Comprehensive Affidavit by Alonzo Mann, Drafted November 10, 1982 in Atlanta
Alonzo Mann, who worked as a teenage office boy at the National Pencil Company in 1913, later gave an extensive account in 1982 that supported efforts to clear Leo Frank of Mary Phagan’s murder. Mann said he spent his days in the front office alongside Frank, knew him as a strictly businesslike and respectable manager, and never saw him behave improperly with women at the factory.
Mann described Memorial Day 1913 as a half day at the office. He arrived around 8 in the morning, passed Jim Conley sitting under the stairway asking to borrow ten cents, and refused because Conley often drank and never repaid loans. Near midday Mann left briefly to meet his mother downtown, failed to find her, and walked back to the plant roughly thirty minutes later.
When Mann reentered the building he turned toward the stairwell and, on the first floor near the elevator and the basement trapdoor, saw Conley holding the limp body of a very small girl, later understood to be Mary Phagan, in both arms with her head slumped and her hair hanging down his back. Mann recalled seeing no blood but believed she was either unconscious or dead. Conley reached toward him and warned that if he ever talked about what he had witnessed he would kill him, prompting Mann to retreat, leave the factory at once, and go home.
According to Mann, his parents insisted that he stay out of the case and speak only if directly questioned, fearing violence during a period of intense antisemitic agitation around Frank’s trial. Mann said that investigators and lawyers asked him only limited questions about routine office matters, never inquiring whether he had seen anything connected to the killing, so his brief 1913 testimony did not include what he had seen Conley doing with the girl’s body.
Many years later, disturbed by what he viewed as errors in Harry Golden’s book “A Little Girl Is Dead,” Mann marked up his copy with corrections, which eventually brought him to the attention of Nashville Tennessean reporters. After being interviewed and subjected to lie detector and stress tests, he signed an affidavit stating that he saw Conley carrying the girl and that he believed Conley, not Frank, was responsible for the murder, explaining that he came forward in old age to ease his conscience and help posthumously vindicate Frank.