By the end of August 1918, panic had gripped New Orleans. The man who would become known as the ‘Axeman of New Orleans’ stormed into many Italian grocery stores at night and brutally attacked the store owners and their families. From May 1918 through October 1919, the unidentified American serial killer terrorized the city of New Orleans and its neighboring areas, particularly the town of Gretna. Recent research has cast doubt on press stories from the pinnacle of public hysteria about the crimes, which claimed that similar murders had occurred as early as 1911 (Kaminsky, 2021). The killings were never solved, and the Axeman has never been recognized. The killer singled out Italians and Italian-Americans as his primary victims. Since the murderer was never apprehended, it will always be possible to speculate that the crimes were motivated by racism. The axe murderer may have begun the spree as early as 1879 and continued it up to 1922 in Germany.
Axes, often the victims’ own, were used in the attacks, as suggested by the killer’s approach. In most instances, a chisel was used to take out a panel from a house’s back entrance, and both were then abandoned on the floor in the door’s vicinity. The Axeman then used an axe or a straight blade to attack the residents (O’reilly, 2019). Robbery was not the driving force behind the crimes, and nothing was taken from the victims’ homes. The Axeman was never established, and his killing spree ended as strangely as it had begun. To this day, nobody knows who committed the murders, while several hypotheses of different credibility have been put forth as to who might have done it.
References
Kaminsky, M. (2021). Serial killer trivia: Cold cases: Fascinating facts and chilling details from the creepiest unsolved murders ever. Ulysses Press.
O’reilly, J. (2019). ‘We’re more than just pins and dolls and seeing the future in chicken parts’: Race, magic and religion in American horror story: Coven. European Journal of American Culture, 38(1), 29-41.