The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Lena and Tony decided not to wait. The future would take care of itself. But how could the entire family share in their union when Iorlando and Frank were imprisoned? Somebody came up with the inspired idea of holding the wedding celebration in the prison yard. All they needed was Sheriff Marrero’s approval.

  Venal and corrupt though he was, Sheriff Marrero was not heartless. He had children of his own and had recently lost a son. Frank pointed out that if they hanged him, this was the last family celebration he’d see. The sheriff saw no harm and agreed.

  On Sunday afternoon, January 4, Lena Jordano and Anthony Spera were married at Saint Joseph’s Church in Gretna, and after the ceremony the entire wedding party made their way from the church to the parish prison. There they found a table set up in the prison yard covered with “tempting dishes of chicken, ham, potted meats, cakes, pies and soft drinks.” Sixty or so relatives and friends ate and drank, offering the bride their best wishes and congratulating the groom. Laughing and delighting in the presence of so many friends, Iorlando and Frank moved easily among the guests. Except for the presence of a couple of deputy sheriffs, no one would have guessed that the shadow of the scaffold loomed over the festivities. No one was saying what everyone was thinking: this was probably the last time they would celebrate as a family.

  But then Saint Joseph answered their prayers and gave them a miracle.

  Rosie couldn’t sleep.

  Things had not gone well for the Cortimiglias in the months since the trial. Losing a child produces unfathomable stress; surviving the murder of one’s child so strains a marriage that, in the early twenty-first century at least, most marriages don’t survive it. Divorce might not have been such an easy option a hundred years ago, but for Charlie and Rosie Cortimiglia, Mary’s murder was no less damaging. The pressure on their lives and their marriage exacted such a toll that Charlie wasn’t able to manage his business. The grocery—earlier so successful—began to founder.

  Most of the specifics of the Cortimiglias’ business failure and marriage breakdown are lost, and only a few details of their lives in the months immediately after the trial are known. In mid-June, about three weeks after the verdict, Rosie was somehow accosted by Lillie and Lena Jordano, who accused her of lying on the witness stand about Iorlando and Frank. A few days later, Charlie carelessly shot himself in the hand while cleaning his pistol. The injury wasn’t life-threatening, but he ended up in Charity again a few weeks later when the wound became infected. At the end of August, he was sued by a wholesale company to which he owed money. The police didn’t return the $134 that had been in the bedroom the night of the attack. Exactly how these particular events contributed to the decline of the Cortimiglia grocery business isn’t known, but by the autumn of 1919, things had become so bad that the Cortimiglias became desperate. So desperate that Rosie found her way to Storyville.

  Officially, of course, the federal government had shuttered Storyville two years before. The sixteen-block district outside of the French Quarter where vice and sin had been officially tolerated had been a cornucopia of carnality, a galleria of luxurious whorehouses, saloons, and cabarets that flaunted their immorality. Suppressing Storyville meant closing the more ostentatious establishments but leaving many prostitutes in business, mostly the down-market whores, many of whom operated out of cheap one-room “cribs,” standing in their doorway, provocatively advertising their wares.

  It was there, on November 1, in one of their periodic vice raids on the “ancient restricted district,” that two detectives arrested Rosie Cortimiglia in a squalid Bienville Street rooming house with a traveling salesman named Ralph Rogers. Rosie tried to pretend that she was his wife, but the detectives recognized her.

  Rogers was released, as the prostitutes’ customers unfailingly were. Only later, when the police realized that he’d given them a false name, that he was really a former New Orleans Police Department patrolman named Edward Hickey, was Rosie’s paramour tracked down and locked up on a “dangerous and suspicious” charge. Rosie was taken to the Third Precinct, where she was charged with prostitution. Her arrest report also records that she had a venereal disease. She admitted that she met Hickey for money—several times since he had first picked her up at the corner of Canal and Dauphine Streets a month before. She didn’t have a choice, she sobbed. The store was failing; she and Charlie were broke.

  When Chief Mooney found out about her arrest, he was inclined to be suspicious. Was this a ploy to besmirch Rosie’s character and aid the Jordanos’ appeal? Had someone been hired to entice Rosie into immorality in order to stain her moral character? When he questioned Hickey he uncovered no connection to the Jordanos, but he still felt sorry for Rosie and wanted to send her home.

  Charlie Cortimiglia was soon summoned to police headquarters, where he was informed of the charges against his wife. If he’d had any idea of what Rosie had been doing, he didn’t admit it to Superintendent Mooney. Charlie raged with the predictable fury of a wronged husband and swore that he’d turn his wife out immediately: “Nothing in the world will ever make me consent to forgive her and take her back!” he declared to the police superintendent. Mooney tried to calm Charlie down and talk him around, without much success, even when he explained his hunch that some Jordano supporter had been behind this. Charlie was adamant that Rosie had to go.

  Rosie was mortified and contrite. She told the police department social worker that Charlie was right: “I sinned . . . my husband is right by refusing to forgive me.” There was nothing for her to do, she said tearfully, but to kill herself.

  Afraid that she meant it, Mooney had Rosie committed to the Isolation Hospital, a relatively new public institution on Rampart Street for contagious diseases, especially prostitutes with venereal disease. There she stayed for almost a week, until Charlie softened and took her home to Gretna.

  Their reconciliation didn’t last. Neighbors, taking pity on the couple that had endured so much misfortune, arranged a benefit to help with their money problems. But the Cortimiglias had been through too much. After only a few months, which they spent quarreling constantly, they separated. Rosie left Gretna and went to New Orleans, where she got a job at the American Can Company’s tin can factory.

  Since that awful night in March, Rosie had been plagued with chronic headaches as a result of the head wounds she’d sustained. But now the torment from her uneasy conscience was greater. Maybe, as one newspaper later suggested, she remembered Frank Jordano’s statement when he’d been sentenced to death. “I would rather go to the gallows than tell a lie in order to have an innocent man executed,” the boy had said, with more sadness than anger. “If Mrs. Cortimiglia is possessed of her faculties, she knows that she is lying and I would not swap places with her today.”

  Rosie Cortimiglia, who accused two innocent men of one of the Axeman’s worst crimes.

  Maybe it was his words that gnawed at her day after day. Or maybe it was simply the knowledge that she’d been responsible for sending an old man to prison for life and a boy to the gallows. But something unsettled her, causing her to doubt her own sworn testimony. She should come forward, Rosie thought to herself, and make things right. But she was afraid. What would they do to her if she admitted she’d sworn falsely in court? Would they understand why she had done it? Would they put her in jail? Increasingly anxious and agitated, the distressed and indecisive Rosie was restless at night, fighting off pricks of conscience, the specter of the old man and teenaged boy haunting her sleep.

  Rosie’s indecision reached an end on Monday night, February 2, 1920, when she dreamed that she lay dying, and Saint Joseph, the patron saint of Sicilians, came to her. “He raised his hand and pointed a finger at me,” she recalled with awe later. “Oh, it was terrible, and yet it was beautiful.” The saint spoke: “Rosie, you cannot die with that boy’s life and that old man’s liberty on your conscience.” She woke up, tears running down her face, and determined to see the Jordanos free as soon as possible.

  It’s no
t clear exactly how Times-Picayune police reporter Jim Coulton was involved in all this, but it seems likely that he followed up on his promise to Frank by staying in touch with Rosie, perhaps playing some role in awakening her conscience. The New Orleans States reported that after her dream, Rosie “sought out friends, and to them she unbosomed the truth.” These friends immediately encouraged her to go public with her story. That, presumably, is what led to Rosie going to the Times-Picayune. She had met Jim Coulton during the trial, and after the verdict he had determined to get at the truth of her story, and if he was one of her encouraging friends, it is easy to see why she went to the Times-Picayune office and why one of the paper’s attorneys was so conveniently there to witness her statement. Coulton had promised Frank Jordano that he would do what he could to help him, and convincing Rosie to retract her accusation—which Coulton certainly believed was false—would help him the most.

  On Tuesday, February 3, Rosie Cortimiglia officially recanted her identification of the Jordanos as her assailants. In the office of the newspaper, she signed a statement in which she said her family had been attacked by two tall, black-haired men whose faces were hidden by red bandanas and that she didn’t recognize the Jordanos “either by their faces, figures or voices as the men who killed my baby.” The statement was officially witnessed by Jim Coulton and James E. Edmonds, managing editor of the Times-Picayune.

  “Oh, God,” sighed Rosie after signing her statement, “I hope I can sleep now!”

  The next morning, word of Rosie’s confession flashed through Gretna with the speed of a brushfire. Reaction was swift and intense. Those many community members who had for almost a year been firmly, incontrovertibly convinced of the Jordanos’ guilt now loudly declared that Iorlando and Frank were the victims and that it was Rosie who should be jailed. Indeed, in less than twenty-four hours, popular opinion reversed itself completely.

  William Byrnes was ecstatic when he got the news. He had been convinced of his clients’ innocence, repeatedly telling reporters that he knew the truth would eventually come out, “as surely as there is a heaven above us.” He had only feared that the truth might not be known until it was too late for Frank. He told reporters that he hoped that with the cooperation of District Attorney Rivarde and the state attorney general, in light of Rosie’s confession, he could ask the state supreme court for the case to be sent back down to the district court for a new trial. There, he assumed, the charges would be dropped.

  At first light on Wednesday morning, February 4, Frank heard John Bruno, Josie’s stepbrother, yelling for him. He looked through his cell window to see John sprinting toward the prison gate, all the while shouting up at him and waving a newspaper. Frank couldn’t make out what he was saying, but his throat tightened in dread. Had something happened to his mother? Or to Lena? Why else would John be making such a fuss? How will Papa stand it? he thought. With mounting anxiety, he could barely force himself to go downstairs to greet his friend in the prison yard.

  The words were fairly bursting out of John. Miss Rosie has told the truth! Miss Rosie said she lied! He shoved the Times-Picayune into Frank’s hand. Bewildered, Frank opened the paper to see Rosie’s face and his own face staring back at him. He gaped at the headline for a few seconds as the meaning began to sink in: ROSIE CORTIMIGLIA RETRACTS HER IDENTIFICATION. CONFESSION THAT PUT NOOSE AROUND TWO MEN DENIED.

  Frank was soon joined by his father, and with growing elation, he read the story to Iorlando. Shortly afterward, a call came from Mr. Byrnes, confirming the paper’s good news. It wasn’t long before Jordanos were fairly streaming into the Gretna jail—mother, brother, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins, brothers-in-law, and fiancée—the entire clan returned for another party in the jail’s courtyard, spontaneously rejoicing that their family would soon be made whole again.

  There was much talk of forgiveness; now that the shadow of death seemed lifted, no one seemed to bear Rosie a grudge. “Both of us are happy that she has told the truth,” Frank told reporters. “She need not be afraid to come to see us. We will both welcome her and forgive her. She must have been out of her head, like she said.”

  Frank’s mother, Lillie, too, was magnanimous: “Of course, I forgive Rosie Cortimiglia. But she’s not the one who needs forgiveness most. I even forgive those who forced her to tell that lie . . . I forgive them all. I’m going to get my boy and my husband back.”

  There also was talk of gratitude. “It must have been the blessed Saint Joseph made this happen,” Frank told Jim Coulton as he held one of his little cousins on his lap. “We must all pray to thank him for making Miss Rosie tell the truth by coming to her in a dream like he did. I was praying hard last night. It must have been right when Miss Rosie was taking it all back.”

  The defense’s contention that a vulnerable Rosie had been bullied into implicating the Jordanos is probably accurate. Rosie herself said that after her release from the hospital, she was bombarded by voices insisting that the Jordanos must be guilty. Remembering the falling out over the grocery store, she admitted, “I made up my mind to say it was the Jordanos who had committed the crime,” despite her uncertainty that it was true. In all probability, young, uneducated Rosie, still recovering from a serious injury, felt scared and alone in the Jefferson Parish jail. Sheriff Marrero, District Attorney Rivarde, and her jailer, Deputy Sheriff Burgbacher, must have made it clear what they wanted her to say. She eventually complied, probably even convincing herself for a time that Frank and Iorlando were actually guilty. Everybody said so. Questioned over and over again in the hospital while drugged with painkillers, then again in the intimidating surroundings of the Gretna jail, asked the same questions—“Did the Jordanos do it? Was it Frank Jordano [who] hit you?”—Rosie wouldn’t have found it hard to persuade herself that everybody was right; they must have done it.

  After the trial, she no longer had the constant reinforcement of the sheriff or the DA checking that she hadn’t changed her story. When she moved to New Orleans, she also escaped the citizens of Gretna who were so set against the Jordanos. There, she let her doubts overtake her. Rosie knew she hadn’t seen the assailants, and perhaps she realized how improbable it was that Iorlando, a kindly, crippled old man, and Frank, an ambitious, likable boy, would kill a child over an old quarrel. Perhaps fully realizing that young Frank, who had played so often and so lovingly with Mary, was going to be hanged, she recovered her doubts about his guilt, and she wanted no part in his death. In New Orleans, supporting herself, away from her husband, she found an inner strength that perhaps no sheriff or lawyer had suspected.

  Rosie’s amended account of the attack was very similar to the story she told at trial, save that she didn’t see the assailants’ faces. But it remained an implausible tale: two men entered her bedroom; one handed the other an axe, and the man with the axe told her “he would have to kill the baby because the baby was crying.” Rosie pleaded, but the intruder hit the baby three times, then knocked Rosie unconscious. Charlie slept through all of this but was then assaulted.

  Memory isn’t a literal recording of the past that people play back in their heads. Memories are highly subjective. They’re malleable constructs that can be created through suggestion or manipulation. When Rosie was subjected to suggestive questioning and told over and over that the Jordanos must have done it, it’s easy to see that in trying to remember, she could have imagined—and eventually came to believe as real—a scene in which she saw two men enter her room, even if, as she eventually acknowledged, she never convinced herself that she saw the Jordanos or heard Frank’s voice. Repeated efforts on Rosie’s part to remember the attack in all probability led to a false, created memory. The prosecutors’ insistence on the Jordanos’ guilt made the Axeman into two men in Rosie’s mind, even when she had decided that Frank and Iorlando were innocent.

  Not everyone was rejoicing in the Jordanos’ apparent salvation. Robert Rivarde was having none of it. The district attorney was convinced of their guilt and wasn’t to be det
erred by the defection of his star witness. He refused to cooperate with the defense attorneys and had no intention of asking the state supreme court to send the case back to the trial court. Rivarde knew full well that Rosie’s admission would have no bearing on the high court’s decision if he opposed the appeal because the court decided on matters of law, not matters of fact.

  He let it be known that if the Jordanos won their appeal and the case was remanded to the district court for retrial, he would charge Rosie with perjury for changing her original testimony. Rosie’s fears of getting into serious trouble were likely to be realized. And not everybody was convinced that she was willing to go to prison to free the convicted men.

  In the face of the DA’s resolve, Byrnes prepared to present his appeal. No doubt he knew that the state supreme court was legally required to ignore Rosie’s statement. But Byrnes could hope that the justices would agree that “where human life was at stake . . . her retraction of that damaging testimony could not, in justice to the accused, be utterly ignored.” He could hope that the justices’ knowledge that the men were almost certainly innocent would have an effect, even if an unconscious, extralegal one.

  On March 6, in the marble and granite neoclassical court building on Royal Street in the Vieux Carré, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the defense’s motion to send the Jordano case back to the Twenty-Eighth District Court. The appellants went first. Andrew Thalheim and Archie Higgins were present, but chief counsel William Byrnes did most of the talking.

  The defense had amassed thirty-two bills of exception, or objections to the trial court’s ruling. Not all of them could be addressed during oral arguments, but any one of them might be grounds for overturning the jury’s verdict. For the defense, the most significant issues were multifold. It had been the district attorney’s tactic to ask the defendants if they made certain threatening statements, warning that he would introduce witnesses who would contradict their statements, but never doing so, and so unfairly introducing unsubstantiated, prejudicial accusations to the jury. The judge refused to permit evidence that the Cortimiglia attack was an Axeman attack. The state’s attorneys made prejudicial statements against the defendants during the trial. And the state had refused to turn over to the defense the statement Rosie Cortimiglia made in the Gretna jail.