In the spring of 1918, a killer arrived in New Orleans with a chisel and a method he had been perfecting for decades. He removed wooden panels from back doors in the dead of night, retrieved axes from the yards and sheds of his victims, and struck sleeping families with a force that left investigators baffled and communities shattered. He took nothing. He left no useful trail. And he was never caught.

The Axeman of New Orleans tells the complete story of one of the most perplexing cases in the history of American crime. Author John Foster begins not in New Orleans but in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1879, where an elderly couple was slaughtered in their beds by an intruder who had been hiding in their upstairs room for days, who helped himself to food from their kitchen, and who left the murder weapon in the fireplace before disappearing without a trace. From there the trail moves through Austin, Texas, where eight people died in a two-year span that paralyzed an entire city. Through Tennessee, where an entire family was axed to death and the killer prepared a meal before setting the house on fire. Through Oregon, Washington, Colorado, Illinois, Kansas, and the Iowa town of Villisca, where eight people were murdered in a single night and the killer covered every mirror in the house before leaving.

And then New Orleans.

The canonical Axeman spree of 1918 and 1919 claimed five lives and left survivors who could describe only a large, dark figure moving with unsettling ease through their homes in the hours before dawn. The investigation arrested the wrong people, chased a German spy who did not exist, convicted innocent neighbors of a child's murder, and produced no verdict that held. Then, in March of 1919, the Axeman wrote a letter. He called himself a demon. He said he loved jazz. He promised to spare every home where a jazz band was playing at fifteen minutes past midnight on a specific Tuesday night. New Orleans believed him. The clubs filled to capacity. Families banged pots and pans in their kitchens. A young Louis Armstrong played somewhere in the French Quarter. The appointed minute came and went without incident, and the city exhaled — and the killing continued.

Foster examines every dimension of the case with the steady, unhurried attention it deserves: the chiseled door panels that became the Axeman's most specific signature, the Italian grocer targeting that may or may not connect to organized crime, the theatrical jazz letter that transformed a serial predator into a mythic figure, and the widow of the final victim who tracked down the man she believed was responsible and shot him eleven times on a Los Angeles sidewalk two years later. The book extends the inquiry beyond New Orleans to a 1922 Bavarian farm massacre whose signatures matched the American cases with a precision that decades of German investigation never explained.

This is not a book that forces conclusions where the evidence does not support them. It is a book that looks at the full record carefully and honestly and asks the questions that the record generates — and sits with the answers that the record, after more than a century, still refuses to provide.

The Axeman was never identified. The case remains officially open. The music from March 19, 1919 is the closest thing to a resolution that New Orleans ever got.