The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Then everything went blank. A hazy memory of a black-haired man towering over her in the early dawn light had burned itself into her consciousness, followed by the recollection of waking up in a pool of blood on the porch. She got a glimpse of a man’s shoes moving around her. The next thing she knew she was in the hospital.

  Neither Mrs. Lowe nor Besumer could identify a possible suspect. Besumer could only suggest business rivals angry because he undersold them. At the same time, he tried to convince Mooney that the motive was robbery, arguing that a brass lock on a trunk in his room showed signs of an attempt to break it open.

  The federal government was also interested in the immigrant grocer and suspected spy. Two days after his interview with Superintendent Mooney, he was picked up by agents from the Department of Justice, the forerunner of the FBI, and interrogated about the letters discovered by the police. Whatever they got out of him, whatever arcane erudition he inflicted on them, wasn’t enough to hold him, and after several hours Besumer again went home to his grocery.

  Mooney’s investigation suffered a setback a week after the attacks when he had to reprimand two of his detectives working on the case. They’d been assigned to Besumer, ostensibly to help him with his own investigation but more likely to keep an eye on him. But one day during working hours, they’d skipped off to a dancing pavilion in Milneburg, a popular resort on Lake Pontchartrain, where they’d become embroiled in a brawl. Mooney not only gave them a dressing down, but also demoted both to uniformed patrolman, an almost unheard of action in the New Orleans Police Department but part of his campaign to impose stricter discipline on the police force.

  Many Orleanians speculated that the attack on Louis Besumer and Harriet Anna Lowe was connected to the Maggio murders, or even the whole previous series of axe and hatchet attacks. Newspapermen frequently mentioned the earlier attacks, even as mistakes in their articles showed that their memory of the details was a little foggy. Coming on the heels of the grisly slaying of Joseph and Catherine Maggio, the Besumer attack was naturally suspected of having some connection with the “fiend” who’d struck previously.

  Initially, Superintendent Mooney had believed that the couple had been attacked by the Maggios’ killer. As he mulled over the evidence, however, doubts began nagging at him. All the other victims were Italians. The victims in the Besumer attack were an Eastern European immigrant and an Irish American. Did it matter?

  Aside from the question of ethnicity, however, this latest attack differed from earlier ones in important details. Most of the other attacks had occurred in sparsely populated parts of the city. But the Besumer grocery, only a few blocks from Esplanade Avenue, was in a heavily populated neighborhood. And the other attacks took place between 1 and 3 AM, the stillest time of the night, usually on moonless nights. The Besumer attack had come after sunup, between 6 and 7 AM (after a night during which the moon was out all night), just as the streets were beginning to stir and when the intruder ran a greater risk of being spotted. Yet no one had seen any strangers enter or leave the premises.

  The Crutti, Rissetto, Davi, Andollina, and Maggio crimes all involved a break-in, and the victims were attacked while they slept. But Mooney had no evidence that anyone forced his way into the Besumer residence. And Besumer and Mrs. Lowe had not been attacked in their beds. The blood evidence made clear that Mrs. Lowe had been attacked on the outside gallery: Not only did the quantities of blood pooled on the porch testify to this, but it was the only way to account for the blood spray pattern on the outside door. And the blood-smeared gallery door handle indicated that a bloody hand had grasped it and pulled it open after the attack. Later, Besumer would claim that the back doors and windows had been left open because it was so hot, but shortly after the crime, the Times-Picayune reported that he assured the police that the back door had been locked when he went to bed. Whoever had opened the door had done it from the inside.

  Mooney wasn’t sure where Besumer had been assaulted. Certainly not in his bed. It wasn’t bloody enough. The only blood in the room were slight traces staining his pillow. Where was the blood spatter on the floor? The deep gash Besumer sustained would have bled profusely, and if he had been in his bed as he claimed, some of this blood should have ended up on the bedroom floor when he got up to answer John Zanca’s knock. Moreover, Zanca had said that when Besumer had called to him, his voice had sounded as if it were coming from a distance, perhaps Mrs. Lowe’s room, or from out on the porch, not his own bedroom as he had claimed.

  And why was Besumer so slightly wounded compared to Mrs. Lowe? While he might have sustained a skull fracture, he’d only been hit once: he only had the one gash over his eye. But someone had made a real effort to smash her skull. In most previous attacks the full ire of the attacker had been aimed at the man rather than the woman.

  Besides, Mooney found Besumer just plain shifty. The grocer had misled everyone about his relationship with Mrs. Lowe. Details of his story about living in Jacksonville hadn’t checked out. He admitted to using aliases. No, Louis Besumer, or whatever his name was, could not be dismissed as a suspect.

  Could Besumer have been the assailant?

  Perhaps no one had seen a stranger in the vicinity that morning because no stranger had been in the house. Perhaps Mrs. Lowe struck Besumer first, and he, wounded and enraged, grabbed the axe from her and chased her out onto the porch. If both were guilty, both had reason to keep silent about what had really happened. That would explain why Besumer didn’t want the police or ambulance called. Mrs. Lowe told Mooney that Besumer had read about the Maggio case. Maybe he hoped that the attack in his home and grocery would be attributed to the same murderous fiend.

  Mooney was convinced Mrs. Lowe wasn’t telling him everything she knew, and the circumstantial evidence he had wasn’t enough to make an arrest. The superintendent needed an eyewitness. If Besumer was to be charged, the woman’s testimony would be crucial. Mrs. Lowe, however, refused to cooperate. So Mooney pursued other leads and bided his time.

  On the fourteenth of July, as the city celebrated Bastille Day with a special fervor, given the American and French young men dying side by side in the war raging abroad, Louis Besumer arrived at Charity Hospital to take Mrs. Lowe home. After two weeks in the hospital, the doctors were ready to discharge her.

  Besumer had reopened the People’s Cash Store, and business, he boasted, was good. Let us go back to the way things were, he offered Mrs. Lowe. She had misgivings. By now she had conceded that they weren’t married, either because her memory had cleared or because she’d decided it was useless to continue to pretend. But she had nowhere else to go. She had no family—other than an abusive ex-husband. Her mother was dead and her father and sister were in Ireland. Where else was she to go other than the little yellow grocery at Laharpe and North Dorgenois Streets?

  The blows had left Mrs. Lowe mangled mentally as well as physically. In the days after returning home she showed classic signs of generalized anxiety and depression: she was shaky; she couldn’t concentrate; she was indecisive. She’d give orders to Mrs. Sacriste, who’d been hired to nurse her and help with the cooking, and then countermand them. She spent hours each day on her knees obsessively praying, and having visions of Jesus Christ. Mrs. Sacriste worried about Mrs. Lowe’s sanity.

  Outwardly, relations between Besumer and Mrs. Lowe remained cordial, but something happened in the month after she left the hospital, something that made her fear Besumer. Maybe he threatened her. Perhaps as more and more of her memories fought their way to the surface and became clearer and clearer, she became more and more afraid of him.

  Mooney didn’t forget about Mrs. Lowe. He felt sure there was something she could tell him to help him close the case. He dropped by the People’s Cash Store regularly to talk to her, taking Assistant DA Ben Daly with him. His efforts would eventually pay off. But not before another attack claimed the headlines.

  Twenty-eight-year-old Mary Schneider was tired as she crawled into bed on the evening of Augu
st 4, 1918. Caring for three small children and expecting another any day was an exhausting business. Her husband Edward worked the night shift at the Southern Pacific wharf, so she was alone at their home at 1320 Elmira Street (now Gallier Street), in the Saint Claude neighborhood on the eastern edge of the city, with her children safely tucked into the other room, when she turned down the lamp and went to sleep.

  Mary woke, days later, confused. This wasn’t her bedroom. Where was she? How did she get here? Had the baby come yet? As she fought her way out of the opiate cloud that fogged her brain, Mary dimly remembered that her baby had been born, a girl, named Clara.

  But why did her head hurt?

  The Charity nurses summoned her husband Edward, who hurried to her bedside to explain. She’d been attacked in the night, he told her, and had been taken to Charity Hospital. She was in the maternity ward and the baby was safe. But now the police needed her to identify her assailant.

  Did she see who had hit her? Did she know him? Shocked, Mary could only stammer, “Struck? Oh, no, I was not struck. Who said that anyone assaulted me?” She was even more surprised when Superintendent Mooney showed up at the maternity ward, detectives in tow, anxious to question her. But she could tell him nothing.

  Gradually, as her mind cleared, she began to understand what had happened. Mary’s sister Kate and her husband lived in one side of a double cottage; the Schneiders lived on the other. About two in the morning, Kate heard her sister scream. She shook her husband awake, and they rushed over to Mary’s house to find her barely conscious, a nasty gash on her scalp and several of her teeth cracked and broken. Mary managed to say that she didn’t know who had done this to her before she passed out.

  Once the injured woman had been dispatched to Charity Hospital, Superintendent Mooney and Chief of Detectives Long took stock of the crime scene. They could find no evidence that the house had been broken into; none of the doors or windows had been smashed or pried open. But the wardrobe in the Schneiders’ bedroom had been ransacked and its contents dumped on the floor. Questioning of Edward Schneider when he arrived home revealed that seven dollars was missing, but a tin box with a wad of cash—over a hundred dollars—hadn’t been taken.

  A broken lamp lying on the floor appeared to be the weapon used to batter Mrs. Schneider. The detectives spotted strands of hair caught in the prongs of the shattered lamp, and spots of oil that had been flung out as it smashed across her face stained the bedspread.

  It looked like a straightforward burglary: an intruder rummaging through the wardrobe woke Mary Schneider, who might have been sleeping uneasily because of her pregnancy. When she screamed, he grabbed the nearest weapon—the lamp on the mantel—smashed her over the head with it, and fled.

  But the citizens of New Orleans were primed to imagine more. After the recent Andollina, Maggio, and Besumer attacks, another mysterious attack in the dead of night wasn’t going to be easily dismissed. No matter that the evidence indicated that the weapon used against Mrs. Schneider was a lamp, the Times-Picayune was first off the mark: POLICE BELIEVE AX-MAN MAY BE ACTIVE IN CITY.

  Curious aspects of the case did make the more suspicious wonder if there wasn’t a more sinister explanation than burglary gone wrong. An axe was missing, stolen from the Schneiders’ shed, and a hatchet belonging to the couple had been dropped in the neighbor’s yard. Most strangely of all, a couple of days after the attack, the Schneiders’ eight-year-old daughter found one of her mother’s skirts, stained with blood, stuffed under a doorstep a few houses away. But there was little evidence to connect this incident with the attacks on the Andollinas or the Maggios.

  Young Jim Coulton, the Times-Picayune’s crime reporter, was most responsible for connecting the Schneider attack to the Axeman crimes in the public mind. Coulton became convinced early on of the existence of a single attacker, and his stories on Mary Schneider pushed that angle, even as he dutifully reported Superintendent Mooney’s belief that the broken lamp had been the weapon. He cited police officers who opined “it probable that Mrs. Schneider was attacked by the hatchet-man who murdered Joseph Maggio and his wife and attempted to kill Louis Besemer and Mrs. Harriet Lowe.” And the Times-Picayune’s headlines, POLICE BELIEVE AX-MAN MAY BE ACTIVE IN CITY and VICTIM OF AX-MAN NOW HAPPY MOTHER, contributed to the perception that the Axeman’s taste extended to lonely mothers in addition to Italian grocers.

  Over at the States, Andy Ojeda took a different tack, citing police who believed robbery more likely to have been the motive. Like Coulton, he’d entered journalism young—as a boy really, at seventeen—writing about cotton prices for the New Orleans Daily News, then working at the Item before joining the New Orleans States around 1907. Ojeda interviewed veteran detectives who scoffed at the notion that the attack on Mrs. Schneider was an “Axeman” crime. One—anonymously—told the States, “It is nothing more or less than a case of ordinary burglary, and the robber used some weapon upon Mrs. Schneider only when she either moved in her sleep or attempted to get up.”

  The Item steered a course between the two polarized viewpoints, reporting that some policemen believed the crime the work of a burglar, while others attributed it to “the axe man.” But the paper was rather free with its headlines—AXE-MAN’S VICTIM CAN’T RECALL ATTACK, ARMED MEN GUARD SLEEPING FAMILIES FROM AXE-MAN, and AX-VICTIM TO BE TAKEN TO HER HOME. No wonder many Orleanians assumed that Mary Schneider was, without question, another victim of the Axeman.

  But Mary Schneider’s nighttime visitor was unlikely to have been the Axeman. He targeted couples, usually injuring the man first and most severely. What’s more, all his previous victims had been Italian grocers. Mary Schneider was neither male, nor Italian, nor a grocer. Her house was in the middle of the block, not at a corner, as were the other Axeman attacks. Her assailant hadn’t used an axe or cleaver. The missing axe, misplaced hatchet, and bloodstained skirt were curious, but several detectives offered the explanation that they were a ruse to make the incident look like an Axeman attack.

  But the headlines were enough to set off a minor wave of panic in the city, especially in neighborhoods near the crime scene, and most especially among Italians. Memories of the gruesome butchering of the Maggios were still fresh, and men too afraid to sleep stood guard at night over their sleeping families, loaded pistols or shotguns at the ready.

  Superintendent Mooney hadn’t made much headway in solving the Axeman crimes, but to calm fears, he sent regular police patrols through sparsely populated areas on the fringes of the city, the kind of neighborhoods the Axeman preferred.

  The killer took note.

  ≡ 8 ≡

  Axeman Hysteria

  EXPERTS ARGUE THAT SOME serial killers carefully watch the news, enjoying the coverage of their crimes, relishing their notoriety, savoring the fear they inspire, and thrilling in the frisson of outwitting the police. How did the fiend react when he heard of another’s attack attributed to him? Was he angry? Or flattered? Did he damn the stupidity of the police who could not catch him and the press who could not accurately identify him?

  Such thoughts might have led the Axeman to slip up to 2336 Gravier Street during the night of August 10. In the empty lot next to the house, he looked around and picked up two boards, which he leaned against the fence. Then, he scrambled up and over into the backyard. In the shed behind the house, he found what he needed: the family’s two axes. He selected the short-handled one and turned toward the house. A window at the back was open, and it was easy enough to crawl inside, axe in hand.

  Fifteen-year-old Pauline Bruno lay in bed, unable to sleep, preoccupied with thoughts of the Axeman. From the papers, from the whispers of neighbors and customers and friends at work, she was painfully aware that the killer had a penchant for grocers. And Italians.

  She turned over fitfully in bed, trying not to disturb her sleeping thirteen-year-old sister. What would keep the Axeman away from them?

  She’d been born in Louisiana, but her mother and her thirty-one-year-old uncle Joe
Romano had come from Italy. They all lived packed into the dingy double cottage at the corner of Tonti and Gravier. Pauline and her sister Mary were in one room, and Joe slept next door. Pauline’s mother Lilly Bruno lived with her widowed daughter Rosie on the other side.

  Together they managed to support themselves. Pauline worked in a candy factory. Rosie ran the little grocery in the front part of the house, trying to sell enough staples—beans, rice, and cigarettes—to bring in a little income. Uncle Joe was a barber, pulling in a much-needed fifteen dollars a week at the shop where he worked over on Canal Street. They were poor but not desperately so.

  The Bruno home was in a crowded working-class neighborhood half a dozen blocks from Canal Street, not one of the less densely populated areas the Axeman seemed to prefer. But that thought gave Pauline little comfort. Her immigrant family was Italian, and they ran a grocery. No wonder she didn’t sleep well.

  Pauline finally nodded off into an uneasy slumber, but about 3 AM she awoke with a start. What was that? Some commotion in Uncle Joe’s room? Then she heard a groan. Sitting up in bed, she looked up to see a man, a stranger, standing in the doorway. She screamed, waking Mary. Now both girls shrieked in utter terror. The figure in the door vanished.

  As if in answer to their cries, Uncle Joe staggered out of his room, holding his bloodied head. In a stupor he sank into a chair in the small parlor next to their room. “Something has happened,” he murmured to the girls. “My head hurts. Call for an ambulance.” Then he slumped over in a faint.

  The family was too poor to have a phone, and it was a neighboring grocer who rang Charity Hospital for an ambulance. By the time it arrived Joseph Romano had regained consciousness, and escorted by the Charity interns, the bloodstained barber made his own way out of the house to the waiting vehicle.

  Superintendent Mooney and his men were on the scene within the hour, followed by the usual swarm of newspapermen. As grimly determined patrolmen spread out through the neighborhood searching for the attacker, and the Bertillon operator began fingerprinting the open window, Mooney and his detectives traced the intruder’s path through the house. They noted the vacant lot next door and saw the open window in the rear of the house. In Joe Romano’s bedroom, next to the kitchen, the bed and pillow were covered with blood. A bloodstained axe lay on the floor next to Romano’s bed.