Sunday, May 4th, 1913
At the top is a sketch made by Henderson from the last photograph taken of little Mary Phagan, the 14-year-old girl of tragedy. Below is a photograph of her mother and step-father, Mr. and Mrs. J. W. Coleman, and her sister, Miss Ollie Phagan. The other picture was taken at the funeral.
Could you walk for hours in the heart of Atlanta without seeing a person you know?
What did Atlanta detectives do to keep murderer from "planting" evidence against suspects?
Are all the men who have been held as suspects marked men for the rest of their lives as the result of a caprice of circumstance?
This not the story of Mary Phagan. It is a story about the story of Mary Phagan.
All of the story of little Mary Phagan that can be learned has been told simply and without further sensation than the facts themselves afforded in the columns of The Atlanta Constitution from the time of this paper's exclusive story of the grewsome discovery of the girl's body last Sunday morning. It is, therefore, not for this story to shed light on the case, but merely to point out and discuss a few of the extraordinary phases of the most extraordinary case that has ever shocked a city.
The story of the death of Mary Phagan is the most improbable chain of events that has ever occurred within the lifetime of Atlanta. And these events have gripped and stirred the people of Atlanta as nothing that has ever happened before.
Aside from the mystery which shrouded the slyer of the girl, the thing which has held the sympathies of a whole city, as if Mary Phagan were the daughter of each person, is the youth and innocence of the little girl. She was just a little girl. When that has been said about Mary Phagan, all has been said. All testimony that has been brought out shows that she was all in simplicity, guilelessness and purity that is implied in that simple statement.
There have been other cases—recent cases—which have interested the public and appealed more or less to their sympathies, but the principals in the cases were as different as the world is wide. In the other cases there was maturity and experience, worldly wisdom and pasts that came home to roost. In all the interest and sympathy there was a subcurrent that ran chill and repellant. In past cases, could all the tears blot out one word of the sordid tales of illicit loves and intrigues? Could the "leopard skins" change their spots?
No, Lady Macbeth, No Spotted Hand.
But in the story of Mary Phagan there were no words or sentences through which she or any one would have cared to have traced a killing line. There were no stains from a spotted past to shriek their shame to the world. There was no Lady Macbeth in the past of Mary Phagan to wander through the halls of her conscience and scrub with frenzy at the tiniest speck of wrongdoing upon her white hands!
