For about 18 months in 1918 and 1919, someone broke into the homes of Italian immigrant grocers in New Orleans at night and attacked the people sleeping inside with axes. The intruder usually came through a back door, often by cutting out a panel with a chisel, and often used an axe that belonged to the household. Several people died, among them a married couple, a barber and a two-year-old girl. Others survived with serious head injuries. The newspapers called the attacker "the Axman."
He was never caught or identified. The only convictions in the case came in Gretna, across the Mississippi River, where two neighbors of the Cortimiglia family were found guilty in May 1919 of killing the family's small daughter. The Louisiana Supreme Court overturned those convictions in April 1920, after the girl's mother told a reporter that her accusation had been false, and the charges were dropped that December. The National Registry of Exonerations lists both men as exonerated.
The case is also remembered for a letter. In March 1919 The Times-Picayune printed a message, signed as if by the Axman, which said he would spare any house where a jazz band was playing on a named night. Bands played across the city, and no one was attacked. Who wrote the letter has never been established.
Most of what is known comes from the New Orleans newspapers of the time, above all The Times-Picayune, and from the historian Miriam C. Davis, whose book The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story (Chicago Review Press, 2017) was described by Country Roads Magazine as a factual account built on primary documents. The 1919 to 1920 trial and appeal in Gretna are summarized in two entries of the National Registry of Exonerations, which draw on Davis's book.
There is no agreed list of victims. The Historic New Orleans Collection, which holds sheet music from the case, says at least six people were killed between May 1918 and October 1919. A 2016 Mental Floss account counted six documented home invasions and several near misses, with eight deaths and 10 injuries, by March 1919. The Advocate of Baton Rouge reported that Times-Picayune reporters in 1919 tallied 16 victims between 1915 and 1919, five of whom died. Dirk Gibson, a University of New Mexico professor who studies serial murder, told WBUR in 2018 that as many as a dozen people were attacked with axes in New Orleans in 1918 and 1919.
Davis drew her own list more narrowly. According to a 2022 Country Roads Magazine account of her research, she set aside attacks that did not match the pattern and concluded that the Axeman targeted Italian and Sicilian grocers almost exclusively. She did not count two of the 1918 cases that the press of the day linked to him. At the same time she argued that an earlier run of attacks, in 1910 and 1911, was the work of the same man. Dates also differ from source to source, sometimes by a day or more.
By 1900 New Orleans had the largest Italian community in the South, about 20,000 people counting the children of immigrants, Davis wrote in Smithsonian Magazine in 2018. Many had come from Sicily, drawn by work on sugar and cotton plantations. Many saved money and opened small grocery stores. Italians owned 7 percent of the city's groceries in 1880, 19 percent in 1900 and about half by 1920. The family usually lived behind or above the store, which is where most of the attacks took place.
The community lived with open prejudice. In October 1890 the New Orleans police chief, David Hennessy, was shot, and Sicilian men were charged. After a jury acquitted some of them, a mob stormed the jail and killed 11 of the accused. Davis wrote that after this, talk of "the Mafia," the Black Hand and Sicilian vendettas was used loosely, and often interchangeably, to explain violence among Italians. The historian Humbert S. Nelli argued that Italian crime in the city could not accurately be put down to Mafiosi, and Robert M. Lombardo described the Mafia of the period as a kind of behavior and power rather than a formal organization. Davis's own conclusion, as she put it to WBUR, was that the attacker may have resented Sicilian immigrants, who were not then regarded as fully white and who were doing well economically.
Before the 1918 series, New Orleans had seen a similar run of night attacks on Italian grocers. According to Country Roads, drawing on Davis, August and Harriet Crutti were attacked in the Bywater neighborhood on August 13, 1910. The intruder took eight dollars and the family's pet mockingbird, and August survived. On September 20, 1910, Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto were attacked in the Seventh Ward. Both survived, she permanently scarred and he blind in one eye, and nothing was taken. In the summer of 1911 Joseph Davi, 26, died about a day after an attack in the St. Roch neighborhood. His wife, Mary, 16 and pregnant, was knocked unconscious. Nothing was taken, and his revolver was not used. Mental Floss gives June 1911 for the Davi attack and a meat cleaver as the weapon in the 1910 cases.
Davi had received extortion letters, and a truck farmer, S. P., was questioned. Mary Davi described her attacker as a clean-shaven white man; the farmer wore a mustache. Detective John Dantonio thought the 1910 attacker was a man driven by a taste for blood rather than by money, Country Roads reported.
On May 15, 1912, Tony Sciambra was shot and wounded and his wife was killed, according to Mental Floss. That case was tied to the later series only in 1918, because of a message written in chalk near the Maggio home that mentioned a "Mrs. Toney." Mental Floss notes that historians disagree about these earlier attacks.
On December 22, 1917, the Sicilian grocer Epifanio Andollina was attacked with a hatchet, and his sons were also hurt, Country Roads reported. Mental Floss says the father, the mother and two sons all survived glancing blows, and it treats the attack as the start of the 1917 to 1919 run. Andollina died about ten months later in the Spanish influenza epidemic. Davis, in Smithsonian Magazine, dates the Axeman's activity in New Orleans from 1917 to March 1919.
The attacks that made the Axman a public figure began on May 23, 1918, the date given by Country Roads, in the Maggios' grocery Uptown. (A victim list printed by The Advocate gives May 31.) Joseph Maggio's brothers found the couple. Joseph and his wife, Catherine, had both been killed; an axe from their own home and a razor were used, Davis wrote in Smithsonian Magazine. About a block away, words written in chalk read, "Mrs. Maggio is going to sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney."
Country Roads reports that fifty dollars was taken. Joseph's youngest brother, A. M., was briefly a suspect and was released.
In about June 1918, the grocer L. B. and Harriet Lowe were attacked in the Seventh Ward, Country Roads reported. Both were hurt. Lowe later accused L. B. on her deathbed of having attacked them. Frank Mooney, who had become police superintendent after the murder of his predecessor, Superintendent Reynolds, suspected L. B. of being a spy. He was questioned by the federal Department of Justice and released. Davis does not count this attack as one of the Axeman's.
On August 4, 1918, Mary Schneider, 28, was struck with a lamp in her home and more than a hundred dollars was stolen, according to Country Roads. She survived and gave birth to a daughter. Davis does not count this attack either.
On August 10, 1918, Joseph Romano, a barber whose family ran a small grocery from the front room of their home, was attacked in bed. His two nieces, who slept nearby, heard him scream. When they opened his door, Mental Floss reports, they saw a tall man in a dark suit and slouch hat standing over him. The man fled. Romano had two wounds to the head, and he died hours after he reached the hospital. In the following weeks, Country Roads reported, neighbors told of intruders dropping axes as they ran, and three more Italian grocers were robbed.
By then, Davis wrote, the city was gripped by fear. Superintendent Mooney described the attacker as a "murderous degenerate" who "gloats over blood," and later compared him to Jack the Ripper, a man with a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Detective Dantonio offered the same dual-personality idea in 1918. Mooney also came to believe that the attacker was Black, Country Roads reported, and on August 16, 1918, The Times-Picayune printed a joke about an "ebony Mafia." WBUR quoted Dirk Gibson as saying that The Times-Picayune "played up these murders to the salacious hilt."
Davis wrote that survivors described the attacker as a white, working-class man in his 30s. Police believed he was an experienced burglar, because he got into the groceries easily and used a railroad shoe pin, a common burglary tool. The Historic New Orleans Collection says survivors described only a heavyset man of dark complexion. The Advocate reported a description of a small-framed man about five feet eight inches tall, and the account of the Romano nieces describes a tall man. The descriptions do not agree.
The method was more consistent. The attacker usually broke through a door, often with a chisel, and used an axe he found on the premises, the Historic New Orleans Collection says. The Advocate described police reasoning that became known as "the Panel Theory": a lower door panel was removed, the attack came at about 3 a.m., and the front door was left open. Mental Floss reports that the attacker sometimes demanded money but rarely took anything, and that he tended to choose Italian American shopkeepers who lived at their stores. The Advocate reported that police said a pair of gloves left at one scene showed that the attacker knew about the Bertillon system of identifying criminals by body measurements.
Davis and Detective Dantonio both doubted the Black Hand explanation. Black Hand attacks were meant to kill, Dantonio said, and the Axeman often left survivors. Davis described the Black Hand as an extortion method rather than an organized group that used axes.
At about 3 a.m. on March 9, 1919, an intruder attacked the grocer Charlie Cortimiglia, his wife, Rosie, and their two-year-old daughter, Mary, in their home in Gretna, a town across the river from New Orleans. Mary was killed. Both parents had severe head injuries, and they were taken to Charity Hospital in New Orleans. That date comes from the National Registry of Exonerations and Davis's Smithsonian article; other sources date it March 8, March 10 or March 19.
Neighbors found the family. Among the first to arrive were I. J., a grocer then 68 (Smithsonian gives 69), and his son F. J., 17. The two families were business rivals and had been in a court dispute. Gretna officials, Police Chief Peter Leson and Sheriff Louis H. Marrero, quickly focused on the father and son. Superintendent Mooney publicly linked the attack to the Axeman, but the Gretna police disagreed, the registry says. Davis wrote that there was no physical evidence against the two men.
At first both Charlie and Rosie said they had no idea who had attacked them. Rosie's doctor feared her mind might be permanently damaged. Davis wrote that officials pressed the injured couple with questions such as whether the neighbors had done it. About a week after the attack, police arrested I. J. and F. J. and held them in the Gretna jail.
Rosie Cortimiglia, who could not read or write English, left the hospital on March 28, 1919, and was immediately arrested by Sheriff Marrero as a material witness. The next day she signed an affidavit identifying her neighbors and was released. On April 13 a coroner's jury heard her and returned a murder verdict against both men.
The defense lawyer, William H. Byrnes Jr., challenged Rosie's jailing and asked for an examination of her mental competence. Judge John E. Fleury of the 28th District Court granted the examination and set a preliminary hearing for May 7. The two men were indicted on May 5, and Judge Fleury then canceled the hearing as "useless and unnecessary" and set the trial for May 19, according to the registry.
The joint trial opened on May 19, 1919. District Attorney L. Robert Rivarde, who had close ties to Sheriff Marrero, prosecuted, with help from Clay Gaudet, a lawyer hired by the Cortimiglia family. Rosie testified that both men had been in her bedroom and that F. J. had struck Mary with the axe. Charlie testified that he remembered nothing of the attack. Both defendants denied making threats against the family, and the people said to have heard such threats were not called. The defense was not allowed to put in evidence about the Axeman attacks in New Orleans.
On May 26, 1919, the jury convicted both men. F. J. was convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death by hanging. His father was convicted of murder "without capital punishment" and sentenced to life in prison. The son told the court, "Hang me and set him free," the registry reports.
A Times-Picayune reporter, Jim Coulton, became convinced that the two men were innocent. Judge Fleury denied a new trial, and Byrnes appealed to the Louisiana Supreme Court in November 1919. In January 1920 the older man's daughter held her wedding reception at the Gretna jail so that her father and brother could attend.
On February 3, 1920, Rosie Cortimiglia told Coulton that her accusations had been false. She said Saint Joseph had come to her in a dream and urged her not to die with the sin on her conscience. She signed a statement that the attackers had worn red bandanas over their faces and that she had not recognized them or their voices. She was then taken to the hospital with smallpox. The district attorney refused to accept the recantation and threatened to charge her with perjury if she changed her trial testimony. The Advocate reported that Superintendent Mooney called her "the victim of a frameup."
The Supreme Court heard the appeal on March 6, 1920. The defense argued that the prosecution had failed to disclose Rosie's written identification statement and had failed to produce the witnesses to the alleged threats. On April 5, 1920, the court granted the appeal and overturned the convictions. On April 23, after leaving the hospital, Rosie repeated her recantation under oath before a notary and witnesses, and accused a Gretna jailer of threatening her with life in prison if she did not identify the two men.
At the retrial set for December 6, 1920, Rosie again told the district attorney that she could not identify her attackers. He dropped the charges, Judge H. N. Gauthier granted the dismissal, and father and son were released from jail, the registry reports. The registry lists perjury or false accusation and official misconduct as the factors in the convictions. No one else was ever charged with Mary Cortimiglia's death.
While the Gretna case was still new, The Times-Picayune printed a letter that claimed to come from the attacker. It was dated "Hell, March 13, 1919." WBUR and Mental Floss give the date it appeared as March 14; the Historic New Orleans Collection, the St. Tammany Parish Library and Country Roads give Sunday, March 16.
The letter began, "Esteemed Mortal: They have never caught me and they never will," and went on, "I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the axman." It described the writer as "a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell," invisible and not human. It said he would come again at 12:15 on the night of the following Tuesday. The Historic New Orleans Collection describes the night named as Saint Joseph's Day, March 19; WBUR describes it as Tuesday, March 18. The writer then offered what he called a proposition. He said he was "very fond of jazz music," and that anyone in a house where a jazz band was in full swing at that hour would be spared. The St. Tammany Parish Library compared the demand to a Passover story told with jazz.
The letter did not appear in a vacuum. Jazz was still new, and many respectable New Orleanians disliked it. The Navy had closed the Storyville district in 1917, and in the summer of 1918 The Times-Picayune ran an editorial calling jazz noise rather than music, WBUR reported. Bruce Raeburn, curator emeritus of Tulane University's Hogan Jazz Archive, described jazz to WBUR as "a young people's music."
The city took the letter in different ways. On the named night, dance halls were full, and bands, professional and amateur, played at house parties across New Orleans, according to the St. Tammany Parish Library. Four Times-Picayune journalists published a mock invitation to the Axman to a "small, select party," which they called "a stag affair," The Advocate reported. Across the river, the Algiers paper The West Bank Herald called the letter a joke in an editorial on March 20, 1919, and criticized The Times-Picayune for spreading fear, Country Roads reported. No one was attacked that night.
On March 19 The Times-Picayune ran a cartoon of the night's frenzy with a report on the jazz gatherings that went on past midnight, according to the Historic New Orleans Collection. The paper later praised the letter for giving residents a "splendid excuse for merry-making," The Advocate reported.
A local composer of popular music, Joseph John Davilla, wrote a piano piece called "The Mysterious Axman's Jazz (Don't Scare Me Papa)." According to the Historic New Orleans Collection, which holds a copy, he wrote it while he waited for the Axman, and it was published in New Orleans by the World's Music Publishing Company, arranged by Jos. Garrow, with the Times-Picayune cartoon on the cover. Country Roads, drawing on Davis, says he composed it at about 2 a.m. on March 19, 1919. The Advocate reported that 10,000 copies were printed and sold for 10 cents each. "He made a pile of money off that song," Davis told WBUR. The jazz guitarist and composer Eric Hofbauer suggested to WBUR that the night may have helped New Orleans jazz musicians get paid that year.
The New Orleans attacks resumed later in 1919. Mental Floss lists four more that year after the letter. Sarah Laumann, 19, was attacked in her bed and survived. Steve Bocca was attacked but reached a neighbor's door. William Carson fired at an intruder and apparently missed but drove him off. The Advocate places the attack on the 19-year-old in August 1919. Exact dates for the other attacks were not reported.
Mike Pepitone, a grocer, was killed in his home in Mid-City. Most sources, including Mental Floss and The Advocate, date his death to October 27, 1919, and treat it as the last attack. Mental Floss reports that he was struck with an iron bar. His wife was in the house. Davis, in Smithsonian Magazine, dates his killing to August 1919 and writes that, although it was sometimes attributed to the Axeman, it appears to have been part of a longstanding vendetta.
After 1919 there were no further attacks in New Orleans attributed to the Axeman. Davis wrote that similar attacks followed elsewhere in Louisiana: Joseph Spero and his daughter were killed in Alexandria in December 1920, Giovanni Orlando in DeRidder in January 1921, and Frank Scalisi in Lake Charles in April 1921. The National Registry of Exonerations notes that some experts believe the attacker may have moved northwest across the state. No charge treating any of these as an Axeman crime was reported.
The killer was never identified, and every proposed suspect is a theory. None was charged with the New Orleans attacks.
The Mafia or vendetta theory. Because most victims were Italian, many people at the time blamed the Mafia, the Black Hand or family feuds. Others argued that organized crime did not attack women and children, Mental Floss notes. Davis rejected the theory and, according to WBUR and Country Roads, believed the attacker was a working-class man with a grudge against Sicilian grocers. The Advocate wrote that the Mafia theory weakened after two victims who were not Italian were killed.
The spy theory. Superintendent Mooney suspected L. B. of espionage after the June 1918 attack. He was questioned by the Department of Justice and released, Country Roads reported.
Joseph Mumfre. The suspect named most often in later books is Joseph Mumfre, whom Country Roads describes as a known Black Hand member arrested in 1907 and a suspect after the Pepitone killing. The story, as Mental Floss tells it, is that Pepitone's widow, who had remarried, later shot a man called Doc Mumpre in Los Angeles, believing he was involved in the disappearance of her second husband. Because that man used several names, including Leon Manfre and Frank Mumphrey, he became confused with the Joe Mumfre who had been in and out of prison in New Orleans. Mental Floss called it unlikely, though not impossible, that they were the same man. The Historic New Orleans Collection repeats the version in which the suspect was shot dead in Los Angeles by the widow of the last New Orleans victim. Davis told WBUR that Mumfre could not have been the Axeman because he was in prison during most of the attacks, and Country Roads reported her view that the story was distorted as it was retold.
The letter writer. Davis believes the letter was not written by the attacker. She argued that its author was educated, unlike the working-class man the survivors described, and she suspects the composer Joseph John Davilla, who sold a song built on it. Country Roads reported that she consulted a modern homicide detective and a Georgia Bureau of Investigation profiler, and that the profiler, told how Davilla had used the letter in newspaper ads for his song, said, "I bet he did it." Davilla was never accused of any attack, and the authorship of the letter remains unknown.
Jazz theories. Eric Hofbauer told WBUR that the attacker may have been upset at the closing of Storyville, or may even have been a promoter of jazz, though he said he doubted the second idea. He also doubted a theory that the attacker was angry that Nick LaRocca, an Italian American, had claimed credit for inventing jazz with the Original Dixieland Jazz Band's 1917 recording.
Which attacks belong to the series. The 1910 to 1912 cases, the 1917 Andollina attack, the Besumer and Schneider cases of 1918, the Pepitone killing and the 1920 to 1921 killings outside New Orleans are all counted by some sources and rejected by others. Davis counts the 1910 attacks but not the Besumer and Schneider cases, and she treats the Pepitone killing as a likely vendetta.
Whether anything was stolen. Some accounts say the attacker took nothing. Country Roads, drawing on Davis, reports that fifty dollars was taken from the Maggios and that money and a bird were taken from the Cruttis in 1910.
Whether anyone was arrested. The Historic New Orleans Collection says no one was ever arrested for the crimes. That is true of the series as a whole, but two men were arrested, convicted and later freed in the Gretna case, and others were questioned.
Charlie Cortimiglia's fate. Country Roads writes that he died in the 1919 attack. The National Registry of Exonerations and Davis's Smithsonian article say he survived and testified at the trial.
The dates of the letter and the jazz night. The letter was dated March 13, 1919, but sources give March 14 or March 16 for its publication, and describe the night it named as the night of Tuesday, March 18, or as Saint Joseph's Day, March 19, at 12:15 a.m.
Little has been reported about the lives of the two Gretna men after their release. Both have entries in the National Registry of Exonerations, posted in July 2020, which list perjury or false accusation and official misconduct as the causes of their convictions.
The Axeman story has had a long second life. Country Roads notes that it features on New Orleans ghost and true crime tours and at Halloween jazz concerts, and that a version of the Axeman appeared in the television series American Horror Story. Davis, a former tour guide, told Country Roads that people find crime stories thrilling but rarely learn about the victims, and that "evil is kind of sexy, if you're not the victim and at kind of a distance." Her advice, offered half in jest to WBUR, for anyone afraid of an intruder was to get a big dog that barks.
1890: Police Chief David Hennessy is shot on October 15; after some of the accused Sicilians are acquitted, a mob kills 11 of them.
August 13, 1910: August and Harriet Crutti are attacked; both survive.
September 20, 1910: Joseph and Conchetta Rissetto are attacked; both survive.
Summer (June, per Mental Floss) 1911: Joseph Davi is fatally injured; his wife survives.
May 15, 1912: Tony Sciambra is shot and wounded and his wife is killed.
1917: the Navy closes Storyville.
December 22, 1917: Epifanio Andollina and his sons are attacked with a hatchet; all survive.
May 23, 1918: Joseph and Catherine Maggio are killed; A. M. is briefly a suspect and released.
About June 1918: L. B. and Harriet Lowe are attacked; Lowe later accuses L. B., who is questioned and released.
August 4, 1918: Mary Schneider is struck and survives (Davis does not count this case).
August 10, 1918: Joseph Romano is attacked and dies in the hospital.
August 16, 1918: The Times-Picayune prints its "ebony Mafia" joke.
March 9, 1919: the Cortimiglias are attacked in Gretna; Mary, 2, is killed.
About March 16, 1919: I. J. and F. J. are arrested.
March 13 to 16, 1919: the letter dated "Hell, March 13, 1919" appears in The Times-Picayune.
Night of March 18 to 19, 1919: jazz is played across the city; no one is attacked; Davilla writes "The Mysterious Axman's Jazz."
March 29, 1919: Rosie Cortimiglia signs an affidavit naming her neighbors.
April 13, 1919: a coroner's jury returns a murder verdict against both men.
May 5, 1919: both are indicted.
May 19 to 26, 1919: trial in the 28th District Court; both are convicted; F. J. is sentenced to death and his father to life in prison.
Later in 1919: attacks on Sarah Laumann, Steve Bocca and William Carson's home; all survive.
October 27, 1919 (August, per Smithsonian): Mike Pepitone is killed.
February 3, 1920: Rosie Cortimiglia recants to a Times-Picayune reporter.
April 5, 1920: the Louisiana Supreme Court overturns both convictions.
December 6, 1920: the charges are dropped and both men are released.
December 1920 to April 1921: killings in Alexandria, DeRidder and Lake Charles are attributed by some to the same attacker.
2017: Miriam C. Davis publishes The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story.
July 2020: the National Registry of Exonerations posts entries for both Gretna defendants.