Wednesday, October 25, 2000
|
Wednesday, October 25, 2000 |
|
Infamous Atlanta lynching victim innocent, Jordan's new book finds By JOHN MUNFORD
Bruce Jordan, as the chief investigator at the Fayette County Sheriff's Department, usually collects evidence with the goal of successfully prosecuting criminals. But in Jordan's new book, "Murder in the Peach State," he concludes that a convicted murderer is innocent, supporting that belief with carefully cultivated research. The story also has a local flavor, since Fayetteville native Hugh Dorsey was the prosecutor who secured the guilty verdict against Leo Frank and who used illegal means to secure evidence to support Frank's guilt, Jordan charges. The first chapter of the book is devoted entirely to the Leo Frank murder trial, which occurred in the early 1900s. Frank was a Jewish man convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, who at the time was a teenage employee at a pencil factory Frank ran in Atlanta. Phagan's body was found in the factory building after she was strangled, beaten and sexually assaulted, according to Jordan's book. Scheduled for release the first week of November, "Murder in the Peach State" also details other famous Georgia murders, such as the John Williams farm in Jasper County, where a number of farm workers were killed by Williams, who used them as slaves, Jordan said. But Jordan's contention that Frank was innocent represents the first time such a hypothesis has come from a non-Jewish author whose efforts weren't financed by a Jewish benefactor. Jordan has been invited to speak at an Atlanta synagogue about his work on the book. Atlanta businessman Fred Bleiberg, who reviewed the manuscript at Jordan's request, said the investigator's credentials lend weight to the authenticity of his findings. "It answers a lot of questions," Bleiberg said. "... He wrote it like he saw it." Jordan said he couldn't have completed his research of the Frank case without the assistance of former Atlanta newspaper reporter Celestine Sibley. "She told me exactly where to go to find the transcripts of the trial," Jordan said in an interview Tuesday afternoon. He called the transcripts "the mother lode of what I needed" in addition to newspaper accounts that provided the backbone for his research. Frank was not one of the original suspects arrested by police, although he was eventually targeted by prosecutors in what would become a racially charged trial. He was found guilty by a jury and sentenced to death although that sentence was later commuted by Georgia Gov. John Slaton. Jordan concludes that Frank was never guilty of the crime to start with. "A careful review of the evidence known in 2000 reveals that it is doubtful that Leo Frank could be convicted today by a non-biased jury based on the evidence presented at his trial in 1914," Jordan wrote. To help prove Frank's innocence, Jordan brings to light evidence from trial transcripts and newspaper accounts to point fingers at another suspect: Jim Conley, a sweeper employed at the pencil factory. Frank was eventually lynched by a mob that overtook a Georgia prison to kidnap him and take him to the place where he was hanged. But Jordan's book, this many years later, helps to clear Frank's name. And by the pen of a policeman, no less.
|
||