The Butcher of Ursulines Street: The 1927 New Orleans Trunk Murders
by M.P. Pellicer | Noir Notebook
In the sweltering autumn of 1927, a gruesome discovery at 15 Ursulines Street plunged New Orleans into a state of terror. Uncover the gothic horror of the Moity sisters, a bizarre “phantom sailor” alibi, and the chilling legacy of a butcher who walked free.
Shadows in the French Quarter
During the 1920s, the French Quarter of New Orleans existed as a dense, working-class enclave—a stark contrast to its colonial grandeur. Following the Civil War, old wealth had migrated uptown to the garden suburbs along Esplanade and St. Charles Avenues to escape the industrial grime of sugar refineries and riverside warehouses.
Beginning in the 1880s, newly arrived Sicilian immigrants populated the affordable tenements of the Quarter, particularly near Esplanade Avenue. Along with this rapid demographic shift came a dark, quiet rise in violent crime.
On October 17, 1927, a domestic worker named Nettie Compass arrived at a second-floor apartment at 15 Ursulines Street for a routine cleaning. The moment she crossed the threshold, she noticed dark, smeared trails of blood. Terrified, she cried out for help, summoning two nearby men. Inside the cramped rooms, the trio stumbled into a slaughterhouse.
Two trunks sat in the center of the room, packing the dismembered remains of the two young sisters who leased the apartment.
The Grimy Room on Ursulines Street
The New Orleans coroner, Dr. George Roeling, determined that the killer had first incapacitated the women by striking them with a lead-weighted billy club. He then used a heavy blade, likely a machete, to decapitate them and sever their limbs. Although the sisters apparently slept when the assault began, deep defensive wounds on their hands proved they had fought desperately for their lives. Deep within a gaping wound on one of the victims’ backs, investigators discovered a gold wedding band.
To pack the torsos into the trunks, the killer had hacked away the arms and legs, scattering blood-soaked garments and severed human tissue across the floor.
The victims were sisters married to brothers:
Theresa “Teenie” Alfano Moity (26): Wife of Henry Moity, an ex-sailor and sign painter.
Leonita “Leonide” Alfano Moity (25): Wife of Joseph Moity, a former streetcar conductor
Only a few hours after the discovery, police arrested Joseph Moity at the Toulouse Street home of his sister, Ada Lecamu. Because Mrs. Lecamu corroborated Joseph’s alibi, proving he had spent the night of the murders at her residence, investigators redirected their gaze toward his brother, Henry.
Detectives quickly learned that Henry Moity had fled to a boarding house on Camp Street, seeking passage out of the port on an outgoing vessel. Police Superintendent Thomas F. Healy immediately alerted the captains of seven ships departing New Orleans, providing a distinct description: “Dark, bushy hair, very dark brown eyes, and tattoos on his arms depicting a flower with a lady’s face, and a nude woman.”
The Intruder and the Love Letters
As detectives hunted for Henry, a third figure emerged from the shadows of the tragedy.
Frank Kimmel, a man carrying a special officer’s badge, had spent months aggressively pursuing Mrs. Lecamu and her sixteen-year-old daughter, Mary. After Mrs. Lecamu barred him from the Toulouse Street house, Kimmel turned his obsessive attentions toward the Ursulines Street apartment, where the recently estranged Leonita Moity resided.
One evening, Joseph Moity had arrived at the apartment only to find Kimmel alone with his wife. When Kimmel drew a revolver and threatened him, Joseph called the police. The court convicted Kimmel of brandishing a weapon, fining him $15 or thirty days in the house of detention. Kimmel paid the fine, but before guards could release him, investigators searching the blood-drenched murder scene discovered a cache of passionate love letters Kimmel had sent to Leonita. Police immediately held Kimmel in his cell.
The Tale of the Phantom Sailor
The police dragnet soon closed around Henry Moity. Upon his arrest, Henry claimed that Theresa’s plans to abandon him had driven him to a frenzy of vengeance. He deeply resented his sister-in-law, Leonita, accusing her of corrupting his wife and facilitating her infidelities.
In a smoke-filled room before District Attorney Eugene Stanley, Coroner Roeling, Superintendent Healy, and Captain Theodore Ray, Henry spun a bizarre, self-serving tale:
He claimed his wife’s alleged affairs had shattered his mind. On the Wednesday before the murders, he allegedly met a mysterious Norwegian sailor near the docks who went by the name of “Erickson,” “Aronson,” or “Oakson.”
Later that afternoon, Henry met the sailor again at the corner of Peyfarré and Camp Streets. When Henry confessed his marital woes, the sailor reportedly replied, “I know what I’d do if I had two women like that. I’d bump ’em off.”
When Henry admitted he lacked the stomach for murder, the sailor offered his services: “I’ll do it for you if you get the tools. Get a meat cleaver, and we’ll pack the bodies up, dump them in the river, and no one will ever know. We can cart them away in a taxi.”
According to Henry, he bought a cane knife and a length of rope, hiding them behind his kitchen door. He then met the sailor at a saloon on the corner of Decatur and Ursulines Streets, where they drank themselves into a stupor.
Henry claimed he sneaked the sailor into the apartment, where the man hid under Theresa’s bed. While the children slept on a mattress in the adjoining room, the sailor waited for the sisters to fall asleep. He then crawled out, retrieved the hidden cane knife, and sliced through the neck of the sleeping Theresa.
The seasoned investigators in the room shuddered as Henry described the decapitation. He claimed the sailor then walked into the next room to slaughter Leonita before forcing Henry to help him dismember the remains and pack them into the trunks.
After the act, Henry Moity said a fear of the sailor came over him. He considered him a madman and left the house, but then returned when he feared the sailor would harm his children. The sailor had disappeared, and he took the children and left them at his sister’s house on Toulouse Street.
Henry Moity decided to look for the sailor and turn him over to the police, but he failed to find the man. He knew he would be blamed for the crime, so he decided to leave the city. Walking and bumming rides, he reached Bayou Lafourche but eventually was found by police.
Ironically, due to Henry’s actions, his three children were left in the care of Hope Haven Orphanage.
The Verdict and the Butcher’s Legacy
The prosecution easily dismantled Henry’s phantom sailor defense, proving cold-blooded premeditation.
The afternoon before the murders, Henry had told his housekeeper, Nettie Compass, that he intended to “take a pistol and shoot both of those bastards.” Nettie testified that although she saw Henry, the sisters, and the children leaving the apartment in high spirits later that evening, Henry had pulled her aside with a chilling warning: “Do not be frightened if you hear the children crying in the early morning.”
Furthermore, Dr. Roeling testified to the killer’s unsettling anatomical precision:
“The killer who decapitated Mrs. Henry Moity… knew enough not to try to cut through the bone, but to cut through the joint. The head of the defendant’s wife had been skillfully removed.”
This forensic detail pointed squarely back to Henry, who had previously worked as a butcher’s assistant in New Iberia.
Judges Frank T. Echezabal and J. Arthur Charbonnet tried the murders separately. Juries found Henry Moity guilty in both trials, resulting in two concurrent life sentences. On July 6, 1928, Henry entered the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola as Convict No. 18038.
Within six years, prison officials promoted the cooperative killer to “trusty,” allowing him to move about the grounds with minimal supervision. In the summer of 1944, during a routine errand to the local post office, Henry hailed a taxi, fled to Hammond, Louisiana, and boarded the Illinois Central Panama Limited train to Chicago.
Though the superintendent of the prison camps, George Provosty, confidently predicted Henry would return on his own, the fugitive remained at large for two years.
In 1946, St. Louis police detained Henry for suspicious behavior. He revealed his true identity, prompting his extradition to Louisiana. Shockingly, the Louisiana Pardon Board recommended his release the following year, and on March 26, 1948, Governor Jimmie Davis signed his official pardon. Just twenty-one years after the butcheries on Ursulines Street, Henry Moity walked out of prison a free man.
He relocated to California to start anew. Ironically, his son grew up to become a police officer.
However, age did not dull Henry’s violent pathology. In March 1956, a California court convicted him of assaulting his thirty-two-year-old common-law wife, Alberta Orange, after he shot her in the chest during an argument over money. Although originally charged with attempted murder, the court downgraded the offense because the prosecution could not definitively prove lethal intent. The judge sentenced him to one to ten years.
Just as in New Orleans, a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation deemed him legally sane. Henry Moity entered Folsom Prison, where he died on December 31, 1957, at the age of fifty-nine. Guards buried the Butcher of Ursulines Street in the prison’s barren cemetery.
Postscript: The Haunted Sausage Factory of 725 Ursulines Street
The horrific trunk murders of 1927 did not mark the first time that blood-soaked shadows fell upon Ursulines Street. Decades prior, a legend of “high strangeness” gripped the very same block, weaving a grim tapestry of murder, cannibalism, and madness that local ghost tours whisper to this day.
In the late 19th century, a young German couple, Mr. and Mrs. Hans Muller, arrived in the French Quarter. Seeking prosperity in their new home, they opened a sausage factory a few doors down from the future Moity crime scene, at 725 Ursulines Street. Though they appeared respectable and industrious to their neighbors, darkness festered behind the closed doors of their tenement.
Tiring of his wife, Muller brutally strangled her to death inside the shop. To dispose of the evidence, he dragged her body to the heavy sausage grinder, processing her remains into ground meat. For weeks, unsuspecting patrons bought and consumed the tainted sausages from his butcher shop counter.
His monstrous secret finally collapsed when a local customer bit into a hard, metallic object—a fractured piece of Mrs. Muller’s gold wedding band.
Before the authorities could even arrest him, retribution arrived from the spiritual plane. Mrs. Muller’s bloody, mutilated specter began appearing inside the shop, rising from the sausage vats with arms outstretched. Neighbors reported hearing Muller’s hysterical screams echoing into the street as the vengeful spirit relentlessly haunted his steps. The terrifying manifestations eventually drove Muller completely insane, prompting his confinement to a solitary asylum cell, where he ultimately took his own life.
Though the sausage factory has long since vanished, the old Muller residence at 725 Ursulines Street still stands, carrying the lingering chill of the “Sausage Ghost.”