Former Streetcar Conductor Arrested Leaving Sweetheart’s Home on Bellwood Avenue
As Arthur Mullinax, a strikingly handsome young man, left the home of his sweetheart, Miss Pearl Robinson, on Bellwood Avenue early last night, Detective Rosser stepped forward and arrested him, taking him directly to police headquarters. He was held under suspicion of involvement in the slaying of Mary Phagan.
E R Sentell, of 82 Davis Street, had visited Detective Chief Lanford on Sunday afternoon and reported seeing Mullinax and the dead girl together shortly after midnight. Sentell said that while he was walking along Forsyth Street around 12:30 a.m., he noticed the couple moving slowly across Hunter Street toward the National Pencil Company, where Mary would later be found murdered. The street lamps shone brightly on their faces, and he recognized both of them at once.
Chief Lanford also had other information placing Mullinax with Mary Phagan near the National factory around midnight. Acting on these reports, police brought Mullinax to headquarters, where at nine o’clock in the evening he faced a sharp, grueling third‑degree from Chief Lanford, Chief Beavers, and several detectives.
Mullinax gave a straightforward account of his evening. He said he had spent the early part of Saturday night with Miss Robinson, gone uptown to a theater, returned to her home before 10:30 p.m., and then walked to his boarding house at 60 Poplar Street, where he went to bed. He claimed he had not been out again that night and that he first learned of the murder from the extra edition of The Constitution the next morning. He denied that he knew Mary Phagan well, saying he had spoken to her only once.
Reporters who were present at the station heard him repeat the same story. He insisted he had not been in the downtown area after 10:30 p.m. and had gone straight home after leaving Miss Robinson.
The only time he admitted speaking with her, he said, was the previous Christmas at a holiday show at a church on Jefferson Street. At that event, she had played the part of “Sleeping Beauty” and was widely regarded as the prettiest girl in the neighborhood. He had taken a blackface role in the same performance. “I couldn’t keep my eyes off her,” he recalled. She had noticed and told him he looked good with his face blacked. He answered that he would keep his face blacked all the time if he could. That, he said, had been the full extent of their conversation.
Mullinax, who is 28 years old, is a former streetcar conductor on the English Avenue belt line, which ran near the Phagan home. Detectives have pointed out that evidence suggests they had more acquaintance than he admitted: Mary often rode his car and used to talk with him on the way to and from work.
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