by Gary Krist
Back on the other side of the river, Superintendent Mooney continued to insist that all of the ax attacks (except, perhaps, for the Harriet Lowe murder) had been committed by a “degenerate madman,” and that “he ransacked the places he enters to create the impression that robbery is his motive.” The superintendent’s desk was now covered with maps, police reports, and photos of all of the ax cases in the city, and he was reportedly poring over them night and day. According to the Times-Picayune, his collection also included “the opinions of some of the South’s best recognized scientists, placing the axman in the same class as Catherine de’ Medici, the French author Sade, and other historic degenerates.”
But the Gretna authorities had a far more mundane perpetrator in mind for the Cortimiglia attack. So sure were they of Frank Jordano’s guilt that they kept asking the Cortimiglias again and again whether he was the man who assaulted them. The victims were still barely coherent and could do little more than nod or whisper in reply. But while Charles Cortimiglia (by some accounts) continued to insist that he did not recognize his assailant, his twenty-one-year-old, highly traumatized wife apparently indicated an affirmative to the question. This was enough for Chief Leson. He promptly had the younger Jordano arrested, despite the fact that the Cortimiglias’ doctor refused to “vouch for the condition of their minds.” “Both Charlie Cortimiglia and his wife, Rosie, told me that Frank Jordano had committed the crime,” Leson told a skeptical press. “We have worked up a strong case against him and I am satisfied that the circumstances surrounding the case justified the arrest.”
Frank Mooney ignored these developments in Gretna, preferring to pursue his own theory of the murders. In a high-profile presentation to the press—including, as a visual aid, a large city map marked with no fewer than sixteen alleged axman incidents—the superintendent outlined what he was now calling his “panel theory.” There were common elements, he claimed, not just in the various ax assaults, but also in the numerous attempted ax break-ins that had been reported throughout the city over the past year. And these common elements convinced him that the crimes were all the work of a single man.
The Times-Picayune reprinted the commonalities in full:
LOCATION—In nearly all of the cases a corner house with a high board fence at the side and rear has been selected, and in most instances it was a grocery or barroom or a combination of both.
TIME—The hour generally has been about 3 AM.
METHOD—Entrance has been effected by removing a lower panel of a rear door. The plan of work in each instance has been remarkably similar.
WEAPON—Where the crimes proceeded to the attack, an ax has been used (except in one case where a hatchet was wielded)—sometimes an ax found on the premises, sometimes brought by the murderer, but always an old ax and always left behind.
THE ATTACK—Always on sleeping victims with no apparent choice between men and women, and use of the blade of the weapon as a rule.
PRECAUTIONS—Complete failure to find fingerprints, together with the fact a pair of rubber gloves was left behind in one case, leads to the belief that the murderer uses rubber gloves to protect himself against identification by the fingerprint method.
ROBBERY AS A CAMOUFLAGE—In practically every ax murder, while bureaus, safes, and cabinets have been ransacked, little was stolen, and money and valuables in plain sight were left behind. And in numerous instances of “panel burglaries,” the work of the intruder has been so incomplete as to leave strong doubt whether robbery was the real motive.
Mooney did acknowledge that each assault and break-in could conceivably be a separate, unrelated incident. He also admitted that they all might be part of a systematic campaign of revenge or terrorism by the Mafia or Black Hand. But he remained convinced that the culprit in all or most of the incidents was a “solo maniac”—“a diabolical, bloodthirsty fiend, cunning and shrewd,” as the Times-Picayune described him, “a slinking agent of the devil at 3 AM.”
Then, on Sunday, March 16, the city received a kind of confirmation of this macabre description. The Times-Picayune reprinted a remarkable document the paper had received in the mail on Friday. It was an open letter to the public purporting to be from the axman himself. Addressed to the newspaper’s editor, and written in a hand similar to that of the letters received by Superintendent Mooney from the anonymous criminologist, it began with an attention-getting flourish: “Esteemed Mortal: They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether which surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police called the axman.”
The letter went on to ridicule the police for their inept investigation of his crimes. The department’s antics had been so “utterly stupid,” in fact, that they had amused not only him, but also “His Satanic Majesty” and the recently deceased emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph, among other denizens of hell. “Undoubtedly you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am,” he continued, “but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished to, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.”
The letter writer followed this with a threat, specifying the time of his next appearance: “Now, to be exact, at 12:15 o’clock (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans.”
But those in fear of their lives had one way to protect themselves:
“I am very fond of jazz,” he wrote, “and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose house a jazz band is in full swing at the time I just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then so much the better for the people. One thing is certain, and that is [that] some of those persons who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the ax.” The letter was signed, simply: “The Axman.”
The sensation created by this letter—particularly in the poorer ethnic neighborhoods that had been hardest hit by the ax crimes—can only be imagined. Certainly many, if not most, people in the city must have doubted the authenticity of the document. There was something too slick—too ironic and knowing—about the entire exercise to be fully convincing as the ramblings of a crazed maniac. But for a populace traumatized by a bizarre and brutal crime wave, the letter was a shock, hoax or no hoax. After all, something was stalking the streets at night with malicious intent. And if the way to appease the demon was to cut loose for a night, then New Orleans, starved of music and conviviality by the forces of reform, would cut loose with abandon.
And indeed, when Tuesday night arrived—the eve of St. Joseph’s Day, a major holiday for the city’s Italians—New Orleans made sure to mollify its axman. “The tinkle of jazz music coming from dozens of New Orleans homes at 12:15 o’clock Wednesday morning demonstrated that many New Orleanians took the axman letter seriously,” the Times-Picayune reported on March 19, “and that scores of others who didn’t take it seriously found inspiration in it for house parties.” Homes and cafés all over town were brightly illuminated and filled with jazz all night long. One group of uptown revelers expressly invited the axman to attend their stag party. “Enter by way of the bathroom at the head of the stairs,” their invitation said. “It will not be necessary to remove any panels, for all of the doors will be open.”
One enterprising local composer even took the opportunity to do some self-promotion: Joseph John Davilla claimed to have composed “The Mysterious Axman’s Jazz” while waiting for the eponymous fiend to make an appearance. By Thursday morning, Davilla was already offering the composition—containing “every known incidental, accidental, syncopation, flat, sharp, and casualty known to man”—for sale to the public. Dedicated to the New Orleans Police Band, the sheet music was soon being advertised in the daily papers (“Immunity promised all homes wherever played,” the ad insisted). Davilla’s marketing ploy was so in
genious, in fact, that one wonders whether he himself may have written the axman letter—to create an eager market for his new composition.
Whether it was the jazz being played all around town, or Superintendent Mooney’s decision to put the police on high alert, there was no ax attack in New Orleans on that St. Joseph’s Eve. Certainly the night had been a boon for the city’s jazzmen, suffering from a lack of work under the recent restrictions. And it was apparently just as much a bane for the city’s petty thieves (“No burglar,” as the Times-Picayune pointed out, “likes to enter a home where there is a prospect of receiving the welcome of a sawed-off shotgun”). But in the days and weeks following the big night, the axman seemed to go silent.
Perhaps he, like the rest of New Orleans, was riveted by the spectacle of two court trials of alleged ax criminals that occurred in the city that spring. In the first, which took place in early May, Louis Besumer finally got his day in court. Serving as his own best witness, the loquacious grocer testified for four hours, telling the jury the same story he had been telling police for months—that he was essentially a prominent businessman running a small grocery as a temporary sideline, that Harriet Lowe was his housekeeper and companion, and that the two of them had probably been attacked by the axman responsible for so many other assaults in the city. He reiterated that he had no idea why Mrs. Lowe had accused him of the deed, and suggested that she may have been forced to make that dying declaration by an overzealous district attorney. In the end, the jury believed him—or at least they disbelieved the deceased Harriet Lowe. After deliberating for just seven minutes, they came back with a verdict of not guilty.
Later that same month, Frank Jordano and his father Iorlando (who had been arrested two days after his son) went on trial for the murder of baby Mary Cortimiglia. Here again, the defense attempted to show that the principal evidence against the defendants—the accusation by Rose Cortimiglia—had been coerced from a highly traumatized victim influenced by aggressive and tendentious interrogation techniques. Charles Cortimiglia continued to insist that the man he struggled with in his bedroom that night was not Frank Jordano. But his wife, appearing in court with shorn hair and head bandages still in place, would not be shaken from her testimony. And although the defense tried to put Superintendent Mooney, Louis Besumer, and others on the stand to convince the jury that this was another in the long series of axman cases, the judge ruled their testimony irrelevant. Convinced by a living victim’s own testimony, the jury found both Jordanos guilty. The case would eventually be appealed to the state Supreme Court, but in the meantime, Frank was sentenced to death, and his father—perhaps because of his age—was given life in prison. Evincing some agitation after the verdict, Rose Cortimiglia stood up and tried to make an announcement to the court. “You can say what you want, but before God—” she began, but the judge did not allow her to finish.
So at least one axman candidate was convicted, but few New Orleanians thought that it was the true culprit who was headed to the gallows. (No one, in fact, had ever even suggested that Frank Jordano might be responsible for the other axman assaults.) Meanwhile, Superintendent Mooney and his police were coming under increasing criticism for their uselessness. “There is no getting away from the fact that the police department of the city is utterly incompetent,” claimed an open letter from the Citizens League printed in the Daily Item. Seven unsolved ax murders, a resurgence of prostitution in the city, and a host of police scandals, according to the League, indicated a growing crisis of leadership in New Orleans. Had the hard-won victories of the forces of reform during the war years been in vain? Was New Orleans once again to descend into the chaos, lawlessness, and turpitude of the not-too-distant past?
As if in answer to these questions, the axman soon made his presence felt again. At 3:15 A.M. on Sunday, August 4—in a house at 2123 Second Street, virtually around the block from the Uptown residence in which Buddy Bolden had lived for much of his life—a scream again rent the silence of a summer night. Sarah Laumann, a nineteen-year-old woman asleep in her parents’ house, woke in pain to find someone looming over her in the bedroom. “I felt a stinging of the left ear,” she later explained, “[and] I saw a man standing over me under the mosquito bar …” That’s when she screamed, and the man bolted away, scrambling out an open window. By the time her parents had rushed into her room from their own bedroom next door, the intruder was gone.
But had he been the axman? There was no blood in the bed, and Sarah Laumann didn’t even realize she was injured until several hours later, when she found a small but painful laceration behind her left ear. Was this the result of a glancing blow from an ax that had perhaps gotten tangled in the mosquito netting? (One wonders how many ax victims’ lives were saved by this ubiquitous New Orleans necessity.) But Laumann had seen no ax held by the man standing above her bed. Hours later, an ax was found under the school building next door, which was under repair, but it had no bloodstains on it. And the Laumanns, unlike so many other victims, were not grocers, Italian or otherwise. And yet Sarah’s description of her white assailant matched that of the Bruno girl in the Romano case a year earlier: “He was about five feet and eight inches tall,” she told police, “had a dark complexion, weighed about 160 pounds, [and] wore a cap pulled down over his eyes, dark coat and pants, and a white shirt with dark stripes.”
Axman attack or not, the Laumann incident set off yet another round of hysteria throughout the city. Less than a week later, a grocer named Steve Boca stumbled to the door of a neighbor on Elysian Fields Avenue with a bloody gash in his head and no idea what had happened to him. Police discovered that his house had been broken into via a chiseled-out panel in the back door. A bloody ax had been left on the kitchen floor. Then, on September 2, a druggist named William Carlson, lying awake reading, heard sounds coming from his back door. Panicking, he called out a warning, but when the noise continued he fired a shot at the closed door with his revolver. When he worked up the courage to open the door, he found that one of its lower panels had been scored with chisel marks.
By now, the people of New Orleans seemed prepared to believe that the axman was everywhere, and that Mooney and his police could do nothing to stop him. This became terrifyingly apparent when, on the night of October 27, Deputy Sheriff Ben Corcoran, returning late to his home on Scott Street in Mid-City, heard yet another scream coming from yet another Italian corner grocery. He ran to the end of the square and found eleven-year-old Rosie Pipitone out on the street, “bellowing that her father was full of blood.” When he entered the premises, he found Mrs. Michael Pipitone, whom he knew as a neighbor, distraught and near hysteria. “Mr. Corcoran,” she wailed, “it looks like the axman was here and murdered Mike.”
The crime scene was by now sickeningly familiar. Mike Pipitone lay in a gore-soaked bed with a fractured skull and the entire left side of his face beaten in. This attack had apparently been particularly savage. Bloodstains spattered the bedroom walls to a height of eight feet. The obvious murder weapon lay on a chair beside the bed. But it was not an ax or a hatchet; it was a foot-long thick iron bar with a large iron nut screwed to its end.
Mike Pipitone, rushed to Charity Hospital, died there at 3:15 A.M. of massive hemorrhaging in the brain. Later, after Superintendent Mooney and Detective Long had arrived on the scene, Mrs. Pipitone explained what had happened. She had been sound asleep until she heard her husband’s cries in the darkness beside her. “Someone was calling me,” she told them. “The cry seemed to get louder and nearer and suddenly I opened my eyes and I heard my husband say, ‘Oh, my God!’ That is all he said. And then I saw the forms of two men. I could just see the outlines of their figures as they hurried from our room into the children’s room and disappeared in the darkness.”
“I turned to my husband,” she continued. “What I saw terrified me. Every time he turned his head, blood came from his head and face. It simply poured over the bed.” That’s when she jumped up, ran into the dining room window, and began to scream
for help.
This was another horrifying crime, but again, as in the Laumann case, it seemed questionable whether this was indeed an axman assault, for several reasons. Most obvious of them: the murder weapon was not an ax. The means of entry—through a smashed side window—was another atypical element in the axman repertoire. And Mrs. Pipitone seemed certain that she had seen two men, not one, fleeing in the darkness. In fact, if not for her initial remark to the deputy sheriff—not to mention the ongoing serial-killer obsession in the city—one wonders whether the deed would have been considered an axman crime at all.
Mooney’s detectives eventually turned up a different intriguing possibility, linking the Pipitone murder to the rash of Mafia killings that had broken out in the years following the Lamana kidnapping in 1907. The 1910 shooting of Paulo Di Christina, after all, had been laid at the door of Mike Pipitone’s father, Pietro (at the time, some detectives had even believed that Mike actually did the shooting). Now free on parole for that crime, the senior Pipitone had been in the house when his son was killed. But although the police questioned him and numerous others involved in the Di Christina murder—including all of the attendees at Mike Pipitone’s funeral—they could find no connection to the current crime. When asked by a Times-Picayune reporter whether Mooney had any theory to explain the apparent coincidence, the superintendent frankly admitted “that the police have not the slightest clue.”
