Axeman of New Orleans

What the record shows

The Axeman of New Orleans is the name the press gave to an unidentified attacker held responsible for night-time assaults on households in New Orleans and neighboring Gretna, Louisiana, between May 1918 and October 1919. According to the Wikipedia article, at least six people were killed and six injured in the attacks attributed to the series, and some tallies run higher. Most victims were Italian-American grocers and their families. No one was ever convicted of the series, the case was never solved, and the offender is presumed dead.

The first attack came on May 23, 1918, when grocer Joseph Maggio and his wife Catherine were found with their heads struck by an axe and their throats cut; both died. On June 27, 1918, grocer Louis Besumer and Harriet Lowe were attacked; Lowe died in August after surgery. Anna Schneider survived an attack on August 5, 1918, and Joseph Romano died two days after being struck on August 10, 1918. Wikipedia reports that the intruder usually chiseled out a rear door panel, used the household's own axe and stole nothing.

According to the Louisiana Supreme Court opinion in State v. Guagliardo, Charles and Rosie Cortimiglia were found in their bed in Gretna on the morning of Sunday, March 9, 1919, with their skulls fractured and their daughter, aged about 21 months, dead beside them; both parents recovered after emergency surgery at Charity Hospital. Back in New Orleans, grocer Steve Boca was injured on August 10, 1919, Sarah Laumann, 19, on September 3, 1919, and grocer Mike Pepitone was killed on October 27, 1919, the last attack attributed to the series.

The case is remembered for a letter dated "Hell, March 13, 1919" and signed by the Axeman, which the Times-Picayune published on March 16, 1919, according to Country Roads Magazine and Crime and Investigation. The writer said he would pass through the city at 12:15 a.m. the following Tuesday night and spare any home where a jazz band was playing. On the night of March 18 to 19, bands played across the city and no attack was reported. Historian Miriam C. Davis has argued that the letter's style suggests it was not written by the killer and that a local composer used the scare to promote a song, "The Axman's Jazz".

The investigation produced arrests but no lasting conviction. Wikipedia reports that police briefly held Joseph Maggio's brother Andrew and released him, and that other men arrested in 1918 were freed for lack of evidence. Louis Besumer, accused by Harriet Lowe before her death, was charged with her murder and acquitted by a jury on May 1, 1919. In Gretna, authorities arrested the Cortimiglias' neighbors and business rivals, Iorlando Jordano, about 66, and his son Frank, 17, whose family name was Guagliardo. Indicted on May 5, 1919, both were convicted by a jury; Frank was sentenced to death and his father to life at hard labor. Rosie Cortimiglia, the only witness connecting them to the crime, later retracted her identification. On April 5, 1920, the Louisiana Supreme Court annulled both convictions because the prosecution had withheld her written statement and announced impeachment evidence it never produced, and ordered a new trial. Smithsonian magazine reports that the two men were freed in December 1920.

The Mafia and the Black Hand extortion practice were widely blamed at the time, but according to Smithsonian the New Orleans police superintendent, Frank Mooney, and detective John Dantonio rejected that theory because a vendetta would not have left so many survivors. Later writers have proposed names for the killer, but no person was ever named by the police or a court as the Axeman.

Historians disagree about the series' boundaries. Newspapers in 1918 linked the attacks to axe and cleaver assaults on Italian grocers in 1910 to 1912, including the fatal attack on Joseph Davi in June 1911, and Davis argues the same offender was responsible. She excludes the Besumer, Schneider and Pepitone cases as unrelated and attributes axe attacks on Italian grocers elsewhere in Louisiana in 1920 and 1921 to the same man. None of these conclusions has been confirmed by any official finding.