Two small flimsy wooden latches proved no obstacle to the prowler who easily forced his way past the kitchen door. He moved directly into the bedroom of Girard and his wife Adele. By the light of the lamp, he could see the man, his wife, and the toddler between them in the bed; an older child slept across the foot of the bed.
Gripping a hatchet with a large blade and small handle, a type sometimes used by butchers, the intruder approached the husband’s side of the bed. Standing above the sleeping figure, he delivered two hard blows, slicing Joseph Girard across the face and through the nose.
Adele Girard was woken by the sound of her husband gurgling for air. She rolled over to find herself staring straight into the face of the man with the hatchet. He hit her once, and then again. He was swinging at her for a third time when his hatchet became entangled on the mosquito bar.
By this time, eight-year-old Helen had woken up, taken in the situation, and started screaming. The hatchet man punched her in the face and slashed her once on the forehead. When Mrs. Girard saw her daughter slump bloody on the bed, she forced herself off the bed and leapt into the side gallery (or porch) off the bedroom hollering, “Murder! Murder!” The assailant escaped back through the kitchen.
This was just the kind of straightforward case that made a policeman’s life easy. When Chief Reynolds interviewed Mrs. Girard later that morning at Charity Hospital, she immediately told him that it was John Wesley Sumner, a rival ice man with whom she and her husband had clashed only two days before. She and her daughter had both seen him. Three months later, a jury took twenty minutes to convict Sumner for breaking and entering with a dangerous weapon and assault and sent him to the Louisiana State Penitentiary for life.
The Andollina case six months later offered no such easy solution for detectives. Most of them probably didn’t believe the family anyway and dismissed it as one of those mysterious “Italian” crimes that were nearly impossible to solve. No one much noticed when Epifanio Andollina died ten months after the attack. He died in the influenza epidemic that struck the city, his constitution perhaps weakened by the serious injuries he’d sustained in the nighttime attack. Perhaps, like Joseph Rissetto, he was another unknown victim of an unknown killer.
That unknown killer had vanished into the darkness. But this time, not for long.
Thursday, May 23, 1918
The voice on the phone that rang at the police station just before dawn was frantic with grief and shock. “Come at once!” the caller pleaded. The anguish in the man’s voice was palpable. “My brother and his wife have been killed!”
Captain John Dunn of the Seventh Precinct ordered a squad to come with him. The patrol wagon was hitched up, the policemen climbed aboard, and they headed north across Saint Charles Avenue toward Carrollton. The patrol wagon bumped down the dirt road, passing by grazing horses, fields of sprouting corn, and vacant grassy lots. This section of New Orleans was as much country as city, with dairies and stables and small truck farms. It was very similar to the Andollina neighborhood and not far from it, less than two miles distant; the Miramon attack had taken place just over a mile away. It was also a high-crime area. Captain Dunn knew that only three months earlier a bandit responsible for a string of drug store and grocery holdups had shot and killed a policeman nearby.
When the officers arrived at the corner of Magnolia and Upperline, they found the usual small grocery and saloon with a residence in back. Pale and shaken, brothers Andrew and Jacob Maggio came out to meet them and motioned them toward the back room. Entering the bedroom, Captain Dunn came upon one of the most gruesome scenes he’d ever encountered: the proprietors of the grocery store, Joseph and Catherine Maggio, appeared to have been hacked with an axe. Dunn was surprised to see that Joseph was still—just barely—alive. The ambulance from Charity Hospital had already been called and pulled up at the grocery store just after the police detail arrived. The interns didn’t even have time to put the dying man in the ambulance. They entered the bedroom only to watch with Captain Dunn as Joseph Maggio choked out his last breath. His wife had been dead for several hours. The ambulance returned to Charity empty.
Captain Dunn quickly hustled Andrew and Jacob Maggio down to the Seventh Precinct station where he took their statements. The brothers were still in shock, but they managed to pour out their story.
Twenty-eight-year-old Andrew Maggio had not wanted to go into the army. On his draft registration form in answer to the question “Do you have a father, mother, wife, child under 12, or a sister or brother under 12, solely dependent on you for support?” he had written “Mother.” This wasn’t true. Not only did his mother live with his sister in Arkansas, but he also had three older brothers, all successful businessmen, to share in the support of their mother. Surely Andrew, a barber, wasn’t expected to do so alone. He didn’t even have his own home; he lived with Joseph and his wife. No, clearly Andrew wanted to duck military service. But now the army expected him to defend his classification as “exempt because of dependency.” He’d received instructions to report to the exemption board office next week. Later he claimed to have been out drinking that Wednesday night. Perhaps he needed to steady his nerves for the coming interview. That would explain why he’d slept so deeply that night.
About 4:30 that morning something woke him from his sleep. At first he couldn’t tell what it was. Then he heard it. A low groan coming from the other side of the wall, from Joe and Catherine’s room. Andrew sat up in bed and listened again. He heard nothing. He rapped on the wall. No answer. Andrew wasn’t sure what to do. He had a feeling that something was very, very wrong. But he wasn’t used to barging into his brother’s bedroom. And he was afraid of what might be on the other side of the wall. As the youngest of four brothers, Andrew was used to following, not leading. So he pulled on some clothes and ran down the block to the house of Jacob, another of his older brothers. Waking him, Andrew told Jake that he was afraid something terrible had happened.
The two men returned to the house and went around the back to enter by the kitchen door. What they saw there made them even more apprehensive about what they’d find inside. The kitchen door stood open; one of its panels lay on the ground. Anxiously, the two brothers went through the kitchen, past the bathroom, and stood at the door of the bedroom. Jake tapped on the door. There was no answer. Slowly, Jake pushed open the bedroom door to reveal the horrific scene. Reeling from the discovery, they immediately called the police and ambulance and waited for help to arrive.
After the brothers finished their statements, Captain Dunn kept them at the station, using the handy excuse that they were “material witnesses.” He knew Chief Long and Superintendent Mooney would want to talk to them.
Back at the Maggio grocery, Bertillon Operator John Norris flashed away with his camera. Superintendent Mooney, Chief of Detectives George Long, and a handful of other officers inspected the bodies. This wasn’t Mooney’s first big murder case. Most of the others, however, had been straightforward shootings that didn’t require much detective work to determine who the shooter was. None had been anything like this. Even if he was new to police work, Mooney planned to apply the same systematic thinking that had always served him so well to this murder case.
Joseph was on the bed with his feet hanging off the side. Catherine lay on the floor at his feet, sprawled on her back, a gaping wound on the right side of her neck. Both were drenched with blood. An axe stained with blood had been discarded in the nearby bathroom, dropped into the bathtub; it was the couple’s own axe, last seen lying in their backyard. Blood on the bed, blood on the floor, and blood spattered seven feet up the wall testified to the ferocity of the attack.
A few hours after the bodies had been removed to the morgue, Dr. O’Hara’s autopsy showed that both had had their throats cut. In addition, Joseph had been hit twice with the axe, fracturing his skull, and cut a couple of times on his face and neck. Catherine hadn’t actually been hit with the axe at all but had died an even more horrific death. She had gotten
out of bed, the police speculated, to defend her husband from his killer. But he’d slashed her seven times—on the face, on the shoulder, on the hand, the last probably a defensive wound received as she attempted to protect herself from the deadly razor. The killing stroke had cut deep into the right side of her neck, slicing through the muscles, internal jugular vein, and carotid artery and cutting into her airway. Such a stroke must have immediately dropped her to the floor, where her gasps for breath would have sucked the gushing blood into her airway, drowning her in her own blood as she simultaneously bled to death.
Joseph and Catherine Maggio and the grocery where they were murdered.
The means of the killer’s entry they’d seen before at the Andollina grocery: he had chiseled out a panel in the kitchen door and then reached through to the lock. Once inside, he went straight through to the bedroom.
“Robbery was the motive,” announced the New Orleans States, reporting what the police were telling the public. The small safe in the bedroom was open; likely it had been left unlocked because Joe Maggio had deposited $650—several days’ receipts from the grocery—in the bank the day before. A tin strongbox had been forced open and fifty dollars taken. The jewelry box hadn’t been tampered with, although it contained jewelry worth much more than the money stolen. Dresser drawers had been pulled out and clothes strewn about.
After Dr. O’Hara took charge of the bodies and sent them off to the morgue, Superintendent Mooney had the house and grocery locked and put under guard. The half-dozen detectives assigned to the case spent the rest of Thursday interviewing neighbors and family members and finding out as much about the Maggios as they could.
Investigators didn’t systematically search the premises immediately. Before the development of scientific crime scene analysis, such things were less important than tracking down witnesses—and suspects—as quickly as possible. Even neophyte policeman Frank Mooney knew that the way to solve a case was to find a suspect and sweat a confession out of him as soon as possible. A time-consuming search of the residence and grocery could wait.
There were few surprises in the information the detectives gathered. The Maggios were typical Sicilian immigrants, small-time businessmen. Forty-year-old Joseph was the eldest of the four brothers. Andrew, the youngest, had a barbershop down in the Central Business District. Jacob, thirty-six, owned a shoe repair shop only about a block (or a “square,” according to New Orleans vernacular) away. A fourth brother, Salvatore, thirty-three, ran another grocery. Joseph took over as the head of the family when their father died years before. He had been the first to leave Sicily, immigrating to America and sending for the rest of his family as soon as he could.
Joe had married Catherine in 1903. A photo of them on their wedding day shows a sober groom, his dark mustache curling upward, and a self-conscious Catherine, still radiant in her wedding finery. Except for the unusual circumstance of having no children, they were an ordinary, happily married couple, working seven days a week to build a business that served both black and white customers who affectionately knew them as “Mr. and Mrs. Joe.” The Maggios were careful with their money, as Sicilian immigrants usually were, investing their small excess funds in Liberty Loan bonds. And patriotic as only new Americans can be, the Maggios tucked away their Red Cross pledge cards among their other important documents. They were the “right sort” of Italians, the detectives discovered, hardworking merchant petite bourgeoisie who had no enemies or questionable associates. No one had any reason to harm them.
In the course of his inquiries that morning, Detective Theodore Obitz stumbled across a bizarre message chalked onto the banquette—the sidewalk—a block away. What the message actually said is uncertain. Police records that might have preserved the message are lost. The Times-Picayune reported it as “Mrs. Joseph Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney.” The States had a slightly different version: “Mrs. Joseph Maggio is going to sit up tonight. Just write Mrs. Toney.” The New Orleans Item carried a third variant: “Mrs. Joseph Maggio will sit up tonight—just write. Mrs. Tony.” That all of the newspapers carried a different version of the message suggests that the reporters didn’t see the writing themselves but relied on secondhand accounts muddled in the retelling. The versions in the Item and States are closer to each other, but the one in the Times-Picayune makes the most literal sense.
Was it a clue? What did it mean? None of the various versions made much sense. The newspapers bandied about explanatory theories about the message ranging from its having been left by the deranged killer to it being the work of an accomplice warning the Maggios to be on their guard, to a practical joke of unusually bad taste. No wonder that Captain Dunn’s statement to the press on Thursday evening could only say that this was an “unusually mysterious” case.
While detectives were still puzzling over the chalk message Thursday afternoon, another murder weapon turned up. A black woman the newspapers designated a “colored girl” working next door noticed a straight razor sticking out of the rose trellis on the lawn of the house next to the Maggio property. She alerted the owner of the property, who notified the police.
Chief of Detectives George Long turned the tortoise shell–handled razor over in his hand. The stainless steel blade was only three inches long, but it was deadly sharp. Dried blood clung to the blade and the black and yellow handle. If we can find the owner, Long thought as he folded the blade into its handle, we’ll have the killer.
Long immediately sent Captain Dunn to Andrew’s barbershop to interview his employees. Under questioning, one of them, Estaban Torres, conceded that he had seen Andrew take a similar razor from the shop a few days before, saying that it needed to be honed.
This was just the piece of evidence that Long and Mooney needed. From such minor details cases could be solved. The blood-smeared razor was almost certainly the murder weapon, and now the investigators might be able to connect it to one of the chief suspects, someone familiar with the house and grocery. Andrew had aroused suspicion from the beginning because he claimed to have slept through two people being hacked to death in the next room. It also seemed odd that Andrew hadn’t inspected the sounds in Joe’s bedroom himself but instead had gone to get Jake. He was either a coward, the detectives thought, or else something more sinister.
Optimistic that they were on their way to solving the case, Mooney let Jake go home Thursday night. But not Andrew. Less than twenty-four hours after the murders, the investigators had zeroed in on a suspect.
Now they were ready to thoroughly search the crime scene. Perhaps they could turn up more evidence to support a charge against Andrew. On Friday, Superintendent Mooney, Chief of Detectives Long, Captain Dunn, Detective Obitz, and Obitz’s partner, Detective James P. Ford, returned to the Maggio grocery where they went through the premises room by room. In the murdered couple’s bedroom, they found a blood-spattered suit of clothes in the corner, a pair of blood-stained socks, a bloody footprint, and a loaded revolver.
A search of Andrew’s room turned up three more straight razors, not very surprising since he was a barber, none with blood on them. Of more interest was a shirt found in his bathroom—a stiff-bosomed white dress shirt spotted with faded dark stains that someone had tried to wash out. Were they bloodstains?
The search was as thorough as the investigators could make it. Detective Obitz even wedged himself uncomfortably under the house looking for evidence. In the backyard, one of the investigators found a screwdriver matching the marks in the door panel. Like the axe and razor, this tool had been abandoned by the killer. In the grocery, footprints of stocking feet were spotted on the bar’s newly varnished counter, indicating that the killer hadn’t worn shoes. Perhaps, someone speculated, he had climbed on the counter to switch on a light.
Once they completed the search, the detectives returned to their witnesses. Yes, some remembered that on the day before the murders, Andrew had worn dark clothes, similar to the blood-stained ones found in his brother’s bedroom. The
case against the youngest brother seemed to be tightening.
Then investigators suffered a setback. When they reinterviewed Estaban Torres, he looked carefully at the three razors found in Andrew’s room. He pointed to one of them, saying that it looked like the one Andrew had taken from the shop. Now, there was no evidence of any connection between Andrew and the bloody murder weapon. Nevertheless, he remained the only suspect.
As rumors spread that he would be charged soon, Andrew begged to be allowed to attend his brother and sister-in-law’s funeral. Mooney refused to release him, citing “the unsettled state of the case.”
On Friday afternoon, two services were held to accommodate the many mourners. The first was at the funeral parlor on Toulouse Street, where the overflowing crowd spilled out into the street, blocking traffic. A second service was held at Saint Mary’s Italian Church, the parish church for Italian immigrants in New Orleans, situated at the site of the old Ursuline Convent in the French Quarter. Here the tearful young nephews and nieces of the childless couple trudged by the caskets to say good-bye to their aunt and uncle. After the funeral mass, pallbearers loaded the flower-laden caskets into two hearses. The melancholy procession then slowly made its way down Esplanade Avenue the two short miles to Saint Louis Cemetery No. 3, where Joseph and Catherine Maggio were interred in the same vault. Meanwhile, Joe’s youngest brother sat in the parish prison, suspected of their murder.
On Saturday morning, accompanied by Assistant District Attorney Ben Daly and Dr. O’Hara, Superintendent Mooney made a final examination of the Maggio residence and grocery. It was an opportunity for Mooney to show Daly and O’Hara the crime scene, outline his theory of the crime, and listen to their views. Mooney told them he was inclined to think that Andrew was their best suspect, but a lot would depend on the interview and how Andrew answered the investigators’ questions. The case could go either way.
The Axeman of New Orleans Page 10
