The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  He recovered from the shock before Rosie did and, betraying no bitterness, walked up to her and shook her hand. Rosie told him she was happy he was free. She couldn’t stop the tears as she added that she did sometimes think of her dead baby. Then, overcome with grief and regret, she sank to the floor in a silent fit of weeping.

  Embarrassed by the tears and her unmistakable wretchedness, “That’s all right. God bless you,” was all Frank could manage before he escaped outside onto the deck.

  Later that afternoon, Frank gazed introspectively out the window of the Times-Picayune office at the corner of Camp and North Streets, watching the rain fall on the leafy Lafayette Square. He knew he and his parents were worse than penniless; they were in debt. The money, grocery store, and land they had slowly and thriftily accumulated over the past thirty years had all been liquidated toward their defense. But Frank, as was his nature, was cheerful and confident. He could take care of his parents and his younger brother Louis. He’d been offered a job in New Orleans selling real estate. He was young. He was hardworking. Like the biblical figure Job, he could get it all back.

  He turned to look at Jim Coulton and he smiled. “Ain’t it fine?”

  ≡ 14 ≡

  The Final Chapter?

  IORLANDO’S JOY AT BEING released was crushed two months later when his daughter, Lena, died in childbirth. His heart was broken. He died four years later. But he died at home surrounded by his family, not on a prison farm.

  Meanwhile, Frank went back to work for Paul Dupas and soon had his own real estate company, becoming what the Times-Picayune called “probably the youngest realtor in the state.” After working, like so many Italians before him, fourteen hours a day, seven days a week (with an hour off on Sundays to go to church), he made his fortune in real estate development as the wetlands surrounding New Orleans were drained and the population spread inexorably over former swampland. And Frank didn’t just sell real estate. He branched out into lumber, construction, mortgages, and cattle ranching.

  While it isn’t clear whether Frank married the girl he met while in jail, we know that in 1926 he married twenty-one-year-old Linzy Hamilton, and that it was a mistake. Just a year later, he filed for divorce. All we know about Hamilton is that she ran up debts she then didn’t, or couldn’t, pay. Maybe an attraction driven by the notoriety of a murder accusation wasn’t enough to make a good marriage. But in 1936, he married a woman a couple of years older than him named Mary Shambra, this time for life. They never had children. In 1961, Frank’s huge size and years of overwork finally caught up to him; at the age of fifty-nine, he died of congestive heart failure.

  There is no record of what happened to Charlie and Rosie Cortimiglia after Rosie’s December 1920 appearance in the Gretna courtroom.

  In 1924, Robert Rivarde, the DA who had been so thoroughly convinced of the Jordanos’ guilt, defeated both his Jordano case opponent Andrew Thalheim and the incumbent judge Prentice Edrington in a primary election and went on to be elected judge of the Twenty-Fourth District Court at Gretna, where he served until his retirement in 1958. He and John Fleury remained friends until Rivarde’s death in 1967, and the Jefferson Parish juvenile detention center is named for him.

  John Fleury was elected district attorney for the Twenty-Fourth Judicial District in 1924 and was reelected for three more terms. After his retirement from the DA’s office in 1948, he practiced law in Gretna and was a fixture in Jefferson Parish politics until he was in his nineties. He died in Gretna in 1984 at the age of ninety-eight.

  William Byrnes, too, had a long career in Louisiana law and politics. He was a civil district court judge for twenty years, as well as a lecturer at Loyola University Law School and, briefly, its dean. In the 1930s, he turned down a spot on the state supreme court because of philosophical differences with Louisiana law.

  Police Superintendent Frank Mooney was out of office by the time the Jordanos walked free, and he left widely regarded as a failure. He’d never quite fit in with the police department, too much a disciplinarian to have been a favorite of the rank and file, his tenure marred by scandals involving corrupt and incompetent policemen and the flourishing trades of prostitution, gambling, and illegal sale of alcohol, as well as his failure to find the Axeman.

  He stepped down from office in December 1920, stating emphatically, and with great relief, “There’ll be no more political jobs or detective work ever again for me.”

  Mooney went back to the railroad world that he knew and understood. Ironically, the man who failed to track down the killer of Italian grocers took a position with the Standard Fruit Company, founded and run by the Sicilian immigrant Vaccaro brothers. He ran the company’s railroad lines in Honduras with great success, and it was there, in La Ceiba, that he died suddenly of a heart attack on August 22, 1923. His body was returned via steamship to New Orleans where it was met by a police honor guard in full uniform. The next day, the white-gloved honor guard escorted him to his final resting place in the family vault in Metairie.

  What became of the Axeman, the “fiend” Mooney so fruitlessly sought? Previous accounts of the Axeman story note that he vanished after 1919, dropping out of sight as mysteriously as he had materialized, never to be heard from again. But while it’s true that he disappeared from New Orleans, there is good reason to believe that he left the city only to terrorize victims elsewhere.

  On a mild December morning in 1920, in Alexandria, Louisiana, two hundred miles northwest of New Orleans, Rosa Spero woke abruptly at 1 AM, sensing a presence in her bedroom. Later, all she could remember was that someone hit her husband with an axe and then turned to her, raising the weapon and bringing it crashing down on her head. Then nothing. She woke at 4 AM, covered in blood, a dull throbbing pain in her head and jaw and shoulder. On the bed lay her husband Joseph, dead, drenched in blood. Her baby, twenty-month-old Josephine, was unconscious and bleeding. Her five boys were still asleep in the next room. Cradling the infant in her arms, she fled the house, calling for help.

  Frank Mooney would have instantly recognized the crime scene. Forty-eight-year-old Joseph and thirty-one-year-old Rosa Spero were the Italian proprietors of a grocery store at the corner of Wise and Turner Streets. Their assailant had broken in through a kitchen window. Entering the bedroom with an axe taken from the backyard and a butcher knife from the grocery, he struck Joseph Spero with the axe, breaking his jaw, then slashed the grocer’s throat, slicing through his carotid artery. Spero bled out in minutes. After striking the woman and infant, the murderer abandoned the bloody axe and a railroad coupling pin (similar to the shoe pin left by the “Cleaver” when he’d broken into the Crutti home in 1910) in the bedroom. Police found the bloody butcher knife on the grocery counter. There was no evidence of robbery; hundreds of dollars in cash in the residence and store had not been touched.

  Mrs. Spero’s cuts were not severe enough to kill her, and by Monday afternoon she could speak to the police but could tell them nothing about the assailant. That evening her little girl died without regaining consciousness.

  The police had no real leads. They briefly took into custody Louis Hughes, a sixty-year-old black carpenter. He’d recently done some work for Spero and had bloodstains on his trousers. But he satisfactorily explained the blood as the result of a cut on his hand, and with no other evidence against him, the investigation quickly came to a dead end.

  A month later in DeRidder, Louisiana, seventy miles southwest of Alexandria, early on the morning of January 14, 1921, neighbors discovered thirty-eight-year-old Sicilian grocer Giovanni “John” Orlando, hacked and bloody, along with his wife and two small children. His skull had been cracked with an axe. Rushed to the hospital, he died on the operating table. The doctor estimated that his injury occurred about 2 AM.

  Again, the assailant had broken in through a window and apparently hadn’t taken anything. He’d left the axe, hair still sticking to the blade, in the blood-splattered bedroom. Mary Orlando, and the children who’d been sleeping in
their parents’ bed—Paul, age eight, and Josephine, age six—had all been badly cut but survived.

  Once again, no real suspects were ever identified. Once again, the police collared a black man—this time, a “half-witted Negro,” known as “Fittified Sol” on account of the seizures he suffered—who was jailed while the police investigated. And, again, the investigation turned up nothing. The murder remained unsolved.

  Three months later, at around three o’clock in the morning on April 12, 1921, another incident occurred, this time in Lake Charles, Louisiana, fifty miles south of DeRidder. Neighbors of Marlena Scalisi were startled out of their beds by her screams for help. They hurried to the house at Opelousas and Blake Streets to find Mrs. Scalisi covered with blood, her husband Frank lying in their bed with a broken neck.

  Frank Scalisi, a thirty-five-year-old immigrant from Palermo, worked at the Powell Lumber Company, while his wife Marlena ran the grocery store at the front of their house. In addition to eleven-month-old Johnnie, who slept in his parents’ bed, the Scalisis had four other children in the next room.

  The murderer had opened a dining room window and crawled into the house with an axe stolen from a backyard several blocks away. Entering the bedroom, he’d struck Frank one blow, killing him instantly. Then he’d raised his weapon against the sleeping Marlena and Johnnie. Fortunately for them, as he swung down, the blunt old axe head flew harmlessly off against the wall, and only the old wooden handle cracked against their heads.

  Startled out of sleep by the blow, Marlena screamed. The intruder bolted. Marlena stumbled out of bed to turn on the bedroom light. Seeing her husband dead, she snatched up the baby and darted into the adjoining room where her ten-year-old daughter Mary had woken. Marlena handed Johnnie to Mary and ran off to call for help.

  The Lake Charles sheriff arrived to find a scene that was very similar to the ones in Alexandria and DeRidder: a mysterious break-in, a shadowy assailant, and a dead body. This time, however, there was a witness.

  Marlena had woken to see only a silhouette of a man at the foot of her bed, but she was able to describe him only as “short [and] chunky.” But as the intruder had run through the children’s room, ten-year-old Mary had gotten a look at him. She described him as a “short and stout” black man.

  Was the murderer of Joseph Spero, Giovanni Orlando, and Frank Scalisi the Axeman of New Orleans? Was another killer at work? Was the same person even responsible for all three of these deaths?

  The modus operandi was clearly that of the New Orleans killer: a break-in into the home of an Italian grocer in the middle of the night, the use of an axe found at or near the scene to murder the grocer in his bed, little or nothing stolen, and no apparent motive. Joseph Spero’s throat had been cut, as had the throats of Joe and Catherine Maggio in May 1918. Also, the killer had taken care to tread softly by wearing rubber soles, as had Joe Romano’s killer.

  The New Orleans Axeman, however, was a white man. He’d been clearly seen by Harriet Crutti and her neighbors, and by Mary Davi; Pauline Bruno, too, told police she had the impression that her uncle’s killer was white, although she could not be certain. And, based on descriptions, his height ranged from five feet six inches to perhaps six feet. Only one witness, one of the Crutti neighbors, had described him as “a short, heavy-set man.”

  The newspaper reported that robbery was the motive for the Scalisi crime. Drawers had been pulled open and a box on top of the dresser had been opened. However, the intruder had not found the significant amount of cash tucked away in a trunk, and while he had grabbed Frank’s trousers containing two dollars, he abandoned them two blocks away. Eleven dollars in the grocery’s cash register had not been disturbed.

  The New Orleans Axeman was also known to have opened and rummaged through wardrobes. When he killed Joe Romano, he had also grabbed his trousers and wallet. But was robbery the primary motive for the attack on the Scalisis? Or was it, as some New Orleans detectives believed of the Axeman attacks, only an attempt to disguise his murders as robberies? Maybe the killer would have discovered the savings and cash register money if given enough time. But then, why try to kill the Scalisis? Did the grocer wake up, prompting the robber to strike? He had only been hit once, unusual for the Axeman. If that’s what happened, why did he turn on the wife who was only woken when hit on the head? On balance, it seems more likely that the intruder chose to abandon his search for valuables, if that’s what it was, in order to attack.

  As for Mary’s identification of the intruder as a black man, could she have been mistaken? A light had been shining in her room, but the girl had only just been woken up; she only got a fleeting look at the fleeing man. Moreover, her identification appears to have become more certain overnight. On the day of the attack, the newspaper reported that Mary “said she did not see the man plainly but he seemed short and stout and to her he seemed a negro.” She was much more confident the next day when she testified in front of the coroner’s jury: “The man was short and stout. He was dark, a colored man.”

  Not only are children less reliable as witnesses than adults, but studies demonstrate that memories can be unconsciously influenced by others, who can make witnesses more positive in their identification of a suspect, regardless of whether the identification is correct. Mary, no doubt, discussed her experience with her family before she gave testimony, and perhaps they gave her reason to (subconsciously) want to pin the blame on a black man.

  The sheriff’s first suspect was Mary’s uncle and Marlena’s brother, Joe Mansueto. But Marlena and her mother firmly rejected that possibility, and Mary insisted that the person she saw was not her uncle. As she ruminated over the incident or discussed it with her mother or grandmother before she gave evidence to the coroner’s jury (and it’s hardly likely that she did not), the idea that the assailant couldn’t have been Uncle Joe solidified in her mind. Certainly, it would have been convenient for the culprit to have been black; that way, he couldn’t have been Uncle Joe.

  Moreover, Mary might have been subtly conditioned in other ways to identify her father’s killer as a black man if she didn’t get a good look at him. Witnesses often see—and remember—what they expect to see. People fit what they observe into preexisting paradigms, or schemas, of how they understand the world. The black axe murderer was a common racist stereotype at the time. That’s why, in many of the Axeman cases, a black man was among the first to be detained for the crime. Given assumptions about black criminality, it wouldn’t be surprising for the girl to subconsciously assume a black man was responsible for breaking into the grocery and killing her father.

  If the Scalisi killer was, indeed, the Axeman of New Orleans, it is problematic that both mother and daughter described him as short; almost all the New Orleans witnesses had stated otherwise. But witnesses make mistakes. And Mary’s characterization of the man could have been influenced by her mother’s description. Waking up in pain and fright, Mrs. Scalisi got a fleeting glimpse of a silhouette in the room and decided she’d seen a short, pudgy man. Mary’s memory of the intruder was conceivably influenced by her mother’s.

  Or perhaps the girl was right and the killer was a stocky black man. It could have been nothing more than a botched or brutal robbery. Such crimes weren’t unknown. Around the same time, a series of robberies and axe or hammer murders of shopkeepers—some Italian—took place in Birmingham, Alabama, which would end only with the arrest and conviction of five black suspects.

  However, the axe murder of an Italian grocer amid little evidence of robbery in much the same way as the grocers in New Orleans seems too remarkable a coincidence to ignore. Of course, it’s possible that the Scalisi murder was the work of a would-be African American burglar, and the Spero and Orlando killings were Axeman murders. Or, perhaps, Mary Scalisi was mistaken and the Axeman was responsible for all three of these crimes. The possibility that the Axeman continued killing after leaving New Orleans must be balanced against the possible but improbable scenario of someone else with no appar
ent motive preying on Italian grocers with an axe.

  Did anyone in New Orleans see a connection between these killings and the Axeman murders? The only evidence of an effort to connect the murders is a single line in the New Orleans States that referred to the Spero killing as “an ax murder identical in detail with those which stirred the state more than a year ago.”

  The Scalisi murder, too, remained unsolved.

  So who, then, was the Axeman? He has never been identified and is unlikely to be given a name now. Had the murders occurred today, sophisticated investigative techniques—better fingerprinting, DNA analysis, forensic psychology—would have given Dantonio and Mooney tools to make it easier to identify and track him down. Criminal profilers would provide more sophisticated insights into a killer who struck with no apparent motive and would suggest tactics for flushing him out. The police could release information about how the murderer would act and his likely personality. Profilers also could advise them on how to turn up the killer’s stress level to make him nervous enough to exhibit unusual behavior such as becoming obsessed with the investigation, trying to change his appearance, drinking too much, having trouble sleeping, or planning to leave town. This behavior might, in turn, alert his family and/or coworkers that something was wrong. Of course, there’s still no guarantee that modern methods would have yielded success; too many serial killers still go uncaught.

  Even if the Axeman cannot be identified, however, the modern study of serial killers provides insight into what kind of person he probably was. Without benefit of real forensic evidence and detailed crime scene evidence, conclusions can only be provisional and sketchy, but it’s possible to construct a likely profile of the Axeman.