The World's Most Evil Psychopaths: Horrifying True-Life Cases (7 page)

After her recovery, Rosie Cortimiglia accused father and son Frank and Iolando Jordano, business rivals of her husband, of her daughter’s murder. Some newspaper accounts record that Charles disputed his wife’s accusation; others state that he died of his injuries. Whatever the case, he did not join his wife in testifying at the subsequent trial of the Jordanos. Frank was sentenced to death, while Iolando received a life sentence.

And yet the incarceration of the Jordanos, like those of Andrew Maggio and Louis Besumer, did nothing to stop the attacks. The Axeman’s next victim was another grocer, Steve Boca, who was attacked as he slept on 10 August 1919. Boca survived his wounds. Once again, the assailant used a chisel to gain access to his lodgings.

He struck again three weeks later, on 3 September, using his axe on a sleeping 19-year-old woman named Sarah Laumann. She later died in the hospital.

Miss Laumann had been alone when attacked, but eight people were home when the next victim, Mike Pepitone, was attacked. One of the eight, Mrs Pepitone, reported seeing two intruders in her house. Her husband could provide no statement. He died shortly after arriving at Charity Hospital.

And it was here that the attacks ended.

The mystery of the Axeman of New Orleans may never be truly solved, but there were further events that may provide some indication of the truth. The first took place on 2 December 1919 when Mike Pepitone’s widow stepped out of a darkened doorway and shot a man named Joseph Mumfre. She then waited next to his dead body. When the authorities arrived, Mrs Pepitone claimed that Mumfre was one of the two men she had seen fleeing her bedroom on the night of her husband’s murder.

Five days later, on 7 December, Rosie Cortimiglia retracted her accusation against Frank and Iolando Jordano. They were summarily released from prison.

Whether Joseph Mumfre was the Axeman of New Orleans is a matter of considerable debate. A man with an unenviable criminal record, he had been in prison during the period between the last axe murder of 1911 and the first of 1918, and again between the murder of Joseph Romano on 10 August 1918 and that of Mary Cortimiglia seven months later.

Mrs Pepitone herself served three years for Mumfre’s murder. She was never able to identify the second man she claimed to have seen on the evening of her husband’s murder. It may well be that ‘The Axeman’ was right when he wrote in that infamous letter to the
Times-Picayune: ‘
They have never caught me and they never will.’

HENRI LANDRU

Henri Landru was short and bald, with an unkempt beard and bushy eyebrows. Yet approximately 300 women in First World War France saw him as a desirable partner and an object of romance.

A Parisian from birth, Henri Désiré Landru entered the world on 12 April 1869. His mother took care of the home, while his father worked keeping the blast furnaces alive at the Forges de Vulcain, an ironworks located within the city. An intelligent if unexceptional boy, Landru attended Catholic school and, in later years, studied engineering. At the age of 18, he was drafted into the military. Here, too, he did well. By the time he was discharged four years later, he had achieved the rank of sergeant.

To all appearances, Landru had grown into a respectable, dependable young man, who attracted little attention. What little profile he had came from his service as a deacon in his church. He was also a member of the choir. It therefore seemed uncharacteristic when, in 1891, he seduced one of his cousins, Marie-Catherine Remi, impregnating her. Later that same year, she gave birth to a daughter. Two years passed before Landru did the honourable thing and married the mother of his child.

Shortly after the marriage, Landru entered the business world as a clerk. As his family began to expand, he was dealt a significant blow when his employer ran off to the United States, taking with him money Landru had provided as a bond. The swindle appears to have motivated Landru to act in kind.

He established a business dealing in used furniture and was soon preying on recently widowed women. Often Landru’s victims would enter his shop, hoping to sell furniture in order to supplement the modest pensions left them by their departed husbands. Landru would then encourage these women to invest these same pensions, stealing their money in the process. The cons went unnoticed for some time until, in 1900, he was arrested after having attempted to withdraw funds using a false identity. It was the first in a series of seven convictions.

Landru spent the first decade of the 20th century moving in and out of prison. The longest sentence received was for a scheme that began with a matrimonial advertisement he’d placed in a Lille newspaper. Portraying himself as a wealthy widower, he had persuaded one respondent, a 40-year-old widow named Jeanne Isoré, to exchange 15,000 francs for several counterfeit deeds. By the time the law caught up with Landru, the money was long gone – Mme Isoré was impoverished.

Landru’s lawlessness had also taken a toll on his family. His mother died while he was in prison. Landru’s father, ashamed of his son’s behaviour, committed suicide. Landru’s wife and four children were penniless.

By the beginning of 1914, he had become estranged from his wife, although no divorce was sought. During the tensions leading up to the First World War, Landru was released, yet again, from prison. After spending his initial months of freedom drifting around the French countryside, he somehow ended up in a rented villa on the outskirts of Paris. During one trip into the city he met a very attractive 39-year-old named Jeanne Cuchet. A widow, she was employed in a lingerie shop and had a 16-year-old son named André.

Though a romance developed quickly between Cuchet and the man she knew as Raymond Diard, the couple hit at least one rough patch. When this occurred, the distraught woman’s family accompanied her to meet with the suitor at his villa. Finding he wasn’t at home, Cuchet’s brother-in-law took the opportunity to investigate the suave Diard. He searched the villa and came across a chest containing letters from other women. The family was outraged, but not so Cuchet herself.

She severed ties with her relatives, and with André moved into Diard’s villa.

In January 1915, the three relocated to a villa in Vernouillet, after which the mother and son were never seen again. It is thought that their bodies were incinerated in their new home. Shortly after the Cuchets disappeared, Landru opened a bank account with 5,000 francs, an amount he claimed he had inherited from his late father. He also presented his estranged wife with a gold watch that had once belonged to Jeanne Cuchet.

Another lady, Thérèse Laborde-Line, vanished in July 1915. A wealthy Argentine widow, she and Landru had set up house in a lovely new villa shortly before her disappearance. He later returned to collect her furniture.

In May, two months earlier, as M. Fréymet, Landru had placed a newspaper advertisement in Paris’
Le Journal:
‘Widower with two children, aged 43, with comfortable income, serious and moving in good society, desires to meet widow with a view to matrimony.’

Nearly everything about the advertisement was a lie: Landru was not a widower, he had four children, he had no income and he had no contact with anything that could be described as ‘good society’. Even his age was a lie – Landru was in his forty-sixth year. However, while it wasn’t true that he desired matrimony, he was most certainly interested in meeting a widow. And he met many.

In August 1915, a 51-year-old widow named Marie Angelique Desirée Pelletier disappeared. She was soon followed by a Mme Héon, Mme Buisson, Mme Collomb, Mme Jaume and Mme Pascal.

Two victims stand out from the rest. The first, Andrée Babelay, was a 19-year-old servant girl who had no money. Why Landru killed her remains a mystery. It may be that she somehow discovered his secret.

The second, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier, was not a widow. That said, she did have money. In fact, she had become something of a celebrity during the war as an entertainer for the troops known as ‘La Belle Mythese’.

Marchadier vanished without trace at about the time of the Armistice.

With ‘La Belle Mythese’, Landru had claimed his eleventh murder victim, and still no one suspected him of any wrongdoing.

The end of Landru’s killing came about through an unrelated death. Late in 1918, the son of Mme Buisson died. The family attempted to reach the mother, care of a M. Fremiet in Gambais, with whom, it was thought, she had run off. They heard back from the mayor that the town had no M. Fremiet. He suggested that the family might wish to contact the family of Mme Collomb, another woman who was believed to have gone missing in Gambais.

Clearly Landru sensed that, after all these years, a net was slowly closing. He left Gambais for good, moving in with his 27-year-old mistress in Paris. The authorities arrived to find his villa unoccupied.

However, the family of Mme Buisson was not so easily defeated. For months, Buisson’s sister haunted the streets of the Parisian neighbourhood in which she had once been introduced to the mysterious M. Fremiet. On 12 April 1919, her dedication paid off when she spotted her sister’s suitor entering a porcelain shop. Finally, the authorities managed to catch up with Landru. When arrested, he was found to be carrying a notebook containing names and details of 283 women, including nearly all of the widows who had gone missing.

Despite the discovery of the notebook, police were unable to charge Landru with anything more than embezzlement. Simply put, there were no bodies. The properties surrounding his villas in Gambais and Vernouillet were dug up, but revealed nothing more than the bones of two dogs. Landru admitted to strangling both at the request of the owner, Marie-Thérèse Marchadier.

A furnace Landru had installed shortly after moving into the Gambais villa provided the damning evidence.

It had sat there completely ignored for much of the investigation, until neighbours remembered the black smoke and noxious fumes that had on occasion spewed out of the villa’s chimney. The bones and teeth found behind the iron door of the furnace finally provided the evidence needed to proceed in charging Landru with 11 counts of murder.

His trial began on 7 November 1921. Arrogant and impudent, Landru’s demeanour in no way supported his defence. He admitted nothing and argued that the prosecution had proved his innocence in claiming him to be a sane man. Despite this, the victims’ families and members of the jury presented the court with a petition requesting mercy. This was ignored and on 30 November 1921, Landru was sentenced to death.

On 25 February 1922, he kneeled beneath the blade of a guillotine and was executed.

In 1947, 25 years after the end of Henri Landru, his life was resurrected as the inspiration for the main character of Charlie Chaplin’s
Monsieur Verdoux.
Played by the actor, Verdoux is a banker who, after having been dismissed, supports his family by marrying and murdering wealthy widows.

In 1963, the murderer returned to the screen in a more direct form, a feature film centred on his crimes entitled
Landru.
Directed by Claude Chabrol, the movie occasioned a lawsuit from an elderly woman named Fernande Segret – the Parisian mistress to whom Landru had fled in 1918. Upset by her portrayal in the film, she sought 200,000 francs in damages. She was awarded 10,000 francs in 1965. Three years later, the 74-year-old woman committed suicide in a very dramatic fashion by jumping into the moat of the Château de Flers in Orne. She left behind a note reading: ‘I still love him, but I am suffering too greatly. I am going to kill myself.’

FRITZ HAARMANN

Fritz Haarmann recognized the social unrest, hyperinflation and food shortages experienced by Germany in the years after the First World War and used them to his advantage. He preyed on runaways and male prostitutes. Convicted of having murdered 24 boys and young men, it is more likely that he killed over 50. Together with his live-in lover, he sold the clothing and meagre belongings of his victims in a public market. But that was not the only profit Haarmann made from his killings; he also sold their flesh as steak on the black market. During his time, Haarmann was known by many names, including the Vampire of Hanover and the Werewolf of Hanover; but history has settled on the most appropriate: The Butcher of Hanover.

Friedrich Heinrich Karl Haarmann was born on 25 October 1879 in Hanover. It might be said that during his early life he was something of a stereotype. The youngest of six children, he was coddled by his mother and disliked by his father. The young Fritz loved to play with dolls, and avoided more masculine pastimes. Although he shunned team sports, he was athletic and excelled in gymnastics. He was attracted to the feminine, while demonstrating abhorrence for the masculine.

As a young man, one of his brothers was arrested and sentenced for a sexual assault. As a teenager, Haarmann himself got in trouble with the law after molesting a number of children. At the age of 18, after a thorough examination, he was sent to an asylum. It wasn’t long before he managed to escape. Haarmann fled to Switzerland, but by the age of 21 had returned to Hanover. Within months he had married and impregnated a woman named Erna Loewart. However, before the birth, Haarmann had again moved on, deserting his wife to join the army. His role as a soldier proved to be as brief as had been the role of husband. Deemed unsuitable for service, Haarmann was soon back living with the father he so detested. What followed was a period consisting of smuggling, thievery and a variety of sexual offences. Over the next decade, one in three years was spent in prison.

Exactly when he began killing is unknown. The first known incident connecting Haarmann with murder occurred in September 1918, when police burst into his apartment. They were looking for a young runaway named Friedel Roth. What they found instead was Haarmann in bed with a young boy. Although he was arrested and sentenced to nine months in prison, Haarmann likely thought that being caught molesting the boy had been a lucky break. In dealing with the paedophiliac crime, the authorities neglected the initial purpose of their visit: the investigation of Friedel Roth’s disappearance. Had they bothered to search Haarmann’s room, the police would have discovered the runaway boy’s severed head wrapped in newspaper behind the stove.