The Axeman: The Brutal History of the Axeman of New Orleans: Cold Case Crime, #4
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About this ebook
★★★ Discover a serial killer you'll never forget! ★★★
Between 1918 to 1919 a serial killer ran rampant throughout New Orleans. His weapon of choice? The axe.
He didn't spare women. Or children. Or even men. There was only one kind of person who could be sparred from the blade of his axe: the home of a person playing jazz music. At least eight people were brutally murdered. Who could have been responsible for this crime, and how was the Mafia connected?
Did a corrupt police department intentionally leave this case unsolved?
Come, if you dare, as Absolute Crime takes you on the hunt for one of the most brutal killers who ever lived.
Read more from Wallace Edwards
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The Axeman - Wallace Edwards
About Absolute Crime
Absolute Crime publishes only the best true crime literature. Our focus is on the crimes that you've probably never heard of, but you are fascinated to read more about. With each engaging and gripping story, we try to let readers relive moments in history that some people have tried to forget.
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Introduction
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While jazz was making New Orleans buzz in the early 1900s, a vicious axe murderer almost stopped the party, igniting enough terror to evoke comparisons to London’s Jack the Ripper. Neither women nor children were spared, as the killer sent taunting letters to the newspapers and mangled bodies to the morgue.
By 1919, few people felt safe at night in New Orleans. The Axeman’s blade and the Mafia’s Black Hand seemed to work in harmony, as locals huddled in fear and murder after murder went unsolved. The city would regain its composure in time for the Jazz Age, but the identity of the killer eluded investigators in every branch of law enforcement.
Chapter 1: The Murders of a Killer with Supernatural Means
Turn-of-the-twentieth-century New Orleans was exploding with jazz music and a riot of conflicting cultures. Free blacks joined the ranks of the city’s bubbling population, while Italian immigrants settled in increasing numbers from 1890-1920, representing a shift from the mainly Francophile culture of the Crescent City’s past. By the 1910s, the famed French Quarter was at least 80 percent Italian, the majority of whom were natives of Sicily, whose cooking and St. Joseph’s Day rites filled city streets. As much as Sicilians brought with them a culture dating back to Ancient Greece, they also brought more recent innovations, including the Cosa Nostra.
A menacing product of the old country, the Cosa Nostra in New Orleans was its most intimidating as the Black Hand, an arm specializing in blackmail and extortion. The Hand, as it was called, targeted enterprising Italians looking to run small businesses without interference. Following the lynching of Italians in 1890 and a race riot in 1900, there was good reason to doubt the stability of New Orleans. Yet more often than not, Italians would come to fear the Mafia itself rather than seek its protection.
Upon the arrival of the Axeman of New Orleans, the city was fully enmeshed in its superstitious ways. Voodoo rites and ravenous cults were blamed for axe murders the preceding years in Louisiana, reminding residents that the supernatural demanded their respect. New Orleanians became terrified of the landscape itself, whether it was the flu epidemic brought to ports in 1918 or the bombings that rocked the Italian community for years. Whoever struck the blows attributed to the Axeman of New Orleans preyed on these fears, possibly hiding behind a Mafia mask. In any case, the killer started out with a headline murder.
A Slaying of Alarming Brutality
On May 23, 1918, New Orleans woke up to the story of a gruesome axe murder. Joseph and Catherine Maggio were hacked to death as they slept in rooms adjacent to their grocery on Magnolia Street, about midway between Napoleon and Jefferson Avenues, south of Claiborne. The story in the