The Axeman of New Orleans

Book excerpt: New Orleans has always managed to create a mix of the mysterious and the macabre in our minds. As a city, it is different; its jazz, its location and openness to the elements, its cosmopolitan community. At the turn of the last century, the French influence was still strong. A quarter of the population spoke the Gallic language, and French newspapers were still popular. But these Northern Europeans were not the only significant immigrant group to reside there. In 1915, Atlantic storms blew into the vulnerable city, and floods threatened lives and buildings. But still the city stood, tall and firm, against all that nature could throw against it. Yet if it could withstand the onslaught of the natural world, the same was not necessarily true of the human one. Back in 1910, a particularly savage crime took place, a vicious, merciless assault with an axe There is something almost primordial about such an attack. On this occasion, the victim survived, and in a city where racial tensions were rife, where child labour still flourished, the confrontation went largely unnoticed by the wider community. Then, in the early summer of 1911, another incident took place and this time the assault proved fatal. Joe Davi was, in all probability, the first man to die at the hands of the Axeman of New Orleans.