by Gary Krist
Of course, it remains to be seen how completely the city will rebound from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. As of this writing, recovery is still somewhat spotty, and some of the poorer African American neighborhoods may never return to their former vitality. But as the turn-of-the-century reformers could attest (to their vexation), New Orleans’ rebellious and free-spirited personality is nothing if not resilient. And so the disruptive energies of the place—its vibrancy and eccentricity, its defiance and nonconformity, and yes, its violence and depravity—are likely to live on.
AND WHAT OF THE AXMAN, THAT OTHER DISRUPTIVE figure who—like the brothel madam, the Ring politician, and the jazzman—seemed to drop from prominence in the new New Orleans of the early 1920s? After the Pipitone murder of October 1919, he had not been heard from again. As the months passed without another ax attack, police began to suspect that their “fell demon from the hottest hell”—whoever he was—had simply left town, like so many other figures from the city’s underworld.
That conclusion was given some credence in December 1921, when inquiries came from authorities in Los Angeles about a man from New Orleans named Joseph Monfre, who had been shot dead in L.A. the day before. Monfre’s killer was another ex-New Orleanian—one Mrs. Esther Albano, the former Mrs. Esther Pipitone, widow of the man widely regarded as the axman’s last victim. According to Mrs. Albano, Monfre had killed her second husband, Angelo Albano—a small-time gangster who had gone missing in L.A. several weeks earlier—after he had refused to pay $500 in extortion money. When Monfre had shown up to collect the money from the widow, claiming that he was willing to kill her as well, Esther Albano was ready for him. “I grabbed my revolver,” she told police, “and began to shoot. He tried to run. After one revolver was emptied, I seized another and killed him on the steps of my house.”
But Mrs. Albano also claimed (at least once before changing her story) that Joseph Monfre had been one of the killers of her first husband as well. Why she had denied knowing Mike Pipitone’s assailant at the time of the initial police investigation in 1919 is impossible to say; perhaps she was afraid of Monfre at the time, or even in some way complicit in the murder of her husband. But New Orleans Police, who knew Monfre well as a convicted dynamiter, suspected mob assassin, and notorious Black Hand extortionist, were inclined to believe her now.
Los Angeles authorities went on to try Esther Albano for the killing of Joseph Monfre, but their counterparts in New Orleans saw in the revelations about Monfre something of greater interest to them—namely, a thread by which they could tie together much of the Italian crime that had plagued the city over the previous fifteen years. Joseph Monfre, after all, had been implicated in everything from the Lamana kidnapping of 1907 (in which he was suspected of aiding his relative Stefano, one of the principal co-conspirators) to the Black Hand grocery bombings of the same year. He was also suspected of involvement in the back-and-forth mob murders of 1915 involving Paolo Di Christina and Vincenzo Moreci (Monfre was arrested, though never charged, in the Moreci assassination). Now Mrs. Albano’s implication of him in the 1919 murder of her first husband allowed police to tie him to the most notorious unsolved crimes of all. Since the Pipitone slaying of 1919 was regarded as the last of the axman attacks, could Monfre have been the axman himself, and thus responsible for all of those killings as well? Clearly his description—a tallish, heavyset, dark-complexioned white man—fit the one given by several witnesses to the axman crimes. And in going over Monfre’s criminal records, investigators noticed a pattern. Though arrest and prison records in New Orleans at this time were notoriously confused and incomplete, it seemed that the waves and lulls in the axman’s reign of terror jibed suspiciously well with Monfre’s arrivals and departures from prison for his various deeds—most notably the lull in axman attacks from August 1918 to March 1919, which coincided almost exactly with one of Monfre’s stints in prison.
The pattern was, at best, an imperfect fit, but it at least suggested a solution to the axman murders. Certainly the Times-Picayune seemed to buy the logic of Monfre as the axman. The Daily Item was more skeptical. In a December 16, 1921, article on the case, the paper ridiculed the theory, pointing out that Monfre had still been in jail when the Andollina and Maggio ax crimes were committed. (They were wrong about the Maggio slaying—Monfre had been released several days before that murder—but they were right about Andollina.) And in any case, even if the pattern of ax attacks had lined up perfectly with Monfre’s prison record, this alone would not have been enough even to arrest him, let alone convict him.
But for many New Orleanians eager to put the episode behind them, it was at least a tempting conclusion to jump to. Joseph Monfre could become the last of the city’s underworld monsters slain—like the Hennessy assassins, like Robert Charles, like Lamana kidnapper Leonardo Gebbia, even like Martin Behrman and Tom Anderson (slain at least symbolically). And much of the literature that has grown up around the axman legend has uncritically embraced that conclusion.
But some latter-day writers have questioned the notion that Monfre could have been the axman. The crime writer Keven McQueen, in his book The Axman Came from Hell, has pointed out that the only “axman crime” that Monfre was at all convincingly linked to was the Pipitone murder, which may not even have been an axman crime (the murder weapon was an iron bar—a fact conveniently forgotten by the Times-Picayune in its later coverage of the incident). McQueen also points to evidence in prison records that seems to indicate that Monfre was still alive as late as 1930—though McQueen admits that the records are “muddled.” The absence of any death certificate for a Joseph Monfre in California in 1921 just confuses things further.
Part of the problem in trying to solve the case a hundred years after the fact is the overall carelessness of record keeping in the early 1900s. Names—particularly “ethnic” names—were misspelled in contemporary newspaper reports and even official records with a recklessness that seems inconceivable to us today. The axman case has also been hopelessly entangled in a skein of misinformation perpetrated by popular writers on the subject over the years. One of the early chroniclers of the case, Robert Tallant, in his book Ready to Hang: Seven Famous New Orleans Murders, seems to have invented freely, altering chronology and planting fictitious details that seem to have no basis in contemporary newspaper accounts and police reports. These inventions have all too often found their way into accounts of the axman crimes by later writers.
In fact, a close reading of the Police Homicide Reports and the contemporary newspaper reportage leads one to wonder whether more than a few of the so-called axman crimes were really the work of a single perpetrator acting with an unmistakable modus operandi. As we’ve seen, some of the crimes later attributed to the axman were actually committed with other types of weapons (even, in the Tony Schiambra case, a gun). They did not, moreover, invariably involve a chiseled-out door panel as the means of entry, or an obviously faked robbery motive. But somehow, in the hysteria that prevailed during those months of terror, such dissonant notes were forgotten or glossed over in the public mind. To many in New Orleans, the axman was real, and so every crime that was even remotely similar that occurred in New Orleans during those months was unconsciously tailored to fit the axman pattern.
If I were to hazard a guess—and it would be just that, a guess—I would say that at least some of the 1918–19 attacks on Italian grocers (the Maggio, Romano, and Cortimiglia crimes in particular) were quite likely the work of one or possibly two men, perhaps members of the same Black Hand organization. One of them could very well have been Joseph Monfre. The attacks on non-Italians were probably unrelated. The impossibly muddled Besumer case may have been a domestic crime of passion made to look like an axman crime, while a case like the attack on Sarah Laumann was likely a robbery gone wrong that merely became an ax attack in the fevered imagination of a traumatized public. The Pipitone murder, along with the Crutti, Davi, and Schiambra crimes of 1910–12, bear all the earmarks of Black Hand- o
r Mafia-related vengeance, but whether they were related to the 1918–19 crimes is impossible to say. As for the axman letter to the Times-Picayune, I think it was almost certainly a hoax, and one that must have fooled only the most gullible New Orleanians.
So was there really a deranged serial killer at large in the streets of New Orleans in 1918–19? Perhaps, though I suspect he was more of a brutal underworld enforcer than a textbook sociopath of the Jack the Ripper type. Any definitive answer to that question, however, is probably lost forever in the empty spaces of a flawed and incomplete historical record. The case remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the serial-killer literature.
Bibliography
Historical Newspapers
New Orleans: Harlequin, The Mascot, New Orleans Bee, New Orleans Daily Item (in the endnotes abbreviated NODI), New Orleans Item-Tribune, New Orleans Daily States (NODS), New Orleans Times-Democrat (NOTD), New Orleans Times-Picayune (NOTP); and, before 1914, New Orleans Daily Picayune (NODP). Others: The Deseret Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution, The Los Angeles Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
Court Transcripts
ORLEANS PARISH CIVIL DISTRICT COURT
• Mrs. Kate Anderson vs. Thomas C. Anderson, her husband, Docket No. 48,601, Division E
• Thomas C. Anderson vs. Mrs. Anna Deubler, wife of John T. Brady, and said Brady, Docket No. 125,290, Division E
• Thomas C. Anderson vs. His Wife, Docket No. 43,575
• Mary A. Deubler vs. Merchants Insurance Company of New Orleans, Docket No. 80,426
• Morris Marks vs. Kate Anderson and her husband Thomas C. Anderson, Docket No. 29,385
• Succession of Mary Deubler, Docket No. 107,603
• Succession of Olive E. Noble, Docket No. 93,226, Division E
ORLEANS PARISH CRIMINAL DISTRICT COURT
• State of Louisiana vs. Anderson, Docket No. 48,491
• State of Louisiana vs. Thomas C. Anderson and Charles G. Prados, Docket No. 49114
• State of Louisiana vs. Louis Bessemer [sic], Docket No. 33,902
• State of Louisiana vs. Joseph Monfre, Docket No. 35,993
• State of Louisiana vs. Vincent Moreci, Docket No. 35,043, Section B
LOUISIANA STATE SUPREME COURT
• Succession of Mary Deubler, Docket No. 21,667
• Succession of Thomas C. Anderson, Docket No. 32,083
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