HISTORY LESSON: Detroit’s 1929 Axe Murders: The unsolved case of Benny Evangelist and his family

When Vincent Elias pushed open the door to 3587 St. Aubin Street on the morning of July 3, 1929, he expected to talk lumber, not look at death. The house was quiet, the air stale, curtains drawn tight against the summer light. Elias called out for his employer — Benny? — but there was no answer. He stepped into the front room, then into the small office beyond, and stopped breathing.

At the desk sat Benny Evangelist, fully dressed, his hands folded neatly across his chest. His head had been severed and placed between his feet. Blood streaked the floorboards and pooled under the chair. Lying in the pools of blood were images of a baby lying in a coffin.

Upstairs, Elias found what he would never forget: Benny’s wife, Santina Evangelist, her head hanging by a strip of flesh, and the couple’s four children — Angeline, Margaret, Jean, and Mario — each bludgeoned as they slept.

The oldest girl lay near the doorway, one arm hacked off, as though she’d tried to fight her way out. Elias staggered out of the house on the City’s east side, and by the time police arrived, the neighborhood had already filled with people. Hundreds of onlookers pressed onto the porch, climbed window ledges, and eventually forced their way inside.

Within hours, Detroit’s most horrifying crime scene had become a public exhibition, and any hope of solving it was already fading.

Evangelist was not a typical murder victim. Born in Naples in 1885, he moved to Philadelphia in 1904 to live with his brother and began experiencing nightly visions between midnight and 3 a.m.

The revelations cost him his brother’s support, and Evangelist ultimately moved outside of Philadelphia, where he began practicing a Germanic folk religion called Powwowing. He quickly gained a following among the superstitious and desperate, earning him the nickname “Benny the Preach”

By the 1920s, The Preach had moved to Detroit, where he built houses by day and healed souls by night. For a ten-dollar fee, he offered readings and “psychic killings” meant to drive out evil spirits. By the time the Evangelist family moved to St. Aubin Street, he was making about twice as much as the average assembly line worker.

He published a 376-page book, The Oldest History of the World, and filled his basement with an illuminated altar: wax figures suspended from wires, orbiting a glowing electric “sun.”

He was a curiosity, a sideshow, and, in some circles, a prophet who had grown too rich and too strange for his own good.

Detectives who arrived that morning were met by chaos. The crowd was so thick that they had to fight their way to the door. Inside, everything was contaminated: handprints smeared across walls, footprints in the blood. Reporters took photographs before evidence technicians could take notes. By nightfall, there was no chain of custody, no preserved scene.

Police managed to lift a fingerprint from a doorknob and noted a bloody footprint leading toward the stairs. Both would prove useless.

With the crime scene ruined, detectives were left with more rumors than evidence. Each new theory promised answers, but none stood up to closer inspection.

One theory pointed to a mysterious delivery. Officers learned that Evangelist had expected a lumber delivery that morning and planned to pay in cash. But there was no lumber and no cash. Could someone have lured him into a trap?

Another theory pointed to the Black Hand, the old Italian extortion ring that had once terrorized immigrant neighborhoods. Among Benny’s papers, police found letters demanding money, signed with the group’s familiar handprint emblem. But when talking to those familiar with the dealings of the crime syndicate, they found the Evangelist murders too gruesome even for them.

Next, the police focused on Angelino Aurelius, a former associate from Pennsylvania who had once murdered his own children with an axe before escaping from an asylum. He was supposed to have died in a train crash, but it was almost impossible to identify the body. It made for great headlines, but there was no record that Aurelius had ever come back to Detroit.

The final theory was the most unsettling: that Benny had somehow foretold or staged his own death. In The Oldest History of the World, one of his characters decapitates an enemy and places the head at his feet, exactly how Benny was found. Some claimed it was a prophecy fulfilled, while others claimed it was a ritual gone wrong. But it explained nothing about the rest of the family.

Ultimately, investigators assumed that someone who had felt wronged by the Prophet had returned for vengeance. And soon, an Italian American police officer would seemingly validate this view.

Michael Larko was a member of a special Detroit Police squadron tasked with stamping out crime in the Italian community. He, seemingly out of nowhere, was put into contact with a prisoner in Windsor who had a connection to Evangelist.

According to Larko, the prisoner had an ailment that was stopping him from getting work. Out of desperation, he began visiting Evangelist in his healing basement, paying $10 each time. Temporary relief would be followed by excruciating pain, and a follow-up returns to Evangelist. Eventually, the prisoner’s savings were gutted, and he felt no better than before. Larko claimed that this man finally had enough and murdered Evangelist on the morning of July 3.

But nothing could corroborate this story. Ultimately, it was discovered that Larko was in crippling debt and fabricated the story in an attempt to receive the $4,000 reward that had been promised for information leading to an arrest. The case remained unsolved.

And it stayed this way until six years after the murder.

Umberto Tecchio and Angelo Depoli were frequent guests at the Evangelist home and two of the original suspects. They lived together in a boarding house on the east side and were seen there on the evening of July 2. Tecchio, just one day before the murders, had been seen at the Evangelist’s house. Both men were brought in for questioning, and they offered matching alibis: they’d been drinking at night and then went back to the boarding house, each vouching for the other.

In their home, police found an axe and a banana knife. But the axe’s blade rusted and dulled, and there was no blood on the banana knife. Ultimately, Tecchio and Depoli were let go.

After Umberto Techio died in 1934, his ex-wife contacted the police. She said that Tecchio undoubtedly killed the Evangelist family and that she knew what weapon was used. How did she know this? She had been in the Evangelist’s office for healing multiple times, and above his desk were two machetes. Machetes that the police didn’t know about.

Her account was bolstered by two independent witnesses. A boarding-house resident recalled Tecchio ranting about Benny the night before the murders, then returning home around 7 a.m. carrying a heavy bag. Frank Costanza, a paperboy, said that on the mornings of the murders, he saw a man resembling Tecchio leaving the house at dawn.

It was the first time the puzzle pieces aligned. The timing, the motive, the knowledge of the missing machetes — all pointed to Tecchio. But, unfortunately for investigators, he was already dead.

In 1935, Detroit police filed their final report: unsolved.

The fingerprint was never matched. The shoeprint didn’t have a match. The missing blades were never found.

But within the department, few still believed in mystery. The consensus was unofficial but certain: Umberto Tecchio did it.

The green-and-white house on St. Aubin Street didn’t last long. Neighbors called it cursed. In an ironic twist of fate, it was turned into a funeral parlour before ultimately being torn down in the 1940s.  

Today, the lot that once housed Benny Evangelist’s ministry and was home to one of the City’s most gruesome murders is just an empty lot with a dark history poking through its weeds.