The Axeman of New Orleans

by Miriam C. Davis

  At ten o’clock the next morning, Frank Jordano took the stand in his own defense. The big, hulking youth was pale from two months’ imprisonment, and he had lost weight. He hadn’t been allowed to see his father, brother, sisters, or fiancée since he’d been imprisoned in the Gretna jail. He had only been allowed to see his mother a couple of times in the presence of Detective Marullo. He had a hard time understanding why he was here, why he and his father were standing trial. Now was his opportunity to set things right.

  At Byrnes’s request, Frank told the jury how he’d dressed up that Saturday night, dropped off his suit to be cleaned and pressed, gotten a haircut and shave, briefly visited with an aunt, then walked to Lee Hall—a dance hall—where he watched the dancing for several minutes before going home. When he got home, his mother told him that if he wanted anything to eat, he’d have to get it from the store. He decided to skip supper and finished up some paperwork before saying good night to his parents. He recounted his girlfriend Josie’s dream to his mother, then went to bed.

  The next morning he was startled awake by his sister’s screams, and he flung himself half dressed down the stairs to find out what was wrong. He joined the crowd of people rushing into the Cortimiglias’ home and found the baby dead and Charlie and Rosie gravely wounded. He asked Charlie, “Charlie, for Christ sake, who done this?” But all Charlie could do was ask Frank to tell his brother-in-law. So Frank hitched up his horse and buggy and rode out to Amesville, calling on Dr. Gelbke and Dr. Rossner on the way.

  Byrnes asked him if he’d been in the Cortimiglia house at any time that night. Frank emphatically denied it: “No, sir. I was not in there.”

  Byrnes asked him about Rosie Cortimiglia’s testimony that she had seen him hit baby Mary with the axe.

  Frank must have thought of little else in the last two months. Now, all he could do was deny it in the strongest of terms: “I didn’t strike that baby with any axe; it is one of the biggest false stories that ever came from a living human being’s mouth in the State of Louisiana, if she said I struck the baby with an axe.”

  Byrnes: “Were you in the house that night, and did you strike that baby with anything?”

  Frank: “No, sir, I did not.”

  Byrnes: “Is her statement true?”

  Frank: “It is untrue.” He turned to look directly at the jury. “It is false.”

  Now Byrnes turned to the kitchen door taken from the crime scene. Someone had pried off the door panel that Manny Fink and Chief Leson had nailed back into place. Byrnes pointed to the missing panel and asked Frank to climb through the opening. Would he fit?

  Frank dutifully took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. Bracing himself against the wooden platform on which the clerk of court’s desk sat, he stretched one arm and then the other through the hole as he tried to pull himself through it. He paused when he heard a slight rip as one of the jagged edges of the door tore his shirt. Frank took a deep breath and, steadying himself, managed to force himself a surprising distance through the opening before he got stuck and could move no farther.

  That was one theory of the crime debunked; whoever had attacked the Cortimiglias and however they got into the house, Frank Jordano couldn’t have climbed through the hole in the door. At the request of one of the jurors, however, Frank easily reached over to slide the latch.

  Frank extracted himself from the door, tugged his coat back on, and sat down in the witness chair.

  His lawyer proceeded to ask him about his feelings toward baby Mary. “I loved the child with all my heart,” he said. “Every time I came home in the evening the little child was over [at my] home and I grabbed her up and played with her until I . . . went out again.”

  On cross-examination, the district attorney asked him about the dream he’d told his mother about. Josie had dreamed about snakes, and he’d asked his mother if it was a good or bad dream. Rivarde asked Frank what he had told the coroner’s jury. Frank admitted he’d lied. He’d said that he’d had a bad dream. “I didn’t want to mention my sweetheart’s name,” he explained. But Frank pointed out that he’d come forward with that information himself. He had recently admitted the truth to Chief Leson in the Gretna jail.

  Rivarde still hammered on Frank because of his falsehood.

  “Now, you do admit, that when you swore before the coroner’s jury, you absolutely swore to a falsehood?”

  “I told Chief Leson I did wrong.”

  “That is not an answer to my question. Did you know when you made that statement to the coroner’s jury, after you had been sworn, that you were swearing to an absolute falsehood?”

  “I did know.”

  “You did know that you were swearing to an absolute falsehood?”

  With some desperation, Frank said, “I did. . . . I did tell them that I had the dream, because I didn’t want to mention my girl’s name amongst men. I know I did wrong. I told Chief Leson I done wrong. . . . But that night they questioned me so.”

  Rivarde let the matter drop and moved on to other questions. He asked Frank if he’d gotten into a fight Sunday morning or Saturday night. Puzzled, Frank said, no, he hadn’t. Rivarde then asked if he knew a streetcar conductor on the Algiers line named Fandel. Still puzzled, Frank admitted that he did. Wasn’t he on Fandel’s streetcar on Sunday morning after the attack on the Cortimiglias, and didn’t he tell the conductor when asked how he’d hurt his hand that he’d gotten into a fight? Frank said no, he didn’t go to Algiers that morning, he hadn’t seen Fandel, and he hadn’t been in a fight.

  Suddenly, Rivarde switched to a different line of questioning: “Do you know a man named Rube Mayronne?” he demanded.

  Frank admitted that he did. Rivarde asked if he recalled talking to Mayronne at his feed store about two weeks before the assault on the Cortimiglias. “Did you go and ask him if he had made a loan to the Cortimiglias, which would enable them to build their store?”

  “No, sir,” Frank replied, “I did not.”

  “And did you,” the DA continued, “tell him, ‘That son of a b will not be there longer than two weeks’?”

  Frank vehemently denied saying any such thing. But he said he had been in Mayronne’s store about the time that they had gone to court with Charlie Cortimiglia, and Mayronne didn’t seem to like it. Mayronne cursed him and called him “a dirty little low down dago” for evicting Cortimiglia.

  Frank testified that he’d told Mayronne that he didn’t know what business it was of his, and continued: “So then he says to me, ‘That dago says he is going to kill you if you fool with him.’ I looked at him and burst out laughing, and said, ‘It takes more than one man to do that job.’ That is all I said to Rube Mayronne.”

  When he had the opportunity to question Frank again, William Byrnes tried to undo some of the damage done by the prosecution by exposing Frank as, technically, a perjurer. “Now Frank, about that dream, why did you tell that story about the dream, saying you had it when your girl had it? Did you tell it to mislead the coroner’s jury about the Cortimiglia murder; did you tell it to hide anything that you knew?”

  Frank was adamant that he had not.

  “Did you know at that time that you would have to answer for every word that you said—every statement?”

  “No, sir; I did not.”

  “Were you preparing a defense at that time?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But did you make that statement for the purpose of throwing the coroner’s jury off the trail of the murderer, or did you connect it in any way with the murder?”

  “No, sir.”

  “What did you do it for?”

  “I did not want to mention my sweetheart’s name before the coroner’s jury.”

  “When you told your attorneys that it was you who had the dream, what were you advised to do?”

  The DA objected to this, so the question went unanswered, although it suggests that when Frank had his attack of conscience he’d gone to his lawyers, who’d advised him to confess to the
truth. And, probably, a male jury of that era might have understood his hesitation at mentioning a young woman’s name in a public proceeding, “notoriety” being something that no well-brought-up young woman aspired to.

  When Frank rose from the witness stand after three hours of testimony, he and his lawyers had reason to worry. He’d admitted under oath that he’d lied under oath. Arguably, his lie had been trivial, and arguably, it had been justifiable in defense of a young lady’s reputation. But there was no way to know if the men on the jury would see it that way. No doubt, his lawyers hoped that other witnesses scheduled that day would repair some of the damage.

  The star in this lineup of witnesses was Dr. Jerome Landry, the house surgeon who had cared for Rosie while she was in Charity. Under direct questioning by Byrnes, Landry testified that he kept a close eye on Rosie while she was in the hospital, checking on her up to five or six times a day. For the first few days, she’d been unconscious but had “gradually regained consciousness.” She had no memory of anything from the time she went to bed on Saturday night until she woke up in Charity weeks later. She didn’t know what had happened, how she got there, or who had struck her. Landry said that he had asked her numerous times who had attacked her, and her consistent reply was “I don’t know.”

  Byrnes asked him if Rosie had been in any condition to identify her attackers on March 14 when Frank had been arrested. Landry’s response was brief and to the point: “No.” Byrnes asked him what he thought of the fact that the day after she’d been discharged from the hospital, Rosie signed a statement identifying her assailants. Dr. Landry was suspicious: “It does seem strange to me that here to-day is a woman who has a perfectly blank mind, does not know anything, and the next say she remembers everything. She leaves the hospital this evening and knows nothing about it, and the next day she knows everything [that] happened at the time of the murder.”

  Landry also testified that although he couldn’t be absolutely certain, he thought he’d heard the investigators ask Rosie if Frank had done it.

  Nothing Rivarde asked could shake the doctor’s testimony, so when Landry left the stand, Byrnes must have been relieved; the doctor had done the defense a lot of good. The physician who had taken the greatest care of Rosie was the one who discredited her the most.

  Dr. Henry Leidenheimer, who had also worked at Charity when Rosie and Charlie had been patients, followed Dr. Landry. He was the physician who attended Charlie when the Cortimiglias first arrived at the hospital, while Landry operated on Rosie. It was clear that Byrnes called him as a witness not because he had observed either of the wounded as closely as Landry had observed Rosie, but because of his views on Rosie’s injuries. Leidenheimer testified that he didn’t believe that Rosie’s head wounds had been caused by an axe. An axe, he said, would have torn the soft tissues of the head to a greater degree than he had found. Rosie, he believed, had been hit with something lighter. Charlie’s injuries, however, were consistent with those caused by an axe; a heavy, sharp implement had sliced cleanly through the soft tissues of the scalp, through the skull, and into the brain.

  Dr. Leidenheimer may well have been wrong in his assessment of the cause of Rosie’s head wounds. He was a surgeon, not a forensic pathologist, and spent his time saving lives, not studying wound patterns the way a coroner or, today, a medical examiner does. Or perhaps he was correct and the attacker had hit her with something other than an axe, as he had done to Mary Davi. Either way, for the defense his testimony was a godsend because it directly contradicted Rosie’s assertion that Frank had hit her with an axe.

  Leidenheimer also testified that the cut Rosie had sustained on her arm could have come from an infusion injected into her at the hospital. He didn’t recall if she’d had such a cut while in the hospital, but it was plausible, he thought, that a spot on her inner arm, at the bend of the elbow, just where she had a scar, had been “cut [to] expose the vein” for a medical procedure. This suggested that Rosie’s story that she’d been cut on the arm by Frank might also be inaccurate.

  From the questions jurors asked, it was clear they didn’t want to give up on Rosie’s story about being struck with an axe. One asked if her wounds could have been caused by a corner of the axe; another if they could have been caused by the inability to “swing the axe properly in close quarters.” The DA chimed in and asked if the injuries could have been caused with the axe handle. To all, Dr. Leidenheimer replied, “No.”

  After Landry and Leidenheimer’s testimony, reporters thought that the defense was in the best shape it had been in since the trial began. Then Chief of Police Peter Leson took the stand. He was the person for whom Rosie had first identified the Jordanos as culprits. Leson testified that he had visited the Cortimiglias in the hospital twice a day after they had been admitted. Finally, one day—he couldn’t remember which one—Rosie told him that it was “Frank Jordano and the old man.” He denied asking her if the Jordanos had done it and denied later warning her to “stick” to her story about the Jordanos. Initially, Leson testified that there were no other witnesses to Rosie’s accusation, but later he amended his statement, saying that when he brought Dr. Gelbke to the hospital, Rosie told him that Frank and his father had hit her.

  When asked by Byrnes why he took Rosie to the parish jail after she was discharged from the hospital, Leson explained that it was done out of concern for her safety. They feared “someone might harm her,” he claimed, although he never explained who that someone might be. They needed someplace safe to keep her “until we could find a place for her to be taken care of. . . . She had no place at that time to stay.” Moreover, he added, when Byrnes pressed him, she was a material witness in a murder case.

  He denied realizing at the time that she had relatives in Amesville, despite the fact that two of her brothers-in-law—at least one of whom lived in Amesville—accompanied her from the hospital to the jail. When Byrnes asked him if he had questioned Frank Jordano about visiting these same relatives on the morning the crime was discovered, Leson said he didn’t remember. When Byrnes asked why, if he was so concerned about Rosie’s safety, he thought it safe to release her the next day, Leson disavowed responsibility; he lost control over her when he turned her over to Sheriff Marrero and Charles Burgbacher, the deputy in charge of the jail.

  The final witness of the day was the coroner of Orleans Parish, Dr. Joseph O’Hara. O’Hara had not examined either of the Cortimiglias, but he was a specialist in brain and nerve diseases, head of neurology at Touro Infirmary, and a consulting neurologist at both Charity Hospital and the New Orleans City Hospital of Mental Diseases. Perhaps as one who had worked with both Inspector of Police James Reynolds and Superintendent of Police Frank Mooney on Axeman cases, he, too, believed that a mad killer was loose and the Jordanos were guiltless. He certainly didn’t think they should be convicted on Rosie Cortimiglia’s evidence.

  O’Hara was on the stand for several hours, from the late afternoon until after the dinner break. Most of the defense’s questions were about Rosie’s injuries, but they were always couched as hypotheticals about someone who’d been injured in precisely the way Rosie had been. The gist of O’Hara’s response to defense questioning was that someone who had sustained the head injuries that Rosie Cortimiglia had sustained, and had made the claims that she had made, was likely “suffering from a paranoiacal [sic] state, . . . [which] is a firm, fixed, systematized, forced delusion or hallucination, the result of trauma, from an emotional shock, or from external forces of the head.” O’Hara’s expert view was that (underneath all the hypotheticals) Rosie’s mental condition made her an untrustworthy witness. In particular, he believed it unlikely that she would be able to recall her attack with such precision since people who had received this type of brain injury were usually unable to recall the events leading to the injury in so much detail.

  Byrnes asked if such a person was more likely to be suggestible. O’Hara replied yes, “Those people are very prone to suggestions, and easy to be led.”
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br />   Byrnes then asked if such a person would be more open to suggestion if arrested and thrown in jail. O’Hara thought so: “Yes, she would be if she was put in jail. If she came out of the hospital suffering from an emotional shock and was put in jail, certainly she would be more depressed. If she was more depressed she would be more susceptible to suggestion.”

  The prosecution, playing the same hypothetical game, tried to get O’Hara to say that because some circumstantial evidence supported Rosie’s accusation, it should be believed, but failed. Dr. O’Hara continued to maintain that Rosie’s testimony shouldn’t be trusted.

  After Dr. O’Hara completed his testimony and rose from the witness chair, at 10:30 Saturday night the defense rested its case.

  Rivarde and his team must have thought O’Hara’s testimony seriously damaged their case because they immediately scrambled to find an additional expert medical witness. Rivarde had had Dr. C. V. Unsworth, a specialist in mental and nervous diseases, examine Rosie earlier but hadn’t known if the state would need him. He decided it did. Late Saturday night, Judge Fleury issued a subpoena for Dr. Unsworth, and the case was adjourned until Monday.

  On Monday morning, the prosecution’s rebuttal began. Everyone hoped that today the case would finally go to the jury. The trial had already been the longest for a murder that anyone in Jefferson Parish could remember. The jurors had been living in the courthouse for almost a week, eating and sleeping in the building and attending court thirteen or more hours a day, breaking only for meals. They were ready for it to end. Everyone was ready for it to end. The defense even dispensed with the usual character witnesses—friends, neighbors, and business associates who would testify to the men’s kind natures and excellent reputations.

  The state’s first witnesses Monday morning were Robert J. Langridge, a young railroad security officer, followed by John Fourcade, a Gretna patrolman. In his earlier testimony, Frank Jordano had denied seeing either Langridge or Fourcade the Saturday night before the murder. The prosecution wanted to show that Frank had been out and about in Gretna later than he’d said he’d been and that he’d lied about not seeing the two men.