In the spring of 1884, a male laborer known as Brosnan was working along the Philadelphia Road in Gunpowder, Maryland, a rural area of Baltimore County. Among his fellow workers, he was distinguished by the nickname "The Blacksmith," a title that spoke to his trade or perhaps his strength. Like many in the area, he was likely employed by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, which was a major force of industry and labor in the region.
His life, however, was cut brutally short on April 1, 1884, in an act of violence that would go unsolved for two years and lead to a grave miscarriage of justice.
On that Tuesday, Brosnan was attacked and killed. The motive was robbery, the perpetrator a fellow laborer who saw him as a target of opportunity. In the immediate aftermath, however, suspicion fell on the wrong man. Another worker, an Italian immigrant named Juliano, was arrested and charged with the crime. Despite his innocence, Juliano was convicted of Brosnan's murder and sentenced to serve ten years in prison, a devastating outcome that took away his freedom for a crime he did not commit. For two long years, the true killer remained free, and an innocent man languished behind bars.
The truth of what happened to Brosnan only began to surface with the crimes of Antonio Nardello. An Italian immigrant born in Naples, Nardello had come to the United States in 1883 and worked as a laborer in several states, including Maryland. Also known by the aliases Frank Rosso and Michael Ross, Nardello continued his violent spree after killing Brosnan. In 1885, he murdered two other men, Antonio de Balbo in Cecil County, Maryland, and Carmine Rotunno in Washington, D.C. His methods were savage, ranging from shooting and blunt force trauma to cutting his victim's throat.
It was the murder of Carmine Rotunno that finally led to Nardello's downfall. After Rotunno's decomposing body was found in an abandoned shack near Howard University, the investigation quickly pointed to Nardello, who had been seen with the victim. He was arrested in August 1885 while attempting to flee Baltimore with a woman named Willa Morrow. Police found his bloodied clothing, and though he initially tried to implicate accomplices, he was ultimately tried and convicted for Rotunno's murder. On December 12, 1885, he was found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to death.
As the date of his execution neared, Nardello began to confess to his other crimes. Just a day before he was scheduled to be hanged, he admitted to his priests that he was responsible for the murders of Antonio de Balbo and the man known as "The Blacksmith" in Gunpowder, Maryland. He revealed that his goal on that April day in 1884 had been to rob his fellow laborer, Brosnan, and the robbery had escalated to murder.
On May 28, 1886, Antonio Nardello was executed by hanging at the D.C. Jail. His last-minute confession, while it could not bring his victims back, served to correct a terrible injustice. Based on his admission, Juliano was exonerated and finally released from prison, his name cleared after two years of wrongful incarceration. The confession closed the case on the murder of Brosnan, officially identifying him as the first of at least three victims of the serial killer. Little is remembered today of the man called "The Blacksmith," his first name and origins lost to the historical record, but the story of his death serves as a somber reminder of a killer's brutal path and the flawed justice that followed in his wake.
