The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  For years Monfre [sic] has been looked upon by the police as a member of an undesirable band of Italians in the city and on several occasions when vendetta activities gave the police trouble, Monfre [sic] was taken into custody and questioned. He was believed to have had knowledge of these activities. But Monfre [sic] always—except in the Graffignino [sic] case—wriggled out of it.

  It was time to run him out of town.

  When Mumfre was brought up before Judge Fogarty, the judge looked at him and said, “It would do the city no good to send you to the parish prison for thirty days. I am going to give you twenty-four hours to leave the city. Be sure that you do so.” If he stayed in the city, the judge warned, he would be arrested again.

  Doc Mumfre left New Orleans. If he couldn’t be a Black Hander in New Orleans, there were other cities with Italian populations. He had a daughter, Lena, in California, who had been taken there by her maternal grandparents. He would try his luck there. California turned out to be not at all lucky for Joseph Mumfre.

  By the time murder found another Italian grocer in New Orleans, Mumfre was long gone.

  Nineteen-year-old Sarah Laumann woke at 3:30 on the morning of August 3—a Sunday morning—to see a man leaning over her. Instinctively, she shrieked. The intruder fled from her room. She screamed again. Her alarmed parents, woken by her cries, raced from their room to see what was wrong.

  They found her terrified but apparently unhurt. Only after she complained about a pain in her head several hours later did her mother realize that Sarah had been wounded. The Laumanns immediately summoned their family doctor, who found a small laceration behind Sarah’s right ear, the result, it seemed, of some sort of blunt instrument. The doctor assured the worried parents that it was only a slight injury; the girl would be fine.

  The Laumanns didn’t alert the police until midmorning. One of the first questions the responding officer asked was Where is your axe?

  Mrs. Laumann took the policemen out to the woodshed in the back where the axe was kept. It was gone. Mr. Laumann said he’d used it only the day before and had left it on a stack of firewood in the shed.

  Patrolmen blanketed the neighborhood. One of the officers found the blunt axe on the grounds of the next-door Saint Francis de Sales School. Looking closely, the policeman could see no bloodstains on the blade.

  The Laumanns lived at 2123 Second Street, a modest house in the middle of the block between South Saratoga Street and Loyola Avenue, in the Central City neighborhood. Both of Sarah’s parents had been born in Louisiana, although her grandparents were from Bavaria. Mr. Laumann was a carpenter. Sarah was the youngest of four children and the only one still living with her parents. She worked in a cigar factory.

  When he heard that there had been another axe attack, Superintendent Mooney went out to see for himself. The intruder had climbed onto a gallery on the side of the house and then through an open window into the dining room. Although the shutters had been locked shut, it had been a simple matter to force them open.

  “I felt a stinging of the left ear,” she told the officers. “That is what probably awakened me. I saw a man bending over me under the mosquito bar.” The young woman was considerably shaken by her encounter, but she could describe her attacker: “About 26 years old, of rather dark complexion, 5 feet 8 inches in height, about 165 pounds in weight and wearing a dark coat and pants; his shirt was white with dark stripes and he had a dark cap pulled down over his eyes.”

  The next day the girl’s parents took her in to see Dr. Landry at Charity Hospital. The doctor reassured them; Sarah had sustained a mild concussion, but her skull hadn’t been fractured. He didn’t, however, believe her injury had been caused by the axe, as everyone seemed to have assumed. It was a circular wound, the result, he thought, of “a thick, blunt instrument.”

  How her assailant would have fled carrying a heavy axe was a mystery anyway. Sarah said that she hadn’t seen anything in his hands when he’d been leaning over her. “So,” Mrs. Laumann pointed out to a reporter, “if he had hit her with the axe, he would have had to pick it up and jump out the window with it. But when she screamed, he didn’t stop for anything, but just scrambled out of the window and over the fence.”

  Opinion was divided. Although the Laumanns and their neighbors shrugged off the Axeman theory, some investigators were convinced that the girl had been his latest victim. Others, probably those who’d never believed in the Axeman anyway, thought that this was merely a bungled burglary. On the other side of town, on Frenchman Street, the following night, a thief had broken into a house and snatched a chain and pendant from around the neck of a sixteen-year-old girl before running off.

  It was all speculation because there were few clues. But the lack of evidence didn’t stop the newspapers from lumping the attack in with the other unsolved axe attacks. Jim Coulton was still pushing the Axeman angle hard: A Times-Picayune headline declared that the attacker had been the MYSTERIOUS “AXMAN,” and the article listed Sarah Laumann among the Axeman’s victims: the Cortimiglias, Joseph Romano, Louis Besumer and Harriet Anna Lowe, the Maggios, Epifanio Andollina, the Sciambras, and Joseph Davi.

  But this was probably not the Axeman’s work. The girl was barely injured, not beaten half to death. The assault had more in common with the attack on Mary Schneider a year earlier than the serial killer’s other victims. And the description given by Sarah Laumann didn’t match that of Joe Romano’s niece. Pauline Bruno described her uncle’s attacker as tall—“probably six feet”—and heavily built, while Sarah Laumann’s assailant, described as about twenty-six years old, was only five foot eight and 160 or 165 pounds.

  There was a lull of three months before the next “Axeman” attack, but the literary history of the Axeman story has it otherwise. In Ready to Hang, New Orleans writer Robert Tallant claimed that on August 10, the Axeman pried off a door panel on Elysian Fields Avenue and attacked grocer Steve Boca, slashing his head open. In pain and dripping blood, Boca managed to make his way next door to the home of his friend Frank Genusa, who summoned help. Boca had little memory of the attack and couldn’t describe his attacker, but the Axeman left his calling card on the kitchen floor: the bloodstained axe.

  Tallant also recounts the case of druggist William Carlson, who sat up late reading on the night of September 2. Hearing a noise at his back door, he hastily picked up his revolver and nervously called out, Who is it? What do you want? When he got no answer, he fired in the direction of the noise. The next morning, the police found the unmistakable sign of chisel marks on one of the door panels.

  Other authors have repeated these incidents in accounts of the Axeman’s crimes. But they seem to have no basis in fact. No New Orleans paper carried an account of an Axeman attack on Steve Boca or of an averted attack on William Carlson. No Steve, Steven or Stephen Boca, William Carlson, or Frank or Francis Genusa are even listed in the 1919 New Orleans city directory (although in 1920, a Frank Genusa was living on Saint Philip Street, over two miles from where Tallant said Boca lived). It’s inconceivable that with the city on high alert for the axe murderer, the newspapers would ignore an Axeman attack or even a near miss. The more likely explanation is that Tallant got it wrong, and the attempts on Boca and Carlson are just myths.

  The attack on Mike Pepitone, however, was real enough.

  Esther Pepitone was a heavy sleeper. And this night she especially deserved her sound slumber. She and her husband Mike had worked all day and long into the night on both Saturday and Sunday when the Sells-Floto Circus was in town. There was a small fortune to be made selling soft drinks to the crowds of delighted children and adults who walked past the Pepitones’ grocery at the corner of Ulloa and Scott in midcity to the circus a block away. Sunday night it wasn’t until midnight that the exhausted Mrs. Pepitone was able to fall asleep next to her husband Mike in their bedroom behind the store.

  When she first heard the voice, she thought she was dreaming. From a distance, she heard someone calling for help. The voice go
t closer and closer. Then she woke abruptly to the sound of her husband’s exclamation: “Oh, Lord!” Sitting up in bed, she saw the shapes of two men slipping out of the bedroom into her children’s room next door. She looked over to see her husband lying next to her covered in blood, moaning. Panicking, she shook him: “Mike! Mike, what happened?” Mike groaned in reply.

  On the verge of hysteria, she leapt out of bed and rushed out of the bedroom shouting for help. Her oldest child, eleven-year-old Rosie, ran outside to summon a neighbor.

  Around 1:20 AM on October 27, Deputy Sheriff Ben Corcoran was walking down Scott Street on his way home when Rosie ran into the street hollering for help. My father is full of blood! she cried. Corcoran followed Rosie back into the house, where he met Mike’s terrified and bewildered wife.

  “Mr. Corcoran,” she said, “it looks like the Axeman was here and murdered Mike.” She pointed toward the bedroom. Corcoran entered to see Mike lying unconscious on the bed, awash in his own blood. The bedroom wall was speckled crimson, blood splashed eight or ten feet high. Mike had been viciously pummeled. His skull was fractured in several places and his face beaten into an unrecognizable mess. On a chair near the bed lay the bloody weapon: a fourteen-inch iron bar with a heavy three-inch iron nut on the end.

  Deputy Corcoran immediately called for the Charity Hospital ambulance and reported the attack to the New Orleans police. Chief of Detectives George Long and a squad of detectives quickly arrived, with Superintendent Mooney, Captain Thomas Capo, and other detectives and senior officers not far behind.

  Another dead grocer, must have been Mooney’s first thought. The Axeman is back.

  Mrs. Pepitone told her story to the investigating officers and gave a description of the attackers: a tall, thin man and a shorter, stockier one. She had only gotten a glimpse of them as they escaped through the children’s room into the backyard.

  Broken glass littering the dining room floor testified to the manner of entrance. The intruders had gotten in by smashing two glass panes, unlatching the window, and raising the sash.

  The intruders were not intent on robbery. Nothing had been stolen: receipts from the sale of drinks to the circus crowds remained safely tucked in a cupboard. There were no signs that the house had been searched for jewelry or other valuables.

  Mike had been discovered wearing trousers. But Mrs. Pepitone said that he’d gone to bed in only his underwear. Detectives theorized that he’d heard the sound of the break-in and was preparing to investigate when he was attacked.

  While policemen in the midcity neighborhood combed over the Pepitone residence and grocery, doctors at Charity tried to save Mike’s life, but the thirty-five-year-old grocer was dead by 3:15 AM. He bled to death from multiple wounds on both sides of his head. In addition to multiple lacerations, his skull had been fractured twice on the left side and once on the right. Any one of those blows would probably have been deadly. Whoever beat Mike Pepitone meant to kill him.

  If Mooney arrived thinking the Axeman had struck again, it didn’t take long to change his mind. He quickly decided that the killing was another act in the vendetta between Paul Di Christina and Peter Pepitone.

  Although Peter Pepitone had sworn that his son Mike had nothing to do with Di Christina’s murder in 1910, the police at the time had believed he was involved. Apparently, so did Di Christina’s friends. After Di Christina’s murder, Mike Pepitone had taken his family and business to the south, to Plaquemine Parish, perhaps to escape retribution for the killing. He’d only moved back to New Orleans about a year earlier because his business had failed. Peter Pepitone served five years in the penitentiary before being paroled in 1915. He had been terrified of retaliation, and now, it seemed, the Di Christina faction had struck back against the Pepitones.

  The little evidence Mooney’s detectives uncovered pointed in that direction. Several Italians who’d been in the store in the week before Mike’s murder raised suspicions that they had been plotting the vendetta. Investigators didn’t find much else. No one was very optimistic about solving the case. The States warned that the murder would probably remain “another vendetta mystery.”

  Nevertheless, Jim Coulton at the Times-Picayune fed the Axeman narrative. All three of the major papers were quick to report that Mooney was treating the case as a vendetta murder (and the States was explicit that “Mooney does not connect the Pepitone murder with the recent ax butcheries”), but unlike the other two papers, the Times-Picayune repeatedly emphasized the similarity of Pepitone’s murder to the Axeman crimes. The subheading of the first report of the attack on Pepitone read CASE OF MIKE PEPITONE HAS POINTS OF SIMILARITY TO AX MURDERS. Coulton reported that the attack “bore some of the characteristics of an ax-man case.” He pointed out that like the Axeman attacks, Pepitone owned a corner grocery, and, he noted, “The assailant escaped as in some of the ax cases that terrorized New Orleans during the last four years.” In a later story, Coulton observed that “the Pepitone case is not unlike the long string of mysterious murders committed in New Orleans during the last few years. . . . During the last three years there have been nearly fifteen people murdered with an ax or other instruments.”

  Coulton certainly could overstate the case: it was more accurate to say that there were nearly fifteen mysterious attacks in the last few years. One gets the distinct impression that whatever the police said, Coulton couldn’t quite give up the possibility that Mike Pepitone was a victim not of Mafia vengeance but of the Axeman.

  Widowed and with six children under the age of twelve, Esther Pepitone’s situation was precarious. Desperate, she farmed at least some of them out to family or orphanages. Then she had a fortuitous encounter with an old friend. In January of 1921, Esther took the train out to Los Angeles to attend the wedding of her niece, Rosa. Esther’s sister Jenny had been married to Angelo Albano, but Jenny had died in the 1918 flu epidemic, leaving her husband with daughter Rosa and son Dominick. Within a few years of his wife’s death, Angelo had left New Orleans and moved out to Los Angeles, where he became the owner of a successful grocery.

  After Esther had been in L.A. for several months, Angelo proposed to his former sister-in-law. She was an attractive, good-natured young widow—only thirty-one or thirty-two—with children to support. He was a well-to-do widower with children of his own. It made sense. Romantic sensibilities didn’t need to enter into consideration; if she was put off by the thirty-year age difference, it was probably outweighed by the reality that he was a successful businessman who could reunite her with her children. They married on September 2, 1921.

  But Joseph Mumfre would destroy any chance they had for happiness. When Albano had first arrived in California, he was in business with Mumfre, who in California went under the alias Leone J. Manfre, or sometimes M. G. Leone. Regardless of what he called himself, Mumfre and Albano had known each other for at least thirteen years. After his parole from Angola, Mumfre hung out in Albano’s barroom in New Orleans, and the two men were arrested together in Kenner in January 1916.

  They moved out to California about the same time in 1919 and went into the real estate business together. Although their business ventures prospered, Mumfre was too unscrupulous a character to be trusted by anyone for long, and they eventually had a falling out. Albano bought out Mumfre, who then opened a drugstore in San Bernardino, about sixty miles from L.A.

  Angelo and Esther had been married only eight weeks when, on the morning of October 27, Angelo told his wife that he was going to the produce market three miles away. He kissed her good-bye and walked out the door of the home they shared with his elderly father and their children humming happily to himself. That was the last Esther Albano ever saw of her husband.

  When Angelo didn’t come home, Esther reported him missing to the police. Investigators located witnesses who saw him at the market, and a bank teller at the Bank of Italy remembered him withdrawing money from his account. Then his trail disappeared. Angelo Albano had just vanished.

  Esther tried to
carry on as best she could, sending the children to school and taking care of the home they shared at 554 East Thirty-Sixth Street. Around noon on December 5, five and a half weeks after Angelo’s disappearance, the house was quiet. The younger children were at school and the eldest daughter was in the kitchen preparing dinner; Angelo’s elderly father Jerome was napping in his room. Esther was busy with housework when Joseph Mumfre climbed the stairs that led into the family’s rooms on the second floor and walked boldly into the house.

  Esther remembered Mumfre from New Orleans, she knew about the disagreements he had had with Angelo, and she knew his reputation. Looking into his unsmiling dark eyes and scarred face, before he even spoke, she felt a tremor of fear. Did he have anything to do with Angelo’s disappearance? Had Mumfre tried to blackmail him and, failing, killed him?

  Mumfre came straight to the point. I want money, he said to her in Italian. I want $500.

  I don’t have any money, she answered.

  He wasn’t to be put off. I want $500 in cash and all your jewelry.

  When she hesitated, he sneered, If you don’t give me the money and your jewelry, I’ll kill you like I did your husband. Esther would later tell police that as he issued the threat, his hand went to his hip pocket where deputies later found an automatic pistol.

  So Angelo was dead. At least now she knew. And she knew what she had to do.

  Wait here, she said to him. She went into her bedroom as if she were going to retrieve her valuables. But when she returned to the dining room, she carried not her jewels but a revolver. She raised it and fired. The first shot went wide. But she steadied her aim, and the second hit Mumfre. As did the next and the next.

  Stunned, Mumfre reeled from the shots, then stumbled out of the house, trying at the same time to draw his own pistol. Esther followed him, relentlessly firing. When she emptied the first revolver, she dropped it, ran to get another, and again pulled the trigger until the hammer clicked. Mumfre tumbled down the stairs until he lay still at the bottom, eleven bullets riddling his body. When she’d emptied the second revolver into the blackmailer, Esther let the smoking weapon drop to her side. She stood at the top of the stairway, staring down at the crumpled body while her niece Rosa ran down the street to call the police.