Man Who Revealed Identity of Girl’s Killer After 69 Years Dies

Alonzo Mann, who broke a 69-year silence to admit that an innocent man had been lynched in the murder of a 14-year-old girl, died Monday at the age of 87 of pneumonia accompanied by heart complications, doctors said.

Three years ago, after keeping silent since 1913, the Bristol, Va., man said that Jewish pencil merchant Leo Frank was innocent of the murder of Mary Phagan at an Atlanta pencil factory. Frank was convicted in 1913. His death sentence was commuted to life in prison, but two years later, he was lynched by an angry mob that took him from a Georgia prison at gunpoint.

The lynching proved a catalyst for the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan, and the ensuing hatred aimed at Jews helped lead to the formation of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

In a sworn statement to The (Nashville) Tennessean, Mann said the real killer was Jim Conley, a janitor at the factory, who died in 1962. Lie detector tests supported his story.

Mann, who was an office boy at the factory, said that he saw Conley carrying the girl’s body and that Conley threatened to kill him if he talked. Mann said his mother had assured him that Frank would be found innocent, so he said nothing at the trial, at which Conley was a witness.

In 1983, the Georgia parole board declined to pardon Frank, saying that it was impossible to determine the truth after 70 years.

“I have had to live with this for 70 years. Now the pardons board will have to live with what they have done,” Mann said.

Dale Schwartz, an Atlanta attorney who represents the American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League and the Atlanta Jewish Federation, has vowed to continue Mann’s fight.