The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Mooney had Besumer arrested. Under interrogation, the grocer was as talkative and glib as ever. He laughed at the accusation that he was a secret agent. That’s ridiculous, Besumer said. I was born in Poland. I have no love for the Germans. I have two sons in the army! He could explain everything. The secret compartment in his trunk and secret pockets in his clothes were for hiding important papers and cash. Likewise, he said, he sometimes found aliases useful in his business. Or sometimes in his pleasure, as he implied when he claimed to have switched to the name “Harrison” at one time to avoid a woman who, he added confidentially, “gave me some trouble.”

  About the night of the attack, his answers remained the same: He went to bed at the usual time and knew nothing until the bread man pounded on his door. He had nothing bad to say about Mrs. Lowe, only that she was of a “peculiar disposition.” He repeatedly denied that he had struck her. No amount of questioning could dent his claim of innocence.

  Besumer was charged with attempted murder and clapped into the parish prison. A few days later, he appeared for a bail hearing in the Second City Criminal Court. Superintendent Mooney and Agent W. C. Stillson of the Department of Justice wanted to make certain that Besumer remained in jail and within their reach. With his habit of aliases, there was too much risk he’d leave New Orleans, change his name again, and vanish. Attempted murder was a bondable offense, so after he made bail on the murder charge, Mooney had him immediately rearrested on a D&S charge—as a “dangerous and suspicious character.”

  Still on the edge of a nervous breakdown, wracked with anxiety, Mrs. Lowe was readmitted to the hospital five weeks after being released. And nerves were not her only problem: her head wound was not healing properly. After she’d been hospitalized for about two weeks, doctors decided that a piece of bone in her skull needed to be removed to relieve the pressure on her brain. The operation itself was successful, but she contracted pneumococcal meningitis, an infection of the lining of the brain and spinal column, most likely caused by bacteria introduced as a result of her fractured skull.

  By the end of the first week of September, Mrs. Lowe was failing fast. A priest gave her the last rites. She asked to see Superintendent Mooney one final time. As she lay in her hospital cot, knowing that she was dying, she again accused Louis Besumer:

  I feel that I am going to die. The statement that I make to you that Louis Besumer struck me with an axe is correct. I am not mistaken. I don’t know what he struck me with in the grocery, but he struck me with an axe in the hall. He was in a nude form. He had no clothes on at all. I gave him no cause to strike me. I asked him for my money. I saw him with the axe in his hand before he struck me. I saw his arm coming down and felt the stunning blow. I can’t be mistaken about this. I would not tell a story about him. I don’t know why he struck me.

  She rallied briefly, then died suddenly ten days later. Besumer, about to be released from his twenty-day sentence, was immediately charged with murder.

  Louis Besumer—or whatever his real name was—almost certainly was Mrs. Lowe’s murderer. The lack of evidence of an intruder doesn’t leave much room for any other conclusion. His story of waking up dripping blood, with no evidence of blood on the bed or the floor, was transparently a lie.

  Why, then, did Louis Besumer try to kill Harriet Anna Lowe?

  In the weeks after his arrest the New Orleans papers reported that investigators believed Besumer attacked Lowe when she caught him with secret documents. The New Orleans States reported the discovery of spots of blood on his secret drawer and evidence that someone had tried to remove the blood by washing and then by scraping it off. Nothing ever came of the charge that Besumer was a German agent, so his secret drawer probably held sensitive business or personal papers, rather than anything related to national security. But investigators and newspapermen thought national security a more exciting reason for attempted murder than the usual squalid lovers’ quarrel.

  Whatever his motive, Louis Besumer, not some mysterious killer, took an axe to Harriet Anna Lowe. Her description of his highly inflated self-image and easily provoked, violent temper fit the profile of an abusive husband or partner. Writing over thirty years later, Robert Tallant, who probably relied on the accounts of reporters or policemen who’d been around at the time, reported that neighbors had heard Besumer and Lowe bicker—violently—about money and his jealousy.

  It’s easy to imagine that they got into a fight about who knows what—money, marriage, jealousy, his secret dealings, whatever. Perhaps he shoved her. Maybe he slapped her. Possibly, he did worse. To defend herself, Mrs. Lowe grabbed the first handy weapon, a knife or a meat cleaver, and struck Besumer in the head, a hard blow that sliced into his scalp above his right eye, a wound that could be mistaken for an axe wound. (Maybe she was even strong enough to wield the axe, although it’s easier to believe she used a smaller and lighter weapon.) Besumer staggered under the blow, then recovered. He reached up to touch his forehead, then stared in disbelief at the blood on this hand. Realizing what she did, Mrs. Lowe froze in terror. She knew he would make her pay for this mistake. She turned to flee; she had to get away from him. Enraged, he chased her out onto the porch where he grabbed the axe and hit her, cracking her skull.

  Perhaps afterward he cooled off quickly when he realized how badly she was wounded. What was he to do? He’d read about the Maggio attacks. He didn’t have much time to formulate a plan, and he was still reeling from his own head wound, but he took a sheet (to protect himself from the blood), wrapped her in it, picked her up, and carried her to her bed.

  When John Zanca, driver of the bread wagon, showed up on his doorstep, Besumer wasn’t keen for him to call the police or an ambulance, but there was nothing he could do. The grocer didn’t have many choices at this point, and the best he could do was keep his mouth shut, claim to have slept through the whole incident, and feign bewilderment that Mrs. Lowe was found half dead in her bed. And fervently hope everyone attributed this attack to the Axeman.

  Mrs. Lowe’s story wasn’t exactly airtight either. When she first claimed that a mulatto had attacked her, she’d been pumped full of opiates. Later, because of shock or a genuine loss of memory, she was likely telling the truth when she said she couldn’t remember who attacked her. However, she may well have suspected Besumer. But when questioned by police, she denied that such a thing could occur, like many abused women, then and now.

  When she finally implicated Besumer, her story was, understandably because of her head injury, disjointed and incomplete, with scraps of memory interspersed with periods of blackness. She could recall being dragged into the hall, lying bloody on the porch, and being carried to her bed; a glimpse of a man’s feet, clad in heavy black shoes, flickered off and on in her memory. But she couldn’t fit all the fragments together into a coherent narrative.

  Her recollections didn’t always fit the physical evidence. Lowe said that Besumer attacked her with the axe in the hall, but the blood on the porch told a different story. She said that the attack occurred on the evening of June 25, but the fresh blood evidence indicated that it had taken place on the morning of June 26, shortly before they were discovered. These inconsistencies, strangely enough, make her story more believable. Surely deliberate lies would have been more coherent.

  Mrs. Lowe also denied any knowledge about how Besumer came by his injury. One doesn’t have to believe her denial to believe that the rest of her story was accurate—or at least as accurate as her fragile memory would allow. The detail that Besumer was nude raises some interesting possibilities. One might be tempted to dismiss it as the result of delirium brought on by meningitis in her final days, but the accusation was reported by the New Orleans States almost a month before her death, just after she defected from Besumer to Mooney, and before she entered the hospital for further treatment. Perhaps before Zanca’s arrival, Besumer stripped himself of his bloody clothes and disposed of them. Since the police didn’t always make thorough searches of crime scenes, they might not ha
ve found them. Why else would she include such an odd—and to an early twentieth-century audience—disturbing detail in a deliberate lie?

  Readers also shouldn’t dismiss the idea that Lowe’s memories were the result of weeks of relentless badgering by Superintendent Mooney. Memories are not concrete realities that just need to be accessed. They are a creation of the mind and are influenced by a good deal more than what actually happened in the past. Memories can be manipulated and distorted, even created, by suggestive questioning. If Mooney had become convinced that Besumer was the attacker, his relentless questioning of Mrs. Lowe might well have shaped her recollection of events.

  This possibility, however real, doesn’t change the physical evidence, and the conclusions to be drawn from it: there was no intruder, and the attack differed in significant ways from the modus operandi of the Axeman. Then, as now, women were much more likely to be killed by an intimate than by a stranger.

  Harriet Anna Lowe died on September 16, 1918, and Louis Besumer was charged with her murder the same day. Conveniently, he was still in jail, still serving a “dangerous and suspicious” sentence.

  But Joseph Romano’s death enormously complicated Mooney’s case against Besumer. If there was an axe-wielding fiend in New Orleans, and if said fiend had killed both Lowe and Romano, Louis Besumer manifestly couldn’t be guilty. But despite firmly believing that there was an Axeman at work in the city, Mooney was also convinced that he had a solid case against the Polish grocer.

  Usually, Besumer would have gone to trial within months of being indicted, but his prosecution ground to a halt when the Spanish flu hit in the fall of 1918. Before it had run its course, Spanish influenza killed 30 million people worldwide in less than a year. The disease arrived in New Orleans on the oil tanker Harold Walker in the third week of September, just as Besumer was arrested for murder. Health authorities didn’t know exactly how many cases New Orleans had because physicians, overwhelmed fighting the epidemic, reported the numbers only haphazardly. On October 9, the city health officer estimated that there were some 8,000 cases in the city. From October 8 to 20, at least 24,711 new flu cases were reported.

  Hospitals were quickly swamped as beds filled and more came. The Moose lodge, the Knights of Columbus hall, and the Home for Destitute Boys all became temporary hospitals.

  City officials fought to bring the epidemic under control. To limit transmission of the disease, city health authorities ordered public places closed—schools, churches, movie theaters, and dance halls. They even threatened to close saloons before new cases of the flu began to decline by the end of October.

  Under such circumstances, investigation into the Axeman murders almost certainly slowed down. The police who weren’t ill with the flu themselves would have been too busy enforcing health regulations to follow up on crime leads. Still, perhaps Mooney’s efforts after Joseph Romano’s murder had made New Orleans too hot for the killer.

  The Axeman moved across the river.

  ≡ 9 ≡

  The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz

  GROCER IORLANDO GUAGLIARDO, OF Convent, Louisiana, married in 1883, waiting until he was thirty-two years old and able to support a family. Lillie Billa, his bride, was nineteen. Two baby boys died at birth, both named Frank for Iorlando’s father Francisco. But by 1894 the couple was blessed with the birth of Mary, and then in 1899, another girl christened Anna but known to everyone as Lena. Finally, in 1901, the boy named Frank whom Iorlando so badly wanted arrived; Louis followed in 1906.

  After years in Saint James Parish, Iorlando decided to try his luck elsewhere. He briefly moved his family to Garyville, a small town in Saint John the Baptist Parish, before finally settling forty-five miles down the Mississippi in Gretna, a tiny community across the river from New Orleans. There, sometime between 1909 and 1911, he bought a grocery store—a modest little wooden structure—on the corner of Jefferson and Second Streets. At some point in his mercantile career, Guagliardo took the name Benedict Jordano when he bought a store and decided not only to keep the original owner’s name on the business but to take it for himself. Jordano was easier on the American tongue than Guagliardo. That is how he was known in Gretna.

  Iorlando Jordano.

  Years of constant labor and sixteen-hour days took their toll. By 1916, at age sixty-five, Iorlando was an old man. Gray and stooped, his eyesight was failing. His back was stiff with rheumatism and ached badly most days. He was “all crippled up,” as his wife described him. Standing in the store all day was now out of the question. Responsibility for the business fell almost entirely on Lillie. Although she was only fifty in 1916, she, too, became unwell. Her doctor had to order her to stop working or, he said, “it would just kill her.”

  Their daughter Lena considered what to do. Her older sister Mary had married and started her own family. Frank and Louis were still in school. As the eldest daughter left at home, running the house fell mostly to her. Now, at seventeen, she was also running the grocery—and it was too much. She told her parents to lease the store; she would get a job. That’s how she came to be at Penick & Ford, a mile and a half up the river in Amesville, labeling cans of Brer Rabbit Molasses.

  The Jordanos leased the building and sold its contents to a young couple who only kept it for a few months before selling the business to Charlie and Rosie Cortimiglia.

  Charlie Cortimiglia—his given name was Vincenzo, but Charlie was a common Americanization—was another Italian laborer whose goal had been to run his own place. He’d been born in Italy, and by the time he was twenty-five he’d saved enough to go into business for himself.

  His wife Rosie was a native Louisianan, born in Plaquemine Parish in the extreme southeast of the state. Dark-haired and black-eyed, she was pretty in a young and robust and ruddy sort of way, what the newspapers called “a pronounced Italian type.” A merry girl who laughed easily, she’d never been to school, but she could read Italian. Like many girls with few options, she’d wed young, marrying Charlie in 1913 when she was only fifteen. In 1917, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary, who became the particular pet of next-door neighbor Frank Jordano.

  Frank Jordano had grown to be a hulking bear of a young man with a booming voice, black-haired and pink-cheeked and maybe a little cocky. One man described him as “of a manly bearing,” which might have been another way of saying that he was big: at seventeen, he stood over six feet tall and weighed 275 pounds. Frank had the makings of a hard-headed businessman, but he was also a gentle, soft-hearted boy and loved to play with baby Mary every day after work. A photograph of the two of them shows the teenager lovingly cradling the toddler, an expression of delight lighting up his face.

  Frank was an intelligent boy, but school hadn’t interested him, and at fourteen he’d quit to enter the real estate business. Italians tended to prize work over education, and many sons of immigrants traded in school for a job when barely in their teens. Frank sold real estate for a while, and when the land market turned soft, he turned to selling insurance. He never showed much interest in the grocery business. He wouldn’t be a small shopkeeper his whole life; Frank was fiercely ambitious and had a gift for salesmanship that would serve him well in the business world.

  Frank’s responsibilities and ambitions had matured him early, and he already had a serious girlfriend, Josie Spera. They’d gotten engaged on Christmas Day in 1918 and planned to marry when Josie’s soldier brothers came home from the army. They set March 19, Saint Joseph’s Day, as their wedding day.

  Frank Jordano holding Mary Cortimiglia.

  Meanwhile, the Jordanos decided that they needed their grocery business back. Why, exactly, is unclear. Lena later testified that she was about to lose her factory job, and so she decided to take over the store again. But perhaps she didn’t want to furnish Frank with a motive for murder. Iorlando told a reporter that his wife wanted Frank to have the store so that he’d have enough money to get married.

  At any rate, take it back they did in December 1918, to the annoyance
of the Cortimiglias, who weren’t at all gracious about it. Charlie and Rosie were doing a good business in this location and dragged their feet about relinquishing the property. When the Jordanos finally served them with an order to vacate, Charlie relocated his store just a few blocks away. But he wasn’t willing to permanently give up his spot on Jefferson Street. He bought a vacant lot next to the Cortimiglias and built his own store at the corner of Jefferson and Second Streets, which opened in late February 1919. Some people said that the business, only open a couple of weeks before the attack, was already doing so well that Charlie was cutting into the Jordanos’ trade. But if there had been a cooling of the friendship between the two families, there was no cooling in the affection between little Mary and big Frank.

  After the Jordanos took over their grocery again, it was Lena and her mother—whose health had apparently improved—who ran it. Iorlando couldn’t help much. Maybe he went into the store once a week when he felt up to it, but he had to lie down much of the time because of his back. The old man raised chickens, and he had a little garden he worked in when his rheumatism would let him. But mostly he took it easy.

  On the evening of Saturday, March 8, 1919, Mrs. Jordano closed the store as usual at 10 PM. Shortly afterward, she sat at the kitchen table tallying the day’s receipts when a hungry Frank came in the door.

  “Mama, have you got anything to eat?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied, not looking up from her counting. “It was too busy in the store today for anyone to cook. We ate sandwiches. If you want something to eat, take the key and go to the store to get yourself something.”

  Frank was annoyed. It was hardly worth the bother. “Oh, hell!” he grunted. “If I have to go in the grocery now to get something to eat I won’t go, I’m going to bed.”