Tuesday April 29th 1913
Factory Employee May Be Taken Any Moment Atlanta Georgian
A sensational arrest will be made in the Mary Phagan murder mystery within a few hours.
It will be based on the firm theory of the police and detectives that the strangled girl was never outside the factory of the National Pencil Company from the time she went in there for her pay Saturday noon until her dead and mutilated body was taken to the morgue early Sunday morning.
The detectives do not believe that Arthur Mullinax is guilty of the murder.
They do not believe that J. M. Gantt is guilty of the murder.
They do not place any dependence on the identifications of Gantt and Mullinax made by various persons before Chief of Detectives Lanford.
They are confident that the author of the terrible deed was a person who is not under arrest at the present time. They know his name. They have talked with him. They have his story of what he declares is all he knows of the happenings Saturday night in the building of tragedy on Forsyth Street.
But they are not satisfied with his tale. It is known that they will have him behind the bars within a few hours.
It is known that the signs of weakening on the part of Newt Lee the negro night watchman have had a great deal to do with the pending sensational arrest. The negros attitude all along has led to the belief that he was shielding some one.
One moment he has almost admitted that he is protecting a man who has befriended him and helped him and an instant later he has suddenly gone back into silence with the solution of the mystery trembling on his very lips.
In the still hours of this morning unknown to anyone save the authorities Newt Lee was put through a searching grilling third degree that left him weeping and nerveless.
Before the hangers on had congregated about the police station and the horde of informers witnesses and merely curious had swept down upon the detective force Detective John Black quietly made his way to the police station and into the cell of the bowed and almost broken negro.
It was hardly 4 oclock this morning when Lee was startled to see the detectives form before his cell. Black walked in and sat down. From that time for two pitiless hours the detective plied the negro with questions.
A great fear appeared on the negros heart. Not that he feared for himself or because of his own guilt but that he was frightened at the terrors of the law which slowly were forcing him to open his lips and reveal the man who was hiding behind him.
Black tried to remove the terrors that oppressed the black man.
We know you did not do the murder the negro repeatedly was assured. We know you are guiltless of the whole affair. But we know that you know exactly who did it and that you are protecting that person.
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