During his cross-examination of Leo Frank’s mother, he asked her what business her husband was in, and after her reply, snidely retorted: “Ah, he’s a capitalist then?” While cross-examining four male defense witnesses, Dorsey with diabolical slyness asked questions insinuating that Frank was a homosexual. He blatantly appealed to juror prejudices against Northerners, Jews, factory owners, capitalists, and homosexuals. For example, he refused to tell the defense attorneys that hair found in the metal room (where Dorsey maintained Frank had killed Mary Phagan) was, according to the physician who autopsied Phagan, not Phagan’s. He suppressed evidence that tended to exculpate Frank. In his campaign he also played an anti-Semitic card, regularly giving a stump speech in which he would say: “The attitude of the Hebrews in the Frank case has demonstrated the fact that the successful prosecution of a Hebrew is regarded as a persecution.” In prosecuting Frank, Dorsey (who may or may not have actually believed Frank was guilty) displayed great cunning and ruthlessness in adhering to the principle that the end justifies the means. Less than two years after Frank’s lynching, Dorsey was elected governor his campaign platform emphasized that he was the man who prosecuted Leo Frank. He prosecuted Leo Frank, procured a conviction, successfully labored in opposition to Frank’s endeavors to obtain a new trial, and relentlessly battled Frank’s efforts to have the death sentence commuted. Dorsey was District Attorney (an office then called Solicitor General) for Fulton County, 1910-1916, and Governor of Georgia, 1917-1921. There is no obituary or death certificate for Jim Conley, who is believed to have died in 1962.
His final appearance in the newspapers seems to have been in 1941 when it was reported that he had been arrested on gambling and public drunkenness charges in Atlanta. In 1919 he was shot while burglarizing an Atlanta drug store and after recovering sentenced to 20 years in prison. He was released after serving 10 months of his sentence. In February 1914 Conley was tried and convicted of being an accessory after the fact to the murder of Mary Phagan and sentenced to one year on the chain gang. The essentially misleading story Conley told on the stand, which inculpated Frank in Mary Phagan’s murder and exculpated himself, was a vast superstructure of lies cleverly erected on a foundation of various undeniable facts and seemingly credible minute details. “Conley’s testimony against Frank was a fantastic accumulation of contradictions,” history professor Clement Charlton Moseley has written. Jim Conley (1884-1962) This man, the actual murderer of Mary Phagan, was the principal prosecution witness when Leo Frank was tried and convicted for the murder.