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In An Unspeakable Crime,13-year-old Mary Phagan went to the pencil factory where she worked to pick up her week's pay. She did not leave alive.
This was 1913 Atlanta and when Mary was found dead the next morning all Atlanta was horrified. Deeply angered at Northern industrialists who they blamed for their children having to work in factories in the first place, citizens turned against the factory manager, Leo Frank. A Jewish Yankee, Frank had come down from New York to manage the plant. Other teenage workers testified that Frank had made inappropriate advances to them, and the prosecution built a case of innuendo against Frank. Despite Frank's insistence that he was innocent, the jury convicted him and condemned him to be hanged for Mary's murder.
When Leo Frank's appeals were exhausted, he turned to the governor for clemency. Horrified by the trial's travesty of justice, Gov. John Slaton commuted the sentence from execution to life imprisonment, to give Frank the time to prove his innocence. Atlanta erupted in riots, attacking Jewish businesses and homes, and marching on the governor's mansion.
Nearly a century later, people are still trying to understand what really happened the day Mary went to get her pay - it has taken a lynching and a frightened witness who was 14 when Mary died, and 83 when he finally came forward, to tell the true story of this unspeakable crime.
I wrote An Unspeakable Crime after a friend introduced me to the Leo Frank case. He told me it possessed all the things I feel most passionate about: injustice, extreme political corruption and extreme political integrity, and teenagers poised in a position of to act responsibly or succumb to peer and community pressure. So I began to research the case - and I was as horrified as Gov. Slaton by what I discovered. When I could not stop thinking about Leo Frank, I knew I had to write about him.
At first I considered writing historical fiction about the case, but I couldn't find a way to tell the story in any sort of uplifting or inspiring way. Then it occurred to me to write a contemporary novel instead, in which the Leo Frank case served as the catalyst to transform the main character. The result was the award-winning novel, The Perfect Shot, in which Brian's history project about the Leo Frank case leads him to re-examine his personal responsibility in revealing the truth of what happened when his next-door neighbors who were murdered, each by a single perfect shot, while Brian was shooting hoops in his driveway, across the cul-de-sac.
After completing the novel and seeing it so well received, I thought I'd be finished with writing about Leo Frank. But I was wrong. The case stayed with me, demanding something more. So, after consulting with my editor, I decided to write a nonfiction account of the Leo Frank case for tee
nage readers, since it was a case that involved teenagers in such a pivotal role. I traveled to Atlanta and other cities to study archival collections of diaries, letters, case notes and newspapers, and to visit locations, in order to write An Unspeakable Crime. I was most touched by the flowers and teddy bears that still decorate Mary's grave today, in contrast to the stark plaques that commemorate the site of Leo Frank's death.
The man who succeeded John Slaton as governor of Georgia described Mary Phagan's murder as "an unspeakable crime." That prase stayed in my mind, because it seemed to me that what happened to Leo Frank in the aftermath of Mary's murder was an equally unspeakable crime. That seemed the perfect title for this book about such devastating injustice.
Click here to read an excerpt from An Unspeakable Crime.