Elaine Marie AlphinAn Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank

Elaine Marie Alphin raises that question in her carefully researched, well-written book An Unspeakable Crime, The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank. The 1913 murder of thirteen-year-old Mary Phagan has been a controversial subject for years. In the media frenzy following the tragic incident, antisemitism clouded the investigation of the crime and the subsequent prosecution of Leo Frank, the Jewish superintendent of the plant where Mary worked. Alphin traces this story of injustice in clear and powerful prose and with excellent visuals like old photographs, newspaper stories, facsimiles of the notes found near Mary Phagan's body, and even postcards of Frank's lynching. Teens will be intrigued and moved by this accounting of an historical matter of conscience.

I found this account heartbreaking and at times I could not believe what I was reading. I see that some reviewers have differing opinions as to what actually happened and who was the killer of this poor, lovely innocent. But from any viepoint this was a tragic chapter in American history.

Excellent account of a "Black Eye Story" in American history!!

It is actually for my daughter for her English class' requirement.

Purchased by school district. Didn't hear any complaints from the teacher (and I would), so assume all's good.

The Leo Frank trial, including its aftermath, is an epic saga about one of the most well documented & incendiary capital murder cases in the annals of early 20th century American jurisprudence. 'An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank', authored by children's veteran fiction writer, Elaine Marie Alphin, is supposedly meant to be a 21st century non-fiction, reliable & accurate retelling of a true crime story, but sadly the book fails miserably to measure up to these presumed intentions. Moreover, this is not a book of subtleties & appears to suggest the author really has no honesty & no integrity for giving readers the objective facts. For dispassionate historians, scholars & students of law, who have studied the official legal records of the Frank-Phagan case at an academic level, Alphin's book is sadly point blank an unmitigated mockery of American legal history.This book would more accurately be described as a looney racist diatribe directed against the people of Georgia & Southerners in general, falsely accusing them of blood libel, bigoted hate crimes & anti-Jewish conspiracies. Even more grotesque, Elaine Marie Alphin suggests that within the context of traditional White racial separatist Southern culture, the collective citizenry were so viciously Antisemitic that they knowingly conspired to let a guilty 27 year old Black man go free for the heinous crime of bludgeoning, raping & strangling a White teenage girl, so the public could instead, knowingly frame an "innocent" White "Yankee Jew" from Brooklyn. Elaine Marie Alphin supports this accusation of irrational prejudice with the "logic" that the people of 1913 Georgia believe a "guilty" Negro rapist & murderer is not worthy enough to pay the price for the crime of defiling, mutilating & garroting a white girl, so an "innocent" Jew had to be chosen instead for a blood sacrifice. Elaine Marie Alphin promotes these claims, despite the fact the consensus amongst Jewish & Gentile historians is anti-Semitism was virtually non-existent in the Old South & Jews prospered during the Southern progressive era. Moreover, the fact Leo Frank was Jewish & married into a well respected Southern patrician family of German-Jewish descent, likely helped him significantly more than it hurt him. Jewish-Americans were not generally known by society back then or currently, to commit such conspicuously vicious, sadistic & perverted crimes against children, especially involving battery, rape, strangulation & mutilation on the level of Psychopathia Sexualis.Sadly, this anti-Gentile propaganda hate book is specifically targeted for the demographic audience of young adults: teenagers, high school & college students, which means all over the United States, classrooms of children are being falsely indoctrinated & demoralized with this poisonously deceitful book.What makes this book so hard to take seriously is not just only the fact that Alphin undeniably manipulates the official facts of the official legal records & fabricates evidence that doesn't stand up to even the most basic fact-checking, but she fails to mention Leo Frank made an astonishing admission on the witness that some believe amounted to a murder trial confession.Leo Max Frank (1884 - 1915) was a clean cut, Ivy League educated, Northern Jewish engineer, who relocated to Georgia on August 6, 1908, because of an opportunity presented to him in October 1907 by his wealthy uncle Moses, who had asked his nephew to manage a manufacturing plant in the heart of downtown Atlanta. In 1913, Leo Frank was Atlanta president of the 500 member Jewish fraternal organization B'nai B'rith (the organization responsible for founding the ADL, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith).Leo Frank had been employed with the National Pencil Company from Monday, August 10, 1908, until Tuesday, April 29, 1913, when he was arrested on "suspicion" after botching a premeditated plot to frame his Negro nightwatchman for the grizzly murder of Mary Phagan. Before Leo Frank's arrest, he managed about 170 preteen & teenage child laborers, who mostly came from poor working class families. The majority of Frank's employees were young girls, some of whom, had to drop out of school in their single digit years to help their families make ends meet. This unfortunate reality existed because poverty was rife in the South during its early 20th century transformation from an agrarian economy toward urban industrialization. The child laborers working for Leo Frank, typically worked 10 hours a day, six days a week, in what we would call today, swetshop-like conditions. One of those child laborers was 13 year old little Mary Phagan.Mary Phagan began working for the National Pencil Company in the Spring of 1912, at a meager hourly pay rate of 7 and 4/11 cents an hour (Alphin incorrectly cites Phagan's hourly wage). Phagan's work station was located on the second floor of the National Pencil Company, at the rear section of the building in the machine department - known colloquially as "the metal room" - in a subsection called the tipping department. Using a knurling machine, Mary Phagan's job was inserting rubber erasers into the small hollow brass tubes attached at the ends of pencils. By April 21, 1913, she had clocked more than 2,550 hours under Leo Frank's watch.On Monday, April 21, 1913, Mary Phagan was temporarily laid off with 4 other girls working in the metal room on the orders of Leo Frank, because the factory ran-out of brass sheet metal, which was regularly processed to form pencil eraser holders. One of the other girls laid off along with Mary was 14 year old Monteen Stover, who would unintentionally set off a chain reaction of events, inducing the unequivocal solution to the Mary Phagan murder mystery by Leo Frank.On Saturday, April 26, 1913, noontime, Mary Phagan arrived at the factory to collect her reduced pay envelope from Leo Frank & find out if the shipment of brass sheet metal had arrived yet. The purpose of the inquiry was to determine whether or not she would have her job back on Monday Morning, April 28, 1913, at 6:30 a.m. The brass sheet metal was normally stored in a closet under a staircase in the metal room.On the pretext of "seeing whether or not the metal had arrived yet", Leo Frank knew the answer was "no", but told Phagan "I don't know" and then lured her into the metal room to "find out". Using Phagan's uncertain job status as a species of coercion, Leo Frank demanded to have sex with her, but she made the fatal mistake of refusing him and tried to escape.The 5'8" tall Leo Frank exploded in a fit of rage on 4'11" Mary Phagan, pounded her in the face with his fists & slammed her head onto the solid iron handle of a lathe belonging to employee Robert P. Barret. Mary Phagan fell to the floor unconscious & Leo Frank dragged her to the men's toilet in the metalroom, ripped open her dress from the hem to the crotch, tore open her knitted underwear up to the right seam & savagely raped her, but she woke up from unconsciousness while in the midst of being outraged, crying and pleading for Leo Frank to stop. And so he did, but given the implications if Mary told anyone, Leo grabbed a 7 foot long and 1/8th inch thick packing cord hanging from a nail on the wall & strangled Phagan to death.In the Old South of 1913, rapists were often violently beaten, castrated without anesthesia & lynched by vigilante mobs, thus given these known circumstances, Leo Frank chose to permanently silence Mary Phagan. However, he made a number of incalculable mistakes that served as a text book example of what not to do when covering up a crime of such extreme violence.What Leo Frank did not know is that while he was in the metalroom, raping & strangling Mary Phagan between 12:05pm and 12:10pm, another little girl that Leo Frank also had laid off five days prior, Monteen Stover, had arrived in his business office & waited there to collect her final pay envelope.After the murder of Phagan, Frank temporarily left the scene of the crime, returned to his office collecting himself. Moments later, Leo Frank stomped on his office floor & whistled to signal his Negro janitor, Jim Conley - who was sitting idly downstairs like a watchdog at the first floor lobby - to come upstairs.Frank confessed to Conley what happened in the metal room concerning the little girl that went upstairs, screamed & never went back downstairs. At Leo Frank's behest, Conley curiously went to see what had happened in the metal room & got a rather shocking surprise. He found a dead girl in the men's toilet with a face beaten purple & a strip of her petty coat soaked with blood wrapped around her neck, concealing a cinched cord buried 1/8th inch deep.Leo Frank asked Conley for help to remove the corpse from the metal room to the factory basement. Once in the basement, Phagan was dragged face down across a hard dirt floor 140 feet from the cellar elevator shaft, to a location in the rear where garbage was regularly staged before it was incinerated in a large furnace. Afterwards, Conley returned upstairs where Frank gave him $200 on the condition he would stuff Mary's dead body into the basement furnace & thereby cremate the evidence, but Conley declined unless Frank would help him. In the fallout of this refusal & Leo Frank taking the $200 back, Conley instead wrote "death notes" in Ebonics in an attempt direct suspicion on a new employee. Conley later claimed they were made at the behest of Leo Frank, attempting to frame the murder of Phagan on Newt Lee the Negro nightwatchman. Lee a relatively recent employee of three weeks was scheduled to arrive at the factory in the late afternoon that same day, to start the graveyard shift at the factory.When Newt Lee arrived in the National Pencil Company at his holiday re-scheduled time of 4:00pm, Leo Frank came bustling out of his office, appeared to be frantic and told Newt Lee he needed to leave the factory for two hours and "have a good time". Newt Lee asked Leo Frank if he could please take a nap in the packing room, because he was tired, but Leo Frank refused and asserted that Lee had to leave the building. Newt Lee left as requested, returned to the factory at 5:55 pm & noticed Leo Frank was nervously fumbling & bungling efforts to put Newt Lee's blank timesheet into the punch clock. The incident seemed out of place, because Lee presumed Leo Frank had five years of experience putting time cards into the punch clock. The significance of why Leo Frank was acting so oddly with Lee's time card & the punch-clock, would be revealed two days later on Monday morning, April 28, 1913.At 3:15 am in the morning of Sunday, April 27, 1913, between Newt Lee's regular half-hour security rounds throughout the 5 floor building (4 stories and a basement), he went to the segregated "Negro Toilet" in the rear of the basement to "make number 2" and after using the toilet, he stood up and spotted something in the gloom, upon approaching it, he discovered the mauled body of a young white girl. Newt Lee hurried upstairs & called the Atlanta Police Station, reaching call officer W. F. Anderson at 3:24 pm. Lee was arrested after the Police arrived at the scene & found the "death notes" next to the cadaver of the unknown little girl. The notes written in Ebonics by Jim Conley accused Newt Lee of the murder. The notes physically described Newt Lee exactly, calling him the long, tall, slim and dark Negro "nightwitch" (misspelling nightwatch by one letter). Newt Lee was indeed a tall, slim and dark complected Negro nightwatchman known colloquially at the factory as the nightwatch.On Sunday morning, April 27, 1913, Atlanta Police went to the Selig residence on 68 East Georgia Avenue, where Leo Frank was residing with his wife and in-laws. The police noticed Leo Frank appeared nervous, pale, struggled with his necktie and collar, and kept asking for coffee. Leo Frank began firing off questions at the police officers faster than they could answer him. When the police asked Leo Frank if he knew his employee Mary Phagan, he denied knowing her, even though later it was revealed she had worked for him about a year, on the same floor as his business office, down the hall in the metal room.The Atlanta police escorted Leo Frank to P.J. Bloomfield's mortuary to identify the body of Mary Phagan, where he vaguely claimed to recognize her, but still maintained not knowing her by name. Then the Atlanta Police took Leo to his second floor business office at the National Pencil Company and asked him to check his log book to see if Mary Phagan had actually come into his office or not to collect her pay. Leo checked his accounting book and said Mary Phagan had arrived in his office at 12:03pm on Saturday, April 26, 1913, received her pay envelope and left.Moments later Leo Frank pulled out Newt Lee's time card from the punch clock with the Police present, examined the timestamps, & said it had been perfectly punched every half hour from 6:00pm on Saturday, April 26, 1913 to 3:00 am on April 27, 1913 (On the last day of the Coroner's inquest on Thursday, May, 8, 1913, Police Officer W.W. "Boots" Rogers testified to having looked over Leo Frank's shoulder as he was examining Newt Lee's timecard and seeing it was indeed punched correctly every half hour).The Next Day:At 8:00 am on Monday, April 28, 1913, Atlanta Police brought Leo Frank to the stationhouse for routine questioning during the critical first 48 hours of the murder investigation. Luther Rosser and Herbert Haas, two expensive high powered Atlanta lawyers, arrived to represent their new client, Leo Frank, while the police interrogated him.Leo Frank made a deposition to the police, that Mary Phagan was with him, having arrived inside his business office, "between 12:05 and 12:10pm, maybe 12:07pm" (State's Exhibit B, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913). Oddly enough, Leo Frank also changed his account of examining Newt Lee's time card (about it being punched perfectly every half hour) & said Newt Lee's time card had 4 missed half-hour punches (Defendant's Exhibit A, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913), thus giving Newt Lee several hours of unaccounted for time on the night of the Phagan murder. This newfangled evidence was beginning to look really bad for Newt Lee, but it also raised questions of suspicion against Leo Frank, who appeared to be incriminating his nightwatchman. Out of his own volition, Leo Frank stood up, disrobed, suggesting the police examine his body and then afterward the dirty laundry at his home. Finding his body unblemished and his suit jacket without blood stains at his home, the investigators left & decided to continue pursuing a flurry of leads.While Leo Frank was being interrogated at the Police Station during Monday morning, employees had already arrived at the factory to begin their new work week after the holiday-like weekend. Upon arrival, metal room employee, Robert P. Barret, found an unusual tress of hair with dried blood, suspended on the solid iron handle of his bench lathe, while other metal room employees (initially Magnolia Kennedy) found a 5 inch wide fan shaped blood stain, smeared with powder, located in front of the girls dressing room, adjacent to the metal room toilets.Later that same Monday afternoon, after Leo Frank was released at his home, the police questioned a young boy named George W. Epps, he revealed that Mary Phagan had confided in private, that Leo Frank regularly sexually harassing her.On Tuesday morning, April 29, 1913, at 9:00 am, the police went to Newt Lee's home & entered it using a skeleton key, they found nothing suspicious inside, but outside they discovered a bloody shirt bunched up & concealed at the bottom of Lee's garbage burn barrel in his back yard. When the police examined the bloody shirt closely, they noticed several things that were particularly odd. First, the shirt didn't look or smell like it had been worn, and second, it was giving the appearance of having been laundered, this despite being bunched up and smeared with blood. Third, the blood was oddly smeared high up on the armpits on both sides in a contrived manner. It took the unsophisticated Atlanta police about 2 minutes to figure out the shirt was a forgery & thoughtfully planted, meant to implicate Newt for the Phagan sex murder. The chain of forensic discoveries began first with the "death notes" accusing the "nightwitch", second the odd time card debacle, third the forensic discoveries of blood and hair in the metal room, & finally the staged blood-soaked shirt at Newt Lee's shack. All the forensic evidence initially gave the impression someone was trying to railroad Newt Lee. Naturally suspicion turned to Leo who was the last known person to admit seeing Mary alive at the shuttered factory on April 26, 1913.Leo was taken to the police station, arrested at 11:35am on Tuesday, April 29, 1913, it would be the last day of his freedom & he became the prime suspect at that time. The police decided Leo was to be held on suspicion until the conclusion of the Coroner's Inquest, which began the next day.The Official Coroner's Inquest:On Wednesday morning, April 30, 1913, the Fulton County Coroner Paul Donehoo launched an inquiry into the murder of Mary Phagan. Six jurymen were selected for the official Coroner's Inquest tribunal, they were sworn under oath & ordered to visit the National Pencil Company for the purpose of examining the crime scenes & study the forensic evidence collected by Police. More than 100 associated witnesses were subpoenaed to testify under oath during the coroner's official 9 day investigation. Several employees testified Leo had engaged in lascivious behavioral tendencies toward themselves & toward some of his female child laborers, others said Leo behaved himself like an upstanding gentleman.On Saturday, May 3, 1913, while the police were interviewing leads at the National Pencil Company, they stumbled upon a 14-year old girl, Monteen Stover, who showed up at the factory with her step mother looking to retrieve her pay envelope, because she had unsuccessfully attempted to do so the week before on Saturday, April 26, 1913. When the police began questioning Monteen, a major breakthrough in the Mary Phagan murder investigation was uncovered.Monteen told police she went to the National Pencil Company on Saturday, April 26, 1913, at 12:05pm to collect her pay and found Leo Frank's second floor business office completely empty. She went on to say that she waited inside Frank's office, waited for five minutes, until 12:10pm, & then left because she thought the factory was deserted. With this startling new information, Atlanta Police detective John R. Black & Pinkerton Detective Harry A. Scott, approached Leo Frank in his jail cell on Sunday, May 4, 1913, & asked him to confirm whether or not he had been in his office every minute from noon to 12:35pm on Confederate memorial day. Leo Frank responded with an affirmative Yes.If Monteen was telling the truth, she had just broken Leo Frank's murder alibi, because Leo Frank said on more than one occasion, that he had never left his office between noon and 12:35 pm on April 26, 1913, not even to use the toilet.During the last day of the official Coroner's Inquest on Thursday, May 8, 1913, one of the questions the Coroner Paul V. Donehoo asked Leo Frank, was about whether or not he had left his office between noon and 12:25pm on the day of the murder. Leo Frank told the Coroner & his 6-man Jury that he didn't leave his office on that fateful day during that time, but little did Leo Frank know that his inquisitors already knew about Monteen's evidence. At the conclusion of the Coroner's inquest, the 6 man jury & the Coroner, voted unanimously 7 to 0 against Leo Frank, binding him over for murder to the Fulton County Grand Jury.Leo Frank would not learn about the devastating testimony of Monteen until Saturday, May 10, 1913 when the Atlanta Constitution leaked the story. The significance of that one last uncollected pay envelope left in his moneybox on April 26, 1913, would finally come to a flashback of realization in his consciousness, when he remembered Conley describing another girl going up stairs & coming back down after Mary Phagan arrived.The Grand Jury:From May 9, 1913 to May 24, 1913, a grandjury reviewed the voluminous evidence that had been gathered during the nascent Mary Phagan murder investigation, & heard testimony from a number of witnesses. At the conclusion of the 2 week long investigation, the Grand Jury voted unanimously 21 to 0, indicting Leo Frank of murder. Three of the unanimous voting members of the grandjury were Jews, putting serious doubt into the century long accusations the suspicion and indictment of Leo Frank was because of Antisemitism.In total, for 3.5 months, since Leo's arrest on Tuesday, April 29, 1913, he maintained the alibi, that he never left his office that fateful noontime period when Mary came into his office at minutes after noon on April 26, 1913, but ultimately something very unexpected happened during the month long Leo Frank trial that began on July 28, 1913.Monteen testified at the trial about having gone to Leo Frank's second floor business office at the National Pencil Company on April 26, 1913, and looking for him at 12:05pm to collect her pay envelope and not finding him there. Monteen went on to say, she waited for five minutes until 12:10pm, and then left because she thought the factory was deserted. The defense never tried to impeach Monteen about coming to collect her pay envelope, because they considered it the truth based on Leo's accounting books, which indicated she was indeed owed her wages. What was most ironic about Monteen's testimony, is she was a positive character witness for the defense, contrary to 19 child laborer employees who testified Leo Frank's character for lasciviousness was bad.On August 4, 1913, Jim Conley delivered three days of lurid testimony at the trial, describing in detail how Leo Frank entertained prostitutes at the National Pencil Company. Conley told the court, Leo Frank confessed privately to him about assaulting Mary in the metal room, because she wouldn't agree to have sex with him. Conley described going back into the metal room at Leo Frank's request, to see what happened, & found Mary Phagan dead in the men's toilet of the metalroom, which was adjacent to Mary Phagan's work station. What was so significant about the toilets located in the metal room, is they were the only set of toilets existing on the second floor (State's Exhibit A, Defendant's Exhibit 61, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913).On Monday, August 18, 1913, Leo Frank mounted the witness stand at 2:15pm, and gave a four hour unsworn statement to the Jury and responded to all of the evidence and accusations against him. Leo Frank refused to be examined or cross examined by defense and prosecution attorneys, but 30 minutes into his statement, at 2:45pm, he suddenly changed the murder alibi he had sworn to for three and a half months, the one where he claimed to have never left his office between noon and half passed noon. Leo Frank gave the court a jaw dropping explanation in response to why Monteen Stover had found his second floor office empty on Saturday, April 26, 1913, between 12:05pm and 12:10pm - Leo Frank told the Judge and Jury he might have "unconsciously" gone to the men's toilet in the metal room during this time!Leo Frank reversing his murder alibi was an astonishingly incriminating admission, because he had formerly made a deposition to the Atlanta police that he was in his office alone between 12:05pm and 12:10pm when Mary Phagan arrived at 12:07pm (State's Exhibit B, Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, 1913). If you had been sitting in the Jury box and paying attention, you would have felt cold shivers down your spine, because of the forensic and circumstantial evidence all pointed to the metal room.Leo Frank's trial admission entrapped himself beyond escape, because all the 5" wide blood and bloody hair found tangled in the metal room -described by metal employees at the trial- pointed to the metal room as the real scene of the crime, not the basement where Phagan had been dumped. More importantly, Jim Conley said he found Mary Phagan dead in the men's toilet after Leo Frank confessed to assaulting her in the metalroom. Even more startling were the "death notes" found next to Mary Phagan, that described her going to the toilet for "making water" (urinating), in the only place she could have possibly done so, which was the metalroom's toilet, as there was no accessible toilet on the first floor of the National Pencil Company at the time of the murder and Phagan would not have gone to the rear of the basement to use the segregated "Negro Toilet". Everything came around full circle at the trial when Leo Frank placed himself at the scene of the crime, when the crime occurred, and where the body of Mary Phagan was initially found dead by Jim Conley. The rest is history.After the testimony portion of the trial ended on August 21, 1913, 4 days of closing arguments were delivered, and it took two easy hours of jury deliberation. Leo Frank was convicted of murdering Mary Phagan on Monday afternoon, August 25, 1913, and on August 26, 1913, Leo Frank was sentenced to hang by the presiding Judge Leonard Stickland Roan, with the execution date scheduled for October 10, 1913. Does that sound like Roan doubted, giving him six weeks to live?Leo Frank appealed to the presiding Judge Leonard Strickland Roan for a new trial on 107 grounds, but it was soundly rejected on each point. Leo Frank appealed his case to the Georgia Supreme Court asking them for a new trial, but the court's majority decision ruled against him and the GA Supreme Court said the evidence presented against Leo Frank was more than sufficient for a conviction.On March 7, 1914, Judge Benjamin Hill, having thoroughly sifted the Leo Frank Trial Brief of Evidence, appropriately re-sentenced Leo Frank to hang on his 30th birthday, April 17, 1914. Only mathematical certainty of someones guilt warrants such an execution date.On March 9, 1914, one of the most widely read daily newspapers in Georgia, the Atlanta Constitution, published an indepth and authorized 'Question and Answers Interview of Leo Frank', where Leo Frank essentially repeated his astonishing August 18, 1913 murder-alibi-reversing trial statement, admitting he had gone to the men's toilet in the metal room, to explain why Monteen Stover had found his second floor business office empty on April 26, 1913, between 12:05pm and 12:10pm. The jailhouse admission was considered another murder confession, because the State's prosecution team had built it's case that Leo Frank strangled Mary Phagan in the metal room on April 26, 1913, between 12:05 and 12:10pm, based originally on Leo Frank's stenographed deposition to the Atlanta Police (State's Exhibit B, Monday, April 28, 1913), where Frank stated that Mary Phagan had been with him alone in his office "between 12:05pm and 12:10pm, maybe 12:07pm". Jim Conley also never retracted his trial statement that he found Mary dead in the men's toilet of the metalroom.Did Elaine Marie Alphin ever bother to examine State's Exhibit A and Defendant's Exhibit 61? The 3D model and architectural floor plans ratified at the Leo Frank Trial, both reveal that the only toilet available on the second floor was in the metal room, as there was no other toilets on the second floor. Isn't it interesting, that the "death notes" describe Mary Phagan going to "make water" (urinate) in the only place she could have gone to use the toilet, which was the second floor metal room? There was no toilet accessible on the first floor, and the one at the rear of the pitch-black basement was for "Negroes Only". Everything kept pointing to the metal room, even the statements by Leo Frank after the trial (read Atlanta Constitution, March 9, 1914).During Leo Frank's court appeals process to the Georgia Supreme Court and United States Supreme Court, between 1913 and 1915, a number of former employees of the National Pencil Company came forward to reveal Leo Frank often sexually preyed upon the child laborers who worked for him between 1908 and 1913. One of the most lurid incidents cited in the Georgia Supreme Court case file on Leo Frank, reveals what Leo Frank did to one of the teenage girls who formerly worked for him. Sometime in 1912, after Leo had raped one of his former teenage employees and impregnated her, Leo plunged his teeth so hard and deep into the inner most region of her thy, adjacent to her genitals, that he permanently scarified her. The teenage pregnancy landed the girl in a home for unwed mothers in Ohio. A dreadful turn of events, considering Leo Frank never had any children with his wife Lucille Selig. Maybe Elaine Marie Alphin can write a sequel to her abominable book about the Leo Frank Case (Publication Date: March 1, 2010), called: 'What ever happened to little baby Leo Max Frank Jr?' Too bad she missed the the opportunity to publish it during the 2012 centennial of this ghoulish incident that occurred back in 1912.The Georgia Supreme Court case files on Leo Frank, also reveals a criminal conspiracy of threats, manipulation & bribes made possible by the cash-flush Leo Frank legal defense fund to former employees of the NPCo, using every illegal and underhanded method to get them to change their incriminating affidavits & testimony they provided at the Leo Frank trial.In 1954, Leo Frank's wife, Lucille Selig Frank, had her Last Will and Testament notarized and registered with the local Government of Atlanta, Georgia, in it she requested cremation, instead of being buried in the empty grave site reserved for her to the immediate left of Leo Frank's grave in the Mount Carmel Cemetery, Queens, NY. Steve Oney, writes that Lucille told her family before she passed away, to disburse her ashes at a local park in Atlanta, but a local ordinance forbade it. Lucille was later buried between the head stones of her parents Josephine and Emil, in the Oakland Cemetery, Atlanta, Georgia. If Lucille Selig Frank believed her husband was innocent, she would have requested to her family or in her will to be buried with Leo Frank or at least have some or all of her ashes spread by his grave.In 1986, the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (also known as ADL) galvanized as a result of the 1913 Leo Frank conviction, was able to get the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles to grant Leo Frank a Posthumous Pardon, 71 years after his death, but the Tribunal was very specific in stating they were not exonerating him of the murder of Mary Phagan. The Tribunal essentially acknowledged Leo Frank was the murderer of Mary Phagan, by not disturbing the verdict of the Jury, but in keeping with the tenets of popular culture political correctness, they forgave Leo Frank of the crime. Millions of Gentiles - Black and White - were quietly outraged by this highly political pardon, but nothing was said about this silent anger of the citizenry in the media. Today, the pardon remains as a permanent scar of betrayal on the face of Georgia and her citizens.Leo Frank was a serial pedophile, violent rapist & vicious strangler. Elaine Marie Alphin, using every deceptive tactic to unjustifiably exonerate Leo Frank in the minds of little boys & girls is an unspeakable injustice to every child in this world who has been beaten, sexually abused & murdered. Elaine Marie Alphin has written a book with absolutely no integrity, no honor and no honesty in her retelling of the Leo Frank Case. This book should be considered a betrayal of the truth, meant to poison the minds of children & young adults who read it. What would possess a children's book writer to knowingly do such things is incomprehensible & unforgivable. When I think about this book,'An Unspeakable Crime: The Prosecution and Persecution of Leo Frank', written by Elaine Marie Alphin, it reminds me of every pedophile scandal mentioned in the media and all the people who enabled it by either spinning it, ignoring it, or pretending it wasn't always real.

The Leo Frank / Mary Phagan case is perhaps one of the most complex true-crime cases ever to present itself for review. Like many books, articles, plays & other treatments of this case since the time of the crime, the emphasis here is placed on the supposed (and certainly some actual) injustices suffered by Leo Frank. However, too little time is given to the victim, Mary Phagan, and just as importantly to the reasons Leo Frank was suspected, arrested and convicted in the first place.To be sure, no human being should ever be lynched by a vigilante mob, even if such actions are performed in the name of justice. Our system of justice must be the final authority on crime and punishment even though it is sometimes flawed. Nevertheless, there were reasons for the arrest and conviction of Leo Frank that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that he was Jewish; and it is simply inaccurate to present this case as purely an example of anti-semitism.Leo Frank's supporters like to focus on Jim Conley and the role he played in the Leo Frank / Mary Phagan drama. He certainly did play a huge role ... possibly a more complex one than is generally acknowledged. However, Leo Frank was indicted by a grand jury composed of twenty-three men ... five of them Jewish ... while Jim Conley was still only a minor blip on the radar of this case. Obviously Jim Conley was not solely responsible for Leo Frank's conviction; but to Frank's supporters, the other evidence is glossed over as if it never existed in the first place.Whether Leo Frank was actually guilty or innocent is something we will most likely never know for sure. Certainly the Georgia Board of Pardons never saw any convincing evidence to grant a pardon based on the evidence ... old or new. They did eventually grant a posthumous pardon based on the failure of the penal system to protect the rights of the accused while in custody and to "mend old wounds". Without any hidden meaning or agenda, I must say that this action always seemed like simply a way to shut everyone up to me. Since there was no really convincing evidence that would justify a pardon based on innocence, one was found to pardon him just to appease his supporters. After all a person can only be pardoned once.I would really like to see a book come along written in modern times that lays out this entire case; but this one isn't it. Unfortunately one has to return to accounts written of the case in 1913 and the years immediately after to get a clear understanding of the totality of this crime. Steve Oney came close to writing the perfect modern-day account of this case. As Steve Oney came to believe in Leo Frank's innocence, it's OK for any person to come to the conclusion that Leo Frank may not have been guilty. However, it's not OK to overlook all the evidence against the accused just because he happens to be a member of a minority group.