THE AXEMAN OF NEW ORLEANS-Miriam Davis

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written until now. The Axeman repeatedly broke into the homes of Italian grocers in the dead of night, leaving his victims in a pool of blood. Irelando Giordano, an innocent Italian grocer, and his teenage son Frank, were wrongly accused of one of those murders corrupt officials that convicted them

with coarced testimony. Miriam C. Davis here expertly tells the story of the search for the Axemen and of the eventual exoneration of the innocent Giordano's She proves that the person most widely suspected of being the ax Man was not the killer. She also shows what few have suspected, the acts continued killing after leaving New Orleans in nineteen nineteen, only thirty years after the Jack. After Jack, the Ripper stock the streets of Whitechapel, The Axe Man of New

Orleans held in the American city hostage. This book tells that story. The book to are featuring this evening is The Axe Man of New Orleans, The True Story by historian and author Miriam Davis. Welcome to the program, and thank you for agreeing to this interview. Miriam C.

that time. And as you do in the book, you open, get the setting, set the stage, tell us a little bit about Marty Grass and New Orleans in nineteen nineteen, and the courtemilguless.

really have today. But what seems to have happened is that there were these spontaneous celebrations that had just broken out, with people dressing up and music going up and down the streets. So it really was a very celebratory time.

And it was only a few days after the end of Mardigras that you have the attack in Gretna at the Court of Miglia Grocery and Gretina is now part of Greater New Orleans, but at the time it was right across It was a separate little town, a little settlement right across the river, right across from New Orleans.

into business for themselves. So what they tended to do was to work really hard to save every dime they had, and then as soon as they could to go into some sort of business for themselves. They often started out as little, small peddlers and many of them ended up as a little corner grocery store owners. Now at the time, of course, there's no refrigeration and people have to shop

or housewives have to shop, sometimes twice a day. So on corner there's a small, small, little grocery, usually family owned, and the Sicilians, the Italians, were in the process in the early twentieth century of sort of taking over this business. This was become a little niche so corner, a family owned where the family lived in the back of the grocery. Family owned Italian groceries were very common in New Orleans at the time, and so Charlie and Rosie are a

typical Italian couple. He was born in Italy and so as an immigrant. She actually was born of the immigrant parents in Louisiana in one of the Sugarcane parishes. He had been a laborer. They were in I guess Charlie was probably in his middle twenties, Rosie was about twenty one. They had a small child. He had worked as a laborer for many years until he'd saved the money to

go into the grocery business. And again they had just this very small I mean smaller than you know, most of the quick stops that we go to these days, but their own little grocery in Gretna that they were running.

not open as as it normally would be. And so the neighbors discover them, and that George, the Court Amiglia, I'm sorry that Geordano family are their neighbors, and there's some of the first to arrive on the scene, and you know, the sheriff is sent for, our doctors are

sent for. The whole neighborhood seems to scramble into operation and to eventually transport the short of the court Amiglias, who are you know, who are still alive while they're they're badly injured, to to the hospital in New Orleans.

don't understand motive. And so the police immediately look into the two couples and the Jordano's living next door, and what do they find and what information do they find and what do they then attribute this attack?

Meglias might have had. Now, in fact, they seem to have made up and have been on very good terms. That Frank Giordano, particularly who was seventeen at the time, just adored the little toddler Mary and she used to come over to their grocery and play all the time. But I think it was that the authorities in Gretna understood the idea of the Sicilian vendetta. Sicilians, because they had a distrust of the government, tended to handle things

what we might call extra legally through the vendetta. And when the first generation of immigrants come over, unfortunately, some of them bring that practice with them, and so it's not uncommon for there to be shootings or stabbings among the immigrant Italian community that nobody will cooperate with the police about. And this happens with the first generation immigrants.

So the police in Gretna understand that they're they're acquainted with that idea, but the idea of a serial killer is so uncommon and so unusual, and like you say, at the time, there wasn't even the term that I

think that they just couldn't wrap their heads around it. Now, the across the river where there have been this series of attacks, the police superintendent Frank Mooney, he doesn't use the term serial killer, but he's tumble to the fact that there seems to be somebody who is serially attacking

Italian grocers. But the trouble is is that the Gretna authorities refused to listen to the to the New Orleans authorities, and they just jump to the conclusion that the Jordana's must have been guilty because they were the most obvious suspects.

rental dispute. And despite the closeness of the family, and despite everything, the Jordanos are accused. How does this happen? Tell us about the identification process that puts these two people as he accused.

of who of who attacked her. She had no memory of the attack whatsoever. But after several weeks of this badgering, the police claim that both of them have identified the Giordana's. Nobody else claims to have heard this. In fact, there are reporters who then will after this report came out that the police are claiming that they've identified that Giordana's the police. There are several reporters who go and talk to them, and it's pretty clear that they have no

idea who who attacked them. And in fact, Charlie Courtamiglia is in such bad shape that he will just agree to anything you ask him. So it seems to me that this identification, that this claim on the part of the police in Gretna is at best as a result of the police asking them very leading questions to which they will automatically answer, you know, yes. And then Rosie, after three weeks, is actually well enough to be released, and she's taken from Charity Hospital directly to Greta jail

and she's kept in jail overnight. And she later said and then it's at that point that she seems to indict her neighbors, and she later testified that it's because the sheriff and the jailer told her that basically they were going to keep her in there, ostensibly as a material witness, but they were going to keep until she did what they wanted her to do, which was to identify her neighbors as the attacker.

And then this strapping young boy, Giordano, who loved the baby next door, are accused of this atrocious attack and on the baby and on the couple and are consequently sentenced Frank to death and to the father for life. Let's rewind to August thirteen, nineteen ten and what you call a cleaver and the attack of Harriet Crudy. Why do you go back? Yeah, and what was characterized by that attack? What was similarities or differences in that attack? Tell us about that?

the Cruti family. Harriet Cruty wakes up in the middle of the night. Her husband has been hit with a cleaver, and this man is waving the cleaver at her, demanding money. She gives them money. He leaves very leisurely. He walks to the house. He puts back on his boots that he'd taken off. And I think that this is I suspect this is somebody who started out as a burglar,

but for whatever reason, ended up attacking somebody. Maybe the grocer woke up in the middle of the night and startled him, and he hit him because he was afraid he would start yelling for help. Then and I talked to a homicide detective and to a profiler, and what may have happened is this burglar discovers that when he hits somebody with this sharp implement, that he just likes it. He likes the side of the blood, he likes the power, and so his sort of descent into serial killer may

have begun almost accidentally. So I do think that the attack with a butcher's cleaver probably the first in this series of attacks, because I asked a profiler, a retired profiler from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, how likely was it that somebody would attack the same demographic the same time of night with a sharp implement, you know that there would be one attacker in nineteen ten, nineteen eleven, and then another attacker in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen,

and he said it was extremely unlikely. So I feel pretty confident in saying that the person who started off with a cleaver and then eventually moved to using an axe was probably the same person. And I think I can come up with a good reason for that. After the cleaver attacked Harriet Cruti. Of course, the next month another couple is attacked with a similar implement, and these are their rezetties and they are very, very badly injured.

And it's not until though the next early the next summer, that Joe Davy is actually killed.

axe lying round. He can use that, he can leave it at the scene, and then he can leave without carrying anything incriminating like a butcher's cleaver or like a bloody axe. So so yeah, the attacks start with the cruties in I think it's September of nineteen ten. The next month you have another Italian grocer immigrant couple, the Rossetties, who were not killed, but who were both very badly injured.

And then a few months after that, I think it's June of nineteen ten, you have Joe and Mary Davy who were attacked and she's slightly injured, but he is actually killed. He's the first, I think he's the first actual fatality of the ax man.

And the thing is that even though police were accustomed to seeing the would have as robbery and looking at it very simplistically, even to the police at that time, they could see that robbery, it looked like was not the main purpose because stuff was things were, money was left behind, wasn't it.

mind of signature. Often he would steal, as he did in the Cruti case. He'd steal small amounts of money, but he leaves valuable jewelry behind. Sometimes he's stole nothing. Oftentimes it would look through like he was throwing things around looking for something, but nothing valuable was taken. So the police pretty quickly concluded that burglary was not his major major object, although sometimes small amounts were taken.

later to when they were at trial. So tell us what Reynolds thinks and depicts this killer as and and other police and the media what is all of their takes on who this is and who it could be.

all kind of speculations. This is when you actually see, you know, the attacker compared to Jack the Ripper, New Orleans own Jack the Ripper. But you know, in the first set of attacks, there is a man named Flannery who is arrested. Jim Reynolds sort of assumes that whoever's doing this is not quite in his right mind, because

this attacker is acting very oddly. In the case of the Crutie attack, he not only sort of nonchalantly walks down the street as if he didn't have a care in the world, but he also grabs the Cruties bird on the way out and sits on the stoop and releases the bird. Reynalds sort of thinks this is a person who might be what they called at the time, a drug fiend, you know, somebody and this is a time and you can get things like morphine at the drug store, that this was somebody who was doing this

to get drugs and who wasn't quite in his right mind. Well, there's a guy named John John Flannery who is caught breaking into a grocery in the months thereafter, and sort of he's got a history of burglary, he's got a history of attack but he also seems to had been sort of mentally imbalanced and perhaps a drug user. He's

charged with that first attack of the Crusie attack. However he's never well, he's arrested for it, but he's never actually charged because by the time they come around to putting him on trial, you've had these other attacks, and so it's pretty clear that he couldn't be the attacker, since the superintendent does sort of assume this is the same person committing all of these attacks, and the poor guy, I think Flannery ends up being sent to a mental institution.

But Jim Reynolds does start out thinking that this is somebody who is not only a burglar, but has some sort of drug problem, and that's why poor Flannery gets arrested, because he seems to meet that profile.

Jim Reynolds almost certainly was expecting another attack, which never came. Now, I do talk about the Scambra murder in nineteen twelve, and the reason I talk about that is because, you know, I start out the book talking about the writer Robert Talent and his version of the X Men story that he publishes in nineteen fifty two in his book Ready to Hang. Because most of most versions of the X Men story that people are acquainted with or sort of

Talents version of it. So I use him as kind of a paradigm to sort of, you know, sort of

test to what extent his version is accurate. And he had mentioned the Scaunbre murder possible precursor to these attacks in nineteen eighteen and nineteen nineteen, and so I wanted to examine the Sciambre murder and see how it fit in with these other attacks, and I could go to I don't think there was a killing of an Italian grocery owning couple, young couple Joanna and Tony's Sciambra in nineteen twelve, but I don't think it had anything to

do with the cleaver of the axe man attacks. They were shot, and it was pretty clearly that the wife, Joanna was shot by accident, that whoever was trying to kill her husband Tony shot him in the dead and knights, you know, point blank was really trying to kill him. This I think had nothing to be the axe man attacks. I think this was some sort of personal grudge, probably having to do with the grocery business. So, oh, I'm sorry, I think I lost track. Was that you asked?

This is the Angelina family again and it's with it with a hatchet, and it's very very similar to all the other attacks, but it's not fatal. And I think this is the reason more where people haven't heard about it is because nobody died. But the next spring in nineteen eighteen May of nineteen eighteen is one of the really most gruesome of these murders. This is the one that Robert Tallent thought was the first axe men murder. Joseph and Catherine Maggio, middle aged battalion grocer couple. They

are discovered in their bedroom early one morning. Joseph has been hit twice with his axe, fractured a skull, and he had had his throat cut, probably with a razor. Katherine actually hadn't been hit with an axe at all.

She had been slashed to debt with a razor, and the position of her body led the police to conclude that she'd actually gotten up out of bed and gone around the bed to try to defend her husband, and that the killer had turned around and slashed her, slashed her throat, and she kind of exhiciated and strangled on her own blood. I mean, it was a very very

gruesome death. But she's one, I think, maybe the only woman who's killed by the axe men, and I suspect that if she hadn't tried to defend her husband, she would have survived the attack like the other women did. And so this attack gets a lot, a lot of attention because it's so gruesome and and so this is why I think this was the first X men attack that the writer Robert Talent, you know, writing writing thirty years to forty years later, that he knew about.

of his own men. And the police superintendent by this time is is Frank Mooney, who is a former who's got no experience as a police officer at all, but a railroad superintendent. But there's a lot of speculation as to is this the mafia, is this these are just burglary has gone wrong? Is it the same attacker? And Jim Colton, who's this young crime reporter for the Times piggy Un and he becomes very convinced early on that

there is a single attacker. And this plays a role much later on in in what happens to Frank Frank Tordano. So the newspapers are reflecting these various points of view of uh, you know, speculation is about what is behind these attacks. But I also think that Frank Mooney, the police superintendent, eventually himself comes to be persuaded that there is a single attacker.

But anyway, June twenty sixth, nineteen eighteen, they are found all bloodied and missus low has clearly she's found in her bed covered with blood. She's clearly been you know, attacked with it with their acts. But right from the beginning. Frank Mooney, the police superintendent, has reason to believe that these attacks are very different from the Cleaver axe Man attacks. Now, remember this is a month after Demaggio attacks. It's very natural to see this as a as a similar attack.

But the thing is is there's evidence that Bessemer and missus Low hadn't been attacked in bed like the other victims. The blood evident that missus Low had been attacked on a back porch and then dragged to her bed. Bessemer claimed that he had just woken up in his bedroom in his bed covered with blood. Now the police didn't think that could be the case because there wasn't an enough blood. If he had been attacked in bed, there would have just been more blood in his bedroom, and

there wasn't enough. They didn't think. The other thing is these other attacks they occur between one and three in the morning, in the middle of the night, usually on a moonless night. The blood was so fresh when the best Bessemer and Low were discovered that the attack they were discovered about seven o'clock in the morning by the bread delivery guy. The blood was so fresh that it indicated they were only attacked about maybe an hour or

so earlier. That meant the attack occurred about six in the morning, when the street would have started stirring, and there would been a neighbors to see if anybody entered the premises or exited, and neighbors all testified that they saw nobody go into the grocery or come out. So and there's also, unlike other attacks, there's no evidence of fourth entry. So this leads the police superintendent to treat this from the beginning as very different from the Maggio

attack of the month before. Now, the newspapers tend to lump them together, and in the future months, whenever they're talking about these series of attacks, the Bessemer and Low attack is lumped in with them. But the police had reason to believe from the very beginning that they're different from these other attacks. And the other thing is Missus Low changes her story several times about what's going on.

So in the end Lewis Bessemer is actually arrested and charged, and Missus Low dies several months later about September, of her injuries, the injuries she got as a result of this attack, and so he is actually charged with her murder. And I think I think the police were right. I

think this is a very different kind of attack. There's all sorts of differences between it and the other X Men attacks that I think, in fact, even though Bessemer is acquitted and I think legally there was probably reasonable doubt on the jury's part, I think in fact he is he is the most likely person to have killed missus Lowe.

this story and continuing the sort of the myth. But at the same time, we will find out soon that media like Colton are very instrumental in helping some of these in this case, UH find its truth. You talk about and introduce a character named Andy Ojaida to speaking of the media from the States, from the newspaper the States. Tell us a little bit about the state of the media and their response to all of these crimes and how they were portrayed in the newspapers.

is one attacker. I think that the Jada's newspaper might have been a little bit more skeptical of that, at least initially. But I know that different you know, different newspapers are reflecting some of the different opinions on the part of the police. Because while Frank Mooney is convinced that there is a single attacker, some of his police

officers aren't all convinced. Others, some of them suggest maybe it's the mafia, although a lot of them just want to argue that they're just burglaries, burglary's gone wrong.

and he says that the next Tuesday night. The letter is published on a Sunday, the next Tuesday night, he will be roaming through New Orleans at midnight looking for victims. But he would spare any household that was listening to jazz. Now I think that well, I am virtually certain, and I talked to the profiler that I work with in the homicide detective and they agree that almost certainly the real killer did not write this letter. The person who

wrote this letter was very educated. He makes the classical allusion to Tartaro's. It's very well written. From the identifications that we have of the attacker, he was. He was a working class person who at that time would not have been well educated. So he's not likely to have written such a letter, I think. And you can't wible

the dead, so I'm safe in saying this. I think the most likely suspect is a local songwriter named John Joseph Davila, who right after the letter came out and it got all this attention, he came out with a song called the Mysterious Axe Man's Jazz, which was a big hit. So I remember when I when I I think there's a homicide detective. When I was telling him about this, he goes, Yep, he done it. He's the

person who probably wrote this. So that that's my theory about this, but almost certainly the actual killer did not write this letter. Of course it does obviously, it gets a lot of media attention, and it's one of the aspects of the story that has, you know, remained in the public consciousness.

were questioned and then released. In fact, while they were black people, black men questioned in almost all of these cases, there were you know, white men questioned as well, so I think and of course, you know, black people were poor then, and you know often you looked at at poorer people to be burglars in this sort of thing. So I don't think it's well, of course, it was

a very racist, segregated time. I don't really think that's a good example, although I do talk about how, yes, there was sort of this assumption of black criminality that I think led some people to suspect that this kind of strange murderer might be black. But in fact the major suspect that but again people still talk about is an Italian immigrant named Joseph Mumfrey, and he was a basically a low level thug. He had been sent to prison for bombing a grocer who wouldn't pay kind of blackmail.

He later, after all of these attacks are ended in New Orleans, he ends up in Los Angeles where he's murdered, well, I won't say murdered, because but he's shot and killed by the widow of the last person in New Orleans who Robert Tallent claims is the last axe Man victim. It's a Mike Pepatone is kind of a an Italian immigrant. He's got he's got sort of criminal connections. He is

killed in the middle of the night. Now, if you read the police reports, it's pretty clear the police concluded very quickly that it was not an axe man killing. There were two men at the scene at this at the at the crime. He was not hit with an axe. But still you've got the newspaper headlines, which i'll you know, mention the axe man. But when you read the stories, it's clear that the police think this is sort of

an Italian crime related murder. Well, anyway, Mike Capatoni's widow ends up several years later in Los Angeles, married to a man named Angelo Albano, who had been in business with this thug who's now out of prison, Joseph Mumfrey. Apparently her husband disappears and Mumfrey shows up demanding money from her and says, if you don't give me money, I'll do to you what you did to my husband.

So she empties two revolvers into him, including three shots in his back as he's trying to get down the stairs. She pleads self defense and she is acquitted by a jury in law. Angeles, and is the reports of this trial, the murder, the killing of Mumphrey and her trial, and the reports of this filter back to New Orleans, and it's at that point that you get the sort of scrambling of the story in which Mumphrey is reported to

be the Axe Man. You have this misreporting of the events in Los Angeles, and I think that's what leads to this legend that Joseph Mumphrey with the Axe Man. I mean the press play a central role in the story, not only in getting Frank Giordano eventually exonerated, but also in sort of creating this legend of the Axe Man, which is which is not. I'm not totally rooted in inaccuracy.

know he consult some newspapers. I also think that he's relying a lot on oral tradition because there would have been people still alive who were policemen at the time. So I think he's relying an oral As a historian, I never liked to rely on oral tradition if I have written written documents of what happened at the time, because people's memories are not really as reliable as we'd like them to be. And so I think that's what accounts for this version of talents, which turns out not

to be talent. Did the best he could with the resources he had, and I'm glad he wrote his story because otherwise I don't think it would have survived, but it was interesting to sort of where the legend got a little bit scrambled.

don't think that her story makes much sense. But at that time, I think she's absolutely convinced because everybody was telling her, you know, who else could have done it? The judge does not allow any evidence to be brought forward that there is somebody else out still attacking people, so he doesn't allow an alternative theory of the crime. They're convicted in seven year old Frank is sentenced to be hanged, and his father, who's like sixty eight sixty nine,

his sick father, is sentenced to life in prison. But Jim Colton, who is convinced, you know that there is one attacker out there and that Giordano's could not be it. He goes up to Frank as Frank is sort of standing there shocked after the verdict, and he says, I will do everything I can to help you, Frank, something like I don't know. Nine months later, in February, Rosie walks into the offices of the Times Picking where there just happens to be a notary public and says, I

wasn't telling the truth. I don't know who did it. The Giordanos are innocent. I think what happened in the aftermath of the trial after their daughter's murder, Rosie and Charlie's marriage fell apart, and Rosie moved back to New Orleans and got a job and was supporting herself and was sick for a while. Actually, but I think that Jim Colton tracked her down, you know, convinced her to

come forward. And when she came forward, she said, you know, Saint Joseph came to me in a dream and said, Rosie, you have to tell the truth. And I think her conscience was bothering her because I think she realized what she got away from everybody in Gretna who's telling her, you know, they must have done it, because feelings against

the Jordanas are running very high in Gretna. I think that allows her to sort of come to the realization that, you know, she had just been talked into being convinced that the Grdana's must have done it, that she really she didn't have any memory of the attack. And in fact, this is in February, and I think it's the next month. The case had been appealed to Louisiana State Supreme Court because the prosecution had done in several things that they

shouldn't have done, including withholding potentially exculpatory evidence. So on several grounds, I mean, the State Supreme Court could not take her recanting of her testimony into account. They could only, you know, look at the legal rounds for reversing the verdict. But they did, and it takes several months because the prosecution doesn't want to give up, and at one point they even accuse Rosie of that they threaten her with perjury charges. But in the end, the Jordano's do go free.

And I think, I think that there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that Jim Colton probably had a lot to do with Rosie.

years later. But Frank goes on to be a successful real estate guy and business guy and remarries and and and you talk about supervisor Mooney, but was out of the office by the time the jor Danos were exonerated, and he left the police force regarded as a failure. And he's the guy that really thought that there was a fiend. He did not think this was a black hand. He didn't think this was his robbery. He attributed this

Axe Man before he knew was a serial killer. He had that idea that this was that kind of of person. Now you talk about the media and then you talk about the end of the Axe Man in New Orleans. Tell us what you think you believe happened involving Gretna.

corner grocery. They're attacked with an axe in the middle of the night. Joseph is killed and their small toddler daughter is also killed. About a year later, in January of nineteen twenty, well, I'm sorry. Several months later, in January of nineteen twenty one in De Ritter, Louisiana, which is farther to the west, Giovanni Orlando, who is an Italian grocer, is attacked with his family and he is

killed in bed about two in the morning. And then in April in nineteen twenty one, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, which is also out towards west, a grocer named Frank Scalisi is killed in bed. So I do think that you have a series of attacks elsewhere in Louisiana that meet this m of the x man. So I think he left New Orleans, but he was. He kept attacking and killing for how much longer? I don't know. He just kind of disappears.

the South. They are they're clearly not African American, but they're also not really considered white at first either, what we call sort of liminal, sort of borderline. But yet they're a rising social class. They come in as illiterate laborers, and they very quickly establish this sort of foothold for themselves, and many of them, you know, a rising socially. Many of them, a handful of them, become quite wealthy and prominent in New Orleans society. Many of them quickly becomes

sort of middle class. I have my suspicion, in my hunch, and it's only a hunch, is that this is a white male who for who feels like he's a failure, that he is not getting what he is a white man is entitled to, that has some reason for resenting these Italians who are outstripping him. Socially possibly, I mean, he's a burglar. We have reason to believe that. Maybe is that the homicide detective suggested to me, maybe an Italian grocer testified against him and sent him to prison.

We don't know. Maybe his family lost to grocery store, to the competition from Italians. You know, there are all kinds of reasons. But my suspicion is is that it's rooted in the kind of social terms at the time that the Italians were not considered quite white, but they're doing better than a lot of working class white people people. Yeah, so I think I think there's an element of racial resentment here.

and particularly among Italian immigrants, obviously there's this sense of panic, and you have stories of fathers who are staying up all night with shotguns to guard their family, and of families that are banding together so some of them can stay up. But there really was this sense of panic, particularly obviously among the people who think they're the targets of this attacker, this real sense of fear.

force doesn't. So the same kinds of things that go on in modern investigations sort of not a unified response necessarily, and disagreements over who the killer is and people responsible for it. So I want to thank you very much, Miriam for coming on and talking about the axe Man in New Orleans, The True Story. For those that might want to do you have a website or a Facebook page for this? How might people find out more information about this?