New Orleans’ infamous trunk murders revisited
In the summer of 1944, Louisiana State Penitentiary inmate number 18038, a trustee on a routine run to the Angola post office, flagged down a taxicab. The man hired the driver to drop him one hundred miles away at the train station in Hammond, Louisiana.
Two years later, a police officer in St. Louis, Missouri, stopped the escaped convict for suspicious behavior. Eventually identifying the man, the authorities returned him to Angola. However, on March 26, 1948, Governor Jimmie Davis signed a pardon, freeing him again.
After his release, the convict moved to Los Angeles, California, where he shot a woman in the chest, puncturing her lung and leaving her to suffocate in a hotel room.
The California court sentenced the Louisiana man to five years in Folsom Prison, unaware of the concurrent life sentences a New Orleans court handed down two decades earlier.
When the Folsom Prison inmate died in 1957, word reached Louisiana.
In 1959, as Jimmie Davis campaigned to regain the governor’s seat, a reporter asked him why he paroled the man responsible for two horrendous homicides.
“That’s not on me,” the former governor responded. “The parole board insisted, saying they should never have convicted him by reason of insanity.”
On a Thursday, October 27, 1927, Housekeeper Nettie Compass entered the second-floor apartment at 715 Ursulines Street in New Orleans and stepped into a pool of blood. Panicked, Nettie ran out of the apartment, screaming, prompting two men in the street to join her while another ran for the police.
Inside, investigators found a blood-soaked mattress in a bedroom, a bathroom cabinet dripping with blood, and among the scattered clothing littering the floor, they found a pair of severed fingers.
In a closet, police found two small traveling trunks packed with the expertly butchered corpses of two young women. Clothing tossed from the trunks littered the living room where police found the severed fingers.
Dr. George Roeling, the Orleans Parish Coroner, told reporters that the killer or killers bludgeoned the women with a lead Billy club, before using a machete to decapitate them and amputate their arms and legs.
Buried in a deep gash on one of the victims’ backs, the coroner found a gold wedding band.
The victims, later identified as Theresa and Leonide Moity, were both in their mid-twenties and natives of New Iberia. The sisters married brothers Henry and Joseph Moity, the New Orleans Police Department’s prime suspects in the case.
Before New Orleans Superintendent of Police Thomas Healey could find either man, Joseph turned himself in, telling investigators his brother killed both women.
Both couples and their young children lived in the small apartment. Joseph told police he moved out after catching Leonide with another man. Neighbors reported bitter fights over money, accusations of infidelity, and wild drinking parties late into the night.
Joseph said Henry fled to a Camp Street boarding house and planned to board a ship soon. Superintendent Healy radioed the seven vessels sailing out of New Orleans that day, asking sailors to look for a “dark bushy-haired” man with “very dark brown eyes” and a tattoo on one arm featuring a nude woman with a flower in her hair.
Two days later, Saturday, October 29, crew members from the freighter Gem delivered Henry Moity to the Lafourche Parish Sheriff’s Office. Henry, they said, begged his way onto the ship using a false name, but the crew recognized his tattoo after reading a newspaper account of the crimes.
In his confession, Henry, enraged over an affair he believed his wife was having, explained his motives for killing the women but blamed alcohol for the crime. Henry said his wife, Theresa, threatened to leave him, invoking his vengeance over her infidelities and neglect of the children. He also resented his sister-in-law, Leonide, calling her a negative influence on his wife.
The afternoon before the murders, Henry told Nettie Compass, the housekeeper who discovered the crime scene, that he should “take a pistol and shoot both of those bastards.”
Later that evening, Nettie told prosecutors she saw Henry, Theresa, Leonide, and the children leave the apartment in good spirits. Nettie testified she remembered Henry pulling her aside and whispering not to be scared if she heard the children crying in the early morning.
Following the trial, Dr. Roeling told a Times-Picayune reporter, “The killer who decapitated the Moity women knew enough not to try and cut through the bone, but to cut through the joint. The appearance of the head of the defendant’s wife had been skillfully removed.”
Before coming to New Orleans, police believed, Henry had worked as a butcher’s assistant. However, a butcher at a New Iberia sausage factory told the reporter that the Moity brother who worked for him was named Joseph.