The Axman of New Orleans, Part 1

In 1918 and 1919, a rash of attacks had all of New Orleans on edge. While the Axman has turned up in modern storytelling, no fiction could top the real story of late-night break-ins and assaults by a mystery assailant who was never caught.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm Tracy D. Wilson. And today's topic, Uh comes
directly from the fact that the subject of it showed

(00:22):
up on American Horror Story covin recently, and almost immediately
after they introduced this genuine historical figure as a character
a couple of weeks back, we immediately got requests to
cover it. Yeah. I basically got to work and people
were already asking about it, and I hadn't even seen
the episode, and I was like, Oh, I guess there's
an ax Man, Uh spoiler. That's what the episodes about today. Yeah,
the ax Man of New Orleans. And while it made

(00:43):
for great TV, perhaps the most shocking part is actually
how few liberties the show creators had to take with
this story. Often, when you see a historical figure incorporated
into modern entertainment, it gets really you know, altered and
fluffed up. And but they're some pretty literal one to
one translation on this one, which is really sort of

(01:05):
shocking in and of itself. Well, and just in case
the show completely diverges from reality, uh, we are recording
this basically after the X Man's first appearance, right, and
there's UH at the end we can talk about what
obviously is not accurate in that because it does take
a turn that we would UH not be able to
have in actual UH history. But most of the plot

(01:30):
was written for those show creators nearly a hundred years
ago in terms of what they covered on the program,
and the X Man story actually has a few different
potential starting points. Although we're going to start at the
cases that are generally considered like the official X Man
timeline of events, UH, there are some that happened prior

(01:50):
to that that get linked up, and we'll talk about
those at the end. And because the case was never solved,
there is uncertainty about some similar crimes that may or
not have been related and may or may not have
been the work of the X Man. And also, just
as a side note going into this UM, if you
are following up on this and looking anything up online,

(02:11):
you will see it spelled two ways, a x e
MN and a x M a n UH. The X
Man himself, if his one writing where he self references
is in fact by him and not by an impostor
or a hoaxter. They used the one without the E,
but you'll see it written both ways in perfectly valid

(02:33):
historical accounts. So we're going to start off with where
the murders that are generally considered part of quote the
x Man Murders began, and that is May twenty two.
So Andrew Maggio had gotten a draft notice, and so
he went out and drank a lot. He came home
and passed out in the rooms that he shared with

(02:54):
his brother Jake. There are accounts that suggest that the
two of them had actually been out king together. At
four a m. On the morning of the twenty three
Jake was awakened by groaning noises coming from the other
side of the wall, which was the home inhabited by
another brother, Joseph and his wife Katherine. Joseph and Catherine

(03:16):
ran a grocery in bar room that was connected to
their living quarters, and that was a pretty common layout
at this time. Yeah. One of the items will point
to in the show notes has a picture from the
the New Orleans Times Pickie unit the time, and they
actually have a it's a very simple box layout of
how most of these stores were set up, where the

(03:38):
store was in the front and one to three rooms
were separated in the back half of the building and
those were like the living area, so Uh Jake roused
the drunken Andrew with some difficulty after he was unable
to get a response from his brother or sister in
law when he knocked on the wall that joined their
two rooms or that connected their two rooms to check

(04:00):
on them, that he couldn't get them to answer. What
the brothers found was evidence of a break in. A
wooden panel had been chiseled out of the kitchen door
and left on the ground outside with the chisel lying
on top of it. And when Jake and Andrew reached
the couple's bedroom, Catherine was already dead. She was sprawled
partially across her husband, and Joseph was alive but had

(04:21):
multiple very bad head wounds. Joseph died before police could arrive.
Police found a pile of men's wear in the bathroom
along with an axe. The location of this axe has
been recorded really inconsistently in different sources. That's been cited
as being in the bathtub, near the rear doorstep, and

(04:42):
in the crawl space under the house uh and all
of these have been named as the place where the
axe was found. UH and just to address the men's
were in the bathroom, you will read about that being
very different things. Uh. Some accounts say it was actually
like Joseph's close are close belonging to the couple. Some

(05:02):
hint that they think the ax man actually changed completely
out of the clothes he was wearing during the murder
to another set of clothes to leave without blood on him. Uh.
So that's to my mind a little bit hazy still,
because accounts do very quite a bit. And also found
on the bed was a straight razor, and the coroner's
report indicated that the axe had been the primary cause

(05:25):
of death for Joseph, but that the killer had likely
hit Catherine on the head with the ax and then
used the razor to nearly decapitate her. Uh And her
estimated time of death was between two and three am.
Just a block away, the message Mrs Moggio will set
up tonight just like Mrs Tony was found written on
the sidewalk with chalk in a sort of childish handwriting. Initially,

(05:49):
this particular clue was really baffling to investigators because the
neighbor had actually witnessed Andrew outside that night when he
was still inebriated. He and Jake were both taken in
for questioning, and Jake was released after a day, but
Andrew remained in custody, and unfortunately, several things started to
make Andrew look extremely suspicious to the police. The first

(06:11):
is that it was his razor blade. He was a barber,
and he claimed he had brought it home from maintenance. Uh.
Another thing is that the safe in Joseph and Catherine's
house was open, but it didn't show a sign of
forced entry or robbery. Money and valuables that were nearby
were left completely untouched. And this, combined with the discovery
that the ax had actually belonged to the victims, lad

(06:34):
investigators to believe that the killer knew the layout of
the house and possibly knew the family, so the idea
that it was a family member kind of uh did
not help Andrew's case, and that it was a murdering
not a robbery. Andrew's story was also kind of changing. Yeah. Uh.
He didn't initially mention it, but he later said he

(06:55):
had seen a man going into his brother's house at
about one thirty in the morning. This contradicted his answers
to the police questioning, and an interview that he gave
a newspaper saying he'd been too drunk to even hear
any of the noise coming from his brother's home. Yeah.
So he went from saying he was way too and
he breeded to notice anything, to going, oh yeah, but
I did see that one guy. Uh. But eventually that

(07:17):
was kind of it. They didn't really come up with
any additional evidence. And Andrew was released. So that is
the first murder, and it really kind of gets the
most detail in a lot of accounts, I think, because
it was the earliest one. Even so, and we're at
a time when there were newspapers and records. Uh, we'll
find as we go on that the records get fuzzy.

(07:39):
There wasn't always great accounting. But we're gonna pause before
we get to the second incident and talk about our sponsor.
So let's get back to ax murdyrs. Oh, yes, always fun.
So the second incident happened just a few weeks after
the Maggio slings. Uh. And a delivery man in this
instance discovered this event while he was trying to drop

(07:59):
off bread at grocer Louis Bessemer's store in the seventh Ward. Uh.
And this is another one of those cases that I
just mentioned where the details are not always consistent. Bessemer
gets spelled several different ways. Sometimes it's spelled b E
s E m e R, sometimes b O s s
U m e R. Sometimes b O s U m

(08:19):
b R. There are is a lot of variation. So
when Bessemer did not meet the delivery man, John Zenka
at the store's door and the way he normally did,
Zenka went around to the side door. Bessemer opened the
door and he was covered in blood and said that
he had been attacked, and he directed Zenka into the bedroom.
Uh they're a woman who was presumed to be Bessemmer's

(08:42):
wife was sprawled on the bed with a really deep
head wound, although she was still alive at that point.
Against Bessemer's wishes, Zenka called the police. Bessemer has had
wanted to call his doctor instead. Just kind of odd.
I think they should call both. Yes, make both the calls.

(09:04):
Just as in the Maggio murders, a door panel had
been removed with a chisel and then placed on the
ground with the chisel on top of it. Bessemer's own
acts had been used to commit this assault. And it
was found in the bathroom, and again no valuables had
been taken. So while both of the victims were connected
to a grocery, their ethnicity was different um the Maggio's

(09:29):
where Italian and Bessemer was Polish. Uh. Initially a new
employee of Bessemer's store was detained, but he was soon released,
similar to the Andrew Maggio situation, though he had told
some conflicting stories to police. And this kind of leads
me to go out on a limb. I guess that
fear was the significant motivator in some of these wishy
washy stories of the suspects. That they were probably just

(09:52):
terrified and didn't they wanted to say something that would
clear their name, even if it wasn't accurate. Uh. But
they did really stepman because he didn't there wasn't enough evidence.
So the victim, the female victim, was Anna Harriet Low.
She turned out to be either Bessemer's mistress or his
common law wife, depending on who is talking, and she

(10:15):
told different stories to the investigators before she died of
her wounds. Her first account said that she had been
attacked by a man of mixed race, but she did
not stick to that story. The second account was that
it had actually been Bessemer and that he was a
spy and part of a German conspiracy. This, combined with
letters that were found in his home in a number

(10:37):
of different languages, got federal investigators involved, and Bessemmer was
arrested but was soon released. Yes, so remember this is
during World War One, so that's why to say he
was a German spy got a lot of hubbub happening
very quickly. It's a big deal in a bizarre move.
This particular incident has so many weird layers to it.

(11:00):
Bessemer actually asked the police if he could investigate his
own case regarding the attack, like if they would make
him the detective on the case. Uh. And this, combined
with Anna's strange story and Besmer's reluctance to call a
police in the first place, eventually it led police to
believe that there was actually a domestic dispute at the
heart of this second incident. Uh and Bezmer ended up

(11:21):
being arrested again and this time held on murder charges.
Sometime down the road, he was, however, acquitted. The next
attack was not at the home of a grocer but
a businessman, and it also broke from the typical axeman
scenario in a few other ways as well. When Edward
Schneider got home from work on August eighteen, he found

(11:42):
his pregnant wife on the bed with a serious head wound.
She was unconscious, but she was still alive, and she
was immediately rushed to the hospital. And while Mrs Schneider
did recover and she did successfully deliver a daughter, she
really couldn't help police investigators with many details of the attack.
They had really been hoping that she would have a
witness account, but she had been asleep when the intruder

(12:05):
had entered the house, and she only recalled waking up
to see him by the bed as the axe came
swinging toward her. It's terrifying, yes, although some of the
police investigators thought that she had actually been hit with
I can't remember if it was a large, heavy jar
or a lamp that was near the bed, So whether

(12:26):
or not she was actually hit with an axe actually
even came into question, as in the other attacks, nothing
of value had been taken out of the house, but
that and her account of an axe being involved are
really the only connections with the other Maggio and Bessemer cases.
Unlike in those crimes, there was no door panel that

(12:47):
had been chiseled out of the door, there wasn't a
male victim, and the target was completely removed from the
grocery trade, which just caused some people to wonder if
it really was the same perpetrator. Before we get to
the next one, so many ex events. We're gonna pause
one more time and take a word from our sponsor.

(13:07):
If Tracy's game, let's do that, alrighty, yes? Uh So
just five days after Mrs Schneider was attacked, this time
a barber named Joseph Romano. So he was Italian, uh,
similar to some of the others, but not a grocer,
even though you will often see it said as he
attacked Italian grocers. But there's a lot more variation than that. Uh.

(13:29):
And he was attacked in his home, but this time
there were two witnesses, his nieces Pauline and Mary Bruno,
who lived with him. They were awakened by loud thumping
sounds from their uncle's room. According to some accounts, a
man fled when Pauline saw him and screamed. Other versions
of the story have the man already fleeing the house

(13:50):
when the girls saw him. UH, and Joseph had suffered
several blows to the head and he died from his wounds,
although he did tell the girls before he died to
call for help. So this murder was more similar to
the previous attacks. There was the chiseled door panel with
the chisel aft the entry UH. And by this time,

(14:11):
as you can imagine, New Orleans was in a panic. UH.
There were constant calls to police precincts about suspicious figures
and attempted intrusions. And some of these seem to be
based in truth, but others really seemed to be the
result of panic and fear leading to mistaken assessments of situations.
Like they were constantly getting a call of there's a
weird person in my yard. There's someone at my back door.

(14:34):
That's reminds me of the eight million suspicious package us
that the police departments were getting, like in the wake
of the Boston marathon bombing. Yeah, everyone's extra cautious, so
you're noting everything that stands out. It's not even necessarily
that you're I think some people tend to assume that
fear is causing people to make things up. And while

(14:56):
that may have been the case in some of them,
you're also just noticing things that you normally noticed because
you are at a heightened sense of awareness hyper vigilances behind.
So the mythology of the Axe Man started to morph
as these stories were shared and spread. A mishmash of
true and false details formed this patchwork that was kind

(15:17):
of difficult to pick apart. Yeah, police were responding to calls,
and some things would be in place that suggested the
Axe Man, like some doors looked like they had been
tampered with, but not always. Sometimes people couldn't tell if
it maybe was just a prankster trying to scare people,
or if it could actually be the Axeman copycat, yeah,

(15:38):
or a copcat. But while the city was on edge,
uh and in this state of hyper vigilance, the last
several months of nine eighteen did not have any more
recorded attacks of the Axe Man, although there were, as
I said, a few instances of chisels and axes being
found near people's back doors when police were called. So

(15:58):
we're actually gonna this one into two episodes, because you know,
it's a lot of killing to put in just one
and then another person was murdered by an axe building
mad Yeah. So we're gonna pause here and then our
next episode will pick right back up, because then things

(16:19):
really get interesting and really tie into the story that
appeared on American Horror Story. Do you have listener mail
before we go? I do. Uh. This one is from
our listener Amy, and it is in reference to our
episode on Rudolph the Second. She says, I've been an
avid listener for some time now, especially since I have
a boring job and need some levity. I've always wanted

(16:41):
to write, but never had a good topic that seems
like something I could write about. But I was very
excited when you did the podcast on Rudolph the Second.
I'm an American who lived in Prague, Czech Republic for
twelve years from the first to the twelfth grade, and
one of my favorite parts of the Prague Castle was
actually created by Rudolph. One of his many eccentric pursuits
was acting alchemists to discover how to turn ordinary objects

(17:02):
into gold. He collected them all on one street, which
developed the nickname of Golden Lane. Because of the alchemists,
all of the buildings are oddly short and skinny. It
almost looks like a miniature lane rather than a normal street,
and the buildings are also all bright colors, which was
unusual for that time. As a kid, I always looked
forward to walking down Golden Lane and looking at the
cute houses. Unfortunately, you now have to pay to walk

(17:25):
down it. At the end of the lane, there's actually
a toy museum now that has a fascinating progression of
what barbies have looked like through the ages. Okay, I
would be all over that museum, across the attics of
a few of the houses. They have also put in
a crossbow range for tourists. My older brother enjoyed this
a lot. I now wish I had done it as well. Uh.
I just noticed that the coaster of that my hot
chocolate is resting on is a picture of Golden Lane,

(17:47):
a present from my mom. I'm glad my hometown received
a bit of the spotlight. Keep up wonderful work. Uh
so cool to hear about. I had never heard about
the Golden Lane, even though I have friends that lived
at Prague. I guess they were holding out on me.
But thank you Amy for telling us that, because that's
a really cool bit that I would not down I
want to go to Froud quite badly. Uh, there're can

(18:08):
I see pictures of it? I think it's super cool.
So if you would like to share information with us,
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(18:29):
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(18:50):
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