Superintendent Frank’s Account of that Saturday, 28th, April,1913.

Superintendent Leo M Frank said he was fully convinced that Newt Lee had no part in the murder of Mary Phagan. In his version of events, he described a factory that was far from its usual busy self, shaped by delays in materials and the holiday that had emptied the building of most workers. Because a metal shipment had been held up, the National Pencil Company was running on a reduced schedule, with many employees off or working only part time. Mary Phagan was among those who had come in only for a short shift, and on Saturday she appeared at the plant a little after noon to collect her wages of one dollar and sixty cents. Frank explained that Memorial Day had given employees a holiday, so the factory was almost empty by midday. The day watchman had left before eleven o’clock, the clerks had gone home at noon, and only two young men, Harry Denham and Arthur White, had stayed upstairs to finish some tasks. They worked on until a little past three o’clock. Frank said that, apart from them and himself, there were no other company officials in the building during the afternoon. He stated that Mary came to his office around twelve ten or twelve fifteen in the afternoon. She went into the inner office on the second floor, where she received her pay envelope from the office staff, and then walked out through the outer office on her way back toward the front of the building. He believed she left the factory with another girl, although he could not swear to that detail. He explained that he might not have noticed every person who passed through, so he could not be certain about who else had gone in or out at that time. Frank said he went upstairs a little before one o’clock and told Denham and White that they would have to leave unless he locked them in for the rest of the day. The two young men chose to keep working, so he told them he would return at three o’clock. He kept his word, coming back slightly after three, and they left the factory a few minutes later, leaving the building even quieter than it had been before. He also described how Newt Lee, the night watchman, had been scheduled to come on duty that day. He said Lee had been told to report around four o’clock because it was a holiday. After arriving, Lee was told he could go out and then come back around six o’clock, and he returned as instructed. As Frank was preparing to leave the building, a former employee named John Gantt came in to get a pair of shoes he had left upstairs. Frank told Lee to go with Gantt and help him locate the shoes so that the matter could be settled quickly. Frank added that later, around seven o’clock in the evening, he had called the watchman by phone. Lee told him that everything was all right and that Gantt had gotten his shoes and left the factory. Frank accepted this report and did not think about it again until after the murder was discovered. He also mentioned that he believed he had heard the telephone ring sometime between three and four o’clock in the morning on Sunday, but at the time he had thought it was part of a dream. After learning that Mary Phagan had been murdered, he began to wonder whether the call might have been Lee trying to reach him about something unusual at the factory. Frank maintained that someone other than Newt Lee must have been responsible for the killing. He described the watchman as a reliable and well mannered man who had never caused any trouble and had never been rude or offensive to the employees. He said that he did not know the workers very well, because the staff changed often and many faces passed through the factory each week. Even so, he clearly remembered handing Mary Phagan her pay envelope on that Saturday afternoon, and he believed that her death was not connected to the night watchman who had stood guard over the nearly empty building that night.