Stewart Peters Host of the Stew Peters Network – Mary Phagan Keans Interview of March 11, 2025

Mary Phagan Kean’s Debriefing After Stew Peters Broadcast: The Relentless Pursuit of Truth in the Leo Frank Case No Matter What Price.

By Christy Williams (Guest Post) March 25, 2025

On March 11, 2025, Mrs. Mary Phagan Kean, who is turning 71 years old this June 5th, delivered a riveting and deeply personal testimony on the Evening Edition of the Stew Peters Show on the Stew Peters Network. As the great-niece and namesake of Mary Anne Phagan—a 13-year-old girl savagely raped and garroted in 1913, sparking a legal maelstrom that remains one of the most polarizing chapters in Southern American history—Mrs. Kean brought a voice of familial authority to a case that has been shrouded in controversy for 112 years. Her appearance was not merely a recounting of historical events but a clarion call to safeguard the truth against a century-long campaign of deceit orchestrated by Leo Frank’s defenders.

A Legacy Forged in Tragedy and Tenacity

Mrs. Kean’s journey into the labyrinthine depths of the Leo Frank case began in 1967, when, at the age of 13, she first learned of the horrific fate that befell her great-aunt, whom she affectionately calls "Little Mary." What began as a child’s curiosity blossomed into a lifelong crusade to unearth the reality of an aggravated sexual assault and strangulation that claimed Little Mary’s life, and the subsequent trial that convicted Leo Max Frank, the factory's superintendent whose guilt, Kean asserts, was established beyond a scintilla of doubt. For Mrs. Kean, this pursuit transcends scholarly interest; it is a sacred duty to honor her family’s legacy and to thwart the relentless efforts of Frank’s apologists to obfuscate the truth with fraudulent narratives and fabricated evidence.

“This case has been the crucible of my adult existence,” Mrs. Kean confided during our post-interview debriefing. “To bear the name of a murdered child within your lineage instills an unshakable obligation to ensure that the evidence—irrefutable and painstakingly adjudicated—is neither buried beneath revisionist rubble nor twisted into a tapestry of lies designed to hoodwink the public.”

For those seeking the full context of her revelations, the complete Stew Peters interview, along with an edited version spotlighting Mrs. Kean’s segments, are accessible via the video link provided in the show’s description (see the references section below).

The Quagmire of a Contested Historical Narrative

The Leo Frank case—often simply termed "the Frank case"—remains a festering wound in Georgia’s historical psyche. Leo Max Frank, a 29-year-old Jewish superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, presided over a grueling industrial operation that churned out pencils from 1908 to 1913 until his arrest and continued from 1913 to 1916 when Herbert Schiff was elevated to superintendent. It was within this grimy sweatshop that Little Mary Phagan toiled, enduring 55-hour workweeks for a pittance of $4, disbursed every Saturday at noon. Having labored there for a year, her life was extinguished on April 26, 1913—Confederate Memorial Day, a now-obsolete state holiday, when the then-factory stood silent. She entered the building to collect her final wages, a paltry $1.20, only to meet a gruesome fate: molested and strangled with a waxy packaging rope, her body discarded within the very walls she had trusted for employment but that she also had found almost unbearable. She did not leave the factory alive after asking Leo Frank for her wages. Frank was the only witness known to have seen her alive before she was found dead in the basement of the factory. And he acted nervous and jumpy when asked about the murder. 

Four months later, on August 25, 1913, Frank was convicted of her murder, with sexual battery cited during the trial as an aggravating factor suggesting a motive for the murder. In those days men who raped were given the equivalent of death sentences. The evidence, meticulously presented during a month-long trial, left no room for reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. The presiding judge roan made oral statements which guaranteed the case would be appealed and helped his old law partner Luther Zeigler Rosser. Roan sentences Leo Frank to hang. Roan in private purportedly told family members he thought Frank was guilty. Roan refused Frank's request for a new trial. The state and federal appellate courts upheld the verdict, and the Georgia Supreme Court codified in black ink that the verdict was substantiated beyond a reasonable doubt by the trial. Yet, the saga took a dramatic turn when Georgia Governor John Slaton—whose law firm had represented Frank—commuted the death sentence on June 21, 1915, igniting a firestorm of public indignation. This act of clemency, widely perceived as morally corrupt, illegal and a constitutional crisis, precipitated Frank’s abduction from prison on August 16, 1915, and his lynching the following day by a group styling itself the "Vigilance Committee." Contrary to popular myth, this was not the work of the "Knights of Mary Phagan," a fictitious entity conjured by Frank’s defenders to falsely tie the lynching to the Ku Klux Klan—a group that, in its early 20th-century incarnation, embraced Jewish members and enjoyed Jewish financial support.

In 1915, the American public largely viewed Frank as innocent, swayed by a sophisticated propaganda campaign orchestrated by advertising magnate Albert D. Lasker and New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs. This media blitz co-opted the nation’s newspaper titans to peddle a pro-Frank narrative, drowning out the trial’s damning evidence with a deluge of distortions. Mrs. Kean, however, sees through this veneer, exposing what she describes as a century-long conspiracy by Frank’s modern champions to posthumously absolve him through a web of hoaxes and selective omissions. In 1915 the blackface movie birth of a nation played in thousands of Jewish owned Loews theaters and so did a Leo Frank documentary, Thou Shalt Not Kill, featuring footage of Leo Frank and Georgia Governor John M. Slaton. The Leo Frank film romanticized Leo Frank and his family life, while portraying him as an innocent and decent man who was wrongfully framed up. 

“After 57 years of immersing myself in this case,” she declared, “what gnaws at my soul is the audacity of activist organizations that labor ceaselessly to recast Frank as a martyr of antisemitism. The trial transcripts and evidentiary record paint a far more incriminating picture—one that revisionists conveniently excise from their sanitized retellings.”

“The core travesty,” she asserted with steely resolve, “lies not in reexamining historical cases through a modern lens, but in the calculated cherry-picking of evidence. Frank’s defenders magnify trivial inconsistencies into supposed exculpatory proofs while suppressing the overwhelming testimony and physical findings that scream his guilt. It’s a masterclass in manipulation.”

Kean meticulously cataloged instances where pivotal evidence has been buried or distorted. She cited Monteen Stover’s testimony, which demolished Frank’s alibi by placing him alone at the crime scene; the bloodstains and soaked hair discovered in the factory’s metal room, irrefutably linked to Little Mary’s slaughter; and the parade of female employees who swore under oath to Frank’s habitual predatory conduct—details systematically scrubbed from contemporary scholarship by those intent on rewriting history. The other thing Kean has found is that over the years, hoaxes were inserted into the record over the last 112 years, so that Frank's future defenders could use them to build a case that he was wrongfully convicted. Applying Forensic History, Phagan Kean was able to uncover a number of Leo Frank rumors and falsified evidence that is presented by pro-Frank scholars as evidence he was innocent. In truth this evidence amounts to academic fraud, and she intends to expose it in the second revised edition of her book coming out in 2025. In her new book she goes into great detail of how to debunk these falsifications of history. 

Navigating the Morass of Identity Politics and Judicial Truth

In our extended phone and email exchanges, Mrs. Kean dissected the tangled interplay of race, religion, region, and class that has rendered the Frank case a perennial lightning rod. While she unequivocally denounces the barbarity of Frank’s lynching, she rejects attempts to wield modern identity politics as a cudgel to undermine the original verdict’s legitimacy.

“We can—and must—condemn vigilante justice while acknowledging that the legal process of 1913 adhered to the due process standards of its era,” she contended. “The Georgia Supreme Court affirmed that the evidence and testimony unequivocally supported Frank’s guilt. The coroner’s inquest jury voted 6-0 against him. The grand jury, including five Jewish members, indicted him 21-0. The trial jury—comprising both laborers and elites—unanimously found him guilty, 12-0. Judge Leonard S. Roan denied a new trial. The Georgia Supreme Court upheld the conviction as manifestly sound. The U.S. Supreme Court, despite dissents, found no procedural flaws. Even the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles, in 1982, refused exoneration, issuing only a dubious 1986 pardon that left his guilt intact.” Her recitation of this judicial litany, delivered via Signal App, was as compelling as it was exhaustive.

A Pivotal Moment in American Legal and Cultural History

The trial, conviction, and extralegal execution of Leo Frank marked a seismic shift in American jurisprudence, birthing the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) under the aegis of B’nai B’rith. Founded in 1913 to defend Frank, the ADL has since morphed into a formidable advocacy juggernaut—albeit one marred by controversies, such as its 1980s espionage on anti-Apartheid activists for South Africa’s apartheid regime. Today, it wields its influence to champion censorship while selectively embracing certain marginalized groups over others.

Frank, who doubled as the Atlanta B’nai B’rith chapter president while exploiting child laborers like Little Mary, remains a polarizing figure. Kean alleges that the ADL, in league with media moguls, academics, and political operatives, has waged a century-long revisionist crusade to sanctify Frank as an innocent victim of anti-Jewish bigotry. Jewish advocacy groups hail him as a martyr and saint, his visage a rallying cry against antisemitism and a cornerstone of Jewish civil rights lore. When the ADL marked the 39th anniversary of Frank’s 1986 pardon on X in March 2025, the post garnered millions more views than many of its other campaigns. A 2024 post commemorating the 109th anniversary of his lynching amassed 13 million views—an indication, perhaps, that ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt views Frank as a heroic icon rather than the homicidal predator Kean’s evidence portrays.

Yet, Kean insists this hagiography flies in the face of an exhaustive evidentiary record: the trial’s Brief of Evidence, grand jury findings, and appellate rulings—all affirming Frank’s guilt despite his access to elite counsel and boundless resources. These documents, languishing in Georgia’s Supreme Court archives, are conspicuously absent from mainstream discourse. Outside the mainstream discourse is the Ku Klux Klan believed that Leo Frank was innocent, and the black men Newt Lee and Jim Conley were the real culprits.  

A Tapestry of Interfaith Harmony Amid Conflict

Despite the Jewish-Gentile tensions threading through this saga, Mrs. Kean defies any accusation of antisemitism. Her family’s decades-long bond with a Jewish household stands as a luminous counterpoint. This relationship took root when her father led a color guard tribute for a fallen Jewish airman, forging a kinship so deep that the grieving family enfolded the Phagan family, especially their children into their own. Although deceased now, Mrs. Kean still calls the couple “grandma” and “grandpa”—terms imbued with authentic affection, not mere politeness. This enduring interfaith alliance thrives to this day beyond the grave, a testament to bonds that transcend the case’s divisive legacy.

Safeguarding a Historical Truth Against a Tide of Deception

In our second 40-minute debriefing call, Mrs. Kean recounted her transformative journey from a curious teenager to a resolute guardian of her great-aunt’s story. Confronted by the vast machinery—financial, political, and cultural—mobilized to whitewash Frank’s crimes, she vowed to anchor the historical record in unassailable fact. Her mission: to ensure Little Mary’s voice endures, untainted by the distortions of those who would erase her suffering.

Kean meticulously outlined the stratagems Frank’s defenders have employed to subvert the truth and engage in academic negligence:

• Framing the Innocent: Frank and his B’nai B’rith allies (Herbert and Leonard Haas) initially sought to pin the murder on Newt Lee, the factory night watchman who happened to be black, planting a bloodied shirt and falsifying time records. Ghost written murder notes were also used to frame Lee. When this ruse collapsed, they targeted janitor Jim Conley, fabricating a “bloody club” and forged pay receipt—efforts Kean says persist in modern apologia.
• Dental Hoax: Later, Frank’s supporters concocted a tale of bite marks on Mary’s body that allegedly mismatched Frank's teeth—a claim absent from the autopsy report and unsupported by 1913 forensic standards.
• Slandering the Victim: They smeared Little Mary with baseless insinuations of flirtatiousness, attempting to invert her innocence into culpability.
• Mob Mythology: Decades on, they invented tales of anti-Semitic mobs terrorizing the jury with shouting cries of “Hang the Jew or we’ll hang you!”—a fiction debunked by courtroom records and period newspapers, which Kean has painstakingly collected. Author Steve Oney debunked this anti-goy racial hoax.
• Grave Desecration: Without Phagan family consent, Frank’s advocates altered a historical marker at Mary’s gravesite to imply his innocence by omission. Someone partially destroyed a marble vase placed at the bottom of the epitaph in 1933. 
• Secret Machinations: Over the past four decades, including into 2025, Frank’s champions have held covert meetings with Georgia officials, excluding the Phagans, the press and the public, to push for exoneration—all unsuccessful thus far, but a new push in 2025 is in the works right now.

Mrs. Kean also announced an expanded edition of her book, The Rape-Murder of Little Mary Phagan, slated for release later in 2025. This work will unveil fresh evidence bolstering Frank’s guilt while dismantling the century of frauds and bamboozles spun by his defenders.

She urged viewers to share the Stew Peters interview and delve into the case’s true history, arguing that understanding this saga is vital to discerning the power dynamics shaping modern America. “The truth,” she concluded, “is not a relic to be reshaped—it’s a legacy to be defended.”