"AX Man of New Orleans"

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"AX Man of New Orleans"
In the predawn hours of May 23, 1918, New Orleans grocer Joseph Maggio and his wife were murdered in bed by a prowler who chiseled through their back door, used Joseph's ax to strike each victim once across the skull, then slit their throats with a razor to finish the job. Maggio's brothers discovered the bodies and were briefly held as suspects, but police could find no evidence of their involvement in the crime and both were soon released.
A few blocks from the murder scene, detectives found a cryptic message chalked on the sidewalk. It read: "Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney." Police could offer no interpretation, so the press stepped in. An article in the New Orleans States cited a "veritable epidemic" of unsolved ax murders in 1911, listing the victims as Italian grocers named Cruti, Rosetti (allegedly killed with his wife), and Tony Schiambra (whose spouse was also reportedly slain). Over nine decades, half a dozen authors have accepted that report as factual, relying on the "early" crimes to bolster this or that supposed solution in the case. Unfortunately, the initial report was so garbled that it bore little resemblance to fact.
Local records reveal that a victim named Cruti was murdered at home in August 1910, followed one month later by a vicious ax assault on Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto. (Joseph survived his wounds and blamed the crime on an unidentified burglar.) The only coroner's report on a Rosetti in 1911 involved Mary Rosetti, a black woman whose death was ascribed to dysentery. Meanwhile, New Orleans journalists ignored the June 1911 ax attacks on a couple named Davi. (The wife survived in that case.) Anthony Sciambra and his wife Johanna were murdered at home in May 1912, both shot at close range and thus divorced entirely from the Ax Man crimes. Ironically, there were other unsolved ax murders in Louisiana during 1911, claiming a total of 16 lives, but the victims were all black and none were killed in New Orleans.
On June 28, 1918, a baker delivering bread to the grocery of Louis Besumer found a panel cut from the back door. He knocked, and Besumer emerged, blood streaming from a head wound. Inside the apartment, Besumer's "wife"—Anna Lowe, a divorcée—lay critically wounded. She lingered on for seven weeks, delirious, once calling Besumer a German spy and later recanting. On August 5 she died, after naming Besumer as her attacker, prompting his arrest on murder charges. (Nine months later, on May 1, 1919, a jury deliberated all of 10 minutes before finding him innocent.)
Returning late from work that same evening— August 5—Ed Schneider found his pregnant wife unconscious in their bed, her scalp laid open. She survived to bear a healthy daughter, but her memory of the attack was vague, at best. A hulking shadow by her bed, the ax descending—and oblivion.
On August 10, sisters Pauline and Mary Bruno woke to sounds of struggle in the adjacent room occupied by their uncle, Joseph Romano. They rushed next door to find him dying of a head wound, but they caught a glimpse of his assailant, described in official reports as "dark, tall, heavy-set, wearing a dark suit and a black slouch hat."
The rest of August 1918 was a nightmare for police, with numerous reports of chiseled doors, discarded axes, and lurking strangers. Several of the latter were pursued by vengeful mobs but always managed to escape. At last, with time and the distraction of an armistice in war-torn Europe, the hysteria began to fade.
On March 10, 1919, the scene shifted to Gretna, across the river from New Orleans. A prowler invaded the home of Charles Cortimiglia, helping himself to the grocer's own ax before wounding Charles and his wife and killing their infant daughter. From her hospital bed, Rose Cortimiglia accused two neighbors, Iorlando Jordano and his son Frank, of committing the crime. Despite firm denials from Charles, both suspects were jailed pending trial.
Meanwhile, on March 14, the Times-Picayune published a letter signed by "The Axeman." Describing himself as "a fell demon from the hottest hell," the author announced his intention of touring New Orleans on March 19—St. Joseph's Night—and vowed to bypass any home where jazz was playing at the time. "One thing is certain," he declared, "and that is that some of those people who do not jazz it (if there be any) will get the axe!" On the appointed night, already known for raucous celebration, New Orleans was even noisier than usual. The din included numerous performances of "The Axman's Jazz," a song composed for the occasion, and the evening passed without a new attack.
The Jordano trial opened in Gretna on May 21, 1919. Charles Cortimiglia did his best for the defense, but jurors believed his wife and convicted both defendants of murder on May 26. Frank Jordano was sentenced to hang, while his elderly father received a term of life imprisonment. (Charles Cortimiglia divorced his wife after the trial, and Rose was arrested for prostitution in November 1919. She recanted her testimony on December 7, 1920, explaining to police that spite and jealousy prompted her accusations. The Jordanos were pardoned and released from custody.)
And still the raids continued. Grocer Steve Boca was wounded at home on August 27, 1919, his door chiseled through, the bloody ax discarded in his kitchen.On September 3 the Ax Man or an imitator entered Sarah Laumann's bedroom through an open window, wounding her in bed and dropping his weapon on the lawn outside. Eight weeks later, on October 27, grocer Mike Pepitone was murdered at home; his wife glimpsed the killer but offered detectives no helpful description. There the crime spree ended as it had begun, in mystery.
Author Robert Tallant proposed a solution to the Ax Man riddle in 1953, in his book Murder in New Orleans. According to Tallant, a man named Joseph Mumfre was shot and killed in Los Angeles on December 2, 1920, while walking on a public street. Mumfre's assailant, a veiled woman dressed in black, was identified as the widow of Mike Pepitone. At her murder trial, which resulted in a 10-year prison sentence, she named Mumfre as her husband's killer—and, by implication, as the Ax Man of New Orleans. Tallant reports that New Orleans detectives checked Mumfre's record and found that he was serving time in jail for burglary during the Ax Man's hiatus from August 1918 to March 1919.
Other authors seized upon Tallant's solution, reporting that Joseph Mumfre was imprisoned between 1911 and 1918, thus implying a connection to earlier New Orleans homicides (though he would still be excluded as a suspect from the 1912 Sciambra attack). Author Jay Robert Nash "solved" the case in his book Bloodletters and Badmen (1973), calling Mumfre a Mafia hit man who was allegedly pursuing a long vendetta against "members of the Pepitone family." The explanation fails when one recalls that only one of the Ax Man's 11 victims—and the last, at that—was a Pepitone. Likewise, speculation on a Mafia extortion plot against Italian grocers ignores the fact that four victims were not Italian, and several were completely unconnected to the grocery business.
Still, there is a more deadly flaw in the Tallant-Nash solution to the Ax Man mystery: the Joseph Mumfre murder in Los Angeles never happened!
Ax Man researcher William Kingman has pursued the Mumfre tale and received formal notice from California's State Registrar of Vital Statistics on September 10, 2001, that no person named Joseph Mumfre died anywhere in the Golden State between 1905 and 2000. The story of Mumfre's murder in Los Angeles and Mrs. Pepitone's subsequent trial is, in short, a complete fabrication. Robert Tallant is beyond interrogation on this or any other subject, having died in New Orleans on April 1, 1957. As for the Ax Man of New Orleans, his case remains a tantalizing mystery.