BIRMINGHAM, Alabama -- Bernard Vigilant returned home from a play -- Channing Pollock's "The Fool" -- to a gruesome scene.

It was Oct. 23, 1923 and inside the Southside grocery store where they lived and worked, Vigilant's wife, Juliet, had been struck in the head with a meat cleaver and her throat cut ear to ear. She died the next day.

Juliet's mother, 65-year-old Elizabeth Romeo, had been struck in the head with a cleaver and killed while she slept in a bed with the Vigilant's 3-year-old daughter Caroline. The child was not harmed.

The horrific murders were among more than a dozen over a four-year period linked to a gang newspapers dubbed "Birmingham's axe wielding fiends."

It is one of the bloodiest, least remembered chapters in Birmingham history.

Those attacks left 18 people dead and 16 injured between 1919 and 1924, although it is very likely the crimes were committed by multiple assailants and many of the cases unrelated. Those facts did not stop the spree of violence from creating panic in the streets of Birmingham.

The attacks typically targeted immigrant merchants working in their shops. In most cases, owners were struck down with axes and hammers, apparently as they filled customers orders.

The case hinted at the racial discord that would dominate the city for decades to come as blame quickly fell on the black community, which regularly endured violence in the form of lynchings and floggings at the hands of white men but without the widespread attention the ax cases received.

The slayings and subsequent trials also made national news and were described by The Birmingham News as the "greatest crime mysteries in the history of the South."

In a city that struggles still with violent crime, the story has largely been forgotten, but at the time a frenzy developed among citizens and the courthouse was packed with people seeking gun permits.

"I want to appeal to the people of Birmingham not to give way to hysteria over recent axe murders," public safety commissioner W.B. Cloe pleaded in a statement to The News.

Police scurried to make arrests. While suspects were convicted in several of the cases, including the Mantione case, police and prosecutors later made public statements that laid the entirety of the violent scheme at the feet of five suspects -- all black -- who reportedly gave drug-induced confessions at the Birmingham City Jail.

The News quoted police officials as saying every black man with a criminal record was a suspect, even though many victims didn't live to describe their assailants and many survivors refused to cooperate with police even in their dying moments.

In several cases, however, victims and witnesses did tell police the attackers were black.

The Ku Klux Klan marched through Avondale in response to the attacks and was welcomed by Birmingham Police Chief Fred McDuff who said their presence might "stop the crime outbreak."

Desperate for clues early in 1922, police were said to have followed a tip a Montgomery man said came to him from a Ouija board. A group called the Italian Protection Association formed in response to the slayings.

A Birmingham News editorial suggested merchants don World War I-era military helmets to protect their heads as they closed their shops.

The attacks were at the forefront of the public's mind in December 1923 when The News reported the drug-induced confessions of five black people in several of the crimes. With those confessions, police said they had solved more than two dozen assaults, including some that bore little resemblance to the merchant ax assaults.

This Jan. 27, 1922 Birmingham Age-Herald drawing depicts the public image of the killer, who by then had been nicknamed "Henry The Hacker."

Also, axes were not used in every case as police linked attacks with shovels and hammers to the "axe gang."

And while robbery accompanied many of the attacks, authorities laid blame on a band of "Negro vigilantes" seeking to stop "the intermingling of the races," newspapers reported.

"The motive is quite obvious when you stop to remember that in several instances resentment against miscegenation was quite obvious," Jefferson County Sheriff Thomas A. Shirley told the Birmingham Age-Herald newspaper in 1923.

The crimes Shirley spoke of, two attacks on interracial couples that left three people dead, were lumped in with the ax cases although police descriptions of those incidents had little in common with the assaults in merchant shops.

Four years of ax attacks

The first ax attack occurred on Nov. 28, 1919, when merchant G.T. Ary was fatally assaulted at his 801 13th St. S. store. The second fatal assault came in late December 1919 when John Besler was found bound and gagged at the downtown store he ran for more than 25 years.

More than a year passed before the next attack. In that third assault, C.C. Pipkins was struck with an ax, but survived, on March 5, 1921.

There were nine more attacks in the next 11 months. These attacks injured eight people and killed five others.

Several subsequent attacks differed greatly from the assaults on merchants but police statements and newspaper reports linked them to the ax murders. These cases, assaults on interracial couples, were dubbed "alley murders."

Meanwhile, the assaults on merchants intensified in both frequency and violence, with seven people murdered and two others injured inside Birmingham shops between November 1922 and October 1923.

Among those killed in that period was 31-year-old Charley Graffeo, slain in his grocery store at 1500 7th Ave. N. on May 28, 1923.

One of Graffeo's descendants, Jefferson County Circuit Judge Mike Graffeo, said he vaguely recalled his father and grandfather, both of whom are now dead, discussing the killing many years ago, but it wasn't until he was contacted for this article that Graffeo knew the case was linked to other slayings.

The next two attacks came in the spring 1924. One of those was committed by a confessed copycat killer, police said.

The last fatal attack came March 19, 1924, when Clem Williams, a black miner who delivered The News in the Overton mining camp, was found with his head split open and an ax on his chest at his kitchen table.

An injection of truth?

Birmingham police proclaimed an end to the reign of terror after a 19-year-old black woman named Pearl Jackson reportedly gave a "free will" confession to the Graffeo slaying and the murders of Luig and Josephine Vitellaro, the News reported.

Shortly before he died, Luig Vitellaro refused to identify his attacker and police at first said "minor clues" pointed to a group of white men.

The "free will" aspect was important because Jackson, her husband Odell Jackson, 21, Peyton Johnson, a 55-year-old black man known as "Foots," and two other black men, Fred Glover and John Reed, were in jail and had reportedly confessed to several of the attacks after being injected with the drug scopolamine, then thought by some to be a truth serum, at the Birmingham City Jail on Dec. 24, 1923.

The quintet reportedly had admitted to the Vitellaro slayings, the brutal slayings of Romeo and Vigilant; the deaths of Julius Silverburg and Louise Carter; and the slaying of John Robert Turner.

The gang was also said to have confessed to the attacks that injured Charles Baldone, wife, Mary, and 14-year-old daughter Virginia; J.H. Seay; Tony and Rosa Lorino; and a woman identified only as Mrs. Sam Zideman, The News reported.

In the end, the suspects were only convicted of the Turner slaying.

"The confessions were blood-curdling and concerned the most horrible series of crimes I've ever heard of," Jefferson County Solicitor James G. Davis, who would later prosecute the cases, announced after the drug-induced confessions.

Scopolamine, a drug that at the time was given to women while giving birth, was credited with giving police the clues needed to stop the reign of violence, but even then its effectiveness as a means of inducing an accurate confession was questioned. The U.S. Supreme Court in 1963 ruled using the drug in interrogations was a form of torture.

And while police said the arrests marked the end of four years of violence, for the five charged in the case it marked the beginning of a long and winding court case and the very real possibility of execution.

Also read: 'Birmingham's 'axe-men' and copycat killers left 18 dead, 16 injured from 1919 until 1924'

And: 'The trials of 'The Axemen of Birmingham': Drug-induced confessions lead to winding courtroom drama'