Monday, 19th July 1915: Frank’s Condition Is Improving; Assailant Has No Regrets, He Says, The Atlanta Journal

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William Creen Contradicts the Statement Made Sunday That He Was Sorry He Injured Frank The Prisoner's Wound Swollen Slightly

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga., July 19. J. W. Creen, the convict who attacked Leo Frank Saturday night, today gave out a statement in contradiction to his assertion to Warden Smith following the crime that he was "sorry" he cut Frank.

"I only wish that I had had more strength," he told The Journal correspondent today. Creen is still chained to a concrete post in the big sleeping quarters of the convicts. He's suffering intensely from a bad bruise on his side as the result of his scuffle with Frank.

"I don't think I ever did wrong in my life," he said. "I think I have done my duty in this matter as well as my strength would allow. I believe that God has helped me."

Further than this, Creen said nothing. He had given out no other statement and today reiterated his declaration of yesterday that he would tell his whole story to no one except B. H. Hardaway, a Columbus, Ga., contractor for whom he at one time worked. Much of his time is spent in reading the Bible. This morning, he wrote to his wife at Columbus telling her not to worry. For fear of the possible effect on him, officials have kept from Creen the reports of a move among his sympathizers to free him.

The attitude of Frank toward Creen remains unchanged. "I only wish that he had been man enough to have given me a fair chance," Frank said in discussing the attack with friends.

The attack of Creen has brought on much discussion here of facilities for caring for convicts. "At present, all white convicts have cots in one big room," said Warden J. E. Smith, this morning.

"This matter has shown that it is almost imperative that we be given a few individual cots for desperate characters."

FRANK RESTING WELL, CONDITION IS FAVORABLE.

Frank's temperature continues to hover between one hundred and one and one hundred and two degrees. This afternoon, he is resting well and those in attendance are encouraged. His pain is somewhat easier.

Dr. Guy D. Compton, prison physician, has consented to take personal charge of the case at all times. He is being assisted by Dr. T. H. Hall, of Milledgeville.

Frank's cot is in a room where the heat is almost unbearable. Mrs. Frank is at his side almost every minute of the day and night.

Numerous telegrams of sympathy, among them one from C. P. Conolly, of East Orange, N. J., have come for Frank and Mrs. Frank.

Although Frank's temperature went to 102.4 degrees at 7:30 o'clock this morning and his wound in the neck showed considerable swelling, which caused serious apprehension among the nurses and doctors, there was a slight change for the better at 10 o'clock when his temperature dropped one degree and Dr. Compton, the prison physician, became more hopeful.

Dr. Compton stated that some fever was to be expected and that the swelling in the neck was not necessarily a dangerous symptom within itself. Blood poison was the greatest danger feared by Dr. Compton, as the stitches seemed to be holding firmly, and the wound was hurriedly dressed. The knife with which Creen attacked Frank might easily have been infected.

Previous to 9 o'clock, when his temperature began to fall, and because of the rise in temperature and the swelling during the night, it was thought advisable to summon Dr. H. J. Rosenberg from Atlanta, he being Frank's family physician, who was here Sunday. He is expected to bring one or more Atlanta physicians with him. He went back to Atlanta Sunday night, as Frank was then resting well and seemed to be steadily improving.

Frank will be moved today to a private room if arrangements can be made. The hospital facilities of the state prison farm do not provide rooms for patients, and the room into which Frank will be moved is an office.

ATTACK RESULT OF LONG BROODING, IS NOW BELIEF.

The prison officials believe Creen's attack was the result of long brooding and planning. Creen is known to have expressed hatred for Frank to fellow prisoners more than once.

One of the guards is authority for the statement that Creen, discussing Frank with a fellow prisoner before Frank's sentence was commuted, made this remark: "Just wait until he comes down here. Then I'll show you something."

Because of the wide discussion of the case, this alleged remark passed unnoticed at the time.

Officials of the prison will take no action, as far as Creen is concerned, until they receive instructions from the State Prison Commission.

Creen is now chained to a concrete post in a sort of dungeon room in the basement of one of the prison buildings. He refuses to talk. His attitude is sullen and at times ferocious. He says B. H. Hardaway, of Columbus, is the only man he will talk to. "If Mr. Hardaway will come here in person, I'll tell him everything," he told one of the prison officials.

It is now believed Creen slipped the knife from the dining room. The guards think he carried it for days, concealed somewhere in his prison clothes, and that he waited his chance and bided his time to make the attack on Frank.

One hundred prisoners were sleeping in a dormitory on the second floor of one of the prison buildings. The dormitory has two entrances, and an inside guard is stationed at each entrance, near the door, while outside of the entrances are other guards.

Frank's cot was about forty feet from one entrance. Creen's cot was the fourth from Frank's in the same row, the cots being ranged in rows with aisles between.

The prisoners who sleep in the dormitory are allowed to stir around until 9 o'clock. Then the lights are turned low and the prisoners go to bed. After that, no one is allowed to stir except on permission of the guards.

HOW CREEN WAS ABLE TO MAKE ATTACK ON FRANK.

The inside guard on Frank's end of the dormitory on Saturday night was Barbour Smith, a prisoner and a trusty. About 11 o'clock, Creen raised up and asked Smith for permission and Creen got up and started toward the door.

At Frank's cot, Creen stopped, reached down with his left hand and seized Frank by the hair, placed his right foot on Frank's chest and struck with the knife in his right hand.

The point went in below the left ear. Still holding Frank's hair, still pinning him down with his foot on Frank's chest, Creen sawed the knife across Frank's throat, jerking and jerking.

Frank, awakened instantly, threw up his hands and grabbed the knife, cutting open his right palm and cutting his left thumb to the bone.

Meanwhile Barbour Smith and two prisoners leaped upon Creen, overpowered him and led him out of the dormitory and carried him into the presence of Warden Smith.

Dr. W. J. Mc Naughton, serving a life term for murder, reached Frank in a moment after the attack. He led him at once to the prison hospital ligatured the several ends of the jugular veins and at once began an operation. In a few minutes, Dr. Guy D. Compton, the physician, arrived. Frank was on the operating table until nearly 2 o'clock. No anesthetic was used and he was conscious all the time. A saline solution was injected into his veins to overcome his weakness from loss of blood.

Dr. Rosenberg, of Atlanta, after examining the wound and the operation yesterday, gave the following description of the wound: "The wound is about seven and a half inches long. It reaches from a point in the middle of the throat, in the center of the Adam's apple, back to a point below the left ear. The jugular vein was completely severed and all the muscles of the left side of the neck were severed. Fortunately, however, the windpipe was not reached by the knife. The hearing of the left ear is now slightly impaired and if Frank recovers his neck will probably be stiff all his life, owing to the severance of the muscles."

PAGE 7, COLUMN 1 FRANK'S CONDITION IS IMPROVING TODAY Continued From Page 1.Dr. Mc Naughton saved Frank's life by making a ligature of the severed ends of the jugular vein and preventing him from bleeding to death. The operation performed by Dr. Mc Naughton, Dr. Harris and Dr. Compton, the prison physician, is thoroughly satisfactory. They had an ugly, zig-zag wound to handle, but they sewed it up as well as could be expected.

Frank was given opiates practically all day Sunday on account of a severe pain in his stomach. This may be caused by an accumulation of gas or by septicemia from the wound. In the latter event, the symptom may be a signal of danger, as septicemia or poison from the wound is liable to attack the stomach, the heart or some other vital part of the body. We are hoping, however, that it is only gas.

In addition to the prompt work of the physicians, as mentioned by Dr. Rosenberg, a further circumstance in Frank's favor is his strong constitution, noticeable during his trial and his subsequent long fight for life. Although lighter when he arrived at the prison farm than when he was first arrested, he was in good physical trim as the result of regular exercise in the Fulton County Jail, and since arriving at the prison farm he had been showing steady improvement from the outdoor work, and he had taken on considerable weight and was becoming more robust every day.

Late Sunday afternoon Frank said to the doctors: "I am going to live. I must live. I must vindicate myself."

CRIMINAL INSANE AMONG PRISONERS. Although the prison officials had noted among the prisoners a few signs of animosity against Frank, none of them seemed sufficiently serious to warrant special precautions, and the officials had no idea that an attack would be made on Frank's life. In this connection, however, some of the officials express the opinion that there are five or six men among the long-term prisoners who are criminally insane homicidal maniacs and on this idea they declare special provision should be made for segregating prisoners who exhibit such tendencies.

This view of the officials in question is shared by some of the prisoners. One of them says he felt such an apprehension when he slept in the dormitory that he took particular pains to keep his record perfect, in order to become a trusty and thereby gain the privilege of sleeping elsewhere.

Warden Smith said Sunday afternoon that Creen had not been permitted to read newspapers or periodicals of any kind. "Creen read only the Bible," said Warden Smith, "it being furnished to him in the prison library. He studied it whenever he had an odd moment. He seemed to be getting religious. I knew that Creen was a bad man, but I never dreamed that he would attack a fellow convict. I had instructed the guards to handle carefully on account of his reputation of being a dangerous man."

The warden was asked whether Creen had any quarrel with Frank. "No, absolutely not," he replied.

PAGE 7, COLUMN 1 Surprise and Regret Expressed by Slaton (By Associated Press.) SEATTLE, Wash., July 19. Surprise and regret at the attempt on the life of Leo M. Frank by a fellow-convict at the prison farm at Milledgeville, Ga., were expressed by former Governor John M. Slaton, of Georgia, who was here today on his way to San Francisco. "I do not believe the attack on Frank could be traced to any outside influence working for Frank's destruction," he said. "I believe that the criminal mind, aroused perhaps by newspaper reports, was responsible. Frank was put in the safest place for him in the state." He said he had no reason to regret commuting Frank's death sentence to life imprisonment. "I would do it again tomorrow if confronted with the same possibility of mistake in the evidence by which he was convicted," declared Mr. Slaton.

PAGE 7, COLUMN 2 B. H. Hardaway Is Now In East on Business (Special Dispatch to The Journal.) COLUMBUS, Ga., July 19. B. H. Hardaway, the man to whom J. W. Creen, in Milledgeville, says he will talk, and to no one else, is the head of a big contracting firm in Columbus, and Creen at one time was employed by this firm. Hardaway is now on a business trip to Baltimore and New York and will be gone ten days. At his office here, it was learned today that Creen has written Hardaway a number of times since he went to Milledgeville to the state farm. The clerks say the letters were "on some fool matters," and were not answered. Ordinary Redd, of Muscogee County, knows little or nothing about Creen.

PAGE 7, COLUMN 2 Wife of Creen Believes He Is Crazy and She Tells Why (Special Dispatch to The Journal.) COLUMBUS, GA., July 19. Living alone in a little two-room house on Upper First Avenue, and clerking in a lunch house for a living, Mrs. Will Creen, wife of the man who cut Leo M. Frank's throat in his cell at the state camp in Milledgeville, near midnight, Saturday night, was dumbfounded at news of the act, and she declares today that she is more convinced than ever that her husband is crazy. Mrs. Creen, who is only about forty-five years of age, and has no children, is deeply concerned for her husband and she can hardly control herself when talking about his acts, and she insists that he is not responsible for what he has done.

"I believe Bill," as she calls him, "was crazy when he killed a man at the corner of First Avenue and Fourteenth Street, years before I married him. He acted queer at the time, and he hasn't been right since. For hours, I have known him to sit and stare at the ground and in other ways indicate that he was not right. I have been talking to him when he would go to whistling and turn off as if he didn't hear me, and then I have had him to stop in the midst of a conversation with me and never finish, and he would say he simply forgot what he was going to tell me."

"Really, the beginning of Bill's trouble dates back to the time when he fell from a cable when he was at work on the construction of the Dillingham Street Bridge several years ago, when he cut a great gash in his head. The scar is quite visible on the back of his head today, and Creen has never been the same since that accident. The doctor told me at the time that the fall was going to injure his mind and since that time, Dr. Crosby, the county physician, told me that Bill was crazy and that I had better watch him."

"When Bill killed Otis Kitchens some years ago. I know he was, and the doctors came over here from Milledgeville to examine him, but they claimed he was all right at that time. I am satisfied that he attacked Frank while in the same state of mind as when he killed Kitchens and the other man, and I do not believe that he meant to commit murder either. He is really not responsible for his acts, and I do not think the authorities should hold him accountable for what he does. As I said, he used to sit for hours with a vacant stare which at times was alarming. He has been unfortunate and I am sorry for him. I see from the papers he says he is sorry he attacked Frank, and I believe him. I don't believe he would have done it, had he been at himself."

"I don't believe he is crazy all the time, but that he has spells at times which make him so dangerous. I hope they will make it light on him for I do not believe that Bill is responsible for the act."

Resolutions Ask Probe of Assault on Leo Frank Two resolutions were introduced in the House of Representatives Monday morning providing for an investigation for the attack on Leo M. Frank at the state prison farm Saturday night by William Creen. One, introduced by Representative Smith, of De Kalb, provides that the Prison Commission shall make a full and thorough investigation and report their findings to the House and Senate. The other was introduced by Representative Starke, of Jackson.Both Resolutions were referred to the Penitentiary Committee of the House, of which Representative John Dorsey, of Cobb County, is Chairman. Commenting on the Resolutions, Mr. Dorsey said he would call his Committee together as soon as possible to consider them; that as far as he was concerned, he would prefer to have a subcommittee make an investigation on its own account.

DAVISON'S STATEMENT.

Chairman R. E. Davison, of the State Prison Commission, stated Monday that Creen was apparently both crazy and mean. "We had to take him out of the Stewart County chain gang in October, 1914," said Mr. Davison, "because of the threats he made against the Warden and Guards."

Chairman Davison said he did not see any necessity of an investigation. He said he had ordered a full written report from Warden Smith, of the State Prison Farm, but that the information so far at hand indicates that Creen's attack on Frank was his own individual act; that it was carried out without the knowledge of anyone else at the Prison, and that Creen had smuggled the knife into the Dormitory.

Representative Starke's Resolution regarding the cutting at Milledgeville follows in full:

STARKE'S RESOLUTION.

By Mr. Starke of Jackson:

"Whereas we are informed through the Daily Press of an attempted Assassination by one convict of another convict at the Prison Farm, and

"Whereas, without passing on the Fact whether he made a bad job or his attempted Assassination, as that view of the matter does not concern this body, and

"Whereas, from the Press Dispatches it appears that last Saturday was hog-killing day at the Prison Farm, in which Butchers were furnished with so many knives that the Guards did not miss one that was retained by convict, and

"Whereas, said convict declares there was on Conspiracy encouraged by the Authorities that he should attempt said Assassination, which Declaration seemed to be voluntary on the part of said convict, and

"Whereas the Press assures us, from a Statement of the Guard, that said convict who attempted to commit the Assassination had not been allowed to read inflammatory articles in the Press relative to the other convict, but on the contrary, had only been allowed to read the Bible, and as a result of which he thought he had designed a Change of Heart, of the would-be Assassin; therefore, be it.

"Resolved, That the Penitentiary Committee of this House be authorized to investigate whether or not the Authorities at the Prison Farm are not too negligent with the use of their Butcher Knives."

Offers to Go on Bond For Frank's Assailant

MILLEDGEVILLE, Ga., July 19. S. L. Terry, Sheriff of Baldwin County, today received the following message from Atlanta signed C. H. Banks:

"If Law permits you are authorized to enter my name as Bondsman on Frank's Assailant. Can be qualified for fifty thousand dollars."

Officials here do not know who Banks is. They are keeping from Creen all Reports that might tend to make him believe that in any Quarters he is praised for his deed.

PAGE 7, COLUMN 4

DR. W. J. M'NAUGHTON, serving a lifetime for murder, whose prompt action in checking the flow of blood when Leo M. Frank was cut, prevented Frank from bleeding to Death.

PAGE 7, COLUMN 5

Convict-Doctor Who Saved Frank's Life Also Noted Prisoner

Dr. W. J. Mc Naughton, to whose prompt and skillful aid Leo M. Frank owes his life, is like Frank, a life-termer whose Sentence of Death was commuted by Governor Slaton.

Dr. Mc Naughton was sentenced to hang for the alleged murder of Fred Flanders, who died, supposedly from Arsenical Poisoning at his home in Covena, Emanuel County, Ga., June 4, 1910. Dr. Mc Naughton, a widower, was living in the Flanders home at the time of Flanders' Death, and was regarded as a close friend of the Flanders.

After the latter's Death, the Grand Jury of Emanuel County indicted Mrs. Mattie Flanders, the widow, and Dr. Mc Naughton, for murder. Traces of Arsenic were found in the body of Flanders, it was testified at the trial.

The Case against Mrs. Flanders was postponed from time to time and finally nolle prossed, but Dr. Mc Naughton was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to be hanged.

His Attorneys carried the Case to the Georgia Supreme Court, which, in a divided Opinion, affirmed the Death Sentence. The lawyers, asserting Dr. Mc Naughton was innocent, carried the Case to the United States Supreme Court. Suddenly, upon the discovery of alleged new evidence, it was withdrawn from this tribunal, and an Extraordinary Motion for a new trial, based upon this evidence, was made in the Emanuel Superior Court. This Court denied the Motion.

Governor Joseph M. Brown respited Mc Naughton several times. Governor Slaton, after entering upon his term of Office, respited Mc Naughton twice, to allow his Attorneys time to develop alleged new evidence.

Dr. Mc Naughton, with many friends working hard to save his life, was during most of this time, confined in the Chatham County Jail at Savannah for safe keeping, so intense was the feeling of the friends of Flanders against him at Statesboro and in other portions of Emanuel County.

Finally, in October, 1913, Dr. Mc Naughton's Lawyers and friends carried the Case before the Prison Commission. All three members of the Prison Commission favored Executive Clemency for Mc Naughton. Chairman R. E. Davison and Commissioner E. L. Rainey recommended a full pardon while Commissioner T. E. Patterson recommended a Commutation to Life Imprisonment.

As will be noticed, the History of the Mc Naughton Case is in many respects similar to that of the Frank Case.