The New Orleans Axeman
1918- New Orleans 1919.

New Orleans has always been a city of living out loud: jazz pouring from open doors, the smell of coffee and rain on old stone streets, neighbors who know each other’s names and keep each other’s secrets.
But in the spring of 1918 there was something creeping into that warmth. Something that knocked on doors after midnight and left no witnesses.
They called him The Axeman.
Nobody knew his face. No one knew his name. What they knew was this—he came at night, cut through the back door panel with a chisel, picked up an axe from inside the house and did what he came to do. Then he disappeared into the darkness as though he had never been.
His first known victims were Italian grocer Joseph Maggio and his wife, Catherine, found dead in their bed in May 1918. Axe was Joseph’s. It had been stolen from his own tool shed and used against him. They were cut in the throat. A neighbour found them in the early hours of the morning. Outside the street was quiet. No one heard a sound.
More attacks came in that summer and into the next year. Mostly Italian immigrant families. Grocers mostly. They were all attacked while they slept, all in their own homes — the one place you’re supposed to be safe.
Cities are seldom scared, but this city was scared. People began sleeping with the lights on. Families pushed furniture up against the back doors. Husbands sat up all night with guns on their laps waiting for every creak of the floorboards.
And then the letter came.
A letter was delivered to the newspapers in March of 1919, signed by the Axeman himself. It was odd–almost playful. He wrote that he was a demon from the hottest hell, that he would pass over any house that had a jazz band playing in it on a certain Tuesday night. He was letting the city breathe in.
Every dance hall in New Orleans was filled Tuesday. Jazz played from homes and windows all over the city. People held parties not out of happiness, but out of fear, hoping that the music would keep death from their door.
It worked — or so it seemed. Nobody died that night.
The attacks fizzled out in 1919. Then the Axeman stopped as quietly as he had come. No last hit. No admission. No arrests. He just disappeared from history, leaving a city of restless people and a case full of unanswered questions.