The New Jersey Sea-Shore Slayings
Between September 1965 and August 1966, there were a series of unsolved murders along the Atlantic shore of Monmouth and Ocean Counties in New Jersey. There were indications that, in each case, the killer was the same man—though 40 years later detectives seem no closer to identifying him.
At 9 p.m. on 15 September 1965, 18-year-old high school senior Mary Klinsky left her home in West Keansburg to mail a letter to her fiancee in the post box at the end of her street. Seven hours later, her naked, battered body was discovered by motorists 60 miles away near the entrance to Garden State Park. The police said that she had been the victim of an “especially vicious attack”.
On 11 February 1966, the body of 17-year-old high-school dropout Joanne Fantazier found on the ice of Yellow Brook in Colt Necks Township. She was fully clothed and there was no sign of sexual assault. Again she had been fatally beaten. Her body was thrown over the side of a road bridge there, but the impact had failed to break the ice as the killer clearly intended.
A month later, Catherine Baker, aged 16, left her home in Edison Township, heading for the local bakery, just a block away. On 14 May, her partially clad body was found in a branch of the Metedeconk River, which ran through a remote area of Jackson Township. The cause of death was a vicious beating, resulting in multiple skull fractures.
The killer then changed tack. The naked body of Paul Benda, aged five, was discovered on 21 June. It was hidden in the high grass along an unmetalled road near Raritan Bay. The boy had been sexually abused and tortured with lighted cigarettes, before being killed with five strokes of an ice pick. The child’s clothes were found nearby.
On 7 August 1966, 18-year-old Ronald Sandlin was abducted from his job at a Lakewood service station. His body was dumped in a ditch in Manchester Township. He had been beaten to death with a tyre lever.
Three days later, the car of Dorothy McKenzie, aged 44, was found mired in the sand near a diner on Route 9, which runs through Lakewood. She had been shot. Her body was fully clothed and her pocket book lay untouched beside her on the seat. Although this murder seems unlike the others, the killer had already shown his versatility in the age and sex of his victim and whether he had sexually assaulted his victim or not. He had also used a variety of murder methods and could easily have swapped his ice-pick or tyre lever for a gun. Perhaps we will never know as the killer—or killers—remain at large.
New Orleans’ Mad Axeman
In 1918, New Orleans was thrown in a panic when a mad axeman stalked the streets. He has never been convincingly identified, much less caught.
It began early in the morning of 23 May 1918, after New Orleans barber Andrew Maggio returned home drunk. The previous day he had received the papers drafting him into the Army. He was off to fight in World War I and he was not keen to go. As a result, he went out drinking. It was nearly two o’clock when he got home to the rooms he shared with his brother Jake. He noticed nothing untoward, but then he was not in much of a condition to notice anything.
Andrew and Jake’s rooms were next door to the home of their married brother, Joseph Maggio and his wife of 15 years, Catherine. The two of them lived behind the small grocery store and bar they ran on the corner of Magnolia and Upperline Streets.
Jake was woken at about 4 a.m. by groaning. The sound was coming through the adjoining wall. Jake got up and knocked on the wall, but got no response. With some difficulty, he managed to wake Andrew. Together they went round to Joseph’s house. There was evidence of a break-in. A wooden panel had been chiselled out of the kitchen door. It lay on the ground with the chisel on top of it.
Entering the house through the kitchen, they headed for the bedroom, where they found Joseph lying on the bed with his legs hanging over the side. Catherine lay next to him. When Joseph saw his brothers, he tried to get up, but faltered. His brothers caught him. There were deep gashes on his head and he was barely alive. Quickly checking, they found that Catherine was already dead. She had suffered numerous blows to the head. Her throat was cut from ear to ear and the bed was soaked with her blood. The brothers called an ambulance. But it was too late. By the time it arrived, Joseph was dead.
The first policeman on the scene was Corporal Arthur Hatener. In an initial search of the premises, he found a pile of men’s clothing in the middle of the bathroom floor. An axe stood inside the cast-iron bathtub, leaning against one side of it. There was blood on the blade and in the bathtub, as if some attempt had been made to wash the murder weapon. In other accounts, the axe was found on the rear doorstep or under the house. In the bedroom, Corporal Hatener found a straight razor, lying on the bed. It too was covered in blood.
It was obvious that the killer had broken in through the rear door. In the bedroom, he struck Joseph and Catherine on the head with the axe. Then he had gone to work on Mrs Maggio’s throat with the razor, almost detaching her head. He had also used the razor on her husband’s throat before casting it aside. Perhaps he had been disturbed.
When the coroner arrived, he examined Catherine’s body and estimated the time of death to be between two and three in the morning. As the victims were removed, a crowd gathered outside to gawp. A woman who lived nearby stepped forward to tell detectives that she had seen Andrew Maggio outside in the early hours of the morning hours. Andrew and Jake were taken to the police station for questioning. Jake was released the next day, but Andrew remained in custody as the police learned that the razor used on Joseph and Catherine Maggio belonged to him. One of the employees at his barbershop at 123 South Rampart Street had seen him take it when he left the day before. Andrew Maggio said that he had taken it home to repair a nick in it. Although he had not mentioned it before, he then said that he had noticed a man going into his brother’s house at around 1.30 a.m., when he had got home. The police did not believe him and he remained their prime suspect.
Other evidence implicated Andrew Maggio. The police had established that the axe had belonged to Joseph and believed that the killer was familiar with the layout of the house. The door to the safe was open and the safe empty. A black cash box which was also empty was found in one corner of the room. The brothers said that Joseph always kept the safe locked. However, there was no indication that the door had been forced. Money in drawers and under Joseph’s pillow had not been taken, and Catherine’s jewellery, which had been wrapped up and hidden beneath the safe was still there.
Despite their suspicions, the police did not have enough evidence to hold Andrew Maggio and released him.
“It’s a terrible thing to be charged with the murder of your own brother when your heart is already broken by his death—when I’m about to go to war, too,” he told the
The paper had already caused a sensation by publishing a grisly photograph of the Maggios’ blood-stained bedroom.
The story then took a bizarre twist. About a block away from the Maggios’ small grocery store, the police found a strange message, written on the pavement in chalk: “Mrs Maggio will sit up tonight just like Mrs Toney.”
Although the handwriting was childish, it seemed significant, though no one was sure what it meant. Then a retired detective named Joseph Dantonio came forward. Seven years before, in 1911, he had investigated a series of axe murders in New Orleans. The victims had been Italian grocers. They had been killed in bed and, in each case, the murderer had broken in through a panel in the back door. The first victim had been a man named Cruti, who had no wife. The second, Rosetti was killed with his wife, as was the third, Schiambra. Schiambra’s first name was Tony and the police wondered if his wife was the “Mrs Toney” of the chalk message. Perhaps it was the women, not the men, who were the target of the killer.
The buzz in the Italian community was that the Mafia were responsible. Like the 1911 victims, the Maggios were Italian. Perhaps they had not paid their “dues”—the protection money extorted by the crime gang operating in the city. Perhaps they had borrowed money from a Mafioso and had not paid it back. There was only one way the
