Empire of Sin (38 page)

Clearly Mooney, the neophyte police superintendent, was out of his depth. When
agents from the Department of Justice arrived to question the Besumers, he was more than willing to turn at least this part of the investigation over to the feds. They began to have Besumer’s letters translated and sent agents to Fort Lauderdale to pursue inquiries into the man’s alleged business interests there.

All of this convinced detectives that the attacks were the result of something other than a crazed ax murderer, but Mooney just wasn’t sure. Much as he would have liked to see the Besumer and Maggio cases as unrelated, he was
convinced that the same assailant—crazed or not—was responsible for both crimes, and he wasn’t afraid to say as much to the newspapers. The fact that Besumer was not Italian did not faze him. Besumer himself admitted that his business practices had upset his Italian competitors, and a neighbor had once even warned the grocer that his rivals might
“burn him down” for his insistence on underselling them. And something else that Mrs. Besumer said was suggestive. On Monday morning, when she seemed to be getting some of her memory back, detectives had questioned her again about the events preceding the attacks.

“
The last I remember,” she said, “was the evening before, about six o’clock, when I saw my husband counting his money at the safe in the grocery store. The door was open, and I said to him, ‘Oh, you oughtn’t to do that; anyone can see you and you will get us both killed one of these days.’ But he didn’t say anything, and I went back through the hall into the little screened gallery at the end. I don’t remember anything more. I don’t remember leaving the veranda. I don’t remember doing anything there. I don’t remember undressing, and they say I was found in my nightgown, in bed. Oh, my poor head!”

On Tuesday morning, five days after the attack, Louis Besumer was deemed healthy enough to be released from Charity Hospital. He was transported directly to police headquarters, where he spent three hours talking to Superintendent Mooney and several agents from the Department of Justice. Faced with an attentive audience, the ever-pompous Besumer again waxed grandiloquent, claiming that he was a student of criminology and a “
born investigator.” He would not rest, he said, until he had helped clear up the mystery, and was willing to borrow against his considerable assets—he could easily raise several hundred thousand dollars, he claimed—in order to get to the bottom of it.

Asked further questions about his history, he insisted on correcting a few “misunderstandings.” First of all, he said, the woman identified as Mrs. Harriet Lowe Besumer was not his wife; she was instead his “traveling companion,” toward whom he felt as toward a sister, which was why they slept in separate bedrooms. His actual wife was an invalid residing in Cincinnati. He also insisted that he was a Pole, not a German, and that he knew not nine foreign languages, as had been reported in the press, but thirteen. And although he still had no recollection of the attack, he was going to consult with physicians at Charity Hospital to recapture the memory “psychopathically.”

Mooney and the federal agents were now uncertain how to proceed. There was clearly not enough evidence to hold Besumer in custody. Possessing letters written in German was no crime, even in wartime (unless, of course, the ongoing translations of them proved otherwise). And while it might be suspicious for a well-traveled, well-educated business tycoon to be running a corner grocery in New Orleans, it wasn’t illegal. In the end, they agreed to release Besumer on his own recognizance. But Superintendent Mooney did assign two of his men—Detectives Balser and Baradot—to stay with Besumer, ostensibly to assist him in his investigations, but also to keep an eye on the man, whom no one was prepared to trust fully.

That afternoon, Mooney returned to Charity Hospital to speak to the woman calling herself Mrs. Besumer. When asked if she really was married to the grocer, she grew agitated. “
If I am not, he is the greatest deceiver yet,” she said. “He was married to me by a Jewish rabbi in New York two years ago and promised to turn Catholic and marry me with a priest. But he never did it.”

“Did you have a license?”

“He said so.”

“Did you see it?”

“No.”

When asked why they slept in separate bedrooms, she claimed it was because he insisted on sleeping with an electric fan running in the room. She didn’t like the noise it made, so she had moved to the back bedroom to sleep.

Trying a different tack, Mooney then asked her: “Mr. Besumer read the newspapers a great deal, didn’t he?”

“Yes, oh yes,” she replied.

“Did he read about the Maggio case?”

“The what?”

“The Maggio case—those Italians who were found murdered in bed with an ax and a razor.”

“Oh yes. [It was] like our case, wasn’t it?”

“And you never before saw the ax with which you were apparently struck?”

“No. We didn’t have an ax in the house even.”

Mooney left Charity Hospital that afternoon as confused as ever. Was it possible that Besumer, wishing to kill the woman who passed as his wife, struck her with an ax in order to make it look like the work of the Maggio assailant, whose crime he took such an interest in? Could he actually have inflicted his own head wound as a way of allaying suspicion? Granted, his injury was far less grave than the woman’s, but it was serious enough to cast doubt on any such notion.

It was now a week since the attacks at the Besumer grocery, and New Orleanians were clamoring for some—for any—explanation from the city’s law enforcement authorities. Mooney had supposedly reformed the
notoriously corrupt and incompetent police department—the latest in a long series of attempts to improve the force. But as in the Maggio case in May, results of any kind in this investigation were distressingly thin. In fact, the two detectives he’d assigned to watch Louis Besumer had proved to be an all-too-familiar embarrassment to the force. One afternoon when they were supposed to be surveilling their prime suspect, the two were
found at the Milneburg resort on Lake Pontchartrain, enjoying an afternoon excursion. Mooney had been forced to demote both of them—something that hadn’t happened on the force in more than twenty years. Needless to say, this kind of story did not inspire public confidence in the police department
or
its new superintendent.

When speaking to the press, however, Mooney tried to seem confident and in control of the situation. He did admit that the case was “
one of the most baffling mysteries” ever to confront the department, but he assured the public that all avenues of investigation were being vigorously pursued. “We are making progress,” he temporized, “and I feel sure that, before we are through, the mystery will have been solved.”

It’s doubtful that New Orleanians found much comfort in these anodynes, but public concern about the crime was apparently on the wane. Many people seemed to have come to the same conclusion as Mooney’s detectives—that the attack was the result of some strange domestic quarrel that the Besumers were determined not to talk about. As such, the case was likely unrelated to the Maggio case, which itself could just have been the result of some obscure Italian feud. Maybe there
was
no mysterious axman haunting the streets of New Orleans after all.

But then—on July 7—something happened that immediately changed the complexion of the case. After eleven days of confusion, Mrs. Besumer apparently got her memory back for real.

“
Along toward dawn,” she told police from her hospital bed, recalling the morning of June 27, “I awoke from sleep. I don’t know what caused me to wake, but I opened my eyes and in the light I saw a man standing above me, making some sort of motion with his hands.…”

She said she told the man to go away, but he remained, still making strange gestures that she couldn’t decipher. She said she felt dazed, perhaps because he had already struck her with the ax. But she
could
describe him: He was tall, heavyset, a white man with rumpled, dark brown hair. He wore a heavily soiled white shirt open at the collar.

The next thing she remembered was waking up outside on the gallery, her face in a pool of blood. “I couldn’t breathe,” she said. “I was strangling. I tried to get up, but each time I would fall back. There were feet scuffling about me … the feet of a man, clad in shoes that were black and heavy and laced—the kind of shoe a laborer might wear.” But then she blacked out again, and remembered nothing else before waking up in the hospital, hours later.

Hearing this, Superintendent Mooney was inclined to be cautious, aware that this latest recollection of Harriet Lowe Besumer, if that was her name, might be another fantasy, like her account of being attacked by a mulatto. But for many in New Orleans, the story was credible enough. And it led to a chilling conclusion: the axman was real, and he apparently was still at large.

IT WAS TWO A.M. WHEN A WOMAN’S SCREAM PIERCED the silence of the soggy August night. Kate Gonzales, lying in bed with her husband, bolted awake at the sound. She was confused at first. Had she really heard something, or had she just dreamt it? But then another scream erupted from the darkness, and the sounds of scuffling, a shattering of glass. The commotion seemed to be coming from next door, in the other half of their duplex Elmira Street cottage. This was where Kate’s sister lived with her husband and their three young children. Mary Schneider, she knew, was alone with the children that night, since her husband was working a night shift.

Kate shook her husband awake. When he also heard the screams, the two of them jumped out of bed and rushed into the street. Several other neighbors were already standing on the banquette, staring at the front door of the Schneider home, which stood wide open like a gaping mouth.

Gonzales and the neighbors entered the cottage, which was quiet now. In the middle room they found Mary Schneider, nine months pregnant, sprawled across the bed in a state of semiconsciousness. Bloody gashes lacerated her scalp and mouth. Several broken teeth lay scattered on the bedclothes, which were stained with oil from
a broken glass lamp that lay on the floor beside the bed. Mary muttered something about being attacked by a tall, heavyset man, but then fainted before she could say more.

Police and an ambulance were called, and Mary Schneider was rushed to Charity Hospital, directly to the maternity ward because of her “
delicate condition.”

Toward morning, when Edward Schneider returned from his job at the Southern Pacific wharf, he found his entire household in an uproar. Police were combing through the cottage and yard for clues, and other officers were searching the surrounding neighborhood. Superintendent Mooney, personally overseeing the investigation with Chief of Detectives George Long, asked Schneider to check the house to see if anything had been taken. A wardrobe in the bedroom had been broken open, and six or seven dollars had apparently been taken from the top shelf. But
a box containing $102 of Schneider’s back pay had been left untouched in plain sight on the bottom shelf. Nothing else was missing.

The newspaper reporters wanted to know immediately whether Mooney regarded this as another axman attack. The superintendent was cautious at first. Mrs. Schneider’s head wound, he pointed out, was quite possibly caused by the broken oil lamp that had been found beside the bed; in fact,
several strands of the victim’s hair had been found on the lamp, snagged on the metal prongs that held the lamp’s glass chimney to its base. But the wound to Mrs. Schneider’s mouth was another matter, obviously caused by something heavier than the lamp.

By late Monday, an even more disturbing piece of evidence was found. Mooney’s investigators turned up a discarded hatchet in one of the yards neighboring the cottage. Edward Schneider, on examining the premises more carefully, discovered that his own ax was missing from a backyard shed. But did this necessarily point to an axman? Or could the intruder have seen the ax and carried it away, hoping to make his aborted burglary look like an axman assault?

“
At the present time,” Mooney told reporters on the day after the attack, “I am unable to say if it was the axman who struck Mrs. Schneider. But the finding of the hatchet and the disappearance of the ax is puzzling.”

Puzzling indeed, though Mooney’s reference to “the” axman reveals his suspicions that a single perpetrator was responsible for at least some of the crimes. Mary Schneider’s was the fourth such assault to occur in the city since Mooney became superintendent less than a year ago. Only one had been fatal—the slaughter of the Maggios back in May. Since the perpetration of that bloody crime, Mooney had learned of an
earlier incident back in December 1917, when a sleeping Italian grocer named Epifania Andollina was attacked by a hatchet-wielding man standing over his bed. Andollina had survived, and the story hadn’t even made most of the daily papers at the time. But its resemblance to the Maggio incident was eerie—the panel chiseled out of the back door, the lack of any fingerprints or significant robbery, the discarding of the weapon in a neighboring yard.

The Besumer and Schneider cases, though, were somewhat different. The victims in those crimes were not Italian, and only Louis Besumer was a grocer. As for Mary Schneider, her head wound had proved to be relatively minor, and in fact she would
successfully give birth to a baby girl within twenty-four hours of being attacked. It was possible that Mrs. Schneider, who now claimed to have no memory of the incident, had merely been awakened by a common burglar rifling through the wardrobe, and that the thief had struck her with a convenient object—the oil lamp—when she saw him and screamed. But what, then, of the allegedly missing ax, and the hatchet in the yard next door? All in all, despite the dissonant elements in both the Schneider and Besumer attacks, Mooney was regarding both—for the time being, at least—as part of the axman pattern.