The Italian community might have been understandably jittery, but the rest of the city was resigned to the likelihood that the Maggio murders would in all probability not be solved. Confusion as to what kind of killer the city faced—a bloodthirsty fiend or a criminal gang—only unsettled people more.
Then another grocer was attacked.
≡ 7 ≡
A German Spy?
ALL OF NEW ORLEANS was uneasy in the wake of the Maggio murders. The Italian community, especially, stirred apprehensively. Memory of the first two attacks in the fall of 1910, the subsequent murder of Joe Davi, and the assassination of the Sciambras created an undercurrent of anxiety, a worry that Italian grocers had special reason to fear. Gossip about a new and lethal Black Hand gang or a fiend with a grudge against Italian grocers was whispered up and down Little Palermo as the city struggled to make sense of the latest killing.
Then, just a month after the Maggio murders, when the police still had hopes of stumbling upon a Reidel-case-like clue and running it to ground to find the killer, an axeman struck again. This time, however, the victims were not Italian.
6:50 AM, June 26, 1918
Thursday morning dawned hot and humid. It was going to be another sweltering New Orleans summer day. But John Zanca wasn’t thinking about the weather when he stopped his delivery wagon in front of the People’s Cash Store, a grocery owned by an Eastern European immigrant named Louis Besumer.
The Besumer grocery.
Zanca stared at the shuttered store, puzzled. It was his usual time, but the little yellow grocery sat closed and bolted shut. Who was going to accept his bread delivery?
He jumped out of his wagon and knocked on the door. No answer. He knocked again, more forcefully. Nothing. He hammered on the door. When he still got no reply, Zanca walked from the store entrance on North Dorgenois Street around the corner to a door facing Laharpe Street that led directly into the grocer’s residence.
Rapping on the door, at the same time he called out, Is anybody home? Finally, he heard footsteps on the inside shuffling toward him.
But the door still didn’t open. Zanca strained to make out the muffled words from the other side: Come around to the front.
Zanca turned and walked again to the store entrance. The door of the grocery finally opened a crack, and Louis Besumer’s unshaven face peered out. Usually a distinguished-looking man who tried to exude a sophisticated, European air, this morning the grocer looked aged and haggard. Zanca was startled to see that his face was streaked with blood.
“My God, what’s happened?” gasped Zanca.
Grimacing slightly as he dabbed at his bloody head with a sponge, Besumer replied, “Nothing. Don’t worry about it. There was an accident.”
Has your wife been hurt? asked Zanca, concerned for the attractive black-haired woman who lived behind the store with Besumer.
The old man didn’t know. When Zanca pressed him, Besumer brusquely told Zanca to check on her himself. Brushing past the grocer, Zanca hurried through the store into the residence and made his way down the hall to the second bedroom. There he found the woman lying blood-soaked and nearly unconscious in her bed. When she opened her eyes to see the young man leaning over her, she whispered, “I’m cold.” Despite the hot day, Zanca looked around the room, grabbed some clothes off the floor, and tucked them around her as best he could.
Returning to the grocery store, Zanca told Besumer that he was going to call the Charity ambulance.
No, don’t do that, Besumer responded hastily. Just fetch a doctor.
But she’s cut up pretty bad!
Besumer gave up. “Suit yourself,” he shrugged. He was pale and drawn, without the energy to argue. Zanca later told police that he seemed weak.
You should go lie down, Zanca suggested as he sped away to alert the nearest policeman.
Besumer was lying on his bed when a squad from the Fifth Precinct arrived at the grocery a few minutes later and entered the scene of what would later be called “one of the queerest [mysteries] in the annals of New Orleans crime.”
The store fronted a two-bedroom residence with a hallway and a small, screened back porch at the end of the hall. On the porch, fresh blood pooled around a woman’s hairpiece. The wooden handle of an ancient short-handled axe lay nearby; its rusty blade sat a good five feet away. Both were bloodstained. Bloody footprints led from the porch through the hall, into the bedroom, and right up to the bed where the woman still lay, covered in blood.
Realizing that he had another axe attack on his hands, the corporal in charge immediately notified his commander, who informed the superintendent of police. Before the morning was out Frank Mooney, Assistant DA Ben Daly, Coroner O’Hara, and a handful of detectives had congregated at the small grocery and residence.
Sketch of the Besumer crime scene.
One of the first things investigators noted was the fresh blood: The attack must have occurred only a short time before, perhaps an hour before John Zanca’s delivery wagon pulled up to the grocery. Its basic outline could be reconstructed without much difficulty: The woman had been struck on the porch so violently that the axe blade had flown off its handle. Somehow she’d managed to stumble from the porch to her room and collapse on her bed.
There was no sign of forced entry.
As the Bertillon operator busied himself fingerprinting the axe and photographing the bloodstains, detectives considered Mrs. Besumer’s bedroom. (Later Louis Besumer explained that he and his wife had separate rooms because the noise of the electric fan that he ran all night kept Mrs. Besumer awake.) They noted that the room’s windows sat right on Laharpe Street and were well lit by a nearby streetlight; anyone passing by on the busy street could see straight into the bedroom. If this attack, like the other axe attacks, had begun in the bedroom, the assailant risked being seen by passersby. And if an intruder had broken into the grocery, the policemen wondered, didn’t the victims scream for help? And if they did, why didn’t any of their neighbors hear them?
Next, investigators checked Louis Besumer’s bedroom. Someone had gone through the contents of his dresser and wardrobe and left them scattered about the room, but nothing seemed to have been taken. The only blood in the room was on the pillow.
Robbery hadn’t been a motive. No one had touched the grocery safe, and Mrs. Besumer’s jewelry was still in the dresser; the cash in her pocketbook remained where she had left it.
James Reynolds was dead and John Dantonio had retired, but several of those inspecting the crime scene were veterans of the previous axe attacks. Dr. O’Hara was still the coroner, and George Long remained chief of detectives. Ben Daly, the assistant district attorney, had been at his job since 1909. The experience of men who had seen the Axeman’s work before would no doubt prove valuable to the new police superintendent.
Leaving his capable detectives to untangle the scene at North Dorgenois and Laharpe Streets, Superintendent Mooney went to Charity Hospital to check on the injured couple. Both victims had head injuries. Besumer had a single wound, a long cut over his right eye. The blunt, rusty axe blade may have fractured his skull, but it was not, house surgeon Hiram W. Kostmayer assured police, a life-threatening wound. The woman’s injuries were much more serious. In addition to several gashes on her arms and chest, she had been hit twice on the head, cracking her skull. Severe brain trauma can damage the body’s ability to regulate itself, which explains why earlier she had been so cold on such a hot day.
The seriousness of Mrs. Besumer’s injuries made the police even more anxious to question her. Senior Captain Thomas Capo spoke to her as soon as the doctors would permit. Doped up on painkillers, she stared hazily at him when he asked what had happened.
I don’t know, she replied.
Was there a fight on the gallery?
Oh, yes. A mulatto wanted to buy some tobacco after the store opened. When I told him that we didn’t sell tobacco, he attacked me.
The attack had taken place before the store opened. Mrs. Besume
r had been found in her nightclothes, not dressed to wait on customers. Her story couldn’t be true. But Capo dutifully wrote it all down.
Louis Besumer.
Frank Mooney himself interviewed Louis Besumer. The grocer told him that he was sixty years old, from Poland, and had lived in New York before moving to Jacksonville, Florida, about two years ago. There he met and married Harriet Anna Lowe. They’d bought the grocery after moving to New Orleans three months ago.
Besumer said that he didn’t have a clear memory of what had happened to them the night before. He had woken to find himself bleeding and the door leading into Laharpe Street open. When he’d discovered his injured wife, he said, he covered her with a sheet.
Later police interviews with neighbors told Mooney even more about Besumer. He was a strange man with pretensions to culture and sophistication unusual in a small-time grocer. Claiming to speak thirteen languages, he bragged about being rich. Rumors circulated that he’d traveled extensively in Europe and Mexico, that he’d owned a coffee plantation in South America and a sheep farm in Kentucky. Everyone said that he sold groceries cheaply, too cheaply some thought. How could he stay in business if he sold below cost? No one knew where he got his money.
The neighbors couldn’t, however, tell investigators much about the early morning events at the grocery. And as Mooney thought about it, several oddities struck him about the attack. If, as the detectives calculated, the assault had occurred between 6 and 7 AM, the neighborhood would have been awake and moving. Yet a canvas of the surrounding area revealed that no one—mulatto or otherwise—had been seen leaving the People’s Cash Store early that Wednesday morning. No one had heard any screams or sounds of a struggle, or spotted any strangers. Someone had seen a light on about midnight. But when questioned, Besumer denied knowing anything about that.
And almost right away, Mrs. Besumer had contradicted part of her husband’s story. At some point in her pain- and drug-induced daze on the morning of the attack, she had babbled to a policeman, “My husband is a German. He claims he is not. I don’t know where he got the money to buy his store.” And that made him a possible suspect as well as a victim.
Mooney quickly sent men to search Besumer’s private papers. The search revealed letters and documents written, according to which newspaper one read, in Russian (the States), Yiddish and English (the Times-Picayune), or German, Russian, and Yiddish (the Item). At any rate, it was a foreign correspondence that sent police into spasms of patriotic suspicion. Rumors of code books and international intrigue immediately ignited and led to accusations that the grocer was, at the very least, involved in propaganda for the Germans. HATCHET MYSTERY MAY LEAD TO SPY NEST trumpeted the Times-Picayune. Federal authorities were contacted and informed about the possible threat to national security, and Mooney barred reporters from talking to the Besumers.
Mooney took the possibility of espionage seriously. Charges of being a German agent were no joke in the summer of 1918. The United States had entered the war in Europe in April 1917, and fear of German saboteurs led to the Espionage Act of 1917, the Sedition Act of 1918, and a steady stream of propaganda encouraging citizens to be on the lookout for enemy agents.
Anti-German hysteria soaked the country during the war years. German Americans everywhere came under suspicion. Books in German were burned, and schools abolished German language instruction. Those suspected of disloyalty could be forced to kiss the flag, beaten, or literally tarred and feathered. In Illinois, persecution spilled over into murder when vigilantes lynched an innocent young German immigrant.
Louis Besumer could very well have been both a Pole and a German. That is, Poland had ceased to exist as a state in 1795 when it was divided among Prussia (which would later become Germany), Russia, and Austria. Besumer might well have been an ethnic Pole born into German-controlled territory and, as such, might have spoken German but have no great love for the German Empire. Most Americans in 1918, however, wouldn’t have understood these finer details of Polish and German history.
Suspicion that Besumer was an enemy agent made his situation precarious indeed. Perhaps, the Times-Picayune suggested, Besumer himself had attacked his wife when they had quarreled over his secret work. The police were determined not to be outsmarted by any of the “spy’s” clever tricks: when Besumer sent his wife a bathrobe for use in the hospital, officers ripped out its lining, fruitlessly looking for secret messages.
Still, Superintendent Mooney thought he should make an effort to find Mrs. Besumer’s mulatto, and so, the day after the attack he ordered the arrest of Lewis Oubichon, a light-skinned, sometime employee of Besumer’s. Oubichon couldn’t satisfactorily account for his movements the night before the attacks, so the police held him for several days. But since no other evidence against him surfaced, he was soon released.
Among the newsmen who clamored for the latest information on the investigation was James G. Coulton of the Times-Picayune. Only twenty-three, Coulton was already a seasoned crime reporter with a reputation for fairness and accuracy. He also possessed a keen sense of justice, a commitment that went beyond mere platitudes uttered in the pressroom. His sense of right and wrong would lead him to become more involved with the Axeman case than he would have ever suspected. But in June 1918, all he wanted to do—along with every other reporter in New Orleans—was get details about the Besumers.
Louis Besumer was released from Charity six days after the attack and the next day found himself in Frank Mooney’s office, answering the superintendent’s questions. For Mooney, it was an infuriating interview. For much of the two-hour conversation, the eccentric grocer seemed more interested in showing off his erudition than in helping the police find the person who’d attacked him. While he answered some questions, he also wandered off on irrelevant tangents, and Mooney had difficulty keeping him on topic. When Mooney asked him a simple, direct question about one of the languages he claimed to speak, Besumer just smiled and “proceeded to tell about the people who speak it and sketched out their history.”
Besumer also insisted that he wanted to take an active part in the investigation. One can only speculate what Mooney thought to himself when the grocer solemnly informed him that he was a student of chemistry and criminology, “a born investigator” qualified to help solve the crime. “I am a man who leaves nothing undone,” he informed Superintendent Mooney. “I will not rest until the case is cleared up. I want to know who attempted to kill [us].”
Louis Besumer was a pompous bore. But was he a criminal?
Mooney eventually dragged some relevant information out of the grocer. Before the war he’d been a wholesaler, buying goods in bulk and reselling at a profit. His health suffered from constant travel and endless fattening restaurant meals, and he opened his grocery, he said, to follow his doctor’s advice: get into a lower-stress business. Because of his knowledge of the wholesale market, he could buy staples like coffee and sugar in bulk and, to attract customers, undersell his rivals. But, he pointed out, “The other articles in my store I sold no cheaper—some things I sold even higher—than other stores.”
Besumer also elaborated on his relationship with the woman everyone thought was his wife. One of the first things he had done when he was released from the hospital the day before was announce (perhaps prompted by the rumor that his ex-wife was in town) that Mrs. Besumer was actually “Mrs. Lowe,” a divorcee. She was not his wife. He was divorced, he said, and his former wife lived in Cincinnati. The twenty-nine-year-old Harriet Anna Lowe, he maintained, was only a friend with whom he had a brotherly relationship.
Still in the hospital, Mrs. Lowe was alarmed when she heard about his confession. By Wednesday, almost a week after the attack, physicians at Charity thought she’d probably survive. By this time Mooney had lifted the ban on press interviews, and she was well enough to talk to reporters. Mrs. Lowe insisted to Jim Coulton that she was indeed Besumer’s wife, that they had been married two years ago in New York.
Harriet Anna Lowe was a naive
, good-natured woman, devout and perhaps not overly intelligent. At one time she’d been attractive, but the blows to her head had permanently disfigured her. Her facial nerves had been so badly damaged that she couldn’t move one side of her face; one eye stared out sightlessly, the other “twitche[d] uncontrollably.” Her head was swathed in bandages; wounds on her arms and chest were also bandaged.
Harriet Anna Lowe.
Mrs. Lowe readily admitted that her mind and her memory hadn’t been clear since the attack, but she told Jim Coulton, “I feel sure he and I are married,” adding plaintively, “If we are not, then I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Undoubtedly, Jim Coulton couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
As the opiates and shock wore off, the sort of incoherent rambling Captain Capo had encountered when he first interviewed Mrs. Lowe dissipated. Her answers to police and reporters’ questions were perfectly lucid. She retracted her story about being attacked by a mulatto but also emphatically denied that Louis Besumer had been the one to take an axe to her.
As her mind cleared, Mrs. Lowe remembered more and more details from the night of the attack. After ten days in the hospital, she could remember closing up the store about 7:30 PM. Going from the grocery into the back rooms, she saw Besumer sitting in front of the safe, counting the day’s takings. She turned into the tiny dining room, carved out of the hallway, and the last thing she could remember was the smell of prunes simmering on the stove.
The Axeman of New Orleans Page 12