It was the screaming that awakened Esther Pepitone.
The woman and her husband, Michel "Mike" Pepitone, had turned in for the night at their Mid-City home. They operated a corner store at the front of their building at South Scott and Ulloa streets, and with a circus on Tulane Avenue just a block away that weekend, their day had been busy.
She woke up shortly before 1 a.m. on October 27, 1919, when she heard her husband's cry, "Oh my God!"
Esther Pepitone found her husband unconscious. Their mattress was saturated with blood. A picture of the Virgin Mary that hung above the bed was specked with crimson, and the walls were splattered from the floor nearly to the ceiling.
Mike Pepitone's head had been bashed 18 times with at least one weapon. But it was hard to tell just what had happened because his skull was so badly damaged. "It was battered into an almost unrecognizable mass," reported The Times-Picayune.
Esther Pepitone told police she had caught a glimpse of two shadowy figures in the darkened bedroom, but she could not identify the men. The two wordlessly slipped toward the back of the house, she said, through the room where the Pepitones' six children were sleeping, and exited through the back door, heading down South Scott Street toward Canal.
Mike Pepitone was in agony. "Every time he turned his head, blood came from his head and face," Esther Pepitone was quoted as saying by the New Orleans States. "It simply poured over the bed."She threw open a window and began screaming, too, and their 11-year-old daughter ran outside to get help.The first one on the scene was Ben Corcoran (or Cochran, depending on the source), a sheriff's deputy who lived on the block and who was on his way home from work. He found Mike Pepitone mortally wounded and a weapon, described alternately as a large bolt with a heavy nut attached to it and as a stake used to secure a tent at the circus, sitting on the chair next to him. Five of the Pepitone children were still in bed, fast asleep. The door to the back yard and the gate that opened onto South Scott Street remained ajar.
Mike Pepitone, 36, was rushed to Charity Hospital. Within two hours he was pronounced dead.His savage murder was never solved. It was the last in a string of attacks commonly attributed to a now-mythical serial killer known as the Axman.
The attack bore some hallmarks of the Axman murders that had terrorized New Orleanians for more than a year. For one thing, the killer or killers had gained forced entry under cover of night, in this instance breaking a window at the front of the house.And this was clearly not a robbery; police found $100 in cash in the kitchen, a considerable sum at the time, said to be the proceeds of sales of soft drinks to people attending the circus.There were many baffling details to the case. Why, for instance, did Esther Pepitone not wake up while her husband was being assaulted in the bed next to her, his skull fractured in three places?"I sleep very heavily," she told Police Supertendent Frank Mooney. "I heard nothing until my husband screamed." With virtually no evidence, no witnesses and no suspects, there was little police could do.
One prevailing theory behind the Axman murders is that they stemmed from a feud between warring Mafia factions. Nine years before the killing of Mike Pepitone, he and his father, Peter Pepitone, were central figures in a killing described at the time as the culmination of one such vendetta.In April 1910, a man named di Christina was shot three times in front of a building owned by Peter Pepitone at Howard Avenue and Calliope Street. He died of his wounds.Di Christina had once leased the building from Peter Pepitone for a grocery, but when the lease expired Mike Pepitone took over the business and also lived at the location. Di Christina then opened a place next door.
Peter Pepitone confessed that he had fired the shot that killed di Christina, pulling the trigger of a sawed-off shotgun from the bedroom of Mike Pepitone as his son slept. There were no witnesses.Peter Pepitone, who was 53 years old, argued at trial that di Christina, a younger man, had attacked him on several occasions when he tried to collect debts. Pepitone was convicted of manslaughter.Before his sentencing, Pepitone's attorney appealed for leniency and made a sensational claim: after the verdict had been rendered, he had uncovered new evidence that di Christina was really Paolo Marchese, a man convicted of murder in Italy who was the leader of a "gang of bomb throwers, blackmailers and Black Hand," according to an account of his trial in The Daily Picayune.Peter Pepitone served five years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, but he was a free man when his son was slain 95 years ago.The dispute with di Christina, he told police after Mike Pepitone's murder, "was not an old-country feud" but the result of a simple business rivalry."No one would have wished to harm him," he said of his son.
After her husband's murder in Mid-City, Esther Pepitone started over. She moved with her children to Los Angeles in January 1921. And in September that year, she became Esther Albano when she married Angelo Albano, a man she had known from New Orleans. 
Just before the wedding, Angelo Albano had dissolved a business partnership with another New Orleans man, Doc Mumfre, who was living in San Bernardino. Mumfre was known by a long list of first names, including Joseph, Leone and Frank, and last names, among them Manfre, Monfre, Mumphrey and even Humphrey.
Mumfre was a pharmacist by day, but he led a double life: he was convicted in 1908 of tossing a bomb at a grocery store at the corner of Palmyra Street and Claiborne Avenue the previous December after trying to extort money from the owner, among numerous other scrapes with the law.On Oct. 27, 1921, two years to the day after the slaying of Mike Pepitone, Angelo Albano left home, "humming a happy tune," to buy vegetables for dinner, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times. He was seen by witnesses at the market and later made a withdrawal from the bank.And then he was never seen again.
A week or so after her second husband went missing, Esther Albano approached Mumfre and asked him if he knew anything about the disappearance, according to an account she gave later to the Times.
Mumfre's response seems to suggest he wasn't aware that Angelo and Esther Albano were married: "Yes. Albano has a big house and plenty money. He is being held for some of that money. His wife will be asked for it after things quiet down."
On Dec. 5, 1921, at about noon, Esther Albano was with three of her children at their home at 554 East 36th St. in Los Angeles when Doc Mumfre knocked on the door.
Esther Albano went to greet him.
"He placed his hand on his hip pocket and demanded $500 and my jewelry," she later told police. "He stated that if I did not give him the home he would kill me the same way he had killed my husband," apparently referring to Angelo Albano, Esther Albano believed.
Esther Albano went to her bedroom and got a .38 caliber revolver. She fired in Mumfre's direction, missing with her first shot. As Mumfre struggled to remove his own gun from his pocket, she fired again, hitting him.
She squeezed the trigger again. And again. She continued shooting as Mumfre slipped down the steps. After emptying the revolver, she grabbed a second .38 and emptied that one into Mumfre, too. He slid nearly to the bottom of the steps, lifeless, and any secrets he had died with him.
Then Esther Albano went to the grocery store next door and asked the man working there to call the police.
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The coroner's report -- using the name he went by in California, Leone J. Manfre -- indicates Mumfre was hit by eight bullets. "The cause of death was gunshot wound of the head, chest and abdomen, inflicted by Mrs. Esther Albano, but whether with homicidal intent or in self-defense we are unable to determine," it says. A .22 caliber pistol was found in his hip pocket.
Her first husband had been viciously murdered in their home. Her second husband had disappeared, never to be heard from again. And now, at the age of 42, Esther Albano found herself on trial for murder in the shooting death of an ex-con who she said had come to her home and threatened to kill her if she didn't give him what he wanted.
She poured money into her defense, and she took the stand and testified about how Mumfre threatened her life. And on April 10, 1922, after a jury had deliberated just 40 minutes, according to a report from The Associated Press, she was acquitted.
