by Karl Hess Stegall
On March 11, 2025, Mary Phagan-Kean—the great-niece of young Mary Phagan, whose brutal murder in 1913 at the hands of Leo Frank shocked a nation and shaped its legal and social institutions—appeared on the Stew Peters television program to recount the legacy of a crime that has reverberated through history. Her full interview may be viewed by clicking the video link above.
The trial, conviction, and execution of Leo Frank—a sweatshop owner and official of the Jewish organization B’nai B’rith—were not merely the resolution of a terrible crime but the catalyst for the founding of one of the most formidable organizations in modern America: the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Established in the wake of Frank’s conviction, the ADL has long positioned itself as a guardian against injustice, yet its function has increasingly become one of suppression, punishing those who dare to expose Jewish abuses of power. With the support of its allies in media, academia, and government, the ADL has, for over a century, insisted upon a revisionist narrative: that Frank was an innocent victim of anti-Semitism. The weight of evidence, however, tells another story—one that cannot be dismissed, for it is inscribed in the thousand-page Brief of Evidence and in the unbroken affirmations of every court that examined the case, from the Grand Jury to the Georgia Court of Appeals and even the Supreme Court of the United States—and every level of the justice system between them. Frank, despite his considerable wealth and the defense of the most renowned legal minds of his day, was found guilty in proceedings that withstood the most rigorous scrutiny.
In her interview, Mrs. Phagan-Kean speaks not only of legal documents and court decisions but of personal revelation. She recounts the moment she first discovered her relation to Mary Phagan and the shock of learning that powerful forces had spent more than a century distorting the truth about her great-aunt’s fate. Faced with a campaign that sought to turn a murderer into a martyr, she made the fateful decision to devote her life to setting the record straight.
Significantly, Mrs. Phagan-Kean is no bigot or “anti-Semite.” Indeed, after her father—who served as the leader of the color guard honoring a fallen Jewish airman—became close to the airman’s family, she grew up knowing them only as “grandma” and “grandpa” after the family unofficially adopted hers. That relationship remains unbroken. Her mission, therefore, is not one of blind enmity but of devotion to the truth.
That truth has been hidden and distorted by Frank’s allies, often by dishonest and desperate means. Frank’s defenders, unwilling to accept the weight of evidence against him, engaged in a series of efforts to obscure the facts, including:
- Framing innocent Black men. In their first attempt to divert suspicion, Frank’s defenders sought to implicate night watchman Newt Lee by planting a fake bloody shirt in his home. When that deception failed, they turned to janitor Jim Conley, planting a fake “bloody club” and pay stub in an effort to shift the blame—a campaign that continues into 2025. If Frank were innocent, why would his supporters need to resort to such elaborate crimes?
- Inventing a bite mark hoax. Long after the trial, Frank’s defenders concocted a claim that bite marks had been found on Mary Phagan’s body—marks that supposedly did not match Frank’s dental records. But this assertion collapsed under scrutiny, as the original autopsy made no mention of such wounds, and dental X-ray analysis was not introduced in Georgia courts until seven decades after Frank’s trial.
- Slandering Mary Phagan. In a grotesque reversal of victim and perpetrator, some of Frank’s supporters spread the shameful lie that the 13-year-old girl had enticed him—an act of slander that served only to highlight their desperation.
- Fabricating the myth of an anti-Semitic mob. Frank’s defenders alleged that a frenzied, hate-filled crowd besieged the courtroom, shouting, “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!” and similar threats. Yet contemporary photographs and newspaper reports contradict this claim, revealing a trial conducted with order and gravity, not with the chaos of racial animus.
- Tampering with historical records. Under the cover of darkness and without the knowledge of the Phagan family, Frank’s defenders clandestinely altered the historical marker at Mary Phagan’s gravesite, replacing the truth with the falsehood of his “innocence.”
- Secret meetings with government officials. Starting in the 1980s, and still happening even in 2025, private discussions continue between Frank’s advocates and officials in Georgia and Fulton County, from which the Phagan family and the public are deliberately excluded. The goal is clear: to obtain an official exoneration for a man whose guilt was established beyond all reasonable doubt.
And this is but a fraction of their elaborate effort to rewrite history.
Mrs. Phagan-Kean announces in this interview that a new and greatly expanded edition of her book, The Murder of Little Mary Phagan, will be released this year. This updated volume will offer even more evidence—evidence that exposes the deceit, manipulation, and calculated erasures that have defined the defense of Leo Frank for over a century.
History, as the Durants often reminded us, is a battlefield where truth and falsehood wage an unending war. To understand the present, one must understand the forces that have labored, decade after decade, to exonerate a man justly convicted of the rape and murder of a child. It is a struggle not merely for justice in the past but for clarity in the present, for the lessons of history remain the foundation upon which the future is built.
Be sure to share this interview. The forces that shape history are at work even now, and only through knowledge can one resist their distortions.