Empire of Sin (39 page)

His veteran detectives disagreed. “
Members of the [detective] squad detailed by Superintendent Mooney to investigate the attack upon Mrs. Schneider,” the
Daily States
reported on August 7, “have not for a moment entertained the notion that the person who attacked Mrs. Schneider bore the brand of ‘the axman.’… They assert there is no such person as the axman going about committing these assaults. They believe that each of the so-called ax cases was separate and distinct.” The officers were not mentioned by name, but they were identified as “men who have many years’ experience in the handling of criminals of all types.” That these veteran detectives would publicly ridicule the whole idea of a serial ax murderer—when their
chief and other police officials were on the record as believing that one existed—indicates just how disordered and undisciplined the investigation had become.

Certainly the people of New Orleans seemed to believe the axman was real.
ARMED MEN GUARD SLEEPING FAMILIES FROM AXMAN
, the
Item
announced on the day after the Schneider assault, reporting on “
all-night vigils” kept by shotgun-toting fathers over their sleeping families. The
Times-Picayune
and the
Item
, at least, seemed totally convinced that “
some insane beast” was at large in the city. The
Item
even went so far as to link the current ax attacks with those that had been committed back in 1910–12. “
More than 12 victims have fallen under the dreadful blows of the weapon within the past few years,” the paper reported, alluding to the Crutti, Davi, and Schiambra outrages, attributed at the time to the Black Hand. One recalled
detail of the 1910 Crutti attack seemed especially haunting: A witness had watched as the perpetrator—who had just chopped grocer Crutti with a meat cleaver—exited the residence by the back door carrying the weapon, his shoes, and the Cruttis’ pet mockingbird in a cage. After tossing the cleaver away, he scaled a fence, walked to the street, and sat down on someone’s front stoop. There he rolled himself a cigarette and smoked it. Then he calmly released the mockingbird from its cage, put on his shoes, and walked away—all while Mrs. Crutti was screaming for help in the house he had just left.

If that was the man who was active again now, eight years later, New Orleans had reason to be in a panic.

Superintendent Mooney, meanwhile, was coping as best he could,
assigning as many patrolmen as could be spared from his inadequate force to the thinly settled parts of town that the axman seemed to prefer. Mooney had been receiving anonymous letters from an alleged forensics expert who claimed to have made a “
study of criminals, especially perverts,” and who was apparently brimming with all sorts of tips and useful advice about apprehending the perpetrator. Modern FBI profilers might speculate that such unsigned missives could very possibly have come from the axman himself, but the neophyte superintendent seemed—or pretended to seem—not at all suspicious. He merely appealed to the letter writer through the newspapers, urging him to present himself in person to discuss his ideas. “
The man seems to know considerable [information] about criminals,” Mooney told a reporter, “and if he comes to headquarters I’ll be glad to talk to him. He has given much study to the axman, it appears from his writings.”

What Mooney’s more skeptical detectives thought of this anonymous expert can be imagined. But then the city was jolted by yet another crime—one that seemed to banish any doubt that an axman was at large in the city, and that he seemed strangely drawn to Italian-owned grocery stores. At three
A.M.
on Saturday morning, August 10, Pauline and Mary Bruno, two teenage girls living in the residence attached to their mother’s grocery on Gravier Street, were awakened by the sound of a scuffle in the bedroom next to theirs. “
I’ve been nervous about this axman for weeks,” Pauline told police. “I couldn’t sleep well last night, and haven’t slept well for a long time.” As she was dozing in bed, the commotion brought her wide-awake, and she sat up. “
There at the foot of the bed was this big, heavyset man,” she said. “I screamed. My little sister screamed. We were horribly scared. Then he ran.”

The figure—which she thought was that of a white man, but couldn’t be sure—disappeared “
almost as if he had wings.”

Their uncle Joseph Romano, who slept in the room next door, had stumbled into the bedroom a few moments later, holding his head with blood-smeared hands. “
I’ve been hit,” he shouted. “Call an ambulance.” Then he fell into a chair, fatally wounded, and lost consciousness.

Superintendent Mooney and his detectives were on the scene within an hour, piecing together what had happened. The intruder, armed with the household’s own ax from a rear shed, had entered the residence via a broken slat in the kitchen window. He’d apparently gathered Joseph Romano’s clothes in the bedroom and carried them into the kitchen, where he rifled through the pockets and found
a wallet, which was now missing. Then he had returned to the bedroom and begun hacking at the sleeping form in the bed, fracturing the base of Romano’s skull. The assailant may have intended to attack the girls next door as well, but their screams, much louder than their uncle’s groans, presumably forced him to retreat, discarding the ax in the rear yard as he fled.

Here again, the question of a robbery motive remained unclear. As in so many of the earlier attacks, the perpetrator had obviously ransacked the premises, and some small amount of money was taken. But
much more was left behind—in Romano’s case, a gold watch on the mantelpiece and the victim’s own diamond ring. If the axman was indeed a thief, he was a curiously incompetent one, especially considering his ability to escape from the scenes of his crimes without leaving any tangible clues behind.

“
I’m convinced that the Romano murder is the work of a madman,” Mooney told reporters later that day, “an ax-wielding degenerate who has no robbery motive but who is taking small sums to throw the police off the track.” But the superintendent again tried to reassure the public. “Take this as the gospel. We’re going to get him yet! I’m doing everything in human power to run down this murderous maniac.” He described his
decision to consult with expert criminologists and private detective agencies to aid in the investigation. “
This series of ax outrages is the biggest thing in New Orleans police history,” he announced. “We are not stopping with the facilities of my own department. I can’t tell all of the steps we’ve taken, but I can tell this much: we’ve called in outside help.”

But the public seemed hardly reassured.
WHO WILL BE NEXT, IS QUESTION ITALIANS ASKING
, read one headline in the
Times-Picayune
, over an article about elaborate precautions being taken among the city’s Sicilians. “
A literal reign of terror has swept through many quarters in New Orleans,” the
Item
reported. In some Italian households, “members of the family divide the night into regular watches and stand guard over their sleeping kin, armed with buckshot-loaded shotguns.” A kind of hysteria seemed to grip the city as
reports of alleged axman sightings came in from all over town. Numerous people called police to report unfamiliar axes found in their yards, or missing hatchets, or panels chiseled out of their doors.
Everyone seemed to have a different theory about the killer’s identity. And—significantly—the suspected culprit always seemed to be a member of one of those groups targeted by reformers in the struggles of the past three decades. Many thought the axman was an Italian belonging to the Mafia or the Black Hand. Others thought he must be a crazed black man like Robert Charles. A few gullible souls, impressed by Pauline Bruno’s statement about the axman’s having wings, thought he might be some kind of supernatural being. (One wonders, in fact, why no one thought to suspect a disgruntled prostitute, or perhaps Tom Anderson himself.)

Even so, given the preponderance of Italians among the axman’s victims, suspicion fell most commonly on the city’s Sicilian underworld. Perhaps for this reason, New Orleans’ chief Italian detective, John Dantonio, sought to deflect criticism from the community he had served for so long.
“Although practically all of the victims were Italian,” he told the
Times-Picayune
in an interview published on August 13, “I do not believe the Black Hand had anything to do with any of them. I have never known the Black Hand to kill women.”

Dantonio instead proposed another theory. “I am convinced the man is of a dual personality,” he said. “And it is very probable he is the man we tried so hard to get 10 years ago, when a series of ax and butcher-knife murders were committed within a few months.… Students of crime have established that a criminal of the dual-personality type may be a respectable, law-abiding citizen when [he is] his normal self. Then suddenly the impulse to kill comes upon him, and he must obey it.”

Dantonio pointed out that this serial ax murderer—like Jack the Ripper in London some years earlier—would be “cunning and hard to catch.” He would work methodically, making his plans well in advance to ensure that he wouldn’t be caught. But he would have a weakness: “This sort of criminal is easily frightened,” the detective claimed. “He fears a dog more than he does ten watchmen. My advice to the public is to put dogs in their yards.”

Just how many New Orleanians took Dantonio’s advice is impossible to say, but the axman hysteria did not dissipate quickly. People were now
shooting at suspicious figures lurking in their neighbors’ backyards, and every character encountered on the streets at night was seen as a potential axman. In one incident, a man named Charles Cardajal insisted he saw the axman dressed as a woman, hiding behind a tree on Dupre Street. As Cardajal approached, the figure jumped out from its hiding place and ran away, and Cardajal himself did likewise. The figure later turned out to be “
a badly frightened Negro woman” who had actually thought that
Cardajal
was the axman.

Superintendent Mooney was, if anything, just stoking this paranoia, insisting that any and all suspicious incidents should be reported immediately. “
I believe it is criminal for citizens to withhold such cases from police,” he announced. “To withhold information means to assist the axman in his murderous work.” Confronted with “
scathing criticism” for the absence of any arrest in the crimes, Mooney was eager to seem in command of the situation. But he clearly was not, and his repeated confident statements that the perpetrator would be caught were sounding increasingly desperate.

O
N
August 19, however, a development in the Besumer case allowed Mooney to at least make an arrest. Mrs. Lowe (who had finally admitted that she was not married to Besumer after all) had recovered sufficiently from her head wound to be released from the hospital, and she had been living again with Besumer for several weeks in the grocery/residence on Dorgenois Street. On that Monday morning, she stopped a passing patrolman and asked him to summon the superintendent. When Mooney arrived shortly thereafter, she told him that she had “
recovered from the trance that had followed the attack on her,” and that all of the details of that night had come rushing back to her.

On the night I was assaulted, I asked Mr. Besumer for money due me. He had promised to pay me $10 a week. It was around 7:30 and the store had just been closed. He was writing on a blueprint. I asked him again for the money and he turned upon me with the most furious expression I ever saw on a man’s face
.

I became frightened and turned around. Hardly had I taken two steps when I was struck from behind and felled. I heard Mr. Besumer say: “I am going to make fire for you in the bottom of the ocean.”

I have a recollection then of being dragged over the floor, and next I was in the hallway where there was a light. Oh, how I tried to call out to him that I had done nothing, and how I tried to raise my arm for protection. But I could not speak nor move. Then I felt the stinging pain on the right side of my face
.

What happened from then to the time I found myself in bed—it seemed like morning then—I don’t know
.

It’s doubtful that Mooney put much credence in Mrs. Lowe’s sudden recollection; this was the fourth or fifth time she had revised her account of the crime. But the new accusation was enough to have
Louis Besumer arrested on a charge of assault with intent to commit murder. Other revelations by Mrs. Lowe also reignited the Justice Department’s interest in the case. Besumer, she claimed, had gone by several different names in the time they had been together. He told her several times that he was a German Jew, not a Pole, and he had a secret compartment in one of his trunks where he kept blueprints and documents in German. Police and federal agents
confirmed this last claim, and that Besumer had sewn secret pockets into many of his clothes.

Besumer, of course, had explanations for everything. He adopted different names for each of his separate commercial ventures, he said. The secret compartment in the trunk was where he kept his wills, and the hidden pockets in his clothing were for hiding the ample sums of money he handled in his various business endeavors. He also continued to deny that he was anything but a Pole. “
Mrs. Lowe is a good woman,” he insisted to investigators, but she was “changeable,” and she was for some reason telling them lies. “[She] knows who assaulted us. I just want to get to the bottom of this case and solve the mystery.”