The Mammoth Book of Killers at Large (27 page)

It was signed: “The Axeman.”

No one knew whether this was really from the Axeman or was a hoax. Nor is it plain whether people took it seriously or simply made it an excuse for a party. But the following Tuesday, although it was in the middle of Lent, New Orleans staged what seems to have been one of the biggest parties in its history. One party-giver issued the Axeman a macabre invitation, promising him “four scalps”. However, the Axeman was to come in through the bathroom window, which would be open. He was not to go tampering with the kitchen door. Even so, the Axeman did not fulfil his promise. No one was murdered that night – though perhaps everyone was out listening to jazz.

In April, Louis Besumer went on trial for the murder of Anna Lowe, but the war had ended five months before and the spy scare was over. The coroner testified that it would take a man much fitter and more powerful than Besumer to inflict the wounds on himself Besumer had sustained. After ten minutes deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

Although the Axeman had not attacked again in March, as the letter had said, he was still at large. On 10 August Italian grocer Steve Boca was at home asleep in bed when he was hit with an axe. He survived the attack and manage to stumble to a friend’s house to get help. He recovered but had no memory of the attack. Again, nothing had been taken, the Axeman had gained entrance by chiselling through the back door and he had left the bloodied axe in the kitchen.

On 3 September, 19-year-old Sarah Laumann was found unconscious in her bed with multiple head wounds. She died later in hospital. No door panel was tampered with to gain entrance, but a bloody axe was left outside an open window. She had been alone in the house and there were no witnesses. The attacker was as elusive as ever.

On 27 October, Mrs Pepitone heard the noise of a scuffle in the bedroom of her husband Mike, which was next door to her own. When she went to find out what the trouble was, she bumped into a man who was making his escape. In his room, Mike Pepitone’s head was split open and he lay in a pool of his own blood.

The Pepitones’ daughter ran to get the police. First on the scene was Deputy Ben Corcoran. He found Mrs Pepitone standing over her injured husband.

“It looks like the Axeman was here and murdered Mike,” she said.

Mike Pepitone was rushed to Charity Hospital, where he died soon after.

Once again, a panel had been cut from the back door and the axe was left on the back porch. However, Mrs Pepitone claimed she had seen two men in her home. They had fled, taking nothing. Strangely, Mrs Pepitone had not screamed when she had happened upon the scene. There were eight people in the house at the time and her screams would have alerted them. Plainly the attacker, or attackers, was not afraid of being caught. The police also noted that Mrs Pepitone showed no sign of grief when she was questioned.

Since the letter from “Hell”, there had been three more attacks and the police were no closer to identifying the killer. All the newspapers could offer was frenzied speculation. They picked up on the idea that the door panels removed at the crime scenes were too small for a grown man to get through. Nor could the Axeman have reached in to unlock the doors. Besides the doors were always found locked. Consequently, he cannot have been human.

Such ideas are not uncommon in Louisiana, which is a place full of superstition. In the late 19th century, a voodoo scare swept New Orleans and people began killing others who they thought had put a spell on them. There was a widespread belief in “Black Bottle Men” who killed hospital patients to sell the cadaver to anatomy students. Then there were “Needle Men,” who stabbed women and carried them off unconscious. The “Gown Man” rode around in a black car, wearing a long black gown, searching for girls on their own, who some thought was a malevolent ghost. In the suburb of Gentilly, his cousin, the “Domino Man”, wore a white robe with a hood, who sprang in the middle of a group of girls and sent them fleeing. Taking their cue from Pauline Bruno, other purported eyewitnesses said that the Axeman had wings – plainly he was a vampire. More prosaically he might have been a sinister development of “Jack the Clipper” who went about cutting off locks of schoolgirls’ hair in 1914. Or that Mike Pepitone was the son of Pietro Pepitone who had killed “Black Hand” extortionist Paulo Marchese some years before, raising again the spectre of the Axeman murders being Mafia slayings.

But perhaps the Axeman was identified and killed. On 2 December 1920, Mrs Pepitone, dressed in her widow’s weeds, stepped from a darkened doorway in Los Angeles and accosted New Orleans resident Joseph Mumfre and shot him dead. He was, she said, the man she had seen fleeing from her husband’s bedroom the night he had been killed.

Mumfre was a career criminal. Intriguingly, between the last murder in 1911 until the Maggios’ murder in 1918, he had been in jail. He had been in jail again during the hiatus between the murder of Joseph Romano on 10 August 1918 and the Cortimiglia attack on 10 March 1919. Then right after the Pepitone murder in October 1919, he left New Orleans. At the times of the murders, he had been at large and in New Orleans. However, apart from Mrs Pepitone’s testimony, there is no evidence that directly links Mumfre to any of the attacks. There has been some speculation that Mumfre was a Mafia hitman. However, the victims were not confined to the Italian community. Besides, the Mafia has its own strict code of conduct. It does not murder women.

Mrs Pepitone was sentenced to ten years for the killing, but was released after three years, then disappeared.

The mystery deepened on 7 December 1920 – just five days after the killing of Joseph Mumfre – when Mrs Cortimiglia came down with smallpox. Perhaps fearing the wrath of her maker, she claimed that a saint had visited her and ordered her to redeem her sins. Publicly, in a newspaper office, she retracted her accusation against the Jordanos, admitting she had lied because she had a grudge against the two men and begging their forgiveness. Both men were released.

There were no more axe murders in New Orleans after the slaying of Joseph Mumfre. But as no one truly knows who the Axeman was, he may simply have moved on.

New Orleans’ Waterside Slayings

In August 1995, the authorities in New Orleans announced that another serial killer was on the loose in the Big Easy. He is thought to have slain 24 people, mostly prostitutes and drug users. Most were black women, though the victims included men and transsexuals. They had been abducted from Treme and Algiers, two of the poorest neighbourhoods of the city, and had died by strangulation or drug overdoses. Their naked bodies were dumped around New Orleans itself, in Jefferson parish and in the swamps to the west of the city.

The first suspect was New Orleans police officer named Victor Gant. Curiously, though, he was only connected to two of the deaths – the body of his 28-year-old girlfriend Sharon Robinson and that of a friend were found floating in a swamp on 30 April 1995. A 15-year veteran, Grant denied any wrongdoing and remained on duty during the investigation, although he was reassigned to a desk job. Later, though, after a domestic fracas involving his new girlfriend, he was suspended from the force.

Then on 2 March 1998, another suspect emerged. Taxi-driver Russell Ellwood was arrested in connection to two of the killings. Ellwood, a former cab driver, is suspected in six more of the killings. However, authorities have four more suspects, including Gant.

“We never thought, from the beginning, that this was the work of one person,” said a spokesman.

Ellwood was charged with the murder of Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack. The body of Cheryl Lewis had been found in a canal near Hahnville 30 miles up the Mississippi from New Orleans on 20 February 1993. Initially it was thought she had drowned while under the influence of amphetamines and cocaine. The next day, the body of the other woman, Delores Mack, was found 350 yards away. She had been strangled and suffocated, and there were traces of cocaine in her bloodstream. The following year, a police officer found Ellwood in the area of the crime scene in the dead of night. He said he was changing his cab’s oil in that remote spot near a canal off the state highway because he did not want to be caught by the Department of Environmental Quality dumping the dirty oil.

The officers were satisfied at the time and Ellwood was released. However, when a murder task-force was formed, he became a suspect on the grounds that serial killers often return to the scene of their crimes. They tracked him down to a Florida state penitentiary where he was serving time on a cocaine conviction and violation of the condition of his probation. When New Orleans detectives contacted him, he was co-operative and he told them that he had dreamt that the serial killer task force wanted to talk to him.

In October 1997, a fellow inmate in Florida told the police that Ellwood had told him that he liked sex with men and women who were drugged into insensibility. Ellwood apparently had boasted that “he enjoyed the fun of having sex with people who were not in control of their bodies . . . He said if they were high on cocaine or heroin, the heroin would put them in a state of mind as if they were paralyzed and he could take advantage.” Another inmate said that Ellwood had confessed to some of the New Orleans murders.

Months later, after Ellwood had been released and had gone to Ohio to stay with relatives, he was questioned again by the police. It was then that Ellwood allegedly told the task force’s head, Sheriff’s Lieutenant Sue Rushing, and a former Cincinnati homicide detective that he had dumped the body of a woman in the water beside a rural road.

In January 1998 Ellwood agreed to return to Louisiana in an effort to clear his name and help solve the cases. Once he was in the state, he was jailed on outstanding traffic charges. But once behind bars in St Charles Parish, Ellwood rescinded his earlier admission, saying that he had been badgered to the point he would have said anything as long as he was returned to New Orleans, where he could see his long-standing attorney Ross Scaccia, who represented him in a marijuana possession case three decades before.

According to Scaccia, Ellwood was a serial loser, who grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and later moved to New Orleans. He worked as a freelance photographer then turned to driving a cab. A loner, Ellwood never had a girlfriend, Scaccia said, and constantly thought of get-rich-quick schemes that failed. He inherited $15,000 from his mother but lost it all investing in penny stocks. He frequently slept in his cab as he could not afford to rent a room.

In Ellwood’s defence, Scaccia said that Ellwood had helped police at first because he craved attention and the detectives told him he could help them solve the case. The lawyer also claimed that Lieutenant Rushing had coached key witness Sharon Jones to say that Ellwood took her to the canal where Cheryl Lewis and Delores Mack were found to smoke crack cocaine and see a “surprise”. According to a police affidavit, Jones said that Ellwood had showed her one body in the canal with an arm and hand showing and another body that was almost submerged.

Ellwood maintained he was in Ohio at the time and had had receipts to prove it, but they had been taken by Lieutenant Rushing who had destroyed or was concealing them. The 1993 receipts seized by police have a mysterious two-week gap in February, Maria Chaisson, another of Ellwood’s lawyers, said.

In November 1998, Lieutenant Rushing failed a lie detector test when asked if she destroyed or lost receipts that could place Ellwood in Ohio February 1993 when the two women were murdered. The polygraph also indicated Rushing was “not telling the truth” when she denied persuading Jones to say that Ellwood showed her the two bodies in a canal. The FBI investigated these and other allegations made against the task force and Ellwood has filed a federal lawsuit against task force investigators, asserting that they had violated his civil rights when falsely claiming that he had confessed under relentless interrogation.