The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large

by Nigel Cawthorne

  This idea had come from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr jekyll and Mr Hyde which had made a great impression in the world of criminal detection after it was cited regularly in coverage of the Jack-the-Ripper case two years after publication.

  Dantonio believed that the perpetrator of the 1918 attacks was the same man that he had been pursuing seven years before. In the meantime, he thought the man had lived quite respectably before he had suddenly suffered the impulse to kill again. Dantonio speculated that the culprit could live and work alongside his victims and still remain practically invisible.

  For seven months, the killer lay low. World War I ended and people got on with their lives. Then he struck again; this time it was across the river in the immigrant suburb of Gretna. On the night of 10 March 1919, screams were heard emanating from the Cortimiglia residence behind their grocery store on the corner of Second Street and Jefferson. A neighbour named Iorlando Jordano went to investigate and found the badly wounded Rosie Cortimiglia kneeling beside her husband Charles, who lay on the floor with a gaping hole in his torso. She was cradling a dead child.

  Again, the attacker had broken in by chiselling a panel out of the kitchen door. It also appeared that the attacker had piled timbers by the fence ready to make his escape. Mrs Cortimiglia had been asleep with her two-year-old daughter Mary in her arms when she was attacked. Her husband had grappled with the attacker but had been injured himself. The neighbours said they had heard nothing. A bloodstained axe was found under the step to the kitchen. This time the police looked for fingerprints, but found none. As usual there were no clues, or anything that might help identify or locate the killer. But one thing stood out. Money that had been left out in the open was not taken, so the motive was not robbery. It was the act of a maniac, the coroner said.

  Rosie Cortimiglia sustained five wounds to the head, but survived the attack, physically at least. When she recovered, she accused Iorlando Jordano and his son Frank of the attack. They were business rivals who operated from the premises next door. They were arrested. Unfortunately, Iorlando had told the coroner’s court a few days earlier that he had had a premonition that something bad was about to happen to the Cortimiglias.

  The water now becomes murky. Newspapers at the time said that Charles had said that he had been attacked by a white man named Frank Jordano. Other accounts say that he disputed his wife’s accusation and even left her over it. Still others say that he died of his wounds in hospital. According to one witness, after the attack, Rosie had stated directly that her own husband had done it – though it is unlikely that he inflicted such grievous wounds on himself. Nevertheless, Frank and Iorlando Jordano were convicted – even though Frank’s 24-stone frame could hardly have squeezed through the hole in the kitchen door. Frank Jordano was given the death sentence and his father got life imprisonment.

  Not everyone was convinced. Three days after the Cortimiglia attack, the editor of the Times-Picayune had received a letter that said it was from “Hell”. This echoed the letters from Jack the Ripper in 1888 which also said that they were “From Hell”.

  The letter to the Times-Picayune was dated, “Hell, March 13, 1919,” and read:

  Esteemed Mortal:

  They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

  When I see fit, I shall come again and claim other victims. I alone know who they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody axe, besmeared with the blood and brains of him whom I have sent below to keep me company.

  If you wish you may tell the police not to rile me. Of course I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way they have conducted their investigation in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid as to amuse not only me but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they were never born than to incur the wrath of the Axeman. I don’t think there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure the police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.

  Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship to the Angel of Death.

  Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to visit New Orleans again. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a proposition to you people. Here it is:

  I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of those people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.

  Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and as it is about time that I leave your earthly home, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, and that it may go well with thee, I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fantasy.

  It was signed: “The Axeman.”

  No one knew whether this was really from the Axeman or was a hoax. Nor is it plain whether people took it seriously or simply made it an excuse for a party. But the following Tuesday, although it was in the middle of Lent, New Orleans staged what seems to have been one of the biggest parties in its history. One party-giver issued the Axeman a macabre invitation, promising him “four scalps”. However, the Axeman was to come in through the bathroom window, which would be open. He was not to go tampering with the kitchen door. Even so, the Axeman did not fulfil his promise. No one was murdered that night – though perhaps everyone was out listening to jazz.

  In April, Louis Besumer went on trial for the murder of Anna Lowe, but the war had ended five months before and the spy scare was over. The coroner testified that it would take a man much fitter and more powerful than Besumer to inflict the wounds on himself Besumer had sustained. After ten minutes deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

  Although the Axeman had not attacked again in March, as the letter had said, he was still at large. On 10 August Italian grocer Steve Boca was at home asleep in bed when he was hit with an axe. He survived the attack and manage to stumble to a friend’s house to get help. He recovered but had no memory of the attack. Again, nothing had been taken, the Axeman had gained entrance by chiselling through the back door and he had left the bloodied axe in the kitchen.

  On 3 September, 19-year-old Sarah Laumann was found unconscious in her bed with multiple head wounds. She died later in hospital. No door panel was tampered with to gain entrance, but a bloody axe was left outside an open window. She had been alone in the house and there were no witnesses. The attacker was as elusive as ever.

  On 27 October, Mrs Pepitone heard the noise of a scuffle in the bedroom of her husband Mike, which was next door to her own. When she went to find out what the trouble was, she bumped into a man who was making his escape. In his room, Mike Pepitone’s head was split open and he lay in a pool of his own blood.

  The Pepitones’ daughter ran to get the police. First on the scene was Deputy Ben Corcoran. He found Mrs Pepitone standing over her injured husband.

  “It looks like the Axeman was here and murdered Mike,” she said.

  Mike Pepitone was rushed to Charity Hospital, where he died soon after.

  Once again, a panel had been cut from the back door and the axe was left on the back porch. However, Mrs Pepitone claimed she had seen two men in her home. They had fled, taking nothing. Strangely, Mrs Pepitone had not screamed when she had happened upon the scene. There wer
e eight people in the house at the time and her screams would have alerted them. Plainly the attacker, or attackers, was not afraid of being caught. The police also noted that Mrs Pepitone showed no sign of grief when she was questioned.

  Since the letter from “Hell”, there had been three more attacks and the police were no closer to identifying the killer. All the newspapers could offer was frenzied speculation. They picked up on the idea that the door panels removed at the crime scenes were too small for a grown man to get through. Nor could the Axeman have reached in to unlock the doors. Besides the doors were always found locked. Consequently, he cannot have been human.

  Such ideas are not uncommon in Louisiana, which is a place full of superstition. In the late 19th century, a voodoo scare swept New Orleans and people began killing others who they thought had put a spell on them. There was a widespread belief in “Black Bottle Men” who killed hospital patients to sell the cadaver to anatomy students. Then there were “Needle Men,” who stabbed women and carried them off unconscious. The “Gown Man” rode around in a black car, wearing a long black gown, searching for girls on their own, who some thought was a malevolent ghost. In the suburb of Gentilly, his cousin, the “Domino Man”, wore a white robe with a hood, who sprang in the middle of a group of girls and sent them fleeing. Taking their cue from Pauline Bruno, other purported eyewitnesses said that the Axeman had wings – plainly he was a vampire. More prosaically he might have been a sinister development of “Jack the Clipper” who went about cutting off locks of schoolgirls’ hair in 1914. Or that Mike Pepitone was the son of Pietro Pepitone who had killed “Black Hand” extortionist Paulo Marchese some years before, raising again the spectre of the Axeman murders being Mafia slayings.

  But perhaps the Axeman was identified and killed. On 2 December 1920, Mrs Pepitone, dressed in her widow’s weeds, stepped from a darkened doorway in Los Angeles and accosted New Orleans resident Joseph Mumfre and shot him dead. He was, she said, the man she had seen fleeing from her husband’s bedroom the night he had been killed.

  Mumfre was a career criminal. Intriguingly, between the last murder in 1911 until the Maggios’ murder in 1918, he had been in jail. He had been in jail again during the hiatus between the murder of Joseph Romano on 10 August 1918 and the Cortimiglia attack on 10 March 1919. Then right after the Pepitone murder in October 1919, he left New Orleans. At the times of the murders, he had been at large and in New Orleans. However, apart from Mrs Pepitone’s testimony, there is no evidence that directly links Mumfre to any of the attacks. There has been some speculation that Mumfre was a Mafia hitman. However, the victims were not confined to the Italian community. Besides, the Mafia has its own strict code of conduct. It does not murder women.

  Mrs Pepitone was sentenced to ten years for the killing, but was released after three years, then disappeared.

  The mystery deepened on 7 December 1920 – just five days after the killing of Joseph Mumfre – when Mrs Cortimiglia came down with smallpox. Perhaps fearing the wrath of her maker, she claimed that a saint had visited her and ordered her to redeem her sins. Publicly, in a newspaper office, she retracted her accusation against the Jordanos, admitting she had lied because she had a grudge against the two men and begging their forgiveness. Both men were released.

  There were no more axe murders in New Orleans after the slaying of Joseph Mumfre. But as no one truly knows who the Axeman was, he may simply have moved on.

  New Orleans’ Waterside Slayings

  In August 1995, the authorities in New Orleans announced that another serial killer was on the loose in the Big Easy. He is thought to have slain 24 people, mostly prostitutes and drug users. Most were black women, though the victims included men and transsexuals. They had been abducted from Treme and Algiers, two of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city, and had died by strangulation or drug overdoses. Their naked bodies were dumped around New Orleans itself, in Jefferson parish and in the swamps to the west of the city.

  The first suspect was New Orleans police officer named Victor Gant. Curiously, though, he was only connected to two of the deaths – the body of his 28-year-old girlfriend Sharon Robinson and that of a friend were found floating in a swamp on 30 April 1995. A 15-year veteran, Grant denied any wrongdoing and remained on duty during the investigation, although he was reassigned to a desk job. Later, though, after a domestic fracas involving his new girlfriend, he was suspended from the force.

  Then on 2 March 1998, another suspect emerged. Taxi-driver Russell Ellwood was arrested in connection to two of the killings. Ellwood, a former cab driver, is suspected in six more of the killings. However, authorities have four more suspects, including Gant.

  “We never thought, from the beginning, that this was the work of one person,” said a spokesman.

  Ellwood was charged with the murder of Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack. The body of Cheryl Lewis had been found in a canal near Hahnville 30 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans on 20 February 1993. Initially it was thought she had drowned while under the influence of amphetamines and cocaine. The next day, the body of the other woman, Delores Mack, was found 350 yards away. She had been strangled and suffocated, and there were traces of cocaine in her bloodstream. The following year, a police officer found Ellwood in the area of the crime scene in the dead of night. He said he was changing his cab’s oil in that remote spot near a canal off the state highway because he did not want to be caught by the Department of Environmental Quality dumping the dirty oil.

  The officers were satisfied at the time and Ellwood was released. However, when a murder task-force was formed, he became a suspect on the grounds that serial killers often return to the scene of their crimes. They tracked him down to a Florida state penitentiary where he was serving time on a cocaine conviction and violation of the condition of his probation. When New Orleans detectives contacted him, he was co-operative and he told them that he had dreamt that the serial killer task force wanted to talk to him.

  In October 1997, a fellow inmate in Florida told the police that Ellwood had told him that he liked sex with men and women who were drugged into insensibility. Ellwood apparently had boasted that “he enjoyed the fun of having sex with people who were not in control of their bodies . . . He said if they were high on cocaine or heroin, the heroin would put them in a state of mind as if they were paralyzed and he could take advantage.” Another inmate said that Ellwood had confessed to some of the New Orleans murders.

  Months later, after Ellwood had been released and had gone to Ohio to stay with relatives, he was questioned again by the police. It was then that Ellwood allegedly told the task force’s head, Sheriff’s Lieutenant Sue Rushing, and a former Cincinnati homicide detective that he had dumped the body of a woman in the water beside a rural road.

  In January 1998 Ellwood agreed to return to Louisiana in an effort to clear his name and help solve the cases. Once he was in the state, he was jailed on outstanding traffic charges. But once behind bars in St Charles Parish, Ellwood rescinded his earlier admission, saying that he had been badgered to the point he would have said anything as long as he was returned to New Orleans, where he could see his long-standing attorney Ross Scaccia, who represented him in a marijuana possession case three decades before.

  According to Scaccia, Ellwood was a serial loser, who grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and later moved to New Orleans. He worked as a freelance photographer then turned to driving a cab. A loner, Ellwood never had a girlfriend, Scaccia said, and constantly thought of get-rich-quick schemes that failed. He inherited $15,000 from his mother but lost it all investing in penny stocks. He frequently slept in his cab as he could not afford to rent a room.

  In Ellwood’s defence, Scaccia said that Ellwood had helped police at first because he craved attention and the detectives told him he could help them solve the case. The lawyer also claimed that Lieutenant Rushing had coached key witness Sharon Jones to say that Ellwood took her to the canal where Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack were found to smoke crack cocaine
and see a “surprise”. According to a police affidavit, Jones said that Ellwood had showed her one body in the canal with an arm and hand showing and another body that was almost submerged.

  Ellwood maintained he was in Ohio at the time and had had receipts to prove it, but they had been taken by Lieutenant Rushing who had destroyed or was concealing them. The 1993 receipts seized by police have a mysterious two-week gap in February, Maria Chaisson, another of Ellwood’s lawyers, said.

  In November 1998, Lieutenant Rushing failed a lie detector test when asked if she destroyed or lost receipts that could place Ellwood in Ohio February 1993 when the two women were murdered. The polygraph also indicated Rushing was “not telling the truth” when she denied persuading Jones to say that Ellwood showed her the two bodies in a canal. The FBI investigated these and other allegations made against the task force and Ellwood has filed a federal lawsuit against task force investigators, asserting that they had violated his civil rights when falsely claiming that he had confessed under relentless interrogation.

  “It’s clear they have deprived him of his right to a fair trial,” said Maria Chaisson. She believed that the police were desperate to prove they had caught the serial killer. “They wanted to get a conviction, but whoever did this is certainly still out there.”

  Prosecutors admit they have no physical evidence to connect Ellwood to the place the bodies of Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack were found in February 1993. On 24 February 1999, they dropped one of two murder charges against Ellwood after Jefferson Parish Sheriff Harry Lee admitted that Ellwood was in Ohio when Dolores Mack was murdered and could not have committed the crime. This completely undermined Sharon Jones’ testimony and left the prosecution with only Ellwood’s disputed confession, the tales of jailhouse snitches and the testimony of a prostitute who sold drugs to Ellwood and claimed that, when she got in his car, he suddenly became very angry and said to her: “You know what I do to bitches like you? I kill them.”