by Gary Krist
That afternoon, Mooney returned to Charity Hospital to speak to the woman calling herself Mrs. Besumer. When asked if she really was married to the grocer, she grew agitated. “If I am not, he is the greatest deceiver yet,” she said. “He was married to me by a Jewish rabbi in New York two years ago and promised to turn Catholic and marry me with a priest. But he never did it.”
“Did you have a license?”
“He said so.”
“Did you see it?”
“No.”
When asked why they slept in separate bedrooms, she claimed it was because he insisted on sleeping with an electric fan running in the room. She didn’t like the noise it made, so she had moved to the back bedroom to sleep.
Trying a different tack, Mooney then asked her: “Mr. Besumer read the newspapers a great deal, didn’t he?”
“Yes, oh yes,” she replied.
“Did he read about the Maggio case?”
“The what?”
“The Maggio case—those Italians who were found murdered in bed with an ax and a razor.”
“Oh yes. [It was] like our case, wasn’t it?”
“And you never before saw the ax with which you were apparently struck?”
“No. We didn’t have an ax in the house even.”
Mooney left Charity Hospital that afternoon as confused as ever. Was it possible that Besumer, wishing to kill the woman who passed as his wife, struck her with an ax in order to make it look like the work of the Maggio assailant, whose crime he took such an interest in? Could he actually have inflicted his own head wound as a way of allaying suspicion? Granted, his injury was far less grave than the woman’s, but it was serious enough to cast doubt on any such notion.
It was now a week since the attacks at the Besumer grocery, and New Orleanians were clamoring for some—for any—explanation from the city’s law enforcement authorities. Mooney had supposedly reformed the notoriously corrupt and incompetent police department—the latest in a long series of attempts to improve the force. But as in the Maggio case in May, results of any kind in this investigation were distressingly thin. In fact, the two detectives he’d assigned to watch Louis Besumer had proved to be an all-too-familiar embarrassment to the force. One afternoon when they were supposed to be surveilling their prime suspect, the two were found at the Milneburg resort on Lake Pontchartrain, enjoying an afternoon excursion. Mooney had been forced to demote both of them—something that hadn’t happened on the force in more than twenty years. Needless to say, this kind of story did not inspire public confidence in the police department or its new superintendent.
When speaking to the press, however, Mooney tried to seem confident and in control of the situation. He did admit that the case was “one of the most baffling mysteries” ever to confront the department, but he assured the public that all avenues of investigation were being vigorously pursued. “We are making progress,” he temporized, “and I feel sure that, before we are through, the mystery will have been solved.”
It’s doubtful that New Orleanians found much comfort in these anodynes, but public concern about the crime was apparently on the wane. Many people seemed to have come to the same conclusion as Mooney’s detectives—that the attack was the result of some strange domestic quarrel that the Besumers were determined not to talk about. As such, the case was likely unrelated to the Maggio case, which itself could just have been the result of some obscure Italian feud. Maybe there was no mysterious axman haunting the streets of New Orleans after all.
But then—on July 7—something happened that immediately changed the complexion of the case. After eleven days of confusion, Mrs. Besumer apparently got her memory back for real.
“Along toward dawn,” she told police from her hospital bed, recalling the morning of June 27, “I awoke from sleep. I don’t know what caused me to wake, but I opened my eyes and in the light I saw a man standing above me, making some sort of motion with his hands.…”
She said she told the man to go away, but he remained, still making strange gestures that she couldn’t decipher. She said she felt dazed, perhaps because he had already struck her with the ax. But she could describe him: He was tall, heavyset, a white man with rumpled, dark brown hair. He wore a heavily soiled white shirt open at the collar.
The next thing she remembered was waking up outside on the gallery, her face in a pool of blood. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I was strangling. I tried to get up, but each time I would fall back. There were feet scuffling about me … the feet of a man, clad in shoes that were black and heavy and laced—the kind of shoe a laborer might wear.” But then she blacked out again, and remembered nothing else before waking up in the hospital, hours later.
Hearing this, Superintendent Mooney was inclined to be cautious, aware that this latest recollection of Harriet Lowe Besumer, if that was her name, might be another fantasy, like her account of being attacked by a mulatto. But for many in New Orleans, the story was credible enough. And it led to a chilling conclusion: the axman was real, and he apparently was still at large.
IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN A WOMAN’S SCREAM PIERCED the silence of the soggy August night. Kate Gonzales, lying in bed with her husband, bolted awake at the sound. She was confused at first. Had she really heard something, or had she just dreamt it? But then another scream erupted from the darkness, and the sounds of scuffling, a shattering of glass. The commotion seemed to be coming from next door, in the other half of their duplex Elmira Street cottage. This was where Kate’s sister lived with her husband and their three young children. Mary Schneider, she knew, was alone with the children that night, since her husband was working a night shift.
Kate shook her husband awake. When he also heard the screams, the two of them jumped out of bed and rushed into the street. Several other neighbors were already standing on the banquette, staring at the front door of the Schneider home, which stood wide open like a gaping mouth.
Gonzales and the neighbors entered the cottage, which was quiet now. In the middle room they found Mary Schneider, nine months pregnant, sprawled across the bed in a state of semiconsciousness. Bloody gashes lacerated her scalp and mouth. Several broken teeth lay scattered on the bedclothes, which were stained with oil from a broken glass lamp that lay on the floor beside the bed. Mary muttered something about being attacked by a tall, heavyset man, but then fainted before she could say more.
Police and an ambulance were called, and Mary Schneider was rushed to Charity Hospital, directly to the maternity ward because of her “delicate condition.”
Toward morning, when Edward Schneider returned from his job at the Southern Pacific wharf, he found his entire household in an uproar. Police were combing through the cottage and yard for clues, and other officers were searching the surrounding neighborhood. Superintendent Mooney, personally overseeing the investigation with Chief of Detectives George Long, asked Schneider to check the house to see if anything had been taken. A wardrobe in the bedroom had been broken open, and six or seven dollars had apparently been taken from the top shelf. But a box containing $102 of Schneider’s back pay had been left untouched in plain sight on the bottom shelf. Nothing else was missing.
The newspaper reporters wanted to know immediately whether Mooney regarded this as another axman attack. The superintendent was cautious at first. Mrs. Schneider’s head wound, he pointed out, was quite possibly caused by the broken oil lamp that had been found beside the bed; in fact, several strands of the victim’s hair had been found on the lamp, snagged on the metal prongs that held the lamp’s glass chimney to its base. But the wound to Mrs. Schneider’s mouth was another matter, obviously caused by something heavier than the lamp.
By late Monday, an even more disturbing piece of evidence was found. Mooney’s investigators turned up a discarded hatchet in one of the yards neighboring the cottage. Edward Schneider, on examining the premises more carefully, discovered that his own ax was missing from a backyard shed. But did this necessarily point to an axman? Or could the int
ruder have seen the ax and carried it away, hoping to make his aborted burglary look like an axman assault?
“At the present time,” Mooney told reporters on the day after the attack, “I am unable to say if it was the axman who struck Mrs. Schneider. But the finding of the hatchet and the disappearance of the ax is puzzling.”
Puzzling indeed, though Mooney’s reference to “the” axman reveals his suspicions that a single perpetrator was responsible for at least some of the crimes. Mary Schneider’s was the fourth such assault to occur in the city since Mooney became superintendent less than a year ago. Only one had been fatal—the slaughter of the Maggios back in May. Since the perpetration of that bloody crime, Mooney had learned of an earlier incident back in December 1917, when a sleeping Italian grocer named Epifania Andollina was attacked by a hatchet-wielding man standing over his bed. Andollina had survived, and the story hadn’t even made most of the daily papers at the time. But its resemblance to the Maggio incident was eerie—the panel chiseled out of the back door, the lack of any fingerprints or significant robbery, the discarding of the weapon in a neighboring yard.
The Besumer and Schneider cases, though, were somewhat different. The victims in those crimes were not Italian, and only Louis Besumer was a grocer. As for Mary Schneider, her head wound had proved to be relatively minor, and in fact she would successfully give birth to a baby girl within twenty-four hours of being attacked. It was possible that Mrs. Schneider, who now claimed to have no memory of the incident, had merely been awakened by a common burglar rifling through the wardrobe, and that the thief had struck her with a convenient object—the oil lamp—when she saw him and screamed. But what, then, of the allegedly missing ax, and the hatchet in the yard next door? All in all, despite the dissonant elements in both the Schneider and Besumer attacks, Mooney was regarding both—for the time being, at least—as part of the axman pattern.
His veteran detectives disagreed. “Members of the [detective] squad detailed by Superintendent Mooney to investigate the attack upon Mrs. Schneider,” the Daily States reported on August 7, “have not for a moment entertained the notion that the person who attacked Mrs. Schneider bore the brand of ‘the axman.’… They assert there is no such person as the axman going about committing these assaults. They believe that each of the so-called ax cases was separate and distinct.” The officers were not mentioned by name, but they were identified as “men who have many years’ experience in the handling of criminals of all types.” That these veteran detectives would publicly ridicule the whole idea of a serial ax murderer—when their chief and other police officials were on the record as believing that one existed—indicates just how disordered and undisciplined the investigation had become.
Certainly the people of New Orleans seemed to believe the axman was real. ARMED MEN GUARD SLEEPING FAMILIES FROM AXMAN, the Item announced on the day after the Schneider assault, reporting on “all-night vigils” kept by shotgun-toting fathers over their sleeping families. The Times-Picayune and the Item, at least, seemed totally convinced that “some insane beast” was at large in the city. The Item even went so far as to link the current ax attacks with those that had been committed back in 1910–12. “More than 12 victims have fallen under the dreadful blows of the weapon within the past few years,” the paper reported, alluding to the Crutti, Davi, and Schiambra outrages, attributed at the time to the Black Hand. One recalled detail of the 1910 Crutti attack seemed especially haunting: A witness had watched as the perpetrator—who had just chopped grocer Crutti with a meat cleaver—exited the residence by the back door carrying the weapon, his shoes, and the Cruttis’ pet mockingbird in a cage. After tossing the cleaver away, he scaled a fence, walked to the street, and sat down on someone’s front stoop. There he rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he calmly released the mockingbird from its cage, put on his shoes, and walked away—all while Mrs. Crutti was screaming for help in the house he had just left.
If that was the man who was active again now, eight years later, New Orleans had reason to be in a panic.
Superintendent Mooney, meanwhile, was coping as best he could, assigning as many patrolmen as could be spared from his inadequate force to the thinly settled parts of town that the axman seemed to prefer. Mooney had been receiving anonymous letters from an alleged forensics expert who claimed to have made a “study of criminals, especially perverts,” and who was apparently brimming with all sorts of tips and useful advice about apprehending the perpetrator. Modern FBI profilers might speculate that such unsigned missives could very possibly have come from the axman himself, but the neophyte superintendent seemed—or pretended to seem—not at all suspicious. He merely appealed to the letter writer through the newspapers, urging him to present himself in person to discuss his ideas. “The man seems to know considerable [information] about criminals,” Mooney told a reporter, “and if he comes to headquarters I’ll be glad to talk to him. He has given much study to the axman, it appears from his writings.”
What Mooney’s more skeptical detectives thought of this anonymous expert can be imagined. But then the city was jolted by yet another crime—one that seemed to banish any doubt that an axman was at large in the city, and that he seemed strangely drawn to Italian-owned grocery stores. At three A.M. on Saturday morning, August 10, Pauline and Mary Bruno, two teenage girls living in the residence attached to their mother’s grocery on Gravier Street, were awakened by the sound of a scuffle in the bedroom next to theirs. “I’ve been nervous about this axman for weeks,” Pauline told police. “I couldn’t sleep well last night, and haven’t slept well for a long time.” As she was dozing in bed, the commotion brought her wide-awake, and she sat up. “There at the foot of the bed was this big, heavyset man,” she said. “I screamed. My little sister screamed. We were horribly scared. Then he ran.”
The figure—which she thought was that of a white man, but couldn’t be sure—disappeared “almost as if he had wings.”
Their uncle Joseph Romano, who slept in the room next door, had stumbled into the bedroom a few moments later, holding his head with blood-smeared hands. “I’ve been hit,” he shouted. “Call an ambulance.” Then he fell into a chair, fatally wounded, and lost consciousness.
Superintendent Mooney and his detectives were on the scene within an hour, piecing together what had happened. The intruder, armed with the household’s own ax from a rear shed, had entered the residence via a broken slat in the kitchen window. He’d apparently gathered Joseph Romano’s clothes in the bedroom and carried them into the kitchen, where he rifled through the pockets and found a wallet, which was now missing. Then he had returned to the bedroom and begun hacking at the sleeping form in the bed, fracturing the base of Romano’s skull. The assailant may have intended to attack the girls next door as well, but their screams, much louder than their uncle’s groans, presumably forced him to retreat, discarding the ax in the rear yard as he fled.
Here again, the question of a robbery motive remained unclear. As in so many of the earlier attacks, the perpetrator had obviously ransacked the premises, and some small amount of money was taken. But much more was left behind—in Romano’s case, a gold watch on the mantelpiece and the victim’s own diamond ring. If the axman was indeed a thief, he was a curiously incompetent one, especially considering his ability to escape from the scenes of his crimes without leaving any tangible clues behind.
“I’m convinced that the Romano murder is the work of a madman,” Mooney told reporters later that day, “an ax-wielding degenerate who has no robbery motive but who is taking small sums to throw the police off the track.” But the superintendent again tried to reassure the public. “Take this as the gospel. We’re going to get him yet! I’m doing everything in human power to run down this murderous maniac.” He described his decision to consult with expert criminologists and private detective agencies to aid in the investigation. “This series of ax outrages is the biggest thing in New Orleans police history,” he announced. “We are not stopping with t
he facilities of my own department. I can’t tell all of the steps we’ve taken, but I can tell this much: we’ve called in outside help.”
But the public seemed hardly reassured. WHO WILL BE NEXT, IS QUESTION ITALIANS ASKING, read one headline in the Times-Picayune, over an article about elaborate precautions being taken among the city’s Sicilians. “A literal reign of terror has swept through many quarters in New Orleans,” the Item reported. In some Italian households, “members of the family divide the night into regular watches and stand guard over their sleeping kin, armed with buckshot-loaded shotguns.” A kind of hysteria seemed to grip the city as reports of alleged axman sightings came in from all over town. Numerous people called police to report unfamiliar axes found in their yards, or missing hatchets, or panels chiseled out of their doors. Everyone seemed to have a different theory about the killer’s identity. And—significantly—the suspected culprit always seemed to be a member of one of those groups targeted by reformers in the struggles of the past three decades. Many thought the axman was an Italian belonging to the Mafia or the Black Hand. Others thought he must be a crazed black man like Robert Charles. A few gullible souls, impressed by Pauline Bruno’s statement about the axman’s having wings, thought he might be some kind of supernatural being. (One wonders, in fact, why no one thought to suspect a disgruntled prostitute, or perhaps Tom Anderson himself.)
Even so, given the preponderance of Italians among the axman’s victims, suspicion fell most commonly on the city’s Sicilian underworld. Perhaps for this reason, New Orleans’ chief Italian detective, John Dantonio, sought to deflect criticism from the community he had served for so long. “Although practically all of the victims were Italian,” he told the Times-Picayune in an interview published on August 13, “I do not believe the Black Hand had anything to do with any of them. I have never known the Black Hand to kill women.”
