The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  In the bedroom, it was clear that the intruder had hammered the grocer mercilessly, smashing his skull and drenching the bed and the bottom half of the mosquito netting in blood. Joe Davi had been attacked while he was asleep, with no chance to fight back; the revolver still lay on the side table, untouched and useless. He’d been hit with such force that the impact of the blows had collapsed the top of the moss-packed double mattress in at a fifteen-degree angle. Skull fragments and bits of brain littered the sheets. On Mary’s side of the bed, detectives could see the bloody print left on the wall where she’d put out her hand to steady herself as she’d staggered to the window in response to Ernest Boyer’s knock. The mug that had hit her in the face lay on the floor.

  After assaulting Mary, the assailant left by the door opening onto Arts Street. As far as the detectives could tell, nothing had been stolen. Despite his demand for money, the man hadn’t tried to take the sixty-four dollars in cash hidden under the pillow—an obvious place for a burglar to look. Contents from the wardrobe and a trunk were scattered about, but Mary’s jewelry was undisturbed. Small amounts of money were still in drawers. Nothing indicated that the attacker had robbed the place.

  The police found no weapon other than those belonging to the Davis at the scene. The nature of Joe Davi’s wounds—and the similarity of the attack to the Crutti and Rissetto crimes—made everyone assume that it was a cleaver of some sort. Davi’s wounds, the inquest would later show, were caused by “a blow with a sharp-edged though heavy blade almost in the center of the head, crushing through scalp and bone . . . just such an injury as would have resulted from a blow with a butcher’s cleaver.”

  Some never had any doubt about who had viciously attacked the young grocer. On Wednesday morning the Daily Picayune screamed, FIENDISH CLEAVER ABROAD AGAIN.

  After inspecting the crime scene, District Attorney St. Clair Adams went to the hospital to interview the victims. There, the doctors told the district attorney that Joe Davi was beyond help and certainly beyond interviewing. Adams turned his attention to Mary, but he didn’t get far. All the shaken young woman could get out coherently was that the attack took place around 1 or 1:30 AM and the attacker was a white man. A more in-depth interview would have to wait until she recovered from the shock.

  Investigators at the scene were interviewing friends, neighbors, family—anyone who happened to be there. Warren Doyle, an assistant district attorney, tried to question Peter Davi, Joe’s older brother. When Peter, having just seen the bloody mess that had been his brother’s bedroom, ignored Doyle and insisted on seeing his brother immediately, he was arrested and forcibly taken to the district attorney’s office.

  The next day Chief Long made his own attempt to interview Mary. He found her recovering in the women’s ward. She lay pale and still in the white hospital bed, her eyes still reflecting the pain of her wounds. Bandages covered her face and cheek where she’d been cut; under the bandages her bruised face had turned a deep bluish-purple. She had cuts and bruises on her right arm and hand as well, presumably from the same weapon that had injured her husband.

  Mary repeated the story she’d first given detectives, a little more coherently this time. She’d heard nothing until she woke to see the man ransacking the wardrobe. She remembered very little after having been hit. She was clear that he spoke English.

  “Are you sure about the man speaking English?” asked Long.

  “Positively he spoke English,” she replied. Unaccented English, she insisted, so she knew he wasn’t an Italian.

  Even though she had only glimpsed him by the light of the single taper burning in the bedroom, Mary was able to provide a description of the man. He was white, clean-shaven, about five foot eight or ten, and not especially strong looking. He wore a blue jumper—a workingman’s shirt—and black pants, but no hat. He’d moved soundlessly across the floor, so she thought he must have been barefoot.

  The chief thanked Mary for her help and left. What he had not told her was that earlier that day her husband had died. No one else told her either. She was allowed to believe that he, too, was in the hospital, gravely wounded but expected to recover. Because of her youth and prettiness and pregnancy, discreetly referred to in the newspapers as her “delicate state,” the girl inspired a great deal of sympathy among the press and the public. Her physicians advised against telling her about Joe’s death just yet, arguing that the shock, on top of her injuries and the trauma of her experience, would be too much for her. It’s likely they were concerned about the baby she was carrying.

  That night a wake was held in her parents’ parlor, and the funeral service took place there the next day. The black-clad procession then accompanied the casket to the cemetery. As Joe Davi was laid to rest, his wife lay in her hospital bed wondering when they’d finally let her see him.

  Chief of Detectives George Long had almost no technology with which to catch a killer. The New Orleans Police Department mostly investigated crimes with shoe leather and gut instinct.

  Nevertheless, the science of investigation had progressed rapidly in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. In the late 1870s, Alphonse Bertillon, a clerk with the Sûreté in Paris, developed a system for classifying criminals based on measurements of various body parts. Each person had a unique collection of measurements that could be collected and used for identification. In the 1880s bertillonage, as it came to be called, spread over Europe and the United States.

  Bertillon’s system arrived in New Orleans in 1897, and by 1911 Inspector Reynolds had two Bertillon operators. For each criminal the Bertillon expert painstakingly took eleven measurements and recorded the information on a card, along with a more general description of the arrestee—hair color, eye color, identifying scars—and two mug shots, both a profile and frontal view. Mostly, the New Orleans police used the Bertillon cards for criminals who originated elsewhere—that is, criminals who might be wanted in other jurisdictions. The police knew their homegrown felons by sight.

  The Bertillon system, as clever as it was, was soon overtaken by an even more accurate system of identification when Frances Galton published Finger Prints in 1892. Police departments, however, were sometimes slow to be convinced of the superiority of fingerprinting over bertillonage. Not until 1911 was fingerprint evidence used for the first time in an American courtroom. Only in 1918 did fingerprints begin to be added to Bertillon cards in New Orleans.

  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, great strides were also being made in criminology. In 1893, Hans Gross, an Austrian judge, published Criminal Investigation: A Practical Handbook for Magistrates, Police Officers, and Lawyers, the first textbook of scientific criminology. Gross’s handbook was a thousand pages of advice on how to examine witnesses, behave at crime scenes, handle the press, deal with hair, blood, and fiber evidence, preserve footprints, make use of experts, and handle dozens of other tasks that could be brought to bear on solving crimes.

  There is little evidence that anyone in New Orleans read it.

  The Bertillon operator did take photographs of the crime scene for the New Orleans Police Department, and the city chemist could determine if rust-red stains were blood, but otherwise it was a decidedly low-tech organization.

  Many detectives probably preferred it that way. They didn’t put their faith in science. They trusted intuition and a lifetime of dealing with criminals. Jim Reynolds himself said that to be a good detective a man didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes. “All he needs is to use his eyes, and have the widest circle of acquaintances he can get,” Reynolds shrugged, “and exercise the horse sense God gave him.” Horse sense could take investigators a long way. Detectives were expected to know the local criminals, where to find them, and who their associates were. When a crime was committed, the investigation usually started with “a well-known police character.”

  Homicide investigation as a specialization didn’t exist. Inspector Reynolds, Chief Long, and their detectives investigated whatever came their way—
robberies, assaults, blackmail, and murder. The nature of homicides in New Orleans meant that most of them didn’t require much investigation. The big question was often not “Who did it?” but “Was it self-defense?” as many barroom killers claimed. But even with a mysterious death in which the perpetrator wasn’t immediately obvious, Long and his men proceeded much as they did with any other crime.

  In the case of murder, a detective would talk to people, figure out who benefited from the death, and proceed from there. The inspector’s detectives knew that “motive is the clew [sic] which leads to the solution of half the crimes committed.” If there was no motive, that, too, could be a clue. One reason Reynolds hauled in the drug-addicted Flannery for the Crutti attack was that he couldn’t imagine what sensible criminal would commit such an odd—and pointless—crime.

  When detectives found a likely suspect, they grilled him. Without the luxury of fingerprint or DNA evidence, and especially if there were no witnesses, detectives relied on sweating suspects until they confessed. Policemen found that the pangs of conscience were a marvelous thing. Most people feel a natural impulse to feel guilty when they’ve done wrong, and they have an equally natural impulse to relieve their guilt by telling someone. Investigators have always exploited this to clear their caseloads. This is why Assistant District Attorney Warren Doyle’s reflexive response was to arrest Peter Davi immediately and take him in for interrogation. As a relative of the victim, Peter was bound to be interviewed anyway, and even the mere appearance of wanting to avoid an investigator’s questions was enough to get him arrested.

  As natural as the urge to confess is, sometimes detectives gave nature an assist. If a few hours of questioning didn’t work, detectives might resort to the “third degree.” This innocuous-sounding term covered a range of interrogation techniques from intense psychological pressure to physical torture, limited only by the imagination of the interrogator. Documented instances of the third degree include sleep deprivation for days on end, withholding food and water, sticking the suspect in a sweatbox, hanging the suspect out of a third-floor window, forcing the accused to spend the night in a room with the dead body of the victim, and for the unimaginative, a thoroughly old-fashioned beating. Sometimes the mere threat—a detective taking off his jacket, rolling up his shirtsleeves, and flexing a rubber hose—would be enough to induce a confession.

  The use of the third degree was widespread in the early twentieth century. Some policemen denied it happened; others boasted about it. Illegal in Louisiana, it was used anyway. Some policemen made it quite plain that they found such intense interrogation a useful professional tool: “I’ve forced confessions,” bragged one, “with fist, blackjack and hose—from men who would have continued to rob and kill if I had not made them talk.” In the course of their careers as detectives both George Long and Jim Reynolds were accused of employing the third degree. A murder defendant (later acquitted) once testified that Chief Long had stuck a revolver in his gut and threatened to shoot him unless he confessed to the crime.

  Without a doubt, some in the New Orleans Police Department used these sorts of tactics, and it’s very likely that Reynolds or Long themselves applied them in one form or another. The Daily Picayune praised Reynolds as a cop who “knew the effect of moral suasion and the weight of a blow.” This suggests that Reynolds could get rough—and that the Daily Picayune approved. At the conclusion of one murder investigation, the Times-Democrat thought it worth noting that District Attorney Adams obtained two confessions “through persuasion and without the slightest use of force.”

  Even if their methods didn’t spill over into physical or psychological mistreatment, they certainly did bring intense pressure to bear during interrogations. Chief Reynolds had once shaken an iron dumbbell in the face of the accused in an attempt to make him look at the murder weapon. If New Orleans detectives did slap a suspect around from time to time, they almost certainly did so with a clear conscience when convinced of his—or her—guilt. In his own case, Long probably felt justified in using rough methods to get a confession since the defendant had been caught with the victims’ diamonds.

  Reynolds and Long didn’t beat confessions out of any of the Cleaver suspects. They wanted the guilty party, not a warm body coaxed into confessing; they questioned suspects and released most of them. John Flannery never admitted to assaulting August Crutti, and after the Rissetto attack the authorities dropped charges against him. Frank Armistead, a black suspect in the Rissetto attack, was questioned and released. Peter Davi, dragged protesting into the patrol car, wasn’t in custody long.

  When Reynolds and Long got hold of a questionable character but had no way to connect him to a particular crime, they used the “flim flam” technique. New Orleans police called it that too, writing “flim flam” on the suspect’s Bertillon card. That is, they could charge a suspect with being a “dangerous and suspicious character” and get a judge to throw him in the parish prison for a few weeks. This was a routine practice with known troublemakers and a useful way of keeping a suspect on ice without having to worry about the niceties of evidence.

  Whatever their deficiencies in technology or respect for constitutional rights, Jim Reynolds and his detective force were determined to find the midnight intruder with a grudge against grocers.

  After Joe Davi died, the governor of Louisiana posted a $500 reward for information leading to the capture and conviction of the killer. In the meantime, Chief Long had over half his detective force working the case, including his “Italian Specialist,” John Dantonio. Dantonio was himself the son of an Italian immigrant, a tailor who had come over from Palermo. He was the only Italian on the force. Joining the police department in 1896 and promoted to detective in 1902, Dantonio had a reputation as a smart and resourceful officer. He had been involved in the Crutti and Rissetto cases but was to play an especially large role in the Davi murder.

  John Dantonio, the “Italian” detective.

  The investigators worked out of police headquarters, housed in the First City Criminal Court Building, at Saratoga Street and Tulane Avenue, where the New Orleans Public Library is now located. The court building was a three-storied, redbrick, neo-Gothic affair, its turrets and Romanesque arches a strange contrast to the tropical flavor of most of the city’s architecture. The high ceilings lent elegance to the building while having the practical effect of keeping it cool. The summer heat was eased when breezes off the river blew through the high rectangular windows, ventilating the offices. Pictures from the period present patrolmen in belted woolen tunics and rounded helmets, detectives in suit coats and tightly knotted ties. No one willingly dressed like that in a New Orleans summer. More likely, when Chief Long, Assistant Chief of Detectives Daniel Mouney, and Detective Dantonio gathered in the Detectives’ Office to consult and send their investigators out with fresh instructions, their ties were loose, their white shirts sweat stained, and their useless coats flung over their chairs.

  By Wednesday—a day after the attacks were discovered—most of the investigators were working on the case from before dawn until late into the night. For days they did nothing else. While everyone else in New Orleans tried to stay out of the sweltering July heat, they tramped up and down dusty streets, canvassing neighborhoods, asking the same questions over and over. Did anyone see anything suspicious that night? Were there any strange men in the neighborhood? Did Davi have any particularly troublesome customers? Did he have any enemies? Had he quarreled with anyone recently? They talked to neighbors, friends, relatives, housewives who shopped in the grocery, men who hung out in the saloon, and peddlers who delivered produce in one-horse carts. They picked up known police “characters” and shadowed possible suspects. They searched the dank, roach-infested shacks near the woods close to Davi’s grocery, terrifying the destitute residents. Every lead, no matter how trivial, was pursued.

  Amid all the activity at police headquarters Wednesday evening, Joseph Rissetto entered the building and asked to speak to one of the de
tectives working the case. He badly wanted to help the investigation however he could. No one had to ask why. The vivid scar across his nose and his blind right eye explained all. But he could tell the detectives nothing that would lead to Joe Davi’s killer.

  At first, what baffled the police was that no one seemed to have any reason to kill Davi. His family assured them that he had no enemies. Investigators didn’t turn up any. Frustrated, Dantonio told a reporter: “There is no apparent motive here.”

  The detectives kept digging.

  By the end of the week they thought the tedium of their repeated questions had paid off. They finally had a promising suspect.

  Joe Davi’s friend Ben Gallin told police about Sam Pitzo, a Sicilian truck farmer who had come to see Joe in his saloon about a week before his murder. They got into quite an animated conversation, Gallin recalled. Gallin couldn’t tell what they were saying since they spoke in Italian, but the conversation seemed to take an angry turn and ended when Joe took two dollars out of the cash drawer and shoved it at Pitzo to get rid of him.

  After the truck farmer left, Joe told Gallin that the man had hit him up for cash with a hard-luck story of a sick wife. Pitzo wanted more than Joe was willing to give him, and he didn’t take being turned down graciously. Joe told Gallin that he was worried the man might be trouble.

  Detectives immediately brought Sam Pitzo in for questioning. At first, he didn’t give them enough information to warrant holding him. But the officers didn’t let up. They asked neighbors about the truck farmer, who turned out to have an unsavory reputation. His real name was Sam Parieno. He regularly went around the neighborhood spinning stories of bad luck and pleading for money. The police also found evidence that he had lied to them about how much time he had spent in Davi’s neighborhood. They didn’t have the evidence to move against him just yet, but Long ordered his men to keep an eye on the shady truck farmer.