Infamous America - NEW ORLEANS Ep. 4 | “The Axeman, Part 1”

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

While the world dealt with the Great War and a pandemic that killed millions, New Orleans was gripped by the fear of a single spectre: a killer who became known as The Axeman. He attacked at night and left no clues except, occasionally, his murder weapon of choice. His identity was unknown, and no one was safe. Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join To advertise on this podcast, please email: [e-mail] For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. This show is part of the Airwave Media podcast network. Please visit AirwaveMedia.com to check out other great podcasts like The Explorers, History of the Great War, and many more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ireland's police superintendent Frank Mooney stood in front of a grocery store in the Tulane Gravier neighborhood. It was just before dawn on the morning of August 11th, 1918. It was already hot, and by the time the sun was high in the sky, the temperature would be well north of 100 degrees Fahrenheit. He was getting the details while his officers canvassed the still sleeping neighborhood. But he knew this. 15-year-old Pauline Bruno had been asleep in her room in the small apartment behind her family's grocery store. When she was awakened by moans coming from her uncle Joseph Romano's room, she saw a large figure in the hallway outside her room.

Her terrified screams scared the intruder off. Her uncle staggered down the hallway. Call an ambulance. My head hurts, he said, before collapsing. He was bleeding from a massive wound to his skull. and he was covered in blood. An ambulance rushed him to Charity Hospital. A couple hours later, when Frank Mooney saw the crime scene,

he was amazed that the man had stood up and walked. The pillow was soaked, and the blood spray reached up the wall behind the bed frame to the ceiling. There was no sign of a struggle. Joseph Romano never saw the attack coming. On the floor next to the bed, caked in blood and hair and skin tissue, was a short-handled axe.

But while Frank Mooney stood outside sweating, he knew something else. There had been other attacks, attacks on Italian grocery store owners, break-in attacks where the victims lay sleeping in their beds, attacks that ended in murder. And there was another similarity. In almost every other assault, the assailant had wielded an axe or something like it. Mooney knew if he and his detectives were seeing a pattern, the newspaper would as well. It was then that he got the news from Charity Hospital. Joseph Romano died.

Superintendent Frank Mooney was going to have to face a hard truth. Though the term didn't exist yet, New Orleans might have a serial killer on its hands. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling four infamous stories from New Orleans over the next six episodes. The next two episodes are the tale of a killer who haunted the city

in the first quarter of the 20th century. This is episode 4, The Axeman of New Orleans, part one. The region of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans was sold to the fledgling United States of America by Napoleon in 1803 as part of the Louisiana purchase. The city was 100 miles up the Mississippi River and protected from the tidal waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

But it was still positioned on deep water. It was a natural port city. With the commerce of the ports came opportunities. The city grew rapidly in the 19th century. In 1810, the population was just over 17,000. But by 1840, it was the third largest city in America, with more than 100,000 people. By 1870, the year of the Molly Digby kidnapping,

the population was more than 190,000. And by 1910, it was nearly 340,000. Immigration drove the population of the city. Hundreds of thousands of German and Irish, Mexican and Chinese, Creole and Cajun, Eastern European and Scandinavians came to the United States through Louisiana. Many decided to stay in New Orleans when they arrived. One of the largest groups that came to New Orleans was Italian. As many as 290,000 Italians came to the United States through the port of New Orleans,

and 80% of them were from the island. island of Sicily. By the turn of the century, no city in the south had a larger Italian population. Italian immigrants did well in their new home. Roots for their culture had been put down by the predominantly Catholic, French and Spanish, who had held New Orleans for its first century. The Italians were happy to discover the soaring facade of St. Louis Cathedral on Jackson Square and the ornate stained glass window above the entrance to St. Joseph's on Tulane Avenue. Italians earned a reputation as being hardworking and industrious. For Sicilians, their experience of farming their island's rich volcanic soil for lemons and grapes and olives in back-breaking heat

prepared them for farming in the South. Tens of thousands of jobs were vacated in cotton and sugar cane fields as African Americans in the South began the great migration of the 20th century. Beginning in 1910, more than 6 million African Americans left the southern states for urban areas in the northeast, Midwest, and the West. Italian laborers filled the gap. Italian immigrants also opened businesses. They were cobblers and tailors and barbers, and of course, they were restauranteurs. Their impact on New Orleans cuisine is unimpeachable.

One of the areas they thrived most was in operating grocery stores. news articles from the time guessed that in the 19 teens, half the grocery stores in New Orleans were run by Italians. But anti-Italian sentiment was pervasive. They were ridiculed for their willingness to do the same jobs that African Americans had done as slaves in the South. Their traditions were mocked. They were thought to be inherently criminal.

People believed every Italian was a member of Mono Nera, the Black Hand, groups of gangsters who ran. and money extortion rackets. The mayor of New Orleans was on record stating that the immigrant group was, quote, the worst class of Europeans, southern Italians and Sicilians, the most vicious, worthless people among us.

Never was the hostility worse than when a police chief was killed in cold blood in 1890 and 19 Italian men, almost all Sicilian, were baselessly arrested and tried for murder. When the jury began a quote, quitting the men, mob rule took over. Citizens stormed the prison, and 11 of the 19 men were killed during the riot. Nearly 30 years later, attitudes toward the Italian community had improved, but just barely. The murder of Joseph Romano could have been racially motivated. Superintendent Frank

Mooney had to allow for that. But two and a half months earlier, when he was called to a murder in Carrollton, three miles from the French quarter, ethnicity had not been on his mind. Joseph and Catherine Maggio lived on the corner of Upper Line and Magnolia Street. Out of the front of their home, they ran a small bar and a grocery store. Joseph had taken over the store from his father, and he had family throughout the city. One of his brothers, 28-year-old Andrew, lived with the Maggios and made a living as a barber. On the night of May 22nd, 19th, In 1818, Andrew had been out drinking and had passed out in his bed. But in the early hours of the next morning, something had been loud enough to stir him from his stupor.

At first, when he sat up, there was silence. But then there was a barely audible, guttural moan coming from his brother's room. Maybe it was the lingering effects of the whiskey, or maybe it was a fearful instinct of what waited on the other side of the wall. but Andrew chose not to go into Joseph and Catherine's room. Instead, he ran out of the house and down Magnolia Street to the home of a third Maggio brother, Jacob. The two brothers returned to Joseph and Catherine's house. The kitchen door, always locked, was open.

A panel on the wood door had been removed and lay on the floor. Andrew was terrified. There had been someone in the house, and now he was forced to wonder, was the intruder still inside when he woke up. The brothers made their way through the house to the closed bedroom door of Joseph and Catherine's room. They knocked softly at first, then with more force. Finally, they pushed the door open.

The couple had been savagely attacked as they slept. Joseph was on half of the blood-soaked mattress. His face was bashed and cut and barely recognizable. Catherine was on the floor, motionless, with blood still pulsing from a lethal wound on her neck. In the bathroom down the hall, in the claw-foot bathtub, was the Maggio's own axe, caked in drying blood. The horrified brothers hurried to a phone and called the authorities.

As the police investigated the scene, they canvassed the neighborhood and began to build a working theory. The killer had struck Joseph Maggio twice in the head and cut his throat. somehow the massive trauma hadn't killed him instantly. His groans had woken up his brother, and in fact he was still breathing right up until the police arrived. But he was too far gone to speak. Catherine had died almost instantly from one deep, violent slash from a razor. Superintendent Frank Mooney was suspicious of Andrew Maggio from the start.

Had he really run for his brother Jacob instead of busting into Joseph and Catherine's room, when he heard Joseph's groaning. Could he really have been so drunk that he slept through the attacks that were right on the other side of the wall? As a barber, he had access to a razor and the skill to use it. But while they held Andrew in custody for several days, Mooney eventually released him. The superintendent told the media,

the doubt as to Andrew's guilt was so strong that we were compelled to give him the benefit of the doubt. Our hope for a solution is still bright. But the murders of Joseph and Catherine Maggio would not be solved in the weeks or months to come. Detectives beat the streets trying to find a lead. The limited forensic science of the time could only provide so much help. And the notion that a culprit could be psychologically profiled was still decades away from being part of the investigation of a violent crime. What Mooney and the New Orleans PD didn't know was that Joseph and Catherine Maggio would not be the last unsubiled.

solved murders that fit this MO. And soon, the police would find out that they might not have been the first. The brutality of the Maggio killings and the investigation of the brother Andrew kept the unsolved case in the headlines longer than New Orleans police wanted. And then a few reporters began to wonder if the real killer was an elusive murderer from 1911. The press dubbed that killer, the Cleaver. In the early morning of June 27th, 11, someone pried open the back door of the home of Joe Davy. Davy was Italian and he owned a grocery store. While Davy was asleep, the assailant struck him half a dozen times with a meat cleaver.

The attacker hit Davy's wife in the head with a large ceramic mug. She survived, but her husband didn't. The killer who was now nicknamed the cleaver struck two more times. Both attacks were on Italian grocers. and then the killer promptly disappeared. The working theory was that the killer was part of the black-hand criminal organization, and the murders were the result when people didn't pay the extortionists. But one of the many unanswered questions was,

if the crimes were financially motivated, why hadn't anything been stolen during any of the attacks? Seven years later, in 1918, the press underscored the similarities between the unsolved cases from 1911, and the murder of the Maggios. Publicly, Superintendent Mooney downplayed the theory that the cases were connected. Privately, he wondered. He was struck by the gruesome scene at the Maggios.

It was eerily similar to the attacks that happened almost exactly seven years earlier. And just like then, the murder of Joe Davy wasn't the last, but only the first. Now, Mooney had a sense that the murders of the Magios was the beginning. And he was right. In late June 1918, one month after the Maggio murders, Lewis Bessemer and his mistress Harriet Lowe were attacked by a hatchet-wielding intruder. Bessemer was not Italian, but he did run a grocery store out of the front of his house. Nothing was stolen, and after being rushed to Charity Hospital,

both victims survived, though Harriet Lowe suffered some paralysis to the side of her face. At first, police whispered privately that maybe it was the same culprit as the previous attacks. Maybe he wasn't only targeting Sicilians. Or maybe he was, but he misjudged Bessemer's nationality. The police made a quick arrest. An African-American man who had recently worked for Bessemer was detained and charged, but subsequently released. Again, Frank Mooney's detectives had no leads. But while the other attacks and kill,

just hung around the necks of the police force as cold cases, the Bessemer low attack took on a new life as a media side show that rivaled the hunt for the axeman himself. The scene of the Bessemer crime raised suspicion from the start. First, the intruder didn't force his way in. Second, Bessemer was discovered by his bread purveyor just before 7 a.m. as he made his morning delivery. It appeared Bessemer had just been attacked. The sun was up, and so were the hardworking people of the seventh ward, yet no one heard or saw anything.

The delivery man ran into the residence and found a woman bludgeoned and bloody on the bed. He knew her well and had always assumed she was Bessemer's wife. But when authorities arrived, they found a bloody wig by the back door and bloody footprints that led through the apartment to the bedroom where the woman was found. Then the police discovered that the woman was not Bessemer's wife, but his mistress, Harriet Lowe. A search of Bessemer's home revealed correspondence with people in Germany and additional papers that led police to suspect Bessemer of espionage. This was June 1918, the height of the First World War. The June 29th issue of the Times-Picayune newspaper flashed the headline, Hatchet Mystery may lead to a spy nest. And as the rumors of infidelity and sedition swirled, another bombshell dropped.

After the attack, Harriet Lowe returned with Bessemer to his home. The attack had left her physically disfigured and psychologically traumatized. Her behavior was erratic, and she continued to be in and out of Charity Hospital. When her condition reached the point that a priest was called in to deliver her last rights, Harriet Lowe also called for Superintendent Frank Mooney. On her deathbed, she told Mooney who attacked her. She said it was Louis Bessemer. Bessemer was arrested, and the trial that ensued would be the biggest and most outrageous

anyone in New Orleans could remember. Bessemer was eventually convicted of murder, but he filed an appeal that would be ruled on the following year. But neither the trial nor the conviction allayed the fear of the people of New Orleans, because the attacks didn't stop. Lewis Bessemer was arrested the day after Harriet Lowe died. That very night, the killer struck again. Just after midnight, on the evening of August 4th, 1918,

Ed Schneider returned from his job on the wharf's loading freight from cargo ships onto trains. He wanted nothing more than to lay down next to his wife Anna, who was eight months pregnant and sleep until he smelled the chicory of the morning coffee. There seems to be a little discrepancy about Anna's name. name, but for the sake of simplicity and consistency, we're just going to stick with Anna. When Ed Schneider returned home that night, he didn't find peace and comfort. Instead, he found chaos outside his home. His sister-in-law, who lived next door, was crying and being held by her husband. More than a dozen New Orleans police officers and detectives stood outside his house.

Anna was okay, they all said, but there was an intruder and a confrontation. The intruder had broken a lamp over Anna's face. There was a gash on her head and some teeth had been knocked out. She was unconscious but stable at Charity Hospital, and the baby seemed to be okay. Some dressers and cupboards in the house had been ransacked. A few dollars had been taken from Ed Schneider's wallet, which he left in their bedroom. But other than that, nothing major had been stolen, and none of their other children had been hurt. By comparison, they were lucky. Two days after the attack, Anna gave birth to a healthy girl named Clara, but Anna couldn't give any details of the night of the attack.

The Schneiders weren't Italian and they weren't grocers. But the attack was at night, it was brutal, and it was on a pregnant woman, and the press seized the opportunity to sensationalize the crime. The attacker hadn't used a cleaver or a hatchet, but after the Schneider attack, the killer was given the moniker that would follow him into history. The Times Picayune ran a series of headlines, victim of the Axeman, now a Happy Mother, and Axeman may be active in the city.

The attacker was now the Axeman of New Orleans. And there was more fuel for the fervor. The Schneider home was almost perfectly in the center of a triangle that could be drawn from the three locations of the attacks in 1911. That couldn't be a coincidence, could it? Those attacks were originally thought, to be the work of organized crime, but now there was a more enticing possibility, a single rampaging killer. Superintendent Frank Mooney was struggling. The attacks on his constituents were mounting.

His reassurances offered little solace. Neither did additional police presence in the less populated neighborhoods where the attacks kept occurring. More and more, Frank Mooney began to believe he wasn't cut out for this. As an executive for the Illinois Central Railroad, he had been a good businessman and a shrewd and effective leader. He could pacify anxious shareholders, placate angry passengers, and smooth over problems with union leaders. Mooney had been appealing to the New Orleans City Council because he held the promise of breaking, or at least weakening, the hold that political corruption had on the police force. But ironically, Mooney was essentially a a political appointee.

He had no law enforcement trading or experience, and now he was dealing with brutal attacks and relentless newspaper coverage. And he needed to look no further than the fate of his predecessor to see how high the stakes were for the superintendent of the New Orleans police force. The job became available because of this.

One year earlier, Superintendent Jim Reynolds held the job. He was well-liked by politicians well respected by his officers and well regarded by the public. On August 2nd, 1917, Reynolds was standing in the lobby of the city courthouse when a deranged police officer walked in and opened fire. A slug from the officer's revolver struck Reynolds in the face. The superintendent was dead before his body hit the marble floor.

Frank Mooney inherited a police force that was as crooked as it has always been and reported to a political machine that was as rigged as it could be while still keeping the public's confidence. Mooney was a manager, but not a lawman. He was a problem solver, not an investigator. Now he had a hell of a problem on his hands, and he couldn't solve it, and it was about to get worse. In the early morning hours of August 11th, just one week after the attack on Anna Schneider, Superintendent Mooney laid in his bed, hoping to get a few hours of sleep. Then his phone rang.

It was a captain from the Tulane Gravier neighborhood. It had happened again. A grocer, a Sicilian, had been attacked in his sleep. There was an axe, caked in blood, on the floorboards next to the bed. Frank Mooney hauled himself up, got dressed, and headed to Joseph Romano's market. The police, the press, and the public believed the murder of Joe Romano cemented the theory that the killer was targeting Italians. Romano was attacked at night while he slept. The killer hadn't carried a weapon to or from the crime scene,

but rather used what he found there, some sort of axe. He was stealthy. He entered the house without waking anyone up. But he also shied away from confrontation. He fled immediately when Joseph's 15-year-old niece Pauline woke up and walked into the hallway. Romano's wallet was missing, but the cash in the grocery store was untouched. and the killer seemed to have made no effort to break into locked boxes or safes. Even before psychological analysis of killers was the norm,

any seasoned detective could see that the manner and the method of the murders spoke volumes. If the attacker simply wanted to kill as many Sicilian grocers as he could, why didn't he just use a gun? Guns were almost as easy to find in New Orleans as warm bignets. Pulling a trigger was fast and easy. It was detached, but the axeman chose to slice and bludgeon his victims. It was close up and intimate, and it showed a desire to inflict pain and suffering. Retired police detective John Dantonio served under the late superintendent Jim Reynolds.

Dantoneo was thought to be an expert on crime in the Italian community of New Orleans, but he was also highly regarded as an expert on killers. The press sought out his expertise. Dantonio told the Times Picayune, The murderer is likely a Jekyll and Hyde type, like Jack the Ripper. A criminal of dual personality type may be a respectable law-abiding citizen when his normal self. Then suddenly the impulse to kill comes upon him and he must obey it. Evoking the name Jack the Ripper only fed the public's hysteria.

The world had changed greatly in the 30 years since the killings in the Whitechapel neighbor, of London, but the gruesomeness of the attacks and the fact that they still remained unsolved made them linger in the public consciousness. The mania in New Orleans was at a boiling point. Families armed themselves. They slept in shifts so that back doors were guarded. Every report of a suspicious person brought a response from Superintendent Mooney's men. Mooney's anxiety matched that of the city he seemed unable to protect.

He could read plainly in the papers that the vultures were circling. They asked, why couldn't Mooney catch the Axeman? Even with the city in a full-on panic and the authorities on high alert, a string of break-ins occurred in the aftermath of Joseph Romano's murder. Many aspects of the crimes matched that of the Axeman. The victims were mostly of Italian origins. Similar means of entry were used, and the break-ins were all at night. However, in all cases, there was little or no violence, and when confronted, the intruders fled.

Additionally, the break-ins were also attempted robberies, and theft was not thought to be a trademark of the Axeman. And there was something else, excluding the Romano murder, which took place in a busier part of the city, attacks attributed to the Axeman mostly occurred in less populated areas on the city's fringes. This new string of break-ins followed no pattern. It took place all over the city, regardless of the neighborhood's population density. Maybe they were copycats who didn't share the axeman's taste for blood. Maybe they were completely unrelated. What was certain was that after the murder of Joseph Romano, the axeman went dormant.

There were no attacks attributed to the axeman for the rest of 1918 and into 1919. There was a possibility that. that the Axeman's attacks subsided because New Orleans was basically shut down when an influenza outbreak struck the city in early autumn. The pandemic, which claimed more than 25 million lives worldwide, closed social clubs, churches, theaters, and dance halls until new cases finally began to subside as winter arrived. Some of the panic and anxiety over the Axeman and the pandemic was subdued by the relief of November 11th, 1918. That was Armistice Day, the day when the German Empire and the Central Powers capitulated,

and the war to end all wars finally did end. As Christmas came and went, and the new year of 1919 began, the only mention of the Axeman in the newspapers was in reference to the ongoing trial of Louis Bessemer. Bessemer's guilt in the attack of Harriet Lowe was still in question. But the murder of Joseph Romano had absolved Bessemer of being the Axeman. Bessemer was still in police custody under Frank Mooney's watchful eye. But any hope that the Phantom Axeman was done with the city of New Orleans ended in March of 1919. There were more gruesome murders.

Again, the victims were Sicilian grocers. And again, the killer used an axe. The terror returned tenfold, because this time there was more. The newspapers that so closely covered the killings the previous year received a letter. The Axeman had demands. Next time on Infamous America, the Axeman resumes his attacks on the people of New Orleans, proclaims his love of jazz music, and forces Frank Mooney and the police department to agonize over the most difficult case of their careers.

That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait, we don't have to wait. to we. They received the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships began to just $5 per month. This episode was researched and written by Jamie Lyko, original music by Rob Valier. Copy editing by me, Chris Wimmer, and I'm your host and producer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. were Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram

and B-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. This show is part of the Airwave Media Podcast Network. Please visit airwavemedia.com to check out other great podcasts like Ben Franklin's World, History of the Great War, and many more. Thanks for listening.