Thursday, May 8th, 1913 Miss Daisy Jones Convinces Jury She Was Mistaken for Mary Phagan

Miss Daisy Jones, identified by J. L. Watkins as the girl he had mistaken for Mary Phagan on the afternoon of April 26th, 1913, appeared before the coroner's jury dressed exactly as she had been on that afternoon. She testified that she had been precisely where Watkins claimed to have seen Mary Phagan, at the same hour, and that she had crossed a vacant field just as Watkins described the girl having done.

Taken together with Mr. Watkins's revised testimony, her appearance before the jury proved conclusively that the girl seen that afternoon was not Mary Phagan at all, but Miss Jones herself.

The witness said she lives at 251 Fox Street in Atlanta and is fifteen years old. Her home sits on the corner of Fox and Lindsay Streets, one block from Mary Phagan's home at 146 Lindsay Street. Between 5 and 6 o'clock on the afternoon of Saturday, April 26th, she said, she carried her father's supper to him at his store on the corner of Bellwood Avenue and Ashby Street. She returned home along Bellwood Avenue and crossed a vacant field before reaching Lindsay Street, passing between two trees as she went.

She had been acquainted with Mary Phagan, she said. The two girls were roughly the same size, though Mary was a little heavier and not quite as tall. Their hair was about the same color.

On the afternoon of April 26th, she told the jury, she had been dressed exactly as she appeared at the inquest that day: a blue serge skirt, a white shirtwaist with a blue bow at the front, and a blue bow in her hair. When the coroner asked her height, she was measured against a board in the detectives' office and found to stand five feet one and a quarter inches tall.