The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  L. Robert Rivarde was district attorney of the Twenty-Eighth Judicial District, made up of Saint Charles, Saint John, and Jefferson Parishes. He’d been a state senator and a district judge, and when Sheriff Marrero’s son Louis Jr. died in 1916, Rivarde had been selected to replace him as DA. An active member of the Marrero political machine, Rivarde could be counted on to cooperate with Sheriff Marrero in prosecuting the Jordanos.

  Sheriff Marrero still had a problem. He was confident that the Jordanos were responsible for the attack on the Cortimiglias and little Mary’s death. But his witnesses were problematic. So far neither one of them had identified the Jordanos in the presence of anyone but police officers, and Andy Ojeda’s coverage in the States had undermined his claim that they had clearly singled out the accused. Marrero needed to be certain of his witnesses.

  On March 28, almost three weeks after the attack, Rosie was at last well enough to leave the hospital. Sheriff Marrero saw a way to solve his problem. The third degree could be used on witnesses as well as suspects. He arrested her.

  Sheriff Marrero obtained a warrant for Rosie’s arrest as a material witness, an unusual move for someone who was the victim of a crime. When she left the hospital with Chief Leson, one of Marrero’s deputy sheriffs, and two of her brothers-in-law, Rosie had no hint that anything was wrong. She was in a good mood, lightly bantering with the men as they rode the ferry across the river, assuming they were taking her home. Instead Leson delivered her to the Jefferson Parish jail.

  Rosie was taken completely by surprise. Not allowed to see a lawyer and separated from her family, she was thoroughly frightened and confused by the time Marrero and Rivarde began questioning her again.

  Was it the Jordanos who attacked you, Rosie?

  I can’t remember.

  You must remember.

  I don’t remember seeing anyone.

  Who else would have done it? Didn’t Frank say he was going to run you off?

  Did you see Frank and the old man that night? You’d better remember if you want to go home.

  As she was being put in a cell to sleep that night, one of her jailers said to her, “You must make up your mind who did it, Rosie. Go to bed tonight and get a good rest, and make up your mind who did it.”

  The next morning she signed an affidavit swearing that Frank and Iorlando Jordano were the assailants. In twenty-four hours, Rosie went from claiming no memory of who killed her baby to a detailed recollection of the attack.

  Because Rosie couldn’t read or write English, Clay Gaudet, a notary and lawyer hired by the Cortimiglias to assist the prosecution, wrote it out for her. Rosie signed. Satisfied, Marrero let her go stay with one of her sisters.

  Now that Rosie was out of the hospital and well enough to testify, the coroner’s jury could finish its job. On April 13, Dr. Fernandez reconvened his five-man jury, and after hearing Rosie’s testimony, they returned a verdict of murder at the hands of Frank and Iorlando Jordano.

  In the meantime, the Jordanos had retained an attorney, William H. Byrnes Jr., a thirty-eight-year-old graduate of Tulane University Law School. The first thing Byrnes did was demand a preliminary hearing, charging that Rosie had been jailed illegally in order to coerce her into accusing the Jordanos. He also wanted her mental competence evaluated.

  Judge John Fleury granted his request and set the preliminary hearing for May 7. But on the afternoon of May 5, a Jefferson Parish grand jury indicted Frank and Iorlando Jordano for the murder of Mary Cortimiglia. Judge Fleury set a trial date of May 19 and canceled the preliminary hearing, ruling that the indictment had made it “useless and unnecessary.”

  In two weeks, the Jordanos would go on trial for their lives.

  ≡ 10 ≡

  “Hung by the Neck Until Dead, Dead, Dead”

  NEW CASES OF SPANISH influenza were declining by the end of October, and by February 1919 the States could declare the FLU IS ALMOST WIPED OUT HERE. Meanwhile, Louis Besumer had been brooding in the parish prison since his arrest in August.

  The long months waiting for trial had worn down some of the eccentric grocer’s natural cockiness. He’d been sued by his landlady for not paying his rent, proving that his claims of wealth were a lie. Imprisonment and illness had aged him, and he began to despair that he’d die in jail. In February, he wrote to an Orleans Parish grand jury complaining that he was being held without trial. The attack on the Cortimiglia family a few weeks later gave him another opportunity to draw attention to his plight. He wrote to the Times-Picayune, appealing for help in getting a trial so he could be cleared of blame in Mrs. Lowe’s death.

  The Times-Picayune was a good target for Besumer’s plea, which resulted in a sympathetic interview on the front page of the newspaper a week after Mary Cortimiglia’s death. Reporter Jim Coulton, believing that one man was responsible for all the axe attacks, was inclined to accept Besumer’s claims of innocence, and he liked to remind readers that the evidence against Besumer was “largely circumstantial.”

  The article prompted a speedy reply from District Attorney Chandler Luzenberg, who blamed the delay on a combination of judicial vacations and the Spanish flu. He promised to bring the case to trial as soon as he could. Louis Besumer’s day in court finally came at noon, April 30. Prosecutors were asking for the death penalty. The trial lasted all of two days.

  The most important witness called by the state on the first day was Superintendent of Police Frank Mooney, and defense lawyer Henry Rhodes quickly cornered him into a damaging admission. Had Mooney declared after Besumer’s arrest, and again after Mary Cortimiglia’s murder, demanded Rhodes, that he believed a single crazed killer responsible for all the axe attacks of the last two years? Mooney conceded that he had. Henry Rhodes left it up to the jury to draw the obvious conclusion: If all the axe attacks were the work of one man, Besumer couldn’t be guilty. He’d been locked up in the parish prison when Joseph Romano and Mary Cortimiglia were killed.

  The next morning Dr. Hiram W. Kostmayer, the surgeon who’d treated Mrs. Lowe at Charity, was sworn in as a witness. The outcome of the trial would revolve around two issues for which the doctor’s testimony would prove critical: First, what had been Mrs. Lowe’s state of mind when she exonerated and then when she accused Besumer?

  Immediately after the attack, Rhodes reminded the jury, Mrs. Lowe accused a mulatto, then recanted her identification, all the while emphatically denying Louis Besumer’s involvement. It was only weeks later that she recalled Besumer hitting her. Dr. Kostmayer testified that despite her horrific head injuries, Mrs. Lowe’s brain function had not been affected, and she had been of perfectly sound mind in the aftermath of the attack when she’d denied that Besumer had been her assailant.

  On the stand later that morning, Jim Coulton corroborated this statement. He testified that Mrs. Lowe seemed confused her first day in the hospital, but afterward she appeared completely lucid.

  It was later, when she turned on Besumer, that she seemed mentally unbalanced. Mrs. Sacriste, the housekeeper, would tell the court that Lowe seemed unhinged, with her obsessive praying and visions of Christ.

  The second issue on which Dr. Kostmayer’s testimony was critical was the question of how Besumer came by his head wound. Police theorized that he’d inflicted it himself so that he could claim to be another Axeman victim. The defense was at great pains to discredit the idea that Besumer would have been able to deliver a blow with enough force.

  How hard would it be, Rhodes asked Dr. Kostmayer, to give oneself the kind of injury Besumer sustained? Kostmayer refused to answer directly.

  I’m not testifying as an expert on such a question, he replied. But, he continued, it could have been self-inflicted only by a man of powerful physique.

  The members of the jury looked over at the old grocer. Was this a man of “powerful physique” who had brought down an axe on his own head?

  When it came the turn of the defense to present its case, Rhodes called no witness except Louis Besumer. He testified for four
hours, telling his story once again, accusing Assistant District Attorney Ben Daly of coaching Mrs. Lowe on her accusation.

  In his closing statement, Rhodes argued that Harriet Anna Lowe and Louis Besumer had been “victims of the murderous Axeman who had terrorized the people of this city for the last two years.”

  Testimony wrapped up after 10 PM Thursday night. The jurymen retired to consider their verdict. They were back by 10:30 PM. Only one ballot had been necessary to find Louis Besumer not guilty.

  The newspapermen covering the trial weren’t at all surprised by the verdict. They didn’t think the prosecution had a very strong case. The testimony that Mrs. Lowe had been perfectly rational when she exonerated Besumer of the attack, coupled with the evidence that she wasn’t altogether in her right mind when she did blame him, made a guilty verdict unlikely.

  Nobody considered that perhaps she’d been in her right mind but was too afraid of Besumer to accuse him. Little was understood at the time of the dynamics of domestic violence, certainly not by the legal system. Still, while it may not have been a correct verdict, it was a fair verdict. The defense had introduced more than enough reasonable doubt.

  The strongest argument in Besumer’s favor was the Axeman himself. Newspaper articles for the last ten months had repeatedly linked the Besumer case with the Axeman crimes. Since the Axeman had continued to strike while Besumer was in jail, it wasn’t a stretch for the jury to believe that Louis Besumer and Harriet Anna Lowe had been the Axeman’s victims.

  After tearfully thanking the jury, Besumer announced that he would stay in New Orleans, yet no record shows him living in the city after his trial. The man who called himself Louis Besumer but was known by other names may well have vanished under one of his many aliases.

  The State of Louisiana v. Frank Guagliardo, alias Frank Jordano, and Iorlando Guagliardo, alias Iorlando Jordano went to trial in the Twenty-Eighth District Court on Monday, May 19, 1919, almost a year after the brutal murders of Catherine and Joe Maggio. Crowds began to pack the Gretna courthouse early. The gray brick building stood at the corner of Second Street and Copernicus Avenue (now Huey P. Long Avenue), fronting Second Street and facing the nearby riverfront. Built in the classically inspired Renaissance style, the three-storied courthouse boasted a front portico, ornate Corinthian columns, rounded arches, a copper cornice, and grand colonnades. For the proud residents of Gretna, it was a veritable “temple of justice,” as the Item boasted when the building was dedicated in 1907.

  The opulence of the high ceilings, tiled corridors, and marble decoration of the inside matched the classical elegance of the outside. But the small third-floor chamber, where the Jordano-Cortimiglia drama would play out, belied the grandeur of the court building. It was a cramped little courtroom. The clerk of court’s desk, positioned directly in front of the judge, was only a couple of feet from the defense table. Prosecutor Rivarde sat just outside the jury box. The prosecution and defense teams sat right next to each other.

  The throng that pressed into the courtroom made it seem even smaller. Italians from all over Jefferson Parish, many of them relatives of either defendants or victims, streamed into Gretna to join the crush of onlookers willing to squeeze themselves into the little courtroom to satisfy their curiosity. Hours before the court was called to order at 10 AM, every available space had been taken. Family and reporters had reserved seats; the merely inquisitive—most of them women, many with children—jammed together, anxious for a glimpse of the proceedings. Observers not lucky enough to get a seat stood at the back of the room or in the hallway or jostled each other for a few inches of standing room on the balcony. Many had packed lunches in anticipation of a long day in court.

  Most residents of Gretna had already reached a conclusion about the guilt or innocence of the Jordanos based on what they’d read in the newspapers or heard from their neighbors. Opinion was running strongly against the father and son; their guilt was widely assumed. Only a few cautious individuals expressed reservations about convicting them based solely upon Rosie Cortimiglia’s say-so.

  District Judge John E. Fleury presided over the trial. Only thirty-four, he’d been a state representative before being elected judge. In fact, in 1914, he’d been the legislator who’d introduced the bill creating an additional judgeship for the Saint Charles–Saint John–Jefferson district, the same judgeship he then ran for. Fleury was a very capable politician, if, perhaps, not a great judge.

  At forty-one, District Attorney L. Robert “Bob” Rivarde was a slim, boyish-looking figure. He’d left school at eleven and worked a variety of jobs before completing night school and graduating from Tulane University Law School. He’d become associated with the Marrero faction early in his career when he’d taken a job working for Sheriff Marrero’s son Louis Jr. The Marrero connection made John Fleury and Bob Rivarde political allies. They’d also served together as the two judges of the Twenty-Eighth Judicial District before Rivarde became DA on the death of the junior Marrero.

  Assisting the prosecution was the attorney hired by the Cortimiglia family, Clay Gaudet.

  Defense attorney William Byrnes had as associate counsel two up-and-coming young lawyers: Andrew H. Thalheim, who would go on to serve as Gretna’s city attorney for thirty-five years, and Archie Higgins, a future state supreme court justice. Byrnes himself came to the case straight off a win; at the beginning of May, he’d gotten a charge of arson against one of his clients dismissed. Frank and Iorlando had an excellent legal team.

  Reporters expected the trial to be over in a few days. But proceedings got off to a slow start. After spending an entire morning dealing with a defense objection to the panel from which the petit—or trial—jury was to be chosen, the actual empanelment of a jury took an unusually long time. Due to the extensive newspaper coverage of the murders, many potential jurors had already made up their minds about the guilt of the defendants, and they admitted as much. Juror after juror was dismissed “for cause.”

  The Twenty-Eighth District Court of Gretna during the testimony of Frank Jordano. Iorlando Jordano and his attorney William Byrnes are seated at a table near the bottom of the picture and are looking up at the photographer. Andrew Thalheim and Archie Higgins are seated next to Byrnes.

  Murder was a capital crime, so Bob Rivarde closely questioned each potential juror about his—they were all men—willingness to sentence a man to death. None had any misgivings. An attorney watching the proceedings commented that before the war (which had concluded only the previous November), many prospective jurors would have expressed reservations about capital punishment. The United States had had an active anti–death penalty movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it had had its effect. But the Great War, the observer said, with its long lists of dead, had “obliterated their awe of death.” To a man, each juror was prepared to send the Jordanos to the gallows.

  By 5 PM Monday, the court had exhausted the regular panel of jurors but seated only five trial jurors. Judge Fleury ordered the sheriff to summon seventy-five more potential jurors to appear in court the next morning. Fleury also ordered the five selected jurymen sequestered, and sheriff’s deputies escorted them to the jurors’ dormitory on the third floor of the courthouse.

  Over the next two days, Judge Fleury had to order that additional men be summoned for jury duty twice more because of the difficulty of finding suitable jurors. Finally, the all-male jury was complete late Wednesday night. It had taken three days to seat, longer than most murder trials.

  At 10:30 PM, the trial started in earnest when, despite the lateness of the hour, Judge Fleury ordered potential witnesses removed from the courtroom, and the state began its case by calling Dr. J. R. Fernandez. His evidence wasn’t expected to take long.

  Dr. Fernandez testified about viewing the body of the murdered child and holding the inquest; he described for the court the injuries Mary Cortimiglia had suffered: two traumatic head wounds, one on her right temple, the other just above her ear. While
Mary’s skull had been fractured, he couldn’t determine what had caused the blows, he said. The coroner, quite mistakenly as it turned out, explained that “there was no evidence of an axe there; the injury might have been caused by numerous things.” His testimony lasted until 11:30 PM.

  The next morning, Thursday, May 22, the state called its chief witness, Rosie Cortimiglia. This was the centerpiece of the trial. Without her, the prosecution had no case. Frank and Iorlando’s fate depended on how believable the jury found the young woman.

  All eyes in the crowded courtroom followed Rosie, straining for a glimpse of her as she made her way to the front of the courtroom. She made a good impression: an attractive, modest young woman, wearing pince-nez eyeglasses and a boudoir cap hiding her still-visible injuries.

  Rosie was sworn in and took her seat in the witness chair.

  Clay Gaudet began for the prosecution. After introductory inquiries about how long she and her husband had been in their new building, Gaudet turned to the events on the night of March 8 and the early morning of March 9. Rosie stated that she went to bed at 11:30 PM and that Charlie followed around forty-five minutes later. Sometime later, she’d woken up when she’d heard knocking. She turned to her husband.

  “Charlie,” she said, giving him a nudge, “you had better get up, maybe somebody wants some groceries.”

  But he just grunted, “It’s too late. I closed the grocery and I’m not going to get up,” and went back to sleep. Rosie said she started nursing the baby while lightly dozing; she continued to hear the noise but dismissed it as the new puppy they’d left in the yard.

  Suddenly, she opened her eyes to see Frank Jordano and his father in her bedroom, clearly visible in the glow of the electric bulb.

  Puzzled, she sat up and asked, “Frank, what are you doing here?”

  He didn’t answer. He just looked at her.