The Axeman: The Brutal History of the Axeman of New Orleans
Discover a serial killer you'll never forget!
Between 1918 to 1919 a serial killer ran rampant throughout New Orleans. His weapon of choice? The axe.
He didn't spare women. Or children. Or even men. There was only one kind of person who could be sparred from the blade of his axe: the home of a person playing jazz music. At least eight people were brutally murdered. Who could have been responsible for this crime, and how was the Mafia connected?
Did a corrupt police department intentionally leave this case unsolved?
Come, if you dare, as Absolute Crime takes you on the hunt for one of the most brutal killers who ever lived.
Between 1918 to 1919 a serial killer ran rampant throughout New Orleans. His weapon of choice? The axe.
He didn't spare women. Or children. Or even men. There was only one kind of person who could be sparred from the blade of his axe: the home of a person playing jazz music. At least eight people were brutally murdered. Who could have been responsible for this crime, and how was the Mafia connected?
Did a corrupt police department intentionally leave this case unsolved?
Come, if you dare, as Absolute Crime takes you on the hunt for one of the most brutal killers who ever lived.
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Excerpt
Introduction
While jazz was making New Orleans buzz in the early 1900s, a vicious axe murderer almost stopped the party, igniting enough terror to evoke comparisons to London’s Jack the Ripper. Neither women nor children were spared, as the killer sent taunting letters to the newspapers and mangled bodies to the morgue. By 1919, few people felt safe at night in New Orleans. The Axeman’s blade and the Mafia’s Black Hand seemed to work in harmony, as locals huddled in fear and murder after murder went unsolved. The city would regain its composure in time for the Jazz Age, but the identity of the killer eluded investigators in every branch of law enforcement.
Chapter 1: The Murders of a Killer with Supernatural Means
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans was exploding with jazz music and a riot of conflicting cultures. Free blacks joined the ranks of the city’s bubbling population, while Italian immigrants settled in increasing numbers from 1890-1920, representing a shift from the mainly Francophile culture of the Crescent City’s past. By the 1910s, the famed French Quarter was at least 80 percent Italian, the majority of whom were natives of Sicily, whose cooking and St. Joseph’s Day rites filled city streets. As much as Sicilians brought with them a culture dating back to Ancient Greece, they also brought more recent innovations, including the Cosa Nostra.
A menacing product of the old country, the Cosa Nostra in New Orleans was its most intimidating as the Black Hand, an arm specializing in blackmail and extortion. The Hand, as it was called, targeted enterprising Italians looking to run small businesses without interference. Following the lynching of Italians in 1890 and a race riot in 1900, there was good reason to doubt the stability of New Orleans. Yet more often than not, Italians would come to fear the Mafia itself rather than seek its protection.
Upon the arrival of the Axeman of New Orleans, the city was fully enmeshed in its superstitious ways. Voodoo rites and ravenous cults were blamed for axe murders the preceding years in Louisiana, reminding residents that the supernatural demanded their respect. New Orleanians became terrified of the landscape itself, whether it was the flu epidemic brought to ports in 1918 or the bombings that rocked the Italian community for years. Whoever struck the blows attributed to the Axeman of New Orleans preyed on these fears, possibly hiding behind a Mafia mask. In any case, the killer started out with a headline murder.
A Slaying of Alarming Brutality
On May 23, 1918, New Orleans woke up to the story of a gruesome axe murder. Joseph and Catherine Maggio were hacked to death as they slept in rooms adjacent to their grocery on Magnolia Street, about midway between Napoleon and Jefferson Avenues, south of Claiborne. The story in the Times-Picayune was accompanied by photos of the dead couple inside their humble chambers. Neither money nor valuables were taken from the scene. Theft was clearly not the purpose. Murder was.
Maggio’s two young brothers, arriving home from a drinking spree just after the killer struck, were arrested and charged with the crime. The police were baffled and tried to identify the clothing covered in blood (it belonged to the murdered couple). Fingerprinting was possible in 1918, but the police had yet to put the technique to work for them in any useful way. The axe found on the scene was only confiscated as evidence of how the couple was killed. The idea of connecting the axe to a killer through a scientific process was never considered. Instead, the police wandered through the neighborhood, asking questions and searching for a motive. They found more than they could have hoped for just a short walk from the crime scene. Scrawled in chalk, in the hand of a child, a message covered the asphalt:
“Mrs. Maggio will sit up tonight, just like Mrs. Toney.”
It was said to be a child’s handwriting, and it certainly represented the careless execution of an amateur. Speculation as to its meaning and origin abounded. Was the killer tipped off by an accomplice who knew the Maggios? It told an eerie tale, one of death messengers waiting in the night, pointing the finger to a killing about to happen. Whether it was a warning or an attempt to dissuade the killer from moving on the Maggio family that night, the message was not heeded.
Mrs. Toney’s identity was also unknown, but the attention to women suggested to observers a connection to classic Mafia practices. Criminal experts past and present have understood Italian gang activities to be respectful of women and children, often sparing them, though proof in connection with New Orleans in 1918 is unconvincing. From child kidnappings to bombings of populous neighborhoods, New Orleans mobsters did not follow any type of consistent rulebook. Instead, it appears a concerted effort was made to prepare the killer for what he was to find inside the Maggio home – whether to prepare to kill a single human, or several.
What the police found at the crime scene included an axe, a razor blade, two mutilated bodies, a wooden chisel and a door panel that had been removed to gain access to the Maggio home. The axe was thought to be Maggio’s own. The killer had possibly been bold enough to enter the home unarmed – through the space created by the door panel – and look through the home for a weapon. Such a tactic suggested that the killer knew where to find the axe. A great deal attention was paid to the razor used to slit the throat of Catherine Maggio, who was nearly decapitated when discovered. Police ascertained the razor belonged to Andrew Maggio, the brother of Joseph, who worked as a barber and said he’d taken it home for sharpening.
Andrew Maggio panicked. His brother and sister in law were discovered mutilated in their bed. He and his brother Jake had come home knowing nothing of the events. Later, as his memory tried to piece together moments of the drunken spree, the police confronted him with a razor and demanded to know why he’d killed the couple with it. Andrew answered unsteadily and entered police headquarters as the chief murder suspect. Once Andrew’s nerves calmed, his story started to make sense. The police held him in jail during the Maggios’ funeral and he never saw them again. Stinging with the embarrassment, the police released him in the following days. It was the first of many miscues made by detectives in the Axeman killings.
A Second Grocer Attacked
The following month, a second New Orleans couple was visited by the Axeman, this time across town in the city’s Seventh Ward. The victims were Louis Besumer and Anna Lowe – a grocer and his common-law wife. John Zanca, a baker who made regular deliveries to Besumer’s store, discovered the couple in the aftermath of the attack. It was the night of June 28, 1918. Zanca noticed a door panel missing upon his arrival and spent several minutes knocking and shouting to make contact with Besumer. Finally he answered the door with blood dripping from his skull. Zanca called an ambulance and remained at the scene as police came to investigate. Both Besumer and Lowe survived their bout with the Axeman, though both suffered lasting damages. Lowe died in a New Orleans hospital in early August 1918. Before passing, she fingered Besumer as the attacker. Besumer would spend several months in jail following the accusations. New Orleans police were among the few who believed Besumer was responsible for her death.
A Pregnant Woman Bludgeoned; An Elderly Barber Hacked
If a killer commits a series of murders, the perpetrator will often leave a sign of his or her presence as a trademark. Serial killers feed off of an inflated sense of self-worth deriving from these signatures. The feeling becomes magnified as the police and media publicize the details of each murder and point out the unifying elements. To believe a killing is anything other than isolated or random, this type of connection must exist.
In the next axe attack of New Orleans, whatever chain had existed was broken. A pregnant woman named Schneider awoke from her sleep to see an axe coming down on her head. It was August 5, 1918. Schneider and her husband, a local businessman, were expecting their first child within weeks. When her husband arrived home, he found the woman close to death and rushed her to the hospital. She remembered little of use to the police and told a simple tale of being struck and left to die. Somehow, Mrs. Schneider and her unborn child survived. She gave birth to a girl a few weeks later. Police found no chisel, no door panel removed and no man on the premises. Mr. Schneider, for his part, had no interest in the grocery business. The Axeman had acted on pure bloodlust.
Just five days later, New Orleans received news of another killing. Joseph Romano, an Italian barber, took the brunt of the Axeman’s weapon this time. Yet there were witnesses who saw the attacker. Romano’s nieces encountered a large figure dressed in black as he fled the premises. Moving gracefully and fleet of foot, he exited without considering an attack on the young women. Romano was taken to a hospital and died two days later. Police did discover a panel chiseled from the Romano home’s door, identifying one telltale sign. The trademark was in place. The killer was not hiding his modus operandi, as both weapon and entry method were consistent. And once again there was no robbery, no sign of valuables disturbed. It was clear the multiple homicides were related, but speculations proved to be fruitless, as did the continued investigation by New Orleans detectives.
While jazz was making New Orleans buzz in the early 1900s, a vicious axe murderer almost stopped the party, igniting enough terror to evoke comparisons to London’s Jack the Ripper. Neither women nor children were spared, as the killer sent taunting letters to the newspapers and mangled bodies to the morgue. By 1919, few people felt safe at night in New Orleans. The Axeman’s blade and the Mafia’s Black Hand seemed to work in harmony, as locals huddled in fear and murder after murder went unsolved. The city would regain its composure in time for the Jazz Age, but the identity of the killer eluded investigators in every branch of law enforcement.
Chapter 1: The Murders of a Killer with Supernatural Means
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans was exploding with jazz music and a riot of conflicting cultures. Free blacks joined the ranks of the city’s bubbling population, while Italian immigrants settled in increasing numbers from 1890-1920, representing a shift from the mainly Francophile culture of the Crescent City’s past. By the 1910s, the famed French Quarter was at least 80 percent Italian, the majority of whom were natives of Sicily, whose cooking and St. Joseph’s Day rites filled city streets. As much as Sicilians brought with them a culture dating back to Ancient Greece, they also brought more recent innovations, including the Cosa Nostra.
A menacing product of the old country, the Cosa Nostra in New Orleans was its most intimidating as the Black Hand, an arm specializing in blackmail and extortion. The Hand, as it was called, targeted enterprising Italians looking to run small businesses without interference. Following the lynching of Italians in 1890 and a race riot in 1900, there was good reason to doubt the stability of New Orleans. Yet more often than not, Italians would come to fear the Mafia itself rather than seek its protection.
Upon the arrival of the Axeman of New Orleans, the city was fully enmeshed in its superstitious ways. Voodoo rites and ravenous cults were blamed for axe murders the preceding years in Louisiana, reminding residents that the supernatural demanded their respect. New Orleanians became terrified of the landscape itself, whether it was the flu epidemic brought to ports in 1918 or the bombings that rocked the Italian community for years. Whoever struck the blows attributed to the Axeman of New Orleans preyed on these fears, possibly hiding behind a Mafia mask. In any case, the killer started out with a headline murder.
A Slaying of Alarming Brutality
On May 23, 1918, New Orleans woke up to the story of a gruesome axe murder. Joseph and Catherine Maggio were hacked to death as they slept in rooms adjacent to their grocery on Magnolia Street, about midway between Napoleon and Jefferson Avenues, south of Claiborne. The story in the Times-Picayune was accompanied by photos of the dead couple inside their humble chambers. Neither money nor valuables were taken from the scene. Theft was clearly not the purpose. Murder was.
Maggio’s two young brothers, arriving home from a drinking spree just after the killer struck, were arrested and charged with the crime. The police were baffled and tried to identify the clothing covered in blood (it belonged to the murdered couple). Fingerprinting was possible in 1918, but the police had yet to put the technique to work for them in any useful way. The axe found on the scene was only confiscated as evidence of how the couple was killed. The idea of connecting the axe to a killer through a scientific process was never considered. Instead, the police wandered through the neighborhood, asking questions and searching for a motive. They found more than they could have hoped for just a short walk from the crime scene. Scrawled in chalk, in the hand of a child, a message covered the asphalt:
“Mrs. Maggio will sit up tonight, just like Mrs. Toney.”
It was said to be a child’s handwriting, and it certainly represented the careless execution of an amateur. Speculation as to its meaning and origin abounded. Was the killer tipped off by an accomplice who knew the Maggios? It told an eerie tale, one of death messengers waiting in the night, pointing the finger to a killing about to happen. Whether it was a warning or an attempt to dissuade the killer from moving on the Maggio family that night, the message was not heeded.
Mrs. Toney’s identity was also unknown, but the attention to women suggested to observers a connection to classic Mafia practices. Criminal experts past and present have understood Italian gang activities to be respectful of women and children, often sparing them, though proof in connection with New Orleans in 1918 is unconvincing. From child kidnappings to bombings of populous neighborhoods, New Orleans mobsters did not follow any type of consistent rulebook. Instead, it appears a concerted effort was made to prepare the killer for what he was to find inside the Maggio home – whether to prepare to kill a single human, or several.
What the police found at the crime scene included an axe, a razor blade, two mutilated bodies, a wooden chisel and a door panel that had been removed to gain access to the Maggio home. The axe was thought to be Maggio’s own. The killer had possibly been bold enough to enter the home unarmed – through the space created by the door panel – and look through the home for a weapon. Such a tactic suggested that the killer knew where to find the axe. A great deal attention was paid to the razor used to slit the throat of Catherine Maggio, who was nearly decapitated when discovered. Police ascertained the razor belonged to Andrew Maggio, the brother of Joseph, who worked as a barber and said he’d taken it home for sharpening.
Andrew Maggio panicked. His brother and sister in law were discovered mutilated in their bed. He and his brother Jake had come home knowing nothing of the events. Later, as his memory tried to piece together moments of the drunken spree, the police confronted him with a razor and demanded to know why he’d killed the couple with it. Andrew answered unsteadily and entered police headquarters as the chief murder suspect. Once Andrew’s nerves calmed, his story started to make sense. The police held him in jail during the Maggios’ funeral and he never saw them again. Stinging with the embarrassment, the police released him in the following days. It was the first of many miscues made by detectives in the Axeman killings.
A Second Grocer Attacked
The following month, a second New Orleans couple was visited by the Axeman, this time across town in the city’s Seventh Ward. The victims were Louis Besumer and Anna Lowe – a grocer and his common-law wife. John Zanca, a baker who made regular deliveries to Besumer’s store, discovered the couple in the aftermath of the attack. It was the night of June 28, 1918. Zanca noticed a door panel missing upon his arrival and spent several minutes knocking and shouting to make contact with Besumer. Finally he answered the door with blood dripping from his skull. Zanca called an ambulance and remained at the scene as police came to investigate. Both Besumer and Lowe survived their bout with the Axeman, though both suffered lasting damages. Lowe died in a New Orleans hospital in early August 1918. Before passing, she fingered Besumer as the attacker. Besumer would spend several months in jail following the accusations. New Orleans police were among the few who believed Besumer was responsible for her death.
A Pregnant Woman Bludgeoned; An Elderly Barber Hacked
If a killer commits a series of murders, the perpetrator will often leave a sign of his or her presence as a trademark. Serial killers feed off of an inflated sense of self-worth deriving from these signatures. The feeling becomes magnified as the police and media publicize the details of each murder and point out the unifying elements. To believe a killing is anything other than isolated or random, this type of connection must exist.
In the next axe attack of New Orleans, whatever chain had existed was broken. A pregnant woman named Schneider awoke from her sleep to see an axe coming down on her head. It was August 5, 1918. Schneider and her husband, a local businessman, were expecting their first child within weeks. When her husband arrived home, he found the woman close to death and rushed her to the hospital. She remembered little of use to the police and told a simple tale of being struck and left to die. Somehow, Mrs. Schneider and her unborn child survived. She gave birth to a girl a few weeks later. Police found no chisel, no door panel removed and no man on the premises. Mr. Schneider, for his part, had no interest in the grocery business. The Axeman had acted on pure bloodlust.
Just five days later, New Orleans received news of another killing. Joseph Romano, an Italian barber, took the brunt of the Axeman’s weapon this time. Yet there were witnesses who saw the attacker. Romano’s nieces encountered a large figure dressed in black as he fled the premises. Moving gracefully and fleet of foot, he exited without considering an attack on the young women. Romano was taken to a hospital and died two days later. Police did discover a panel chiseled from the Romano home’s door, identifying one telltale sign. The trademark was in place. The killer was not hiding his modus operandi, as both weapon and entry method were consistent. And once again there was no robbery, no sign of valuables disturbed. It was clear the multiple homicides were related, but speculations proved to be fruitless, as did the continued investigation by New Orleans detectives.
