On May 23, 1918, Joseph Maggio, an Italian grocer, and his wife, Catherine, were attacked in their sleep in their apartment at the corner of Upperline and Magnolia streets in New Orleans. The intruder had chiseled a panel out of the back door. He cut their throats with a straight razor, Catherine's so deeply that her head was nearly severed, and then struck them both with an axe. Joseph was still alive when his brothers Jake and Andrew found him, and died minutes later. On the pavement nearby someone had written, "Mrs. Maggio will sit up tonight just like Mrs. Toney," taken as a reference to Anthony and Joanna Schiambra, Italian greengrocers attacked in 1912, when Joanna was killed. The killer had changed out of his bloody clothes and left them. Money and valuables in plain sight were untouched. The razor, found on a neighbor's lawn, belonged to Andrew Maggio, a barber, who became the chief suspect and was released when his account held.
The pattern repeated. A panel chiseled out of a back door, the chisel and panel left on the floor, the household's own axe or a razor, and nothing taken. On June 27, 1918, Louis Besumer and Harriet Lowe were attacked with his own hatchet behind his grocery at Dorgenois and Laharpe streets and found alive the next morning by a bakery wagon driver. Police arrested a former employee, Lewis Oubicon, with no evidence and let him go. Lowe gave the press a string of scandalous and often false stories, told police Besumer was a German spy, and, dying in August after failed surgery, named him as her attacker; he spent nine months in prison before a jury acquitted him in ten minutes on May 1, 1919. On August 5, 1918, Anna Schneider, twenty-eight and eight months pregnant, woke to a dark figure over her bed and was beaten about the face; she survived and gave birth two days later. On August 10, 1918, the Bruno sisters heard a commotion in the room of their elderly uncle, Joseph Romano, and saw a dark, heavy-set man in a dark suit and slouch hat fleeing. Romano walked to the ambulance and died two days later. A bloody axe lay in the yard, and a panel of the back door had been chiseled away.
The city panicked. Police were flooded with sightings, and men called in to report axes found in their yards. A retired Italian detective, John Dantonio, said publicly that the killer was the same man who had killed several people in 1911, a Jekyll and Hyde who could be an ordinary law-abiding citizen until the urge came over him; later researchers doubt those earlier cases were linked. On the night of March 10, 1919, in suburban Gretna, the Axeman attacked Charles and Rosie Cortimiglia, fracturing both their skulls, and killed their infant daughter, Mary, in her mother's arms with a blow to the neck. The axe was on the back porch, and a panel of the back door had been chiseled out. Rosie accused the neighbor who came to help, Iorlando Jordano, sixty-nine, and his son Frank, eighteen, although the old man was too frail and the son too big to fit through the panel. Both were convicted, Frank sentenced to hang and his father to life, before Rosie admitted almost a year later that she had accused them out of jealousy and spite, and they were freed.
On March 13, 1919, the newspapers published a letter, supposedly from the Axeman and dated from Hell, announcing that he would kill again at fifteen minutes past midnight on the night of March 19 but would spare any household where a jazz band was playing. That night the dance halls were packed, and bands, professional and amateur, played jazz at parties in hundreds of houses. No one was attacked. Whether the letter was real or a hoax has never been established.
The attacks went on. On August 10, 1919, the grocer Steve Boca woke to a figure over his bed and staggered to a neighbor's house with his head split open; a back-door panel had been chiseled out, and he survived with no memory of it. On September 3, Sarah Laumann, nineteen, who lived alone, was found unconscious with a severe head injury and several teeth missing; the intruder had come through an open window, and a bloody axe lay on the lawn. She survived. On October 27, 1919, Mike Pepitone's wife woke to a noise and reached his bedroom door as a large man with an axe fled. Pepitone was dead, his blood spattered across the room and a painting of the Virgin Mary. He left six children. It was the last attack attributed to the Axeman.
Most victims were Italian immigrants or Italian Americans, and the press played up talk of the Mafia and of an ethnic motive with no evidence. Some criminologists, among them Colin and Damon Wilson, have argued the killer was a sadist who wanted women and killed men only when they were in the way. The scholar Richard Warner has named as the chief suspect Frank "Doc" Mumphrey, who used the alias Leon Joseph Monfre, and whose struggling jazz business in the Garden District was said to have done unusually well once the city was frightened into hiring bands. No one was ever charged, and the case is unsolved.