CHAPTER THREE

Katie felt as if she was going to either explode or implode. What information there was about the murders was being blared on every radio and television station known to man. And in the city, there was no way around every tourist on her rides asking about the Axeman murders of 1918–1919.

She went to work because, otherwise, she’d have been crawling up the walls.

“I can tell you what was known, but to this day, no one can really say who the killer was, if it was just one killer... There are theories, and one woman claimed to have killed him,” she bantered as she directed her mule through the streets.

Her carriage held two couples, both in their late forties or early fifties. They were from a small town in Ohio, and it seemed everything about New Orleans fascinated them.

Both couples had become empty nesters, with kids recently off to college, and wanted to do everything wild that New Orleans was known to offer: Bourbon Street, packed clubs, over-the-top drinks... Fun things for adults who were suddenly free to let loose in the world.

Katie had chatted with them when they had first approached her carriage. They’d liked her mule, and she’d given them a bit of info on Jackson Square just in conversation and pointed out that, yes, they were just across the street from Café du Monde.

But now, though she’d gone into history regarding the French founding of the city, the pirate Jean Lafitte and General Jackson, they wanted more recent history.

“It was early in the 1900s, right? They were killing Polish people...or Jewish bakery owners?” one of the men asked.

Katie had known to expect this. She was ready. “Supposedly, there were axe murders that took place in 1911, but a few literary authors have done intense research and could find no record of the victims or anything to suggest that such murders did occur. Catherine and Joseph Maggio were killed on May 23 of 1918—I believe that most scholars see them as the first victims. They were immigrants to the city, and there was already a large Italian immigrant population here. Some people thought the murders were Mob-related, that it was a Mafia retaliation of some kind.”

“All the victims were Italian? I thought the killer wrote the press about being Satan or a demon or something like that,” one of the women said.