The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Frank Jordano and his girlfriend Josie Spera joined the flood of humanity that darkened the Central Business District, floating along with the crowd down Canal Street, laughing at the masked sprites, the satin-clad cavaliers, the women dressed as redbirds. They tried to listen to the primitive jazz band at the corner of Saint Charles and Canal, heroically attempting to make its ragtime heard over the cacophony of the crowd. They gaped at the red devils and harlequins driving delivery wagons. They ate hot dogs on Canal Street from a vendor hawking them from the back of his wagon. All day and into the night, they shared the streets with the happy crush of surging humanity.

  They also shared the streets with a more sinister companion. He, too, enjoyed the crowds and the masks and the music. But his was a malevolent spirit that threatened Frank and Josie and their future happiness.

  That night, that memorable Mardi Gras, Frank was a happy young man, ambitious and optimistic. An exemplary son of Sicilian immigrants, he worked hard and made big plans. At seventeen he was already an insurance agent and engaged to Josie, a sweet local girl; he anticipated a flourishing American life, a happy family, a prosperous business. But three nights after Mardi Gras, Josie had a dream. She dreamed that evil was about to descend on the neighborhood. She was prescient. Frank’s life was about to become a nightmare.

  Screams tore through the quiet Gretna neighborhood on an otherwise tranquil Sunday morning. Hazel Johnson, a young black woman, bolted out of the Cortimiglias’ combination residence and grocery, yelling for someone, anyone to help—the Cortimiglias had been murdered!

  Frank Jordano was upstairs in bed when his twenty-year-old sister Lena’s hysterical cries—“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!”—punctured his sleep. Panic-stricken, thinking something had happened to their mother, he tumbled down the stairs, dressing on the way. Facing his sister, shirt unbuttoned, shoes on without socks, he demanded, “Lena, what’s the trouble? Is it Mama?”

  “They’re dead,” she wept. “Mr. Cortimiglia, Mrs. Cortimiglia, and the baby are dead.” Dazed, he stared at her: “Do you mean that?” “Yes,” she insisted. “Hazel Johnson came running out hollering that they were dead.”

  At that moment, he looked up to see Ella Kennedy, Hazel’s aunt who had accompanied her on her errand to the store, coming out of the alley that led to the back of the Cortimiglias’ place, screaming that the baby was dead.

  Still buckling his belt and buttoning his shirt, Frank raced into the alley that separated his home from that of the Cortimiglias, ran down it and around to the kitchen entrance to the Cortimiglia home. Despite the recent dispute between the families over rental property, he liked the Cortimiglias. And he adored their little girl. Sprinting up the steps to the little house, he joined the growing crowd that crammed into the single, small bedroom. Peering over the heads of the others who’d already arrived, what he saw there changed his life.

  Charles Cortimiglia and his young wife Rosie lay draped across their bed from opposite sides; the body of their dead toddler lay still between them. The room was soaked in crimson. Blood drenched the bed; it speckled the wall and stained the curtains; it pooled on the floor. You could have wrung buckets of it out of the mosquito bar, the gauzelike netting that had covered the sleepers. From one wall, a picture of the Virgin Mary gazed serenely down on the pain and blood.

  Frank’s parents had beaten their son to the scene. Even old Mr. Jordano, achy with rheumatism, had moved faster than he’d done for months and had followed his wife from their house to their neighbors’, curious and frightened at the same time. Mrs. Jordano took in the situation at a glance: Rosie lay still. Charlie was barely conscious, awash in his own blood, half on and half off the bed, kneeling with his upper body slumped across it. Going over to him, Mrs. Jordano asked, “Mr. Charlie, Mr. Charlie, what can I do for you?” A voice from the back of the crowd advised, “Don’t do anything until the doctor comes.” Charlie Cortimiglia could barely shake his head. Feeling helpless but desperate to do something, Mrs. Jordano went to get a bucket of water and a cloth to bathe his bloodied face. Frank took her place by the side of the bed, asking, “Charlie, for Christ’s sake, who done this?” Charlie couldn’t speak before he passed out. Frank cradled his neighbor in his arms as he kept him from falling over. As he did so, he glanced at the body of the toddler lying beside him. The little girl had been playing at his house only days before. Frank—big, husky, 275-pound Frank—began to cry.

  Pictures that appeared in the Times-Picayune after the attack on the Cortimiglias.

  Charlie came to and moved his lips as if trying to speak. Frank leaned down to make out what he was saying. Charlie was only able to get out “Frank, I’m dying. Get my brother-in-law” before lapsing into unconsciousness again.

  Determined to carry out what seemed very likely to be Charlie’s dying wish, Frank left him in the care of his parents and the other neighbors and went outside. As he left the house he ran into his sister Lena, who had finally found her nerve and come to see for herself what had happened. Pale and wiping away tears, Frank knew that she wasn’t ready for the scene he’d just left. “Don’t go in there,” he snapped as he darted past. “If you see what’s in there, it’ll kill you.” Running on, he hurriedly hitched up his horse and buggy, leapt into the seat, and snapped the reins.

  Under the circumstances, Frank reckoned that finding a doctor was a higher priority than locating a brother-in-law. Charlie Cortimiglia would forgive him if he briefly delayed his errand. The first doctor he called on was not at home. Having better luck with his second choice, Dr. G. W. Rossner, he begged him to hurry to the Cortimiglias: “People are dying down there!”

  After the doctor promised to head right over, Frank turned his buggy in the direction of Amesville, a small farming community about three miles up the river from Gretna. Setting his horse to a brisk trot along the dirt track running next to the Southern Pacific Railroad line, he thought unhappily of news he had to deliver: that the Cortimiglias had been cut up and robbed. For that, reasonably enough, was what he assumed had happened. Perhaps the thought flitted across his mind that they had been victims of the “fiend”—that’s what the newspapers called him—from across the river. But no, he had never struck in Gretna, always in New Orleans itself. Frank flicked the reins to make the horse go faster.

  Dr. Rossner arrived at the Cortimiglias’ to find a houseful of people milling about the bedroom. He took one look at the figures on the bed and realized he could do nothing for them. What they needed was Charity Hospital, and as soon as possible. Fortunately, Manny Fink had already realized that.

  Emmanuel Fink—“Manny” to his neighbors—engineer, machinist, businessman, and city councilman—was an energetic man used to taking charge. Living only half a block from the Cortimiglias, he had been one of the first to be roused by Hazel’s cries. After seeing that Rosie and Charlie were still alive, he left the bedroom and grabbed Tony Winters, the first person he met on his way out of the house, and ordered, “Come back here; these people are all chopped up.” He stationed Winters at the bedroom door with orders not to touch anything and not to let anyone else touch anything.

  Fink then telephoned everyone he could think of: the sheriff, the chief of police, a couple of doctors, and the Charity Hospital ambulance. Charity Hospital was not as helpful as he had expected. The big-city hospital, he was informed, did not extend their ambulance service to his side of the Mississippi. The unpaved roads of little Gretna were so bad that the hospital was afraid of the ambulance getting stuck on the far side of the river. For God’s sake, Fink insisted, two people are dying here. Well, the hospital offered, we could have the ambulance meet you at the foot of Jackson Avenue. You just have to get them to the ferry and across the river.

  Fink wasn’t left with much choice. He returned to the Cortimiglias’ to find the police chief and deputy sheriff. He reported the hospital’s response and then went home to get his own horse and wagon. Hitching up his horse as quickly as he could, Fink drove back to the Cortimigli
a place.

  There, someone had found a thin mattress to use as a stretcher. Gingerly, Rosie was placed on the mattress and numerous hands gently lifted her into the wagon. But what about Charlie? Fink looked around, not seeing another potential stretcher. Then someone had the clever idea of using the bathroom door. Someone else grabbed the axe—covered in congealed blood—that had already been found underneath the house and knocked the door free of its hinges. As Charlie was carried out of the room, Fink glanced back to see two pieces of skull lying on the bed. Shaking off the sight, he snatched up the reins and sent his horse as fast as he dared down the dozen blocks to the ferry.

  Little Mary Cortimiglia’s body was left lying on the bed. A neighbor put a blanket over it. Someone else called Fred Leitz’s undertaking parlor.

  Dr. Henry Leidenheimer strode down the wide hallways of Charity Hospital toward the Accident Room. As the surgeon on duty, new cases were reported to him first. At thirty-nine, he was an experienced surgeon. And Charity, despite the name, was a good hospital. Established for the poor in the early eighteenth century, it was one of the oldest public hospitals in the country and a well-regarded teaching hospital for Tulane Medical School. The main building dated from 1832; the very solidity of the imposing three-storied brown structure, lateral wings flanking both ends of the central corridor, was reassuring. Overcrowded and chronically short of funds, Charity nevertheless managed to provide a fairly decent standard of care for the city’s needy, both white and “colored,” by the standards of the time. The Cortimiglias would need all the expertise Charity and Dr. Leidenheimer had to offer.

  In the treatment room, Leidenheimer examined the couple, now lying on clean white metal hospital beds instead of their makeshift stretchers. Axe wounds didn’t particularly surprise him; the presence of axes and hatchets in most homes for chopping firewood made them obvious weapons of choice in domestic disputes; irate people in New Orleans periodically took a swing at each other. Only last year, a man had gotten himself shot when he took after a friend with a kitchen axe. But these were particularly bad cases. A quick glance told him that Charlie probably wouldn’t live: two severe cuts had sliced through his head, fracturing his skull and cutting into the soft tissue and brain beneath; his traumatized brain had swollen, oozing through the fractured bone like mud through the slats of a chicken crate. Dr. Leidenheimer shook his head. All he could do for Charlie was clean his wounds with antiseptic, dress them, and hope for the best.

  By then Dr. Jerome Landry had come on duty and taken charge of Rosie. She had several gashes on her head and one on her left ear. Much more serious, a blow to the left side of the head had left her with a depressed fracture, pressing in on her brain. Dr. Landry didn’t think Rosie was likely to survive, but he could perform a craniotomy, a procedure to relieve the pressure on her brain. Without much optimism, he ordered her wheeled into the surgical amphitheater. He didn’t bother with anesthesia; Rosie’s injuries made it unlikely that she would wake up during the surgery. Besides, he wanted to avoid the risk of oversedating and accidentally killing her. Rosie survived the operation, but afterward, still without much hope, Dr. Landry, as he later put it, “sent her back to the ward to die.”

  Which she stubbornly refused to do. By Monday morning her relatives—parents, sister, brothers, brother-in-law, and niece—were pouring in from surrounding parishes and gathering at the hospital, waiting for any sign of improvement. Charity had no waiting room in which to confine them. They were a nuisance for the nurses, crowding about, begging to see Rosie and Charlie, and demanding to know who was responsible for the attack. Her niece Anna implored hospital authorities to let her see her aunt. I can speak to her in Italian, she insisted. She’ll tell me who did this. While Anna pleaded, Rosie’s stepbrother John threatened: “I must see her! She will tell me who did this and then something will happen!” He made such a fuss that the police had to step in to persuade him to listen to the nurses and leave.

  Rosie’s parents were the only ones allowed to see her. Mostly, she slept quietly, as her pulse and color gradually improved. From time to time, she mumbled in Italian or murmured her daughter’s name; at times she seemed vaguely to recognize her parents as they sat by her bedside.

  Charlie was still supposed to be dying. That’s what the doctors kept telling his in-laws. But, also not very cooperative with his physicians’ dire predictions, he hung on.

  Neither parent was in any condition to be told Monday when Rosie’s parents arranged for the funeral of their granddaughter. Children were buried in white, the color of innocence. Wealthy people could try to mitigate their grief with a grand display of a white coffin in a white hearse pulled by white horses in a white harness. The Cortimiglias could afford no such extravagance, even for their only child. On that dismal, rainy March day, relatives and neighbors clustered around a modest white casket as the little girl was entombed in one of the whitewashed vaults of the Hook and Ladder Cemetery. Almost certainly Frank Jordano and his parents were there. What must he have thought as he stared at the pathetic little casket? That little Mary had played in his parents’ store countless times? That she had called his own father “Grandpa”? Now she was dead, an ugly, violent, incomprehensible death. Who would bash a toddler in the head with an axe? Everyone in the cemetery must have asked themselves that, over and over. And as they listened sobbing to the final words said over the body of the little girl, no one would have disputed the New Orleans Daily States’ description of it as “one of the saddest funerals ever held in Jefferson Parish.”

  Mary wouldn’t be the Axeman’s only Gretna victim. That Saturday-night attack would damage her father’s business, ruin her parents’ marriage, and endanger the lives of the friendly neighbors who had only tried to help.

  Only thirty-one years after Jack the Ripper terrorized London and presented the world with a new kind of killer, fifty years before the term serial killer even existed, the police were ill-equipped to deal with serial murder. Jack the Ripper lives forever as the ghostly fiend of Whitechapel, and his five victims are among the most famous unsolved murders in history. But he is hardly the only one who got away with such crimes. Killers who target strangers and have no obvious motive are always difficult to catch. In the 1970s Ted Bundy killed over twenty young women before he was finally apprehended, despite over a dozen detectives in three states looking for him. The BTK killer of Wichita was caught after thirty years only because of DNA evidence and his own arrogance. The Zodiac killer of northern California evaded a forty-year manhunt, never to be captured or even identified with certainty.

  In the early twentieth century the difficulties of catching a serial killer—even identifying serial murders—were even greater. It was the dawn of a new age: police forces were becoming professionalized as they began wriggling free from the taint of corruption and patronage. While police procedures and investigative techniques were rapidly developing, the science of homicide investigation was still in its infancy. The art of profiling was unknown. Scientists had only learned how to distinguish human blood from animal blood in the last twenty years; detectives could now conclusively prove whether a pinkish stain was blood. Fingerprinting had only recently been introduced as a crime-fighting tool. Toxicologists in New York City’s coroner’s office were just beginning to systemically develop the discipline of forensic chemistry as a way of detecting poisoners. In Vienna, Freud was still unpacking the unconscious motives of the human mind. Detectives still operated mainly on legwork, gut feeling, common sense, their knowledge of their community, and the surprising willingness of suspects to confess.

  In New Orleans, where the killer struck first, some recognized that they faced no ordinary criminal. The city was blessed with two police superintendents who realized that they were stalked by a Jack the Ripper of their own, a different kind of murderer against whom traditional methods were . . . well, if not useless, at least limited. What they weren’t blessed with was luck. One, an experienced homicide investigator, met his own tragic end. Th
e other was a well-meaning bureaucrat defeated by office politics.

  Gretna was a small town, living in the shadow of its better-known neighbor across the river. Its murders were tragically mundane, arising from drunken brawls, jealous rivalries, and clumsy robberies. Crimes like these can usually be solved the old-fashioned way. With a serial killer, the police need to know what they are looking for. The authorities of Gretna, unwilling to face the reality that they couldn’t solve this appalling murder, convinced themselves that Frank Jordano and his father—a teenage boy and an old man—attempted to hack their neighbors to death over a rental dispute. Through their ignorance (which they couldn’t help), their willingness to bend the law in pursuit of an end (which they could), and perhaps their malice toward Italian immigrants, the Gretna authorities made the tragedy of Mary Cortimiglia’s death worse.

  Unrecognized by them, the attacks of the serial killer who had come to terrorize New Orleans had actually begun on a hot summer’s night some nine years earlier.

  ≡ 2 ≡

  The Cleaver

  3 AM, Saturday, August 13, 1910