Atlanta’s Classic Crime Cases

Every major metropolitan area has a dark side so it is not surprising that the history of Atlanta includes some famous crimes.

The Leo Frank Lynching
Ironically, although the majority of lynchings were perpetrated against African Americans, the most famous in Atlanta was that of a white man for a crime now believed to have been committed by a black.

Leo Frank moved from the North to Atlanta in 1908 where he became supervisor of the National Pencil Factory. Atlanta then had the largest Jewish community in the South. Frank became President of the Atlanta chapter of B’nai B’rith, a Jewish service organization, in 1913, when he was twenty-nine.

Mary Phagan was only thirteen when she started work as a machine operator at the National Pencil Factory. On April 26, 1913, Phagan went to the factory to collect her wages.

Her battered corpse was found in the basement of the factory. Suspicion fell upon Leo Frank.

In order to understand why so many were easily convinced that the supervisor was guilty, we need to review the social atmosphere of the era.

The South was moving from a rural to an urban economy and many formerly rural people were economically hard-pressed. There was a special concern for impoverished women working under male bosses who often took sexual advantage of them. Tragically, this concern applied only to white women; the racism of the time assigned little value to the safety of women of color. Frank’s chief accuser was Jim Conley, an African American sweeper who claimed that he had helped Frank take Phagan’s body from the upper floor down to the cellar where it was found. Conley had an extensive police record and was a heavy drinker. Moreover, he changed parts of his story several times. Most students of the case now believe Conley was Phagan’s murderer.

Given the era’s bigotry against African Americans and Conley’s particular history of crime and deceit, why was his word accepted over that of Frank? Anti-Semitism was rampant and Frank was often described as the “Jewpervert.” Many also saw the case as a way to warn bosses of every ethnicity against assaulting poor white females. Frank was convicted and sentenced to die. However, evidence mounted supporting his innocence and was presented to Georgia’s Governor John M. Slaton. Slaton commuted Frank’s sentence to life imprisonment, confiding to friends that he believed Frank deserved a full pardon.

Soon after this, Frank was attacked in prison by a fellow inmate. He was in the prison hospital on August 16, 1915, when a lynch mob stormed the prison, abducted and hanged him.

Even as we mourn Frank, we must remember that there was another victim: Mary Phagan. By allowing themselves to be guided by prejudice rather than evidence, the mob did not get justice for her. No one did.

The Disappearance of Mary Shotwell Little
On the night of Oct. 14, 1965, twenty-five-year-old Mary Shotwell Little disappeared from the Lenox Mall. Little was newly married to Roy Little and employed at C&S Bank.

Roy Little was out of town so his wife had dinner with co-worker Ila Stock.

The next morning, Little neither showed up for work nor called in to explain her absence. Bank workers phoned her home but got no answer. Her boss, Eugene M. Rackley, discussed her absence with Stock.

Stock recalled the section Little said she had parked in; Rackley contacted Lenox security, asking them to look in that area for her Comet. They reported back that they could not find it. The boss drove down to look for himself and found Little’s car right in the sector that security said they had searched.

The automobile contained a blood-smeared stocking.

Roy Little’s alibi checked out and investigators found that he had nothing to gain by her death. There were no reports of major discord in the marriage.

In November 1965, evidence appeared. Little’s gasoline credit card had been used both in Charlotte and Raleigh, North Carolina, the day after her disappearance. Both receipts bore Little’s signature in handwriting that experts said “resembled” hers.

Gas station attendants remembered servicing a woman who may have been Little. They had seen a “bloodied” woman accompanied by a man or two men. Why hadn’t the workers alerted authorities to an injured woman? Perhaps due to an attitude of “not getting involved.”

If the woman was Little, why had her abductor(s) forced her to drive to her hometown of Charlotte?

As investigators pursued the case, they accumulated a large box of data. It has been lost. This eerie coincidence need not indicate anything sinister, according to John P Quigley, Atlanta Police Public Information Officer: “The turnover in personnel probably has something to do with items getting lost. New people come in and they’re not aware of whether some items are properly stored.”

The last major activity in the case was in 1994. Detective Carl Price worked on it. An informant appeared to have valid information and passed two polygraphs. “Then we obtained a search warrant for the mechanic’s shop in Cumming, Georgia, under which the witness claimed Little had been buried,” Price recalls. “The FBI has an instrument to locate a grave, and they flew it down along with two forensic anthropologists to supervise. The imaging machine got hits which indicated the ground had been disturbed.” They dug but found nothing. “The disturbance in the imaging turned out to be because a petrified fence post was there,” Price explains.

The case remains open. Major Lloyd says, “We’ll check any new information. We solve cold cases all the time.”

The Atlanta Child Murders
Between 1979 and 1981, Atlanta was the setting for a series of mysterious slayings. All of the victims were African American, most were children and teenagers, and all but two were male. Victims were usually asphyxiated, either through suffocation or strangulation.

Atlanta prided itself on being “the city too busy to hate” and had a successful African American establishment. However, the race of all the victims in this series of crimes could not help but bring old fears to the surface.

Were the murders the work of the Ku Klux Klan? That organization’s history of brutality meant that observers couldn’t put it past them. Or was there a newly formed racist group dedicated to wiping out black youth?

Some suspected that elements of the government might even be in collusion with the murderer(s). After all, the now-infamous Tuskegee study that began in 1932 had only recently become public knowledge. The Public Health Service, and later the CDC, recruited four hundred infected African American men for a study of the course of syphilis. The subjects were deliberately left untreated until 1972 when the media broke the story!

In June 1980, several mothers of victims formed the Committee to Stop Children’s Murders (STOP). By this time, much of the city lived in fear. Six African American children had been found mysteriously murdered and three others had disappeared. The Mayor and police were widely criticized for failing to end the terror. Many in Atlanta and elsewhere pinned green ribbons on themselves to show their solidarity with the grieving and frightened African American community.

Tragically, the killings continued. However, in March 1981, the killer’s pattern changed as young black male adults started to disappear. Why the change? Perhaps recently enacted curfews were keeping youngsters off the streets or maybe STOP’s campaign to increase parental alertness was having its intended effect so the slayer had fewer children available to victimize.

The first big break in the case came on May 22, 1981 when police heard a “loud splash” on the Jackson Parkway bridge and saw a lone car driving away. They stopped and interviewed the driver, chubby, bespectacled African American Wayne Williams, a failed music promoter who lived largely off the modest savings of his retired schoolteacher parents. They released him but a few days later, after the body of Nathaniel Cater was found close to where the fateful splash was heard, they investigated him and concluded that he was probably responsible for most of the baffling murders.

Williams was officially tried for only two murders, those of adults Nathaniel Cater and Jimmy Payne. However, the jury was allowed to hear evidence connecting Williams to twenty-six other cases. (Of four others, the murders of two little girls were believed unconnected to Williams; there was no recoverable evidence in the other two but Williams could not be ruled out). That evidence was primarily of fibers but also involved eyewitnesses who placed him with the victims. Witnesses testified Williams felt that young black male “street kids” did not deserve to live. Apparently, he had internalized anti-African American racism.

After Williams’ conviction, police closed the books on twenty-three of the Atlanta Child Killings. They believed he was probably responsible for some of those still listed “unsolved.”

What Have We Learned?
Reviewing Atlanta’s classic crime cases gives us pause for concern — as well as reason for pride and cautious optimism. Serial murder and child homicide are growing menaces in today’s America. However, Judge Lynch has long been retired and for that we can be grateful. It is likely, although not certain, that people in this millennium would report the sighting of a “bloody woman” to authorities as there has been considerable work to encourage people to “get involved” when they see possible abuse. We must learn from the past even as we work for the future.

For those who want to read more:
I’ve got a lengthy and far more detailed story called “The Lynching of Leo Frank” up at http://www.crimemagazine.com/05/leofrank,0314-5.htm.

Much information may be obtained by inputting “Mary Shotwell Little,” “Atlanta Child Murders,” or “Wayne Williams” into a search engine.