Its doubtful that any serial killer in American history inspired more raw fear and horror than the bloodthirsty Axman who stalked New Orleans more then 70 years ago. While World War I raged in Europe, the mysterious murderer roamed the shadowy streets of the city like a demon from hell, smashing the skulls of men and women alike with deadly blows from an ax, sometimes adding a grisly coup de grace by stooping and slashing open the throats of his victims. Perhaps most frightening of all, the relentless Axman often hacked, chopped or chiseled his way through doors to attack his terrified victims cowering in their own homes or stores. Modern crime historians tend to question some of the chilling local legends still told by old-timers about the Axman - but most agree he was one of the century’s earliest and most fearful serial killers. What’s more, his total carnage may never be known because the horrors he perpetrated actually may have begun years before they came to national attention. In the first widely reported Axman case, Jake Maggio was awakened in the pre-dawn hours of May 23, 1928, by a persistent thumping and moaning on the other side of the thin wall where his brother, Joseph, lived with his wife, Catherine. The couple operated a tavern and grocery store. The thumping noises quickly stopped but the moans persisted, and Jake awakened another brother, Andrew. The two men rushed to Joseph’s quarters - and walked in on a scene of horror. Joseph and his wife were sprawled in pools of blood. Their heads had been cleaved open with an ax, and Catherine’s throat had been had been slit. Joseph was still alive, but unconscious and moaning. By the time police arrived with the ambulance, he had joined his wife in death. Investigators found a lower panel on the kitchen door pried open and a wood chisel left lying on top of it. An ax had been left inside the bathtub in a puddle of bloody water, and a bloodstained straight razor was on the bed near the bodies. When a neighbor told the police she seen Andrew enter Joseph’s house earlier that night, police arrested him and Jake. A barber who worked for Andrew reported he had seen his boss take a razor away from their near by shop. Although Jake was released after a few hours of questioning, investigators kept Andrew in custody, believing they had solved the case. Even Jake said that Andrew had been sleeping off a drunk when he was awakened. Andrew acknowledged taking the razor home from his shop, but he said he planned only to hone a nick out of it. And he admitted he had gotten drunk the night before, but returned home shortly after midnight - when he noticed a stranger entering his brother’s house. Reluctantly, investigators finally let Andrew go. Someone had ripped open the door of a small safe in the murdered couple’s apartment and apparently rifled a tin box inside. Police told the press burglary was the apparent motive for the grisly twin murder. The ax used to butcher the couple was also identified - it had belonged to the victims. One of the most curious aspects of the case was a cryptic message found scribbled in chalk on the sidewalk a few blocks from the murder scene. Someone had written: Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney. Baffled police admitted they didn’t have the slightest idea what the message was all about. They didn’t even know if it had been written by the killer. Then the local press revealed that New Orleans had been rocked by an epidemic of unsolved ax murders of Italian grocers in 1911, only seven years earlier. The wives of two of the victims named Rosetti and Schiambra, had been butchered along with their husbands. The other murdered man, named Cruti, had died alone, says the New Orleans States. Curiously, when modern crime historians checked out those shocking headlines decades later, there were no records of the reported 1911 ax murders in police homicide files, corner’s reports or newspaper obituaries. The only name matching those of the victims in obituaries of the time was that of a Mary Rosetti - and she reportedly died a natural death. But there was no question about the ax murder that occurred in new Orleans on June 6, 1918, barely two weeks after the Maggios were slaughtered in their home. A deliveryman preparing to drop off bread and cakes at a small grocery store perated by Louis Besumer and his live-in companion, divorcee Anna Lowe, found the door locked. Curious about the unusual circumstances, he checked a side door and found a wooden panel chiseled out. When the deliveryman punded on the door, he was greeted moments later by Besumer. The grocer’s face was bloody and he was staggering and moaning in pain. He pointed wordlessly to the bedroom. Anna was sprawled on the bed, bleeding from several ax wounds but still alive. The bloody ax used in the assault was found by the police inside the house. Besumer, who quickly recovered, was unable to provide police with a description of the violent intruder. A black man was arrested and held briefly as a suspect, then released. During a brief period of consciousness, Anna told investigators that Besumer was a German spy. She died exactly seven weeks after the attack but not before identifying Besumer as her assailant. It seemed to homicide investigators that the brutal attack was part of a nasty quarrel turned violent, staged to mimic the Maggio murders. Besumer was arrested and charged with Anna’s murder. He was tried the following year but a jury found him not guilty. Meanwhile, there was no cessation of the Axman in New Orleans. August, 1918, was especially frightning. Edward Schneider returned to his house on August 5, to find his pregnant wife unconscious on the bed, bleeding from a terrible head wound. The young woman, who had been struck with an ax, survived her ordeal and later gave birth to a healthy baby girl. All she could remember of the attack was suddenly awakening from a nap to see a dark figure looming over her with an ax. on August 10, 30-year-old- Joseph Romano lurched into the bedroom of his nieces, Pauline and Marry Bruno. He was covered with blood and his skull was split open. The young sisters briefly glimpsed a dark clad figure of a stranger wearing a black hat and fleeing from the house. Romano died a few hours later. Panic spread through New Orleans , and several innocent men were chased down and beaten by frightened residents, for no other reason that their bad luck to have ventured into strange neighborhoods. Police were deluged with reports of suspicious strangers, and sales of metal grates to install over doors and windows skyrocketed. Men, especially grocers, began sitting up nights, armed with loaded shotguns. It was March 10,1919, before the next attack occurred, across the river from New Orleans in the town of Gretna. Grocer Charles Cortimiglia, his wife Rose, their infant doughter were brutally attacked with an ax. The baby died, but the parents survived, and Rose Cortimiglia accused neighbors of the attack. She named a father and a son, Iorlando and Frank Jordano. Her husband, however, claimed that the pair were innocent. Nevertheless, a jury convicted the men of murder two months later. Frank was sentenced to hang. His father was given a sentence of life in prison. But the terror that gripped New Orleans did not end with their convictions. Four days after the Cortimiglias were attacked, a letter signed ‘The Axman’ was published in the Times Picayune vowing to continue the killing - but to spare anyone who was listening to jazz. The writer announced he would prowl the city on March 19, St. Joseph’s Night, and see it that “some of those people who do not listen to jazz (if there be any) will get the ax.” On St. Joseph’s Night, a gramophones through out the city were blaring jazz tunes. One of the most popular was The Mysterious Axman’s Jazz, a piece composed by an Italian pianist especially for an occasion. Fortunately, no one was attacked by the mysterious Axman on St. Joseph’s Night. He struck again, however, on August 10, when a grocer Steve Boca was slashed with an ax in his house. A panel had been chiseled from his door, and the bloody ax left in his kitchen. Boca recovered from his wounds. On September 3, an intruder climbed through the window of Sarah Laumann’s bedroom, and chopped her once with an ax, and fled. The ax was discarded on the lawn. The woman lived. At about 1:30 a.m. on October 27, Deputy Ben Corcoran was walking home after his shift with the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Department when an 11-year-old girl rushed out of her house and screaming that her father was all bloody. Inside the combination home and grocery store, Corcoran found Mike Pepitone, his body chopped into pieces with an ax and his wife and six children gathered around him. he died a short time later in Charity Hospital. Peptone’s ghastly murder apparently ended the phantom’s attacks - but the Axman’s bloody legacy lived on. On December 7, 1920m Rose Cortimiglia confessed that she lied about the attack on her family. She admitted that the Jordanos were innocent, and said she blamed them because of the long-standing feud. The father and son were quickly pardoned and released from prison. Five days earlier Joseph Mumfre, a former New Orleans hoodlum thief, was shot to death on a Los Angeles street corner by a velied woman dressed in black. The woman, captured at the scene, was identified as the widow of Mike Pepitone. At the murder trial, Mrs. Pepitone claimed that Mumfre was the killer of her husband. She was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, but was released after three years. Police in New Orleans appeared satisfied to accept the implication that the murdered thief was the Axman. Mumfre’s record disclosed that he was released from the Louisiana State Prison at Angola in 1918, only a few days before the Axman’s deadly wartime rampage had begun. He had been imprisoned since 1912, about the time that news stories inicated earlier attacks had stopped. But no one ever explained why the Axman focused his deadly attacks on grocers, usually Italian Americans. And it was never mad clear publicly how Mrs. Pepitone, an unworldly house wife and mother of six, was able to track down her husband’s killer nearly 2,000 miles across the country and extract her own form of vigilante vengeance. Nor was it explained why she just didn’t simply pass on her suspicions about the killer’s identify to police and let them handle the job. Could it be, some historians have speculated, that the local Mafia was targeting Italian grocers for extortion in a violent protection plot? Or could Mumfre and Mrs. Pepitone have been involved in a back-ally romance that led the ex-convict to stage the serial murders as a gory cover-up for the ax-slaying of her husband? No one alive will ever know for sure....
