The Axeman of New Orleans

1. The Axeman of New Orleans

2. The legend of "The Axeman of New Orleans" is a brutal tale of savage murder and false accusations. It is also unresolved to this day.

3. He came in the night... Andrew Maggio, had just received his draft notice.  It was May 22, 1918 and WWI was on everyone's mind.  Andrew did not want to go to war, so he went out drinking.  He returned at two am in the morning to the room he shared with his brother Jake, he noticed nothing unusual.  But he wasn't in much of a condition to notice anything at all, and that would soon come back to haunt him.  Compared to what he was about to experience, a draft notice would seem like a mosquito's bite to a shark attack. Their room adjoined the home of their married brother, Joseph, and his family. Jake woke up around 4 a.m.  He realized he'd been startled awake by noises that sounded like groaning coming through the wall from the room where Joseph and his wife slept.  Jake got up and knocked on the wall to get their attention, but failed to get a response, so he knocked louder. Again, nothing. 

4. Looking around the bloody scene, the police discovered a pile of men's clothing in the middle of the bathroom floor.  Inside the bathtub, he spotted an axe leaning against one side.  From all appearances, it had been hastily washed clean of blood, although some still clung to the blade and the tub. Back in the bedroom a straight razor was found lying in blood on the bed. It was believed that the killer entered the home and then went directly into the bedroom.  With an axe, he struck Catherine in the head and used a razor to slice through her throat.  He also hit Joseph with the axe.  It was obvious that the killer also had used the razor on Joseph before discarding it.

5. The brother? The coroner estimated time of death being between 2 and 3 in the morning.  The bodies were removed as a crowd gathered to watch. A woman came forward to tell police that she saw Andrew outside during the early morning hours.  Jake and Andrew were taken into custody.  They swore their innocence, but were locked up anyway.  Jake was released the next day, but Andrew stayed in prison. The police learned that the razor used to cut the victim’s throats belonged to Andrew.  His employees watched him take the razor from his barbershop.  Andrew admitted that he'd brought it home to repair it.  Things looked bad for him, with two witnesses and a significant piece of physical evidence implicating him.

6. Worried, Jake woke Andrew and they crept to Joseph's home, and to their alarm found evidence of a break-in.  A wooden panel had been removed from the kitchen door.  It lay on the ground. They got into the house via the kitchen, skirted around the bathroom, and entered Joseph's room.  He was on the bed, his legs draped over the side, and Catherine lay partially over him.  When Joseph saw his brothers, he tried to rise, but fell over, half out of bed. They ran to check him and found that he was barely alive, with deep bloody gashes on his head. Catherine was already dead, lying in a pool of blood. They called the police immediately. It was too late to save Joseph – he died.

7. Although he had not mentioned it before, Andrew mentioned that he'd noticed a man going into his brother's house around 1:30 a.m. The police did not believe him. They found the door to the safe in Joseph's house open and empty, indicating a robbery, but money under Joseph's pillow was left behind, along with Catherine's jewellery.  A black tin box, empty, was found in one corner.  Joseph always kept the safe locked, but there was no sign of forced entry.  Investigators decided that the axe had belonged to the victims and they believed the killer was familiar with the layout of the house. In Joseph's case, the axe had been the primary weapon involved in his death, breaking through his skull, while Catherine's throat had been slit open from ear to ear with the razor.   A few days after the bodies were found, Andrew was released from prison.  Despite the witnesses, there was insufficient evidence against him, and soon another discovery would point to a different suspect—one who had eluded police before.

8. The Black Hand Just 7 years earlier a group known as the Black Hand had gone around in the middle of the night killing couples in their beds. The one catch was that all of these couple had been Italian and owned grocery stores – just like Maggios. Police Inspector David Hennesy had investigated the murders at the time but came up with no viable suspects. The one suggestion was that the murders were mafia related as New Orleans was rife with the mob at that time. People worried that these murders had started again!

9. The Next Attack! Two weeks later, on June 6, John Zanca took a bread delivery to one of his customers, a grocery store owner named Louis Besumer, but he found the store locked up tightly - unusual. Besumer was always up early. Zanca went around to the side door to knock.  He heard movement inside. But when Besumer opened the door he was shocked to see a face was covered in blood.  Besumer said that someone had attacked him, and he pointed toward the bedroom.  Zanca went to look and found Besumer's mistress on the bed covered with a blood-soaked sheet.  She had a terrible head wound.

10. Zanca called the police and asked for an ambulance. The police found that the entry was made by prying out a panel of the back door and once again, a rusty axe was the murder weapon.  It belonged to Besumer and was found in the bathroom.  Despite the fact that he was conscious and alive, Besumer was unable to describe the attack or the attacker.  Anna was taken to the hospital. Suspicion fell on a black man Besumer employed. He was arrested but was released. Then Anna, before she died, gave several stories.  First she said she'd been attacked by a "mulatto."  Then she changed her story and accused Besumer of hitting her with an axe and of being part of a German conspiracy—that he was, in fact, a spy.  During this time of apprehension about the war, it was a believable story.  Federal authorities came in to investigate, but the local police wondered if the estranged couple wasn't just saying things to hurt each other.

11. When Besumer got out of the hospital, he asked to investigate his own case.  That made the police suspicious, since Besumer was not a police officer.  He obviously wanted to keep something quiet.  They began to think that the attack was the result of a private, if bloody, domestic quarrel, and Besumer had simply concocted the tale of an attack.  Although fingerprinting was used in criminal investigations at the time, no one dusted for prints in the victim’s homes.  They arrested Besumer for murder.  Yet he was clearly not the New Orleans Axeman.

12. The Dark Figure Mrs Schneider and the baby were fine! when she regained consciousness she explained that she had taken a nap and woke up to see a dark figure looming over her! Two months after the Besumer incident, on August 5, a man called Edward Schneider worked late at his office.  He returned home expecting his wife to meet him at the door.  They were expecting a baby shortly and he wanted to be there to support her.  However, when he opened the door, the place was too quiet. He called for his wife but received no response. Looking around with growing fear, he entered the bedroom.  Hs wife lay on the bed! Covered in blood, she had a gaping head wound and some of her teeth were knocked out.  Edward ran to her and discovered that she was still alive, so he summoned the police and an ambulance. ?

13. Five days after the Schneider attack another woman was confronted by a dark figure in her home.  Sisters Pauline and Mary Bruno were awakened early that morning by the sound of loud thumps coming from their Uncle Joseph's room.  Pauline sat up and saw the tall, dark figure right there in her room, standing over her bed so she screamed.  The figure turned and ran from the house.  The girl later said that it seemed as if he had wings.  "He was awfully light on his feet," she told a reporter. In response to her scream, Joseph Romano came to her room, but he was in no condition to offer assistance.  His nightshirt was covered in blood from gashes to his face.  "I don't know who did it," he told Pauline.  Instructing her to call Charity Hospital with his last breath, he collapsed to the floor, dying two days later.

14. Terrified! Now the people of New Orleans were terrified.  A killer was at large who managed to break into people's homes while they were sleeping.  The citizens were on the lookout for mysterious figures, and reports flooded the offices of the police.  There were supposed sightings all over the city.  People found chisels on the ground outside their doors.  People found axes lying in the yard.  Others found signs of someone chipping at the back door. People were scared!

15. Jekyll and Hyde Police wondered if this was all the work of a single person or different people.  One policeman had a theory. In 1886 Robert Louis Stevenson published the tale of a citizen who takes an elixir that changes him into a rampaging madman.  No one suspects Dr. Jekyll, who is in fact guilty, since by all appearances he's a normal professional man.  The short book created an international sensation and is still referenced today when police want to describe someone with two opposing personalities—one good and the other evil.  They had heard about it in New Orleans. Did they have a similar murderer at work in their city? The Axeman did not show himself for the rest of the year.  New Orleans eventually settled into its normal routines.  Months went by without a report of the Axeman.  People wondered if he might have left the area, or if his murderous agenda had been fulfilled.  World War I ended and their thoughts turned to other concerns.  They were soon to find out that their assumptions about their local killer were wrong.

16. Copycat? It started again on Monday, March 10, 1919, but this time it was across the river in Gretna. Loud screams were heard emerged.  A neighbor ran to help and found a terrible scene. Rosie Cortimiglia, badly wounded, was holding a dead two-year-old child, her daughter Mary.  Her husband Charles, a grocer, lay in the pool of blood on the floor. Rosie said they had been attacked while they slept.  Her dead baby had been sleeping in her arms and was killed by a single blow to the back of the head.  Charles had grappled with the attacker, neighbors said they had heard nothing. The Axeman had struck again – or had he?

17. Accusations The police combed the house but once again found no evidence.  A panel had been chiseled out of the kitchen door. Police looked for fingerprints and found none, but they did locate a bloodstained axe beneath a kitchen doorstep.  Money that was right there in the bedroom was not taken, so robbery did not appear to be the motive.  The coroner said that the deed was the act of a maniac. When Rosie recovered from her numerous wounds, including five cuts to the head, she accused  Frank Jordano and his son, next-door business rivals. Charles had said that a white man had attacked him and did name Frank Jordano, although several people insisted that he disagreed with his wife's accusation and even left her over it.  Other accounts say that he died in the hospital. At any rate, Rosie's testimony against the two men at their trial was so persuasive that they were both convicted—despite the fact that Frank's 330-pound frame could never have fit through the hole in the kitchen door, and that Charles (if he was in fact still alive) could not identify him in court as the perpetrator.  In the end, Frank received the death sentence and his son got life in prison.

18. An English Murderer maybe! In London in 1888, a man brutally murdered five prostitutes, often cutting pieces out of them and taking them with him.  He was never identified or caught, but several letters came to the police, one of which was signed, Jack the Ripper.  Another, which appeared to contain a piece of a kidney said to be from one of the victims, was unsigned.  It simply said, "From Hell" and promised more violence. The Police never captured Jack the Ripper and suddenly the New Orlean’s police had a letter of their own on their hands – they wondered if Jack had travelled to America to escape the English police!

19. It kept on happening! On August 10 Steve Boca was hit with an axe.  He stumbled from his home to get help from a friend.  Although Boca recovered, he had no memory of the details of the attack.  A panel had been chiseled from his door and the axe left in his kitchen.  Nothing had been taken. On September 3, the Axeman gained entry to the home of Sarah Laumann, but not through a door panel.  The 19-year-old girl was found unconscious in her bed, with multiple wounds to her head.  A bloody axe was left outside an open window. The next victim was Mike Pepitone on October 27.  During the early morning hours, his wife heard a struggle in her husband's room, which was adjacent to hers.  She rushed in, nearly colliding with a man fleeing the scene.  Mike lay in his own blood, and the weapon of attack clearly had been an axe.  It was left behind on the back porch.  Once again, a panel had been cut from the door.

20. People had noticed that the door panels removed from each crime scene were too small for a grown man to get through.  Nor could he have reached in to unlock the doors, and anyway, the doors were always found locked.  How did he get in and out unless he was other than human?

21. It was no surprise, then, when many New Orleans residents began to speak of the Axeman as a spirit, a devil in their midst, especially when one witness said they had seen him dressed in black, wearing a black slouch hat.  He was tall and thin, like most good phantoms. It's possible that these attacks could have been by someone who believed he was superhuman.  Homicidally deranged people can have such delusions of grandeur.  Yet he did make a dare that they wouldn't catch him, and they didn't.  The murders were never solved. 

22. Justice? Mrs. Cortimiglia apparently had an attack of conscience.  She retracted her accusation against the Jordanos, admitting quite dramatically that she had lied. She begged their forgiveness. Both men were released. Mrs. Mike Pepitone had accosted a New Orleans resident named Joseph Mumfre, stepping out from a shadowed doorway to shoot him.  He dropped dead on the sidewalk and she waited for the police to come and arrest him.  She insisted that she had seen him running from her husband's room the day he was killed. Mrs. Pepitone served three years of a ten-year sentence in Los Angeles, and then disappeared. There were no more axe murders in New Orleans. No one knows for sure who the Axeman was.