The a to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (4 page)

Joe Coleman in his “odditorium”
(Photo by Steve Bonge)

Coleman was born on 11/22/55—a date (as he likes to point out) full of doubles, prefiguring his own fascination with linked dualities: sinner and saint, heaven and hell, corruption and purity, killer and victim. Growing up across from a cemetery and steeped in Catholicism, he developed an early fascination with death and disease, suffering and sacrifice. His childhood imagination was also shaped by two books: the Bible (particularly its juicier stories of sex and violence) and a volume on Hieronymus Bosch, whose teeming, demonic dreamscapes made a profound impression on Coleman’s budding artistic sensibility.

Indeed, though Coleman is often classified under the ever-so-slightly disparaging category of “naive” or “outsider” artist, his work falls into a mainstream tradition that extends from such medieval painters as Bosch and Breughel to modern German Expressionists like Dix and Grosz. It’s also true,
however, that—as accomplished and sophisticated as Coleman’s paintings are—there is, in his densely textured, meticulously detailed style, a distinctly folk-art quality. He is, in short, a complete original, an all-American delineator of the darkest recesses of the soul. If Bosch had coupled with Grandma Moses, their unholy offspring would have been Joe Coleman.

In the festering landscape of Coleman’s art, legendary serial killers like Carl
Panzram
and Charles
Manson
become mad visionaries, driven by a savage need to rip away the comforting illusions of conventional society and expose the terrible realities of existence: random horror, inexorable death. Coleman is quick to point out that his paintings are self-portraits, and the same ferocious drive is evident everywhere in his work. He uses his paint-brush like a vivisectionist’s scalpel, to penetrate to the bloody innards, the guts of existence. Beneath our skins, his art seems to say, we are nothing but blood, shit, and phlegm, with a latent tumor undoubtedly lurking somewhere in our cells. But there is another element, too, one that redeems his work from sheer morbidity: the belief, or at least the hope, that if he penetrates far enough, he will discover something much deeper—the soul.

As one critic has commented, Joe Coleman has put the
pain
back in painting. But his work blazes with power and meaning. For those unfamiliar with it, we strongly recommend his book
Cosmic Retribution
(Fantagraphic Books, 1992)—the only art volume (so far as we know) with an enthusiastic jacket blurb by Charles Manson. More recent examples of his paintings can be found in
Original Sin
(Heck Editions, 1997) and
The Book of Joe
(La Luz de Jesus Press, 2003).

My earliest drawings were of the crucifixion of Christ. That’s one thing that’s going to turn little boys on—that your religion has to do with a guy getting nailed to a fucking cross and all this blood spurting out and all these saints being set on fire.
That’s the kind of religion I like.”

J
OE
C
OLEMAN

A
XE
M
URDERERS

Though the figure of the axe-wielding maniac is a staple of horror movies and campfire tales, he is largely a figment of the popular imagination. In reality, serial killers rarely rely on axes.

The most famous axe in American criminal history, of course, was the one that belonged to Miss Lizzie Borden, who, according to folklore, used it to give her sleeping stepmother “forty whacks” in the face (and when she saw what she had done, she gave her father forty-one). Lizzie, however, was no serial killer but a chubby, thirty-two-year-old spinster with long-simmering resentments who apparently went berserk one sweltering day in August 1892. In short, her crimes (assuming she committed them, which seems fairly certain, in spite of her acquittal) were a one-shot deal—a lifetime’s worth of stifled emotions exploding in a single savage deed.

Another fatal female who was handy with an axe was the notorious Belle Gunness (see
Black Widows
), who murdered at least fourteen of her husbands and suitors. Some apparently were poisoned, others were dispatched in their sleep with a hatchet. Though the fat, ferocious Gunness cut a more frightful figure than the ladylike Miss Lizzie, she was no wild-eyed thrill killer. Rather, she was a cold-blooded mercenary, killing to collect on her spouses’ life-insurance policies or inherit their savings.

Closer than either of these lethal ladies to the popular stereotype of the axe-wielding psycho was a hard-bitten drifter named Jake Bird. Roaming around Tacoma in 1947, Bird hacked a mother and daughter to pieces with an axe he found in their woodshed. Alerted by the victims’ dying shrieks, neighbors summoned the police, who managed to subdue Bird after a violent struggle. Bird pled innocent until forensic analysis established that the stains on his trousers were human blood and brain tissue. Before his execution in 1949, he confessed to no fewer than forty-four murders throughout the United States, a number of them committed with his weapon of choice—the axe.

The most fear-provoking axe killer in the annals of American crime, however—one who kept a whole city in a state of panic for over two years—was a maniac whose identity remains unknown. This is the shadowy figure known as the “Axeman of New Orleans.”

On the night of May 23, 1918, a New Orleans couple named Maggio was butchered in bed by an intruder who smashed their skulls with an axe blade,
then slit their throats with a razor, nearly severing the woman’s head. Thus began the reign of terror of the so-called Axeman, a real-life boogeyman who haunted the city for two and half years. His MO was always the same. Prowling through the darkness, he would target a house, chisel out a back-door panel, slip inside, and find his way to the bedroom. There, he would creep toward his slumbering victims, raise his weapon, and attack with demoniacal fury. Altogether, he murdered seven people and savagely wounded another eight.

Lizzie Borden; from
52 Famous Murderers
trading cards

(Courtesy of Roger Worsham)

Panic gripped the city, particularly since the police were helpless to locate the killer. Hysterical citizens pointed fingers at various suspects, including a supposed German spy named Louis Besumer and a father and son named Jordano, who were actually convicted on “eyewitness testimony” that later proved to be fabricated. Since many of the victims were Italian grocers, there was also a theory (wholly unsubstantiated) that the killer was a Mafia enforcer. To cope with their fears, citizens resorted to morbid humor, throwing raucous New Orleans-style “Axeman parties” and singing along to a popular tune called “The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz.”

Though the killer was never identified, some people believe that he was an ex-con named Joseph Mumfre, who was shot down by a woman named
Pepitone, the widow of the Axeman’s last victim. Mrs. Pepitone claimed that she had seen Mumfre flee the murder scene. Whether Mumfre was really the Axeman remains a matter of dispute, but one fact is certain: the killings stopped with his death.

Hatchet Man

Frailty,
a creepily effective chiller released in 2002, stars Bill Paxton (who also directed) as a Texas widower whose fatherly devotion to his two young sons is somewhat undercut by his rampaging religious mania. Dad (the only name he’s given in the film) believes that God has chosen him to hunt down and destroy demons-in-human-form, using a very large axe as his weapon of divine retribution.

Complications arise when Dad comes to believe that his own twelve-year-old son, Fenton, is a demon in disguise. Reluctant to dismember his child, Dad settles for locking the boy in a dungeon until he repents. Thanks to this act of paternal solicitude, Fenton manages to make it to manhood. In the grown-up form of Matthew McConaughey, Fenton shows up years later at FBI headquarters to tell his story to an agent named Doyle (Powers Boothe), who is investigating an unsolved serial murder case known as the “God’s Hand” killings.

Solid acting, surprising plot twists—and the scariest axe-wielding father to appear in movies since Jack Nicholson went off the deep end in Stanley Kubrick’s
The Shining
—make
Frailty
a highly satisfying little horror film.