The Leo Frank Case: The Lynching of a Guilty Man Part 22

ONE OF the weirdest aspects of the Leo Frank case was the — shall we say — strained effort of the Frank team to make some human excrement found in the National Pencil Company elevator shaft into a “proof” that Leo Frank was innocent of murdering Mary Phagan. This so-called “shit in the shaft” theory was based on the overwhelming fear of the Frank defense that the use of that elevator to move Mary’s body — evidenced by dragging marks in the basement’s dirt floor leading from the elevator to precisely where the body was found — was too damning for their client, since only Frank had a key to the elevator. The theory they crafted was that the excrement was deposited at the bottom of the shaft before the murder by James Conley, but was “crushed for the first time” when the detectives visited the basement after the murder — therefore, they claimed, the elevator could not have been used to move Mary’s body.

Originally posted on The American Mercury:
https://theamericanmercury.org..../2018/09/the-leo-fra