The New Orleans Axe Man: Italian Grocers, the Letter, and Mumfre

The Axeman of New Orleans was an unidentified serial killer who attacked Italian immigrant grocers and their families in and around New Orleans between roughly 1910 and 1919, breaking into their homes at night and striking sleeping residents with axes and cleavers. At least six people were killed during the main 1918–1919 spree, with many more wounded, and earlier and later attacks in the same pattern pushed the toll higher.¹ No one was ever arrested or charged. The case is remembered today for its brutality, for the ethnic hatred that shaped both the attacks and the investigation, and for a letter the killer purportedly sent in 1919 promising to spare any home where a jazz band was playing.

The Attacks

The crimes now grouped under the Axeman name likely began in 1910, years before the press settled on that label. In 1910 and 1911, a figure the newspapers called “The Cleaver” attacked Italian and Sicilian grocery owners in their homes, entering through kitchen windows or doors and striking the sleeping residents with hatchets or cleavers.

On August 13, 1910, Harriet and August Crutti were attacked in the Bywater neighborhood. August survived deep lacerations to his head and chest, and the attacker took eight dollars and a pet bird. On September 20, 1910, Conchetta and Joseph Rissetto were attacked in the Seventh Ward; both survived, though Conchetta was permanently disfigured and Joseph lost sight in one eye. In the summer of 1911, Joseph and Mary Davi were attacked in St. Roch, and Joseph died of his wounds. Mary Davi told investigators the attacker was a white man who spoke English without an Italian accent, a detail that cut against theories blaming Italian organized crime.²

The attacks resumed in May 1918 with a chillingly familiar pattern. The intruder chiseled out a lower panel of the back door, used an axe found on the premises rather than bringing one of his own, and often left the chisel behind. Valuables were rarely taken, and investigators ruled out robbery as the main motive.³ The first known victims of the 1918–1919 spree were Joseph and Catherine Maggio, both killed; a razor used to cut their throats was found discarded in a neighbor’s garden. Joseph’s brother Andrew Maggio was arrested after finding the bodies but was released for lack of evidence.⁴ Survivors could describe the assailant only as a “heavyset dark man.”¹

On March 9, 1919, the violence crossed the river to Gretna. Charlie and Rosie Cortimiglia were badly wounded and their two-year-old daughter, Mary, was killed.⁵ The last attack attributed to the Axeman in New Orleans was the beating death of grocer Mike Pepitone in his Mid-City home on October 27, 1919, though some historians consider the Pepitone killing a vendetta unrelated to the broader spree.⁶

Historian Miriam Davis has offered a practical reason for the shift from cleavers to axes between the two periods: by the later years, most homes kept an axe for chopping stove wood, so the killer could count on finding a weapon inside and did not need to carry one in or out.⁷

The Letter and the Jazz Night

On March 16, 1919, the Times-Picayune published a letter from someone claiming to be the killer. “They have never caught me and they never will,” the writer declared, identifying himself as “not a human being, but a spirit and a fell demon from the hottest hell.” He announced he would strike again at 12:15 a.m. on St. Joseph’s Day, March 19, but promised to spare any home in which “a jazz band is in full swing.”¹

New Orleans complied, loudly. Professional and amateur jazz bands played at house parties across the city, dance halls and cafés filled to capacity, and residents without musicians cranked phonographs instead. Some accounts call it the loudest night in the city’s history.⁸ No attack came. On March 19, the Times-Picayune ran a cartoon of jittery residents playing jazz while glancing over their shoulders.¹ Local musician Joseph John Davilla capitalized almost immediately with “The Mysterious Axman’s Jazz (Don’t Scare Me Papa),” claiming he finished the piece around 2 a.m. that same morning “while he waited for the axman.”²

Not everyone treated the episode as harmless theater. The West Bank Herald condemned the Times-Picayune for publishing the letter at all, calling it a dangerous joke that exploited public fear for a scoop.² Modern historians, including Davis, have argued that the letter was almost certainly a prank written by someone more educated than the actual killer, noting the elevated language and the classical reference to “Tartarus.”⁷ Whoever wrote it, the Axeman did not strike that night.

Why Italian Grocers

Italian immigrants in New Orleans had moved from plantation labor in the late 1800s into the grocery business, and by 1920 Italian-owned stores accounted for roughly half of all groceries in the city.⁵ That visibility came with hostility. The press routinely described Italian immigrants as members of an “inferior race” prone to criminality.⁸ The climate had deep roots: in 1891, a mob stormed the Orleans Parish Prison and lynched 11 Italian prisoners held in connection with the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy, even though six had already been acquitted.⁹

The Axeman attacks landed on a community already accustomed to being treated as a threat rather than protected as victims. One account from the period describes the Italian community as “paralyzed by fear,” with men staying awake at night to guard their families. Three theories of motive circulated. The press favored Mafia vendettas or Black Hand extortion, but investigators and later historians have largely rejected that view: Detective John Dantonio, an Italian-American investigator who worked the early cases, argued that a professional extortionist would not leave victims alive the way the Axeman repeatedly did.⁵ Davis and others have noted that the “Black Hand” in New Orleans was an extortion tactic involving threatening letters, not an organization, and that axe attacks were not part of its repertoire.² A second theory held that the killer was an experienced burglar for whom groceries were easy targets. The third, backed by Dantonio and by police Superintendent Frank Mooney, was that the Axeman was a compulsive serial killer driven by fixation rather than profit. Modern profilers have generally endorsed some version of this view.

The Investigation

Superintendent Mooney took the unusual step of treating the crimes as the work of a single serial killer rather than unrelated vendettas, describing the perpetrator as a “murderous degenerate” with a “Jekyll and Hyde personality, like Jack the Ripper.”⁵ His team built a profile of a white, working-class man in his thirties, an experienced burglar who used a railroad shoe pin, a common burglary tool of the era. After attempted break-ins at the homes of Al Durand and Paul Durel Jr. in September 1918, Mooney deployed a squad of plainclothes detectives, but the effort produced no leads.¹⁰

Forensics of the era were not up to the job. Crime scenes produced chiseled door panels, blood-soaked bedrooms, and discarded weapons, but there was no fingerprinting or forensic infrastructure capable of linking the attacks scientifically. Suspects were rounded up and released for lack of evidence.³ The institutional memory of the earlier Cleaver cases was also lost: the superintendent who led the 1910–1911 investigation died in 1917, and the connection between those crimes and the 1918–1919 spree was not formally recognized for nearly a century.²

A Wrongful Prosecution

Investigators did build one case to trial, and it collapsed. Under police pressure, Rosie Cortimiglia accused her neighbors Iorlando Jordano and his son Frank of the March 1919 attack on her family. Frank was sentenced to death and Iorlando to life at hard labor following an indictment on May 5, 1919.¹¹²

Suspects: The Mumfre Theory

The only named suspect to emerge publicly was Joseph Mumfre (also recorded as Monfre or Manfre), a convicted criminal said to have ties to a blackmailing gang that targeted Italian-Americans. He had been arrested in 1907 for attempting to bomb an Italian grocery.² The case against him rests almost entirely on Esther Pepitone, the widow of final victim Mike Pepitone. After Pepitone’s murder, Esther remarried a man named Angelo Albano, who went into business with Mumfre. When Angelo disappeared, Mumfre allegedly confronted Esther at her Los Angeles home, demanding $500 and jewelry and threatening to “kill her the same way he had killed” her husband. On December 5, 1921, Esther shot Mumfre with two revolvers, hitting him with eight bullets; a .22 caliber pistol was recovered from his pocket. She was tried for murder and acquitted on April 10, 1922, after 40 minutes of jury deliberation.⁶

Supporters of the Mumfre theory point out that his reported incarceration from roughly 1912 to 1918 matched the pause between the Cleaver and Axeman attacks, and that he left New Orleans after Pepitone’s death, when the attacks there stopped.¹²³²

How the Spree Ended

After the New Orleans murders stopped in late 1919, a string of similar killings struck smaller Louisiana towns. In December 1920, Joseph Spero and his daughter were killed in Alexandria. In January 1921, Giovanni Orlando was killed in DeRidder. In April 1921, Frank Scalisi was killed in Lake Charles. All three targeted Italian grocers and mirrored the earlier pattern.⁵ Whether the same person was responsible or a copycat has never been established. After 1921, the attacks stopped entirely.

The Axeman was never identified, never arrested, and never charged. Barring an unexpected archival discovery, the case will stay unsolved.

1
The Historic New Orleans Collection. The Mysterious Axman
2
Country Roads Magazine. The Axeman of New Orleans
3
Crime + Investigation UK. The Axeman of New Orleans
4
People. Who Was the Axeman of New Orleans
5
Smithsonian Magazine. The Axeman of New Orleans Preyed on Italian Immigrants
6
NOLA.com. The Axman Murderer Claims a Final Victim in Mid-City
7
NOLA.com. The Axeman Cometh Again: Historian Miriam Davis Tackles a New Orleans Mystery
8
LSU Reveille. Louisiana True Crime: The New Orleans Axeman
9
Reimagining Migration. Lynching of Italian Immigrants
10
NOLA.com. The Year of the Axeman
11
vLex. State v. Guagliardo, No. 23815
12
Crime Library. The Axeman of New Orleans