Image courtesy of the Historic New Orleans Collection, Acc. No. 2008.0052.
The cover of Joseph John Davilla's sheet music for "The Axman's Jazz (Don't Scare Me Papa)," inspired by the deadly attacks and released in 1919.
Late into the night of March 18, 1919 and early the morning after, jazz floated into the damp, dark air from homes and bars across New Orleans and its suburbs. Normally such an outpouring of music is, and was, a product of celebration—but on this particular spring night, the sound signaled something much more sinister. New Orleanians were playing jazz music out of fear for their very lives.
This collective anxiety was the result of a string of brutal attacks by a mysterious killer, whose spree of terror had escalated considerably in the previous few months. The attacker had established a pattern of sneaking into his victims’ bedrooms, under the cover of darkness, and bludgeoning them in the head with a hatchet or axe (usually found on their own property, or stolen from somewhere nearby) as they slept. A real-life boogeyman, or something worse, lurked in New Orleans—and its citizens were desperate to do anything in their limited power to protect their families.
A Letter from Hell
In particular, the nervously-raucous night of music was the result of a letter published by The Times-Picayune on Sunday, March 16, 1919, around a week after a particularly horrific attack on the Cortimiglia family, which resulted in the death of their two-year old daughter Mary. The letter read:
Hell, March 13, 1919
Editor of The Times-Picayune,
New Orleans:
Esteemed Mortal: They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the axman.
When I see fit, I shall come again and claim other victims. I alone know whom they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody ax, besmeared with the blood and brains of he whom I have sent below to keep me company.
If you wish you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way in which they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid so as to amuse not only me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they never were born than for them to incur the wrath of the axman. I don’t think there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure that your police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.
Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished to I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.
Now, to be exact, at 12:15 o’clock (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to the people. Here it is: I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions, that every person shall be spared in whose house a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, well then, so much the better for the people. One thing is certain and that is some of those persons who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the ax.
Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and as it is about time that I have left your homely earth, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee. I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or the realm of fancy.
—The Axman
Despite its chilling effect, those who have studied the letter carefully—historians as well as criminal profilers—think the likelihood of the actual Axeman having written it exceptionally slim.
Historian Miriam Davis, who wrote The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story (Chicago Review Press, 2017) largely to debunk much of the “realm of fancy” surrounding the Axeman, asserts that the writer and the perpetrator don’t possess the same profile: “When you read the letter, this is a person who’s an educated person—he has a classical allusion to Tartarus [a place of torment in Greek mythology]. It reads like it was written by a fraternity or something. And the person who is the Axeman, from the description we’ve got of him, he’s a working man, he’s working class. And I just don’t think a working class person at that time would have been educated enough to write that letter.”
This raises the obvious question: if the Axeman himself didn’t submit this letter to The Times-Picayune, who else had a motive? Davis’s theory taps Joseph John Davilla as the most likely culprit. Davilla, a New Orleans jazz musician in those early days of the genre, composed the song “The Axman’s Jazz (Don’t Scare Me Papa)”, purportedly in the early hours of March 19, 1919. “He admits that he finished the composition at about 2 a.m. Wednesday, after he was sure the axman had no designs on him personally,” The Times-Picayune reported on March 20. The cover of the sheet music featured a cartoon The Times-Picayune had printed on March 19, which depicted a family frantically playing jazz music while watching out the door, terrified.
When Davis spoke with a modern homicide detective, as well as a Georgia Bureau of Investigations criminal profiler, about the letter, both experts told her, “No, no, the actual serial killer didn’t write that.” When she mentioned to them the way Davilla had built up anticipation for the release of “The Axman’s Jazz” with newspaper advertisements playing on the letter, the criminal profiler posited, “I bet he did it.”
Regardless of who actually wrote the letter, the people of New Orleans clearly took a “better safe than sorry” approach to its warning. The Times-Picayune ran a story the day following the nightmarish night of jazz headlined “Jazz Bands Blare For Axman Who Stays Away From City: Threat of Mysterious Writers of Note, Who Claimed to Be Murderer, Gives Splendid Excuse for Merry-Making.” It reported:
“The tinkle of jazz music coming from dozens of New Orleans homes at 12:15 o’clock Wednesday morning demonstrated that many Orleanians took the axman letter, printed in The Times-Picayune Sunday, seriously, and that scores of others, who didn’t take it seriously, found in it inspiration for house parties with jazz music having a prominent place on the program.”
Across the river, the Algiers newspaper of the time, The West Bank Herald, shared Davis’s suspicion that the actual killer could not possibly have written the letter, and condemned The Times-Picayune for irresponsibly inducing fear in its readers in an editorial published on March 20:
“It is very evident that the man who wrote this letter is one with more than ordinary intelligence and it can readily be seen that it is written more as a joke than anything else. In fact, it looks to us that someone put one over on The Times-Picayune. Undoubtedly, the letter made good Sunday reading for those who like to read articles of a sensational character, but we must stop to think of the great amount of harm it has done to the ignorant classes who are superstitiously inclined and believed to a certain extent that this ax-man would visit certain families who did not have a jazz band … If the T.-P. would have devoted the same amount of space in an effort to capture the man who is causing these murders, it would have served the public to a much greater advantage than the publishing of this joke-letter, which caused a great deal of uneasiness and worry among the ignorant classes. So satisfied was the T.-P. with this ‘scoop’ that it gloated over it Wednesday morning by publishing a cartoon showing one of the many families in a state of fright, the mother piteously trying to sooth the children by playing jazz music in compliance with the order of the ‘Axman’. We fail to see the joke.”
Still to this day, beneath all this editorial banter about who wrote the now-infamous letter, remains the larger question: Who was the Axeman? Unsatisfyingly, the mystery remains unsolved, though theories abound with varying degrees of plausibility.
To understand the possible suspects, one must first better understand the Axeman’s crimes, and the poor, unsuspecting individuals who were his victims.
The Italian Grocers
While some sources assert that the Axeman attacked a few individuals who were not Italian, any researcher will generally agree that the majority of victims in cases attributed to the Axeman were Italian or Sicilian, and primarily grocery store owners.
In writing The Axeman of New Orleans, Davis set out on extensive research to rule out any attacks that previously had been attributed to the Axeman but did not line up with his established pattern. It became clear to Davis that the Axeman preyed practically exclusively upon Italian and Sicilian grocers. Even the victims who did not initially appear to be Italian grocers, Davis found upon further examination, in some sense were. One example is the barber Joseph Romano, whose nieces ran a small grocery out of their front room.
Courtesy of Miriam Davis.
An illustrated map published by the Times-Picayune in March of 1919 marking where the string of axe attacks and burglaries had taken place.
In her book, Davis also devotes extensive page space to providing context for what life was like for Italians and Sicilians in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century, and how within only a generation or two of settling in Louisiana, many were able to establish modest-yet-successful corner grocery stores and other businesses. “I really wanted to explain to people who they were, why they were there, that they were a rising class, why there might have been some resentment of them,” Davis said. She continued with a reminder that in the early 1900s, in lieu of large supermarkets or refrigeration, small corner grocery stores filled an important niche in cities like New Orleans. “I wanted to present them as real human beings as much as I could, given what I could find out.”
The Cleaver
Such efforts at vivid humanization, cutting through the fog of time and myth, render Davis’s book a riveting, if devastating, read.
While many claim that the Axeman’s crimes did not begin until spring of 1918, Davis believes that attacks from as early as 1910—at that time attributed to a killer called “The Cleaver”—were most likely early outings by the same criminal who would gain the “Axeman” moniker years later.
By Davis’s estimation, the Axeman’s bloody legacy began with Harriet and August Crutti, who had hardly owned their small grocery store for a month when Harriet awoke the night of August 13, 1910 to the silhouette of a man standing over her bed, wielding a meat cleaver, threatening to chop her as he had her husband if she did not give him all their money. After stealing eight dollars—a considerable amount of money by the standards of the time—and the couple’s pet mockingbird, the attacker fled back into the Bywater neighborhood.
Police later determined that he had carefully removed a pane of glass from the door in the kitchen, likely hoping to reach the dead bolt inside, before resorting to prying the door open with a railroad pin. The deep lacerations in August’s head and chest were less severe than the profusive blood initially implied; he was taken to Charity Hospital, where he made a full recovery.
A little over a month later, in what is today the Seventh Ward, on September 20, 1910, Conchetta and Joseph Rissetto were awakened in a similarly alarming manner: a man with a stolen meat axe had snuck into their bedroom, striking first Conchetta multiple times, then Joseph. The pair survived, though she was permanently disfigured and he blinded in one eye. This time, the attacker had climbed through an unlatched kitchen window, and stole nothing—even leaving $23 in the grocery’s cash register untouched. It seems it was blood he was after.
It was the summer of 1911 that “the Cleaver,” as papers would come to call him, would finally take his first life. Newlyweds twenty-six year old Joseph Davi and his sixteen-year-old, very pregnant wife Mary slept soundly after a long day running their shop in the St. Roch neighborhood, when Mary awoke to a strange man standing in the room. She tried to rouse her husband, who had already been brutally hacked with a weapon that was never found, but from the wounds appeared to be something bladed akin to a butcher’s cleaver. The stranger demanded Mary hand over her money, and—when shock prevented her responding—knocked her unconscious with a large mug. Despite this demand and the killer’s rummaging through the couple’s belongings, neither cash nor jewelry was stolen.
“The Cleaver,” who Davis and other experts would later identify as the killer who would become known as the Axeman, had snuck in through a window and narrowly avoided the makeshift alarm Joseph had constructed with seltzer cans in their bedroom doorway, which he had hoped would rouse him in the event of an intrusion. Joseph’s loaded revolver, which he kept at the ready beside their bed, remained untouched—he never had the opportunity to defend himself. Just over a day after the attack, much longer than the doctors at Charity Hospital anticipated it would take him to die, Joseph succumbed to his extensive wounds.
The Mafia Theories
John Dantonio, an Italian detective working on the three “Cleaver” cases with the New Orleans Police Department at the time, thought that the theft of the Crutti’s eight dollars was merely a red herring, and that the attacks could only be the work of a “fiend” lustful for blood.
But, as local newspapers started pointing out the commonalities between all three sets of victims—all Italian and of the tradesmen class—the public began to form their own theories. The most prominent was that the Mafia, or more specifically the Sicilian “Black Hand Society”, was responsible for the attacks. Many still maintain this theory today, despite Mary Davi and other witnesses attesting that the man who killed her husband was unequivocally a white man who spoke English without any indication of an Italian accent.
Image courtesy of Miriam Davis.
The Davi family's grocery and home where the couple was attacked.
This theory also prevails despite the fact that the “Black Hand Society” was not so much an actual organization in New Orleans as it was an extortion tactic—defined by the use of threatening letters signed by an ominous black hand. The Black Hand often received credit for shootings and stabbings, occasionally bombings, but axe attacks were not known to be in the “group’s” repertoire.
In fact, a year prior to his murder, Joseph Davi had received such blackmail letters that aligned with the Black Hand’s usual formula: An oddly polite opening (“Dear friend,”) followed by a demand for $200, then a vague-yet-alarming threat should he not comply. Joseph had ignored the first letter, then another a week later. After he was killed, his brother Peter found a third, which had also been ignored, in a trunk.
The police questioned truck farmer Sam Pitzo, who had been in the Davi store arguing animatedly with Joseph only a week prior to the murder and was known to occasionally extort Italian grocers. When Pitzo’s neighbor, a grocer in the Carrollton neighborhood, came to the police station declaring that Pitzo had threatened to “beat his brains in” if he did not supply him with ten dollars, the detectives thought they surely had their man. But, when asked to identify her attacker, Mary maintained her statement that the man who hit her with the mug and killed her husband was white and clean-shaven, while Pitzo was Italian with a mustache.
“The Cleaver,” whoever he was, remained at large, and so Italian grocers sustained a high guard for months, until gradually, as no further attacks occurred, they began to return to some sense of normalcy. In her book, Davis theorizes the perpetrator might have been in prison for some pettier crime, such as burglary, since he was clearly so deft at home invasions. Six relatively quiet years went by in New Orleans—until 1917, when the city received an early, bloody Christmas gift.
“The Cleaver” Becomes “The Axeman”
Just before three o’clock in the morning on December 22, 1917, Sicilian grocer Epifanio Andollina’s wife Anna awoke to a shadowy figure standing over her husband’s bedside, wielding a hatchet. After telling the woman to shut up and pointing a revolver at her, the man proceeded to bring the hatchet down on Epifanio in several strong blows. On his way out, as Anna screamed, the intruder passed through the room of the couple’s two young sons, where he hit one in the head with the hatchet and knocked the other in the arm with the butt of his gun. This time, the assailant had carved a panel out of the back wooden door to enter, and he stole nothing. The family had never received threatening messages from the Black Hand, despite the police’s inquiries. Epifanio died ten months later in the Spanish influenza epidemic, his health no doubt weakened from the attack, his assailant still at large.
"The tinkle of jazz music coming from dozens of New Orleans homes at 12:15 oíclock Wednesday morning demonstrated that many Orleanians took the axman letter, printed in The Times-Picayune Sunday, seriously and that scores of others, who didnít take it seriously, found inspiration for house parties with jazz music having a prominent place on the program."
—The Times Picayune, March 19, 1919
Central to the failure of the New Orleans Police Department to connect the Cleaver to this new attack was the 1917 murder of Superintendent Reynolds, the main investigator on the Cleaver cases. Without his perspective, the similarities between the cases went unnoticed and unpursued. According to Davis, continuing frustration with NOPD’s incompetence led to Frank Mooney, formerly the Illinois Railroad Company’s superintendent of terminals, being selected to fill Reynold’s position. It would be nearly a century before Davis would raise the theory, supported by research and evaluations by experts, that the Cleaver and the Axeman were very likely the same person. Though, she wasn’t the first.
The Rise (or Return?) of the Axeman
The era of violence most famously associated with The Axeman began on May 23, 1918. Joseph Maggio, originally from Sicily, and his wife Catherine, were hacked to death as they slept in the room they shared behind their small Uptown grocery. As in previous cases, a panel had been chiseled from a kitchen door. The couple’s own axe had been taken from their backyard and left in their bathtub, covered in their blood. A girl working next door found a straight razor crusted with dried blood on the neighboring lawn the following day, another weapon from the murders. The home had been ransacked and fifty dollars were taken, but other cash and valuable jewelry was left untouched.
Image courtesy of Miriam Davis.
The Maggios, and their grocery where their murder took place.
Joseph’s youngest brother, Andrew, who had heard Joseph’s dying moans and ran to find his older brother Jake before entering the bedroom and discovering the bloody scene, was taken as a primary suspect. Only after missing his relatives’ funerals, and breaking down in sobs, asking “How could you think I could kill my own brother?” was Andrew finally released.
Theories of Espionage
Around a month later, an attack deviating from the pattern occurred, again in today’s Seventh Ward, but this time upon a Polish grocery store owner and his common law wife (or housekeeper, or mistress, depending on the source). Louis Besumer and Harriet Lowe—though she much worse than he—had been attacked with a short-handled axe that had broken during the assault and was discovered laying in two parts.
Lacking other possible suspects, and upon hearing Lowe’s pain- and pain medicine- induced ramble about how Besumer is actually a German but claims otherwise, Mooney turned to him as a suspect. An eccentric man who claimed to speak thirteen languages and was already the subject of abounding rumors during a very anti-German period in American history, Besumer roused suspicion among investigators. Mooney believed he might well be a spy, motivated to kill Lowe because she found secret documents.
Upon Besumer’s release from the hospital, Mooney questioned him extensively, learning little information beyond the fact that Besumer was an odd and pretentious old man. Two days later, Besumer was questioned by the Department of Justice, at the time the equivalent of today’s FBI, also with no concrete findings. Besumer was released.
[Read this: "Murder, She Rewrote: Another look inside Goat Castle finds justice for its victims"]
In her drug-addled state, Lowe had also made claims that a mulatto had attacked her over a dispute about tobacco, resulting in a light-skinned individual’s arrest and subsequent questioning. All of it led to naught, and they were released, too.
Lowe would be discharged from the hospital and allowed to go home, where she stayed for five weeks, until clarity returned to her and she remembered it was, in fact, Besumer who attacked her. Around this time, she was already on the verge of a breakdown and her head wound was not healing as expected. She was readmitted to Charity Hospital, where on her deathbed she confessed to Mooney that Besumer was her attacker. Whether he was motivated by trying to keep her from divulging secret information about him or by a mere lovers’ quarrel related to jealousy or finances—the thing that seems certain is that Lowe’s murder was not committed by the Axeman.
Another Red Herring
On August 4, 1918, another attack occurred that was widely attributed to the Axeman. Mary Schneider, a twenty-eight-year-old mother of three who was imminently expecting her fourth child was struck violently as she slept. This time, however, the weapon wasn’t an axe—it was a lamp from Schneider’s bedside table, a happenstantial weapon. The home had been thoroughly ransacked and burgled, with over a hundred dollars being stolen. While reporters were quick to assume it was the Axeman’s handiwork, especially because an axe was stolen from the property, Davis points out that this case did not match the all-important pattern. Thus, she does not believe it was the same perpetrator.
Ultimately, Schneider did survive and successfully delivered a healthy baby girl, named Clara, amidst all the chaos and clamor.
A Barber Among Grocers
Not even a full week had passed since Mary Schneider’s attack when the “real” Axeman (by Davis’s well-researched measure) descended again. On August 10, off of Gravier Street, blocks from where the Superdome sits today, barber Joe Romano was robbed of his pocketbook and fatally beaten in the head with an axe, which was found bloodied beside his bed. Though he was not technically a grocer, his family operated a quite small grocery at the front of the house, where Romano lived. In his hunt for Italian grocers, the Axeman could have plausibly made incorrect assumptions, Davis pointed out.
Two neighbors later told police that in the weeks prior, attempted intruders had been chased away from their homes in the night—both times dropping an axe as they ran. Several other sightings of men attempting to break in near previous Axeman crime scenes came forward. In the weeks after Romano’s death, three other Italians—all grocers—were robbed, though not attacked, in a manner in-line with the Axeman’s methods.
"Evil is kind of sexy, if you’re not the victim and at kind of a distance. And it’s like, the reason people take ghost tours, and crime tours. It’s a way of sort of being scared and thrilled in a pretty safe manner." —Miriam Davis
At this point, with burglaries in the style of the Axeman continuing and even ramping up in frequency, to say the people of New Orleans were on-edge would be an understatement. On August 17 of 1918, The Times-Picayune published a story headlined “Still Searching For The Axman: Police Think He Is Lurking In The Vicinity of Romano Murder,” which stated:
“The axman is still at large. Efforts of the police to capture the elusive slayer and bring an end to the terror he instituted several months ago have been without result … Squads of policemen, detectives, and armed citizens scoured the neighborhood, but found no trace of the man …”
Then-retired Italian detective Dantonio theorized to a reporter that these 1918 attacks were likely by the same perpetrator as “The Cleaver” of years past, who he thought was a “Jack the Ripper”-type living a double life of normalcy and bloodlust. “I am convinced the man is of a dual personality … and it is very probable he is the man we tried so hard to get ten years ago, when a series of ax and butcher-knife murders was committed within a few months … My opinion is based on experience and a study of criminology …”
But witnesses had claimed “The Cleaver” was a white man. And at the New Orleans Police Department, Detective Mooney was committed to the perpetrator being a Black man. The Times-Picayune, continually indicating a different era in taste and acceptability, published a joke about the police floundering—with a self-deprecating reference to the press’s penchant for the mafia theories—on August 16: “If this axeman proves to be a negro, I guess the head writers will call it an ebony Mafia.”
Actually catching the Axeman was appearing less likely than perhaps ever.
Death on the Westbank
Several months went by, until late into the night of March 8, 1919, when the Axeman committed one of his most atrocious attacks of all. Grocery owner Charlie Cortimiglia and his wife Rosie were bludgeoned badly with an axe, found the next morning bloody and unconscious, their dead two-year-old daughter Mary laying between them on the bed. As in other cases, the home was ransacked, but nothing was stolen. Two axes were discovered on the property, one marred by blood and hair. Rosie, badly injured, survived, but Charlie did not.
The Cortimiglias were not the only family to suffer misfortune as a result of this case. Seventeen-year-old Frank Jordano and his elderly father Iorlando, who had moved from Convent to Gretna around 1910 to open a grocery store, were the Cortimiglias’ neighbors. The families got along well—teenaged Frank was known to enjoy playing with little Mary; they treated each other almost as family.
When Iorlando aged beyond being able to run his grocery, and Frank declined taking over the business, the Jordanos leased their grocery to the Cortimiglias. In December of 1918, however, the Jordanos took the business back, to the Cortimiglias’ disdain. The Cortimiglias reluctantly relinquished the store, but not their intent to run a grocery on that block. Charlie eventually built his own store on the lot next door to the Jordanos’—so when little Mary turned up murdered, and her parents violently slashed, the police had an easy suspect and assumed motive for Frank and Iorlando Jordano.
Image courtesy of Miriam Davis.
Rosie Cortimiglia (left), with the two men she wrongly accused of attacking her family: Frank Jordano, pictured holding baby Mary (right), and his father Iorlando Jordano (bottom right).
At first, Rosie denied having seen her attacker at all, but when she was well enough to leave Charity Hospital, she was taken to the Jefferson Parish Jail instead of home. There, she was told she must confess who attacked her, and was put in a cell to sleep overnight.
The following day, she signed a document stating that the Jordanos were the ones who brutalized her, her husband, and little Mary—not even twenty-four hours after she said she could not at all recall who had done it. Iorlando and Frank were jailed, Iorlando eventually sentenced to life in prison and Frank to death by hanging. They would remain wrongly-incarcerated for over a year, until February of 1920, when Rosie, wracked with guilt, would walk into The Times-Picayune office and confess that she had wrongfully accused the two men:
“A little more than a week ago Mrs. Cortimiglia came to the offices of The Times-Picayune and in the presence of several members of the staff voluntarily confessed that she had falsely identified the convicted men at the trial. She declared that she was mentally unbalanced at the time of the trial and wished to withdraw her testimony against the Jordanos.”
Finally, much of their respective youth and old age wasted on anxiety and imprisonment for a horrible crime they never committed, and after a frustratingly long wait for the Louisiana Supreme Court to annul Iorlando’s charge and remand Frank’s back to a district court, the father and son walked free—the Axeman never having been detained at all.
The Other L.A.
There are other alleged victims of the Axeman too numerous to describe in an already-too-lengthy article, as well as other alleged Axemen. One of the favorite theories is that Joseph Mumfre, a known “Black Hander” who had been arrested in 1907 for attempting to bomb an Italian grocery, was responsible for the crimes—and considering how dramatically convoluted the Mumfre case became, it is no surprise this suspect in particular maintains his spot in the legend.
This theory gained particular traction after New Orleans grocer Mike Pepitone was beaten in his sleep with an iron bar and died shortly thereafter. His young widow, Esther, remarried a man named Angelo—who was in business with Mumfre—and moved to Los Angeles with him in 1919. After her second husband disappeared mysteriously, Esther said Mumfre walked into her home and demanded $500 in cash or else he would “kill her like I did your husband,” as he moved his hand toward a pistol on his hip. Esther went to her bedroom under the pretense of gathering valuables for Mumfre, and instead grabbed a revolver.
In the course of a dramatic back-and-forth, Esther riddled Mumfre’s body with eleven bullets, killing the notorious criminal. While Pepitone and Angelo’s murders—and Esther’s dramatic revenge—certainly make for a fascinating story, not much about it at all points with any certainty toward Mumfre’s being the Axeman.
“It was funny how that story got twisted in the retelling from the L.A. Police, to the New Orleans Police, to the New Orleans reporters, again, like a game of telephone,” Davis mused. “And it led to [Mumfre being assumed by many to be the Axeman]. And it’s easy to see how it happened.”
The Bloody Legacy
It makes perfect sense that the Axeman of New Orleans, whoever he was, maintains a substantial role in the vast canon of dark New Orleans history that blurs into lore. More than a hundred years later, he remains a fixture of ghost and true crime tours, a marketing gimmick used to sell tickets to Halloween-themed jazz concerts, and even a character on the popular television show American Horror Story. But, like much history, the true stories of the Axeman—and more importantly and often forgotten, the true stories of his victims—have been too-frequently replaced by a simplified narrative of a jazz-obsessed, likely-mafioso.
Dedicated writers like Davis have taken great pains to provide some belated justice to victims and history by riddling out the truth from a murky sea of myth—yet even she understands and acknowledges how in many ways, the Axeman’s legacy has grown beyond the reaches of absolute truth.
“I can speculate—I hate to say, there’s a certain glamor to associating jazz with a killer. I mean, evil is kind of sexy, if you’re not the victim and at kind of a distance. And it’s like, the reason people take ghost tours, and crime tours. It’s a way of sort of being scared and thrilled in a pretty safe manner. But people don’t think in too much detail about the victims, because they don’t know that much about them,” Davis posited. “And people like stories, they like narratives. And often, the narrative might reflect some sort of deeper truth, even if it’s not literally true. I’m not sure what deeper truth a killer who likes jazz reflects … But you know, it’s just the kind of thing people remember. And there is that music. I mean, I’m not a musician, but I’ve got a copy of that music, ‘The Mysterious Axman’s Jazz.’ I mean, when you play that at a party, that gives it a little sort of frisson.”
And with jazz and murder being two of New Orleans’ top claims to fame, it makes sense that the terrible legacy of the Axeman, whoever he was; and his jazz, even if it wasn’t his at all, continue to prowl in the minds of New Orleanians and visitors.
Miriam Davis’ book The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story provides by far one of the most factual and interesting accounts of the historic cases that this former ghost and true crime tour guide has come upon. Based on primary documents and written as narrative nonfiction by Davis, who has a PhD in history and sometimes writes for The Smithsonian, I highly recommend the read for those morbidly interested in knowing more about the The Axeman.
