Endless Thread - Axeman's Jazz

Episode Date: June 22, 2018

A serial killer dubbed "The Axeman" terrorized New Orleans in 1918-1919. One day, the local paper published a letter he'd written saying that he would strike again on a particular night. The only thing that would spare you... was listening to jazz. We dive into this popular TIL story from Reddit.

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Produced by the ILAP at WBUR, Boston. Amory, what do you know about the ancient Greeks? I'll say any given day working on endless thread can feel like tragedy and comedy. Is that what we're talking about here? I think you're talking about how I failed to activate my company credit card for expenses, which made you then fill out expense reports, which for you is tragedy and to me is slight comedy, maybe? No, it is rage.

For me, it is pure rage. I'm sorry. And I've consulted the Oracle, and the Oracle says that if you don't get that damn card activated, you're going to have an untimely, tragic, truly brutal Greek death any day now. And I will have deserved it. But by the dolphin armies of Poseidon, I swear I'll get it done. I swear.

But here's my real question. What can you tell me about Tartarus? Sounds like a dental disease or something. Like a really gross dental disease. Fair. And it might be. But Tartarus is this massive abyss in Greek mythology that is used as a prison and a torture complex in the Netherworld. And it is also perhaps one of the weirdest references

ever put into a letter to a newspaper that was supposedly sent by a serial killer who claimed to be both a demon, and a patron of the arts. Specifically, the jazz arts. And this is, I think, one of the weirdest and most amazing serial killer stories of all time. And not that many people have heard it, which is weird because it involves demons and pretty terrifying murders and music and New Orleans. Did I say demons? And this whole crazy story actually inspired a jazz composition, all of which is to say we've got to tell this one.

And let's call it by the name of it. of the song itself, a little rag called Axeman's Jazz. I'm Ben Brock Johnson, and you are listening to Endless Thread, a show featuring stories from the vast ecosystem of online communities called Reddit. One does not simply walk into our show without saying how it's made. I'm here with my producer and co-host Amory Severson. We are coming to you from WBUR, Boston's NPR station. So Ben, I want to talk about Axeman's Jazz, the song. But to get there, I think we have to start with the letter sent to the Times-Picayune, the local newspaper of New Orleans, that was printed in March of 1919. Yeah, I mean, this is really our entry point.

And the first expert we called is this guy named Dirk Gibson. He is a professor of communication and journalism at the University of New Mexico, which is close to where we call them up in a studio. Wherever he is when you call him, you might call Dirk Gibson a generalist. My main research areas are product recalls. serial murder, and outer space studies. Is that even allowed to study things that are that different as an academic? A lot of professors study one thing, you know, their entire career, like fruit flies or cow butter material. And I like different things.

The nice thing about being a professor is you get to research areas that you're interested in, and I pick those three general areas. Fair enough, Professor Gibson. Now, Dirk has looked really closely at the serial murder stuff. He's looked specifically at how serial killers communicate with the public, which is how we get to this letter. How well known is the Axeman? Not well known at all.

It's interesting been many serial killers, like, you know, you're Boston Frangler, Zodiac, son of Sam, many are household names. Maybe because these crimes occurred between 1911 and 1919. The Axeman is, I think, relatively unknown. And when you consider the supernatural implications of the case and the connection to jazz music, which is, I think, fascinating, it's surprising that so little is known and so little publicity has been afforded this case. A couple things to know before we get to the letter.

This murderer killed up to 12 people with axes. We say up to 12 because there's some question as to some earlier murders being attributed to him. And actually, most of his victims were italian. in grocers killed with their own axes. And then there's the legend part, the so-called ax-man's ammo. The modus operandi was that the killer would carve out a back panel of a back door in these homes, a very small hole. And then he would somehow gain entrance to the home.

And it was speculated that the killer dematerialized outside the home, turned into vapor or smoke, entered the small hole, the card, the cut in the door, and then rematerialized inside. The people who survived the attacks reported seeing a large person, yet the hole in the aperture and the door was very small. This sounds like an episode of the X-Files or something. You know, truth is stranger than fiction sometimes, huh? So you have the letter with you, and you offered to read it. Would you mind reading it to us? Okay, so not saying I believe in ghosts, but something really weird happened while we were recording this interview. If by weird, you mean creepy a.F.

Yep. Professor Gibson is about to read us the letter, which we'll get to, and all of a sudden we start hearing on his line... What sounds like... Music, like radio frequency interference. So these are just the facts. We're not saying it's all connected, per se, but just saying. Well, I'm sort of saying it's all connected. It's the demon reaching through the radio frequencies to haunt us. Is it jazz music?

That would explain a lot. Okay, so cut to no joke. Almost an hour later, we've got Dirk back in the fixed studio. Ghosts in the machines of the radio station gone for now. And he reads the letter. Esteemed mortal, they have never caught me, and they never will. They will never see me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell.

I am what you Arlenians and your foolish police call the Axeman. The Axeman is going to come and commit mass murder, unless... In my infinite mercy, I'm going to make a proposition to you people. Here it is. I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is going. One thing is certain, and that is, some of the people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night, if there be any, will get the axe. Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native tartarus, and as it is about time that I leave your earthly home, I will soon. cease my discourse, hoping that thou will publish this, and then it may go well with thee,

I have been, M, and will be the worst spirit that ever existed, either in fact or realm of fantasy, the Axeman. There is so much to unpack here, and Dirk, who has done a study of the communication techniques of literally a thousand serial killers, agrees. We don't know if the motive of the killer was to popularize jazz music, to terrorize the Italian-American community, to extort money from grocers,

to frighten the citizens of New Orleans. We just don't know. Are we sure that the Axeman wasn't just like an out-of-work drummer or something? Or maybe... Or maybe both? Both a murderer and an out-of-work drummer? We just don't know.

What happened the night of this particular, you know, the night that was mentioned in the letter? Did everyone follow the killer's instructions? Yes, they did. New Orleans was ablaged with jazz music. Dirk makes some other interesting points about this time period. He says that newspapers around the turn of the last century, in the time of Jack the Ripper, for instance, were really hitting their stride as a new medium, and that they were desperate for serialized murder stories. Serial stories about serial killers. To make people into serial readers.

Dirk says that the stories that were run daily in the Times-Picayune were speculative and sometimes fantastical. They would talk about sightings of the Axeman last Tuesday at the corner of intersection 1 and State Road 2, where the Axeman was seen walking away heading toward a certain person's home, speculating that that would be the next victim. So the stories were lurid and speculative and probably very well read. But it's funny, too, because as well read as they might have been at the time, these stories and the larger tale of the Axeman really didn't survive that well. It was like today where there's one big story for like a week or a day and then it's gone.

The Axeman intensely held the attention of the largest city of the southern United States for a period and convinced, reportedly, thousands of New Orleans, to follow his instructions and jazz it. But some months later, he was gone. Never caught. Well, there was this one guy who to this day remains a key suspect, Joseph Mumfrey. He ran a blackmailing gang, which is apparently a thing. He was in and out of prisons in New Orleans during this period,

but the rumor was that he was always conveniently out of jail when the murders occurred. He was supposedly killed by the widow of one of the Axeman's last victims, who searched him out and found him in L.A. and shot him. But the Axeman's mission, other than murder, the jazz part, survived. We know that jazz music is associated with New Orleans, just like the blues is associated with Memphis and rock and roll music with Los Angeles. So it appears as though the Axeman had his way

if his purpose was to inculcate in the residence of New Orleans and appreciation for jazz music. Though we should say, the Axeman isn't entirely gone from the public psyche. There was that season of American horror story on FX. Scared the Axeman? Everyone is scared. It's Tuesday night.

He's going to kill somebody. He's not going to lay a finger on you. Rumor has it, he's got a thing for jazz. And as we mentioned, there was the song, Axeman's Jazz, which has its own bit of mystery to it. But wait, before we get to that, I had one more question for our dulcet-voiced, crazy-laughing, serial murder expert, Dirk Gibson. Has anyone ever been afraid of you because you're associated with this research about serial killers

and you're such like a calm demeanor like someone might assume a serial killer would have? That's a very good question, Ben. And I can answer that in a couple ways. Several years ago, I was on several dating sites for a while. and there were some women who, when they looked me up online and saw this Surly murder research, didn't want to meet, except in a very public place like a Starbucks. But of course I'm not. I'm just a researcher who writes books that have been popularized by the media and by public interest. Pitfalls of the profession, I guess. Very true.

We've now officially established that Dirk Gibson is probably not the Axeman in A-Man. ageless demon from another world come to terrorize us. Far from it. Thanks, Dirk. Thank you, Ben. More jazzing it and chasing the real identity of the Axeman in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories, stories about policing, or politics, country music, hockey, sex, of bugs.

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the creative studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. So while we are trying to solve this unresolved mystery, as Reddit might call it, we got to set the scene in New Orleans, the jazz scene. Back in the time of the murders, 1918, 1919. Now, before the Civil War, New Orleans was the largest, most prosperous city in the South. But after the Civil War, it was a poor city. This is Bruce Rayburn, curator emeritus of the Hogan Jazz Archive at Tulane University. And the massive in-migration of African Americans after the breakup of the plantation system changed the demographic of settlement in the city. And so this was like a cauldron of multicultural exchange. What was the jazz scene like there at the time?

It was emergent and still under construction, you could say. Basically, it was a young people's music. And many of the neighborhoods that produced jazz musicians were what a demographer would call crazy quilt. So in spite of segregation, which was being implemented at the time, many black, white, creole, Jewish families live next door to each other in certain neighborhoods, such as Central City. the Lower French Quarter, Tramé, Algiers, the Seventh Ward, the Irish Channel. So to some extent, jazz was heading in the opposite direction of segregation, which was trying to separate people. For young people in New Orleans in 1918, 1919, they really gravitated to jazz and the blues. Just as the city is a crazy quilt, this human tapestry of cultures and backgrounds,

the genre itself at this time is its own meaning. mishmash of ideas. A gradual transition from the term right time to jazz occurring, and those first jazz records are driving it. It's a new paradigm. In addition, the collective improvisation, which is really the kind of heterophony and polyphony, the front-line interaction of coronet or trumpet, clarinet, and trombone, is becoming more sophisticated.

Stop-time choruses, the... the emergence of solo improvisation within the collective, all of these things are beginning to manifest themselves. So this is a period of high development, but the number of documents, particularly between 17 and 19 that we have, don't include black musicians. And so they're really inadequate to assess what's going on. So the Axeman was obviously among the jazz fans at the time. But what on earth or tartarus? inspired him to incorporate his love of jazz into his murderous scheme. A couple of theories.

One of them connects to the point Rayburn just made about a lack of recordings of black musicians at the time. And we're going to get help on this first theory from this guy. Hi, I'm Eric Hofbauer, jazz guitarist and composer, affiliated faculty at Emerson College and the Laundee School of Music of Bard College. This first theory tries to answer the question, what explains the fact that all of the Axeman's

victims were Italian Americans. What did they have to do with jazz at the time? Well, more than you might think, says Eric Hofbauer. If you look across who made the first, quote-unquote, I'm air-quoting here, jazz recording in 1917, it was the original Dixieland jazz band led by the cornet player, Nick La Raca, who was a first-generation American, his parents immigrated from Italy. Yep, an Italian-American led the band. credited with recording the first jazz album, which doesn't seem right.

Yeah, it's a controversial record in jazz history, specifically because there was no improvisation. It was only, you know, kind of jazz-like. And, of course, it's created by musicians who are kind of approximators and not the innovators or inventors. But yet they claimed that this was jazz. Even Nicola Rockowin as far as to say in later interviews that they invented jazz. So was the Axeman trying to get payback against Italian Americans for taking the credit for creating jazz? I mean, that record helped launch jazz as a national cultural phenomenon

open the doors for the authentic players to find broader audiences in the 20s. If you think of Dixieland, in its own strange way, that record opened that door to that possibility. Maybe the Nick LaRaca recording was a net positive for the genre. as a whole. But the murders, a payback for stealing credit, kind of out there. Don't worry, though, we've got more theories. Eric's second theory has to do with something that happened in the fall of 1917, about six months before the axeman's deadliest streak supposedly began. A neighborhood cults that had a lot of gambling dens and bars and brothels, but also had all

these surrounding dance halls and clubs. That was closed down by the Navy. And in doing so, totally wrecked the jazz economy, or did great damage, rather, to the jazz economy of New Orleans. So maybe the Axeman wasn't happy with the disruption to the area where jazz was really flourishing at the time in Storyville. Then I remember that there was an article in the summer of 1918 by the New Orleans Times Picayune, basically trashing jazz and saying it's not even music, that it's noise, that it's dangerous. and they say that any proper New Orleans citizen should suppress the rumor that jazz was born there, and its musical value was nil. So the Axeman in defending jazz is really making a statement, an anti-establishment statement.

That's Rayburn again. So maybe our murderer was just sticking it to the man. Or, as Eric Hofbauer says, maybe he had an actual agenda for the industry. The X-Man might have been the greatest marketer and publicist of and booking agent of jazz of all time. That one night where there was like every jazz band in New Orleans was working and had a gig, either at a home or at a dance hall. So he probably, you know, helped all these jazz musicians actually get paid finally that year. Yeah, that's like on the one hand he's a serial killer.

On the other hand, he's like a vigilantee for jazz justice. You're right, exactly. And it's a terrible pairing. Oh, definitely. Not a good luck. Yeah, no. And yet, the Axeman made everyone, even the people who poo-pooed jazz at the time,

have to listen to it like their lives depended on it, because maybe they did. Here's Bruce Rayburn again. From Holmes to the Leavings, you could hear jazz played everywhere throughout the city that night. No one died that night. So the inference is everybody was playing. jazz. All of these theories are still just theories, though, and they're all kind of a stretch, because the Axeman's jazz fandom only came into the mix for one night. He actually attacked

three more people after that. And who knows? Those could have all been jazz-loving people, so I just, I couldn't make sense of it all, Ben. I tried, but the dude appears to have been a jazz fan and an axe murderer, no conclusive connection between the two. But you should, you should should probably listen to some jazz, you know, just in case. I thought you did pretty well. Thank you. Also, look who you're talking to. Do you not know about my basketball video game Avatar, Thelonious Dunk?

Oh, I can't even look at you. Come on, that's pretty good. Come on, you know who he plays for, right? No. The Utah Jazz, obviously. Kill his mic. He's out of the show. I have some bad news about the jazz connection here, which don't worry.

We will get to. It's going to come from this person. Hi, my name is Miriam Davis, and I am from Montgomery, Alabama. We are talking to Miriam while she is giving lectures to a tourist group in Ireland about Irish history. Like, she got to go with them to Ireland and give lectures about history. Reminder, 7,923, that we are in the wrong industry, Johnson. Tell me about it. But we get to talk to the people who made better choices so they can tell us their version of this story.

And I love when we get to say this, Miriam wrote the book. on the Axeman. It's called the Axeman of New Orleans, the true story. Here is how she would describe it. He would break in between about one and three in the morning, often on a moonless night, and he would attack the grocer and his wife and whatever children were in bed with them with their own axe. Okay, so far Miriam is corroborating our Axeman story. Except that letter that we started with, the one with the demons in Tartarus, Do you believe that it was sent by the killer? No. And I think it's virtually certain that that was not written by the Axeman for several reasons.

Damn it. Why not? The Axeman was almost certainly not a well-educated person. He was working class. He was probably a burglar. This is not a person who would be at the time would have been well-educated. But the person who wrote that letter was extremely well-educated. They're a classical illusion. It's written very fluidly.

So we don't know the axeman's identity for sure. Do you agree with the popular theory that he was Joseph Mumfrey? No, in fact, I can prove that it wasn't Mumfrey. Go on. I have the prison records. Mumfrey was in prison when most of these attacks occurred. So I am the one thing I am certain of is that Mumfrey was not the Axeman. So who was the axeman?

I'm not certain. What the hell, Miriam? I thought we were getting somewhere here. I know. Miriam, academic, author, dream crusher. You know, I thought he was turning into the ether and slipping through tiny holes in doorways. And I thought for sure he wrote the letter to the newspaper. And you're just, you're really, you're crushing my dreams here.

Oh, sorry. Sorry. That's what happens when you do actual research, I guess. Miriam did have some interesting things to say about the community the Axeman targeted, though. Most of the Italian immigrants are from Sicily. So they tend to be sort of darker than immigrants from northern Italy. They don't really fit clearly into either this black or white category. I mean, they're clearly not African American, but they're also not quite white.

and they're willing to do jobs that a normal white man wouldn't be willing to do. Yet, on the other hand, they're doing quite well economically. So my suspicion is, we know this is a working class white man, my suspicion is that there's some kind of racial or ethnic anxiety that he perhaps has this resentment of these not quite white foreigners, who are doing better than he thinks he ought to be doing. So this, in a way, sounds similar to conversations being had around the world right now, fears about immigration in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Very true. And Miriam says something that people having these debates should maybe think about. These Italian immigrants who really, you know, aren't clearly accepted as white around the turn of the century, over a couple of generations almost completely assimilate an American society. They really buy into the American dream. Okay, so maybe the Axeman was yet another person acting out in irrational fear of the other. And in this case, in this time in New Orleans, that was Italian immigrants. But just for a moment to bring it back to the whole Axe murderer thing again

and how to protect ourselves from irrational fears in that area, any personal practical advice, Mariam? Have a dog who will bark in the middle of the night if anybody breaks in. Genius. But wait, who wrote the letter? We never got to that part, and the letter is, you know, the reason we told this story with its demon references and its classical Greek references and my new favorite phrase, jazz it.

Jazz it. Jazz. Jazz. All right, well, one theory, and it's just a theory. But remember our Axeman theme music? There was a person named John Joseph Davila, who was a musician and a jazz composer. Right after the letter was published,

he came out with a composition called the Mysterious Axeman's Jazz or Don't Scare Me Papa. Now, we knew this already, but the timing that Miriam is describing here is critical. There is a possibility that the letter was like this, viral guerrilla marketing campaign for the song itself. We are speculating here, but... He made a pile of money off that song,

and I just think that he's the most likely suspect. Of writing the letter, not the other stuff. Emery, have you heard this tune I've been working on? Anless thread scat. No, Ben, I haven't. Ah, jabidoo ziba da, la la, la. Emery, Emery, we're going to be famous and make all the monies. Not with that.

I'm just going to go adopt a puppy that will grow into a big, foreboding, protective, lovable dog. Today's story came from the Today I Learned Community on Reddit, but we also reached out to some communities to get ideas and feedback. Shout out to user Pure Misty, who responded to our post asking for theories in the unresolved mysteries community. We asked for your theories, and Peer Misty said, in part, I think the Axeman could have been someone who is against Italians. You have to remember that at this time, relations between Italy and America were strained, and in earlier years, many Italian Americans were the victims of harassment by nativists,

people who believed America should be WASP. As to the jazz angle, maybe the killer was fond of the upcoming jazz scene. Man, pure Misty. We barely know you, but you nailed it. Endless Thread is a production of WBUR, Boston's NPR station, in partnership with Reddit. Our show is a dream realized by Jessica Alpert, who, when we asked, if she likes the episode we've put together, she says, W-T-F. Iris Adler is our executive producer,

and she makes sure our stories meet the bar of mildly interesting. Mix and sound design by John Parati and Paul Vicus, who, whenever we go to record in the field with them, they remind us... Nature is... Lit. Our web producer is Megan Kelly,

who looks at our attempts at writing web copy and goes... Aw. Michael Pope is our advisor at Reddit, and whenever we try to have a serious meeting with him, he's all... You, I'm a toddler. Our interns are James Lindbergh and Josh Luckins. Our theme music is by Squelcher.

This week's episode, Art is called Jazz. It is from Reddit user RK underscore Art. You can find them at Raw Hulk 95 on Instagram. On Reddit, We are Endless underscore Thread. If you want to contribute art for an upcoming episode or give us a juicy story tip so we can tell it like we did today, hit us up there. The show is produced by Josh Swartz. Also my co-host and producer, Amory Sieverts.

I'm senior producer and host, Ben Brock John. I'll let myself out.