Monday, 28th April 1913 Two Maundering Notes Add Mystery to Crime, The Atlanta Journal

City detectives, detailed to run down the murderer or murderers of fourteen-year-old Mary Phagan, are endeavoring to clear up the mystery surrounding the authorship of two crudely written and badly composed notes which were found near the corpse of the murdered girl in the basement of the pencil factory.

These notes were written in lead pencil. They are misspelled, incoherent and nearly unintelligible. They present two questions to the minds of the detectives:

First: Were they really written by the girl while suffering the last throes of a delirious death?

Second: Are they the handiwork of the murderer, to divert suspicion from himself toward a fictitious negro.

One of the notes reads as follows:

"He said he wood love me laid down like the night witch did it but that long tall black negro did by his sleb."

Here is the other:

"mama that negro hired down here did this I went to get water and he pushed me down this hole a long tall negro black that has it woke long lean tall negro I write while play with me."