Empire of Sin (47 page)

The pattern was, at best, an imperfect fit, but it at least suggested a solution to the axman murders. Certainly the
Times-Picayune
seemed to buy the logic of Monfre as the axman. The
Daily Item
was more skeptical. In a December 16, 1921, article on the case,
the paper ridiculed the theory, pointing out that Monfre had still been in jail when the Andollina and Maggio ax crimes were committed. (They were wrong about the Maggio slaying—Monfre had been released several days before that murder—but they were right about Andollina.) And in any case, even if the pattern of ax attacks had lined up perfectly with Monfre’s prison record, this alone would not have been enough even to arrest him, let alone convict him.

But for many New Orleanians eager to put the episode behind them, it was at least a tempting conclusion to jump to. Joseph Monfre could become the last of the city’s underworld monsters slain—like the Hennessy assassins, like Robert Charles, like Lamana kidnapper Leonardo Gebbia, even like Martin Behrman and Tom Anderson (slain at least symbolically). And much of the literature that has grown up around the axman legend has uncritically embraced that conclusion.

But some latter-day writers have questioned the notion that Monfre could have been the axman. The crime writer Keven McQueen, in his book
The Axman Came from Hell
, has pointed out that the only “axman crime” that Monfre was at all convincingly linked to was the Pipitone murder, which may not even have been an axman crime (the murder weapon was an iron bar—a fact conveniently forgotten by the
Times-Picayune
in its later coverage of the incident). McQueen also points to evidence in prison records that seems to indicate that Monfre was still alive as late as 1930—though McQueen admits that the
records are “muddled.” The absence of any death certificate for a Joseph Monfre in California in 1921 just confuses things further.

Part of the problem in trying to solve the case a hundred years after the fact is the overall carelessness of record keeping in the early 1900s. Names—particularly “ethnic” names—were misspelled in contemporary newspaper reports and even official records with a recklessness that seems inconceivable to us today. The axman case has also been hopelessly entangled in a skein of misinformation perpetrated by popular writers on the subject over the years. One of the early chroniclers of the case, Robert Tallant, in his book
Ready to Hang: Seven Famous New Orleans Murders
, seems to have invented freely, altering chronology and planting fictitious details that seem to have no basis in contemporary newspaper accounts and police reports. These inventions have all too often found their way into accounts of the axman crimes by later writers.

In fact, a close reading of the Police Homicide Reports and the contemporary newspaper reportage leads one to wonder whether more than a few of the so-called axman crimes were really the work of a single perpetrator acting with an unmistakable modus operandi. As we’ve seen, some of the crimes later attributed to the axman were actually committed with other types of weapons (even, in the Tony Schiambra case, a gun). They did not, moreover, invariably involve a chiseled-out door panel as the means of entry, or an obviously faked robbery motive. But somehow, in the hysteria that prevailed during those months of terror, such dissonant notes were forgotten or glossed over in the public mind. To many in New Orleans, the axman was real, and so every crime that was even remotely similar that occurred in New Orleans during those months was unconsciously tailored to fit the axman pattern.

If I were to hazard a guess—and it would be just that, a guess—I would say that at least some of the 1918–19 attacks on Italian grocers (the Maggio, Romano, and Cortimiglia crimes in particular) were quite likely the work of one or possibly two men, perhaps members of the same Black Hand organization. One of them could very well have been Joseph Monfre. The attacks on non-Italians were probably unrelated. The impossibly muddled Besumer case may have been a domestic crime of passion made to look like an axman crime, while a case like the attack on Sarah Laumann was likely a robbery gone wrong that merely became an ax attack in the fevered imagination of a traumatized public. The Pipitone murder, along with the Crutti, Davi, and Schiambra crimes of 1910–12, bear all the earmarks of Black Hand- or Mafia-related vengeance, but whether they were related to the 1918–19 crimes is impossible to say. As for the axman letter to the
Times-Picayune
, I think it was almost certainly a hoax, and one that must have fooled only the most gullible New Orleanians.

So was there really a deranged serial killer at large in the streets of New Orleans in 1918–19? Perhaps, though I suspect he was more of a brutal underworld enforcer than a textbook sociopath of the Jack the Ripper type. Any definitive answer to that question, however, is probably lost forever in the empty spaces of a flawed and incomplete historical record. The case remains one of the great unsolved mysteries in the serial-killer literature.

Bibliography

Historical Newspapers

New Orleans:
Harlequin, The Mascot, New Orleans Bee, New Orleans Daily Item
(in the endnotes abbreviated NODI),
New Orleans Item-Tribune, New Orleans Daily States
(NODS),
New Orleans Times-Democrat
(NOTD),
New Orleans Times-Picayune
(NOTP); and, before 1914,
New Orleans Daily Picayune
(NODP). Others:
The Deseret Weekly, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlanta Constitution, The Los Angeles Times, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch
.

Court Transcripts

ORLEANS PARISH CIVIL DISTRICT COURT

•
Mrs. Kate Anderson vs. Thomas C. Anderson, her husband
, Docket No. 48,601, Division E

•
Thomas C. Anderson vs. Mrs. Anna Deubler, wife of John T. Brady, and said Brady
, Docket No. 125,290, Division E

•
Thomas C. Anderson vs. His Wife
, Docket No. 43,575

•
Mary A. Deubler vs. Merchants Insurance Company of New Orleans
, Docket No. 80,426

•
Morris Marks vs. Kate Anderson and her husband Thomas C. Anderson
, Docket No. 29,385

•
Succession of Mary Deubler
, Docket No. 107,603

•
Succession of Olive E. Noble
, Docket No. 93,226, Division E

ORLEANS PARISH CRIMINAL DISTRICT COURT

•
State of Louisiana vs. Anderson
, Docket No. 48,491

•
State of Louisiana vs. Thomas C. Anderson and Charles G. Prados
, Docket No. 49114

•
State of Louisiana vs. Louis Bessemer
[
sic
], Docket No. 33,902

•
State of Louisiana vs. Joseph Monfre
, Docket No. 35,993

•
State of Louisiana vs. Vincent Moreci
, Docket No. 35,043, Section B

LOUISIANA STATE SUPREME COURT

•
Succession of Mary Deubler
, Docket No. 21,667

•
Succession of Thomas C. Anderson
, Docket No. 32,083

Books and Articles

Adler, Jeffrey S. “Murder, North and South: Violence in Early-Twentieth-Century Chicago and New Orleans.”
Journal of Southern History
74, no. 2 (May 2008): 297–324.

Anderson, Gene. “Johnny Dodds in New Orleans.”
American Music
8, no. 4 (Winter 1990): 405–40.

Anderson, Maureen. “The White Reception of Jazz in America.”
African American Review
38, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 135–45.

Arceneaux, Pamela D. “Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville.”
Louisiana History
28, no. 4 (Fall 1987): 397–405.

Armstrong, Louis. “Growing Up in New Orleans.” In
New Orleans Stories: Great Writers on the City
. Edited by John Miller and Genevieve Anderson. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1992 (article originally appeared in
Life
magazine in 1966).

_________.
Louis Armstrong, In His Own Words: Selected Writings
. Edited by Thomas Brothers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.

_________.
Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans
. Centennial Edition. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1954, 1986.

Asbury, Herbert.
The French Quarter: An Informal History of the New Orleans Underworld
. New York: Knopf, 1936; Capricorn Books, 1968.

Baiamonte, John V.
Spirit of Vengeance: Nativism and Louisiana Justice, 1921–1924
. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

_________. “ ‘Who Killa de Chief’ Revisited: The Hennessy Assassination and Its Aftermath, 1890–1891.”
Louisiana History
33, no. 2 (Spring 1992): 117–46.

Barker, Danny.
Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville
. Edited by Alyn Shipton. New York: Cassell, 1998.

_________.
Life in Jazz
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Barry, John M.
Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America
. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997.

Baum, Dan.
Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans
. New York: Spiegel and Grau, 2009.

Bechet, Sidney.
Treat It Gentle
. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960.

Behrman, Martin. “A History of Three Great Public Utilities—Sewerage, Water and Drainage—and Their Influence Upon the Health and Progress of a Big City,” Paper delivered at the Convention of League of American Municipalities, Milwaukee, WI, September 29, 1914.

_________
.
Martin Behrman of New Orleans: Memoirs of a City Boss
. Edited by John R. Kemp. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.

Berger, Morroe. “Jazz: Resistance to the Diffusion of a Culture-Pattern.”
The Journal of Negro History
32, no. 4 (October 1947): 461–94.

Bergreen, Laurence.
Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life
. New York: Broadway Books, 1997.

Berry, Jason. “The Mysteries of Buddy Bolden.”
New Orleans
, November 1996, 43–44.

_________. “Satchmo.”
New Orleans
, July 1986, 38–39.

Bethel, Tom: “The Quest for Buddy Bolden.”
New Orleans Music
13, no. 4 (June 2007), 14–32.

Bindas, Kenneth J., ed.
America’s Musical Pulse: Popular Music in Twentieth-Century Society
. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992.

Blackstone, Orin. “Big Eye Louis.”
Jazz Information
, December 29, 1940, 6–9.

Blesh, Rudi.
Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz
. 2nd edition. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958.

Blessingame, John W.
Black New Orleans, 1860–1880
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.

Blount, Roy.
Feet on the Street: Rambles Around New Orleans
. New York: Crown, 2005.

Botein, Barbara. “The Hennessy Case: An Episode in Anti-Italian Nativism.”
Louisiana History
20, no. 3 (Summer 1979): 261–79.

Boulard, Garry. “Blacks, Italians, and the Making of New Orleans Jazz.”
The Journal of Ethnic Studies
16, no. 1 (Spring 1988): 53–66.

Brothers, Thomas.
Louis Armstrong’s New Orleans
. New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2006.