Copyright © 2017 by Miriam C. Davis
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Published by Chicago Review Press Incorporated
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ISBN 978-1-61374-871-8
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FOR MY BROTHER TIM, WHO GAVE ME THE IDEA
Contents
Preface
1 Evil Descends
2 The Cleaver
3 Dagoes, Sugarcane, and Muffulettas
4 The Davi Murder
5 The Black Hand
6 The Cleaver Returns
7 A German Spy?
8 Axeman Hysteria
9 The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz
10 “Hung by the Neck Until Dead, Dead, Dead”
11 Verdict
12 False Lead
13 Rosie and Saint Joseph
14 The Final Chapter?
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Preface
ONE HOT SUMMER AFTERNOON about thirteen or so years ago, my brother Tim and I were sitting on my front porch drinking bracingly cold English cider. The conversation turned, as it always does on these occasions, to the subject of serial murder. . . .
Tim told me about a case he had read about as a boy, about a killer who went around New Orleans whacking Jewish bakers with an axe. Ever since I read Ann Rule’s account of her erstwhile friend Ted Bundy, I have been fascinated, in a scared sort of way, with serial killers. I don’t know what moved me to look into this further; I was deep into another topic at the time. Probably it was nothing more than the urge to procrastinate. But look into it I did, and found that the New Orleans case involved not Jewish bakers but Italian grocers. Eventually, I got hold of Robert Tallant’s Ready to Hang, which formed the basis of most other accounts of the Axeman. Robert Tallant was a New Orleans writer of the mid-twentieth century who, according to one reference librarian in the New Orleans public library, may well have gotten much of his information by hanging out in New Orleans bars.
In a chapter titled “The Axman Wore Wings,” Tallant tells the story: On the morning of May 24, 1918, Joseph and Catherine Maggio, Italian immigrants who ran a small grocery, were discovered dead and bloody in their bedroom. They’d been assaulted with their own axe and had had their throats cut. Nothing appeared to have been stolen. The assailant had gotten in by cutting out a panel in the back door.
In the course of their investigation, police found a peculiar message written on the banquette (an old New Orleans term for sidewalk) near the Maggios’ home and grocery: “Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney.” The police remembered that seven years earlier, in 1911, three other Italian grocers had been murdered with an axe; in two cases their wives had also been slain. Tallant gave the grocers’ names as Cruti, Rosetti, and Tony Schiambra. Was Tony Schiambra’s wife the “Mrs. Toney” of the sidewalk message? Tallant asked. Was this a message from the Italian Mafia? Had the couple been slaughtered by gangsters for some unknown misdemeanor? No one was ever charged with the murders, so these questions were never satisfactorily answered.
The next month Louis Besumer, a Polish grocer, and Harriet Lowe, the woman who lived with him, were also attacked with an axe and seriously injured. Again, the weapon had been the grocer’s own. Again, a door panel had been removed. And again, nothing was reported stolen. This time both victims survived, at least temporarily, and Lowe, who changed her story several times, accused Besumer first of being a German spy and later of having tried to kill her. When she died of her wounds two months later, Besumer was charged with murder.
Over the next fourteen months, the killer, nicknamed “the Axeman” by the press, racked up a litany of victims: Mrs. Edward Schneider, August, 5, 1918 (survived); Joseph Romano, August 10, 1918 (died); Charles, Rosie, and Mary Cortimiglia, March 10, 1919 (Mary died); Steve Boca, August 10, 1919 (survived); Sarah Laumann, September 3, 1919 (survived); and Mike Pepitone, October 27, 1919 (died). In almost all cases the modus operandi was the same: back door panel cut out, the victim’s own axe used, weapon abandoned at the scene, and nothing stolen. Most but not all of the victims were Italian grocers. Fear of the Axeman paralyzed the immigrant community. Some terrified Italians couldn’t sleep at night without posting guards to stand watch. Phantom Axemen were seen everywhere. Stories circulated about grocers waking in the morning to find a door panel chiseled off and an axe outside their door.
Louis Besumer was acquitted of Harriet Lowe’s murder, but his was not the only trial. Rosie Cortimiglia accused two neighbors, elderly grocer Iorlando Jordano and his son Frank, of having attacked them and having killed their two-year-old daughter out of business rivalry. Even though her husband, Charles, testified that the killer had not been either man, father and son were convicted of murder and eighteen-year-old Frank was sentenced to death. Later, Rosie admitted that she had lied because she hated the Jordanos.
Shortly after the Cortimiglia attack, the New Orleans Times-Picayune received a letter purporting to be from the murderer. He was “a fell demon from the hottest hell,” the letter claimed, and would descend on New Orleans the coming Tuesday night looking for a victim, sparing anyone listening to jazz. Tallant reported that the designated evening, March 19, was Saint Joseph’s Night, and it was “the loudest and most hilarious of any on record” as jazz blared all over the city.
After the death of grocer Mike Pepitone in August 1919, the attacks finally stopped. And in Tallant’s account, the story seems to have had a dramatic—and satisfactory—sequel out in California: On December 7, 1920, Esther Pepitone, the widow of Mike Pepitone, shot and killed a New Orleans man named Joseph Mumfre in Los Angeles. She told the police that Mumfre was the Axeman, that she had seen him as he fled after murdering her husband. Convicted of his murder, Tallant wrote, she served only three years before being freed.
According to Ready to Hang, Joseph Mumfre was a career criminal who was well known to the New Orleans police. And the dates he’d been in and out of prison matched the dates when the Axeman attacked and when he seemed to have disappeared.
So, was Mumfre the Axeman? Tallant said that the evidence was only circumstantial, and most New Orleanians believed that more than one killer was responsible. The two main theories were that the Mafia was responsible, or the killer was a “homicidal maniac,” a “Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” type as suggested by one of the investigating detectives.
This was the story that I found on the web and in crime anthologies when I first began researching the Axeman case. Most of the available sources basically repeated Tallant’s version of events.
While Tallant left the question of the Axeman’s identity open, I found that some writers seem to have swallowed whole the theory that Joseph Mumfre was the killer. In a list of male serial killers, for instance, forensic psychologist Eric Hickey listed “Joseph Mumfre” as the Axeman of New Orleans. In Bloodletters and Badmen, crime writer Jay Robert Nash argued that Mumfre was a professional killer who used an axe to kill Pepitone and other victims as part of a Mafia vendetta.
Others, however, questioned aspects of Tallant’s account. In an early edition of his Hunting Humans: The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers, vol. 1, crime writer Michael Newton reported that city records showed that no Italian grocers named Cruti, Rosetti, or Schiambra had been killed—by an axe or anything else—in 1911.
I had an opport
unity to check out some of these questions in the early 2000s soon after I became interested in the Axeman case. At the time, my husband and I visited New Orleans once or twice a year. On one of our visits, I popped out of the French Quarter to visit the city archives, located in the public library conveniently across Canal Street in the Central Business District. Examining homicide and coroners’ records for 1911, I discovered that while no Cruti, Rosetti, or Schiambra had been murdered that year, a sleeping Italian grocer named Joseph Davi had been—his skull fractured and his wife cut up in the middle of the night. That such a basic fact about the case and one so easily discoverable had been missed suggested that the story had never really been properly investigated. Maybe, I thought, there’s a book here.
Since I began working on The Axeman of New Orleans, two well-done works on the subject have appeared (both times nearly giving me a heart attack): Keven McQueen’s chapter on the Axeman in The Axman Came from Hell, and the account given by Gary Krist in Empire of Sin. If either narrative had been available when I first read about the Axeman, I might have never written this book. Both are useful, well-researched explorations of the Axeman’s crimes. But both, I will argue, are incomplete. They don’t answer questions that can, in fact, be answered.
In the course of examining the tale of the Axeman, moreover, I became fascinated by the experience of the Italian—usually Sicilian—grocers he preyed on, particularly in the case of the Jordanos, the father and son accused by Rosie Cortimiglia. The teenaged Frank and his elderly father, Iorlando, were as much casualties of the Axeman as any of his other victims. The story of Frank and his family merits telling because it illustrates the experience of Italian immigrants and the niche they carved out for themselves in the social hierarchy of early twentieth-century Louisiana as well as the social prejudice against them.
Mafia aficionados shouldn’t worry. The story also involves the gangsters of the Sicilian underworld.
What follows is the result of my own investigation into the Axeman of New Orleans murders based on an examination of all available sources. This has been a different kind of history than I was trained to write in graduate school. I wanted to write something analytical that would be fully grounded in the sources but would also appeal to a wide audience by telling a story rather than merely being an analysis of a list of murders.
A college friend of mine who was studying English once remarked that the great thing about being a lit major was that unless someone could prove you absolutely wrong, you could say anything you wanted. I assure the reader that this is not the approach I have taken here. While I’ve tried to tell the story as what is sometimes called creative or narrative nonfiction, I’ve stayed true to my obligations as a historian. Everything I write can be justified on the basis of what is found in the historical record, although I’ve sometimes had to use my judgment when choosing between conflicting accounts in, for example, rival newspapers. On occasion, I’ve relied on deduction and common sense to connect dots and piece together what must have happened and what must have been experienced by the individuals in my story.
Anything in quotation marks is from a written document, usually a newspaper, police report, or court record. Sometimes these quotations have been condensed or edited for clarity, especially when they’re based on varying accounts found in different newspapers. I have sometimes modernized spelling. Italicized dialogue has been imaginatively reconstructed when I felt that something like it must have been expressed but didn’t have direct evidence of exactly what was said. I’ve been careful to remain faithful to the historical evidence and context. In some cases I’ve inserted personal thoughts or feelings—but, again, always based on deductions from the historical evidence.
Full passages of italicized text indicate a re-creation of scenes that no one but the killer himself was witness to. For insight into the elusive killer, I’ve relied on modern forensic psychology.
Endnotes have been consolidated as much as possible, while still providing full documentation. Anyone wishing to retrace my footsteps should be able to do so.
Among the questions that I began my research hoping to answer were:
Were all the killings named by Tallant actually Axeman crimes?
Did the Axeman murders begin with the murder of Joseph and Catherine Maggio?
Was the Mafia involved?
Were all the Axeman’s victims Italian, and if they were, why did he target them?
Why did Rosie Cortimiglia accuse Frank Jordano and his father of murdering her daughter? Did she later change her story, and if so, why?
Did Esther Pepitone murder Joseph Mumfre?
Most important, was Joseph Mumfre the Axeman? And if he wasn’t, who was?
How do the answers to these questions help one understand what it was like to live in New Orleans during the Axeman’s reign of terror?
In the course of my investigation, I discovered that Tallant was wrong in many details, some unimportant, some not. At the end of “The Axman Wore Wings,” he wrote, “It is extremely doubtful that anyone will ever know more” about whether Mumfre was the Axeman. He was wrong about that.
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Evil Descends
3 AM, Sunday, March 9, 1919
THE KILLER BALANCED ON the chair as he looked through the window, straining to see the figures in the bed. It was a moonless night; he couldn’t see much by the light of the one electric bulb dimly illuminating the room. It didn’t matter. He knew they were there. He went around to the back and broke in in the way for which he was famous, carefully chiseling out a panel of the heavy kitchen door. He worked steadily, taking his time, pausing when he needed to; no reason to hurry. When the panel finally came off, he slipped his gloved hand through the door and eased back the bolt. Once in, he moved surely through the tiny kitchen, in stocking feet so his heavy boots wouldn’t clatter on the wood floors, straight through the dining room, past the door leading to the small grocery, and stopped at the bedroom door. He paused, listening to the breathing of the sleeping figures. Then, getting a tighter grip on the heavy axe, he entered the bedroom.
Minutes later, his work done, he walked unhurriedly through the dining room and the kitchen, out the door, and down the steps. He tossed the axe carelessly under the house, human hair still clinging to the quickly drying blood. Sitting down on the stoop, he pulled his boots back on, tugging at them firmly before lacing them up. Then he vanished into the night. The Axeman of New Orleans had claimed another victim.
Carnival had just ended. Only four days before, the murderer and his victim had both jostled with the crowds flooding the streets of New Orleans. Mardi Gras was meant to be a sedate affair this year, very unlike the one two years before in 1917. That year it was celebrated with all its magical grandeur, perhaps with a little more intensity than usual given that anyone could see that the United States was about to go to war. The Carnival season, between Epiphany and Lent, was a season of balls, pageants, parades, and general exuberance. It culminated in two hedonistic days before Ash Wednesday. New Orleanians were not reticent about enjoying themselves in anticipation of Lent; maybe they thought they needed the pagan holiday to get through the penitential season.
Each year on the eve of Mardi Gras, Rex—King of Carnival, Monarch of Mirth—arrived at noon, steaming up to the landing at the foot of Canal Street in his royal yacht, where he was met by thousands of his frolicsome subjects. Dressed in white satin and silver cloth, he led his parade through the heart of the city, accompanied by mounted police, artillery battalions, sailors, marines, National Guardsmen, and Boy Scouts. At city hall, the mayor presented Rex with the keys of the city, inaugurating his merry thirty-six-hour rule. On Fat Tuesday, Rex again processed through the streets, leading a parade of floats so elaborate they took their krewes a full year to create. In 1917, framed in a great golden crown, Rex had led a dazzling pageant of twenty floats whose theme, “The Gift of the Gods to Louisiana,” used glittering images from ancient mythology to illustrate the wonders of the state. T
he crowds loved it.
Mardi Gras wasn’t just about parades and pageants. On Fat Tuesday the population itself took to the streets in costumes and masks. Clowns, gypsies, elves, and pirates packed into Canal Street and danced to jazz bands playing on street corners; red devils and black-faced minstrels added a touch of the grotesque, children dressed as bumblebees a touch of the comical. The city center became a playground for high-spirited antics. Identities safely hidden, people dared what they’d never do unmasked. Maskers danced with complete strangers; respectable women invaded bars; masked matrons peeked into houses of ill repute on Basin Street.
But in 1919, Rex announced that this year he would not leave his palace in Araby the Blest to descend upon New Orleans. Celebrations had been canceled in 1918 because of the war. Such frivolity didn’t seem quite right with American boys dying in French mud. The thousands who enjoyed the pageants and parades and costumes swallowed their disappointment and looked forward to the resumption of festivities at the end of the war. March 1919, however, just four months after the end of a conflict that left over 116,000 Americans dead, still seemed too soon. The celebration of Carnival was scaled back. A few modest parades were planned, private masked balls were permitted, but the Times-Picayune tried to lower expectations: “There will be no gorgeous pageants to fill the streets with a blaze of color and light.”
Apparently, no one checked with the people of New Orleans.
By ten on the morning of Mardi Gras, the spirit of Carnival had overwhelmed the city fathers’ reluctance and spontaneously impelled thousands of masked merrymakers into the streets. Costumed in bright silks, satins, and velvets, revelers swaggered up and down the banquettes, hung out of slick new automobiles, and hitched rides on horse-drawn wagons. The twang of banjos and the reedy hum of clarinets floated through the air. A truck carrying a calliope pushed its way through the crowds, adding its steam-driven whistles to the general din. Elves, gnomes, hula dancers, Spanish dons, Cherokee warriors, and harem beauties made their way down Saint Charles Avenue. Cross-dressing was surprisingly popular, with young women uniformed as soldiers competing for attention with grown men made up as Japanese geishas. No “modest, even . . . somber Carnival” was this. By midday any pretense that the day was in any way normal had vanished; the city was one big party. Businesses closed. Housewives found themselves abandoned by household help who had joined the masked throngs. Even the weather cooperated, an approving sun driving out threatening clouds.
The Axeman of New Orleans Page 1