00:00Did murderer seek to burn slain girl's body, and did the watchman interrupt him?
00:04The Atlanta Journal. Atlanta Journal. Thursday, May 1st, 1913, page 7, column 2. A new theory based
00:13upon an assumption of the innocence of the Negro night watchman Newt Lee is that the murdered body
00:18of Mary Fagan was taken to the basement of the National Pencil Factory primarily for the purpose
00:23of burning it early Sunday morning, and that the slayer was hid in the basement when Newt Lee
00:29discovered the child's body face up with its head toward the back door. This theory will permit
00:34explanation of several details which tend now to keep the mystery thick. It assumes that the Negro
00:40night watchman Newt Lee did write the crude notes found near the girl's body, but wrote them to save
00:45himself from the first fury of suspicion, believing that his innocence would be established by later
00:50calm investigation. The assumption that he did write them is reasonable, because in the notes
00:56themselves and in the Negro's repetition of them, by was spelled boy, and self was spelled slef. The
01:04final F on slef is identical in the original and the test, moreover, and other details seem to indicate
01:10they were written by the same hand that of the Negro. Theory in detail. Here in detailed sequence is
01:17the new theory. The murderer faced the necessity of removing his victim's body from the second floor and
01:23disposing of it. Either before the Negro came to work, or afterward while the Negro was on the upper floors,
01:29the
01:29murderer took the body to the basement, probably by way of the trap door and ladder. There he dumped the
01:35lifeless
01:35form of the child upon a pile of trash and papers and other clutter in front of the firebox beneath
01:40the boiler.
01:41Mary Fagan's hat and her left shoe were found there. Planning to dismember the body or stuff it somehow into
01:46the unlit
01:47box and there consume it by burning it in a hot fire of trash. The murderer was interrupted by a
01:53noise at the
01:53trap door near the front. A gas jet burning dimly there was the only light in the thick gloom of
01:58the place.
01:59Another light the watchman's lantern showed in the opening. The watchman was coming down. The murderer seized the
02:05child's body quickly by its dress, or an arm, or a leg, and whisked it across the dirt floor, past
02:11the boiler and around
02:12the corner of the partition, there dropping it out of sight as he thought. A place that looked as though
02:17something had been dragged upon the dirt floor was found by the officers, and at least one of them swore
02:23to it Wednesday at the coroner's inquest. The child's clothes, her face, one of her legs, were rubbed black
02:29with the black dirt and coal dust of the floor of the place. She was found lying, not upon that
02:34black dirt,
02:35but upon dirty sawdust. Murderer hid. The watchman came on back toward the rear, and the murderer fled
02:41from his corner into the wood dust bin beside the back door. In that are piles of dust from the
02:46pencil
02:46wood machines upstairs. A chute empties the dust there. The bin is an ideal hiding place. The sawdust
02:53underfoot permits no sound. There the murderer crouched when the watchman discovered the body with its face
02:58up, head toward the back. The watchman, a negro, saw that flight for himself would be a confession of guilt.
03:05To report the find would be to invite unknown trouble. He had to choose. He chose the latter,
03:10but wrote a note, then another, to divert the first fury of discovery from himself.
03:14It would have been easy for the negro to have carried the girl's body out of the back door,
03:18across the alley, and deposited it somewhere else outside in the neighborhood. But he did not do that.
03:24Would he not have done it if he had been guilty? The murderer saw the watchman leave,
03:28and the basement was pitch dark again. He emerged, picked up the body to hide it somewhere else,
03:33or do something with it. Dropped it upon its face, head toward the front, as it was found by the
03:38officers, and escaped by pulling a staple from the rear door, stepping out into the alley,
03:43and becoming lost in the city immediately. There are two psychological factors which govern the whole
03:49case. Two governing factors. It is not probable that an outsider would have been interested enough
03:54in the consequences of Mary's body being found in the factory, to hide it or move it anywhere,
03:59or dispose of it in any way. His sole object would have been to escape with his own hide.
04:05Further, it is not probable that a person unacquainted with the premises would have been
04:08able to penetrate to the cellar in the gloom that prevails there even by day, or to have found his
04:14way to the back door and out. Dr. J. W. Hurt, county physician, says that Mary Fagan could not have
04:20been dead less than six hours when the undertaker received her body if the body then was beginning
04:25to stiffen. The doctor takes into consideration, he says, that Mary did not bleed much, nor at all,
04:31perhaps, except from the wound in the back of her head, that her body was full-blooded, therefore.
04:36He considers, on the other hand, says he, that the night was cold, and the basement was dark and chill.
04:43According to that, Mary Fagan died not later than twelve o'clock last Saturday night,
04:47perhaps earlier. At three o'clock, the night watchman reported that he had just found her.
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