The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  HARRIET CRUTTI WOKE FROM a sound sleep to find the shadowy figure of a man standing over her with a meat cleaver. The apparition, holding up the mosquito netting with one hand, and waving the bloody cleaver at her with the other, came sharply into focus as he demanded her money: “Or I’ll do to you what I just did to your husband!”

  Panicking, Mrs. Crutti looked down and saw her bloodied husband lying still across the foot of the bed. “You’ve murdered him!” she screamed. Terrified, she did the only sensible thing: she reached under her pillow for the box containing eight dollars (a significant sum in 1910) and handed it over.

  It wasn’t enough to satisfy the man with the cleaver: “Is that all you got? I want all of it!” Yes, she insisted. Just take it. Mrs. Crutti was too frightened to mention the more substantial amount of money under the mattress. Fortunately, the intruder believed her. He turned around and strode out of the bedroom, and through the Cruttis’ combination grocery/bar/residence, snatching up their pet mockingbird in its cage as he went. Tossing aside the meat cleaver in the yard, he retrieved the shoes he’d taken off and climbed over the back fence, leisurely walked a block down Lesseps Street until he reached the corner, and sat down on a doorstep. There he flipped open the latch on the birdcage and freed the bird. Then he deliberately rolled a cigarette, leaned back against the stoop, and smoked it. Afterward, he pulled on his shoes, stood up, and sauntered down Dauphine Street.

  Harriet Crutti.

  At the same time, Mrs. Crutti, afraid that her husband was dead or dying, was desperately trying to shake him awake. Groaning, he tried to rise, only to fall semiconscious off the bed. One of the Cruttis’ young sons added to the chaos by waking up and starting to cry, panicking his mother even more. Frantic, Mrs. Crutti left her husband on the floor and ran out into the street. She pounded on her neighbors’ doors. Please! Open up! My husband’s hurt! No response. Some slept through the commotion. Others looked through their windows to see what was happening. But all the doors remained shut. For an agonizing fifteen minutes Mrs. Crutti lurched desperately along the dark and deserted street, running from house to house, pleading for help. She finally managed to rouse Officer Gus Albert, a policeman who lived nearby. Officer Albert, still in his nightclothes, grabbed his revolver and rushed after the assailant, now long gone.

  Grocer August John Crutti,

  the Axeman’s first victim.

  The injured grocer was taken to Charity Hospital while the police arrived to investigate. They soon discovered that earlier that night the assailant had stolen the meat cleaver from a butcher’s stall six blocks away. As the police reconstructed the crime, at about three o’clock on that Saturday morning, the shoeless intruder had removed a pane of glass from the Cruttis’ kitchen door (presumably to reach in to the bolt) but had ended up using a railroad shoe pin (a thin, curved steel bar used to couple railroad cars and a common burglary tool for prying doors and windows open) to force the door. Their small business was typical of its time: a small grocery and bar attached to the family’s living quarters. Moving noiselessly, the intruder passed through the kitchen, through the grocery store, and on into the bedroom. There he pulled back the mosquito netting that protected sleepers in subtropical New Orleans from the harassing insects, raised the stolen meat cleaver, and struck the sleeping grocer twice.

  But why?

  The forty-year-old son of an Italian immigrant, August Crutti and his twenty-nine-year-old wife Harriet had opened their store on the corner of Royal and Lesseps Streets only a month before. It was located in the Bywater District of New Orleans, a block from the Mississippi River, just over a mile and a half east of the French Quarter. Crutti had been in the ice business, but he had worked hard to save the money to buy his own grocery, a modest establishment in a modest neighborhood. August and Harriet shared the small house with their two young sons, Jake and August Jr., and eighteen-year-old Arthur, Crutti’s stepson. What could they have done in just a month to provoke such an attack?

  Once the blood was cleaned off, Crutti’s injuries turned out to be far less serious than they’d first appeared. He’d been cut on the head and chest, but neither wound was life-threatening. By Saturday afternoon he was sitting up in his bed at Charity Hospital, smoking a cigarette and patiently answering the police’s endless questions about the evening’s events. He remembered going to bed at midnight but then having an attack of heartburn. Thinking that a cool drink might make him feel better, he got up to get a glass of water and then walked about the house for a bit before going back to bed. The bed was crowded by the presence of his seven- and eight-year-old sons, so Crutti lay with his head toward the foot of the bed, where he fell asleep about an hour before the assault. He remembered nothing about the attack itself; as far as he knew he’d been fast asleep when the first blow fell.

  No one could come up with any reason for the attack. Neither Crutti could think of anyone who would harm them. August Crutti admitted to an enemy from his days in the ice business but scoffed at the idea that he would have been capable of such an assault.

  Besides, his milquetoast enemy didn’t match the description that the police had put together based on the accounts of Mrs. Crutti and a neighbor who’d happened to look out of the window in time to catch a glimpse of the assailant. The police were looking for a man thirty-six or thirty-seven years old; about five foot six inches tall; broad shouldered and clean shaven; with dark hair, thick nose and lips, and a rough, husky voice. He’d worn dark trousers, a loose blue workingman’s shirt, and a black derby hat.

  The man in charge of investigating this puzzling crime was Chief of Detectives Jim Reynolds. The forty-two-year-old policeman hailed from Algiers, right across the river. Joining the police force at age twenty-five as a supernumerary clerk, he’d rapidly been promoted to plainclothes officer, detective, and finally chief of detectives. Portly, with a fleshy face that became almost cherubic when he smiled—as he often did—Reynolds was easygoing and likable, a chain-smoking joker who liked good company and good stories. Popular with the men under his command as well as the reporters assigned to the police beat, he was intelligent and sensible, with a reputation for hard work, a detective who would work a case as long as was necessary. As a seasoned veteran of robbery, kidnapping, and murder investigations, he shouldn’t have been stumped by a simple robbery and assault.

  Chief of Detectives James Reynolds.

  But Jim Reynolds was as mystified as anyone. He walked slowly through the house and grocery, surveying the crime scene. He assumed that the incident at the Cruttis’ home and grocery was just a robbery, although an odd one to be sure. If he was after money, the robber must have checked the grocery first and, finding nothing, realized that all the cash was probably in the proprietor’s bedroom. But why attack the sleeping grocer? Had Crutti stirred in his sleep, frightening him? Why did the assailant take the risk of talking to Mrs. Crutti? Why take the bird? And given that he had just committed a hanging offense—for that was what assault with a deadly weapon was—for what possible reason did he take his time leaving the crime scene?

  The most common supposition was that the attacker was plain mad. After crawling all over the little grocery examining the evidence, hearing the Cruttis’ story, and interviewing the neighbors, most policemen were inclined to shrug their shoulders and dismiss the criminal as “drunk or crazy.” Not much else made sense. August Crutti’s own idea was that “some half-witted fellow” did it for the money.

  The description of the attacker, and the description of two strange men seen hanging about the grocery on the night of the attack, gave detectives enough evidence to question a “well-known police character.” A couple such characters were brought to Mrs. Crutti for identification. No, she said both times, not the man I saw with the cleaver.

  Finally, after about two weeks, detectives got lucky. Chief Reynolds had decided, quite reasonably, that a criminal who acted as oddly, even irrationally, as the Crutti assailant did, was probably either mentally ill or drug addled.
And he’d instructed his men to be on the lookout for such a person. So when a known burglar who had spent time in a mental hospital came to the attention of detectives, they leapt on him.

  John Flannery was an addict—a cocaine and morphine “fiend” the newspapers called him. He also was a petty criminal with a history of burglary to support his drug habit, a previous arrest for assault, and features that roughly tallied with the description of the Crutti assailant. When he was caught breaking into a grocery two weeks after the attack on August Crutti, Mrs. Crutti was called down to police headquarters. There she unhesitatingly identified him as her husband’s attacker. Police were also able to connect Flannery with a series of other burglaries in which a railroad shoe pin similar to the one left in the Cruttis’ grocery had been used. The case against him seemed clinched.

  But it wasn’t perfect. At age twenty-five, Flannery was a bit younger than the mid-to-late-thirties man described by witnesses. And he vehemently denied the crime, even after hours of interrogation by Reynolds and St. Clair Adams, the district attorney. But Harriet Crutti’s identification was positive, Flannery fit the physical description of the attacker, and he was the kind of criminal the police had suspected all along; the case appeared likely to close in short order.

  On September 9 John Flannery was indicted for feloniously breaking and entering into the Crutti residence and assaulting August Crutti. But he never went to trial. Doubts about his fitness to stand trial led to a commission to assess Flannery’s mental condition. The commission consisted of two doctors, E. M. Hummell and Joseph O’Hara, a neurologist who was also coroner and city physician of Orleans Parish. The doctors concluded that Flannery’s mental state had been compromised by drugs and alcohol, that he was suffering from disorganized schizophrenia, and that he was “insane and irresponsible [and] . . . a permanent menace” to society.

  O’Hara and Hummell recommended that Flannery be placed in an insane asylum. He was not committed immediately, however, for he was still in Orleans Parish Prison, the city jail, almost a year and a half later, when Dr. O’Hara reported that his mental condition had improved considerably, and he now appeared perfectly sane. Under normal circumstances the correct procedure would have been to take Flannery to trial. But by that time District Attorney Adams had reason to doubt Flannery’s guilt and declined to prosecute, arguing even if he were guilty of the Crutti attack, Flannery had been irresponsibly insane at the time of the offense.

  Yet the end of August 1910 seemed to bring the Crutti case to a gratifying conclusion. Reynolds was satisfied that he’d found the culprit. Crutti went home to his family after only one night in the hospital. Even the liberated pet bird made its way home and was spotted on the roof of the grocery.

  A month later the attacker struck again.

  A man crept up to the grocery and residence of Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto shortly after 1:45 AM on the morning of September 20, 1910. Tonti Street and London Avenue (now A. P. Tureaud Avenue) was a rundown, crime-ridden part of town, mostly poor and black. This sparsely populated neighborhood on the outskirts of New Orleans hardly seemed part of a proper city at all, littered as it was with pigpens and cowsheds and barely passable dirt roads.

  Conchetta and Joseph Rissetto.

  The Rissettos, both children of Italian immigrants, had done well in spite of their impoverished neighborhood. Their business among the local “Negro” population was so successful that five years earlier they had been able to build a new grocery and barroom and add a poolroom. The cottage they built alongside their business was bigger than those of many other small grocers; it had the extravagance of both a parlor and a dining room, as well as a bedroom and kitchen. At forty-two and thirty-six years old, Mr. and Mrs. Rissetto had been married for seventeen years. With no children, they had only each other for company and were a devoted and loving couple.

  The man quietly approaching the Rissettos’ home and business early that Tuesday morning probably cared about none of this. He carried a stolen meat axe, similar to a butcher’s cleaver but, at three pounds, a little heavier. From the cowshed in the back he stole up to the kitchen and climbed through an unlatched window. Inside the house, he walked past the open door leading into the grocery. Entering the bedroom, the intruder went over to the woman’s side of the bed and with a knife sliced open the mosquito netting, exposing the sleeping couple. He raised his weapon. He brought it down purposively on the helpless woman. The first blow hit her in the face, breaking her right cheekbone. As she reflexively twisted away from her attacker, he struck her again, and again, cutting deep into the left side of her face and slashing her neck. He moved around to the other side of the bed and struck her husband twice in the face, one blow slicing cleanly though the cartilage of his nose. The assailant then dropped his meat axe into the tangled, bloody strands of the mosquito netting. He didn’t stop to take anything but made his way out of the house, going through the poolroom behind the kitchen, opening the door leading out into the yard, and heading toward the fence in the front yard.

  Awake now, Joseph Rissetto felt something warm running down his face. He tried to get up, but, blinded by the blood in his eyes and stunned from two blows, all he could do was fall out of bed. Frantically crawling around on the floor on his hands and knees, feeling blindly around for matches, hurting badly and unable to see, he painfully managed to light a lamp. Still barely able to see, he groped his way to a dresser where he grabbed a revolver and staggered to a side porch to fire two shots into the air.

  Help came fast. Hearing the shots, Bartholomew Pratts, one of the Rissettos’ black neighbors, ran over to investigate. He found Rissetto sitting on his bedroom floor, his bloodied face in his hands, barely able to speak. Pratts immediately raised the alarm, sending for an ambulance and the police. As word spread that something horrible had happened down at the Rissettos’ place, neighbors and relatives made their way in the dark down to the grocery where they could do little but wander through the house in shock and confusion, sickened by what they found. The Rissettos’ bedroom resembled, according to one newspaper, a “slaughtering pen.” Blood soaked the bed and was smeared all over the floor. Traces of Mrs. Rissetto’s hair, cut by the blows of the axe, lay bloody on the bedclothes. She still lay in her own blood, unrecognizable, in great pain, pleading for help. Her distraught husband begged someone to help her. There was, however, little anyone could do except attempt to comfort them and wait for the ambulance.

  But the Charity Hospital ambulance couldn’t reach them. The cratered and rutted roads were impassible. Charity had only just replaced its horse-drawn ambulance with a motorized one, which wasn’t up to the neighborhood’s mud and potholes. Rescuers had to carry the victims by stretcher four blocks from their home to the waiting vehicle. Joseph and Conchetta were then taken to the hospital, he permanently blinded in one eye and disfigured for life, she with injuries so severe that surgeons didn’t expect her to live.

  A mounted policeman, Harry Gregson, who’d heard the gunshots, was the first to gallop over the rough terrain to the Rissetto place. He was the beginning of an impressive police response. Chief Reynolds and District Attorney Adams were awoken from their beds, and city officials, detectives, and uniformed policemen descended on the grocery in the early morning hours, newspaper reporters not far behind.

  Chief Reynolds found his policemen scouring the house and neighborhood as best they could in the dead of night. Even by candlelight, they could trace the intruder’s movements through the manure and mud tracked into the house and the doors left open as he departed. Joining his detectives in their search, Reynolds took careful note of the fact that nothing in the grocery appeared to be disturbed; the cash register had twenty-three dollars in it; the safe, which held several hundred dollars, had not been tampered with. Valuables in the bedroom were also untouched: Joseph Rissetto’s gold watch and chain were still in the drawer where he’d left them; thirty-five dollars sat on the dresser. Reynolds knew very well that John Flannery was sitting in the par
ish prison; he also noted how similar this crime scene was to that of the Crutti grocery.

  Once he’d been thoroughly through the crime scene, Chief Reynolds went with several of his detectives and District Attorney Adams to the hospital. Joseph, in much better condition than his wife, had the most to say. But even Conchetta, as badly wounded as she was, did her best to whisper answers to the detectives’ questions.

  Other than a romantic rival he had had for his wife years earlier, Rissetto couldn’t think of any enemies. He knew of people who disliked him—mostly customers who’d been refused credit and threatened him from time to time—but he didn’t believe any of them would actually try to kill him. Both the grocer and his wife assumed that the crime must have been committed by someone bent on robbery. But this bloody attack was so unlike the type of crime usually associated with the poor, black population of his neighborhood that Reynolds doubted the explanation was so simple.

  Once daylight came, Reynolds’s men searched the Rissettos’ home and grocery again. Assistant Chief of Detectives Dan Mouney combed over the yard outside the grocery, meticulously making note of all the footprints crisscrossing the property and trying to identify to whom they belonged. Investigators traced footprints leading into the pigsty and footprints leading from the cowshed. Two sets of tracks were spotted outside the kitchen window, leading to speculation that two people were involved. Impressions of bare feet led some investigators to argue that the assailant had been shoeless.

  Over the next several days, the police questioned suspect after suspect, without making any progress. Most were black; all were dismissed as possible assailants. Investigators remained thoroughly baffled.

  Meanwhile, Reynolds uncovered a curious fact. The meat axe used in the attack had been stolen from a butcher’s stall in a local market several weeks previously. And a large butcher knife stolen from the stall at the same time had turned up a week or so ago at a burgled grocery less than two miles from the Rissetto grocery. This made the crime even more puzzling. The criminal appeared to be a thief who had robbed one grocery without hurting anyone, as well as an assailant who viciously attacked the Rissettos without stealing anything. The chief of detectives shook his head. None of this made any sense.