The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  Then, abruptly, Higgins switched back to the night of the attack. “I want you to tell us why you didn’t arouse your husband when you saw two men coming into your house.”

  Rivarde was quick with his objection. “This witness has been on the stand the whole of the afternoon, and that question has been asked and answered.” Judge Fleury agreed. Higgins asked Rosie a few more questions before ending his interrogation of the witness.

  But before he sat down, he gave her one final opportunity to reconsider her testimony. Rosie was an unsophisticated, uneducated, and not especially bright twenty-one-year-old. Was it possible that she didn’t understand the consequences of accusing two men of murder? How much thought did she give to what would happen to her two former neighbors, especially the young man who’d been so fond of her daughter?

  “Now Mrs. Cortimiglia, you realize that two men are being tried for murder, and that your testimony in this case is going to be heard as evidence for the State to convict them of murder, and if these men are convicted of murder, Frank Jordano and [Iorlando] Jordano sitting here, they will be hung by the State of Louisiana by the neck until they are dead, dead, dead. You realize that fact?”

  Rosie looked confused. “How do you mean? I don’t understand.”

  Higgins responded gravely: “I want you to realize the seriousness of this, because I don’t want you to make a statement [without] . . . realiz[ing] the seriousness of it. I ask you now if you know that the testimony that you are giving here . . . [is] made under oath . . . and that evidence is being taken here in court in an effort by the State to convict two men of murder when the penalty is death?”

  Rosie didn’t seem to understand that either. Higgins patiently explained it to her again—she was testifying under oath, she had to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, and the crime for which the Jordanos had been charged was punishable by hanging.

  Finally, Rosie nodded, “Yes, sir,” she understood. The defense could only hope that the jury had understood that she did not, in fact, understand and that the jurymen believed that her account was so hopelessly muddled that they dare not send a man to the gallows on it.

  When Rosie got off the stand at 5:30 PM, she had testified for over five hours, much of it under intense cross-examination. Those who’d listened to her so intently had been favorably impressed, and a murmur of sympathy swept through the crowd as she was escorted out of the courtroom.

  Later that night, the jurymen settled back into their chairs to hear from half a dozen more witnesses. First, Dr. Fernandez, at his own request, again took the stand because he wanted to correct some of his earlier testimony. The previous evening, he had testified that he didn’t know how the injuries on Mary Cortimiglia had been inflicted. But, he told the court, he’d forgotten that “there was an axe produced at the inquest which was bloody and had hair on the end of it . . . which made me think that probably the instrument had some connection with it.”

  Byrnes asked the doctor about Rosie’s testimony in front of the coroner’s jury. Then he asked Dr. Fernandez why he hadn’t put her testimony in writing. “Didn’t you know this was a murder trial?” he asked.

  The coroner replied that Sheriff Marrero told him that she’d already signed a notarized statement.

  “The Sheriff told you not to take her statement down in writing?”

  Rivarde interrupted. “I object, if your Honor please, to what the Sheriff told him, upon the ground that it is a conversation of third parties.”

  Byrnes argued that it was a legitimate question since Sheriff Marrero was a law enforcement officer. Judge Fleury, however, dismissed the exchange between Dr. Fernandez and Sheriff Marrero as irrelevant hearsay.

  Dr. Fernandez stepped down from the stand, and other witnesses took his place. Drs. G. W. Rossner and Marvin Odom testified about being called to the scene early that Sunday morning. Hazel Johnson and her nephew George Bolden (who had accompanied his aunt that morning) testified about finding the injured Cortimiglias.

  The last witness Thursday evening was City Councilman Emmanuel Fink, who recounted being woken up about three o’clock on the morning of March 9 by barking dogs and a distant knocking or tapping sound. Fink described the discovery of the Cortimiglias later that morning and told of telephoning for an ambulance and the police. At some point during the ensuing chaos, someone handed him an axe they had discovered under the house, and he, noticing a swatch of dark hair on the blade, gave it to Chief Leson. At the prosecution’s request, the witness identified one of the two axes found on the Cortimiglia premises as the axe he meant, pointing out that a piece of hair was still visible on the blade.

  Court adjourned at 11:30 PM.

  The final witness for the state was sworn in at 10:25 the following morning. Charlie Cortimiglia, who had only been out of Charity Hospital for a few weeks, wasn’t on the stand for long. He said that he’d gone to bed on the night of March 8 with a pistol and cash under his pillow and woken up in the hospital weeks later. He remembered nothing of the attack or his daughter’s death.

  When Charlie was through, DA Robert Rivarde rested his case.

  ≡ 11 ≡

  Verdict

  THE FIRST WITNESS CALLED for the defense was Frank’s sister Lena. The twenty-year-old young woman narrated in chilling detail the morning Hazel Johnson shot out of the Cortimiglias’ house shrieking, “Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” Byrnes used Lena to make several points. He wanted to demonstrate that Frank had no interest in the grocery business—and thus no motive for killing the Cortimiglias—so he quizzed Lena about her brother’s work history in real estate and life insurance. Byrnes also elicited from Lena the fact that on Sunday morning Frank was wearing the same clothes he’d worn the night before, presumably indicating he’d not splattered them with blood during the night. She provided alibis for her father and brother, testifying that she hadn’t heard her father in the next room getting up during the night and that Frank had gone upstairs sometime after 10 PM and hadn’t come down until she’d started screaming about the Cortimiglias. Under cross-examination, however, the prosecution got her to concede that it was possible for either Frank or Iorlando to have sneaked out of the house without her knowledge.

  Byrnes’s next witness was Paul Dupas, a thirty-five-year-old New Orleans real estate agent for whom Frank Jordano had once worked. Dupas had been aghast at the charges against Frank. He liked the boy and had trouble believing that he could do something so appalling. But a lot of people in Gretna thought Frank was guilty. And why would Rosie Cortimiglia—whom he also knew slightly—make up such a thing? Her little girl, after all, was dead. Dupas had felt an acute need to know what had really happened.

  Quite by accident, he had his opportunity when he was out on business over the river and realized that he was near where the Cortimiglias were living with Rosie’s sister in Amesville. On impulse, he decided to call in on them.

  Both Charlie and Rosie were home. Charlie had little to say, still recovering as he was from his ordeal. Rosie, however, was talkative and quite happy to tell Dupas what had happened. Animatedly, she recounted the attack, saying that when Frank had tried to kill Mary, she had fought him, attempting to protect her little girl. Here, she said eagerly to Dupas, pulling up the sleeve of her dress. He cut me here, she said, pointing to a scar on her arm, on the inside of her elbow.

  Dupas returned home profoundly grieved by what he had learned. Frank must have done it. The cut on Rosie’s arm was proof that she’d tried to fight off her attacker and proof, in Dupas’s mind, that she was telling the truth. He’d told everyone in his office what Rosie had said, and word had spread. One day, Dupas received a telephone call from William Byrnes. When he’d heard the story, far from believing that this information indicted Frank, the lawyer knew that it might help exonerate him because it contradicted what Rosie had told the police. And since Rosie was the only eyewitness against Frank and his father, any evidence that demonstrated her unreliability as a witness could help win his clients’ freedo
m.

  Byrnes asked Dupas if he’d be willing to see if Rosie would repeat the same story. So the week before the trial started, Paul Dupas headed back out to Amesville, determined to see Rosie again.

  Under questioning from both the state and the defense, Dupas narrated his story for the jury. Finally, Rivarde addressed the witness: “Now, Mr. Dupas, what was the sum and substance of the conversation between you and Mrs. Cortimiglia on your second visit?”

  The sum and substance, he replied, was that she flatly denied telling him that she’d struggled with Frank or that Frank had slashed her on the arm. She completely repudiated her previous account. No doubt Byrnes hoped that Dupas’s testimony would help convince the jurors that they would be foolish to convict men of murder based solely on Rosies’s testimony.

  After the midday dinner break, the defense called on a witness who added not so much an understanding of events as human pathos. Mrs. Jordano was on the stand for some time but mostly covered ground that had already been gone over. She described the events of the night of March 8 and morning of March 9, and her account matched that of Frank and Lena. She testified that her husband Iorlando—“my old man”—had been in bed with her the entire night; he had trouble getting up now, with his rheumatic back. She ended by turning to the jury and tearfully declaring, “My old man and my child are innocent!”

  Next, the defense called the New Orleans States police reporter Andrew Ojeda. Ojeda told of seeing the Cortimiglias in Charity on the day after Frank had been arrested. He testified that when Rosie had told him that her husband had been the attacker, he hadn’t believed her because Charlie was himself so badly injured.

  In his cross, the DA tried to suggest that Ojeda’s account of Rosie’s statement had been exaggerated or even fabricated by the newspaper. But the newspaperman swore that the States accurately reported what she told him.

  Iorlando Jordano was the next witness. He slowly made his way to the witness chair, his back trouble painfully evident. Two months in jail had not improved his health. In heavily accented, broken English, he testified as to his movements on Saturday afternoon and evening and about being called to the murder scene Sunday morning.

  He added that he had loved the baby who called him, in her childish lisp, “Ganpa.”

  Rivarde rose to question him and asked Iorlando if he knew a man named Ed Hanson. When Iorlando hesitated, Rivarde directed that Hanson be brought into the courtroom. “Yes,” Iorlando nodded, “I know this man.” Rivarde warned the old grocer that the next question he was going to ask was “for the purpose of impeaching and contradicting your testimony.”

  Rivarde walked up to Iorlando: “Do you remember meeting Hanson at the Sportsmens Café?” Iorlando didn’t even remember the saloon until Rivarde prompted his memory.

  Rivarde repeated his question: “Mr. Jordano, did you or did you not meet Ed Hanson on Sunday, February 16 at the Sportsmens Café in Gretna? Did you, or did you not, have a conversation in which Hanson said to you: ‘I see you have gone back in the grocery business and you are going to have opposition, the Cortimiglias are going to open a store. I hope you do well.’ Then you said to Hanson, ‘The opposition don’t worry me, I will get rid of them, I will kill them all.’ Did you, or did you not have that conversation, and tell Mr. Ed Hanson that?”

  “I never said that!” The old man’s voice shook. “If he told you that he told you a God damn lie; I never said that.”

  Judge Fleury broke in to gently reprimand the witness. “Listen, Mr. Jordano. I don’t want to be harsh with you, but that language is not permissible in the Courthouse. I appreciate your situation as a witness, but the Court is not going to permit that kind of language.”

  Rivarde continued: “Then you deny having said that?”

  “I never said that,” Iorlando repeated. “I never told nothing to that man.”

  When it was again Byrnes’s turn to question the witness, he approached Iorlando. “Mr. Jordano, did you at any time say to Mr. Hanson, or to any other person, that you were going to kill Charlie Cortimiglia, and his wife, and the child or any words like that, or any words that could be taken like that?”

  “No,” Iorlando replied. “I didn’t say that.”

  “Mr. Jordano, did you at any time tell anyone, white or black, that you were going to kill Charlie Cortimiglia, or his wife, or his child?”

  “I never opened my mouth [like that],” insisted Iorlando. “I don’t belong to the Black Hand!”

  With this firm denial Iorlando’s testimony ended.

  After the supper break, Byrnes requested that the sheriff bring the Cortimiglias’ kitchen door, taken off by the hinges, into the courtroom. A couple of deputy sheriffs carried the heavy door in and set it down before the jury. Byrnes then called Superintendent of Police Frank Mooney to the stand.

  Byrnes’s defense strategy became apparent. He wanted the jury to see Mary Cortimiglia’s murder and the attack on her parents as part of a larger pattern—the Axeman’s crimes. So he wanted witnesses who could testify to the pattern of the attacks and show how the Cortimiglia assault and murder fit it. The Jordanos hadn’t killed Mary Cortimiglia, he wanted to show the jury. The murder was the degenerate killer who had been terrorizing New Orleans for months.

  Byrnes attempted to ask Mooney about the axe attacks and robberies connected to the “Ax-man” in New Orleans, but each time the prosecution objected on the grounds that the witness’s testimony wasn’t directly connected to the Cortimiglia case.

  Judge Fleury agreed, saying, “We are only concerned with the investigation of the particular case under consideration. The mere fact that they may have had several other cases of a similar character, has no bearing on this particular case.”

  Byrnes argued that it was relevant to show that someone other than his clients had a motive for the crime and was responsible for a series of similar crimes. His clients had an alibi, he said. They were at home in their own beds when Mary Cortimiglia was killed. When defendants claim an alibi, he continued, they have a legal right to show that someone else had committed the crime—in this case, a “degenerate . . . a pervert . . . a sadist . . . [a] Jack the Ripper type.”

  Byrnes reserved a bill of exception, a written statement of his objection to the judge’s ruling, which would put into the legal record his argument for an appeal. He would do this repeatedly throughout the trial.

  Realizing that Fleury would continue to rule the same way, Byrnes nevertheless persisted in asking questions that showed that the Cortimiglia murder was similar in critical details to the Axeman attacks. He continued asking questions he knew the judge wouldn’t allow so he could keep filing bills of exception.

  Byrnes asked Mooney for crime scene photographs that showed similarities among all the Axeman crimes. He asked the police superintendent if the Axeman cut out a door panel. He asked if the Axeman targeted corner houses, like that of the Cortimiglias. He asked about what kind of weapon the Axeman used. And how was the weapon usually disposed of? Were fingerprints ever found? Were sums of money often left, indicating robbery was not the motive? Didn’t evidence indicate the Axeman wanted “a deluge of blood”?

  In each case, the prosecution objected, the judge agreed, and Byrnes reserved a bill of exception. If he wasn’t making much headway in getting evidence in front of the jury about the Axeman’s crimes, he was laying the groundwork for an appeal if his clients were convicted.

  Finally, Judge Fleury had listened to enough: “The court has ruled that testimony is inadmissible,” he told Byrnes, “and that’s an end of it.”

  But Mr. Byrnes wasn’t finished. He called Maurice O’Neil, the New Orleans Police Department’s Bertillon operator, as a witness. He tried to ask O’Neil whether the Cortimiglia case resembled the Axeman crimes in New Orleans, but again, the prosecutor—and the judge—shut him down.

  Then he called to the witness chair Santo Vicari, the Amesville grocer who had been a victim of an Axeman-like burglary of his home and grocery only a few days be
fore the attack on the Cortimiglias. And Louis Besumer, whose acquittal earlier in the month had confirmed his status as an Axeman victim in the public’s eyes. And Jim Coulton, the Times-Picayune reporter who’d done so much work on the Axeman case. In no instance did the judge allow him to question the witnesses about similarities between earlier crimes and that of the crimes against the Cortimiglias. Judge Fleury was not permitting an Axeman defense.

  Byrnes’s next witnesses had seen Frank the morning of the attack or the evening before. Their testimony helped fill in for the jury Frank’s actions in that time period but added nothing controversial.

  Margaret Williams, however, had some surprises. She was a detective hired by Byrnes to get Rosie to talk. This was the kind of stratagem employed by defense lawyers before pretrial discovery gave them access to the prosecution’s case. She testified that on May 1, posing as a door-to-door seller of toilet articles, she had called on the Cortimiglias and found Rosie eager to talk. Rosie told her that she’d woken to find Frank Jordano and his father in her room. She didn’t have time to scream, she said, before one of the men hit the baby, and then her, with an axe. At first, she wasn’t sure whether the men had had to leave the room to find the axe, then she decided that yes, they did. Neither of the men said anything to her, and it all happened too quickly for her to say anything to them.

  Miss Williams’s testimony continued. She thought Rosie seemed embarrassed by her shorn hair, the result of her head injuries, so the next day she returned with the present of a boudoir cap. On that visit, Rosie’s story changed. This time she claimed she had spoken to Frank, and she said that “one of the men held her hands, but she didn’t know which one.” About the axe, Miss Williams said that Rosie told her that “she didn’t remember whether they had [the axe] when they came in, or whether they went out to get it.”

  By the time the court adjourned Friday evening, it was almost midnight.