Tangipahoa Parish’s Tickfaw Axeman revisited
Of all the cases, this column has covered these last five years, the story of the Axeman still prompts regular emails from readers. Although I shared updates on the topic in the first Bayou Justice book, readers still ask for more.
This week, we revisit and update the report with everything I have learned since sharing the original story five years ago.
One hundred years ago, someone claiming to be the Axeman of New Orleans sent a letter to the Times-Picayune newspaper. The letter said the killer would leave the city for good if everyone played jazz music the following Tuesday night during the traditional Feast of St. Joseph. Shortly after, the population complied, and the killings stopped, leaving unsolved more than one dozen murders attributed to America’s most notorious serial killer.
A century later, historians still debate the Axeman’s identity, but one Tangipahoa Parish police officer may have taken the answer to his grave. Former Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff John A. Ballard told a newspaper editor that a man he arrested in 1920 confessed to the Axeman crimes. That man, Tickfaw Grocer Frank DiPrima, died as an inmate at the Tangipahoa Parish Prison in 1931.
Miriam C. Davis, the author of “The Axeman of New Orleans: The True Story,” summarized the killer’s reign of terror this way: “Although the attacks began in the fall of 1910, it was not until June 1911 that one of them was fatal and Joe Davi died. Then the Axeman (or the “Cleaver” as most called him in 1910–1911) disappeared for six years. When he returned—beginning with his murder of the Maggios in May 1918 and culminating with his brutal attack on Charlie and Rose Cortimiglia and murder of their little daughter Mary in March of 1919—the Axeman thoroughly terrorized New Orleanians.”
The author said the Axeman grew more violent over time.
“The first Axeman attack seemed almost tentative. The second attack was more violent, but it took the killer three tries before he managed to kill someone. Joe Davi’s murder, though, was certainly cruel. He beat Davi’s face with a weapon consistent with a butcher’s cleaver. His brains dripped out of his skull. When he returned after a six-year absence, the Axeman slaughtered the Maggios in May 1918.”
According to Davis, multiple attacks came in 1918 and 1919, but the last three killings traditionally attributed to the Axeman, she said, are more likely acts of organized crime.
I asked the author what she thought of the attack on Sarah Laumann, but she did not know the name.
On a Sunday morning, August 3, 1919, at around 3:15 AM, 19-year-old Sarah Laumann awoke in her bedroom at 2123 Second Street in New Orleans to find a man standing over her, both arms raised over his head. He swung something that struck down hard against her pillow and gashed the side of her head just above her left ear.
Reacting to their daughter’s screams, Mr. and Mrs. John Laumann burst through the door as Sarah’s attacker escaped through a window.
Mrs. Laumann told the New Orleans Item, “The first thing the police did was ask my husband where he kept his ax. That is when we found out it had been taken from its place in the woodshed.”
New Orleans Police later found the Laumann ax under the St. Francis de Sales school near the Laumann home.
Sgt. Fred Smith of the New Orleans Police Department told a New Orleans Item reporter, “The method of entry parallels the Axeman attacks; entry made by removing a panel from the back door.”
Police Superintendent Frank T. Mooney told the New Orleans States: “The person making such an attack with robbery or revenge as a motive certainly would not carry such a heavy ax and leave with it, only to drop it next door. This man, to my mind, is a sadist or pervert. The man’s mental condition is far below normal.”
The Item reported that the New Orleans Police Department had long supposed that the Axeman was a black man, but Sarah Laumann described him differently. She said he stood 5 foot 8 inches tall, weighed about 165, and wore a brown suit and white shirt with no tie and a dark cap over his eyes.
She described the Axeman of New Orleans as a white man with a dark olive complexion.
In 1920, Sheriff John A. Ballard told reporters he locked Italian-born Frank DiPrima up for his protection. DiPrima, he said, had “lost his balance” and “ran amuck” after discovering his Tickfaw neighbors, the Congalero family, bloody and unconscious at their dinner table.
Ballard said DiPrima joined the search party for Rosaria Restivo, the suspected shooter, carrying a cane knife and a straight razor.
On May 25, 1920, Rosaria Restivo appeared at the Tickfaw home of Bernard Caldorera with a shotgun and fired on the family at their dinner table. The 22-year-old Restivo had asked Caldorera for his 16-year-old daughter’s hand in marriage the week before. Caldorera had refused, citing her age and suggesting that the rival farmers discuss the matter further at the end of strawberry season.
After the attack, Rosaria Restiva escaped via a pre-cut trail into the swamp. The sheriff’s office contracted bloodhounds from Mississippi, but Restiva vanished, never standing trial.
Frank DiPrima was Bernard Caldorera’s closest friend and one of the first neighbors to arrive after the massacre.
In an article from May 27, 1920, newly appointed Hammond Police Chief John E. Morgan described DiPrima as violent, saying the grocer lived in a “semi-demented state” for some time, but police never considered him dangerous. “His actions this week,” said Morgan, “made his incarceration imperative.”
In 1931, Louisiana Progress Editor John D. Klorer asked Ballard why DiPrima remained behind bars for so long.
“We considered sending him to the insane asylum in Pineville,” the former sheriff said, “but they couldn’t handle him. He turned violent when he found that bloody baby.”
Klorer asked if he could confirm that DiPrima confessed to being the infamous Axeman of New Orleans.
“Well, yes,” the sheriff replied. “He kept saying that, but we never took him seriously.”
Sheriff Ballard apprehended Frank DiPrima on May 26, 1920. The last known Axeman murder occurred in August 1919—six months before Frank DiPrima opened his grocery store three miles outside Tickfaw.