prosecutor-hugh-dorsey-atlanta-georgia-response-to-trial-appeals
[45] The Atlanta Georgian. (1913, June 2). Negro cook at home where Frank lived held by the police. https://www.maryphagan.com/1913-06-02-negro-cook-at-home-where-frank-lived-held-by-the-police-the-atlanta-georgian/
[46] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. State’s Exhibit J, sworn statement of Minola McKnight, including the closing colloquy on voluntariness, sheets 1288-1290. https://www.maryphagan.com/1288-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/ – https://www.maryphagan.com/1290-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[47] Minola McKnight, trial testimony repudiating State’s Exhibit J (1913, August), as reproduced by the Leo Frank Case Archive. https://www.maryphagan.com/1141-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[48] Georgia Code. Section 16-10-72, Subornation of perjury or false swearing. https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-16/chapter-10/article-4/section-16-10-72/
[49] Minola McKnight, trial testimony denying she told her husband what he attributed to her (1913, August), as reproduced by The Leo Frank Case Research Library. https://leofrank.info/the-leo-frank-trial-week-three/
[50] Georgia Supreme Court Case File, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia. Affidavit of Rabbi David Marx, Isaac Haas, Isaac Schoen, B. Wildauer, J. O. Knight, and Otto Schwab concerning Annie Maud Carter’s affidavit, dated April 23, 1914, page 1764. https://www.maryphagan.com/1764-slide-georgia-supreme-court-leo-frank-appeals-documents-1913-1914/
[51] The Atlanta Journal. (1914, May 26). Burns’ men fight effort to shut up offices in Atlanta, p. 1, col. 1. https://www.maryphagan.com/1914-05-26-burns-men-fight-effort-to-shut-up-offices-in-atlanta-the-atlanta-journal/
[52] Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error, Brief of Evidence (Fulton Superior Court, July term 1913), 260-261 (testimony of R. L. Craven, sworn for the State in rebuttal). https://archive.org/details/LeoM.FrankPlaintiffInErrorVs.StateOfGeorgiaDefendantInError.In
[53] Mary Phagan Kean Legacy Project. Albert McKnight and Magnolia “Minola” McKnight episode. State’s Counter-Showing, Leo M. Frank v. State of Georgia, Extraordinary Motion for New Trial, Georgia Supreme Court record: testimony of R. L. Graham, sheets 1601-1602, and Albert McKnight’s sworn statement, “Exhibit A,” sheets 1603-1604 (printed pp. 89-90; dated May 26, 1913, attestation noted for June 2, 1913), reconstructed from a torn and partly illegible original. https://www.maryphagan.com/albert-mcknight-episode/
[54] Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error, Brief of Evidence (Fulton Superior Court, July term 1913), pp. 85-86 (testimony of Albert McKnight, sworn for the State). https://archive.org/details/LeoM.FrankPlaintiffInErrorVs.StateOfGeorgiaDefendantInError.In
[55] Leo M. Frank, Plaintiff in Error, vs. State of Georgia, Defendant in Error, Brief of Evidence (Fulton Superior Court, July term 1913), p. 260 (testimony of Albert McKnight, sworn for the State in rebuttal). https://archive.org/details/LeoM.FrankPlaintiffInErrorVs.StateOfGeorgiaDefendantInError.In
[56] Georgia Code. Section 16-10-93, Influencing witnesses. https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-16/chapter-10/article-5/section-16-10-93/
[57] The Bamberg Herald. (1915, February 4). Acquitted of perjury, p. 1. https://historicnewspapers.sc.edu/lccn/sn86063790/1915-02-04/ed-1/seq-1/