"The Night Witch Did It":
Notes on Jim Conley's Murder Notes in the Leo Frank Case
James Conley,
author of the murder notes
|
note 1
1 Mam that negro
2 hire down here did
3 this I went to make
4 water and he push me
5 down that hole
6 a long tall negro blck
7 that hoo is wase
8 long sleam tall negro
9 it wright while play with me
note 2
1 he said he wood love me :
2 land down play like the
3 night witch did it
4 but that long tall black
5 negro did by his slef. |
1.
BACKGROUND
The excerpt below is taken from Governor
Slaton's commutation order:
JIM CONLEY
The most startling and spectacular evidence in the case was
that given by a
negro, Jim Conley, a man 27 years of age, and one who frequently had
been in
the chain gang. Conley had worked at the Factory for about two years
and was
thoroughly acquainted with it. He had worked in the basement about two
months
and had run the elevator about a year and a half.
On May 1st he was arrested by the Detectives.
Near the body in the basement had been found two notes, one written on
brown
paper and the other on a leaf of a scratch pad. That written on white
paper in
a negro’s hand writing showed the following:
“He said he would love
me, lay
down play like the night witch, did it, but that long, tall black negro
did boy
hisself.”
On the brown paper, which was the carbon sheet of an order
blank which
hereafter becomes important, headed “Atlanta, Ga.,
_________190”, was written
in a negro’s hand writing the following:
“Mam that negro fire
down here
did this I went to make water and he push me down a hole a long tall
negro
black did [had] it I write while play with me.:
The Detectives learned about the middle of May that Conley
could write,
although at first he denied it. He made one statement and three
affidavits
which are more fully referred to in stating the defendant’s case. The
affidavits were introduced by the defendant under notice to produce.
By these affidavits there was admitted the substance of the
evidence that he
delivered on the stand which in brief was as follows:
Conley claimed that he was asked by Frank to come to the
Factory on Saturday
and watch for him, as he had previously done, which he explained meant
that
Frank expected to meet some woman and when Frank stamped his foot
Conley was to
lock the door leading into the Factory and when he whistled, he was to
open it.
Conley occupied a dark place to the side of the Elevator
behind some boxes,
where he could be invisible.
Conley mentioned several people, including male and female
employees, who
went up the steps to the second floor where Franks’ office was located.
He said that Mary
Phagan
went up the stairs and he heard in a few minutes foot steps going back
to the
Metal Room, which is 150 to 200 feet away from
the office. He
heard a scream and then he dozed off. In a few minutes Frank stamped
and then Conley locked the door and then Frank whistled, at which time
Conley
unlocked the door and went up the steps. Frank was
shivering
and trembling and told Conley “I wanted to be with the little girl and
she
refused me and I struck her and I guess I struck her too hard and she
fell and
hit her head against something, and I do not know how bad she got hurt.
“Of
course, you know I ain’t built like other men”.
Conley described Frank was having been in position which
Conley thought
indicated perversion, but the facts set out by Conley do not demand
such
conclusion.
Conley says he found Mary Phagan lying in the Metal Room some
200 feet from
the office, with a cloth tied about her neck and murder the head as
though to
catch blood, although there was no blood at the place.
Frank told Conley to get a piece of cloth and put the body in
it and Conley
got a piece of striped bed tick and tied up the body in it and brought
it to a
place a little way from the dressing room and dropped it and then
called on
Frank for assistance in carrying it. Frank went to his office and got a
key and
unlocked the switch board in order to operate the Elevator, and he and
Conley
took the body in the elevator down to the basement, where Conley rolled
the
body off the cloth. Frank returned to the first floor by the ladder,
while
Conley went by the elevator and Frank on the first floor got into the
elevator
and went to the second floor on which the office is located. They went
back
into Frank’s private office and just at that time Frank said, “My God,
here is
Emma Clark and Corinthia Hall”, and Frank then put Conley into the
wardrobe.
After the left Frank let Conley out and asked Conley if he could write,
to
which Conley gave an affirmative reply. Frank then dictated the letters
heretofore referred to. Frank took out of his desk a roll of green
backs and told
him, “Here is $200.00”, but after a while requested the money back and
got it....
AUTHOR OF
THE NOTES
Conley admits he wrote the notes
found by the body of Mary
Phagan. Did Frank
dictate them? Conley swears he did. The State says that the use of the
word
“did” instead of “done” indicates a white man’s dictation. Conley
admits the
spelling was his. The words are repeated and are simple, which
characterizes
Conley’s letters. In Conley’s testimony, you will find frequently that
he uses
the word “did” and according to calculation submitted to me, he used
the word
“did” over fifty times during the trial.
While
Conley was in jail charged with being an accessory, there was also
incarcerated
in the jail, a woman named Annie Maude Carter, whom Conley had met at
the Court
House. She did some work in the jail and formed the acquaintance of
Conley, who
wrote to her many lengthy letters. These
letters are the most obscene and
lecherous I have ever read. In these letters, the word
“did’ is
frequently employed. It will be observed that in Conley’s testimony, he
uses
frequently the word “negro”, and in the Annie Maude Carter notes, he
says, “I
have a negro watching you”.
The Annie
Maude Carter notes, which were powerful evidence in behalf of the
defendant,
and which tended strongly to show that Conley was the real author of
the murder
notes, were not before the
jury.
The word
“like” is used in the Mary Phagan notes, and one will find it
frequently
employed in Conley’s testimony. The word “play” in the Mary Phagan
notes, with
an obscene significance, is similarly employed in the Annie Maude
Carter notes.
The same is true as to the words “lay” and “love”.
In
Conley’s testimony, he uses the words “make water”, just as they are
used in
the Mary Phagan notes.
In
Conley’s testimony, he says the word “hisself’ constantly.
It
is urged by the lawyers for the defense that Conley’s characteristic
was to use
double adjectives.
In the
Mary Phagan notes, he said “long tall negro black”, “long, slim, tall
negro”.
In his
testimony Conley used expressions of this sort. “He was a tall, slim
build
heavy man”. “A good long wide piece of cord in his hands”.
Conley
says that he wrote four notes, although only two were found. These
notes have
in them 128 words, and Conley swears he wrote them in 2 and ½
minutes.
Detective Scott swears he dictated eight to Conley and it took him
about six minutes
to write them.
The statement is made by Frank, and
that statement is
consistent with the
evidence in the record, that the information that Conley could write
came from
Frank when he was informed that Conley claimed he could not write.
Frank says he
did not disclose this before, because he was not aware that Conley had
been at
the Factory on the 26th day of April, and therefore the materiality of
whether
Conley could write any more than any other negro employee, had not been
suggested to him. Frank says that he gave the information that Conley
had
signed receipts with certain jewelers, with whom Conley had dealings.
WHERE WERE
THE NOTES WRITTEN
At the time of the trial, it was not
observed that the Death
Note written on
brown paper was an order blank, with the date line “Atlanta, Ga.____190. Subsequently the
paper
was put under a magnifying glass and in blue pencil, it was found that
one
Becker’s name was written there. He had been employed at the Factory on
the
fourth floor. Investigation was made and Becker testified that he
worked for
the Pencil Factory from 1908 until 1912, and the order blank was #1018.
During
that entire time, on signed orders for goods and supplies. The brown
paper on
which the Death Note was written bears his signature, and at the time
he left Atlanta
in 1912, the
entire supply of blanks containing the figures 190__, had been
exhausted, and
the blanks contained the figures “191__”, had already been put in use.
Becker
makes affidavit that before leaving Atlanta,
he personally packed up all of the duplicate orders which had been
filed and
performed their functions, and sent them to the basement to be burned.
Whether
the order was carried out, he did not know.
In reply to this evidence, the State
introduced on the
extraordinary motion
the testimony of Philip Chambers, who swears that unused order blanks
entitled
“Atlanta, Ga., __, 191__ were in the office next to Frank’s office and
that he
had been in the basement of the Factory and found no books or papers
left down
there for any length of time, but same were always burned up.
This
evidence was never passed upon by the jury and developed since the
trial. It
was strongly corroborative of the theory of the defense that the death
notes
were written, not in Frank’s office, but in the basement,
and
especially in view of the evidence of Police Sergeant Dobbs, who
visited the
scene of the crime Sunday morning, as follows:
“This scratch pad was also lying on
the ground close to the
body. The
scratch pad was lying near the notes. They were all right close
together. There
was a pile of trash near the boiler where this note was found, and
paper and
pencil were down there too”.
Police Officer Anderson
testified: “There are plenty of pencils and trash in the basement”.
Darley testified: “I have seen all
kinds of paper down in the
basement. The
paper that note is written on is a blank order pad. That kind of paper
is
likely to be found all over the building for this reason, they write an
order
and sometimes fail to get a carbon under it, and at other times, they
change
the order and it gets into the trash. That kind of pad is used all over
the
factory.
Over the boiler is a gas jet.
Another
feature which was not known at the trial and which was not presented to
the
jury, but came
up by extraordinary motion, was regarding the hair alleged to
have been fund by Barrett on the lathe. The evidence on
the
trial of some of the witnesses was that the hair looked like that of
Mary
Phagan. It was not brought out at the trial that Dr. Harris had
examined the
hair under a microscope and by taking sections of it and comparing it
with Mary
Phagan’s hair, and thought that on the lathe was not Mary Phagan’s
hair,
although he said he could not be certain of it.
This, however, would have been the
highest and best evidence.
The
evidence as to the probability of the blank on which the death note was
written
being in the basement, and the evidence as to the hair, would have
tended to
show that the murder was not committed on the floor on which Frank’s
office was
located.
2. DID LEO FRANK DICTATE THE MURDER
NOTES?: AN ANALYSIS
(From The Kansas City Star,
January 17, 1915)
Jim
Conley,
the negro, murdered Mary Phagan, and he described how he slew her in
the two
notes he wrote and laid beside her body.
Conley is a
low, dissolute, brutal negro. He had
been in jail different times. He lived
with a negro woman not his wife. He
drank heavily and was always trying to borrow money from the girls in
the
factory, where he was a roustabout. His
brutal nature is shown by the glib, grinning manner in which he told of
carrying the body of the murdered girl to the basement, dropping her
with a
“thump” upon the floor, handling the body of the pretty, golden haired
girls as
coldly as if it had been a dead dog.
He was
drunk
the day of the murder. He had spent his
last cent for a flask of whisky which he took with him to the factory. That is his testimony. He
went there to sell off the effects of the
drink. he hid himself among the boxes
there, in the deep shadows.
Mary Phagan
came down the stairway with her mesh bag in her hand.
it is easy to think that she was opening her
pay envelope as she came. She might have
had the money in her hand. Now, read
those murder notes again:
Mam,
that negro hire down here did
this, I went to make water and he push me down
that hole. A long, tall, negro, black:
that hoo it wase, long, sleam, tall negro,
I wright while play with me.
In the
reproduction of this note The Star omits two words represented by the
blank
space. The punctuation marks are not in
the original. The other note reads as
follows:
He
said he wood love me laid down,
play like the night witch did it, but that long, tall
black negro did buy himself.
Within a
few
feet of where the negro was hiding among the boxes there is a large
hole in the
floor, two feet square, and a ladder reaching down into the basement. The hole is behind the walled-in elevator
shaft (See fig. 11).
Mary may
have
stepped back into the shadow there for the very purpose stated in the
omitted
words in the note. Conley, crouching
there, saw here and on the impulse of the moment may have clutched her
by the
throat and choked her or he may have hit her with something and laid
her scalp
open. then he thrust her down the hole, head first, likely. At the foot of the ladder is a chuck of
log. Her head may have struck it and
caused the wound in her scalp.
Conley
hurried
down the ladder after her. She was not
dead. All the doctors agreed that the
wound on the head would not have killed her. There
was no skull fracture, no blood clot on the
brain. She would have been unconscious a
few
moments, she would have squirmed and clutched frantically in the agony
or
returning consciousness. She might have
screamed.
Mrs.
J. B.
Simmons of Birmingham, Ala.,
states in an affidavit that she was visiting in Atlanta and passed the pencil factory
the
afternoon of the murder and heard a woman’s screams in the basement. She heard a woman’s voice say “Please
don’t.” She stopped to listen. There was a grating there opening directly
into the basement. Screams in that
basement could have been heard.
She swore
that
she went and told Prosecutor Dorsey of it and that he tried to get here
to
change the time she said she heard the screams because Frank had gone
to his
luncheon then. Dorsey denies this.
In justice
to
Dorsey it must be said that neither he not the defense places any
confidence in
her story. She was not used as a
witness.
Anyway, the
wounded girls must have struggled hard. The
cinders under her finger nails and matted into
her face prove
that. It also proves that she was alive
when she was in the cellar. She breathed
cinders and ashes into her nose and mouth. There
were no cinders on the office floor where
Conley says she was
killed.
Conley says
the cord was put around her neck upstairs by Frank, that she was dead
up
there. All the doctors agreed that she
was strangled to death by the cord. Her
face was black, her eyes starting out, her tongue protruding. If that was done upstairs she could not have
breathed ashes and cinders in the cellar.
The ashes
and
cinders were breathed before she died in the cellar, while she was
fighting off
Conley. In his drunken desperation lest
she be heard and he be discovered he ripped a piece from her underskirt
and
tried to gag her with it. it was not
strong enough. Then he grabbed the
cord.
The
testimony
proved that cords like that were in the cellar. He
tied it tightly around her neck. It was
proved at the trial that a piece of the strip
of underskirt was
beneath the card, and beneath the strip of skirt were cinders. That proves beyond doubt that both were put
on in the cellar.
Having
strangled her to death and eternal silence the negro had leisure to
carry her
back and hide her body at (fig. 12) where it was dark as midnight.
Then he sat
down to write the notes. Against the
wall opposite the boiler was a small, rude table with paper and pencil. Scattered around in the trash that came down
from
the floors above to be burned were sheets and pads of paper exactly
like those
upon which the notes were written. The
pad from which one of the notes was torn was found by the body of
Police
Sergeant L.S. Dobbs, who so testified.
Now mark
this,
it is proof of Frank’s innocence, that pad had printed on the top of
every
sheet the name of the pencil company and a date. it
was a pad used in the office by
Superintendent Becker, who preceded Frank as the factory head. All of those pads were carried into the
basement two years before, after Frank became superintendent, and ask
had new
pads printed. There was no paper in
Frank’s office like that upon which that note was written.
This disproves absolutely the story of the
negro that the notes were written in Frank’s office.
The negro
wrote these in the basement: denied for eighteen days after his arrest
that the
could write, when confronted with proof that the could write, and this
proof
furnished by Frank , he first said that Frank wrote the notes. Shown that his could not be true, that
positively they were in his handwriting, he said he wrote them at
Frank’s
dictation. He swore that he “wrote them
word by word just as Frank told him.”
Frank was
then
believed guilty by everyone. Frank would
naturally be the one upon whom Conley would lay the crime.
Under other circumstance, of less public
delirium, no one would have believed the negro’s story for a moment. It is too absurd from any point of view.
After
writing
the notes the negro was afraid to to-up and out the street door. He went by the back door, indicated by an
arrow in the diagram. He pried the
locked staple out with a piece of iron pipe and went out.
His bloody
finger prints were on the door. The
authorities sawed out the boards and took them to be examined by
experts. The government expert in charge
of the
Bertillon department as the federal prisons in Atlanta says he could have
ascertained
positively from those three distinct bloody finger prints whether
Conley’s
fingers made them. The finger printed
boards were never shown at the trial. The
prosecution said they had been lost.
It is
possible
that someone had them examined, found they corresponded with Conley’s
finger
prints and destroyed them?
The three
strands of hair found on a lathe in the metal room, which did so much
to center
public suspicion upon Frank, also disappeared. Prosecutor
Dorsey said in reply to a question from
the defense, during the
trail, that he had lost them.
Yet, in his
impassioned speech to the jury he referred to those strands of hair. He said: “I tell you right now, gentlemen,
that when Barrett swore he found that hair on that machine he told the
truth.
“I tell you
right now, gentlemen, that when Barrett swore he found that hair on
that
machine he told the truth.”
Mary’s hair
was golden in color, easy to identify. But
several who saw that hair say it was dark. So
it was lost.
Fair trial
indeed!
The negro
escaped by the back door into the alley, and Mary Rich, an old woman
who sold
pieces and cakes at the mouth of that alley, and knew Conley well, made
affidavit that she saw Conley come out that back door into that alley
that very
afternoon, right at the time Conley did go out. But
before the trail she repudiated her affidavit. She
told friends that she had to make a
living and could not afford to antagonize the police.
Conley
wrote
the notes to direct suspicion away form himself and place it upon a
negro who
fired the boiler in the basement, “that negro hire down here.”
Note that
“down here” indicating that the notes were written “down here” not up
in the
office.
Conley is
short, stout and light colored. He
wished to throw suspicion upon someone the very opposite of him, and
that the
murderer “did it by his self, “Conley did not help him.
The negro that fired the boiler was “long,
slim, tall and black,” and so Conley described him that way in both
notes one
was not enough. He emphasized in the
second note that he “did it by hisself.”
“He pushed
me
down that hole.” Would Frank have written that after he had taken her
down in
the elevator? It is pretty good proof
that she was pushed down that hole, and not carried down the elevator.
The drunken
mind of the negro wished to make it appear that the girl wrote the
notes to her
mother while the negro was not watching her write.
“ I wright while he play with me.” Whose
mind but a negro’s would have conceived
such a silly explanation.
The second
note “he said he would love me laid down, play like the night witch did
it,”
evidently this: “He told me to play, or make believe or tell, that the
night
witch did it.” Those words, “night
witch” are negro pure and simple. No
white man would have used them, especially a white man for the North,
who had
never lived among negros. The ”night
witch” is an old negro superstition prevalent among them over all the
South. The “night witch” comes in
through the keyhole at night, gets upon the chest of a sleeping person
and
takes his breath away. Persons who die
in their sleep, who have bad dreams and nightmares are victims of the
“night
witch.”
Nobody but
a
Southern negro would have written that.
In his
speech
to the jury Prosecutor Dorsey emphasized that an illiterate negro like
Conley
would never have written “negro,”: but would have written “nigger:” but
would have
wrote ten “nigger:” that he would have never written or aid “did it,”
but would
have said “done it,” and that argument has great weight in Georgia.
I have
before
me as I write the official stenographic report of Conley’s testimony as
he gave
it in court. he said “did it” and
“negro” many times.”
“I don’t
remember what I did.”
“I don’t
know
what I did.”
“Well, I
don’t
know sir what I did that day.”
“I did some
watching for him.”
Those
are
characteristic answers.
In his
testimony he said “negro,” many times, and seldom “nigger,” and the
court stenographer
has made affidavit sine that he wrote exactly as Conley pronounced the
words. Noting that both notes the writer
has a distinct way of describing a person “long, slim, tall, negro” “a
long,
tall, black negro.”
Conley’s
testimony at the trial shows that his habit was to identify persons
with
several consecutive descriptive words. The
following are from his testimony:
“Well, she
was
a tall built lady, heavy weight.”
“Nice
looking
lady, kinder slim.”
“She was a
very tall, slim built lady.”
“He was a
tall, slim built, heavy man.”
“Well, Miss
Delsy, she was a low lady, kind of heavy.”
“She was
low
and chunky.”
“He was a
slim
looking man, and tall with it.”
The word
“slim” was a favorite with him.
Also he
used
often the word “like: as it is used in the note, “play like the night
witch did
it.” And he used the words “hisself,” as it is used in the notes. I quote from his testimony:
“He went to the front door and fixed it
hisself, unlocked the front door hisself.”
“Looked to
me
like with pieces of velvet on it.”
“I said
something like that.”
“Yes, sir,
eh
looks like he would weigh that.”
“He looked
like it.”
And so on
often and often
Since he
has
been in jail Conley has written many letters to a negro woman prisoner. They are filled with the most unspeakable
obscenity. They prove, not only the
lasciviousness and moral rottenness of his nature, but they establish
beyond
question that he is a pervert. He writes
plainly of his perversion.
When the
negro
wrote the notes his dull mind, sodden with liquor, did not conceive
that there
were differences in handwriting. To his
ignorant mind all handwriting was alike. Experts
say this is a common belief among the
ignorant. They think writing is writing
and that it is
impossible to tell one man’s writing from another’s.
Conley never thought that anyone could detect
that those notes were not written by the girl.
But Frank,
the
college graduate, the expert bookkeeper, would have known that. he would have never resorted to so clumsy a
subterfuge as using eh notes, even had he been such a fool as to take a
dissolute negro roustabout as accessory to his murder.
There are
many
other evidences, beyond those given here, that Conley murdered Mary
Phagan and
that Frank is innocent. They can be
touched on only briefly here.
The fact
that
the elevator did not run at all the day of the murder, proven by a soft
substance deposited early the morning of the murder in the bottom of
the
elevator shaft and found intact Sunday morning after the murder. When the elevator was run then it mashed the
substance. The elevator floor always
hits the bottom of the shaft.
The two men
working upstairs did not hear the elevator run, and it runs with a loud
noise
and shakes the floors.
That Frank
was
not in the least nervous when seen by witnesses immediately after
Conley says
the murder was done. He went home and
ate dinner with his wife and mother-in-law, returned to the factory and
filled
out invoice sheets for three hours. Experts
testified that it would take three hours to
do it. The handwriting was plain and not a
sign of
nervousness in the writer of it.
And Frank
was
extremely nervous and excitable at times. Witnesses
swore that once when a car on which he was
riding struck and
killed a child he was so upset that he could do no work all day. A quarrel with his foreman made him so
nervous that he gave up work the rest of the day.
Conley says
she was wrapped in a cloth when he carried her to the cellar. No such cloth was ever found.
There was
no
blood at the spot where Conley said he found her on the second floor,
where she
had lain at least twenty minutes, and none in the elevator. And the undertaker and doctors testified that
she “must have bled a great deal” from the wound to the head.
Proof that
Conley’s story was “made” for him, that he was coached in the telling
of it is
found in his testimony that “Frank put a piece of cloth under her head
when he
killed her to keep the blood off the floor.”
A silly and impossible tale.
If Frank
wished her body burned why did he dictate the notes?
There was no fire in the boiler that
day. To have kindled one would have
exposed the crime. It is a small
boiler. The door is so small the body
could not have been put in. The negro
would have had to chop it up and burn it piece by piece.
The girl’s
mesh bag and the bunch of red flowers from her hat were never found. The drunken negro probably carried them away
to give to the negro woman with whom he lived.
At the
trial
it was proved by Frank’s bankbook and the factory balance sheets that
there was
not $200 in the office that day.
The
murderer
escaped by the back door, breaking it open first..
Frank did not go out that way.
This one
fact
alone refutes the possibility that Frank murdered Mary Phagan.
The negro’s
story is so incredible, so absurd, so inconsistent with all the facts,
that one
wonders that anyone could believe a word of it.
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