THE AXEMAN OF NEW ORLEANS

Andrew Maggio, a barber in the city of New Orleans, had just received his draft notice. It was May 22, 1918 and World War I was on everyone’s mind. Andrew wasn’t keen to go to war, so he went out drinking that night.

When he returned just before two o’clock in the morning to the place he shared with his brother Jake, he noticed nothing unusual. But then, he wasn’t in much of a condition to notice anything at all, and that would soon come back to haunt him. Compared to what he was about to experience, a draft notice would seem like a mosquito’s bite to shark attack. Jake and Andrew’s rooms adjoined the home of their married brother, Joseph Maggio, and his wife Catherine. As Robert Tallant, a novelist and acknowledged authority on the Axeman  indicates, on the morning of May 23, Jake woke up around four am. He realised he’d been startled awake by noises that sounded like groaning that were coming through the wall from the room where Joseph and his wife slept. Jake got up and knocked on the wall to get their attention, but failed to get a response, so he knocked louder. Again, nothing.

Now worried, Jake tried to arouse Andrew, but had difficulty, since Andrew was inebriated. Finally Jake got him up. Together they ventured into Joseph’s home, and to their alarm, they found evidence of a break-in. A wooden panel had been chiseled out and removed from the kitchen door. It lay on the ground, the discarded chisel on top of it. They got into the house via the kitchen, skirted around the bathroom, and entered Joseph’s room. He was on the bed, his legs draped over the side, and Catherine lay partially over him. When Joseph saw his brothers, he tried to rise, but fell over, half out of bed. They ran to check him and found that he was barely alive, with deep bloody gashes on his head. Catherine was already dead, lying in a pool of blood. They called the police immediately. Cpl Arthur Hatener arrived first, just ahead of the ambulance, but it was too late. Joseph had expired. As Hatener waited for backup, he questioned the Maggio brothers and then looked around for clues. The Times-Picayune newspaper ran the story on its front page that morning, including a photograph of the death chamber—the bedroom in the home where the Maggios had lived behind their store. Married 15 years, they were grocers, operating a small store and barroom. An investigation of the crime allowed the police to deduce that the brutal double homicide must have happened just before dawn.

Looking around the bloody scene, Officer Hatener discovered a pile of men’s clothing in the middle of the bathroom floor. Inside the cast-iron bathtub, he spotted an axe leaning against one side. From all appearances, it had been hastily washed clean of blood, although some still clung to the blade and the tub. Back in the bedroom, Hatener made another discovery, a straight razor, such as a barber might use, lying in blood on the bed. Reconstructing the crime, he believed that the killer had entered the home by chiseling out a panel in the rear door. The murderer then went directly into the bedroom. With an axe, he struck Mrs Maggio in the head and then used a razor to slice through her throat, nearly severing her head. He also hit Joseph Maggio with the same axe. Since Joseph was sprawled half out of bed, it seemed that the killer might have struck him last, but given Catherine’s position on top of him, it could have been the other way around. The events weren’t clear. However, it was obvious that the killer also had used the razor on Joseph before discarding it. The coroner arrived and gave a quick estimate of time of death being a few hours before, between two and three in the morning. The victims were removed as a crowd gathered outside to watch. A woman who lived nearby stepped forward to tell investigators that she had seen Andrew outside during the early morning hours. Jake and Andrew were taken into custody for questioning. They swore they were innocent, but were locked up anyway. Jake was released the following day, but Andrew remained in prison. Then the police learned that the razor used to cut open the throats of Joseph and Catherine Maggio belonged to Andrew. One of his employees had seen him remove it that same day from his barbershop. Visibly nervous, he admitted that he’d brought it home to repair a nick in it. Things looked bad for him, with two witnesses and a significant piece of physical evidence implicating him.

On May 26, two days after his arrest, he gave an interview to the Times-Picayune newspaper to the effect that he’d suffered so much from his arrest. “It’s a terrible thing to be charged with the murder of your own brother when your heart is already broken by his death. When I’m about to go to war, too. I had been drinking heavily. I was too drunk even to have heard any noise next door.” Although he had not mentioned it before, he did say that he’d noticed a man going into his brother’s house around 1.30 am., when he’d come home. The police did not believe him. They had found the door to the safe in Joseph’s house open and the safe empty, which indicated a robbery, but money under Joseph’s pillow and found in drawers was left behind, along with Catherine’s jewelry, wrapped and placed beneath the safe. A black tin box, empty, was found in one corner. The brothers said that Joseph always kept the safe locked, but there was no sign that the door had been forced open. Investigators determined that the axe had belonged to the victims and they believed the killer was familiar with the  layout of the house. In Joseph’s case, the axe had been the primary weapon involved in his death, breaking through his skull, while Catherine’s throat had been slit open from ear to ear with the razor. A few days after the bodies were found, Andrew was released from prison. Despite the witnesses, there was insufficient evidence against him, and soon another discovery would point to a different suspect—one who had eluded police before.

The Black Hand
About a block away from the small grocery store where the Maggios were murdered, two detectives came across a strange message, written on the sidewalk in chalk: “Mrs Maggio will  sit up tonight just like Mrs Toney.” They carefully copied it (although different sources report the wording differently. One says, “Just write Mrs Toney,” but the newspapers report it as the former statement.) The writing resembled that of a schoolboy and it seemed an important clue, but at that moment, no one was sure what to make of it. Some said that it had been written by an accomplice to warn the killers that Mrs Maggio was on guard. After some digging, they eventually spotted a possible connection to earlier crimes in the area.

In 1911, seven years earlier, there had been either two or three incidents of horrendous axe murders (depending on whose account one reads. One crime writer, Michael Newton, claims that there is no record of any of these deaths. However, it was printed in the newspaper in 1918, described by the retired detective who had been involved in the investigations.) The supposed targets were Italian grocers. Since all of the couples had been grocers, Italian, asleep in bed, and killed with an axe after a break-in through a panel in the back door, it seemed that there must be a link, although all three incidents went unsolved. According to reports, which could be nothing more than folklore, detectives puzzled over the names from the scribbled message to try to discern a connection. According to Tallant, the first victim’s name was Cruti (no wife), the second Rosetti (killed with his wife), and the third Schiambra (also killed with his wife). This latter man’s first name was Tony, so Tallant says the police wondered if it had some connection with the “Mrs Toney” of the enigmatic chalk message. Perhaps it was the women, rather than the men, who were targetted. It wasn’t long before people in the Italian community began to talk about a possible connection with the Mafia. These people had been Italian, and perhaps they had not paid their “dues”. Perhaps they’d borrowed money and then failed to meet their obligations. The Mafia was known to teach people lessons for such perceived effrontery. A few Italian citizens of New Orleans requested police protection. Some whispered about an organisation called “The Black Hand,” a Mafia splinter group believed in 1911 to have been responsible for that spate of killings. Since the murder of the Maggios was so similar to the 1911 series, there was talk of the resurgence of organised crime, and those rumours would grow and get worse as more events occurred.

It had been two weeks since the Maggios were killed and the city was settling down again. Then on June 6, John Zanca took a delivery of bread to one of his customers, a grocery store owner named Louis Besumer, when he found the store on Dorgenois and La Harpe streets locked up tight. That was unusual. Mr Besumer, 59, and a native of Poland, was always up early, waiting for his bread. Zanca went around to the side door to knock. He heard movement inside, which relieved him. But then Besumer opened the door, and Zanca was shocked to see that his face was covered in blood. Besumer said that someone had attacked him, and he pointed with a shaking hand toward the bedroom. Zanca went to look and found Besumer’s wife on the bed (who, it turned out, was actually his mistress), covered with a blood-soaked sheet. She had a terrible head wound and bloody barefoot prints led away from the bed to a swatch of false hair. Zanca wanted to call the police, but Besumer tried to stop him, wishing instead to call his private physician. However, Zanca contacted the police and asked for an ambulance for both victims. Once again, investigators found that the entry was made by prying out a panel of the back door with a wood chisel, and once again, a rusty