فصل 8

ICEBERG ANNA

Anna Marie Hahn

One summer day in 1937, three generations boarded a train heading west to Colorado Springs: a pretty thirty-one-year-old blonde, an adolescent boy with the face of a cherub, and a very sick old man. The boy ran up and down the aisle of the train, bringing glasses of cold water to the old man, who was parched and querulous and slept fitfully. Then, to amuse himself, the boy slumped down in his seat and began to draw. He sketched for a while and eventually presented his work to the man: a picture of a skull.

The sick old man looked at the drawing with terror in his eyes. “Witches!” he screamed, snatching the paper and holding it aloft. “Witches!” The little boy snickered at his dismay, and soon the whole train car was laughing, too. When he realized no one was going to help him, the old man folded up the paper and tucked it into his pocket, and then continued to sleep and wake and sleep again, as if he were struggling to fight through a nightmare.

Love at First Sight

Anna Marie Hahn had a tranquil, storybook childhood that was destroyed when adulthood descended on her too fast, like a lightning bolt, and a dark lover broke her heart. At least, that was what she wanted people to believe. She was born in 1906 in the idyllic Bavarian town of Füssen, which was perched on the edge of the Alps and known for its violin makers. Her father, George Filser, was a furniture manufacturer, and their family was religious, well-off, and respected. Anna was the youngest of twelve, though five of her siblings were dead. She was probably adored and spoiled by her entire family. Her mother, Katie, always admitted that Anna was her favorite.

Into this whimsical German town crept a man named Dr. Max Matscheki. He was a famous Viennese physician working on a cure for cancer—“one of the greatest doctors in the world”—and as handsome as a movie star. He wooed nineteen-year-old Anna sweetly; they swayed together on the dance floor as he whispered romantic promises into her ear. “It was the kind of love that every young girl thinks about, this love at first sight,” said Anna. “I was happy then.” Matscheki swore he would marry her, and eventually, borne along on this idealistic narrative, Anna tumbled into bed with him. Why not? She was secure in his love and excited for their future together. But when Dr. Max Matscheki found out that Anna was pregnant, he balked. There was someone else, he said. A wife in Vienna. “It was just like a mountain falling on me,” said Anna. “Not killing me but just smothering me and crushing me.” The story was raw and poetic. There was just one problem: no Max Matscheki ever practiced medicine in Vienna. The doctor was a figment, a shadow lover, a stand-in for some ordinary man. But the child was very real, and when Anna’s conservative family found out she was expecting, they were mortified. There was no hiding a teenage pregnancy in their small, pious town. As soon as Anna’s son, Oscar, was born, the family decided she should get out of their sight altogether—and leave for America.

Anna was actually happy to go after enduring the town’s gossip for nine long months. “I could no longer stand those things that people were saying about my misfortune,” she recalled. It took her two years to get a visa, and she left at age twenty-two, leaving her son behind until she could establish herself overseas. The trip across the ocean, away from Oscar, must have been excruciating. “The little pleasure that I have gotten out of life has been from my boy,” she said.

Until the end of her life, Anna spoke fondly of Dr. Max Matscheki. Perhaps she liked the way the story made her sound: a dreamy, innocent, sexually appealing girl, tossed madly about on the waves of a foreign love affair. A victim. The tale about Oscar’s parentage was one of her most cinematic lies—sex and a cure for cancer!—but it was also her most innocent. Nobody died because of it.

America!

To fund her trip, Anna wrote to her uncle Max Doeschel, who lived in Cincinnati, and asked him for a loan. The two weren’t close—in fact, Doeschel had never heard from his niece before. Still, he sent her $236 and waited, unsure what sort of person to expect. Later, Anna would boast that he sent her a mind-boggling $16,000. But she was always lying about money.

Anna arrived in Cincinnati in February 1929, a “pretty blonde” who spoke English well. She contracted scarlet fever almost immediately and was sick for several months, but by April she was healthy enough to find employment at a hotel. As soon as she began making money, she started behaving like a different person. Doeschel and his wife were confused by her generous income—she “was more than able to take care of her own financial needs”—especially since she hadn’t offered to repay their loan yet. She had a habit of making extravagant purchases and then acting secretive about them, as though to disguise the fact that they were “too expensive for a housework girl.” She even told them she was building a house, which didn’t make any sense. How in the world would she be able to afford that? But logic be damned: Anna wanted to be seen as the sort of person who could build herself a house if she wanted to.

At the hotel where Anna worked, she met a mild, mousy figure named Philip Hahn. He was no romantic Viennese doctor, but she liked that he promised some sort of safe harbor. “He was nice to me and said he loved me and wanted to marry me,” she said. Then again: “I was afraid at first when he talked about marriage.” When Hahn agreed to act as Oscar’s father, Anna finally relented, and the two married a year later. By July 1930, Anna was ready to go back to Germany and get her son.

Her aunt and uncle were blindsided when Anna returned to Cincinnati with a tiny blond boy in tow, since she’d never mentioned him before. Fed up with her lies and weirded out by her behavior, the two eventually decided to cut all ties with her, just as her nuclear family had done back in Germany.

The United States had already begun its sickening economic collapse into the Great Depression, and Anna’s thoughts turned ever more toward money. She was addicted to betting on horse races, and often signed bad checks when she lost wagers. She opened a restaurant with her husband and then tried to burn it down for insurance money. She tried to burn down her own house for the same reason. Perhaps money fed into some huge romantic delusion she had, the same delusion that led her to insist that her uncle had sent her $16,000 for her trip to America—a fairy-tale amount, implying wealthy, indulgent relatives and a luxurious trip across the Atlantic. Regardless, gambling and arson soon stopped satisfying her, and she began to look for bigger game.

Today, some evolutionary psychologists have theorized that male serial killers are “hunters” while females are merely “gatherers,” sensibly collecting resources from their victims instead of doing it out of a deep and unslakable thirst for violence. Anna may have technically collected money from her crimes, but she was a hunter to the core. She set her sights on her victims like she was looking through a rifle scope and stalked them with heartless, single-minded purpose. And like a true predator, she preyed on the weak. She was actually kind of a sloppy criminal, but her victims were lonely and innocent and easy to fool. They thought the rest of the world had forgotten about them, and wanted desperately to believe that the blonde woman bending over them was something like an angel.

“My Girl”

One of her earliest paramours was a man named Ernest Kohler, her sixty-two-year-old landlord. Kohler was the owner of a large, lovely house, and in 1932 he was renting two of the rooms to the Hahns and another to a doctor who never locked his office. Sometimes Anna would sneak in and forge prescriptions for narcotics on the doctor’s blank prescription pads. But mostly she flirted with Kohler.

Kohler died suddenly on May 6, 1933. His death was a windfall for Anna. He left her his beautiful old house, valued at $12,000, plus a car, $1,167 in a savings account, and heaps of expensive antiques. Sure, it was a bit awkward when the coroner’s office received several anonymous phone calls insisting that Kohler had been poisoned, but Anna carefully explained that no, he’d died of esophageal cancer. The coroner gamely checked his esophagus, found no poison, and sent Kohler to the crematorium in peace.

For Anna, this was the perfect relationship. She liked her men elderly and lonely and preferably German, so they could bond over their shared heritage. These men were usually retired (which meant they were potentially sitting on healthy piles of cash) and neglected by society (which meant they were especially vulnerable to her charms). She offered herself up to them as a sort of attendant-cum-girlfriend, willing to nurse, cook, or flirt at the drop of a hat.

These men must have pinched themselves: there they were, sitting around in their lonely bachelor apartments, and suddenly this golden creature appeared at their doors, willing to laugh at their jokes and cook them decadent, nostalgia-inducing meals. Sometimes she would even let them kiss her, and soon enough the men found themselves throwing around words like “engagement” and “honeymoon.” She was a miracle, really. A second lease on life. And such a treat to look at: vivacious, with big hazel eyes and a delicate beauty that was hard to capture on film.

Anna’s next male friend was a sixty-three-year-old coal dealer named George E. Heis, who called her “my girl” and devoured her Hügelsheimer Pfannkuchen, the Bavarian pancakes she whipped up for him. When Anna coyly informed Heis she had divorced her husband (lies!), the smitten man began to drop hints about marriage.

What was Philip Hahn doing all this time, anyway? He had become a very minor character in the play of Anna Hahn’s life. He disapproved of her friendships with elderly men, but Anna ignored his protests. She poisoned one of his meals once, but her attempt was so halfhearted we can only surmise that Hahn meant nothing to her; he wasn’t even important (or rich) enough to kill. Hahn, who became violently ill after the meal, suspected that she’d tried to murder him, and, understandably, their marriage began to cool. But he stuck around, perhaps for Oscar’s sake.

Back at Heis’s apartment, Anna often sidled up to her aging paramour with innocent little requests for money, and he lent to her willingly—sometimes the cash out of his pocket, sometimes money from his business, the Consolidated Coal Company. By the time her “loans” reached two thousand dollars, the company’s credit manager popped up, demanding an explanation. Heis was forced to admit that he had a pretty new girlfriend and couldn’t say no to her. The credit manager, impervious to the madness of love, began pressuring Anna to repay her loans.

This was something of a reality check for Heis. He began looking at Anna with colder, more dispassionate eyes, and he realized that not only did Anna ask him for money all the time, but her cooking often made him feel sick. In fact, some days he could barely get out of bed. Heis ran his suspicions past the credit manager. Was his girl trying to poison him? The next time Anna showed up with her signature dish—spinach sprinkled with white granules that seemed to be salt—Heis told her that he wanted his two thousand dollars back, and that he never wanted to see her again.

Heis had no idea he was effectively signing death warrants for Cincinnati’s other aging bachelors, but his demands forced Anna to speed up her hunt. At the end of 1936, she met Albert Palmer, seventy-two, and they bonded over their mutual love of betting on horse races. Like Heis, Palmer called Anna his girl and devoured her cooking. They planned a trip to Florida together. She left him cloying little notes that probably drove him wild: “My Dear Sweet Daddy,” ran one note, “I’ll see you tomorrow then with all my love and a lot of kisses. Your Anna.” She sweet-talked him out of two thousand dollars, which she used in part to pay Heis.

But eventually Palmer, too, grew wise. He began to ask Anna if there was any way she could start repaying her loan to him, and she responded by serving him dinners that wrecked his health. He may have also overheard neighborhood gossip about Anna’s recent affair with Heis. Hurt and furious, Palmer gave Anna an ultimatum: she could either repay the two thousand dollars right away, or she could become his girlfriend—permanently and exclusively. Anna never had to make that choice, because on March 26, 1937, Palmer died of what appeared to be a heart attack.

Anna unearthed her next benefactor by showing up at a random apartment building and boldly asking a woman if “any old men lived here.” When she found out that a German immigrant named Jacob Wagner was renting one of the apartments, she told the suspicious tenant that oh, yes, that’s right, Wagner was her uncle—even though she hadn’t known his name minutes before. She then slipped a note under his door, organized a meeting, and hit it off with Wagner immediately. “I have a new girl,” Wagner boasted to a pal. His new girl often asked him for loans and assured him she was good for it by showing him a forged bankbook that indicated she had over fifteen thousand dollars in the bank. Was the number any connection to the imaginary sixteen thousand from her uncle? Maybe that was her dream amount: a number she associated with stability and fairy-tale happiness.

Anna was getting sloppy. She was juggling multiple men, some of whom moved in the same circles as others. Her requests for money were becoming bizarre—if she really did have fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, why would she have needed a loan?—and she was now baldly hunting for victims by asking strangers where she could find “old men.” But that was Anna’s genius: targeting the isolated. She certainly made some people suspicious—the woman at Wagner’s apartment remembered her weird question forever—but for the most part, there simply wasn’t anyone around to care.

While Anna pursued Wagner, she killed again for the low, low price of eighty dollars and a rabbit fur coat. She befriended an elderly widow by dressing up in a fake nurse’s uniform and offering her services, and then stole the valuables that the widow kept under her bed. (“I just loved to make old people comfy,” Anna said later.) She bought herself a beautiful coat with the profits and offered to find the “culprit” if the unsuspecting widow paid her eighty dollars. Afterward, she finished off the poor woman with a dish of poisoned ice cream.

Back at Wagner’s apartment, things were getting creepy. Wagner began to look askance at Anna when his bankbook went missing, but Anna assured him she’d done nothing wrong and placated him with well-seasoned food and drink. Soon enough he was in the hospital, “semi-conscious, retching with pain, and in a state of shock and dying.” It was a horrifying sight. Arsenic can make its victims crazed with thirst; shortly before he died, Wagner begged a nurse for something to drink, whispering: “Ich könnte ein Fass voll Wasser trinken!” (“I could drink a barrel of water!”) Anna showed up at the nearest probate court like a classically trained actress ready to play Lady Macbeth. After she’d cried a sufficient number of demure yet heartrending tears, she suggested that perhaps one of the deputies should search Wagner’s apartment, just in case there were any, say, important papers lying about? Sure enough, the deputy found a handwritten will on Wagner’s mantel: I hereby make my last will and testament and I am under no influence. I have my money in the Fifth Third Bank. After my funeral expenses and all bills are paid, I want the rest to go to my relative, Anna Hahn. I want Mrs. Hahn to be my executor. I don’t want any flowers, and I don’t want to be laid out.

The will—surprise, surprise—was written by Anna herself, and the level of cold-blooded confidence Ms. Hahn displayed in directing authorities straight to her forgery is pretty impressive. She was a careless criminal, and part of her carelessness was due to her utter lack of empathy. Last will and testament? An old lady’s eighty dollars? Nothing was sacred to her; nothing got under her skin. And just like so many of her other con jobs, this one worked. At the time, authorities had no reason to suspect this charming, distraught blonde, and apparently nobody cared enough about Wagner to prove or disprove Anna’s place in his family tree.

Her rampage continued: a few weeks later, she befriended sixty-seven-year-old George Gsellman, a German-speaking Hungarian immigrant who considered himself to be a bit of a ladies’ man. After meeting Anna, he boasted to one of his exes, “You wouldn’t marry me, and now I went and got a young blonde German schoolteacher.” Anna only managed to charm him out of a hundred dollars, but that was a lot of money for Gsellman. In fact, Gsellman’s banker noted that it was the largest sum his client had ever withdrawn.

One night, an ecstatic Gsellman told two of his neighbors that he was getting married the next day! By morning, the bridegroom’s body was stiffening on his bed. There was a half-eaten meal on the stove, laced with eighteen grains of arsenic. This was far more than was necessary to kill a man, but who cared? Not Anna.

Witches

Poison is for weaklings, they say. The English poet Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650) may have been the first to coin the term “coward’s weapon,” but the opinion has not dissipated in the centuries since; even a character in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones recently sniped that poison was a gutless way to kill. Poison is sneaky, it’s slow, and you can poison someone without spilling a drop of their blood or awkwardly making eye contact with them midimpalement. As such, it doesn’t get a lot of cred for being scary. Poisoners simply don’t terrify people the way, say, disembowlers do.

But that’s unfair, because poisoning requires advance planning and the stomach for a drawn-out death scene. You need to look into your victim’s trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life. You have to play the role of nurse or parent or lover while you sustain your murderous intent at a pitch that would be unbearable for many of those who’ve shot a gun or swung a sword. You’ve got to mop up your victim’s vomit and act sympathetic when they beg for water. While they scream that their insides are on fire, you must steel yourself against the dreadful sight of encroaching death and give them another sip of the fatal drink. A coward’s weapon? Not so much. Poison is the weapon of the emotionless, the sociopathic, the truly cruel.

Anna Hahn was not a coward. She knew how to draw death out, to make it hurt like hell. Her final victim was a lot like the others, but for some reason, Anna was exceptionally nasty to this man. She poisoned him until he was writhing in his own feces. His last days were a nightmare sequence of pain and hallucination, and she killed him hundreds of miles from his home.

Johan Georg Obendoerfer was a semiretired cobbler, a widower, and the proud grandpa of eleven grandchildren. One day, he was surprised at his shop by a charming, blonde, German-speaking lady who dropped by to see if he could fix one of her high-heeled shoes. Perhaps Anna—who was still seeing Gsellman at the time—already knew what sort of man worked there, and the broken heel was just a ruse. Regardless, Obendoerfer fell hard for her.

After a few weeks of dating, Obendoerfer seemed like a changed man. He shaved off his mustache to appear younger, and he began dropping hints about getting engaged. Anna told him, coquettishly, that they should take a vacation together before she really committed. She claimed to own a beautiful home on a cattle ranch in Colorado, and she told Obendoerfer that they should bring Oscar, check it out—and if they liked it, maybe the three of them could move there for good. Obendoerfer loved the idea, so Anna quickly murdered Gsellman and began to plan the trip.

Obendoerfer had never been happier. A second life was opening before him like some sweet-throated flower: a bride, a marriage, acres of wild American land to call his own, and even a kid. On July 20, 1937, he packed his satchel and strode over to Anna’s house, grabbing a celebratory beer on the way. Anna had prepared a delicious dinner to kick off their journey—a dinner seasoned with those white granules with which she so loved to cook. By morning, Obendoerfer was so sick that Anna and Oscar had to help him into the cab.

The three of them pressed on anyway, taking the train from Cincinnati to Chicago—where Anna checked herself into a fancy hotel with Oscar and tossed Obendoerfer into a cheap motel room nearby—and then on to Denver, where they disembarked for a few days. On their first morning there, Anna and Oscar went to check on Obendoerfer and found him writhing in bed, splattered with feces and vomit. Anna pretended to soothe him by feeding him cool chunks of watermelon as Oscar watched, but Obendoerfer couldn’t keep anything down. So she left the man in his misery and busied herself with the tricky business of stealing his life savings.

Anna wrote a letter to his banker in Cincinnati, claiming that Obendoerfer was planning to move to Denver, wanted to transfer his money to the Denver National Bank, and needed one thousand dollars to tide him over in the meantime. For the next week, she haunted the Denver National Bank to see if the money had arrived, growing more and more frustrated as the days went by.

Meanwhile, Obendoerfer’s hotel room had gotten so disgusting that the housekeeping staff refused to go inside. After the hotel owner peeked in and saw Obendoerfer curled in a fetal position, moaning and surrounded by his own filth, he urged Anna to take him to the hospital. Anna scoffed that she barely knew the man. Then she bundled Obendoerfer onto a train to Colorado Springs.

At this point, Obendoerfer surely suspected he was being poisoned, but he was lost in a fog of agony. All he could do was beg for water and stare blankly out the train window. When Oscar showed him the skull drawing, Obendoerfer seemed to muster the strength to accuse the two of them—witches, witches!—but everyone simply laughed at his terror. He must have curled against the glass then, with the skull drawing folded next to his heart, wondering blearily how he had mistaken these witches for angels.

The fact that Oscar was right there next to the dying man is one of the creepiest parts of Anna’s story. Oscar probably didn’t understand the full extent of what was happening, but still, he saw it all. He smelled the vomit, he witnessed the old man’s agony, he watched his mother feed Obendoerfer chunks of poisoned watermelon. (Anna carried a salt shaker of arsenic with her, and would liberally “salt” Obendoerfer’s food.) With his soft curls, perfect features, and attentive, intelligent face, Oscar certainly helped Anna seem nonthreatening, even Madonna-like. So some people who knew him said he was a “mean little kid” who killed animals for fun and once shot a BB gun at his friend. So what? Maybe his mother kept him around because he made her look good.

In Colorado Springs, Anna and Oscar left Obendoerfer to fend for himself while they went sightseeing. When the two arrived back at the hotel, Anna noticed that the door to the owner’s private rooms was slightly ajar. Peeking inside, she saw two diamond rings sparkling on the dresser. She pocketed them, but as she was leaving the room, she ran smack into the hotel owner’s wife, who was naturally suspicious. Anna explained that she was simply curious how the rooms looked. The theft of those rings in broad daylight was a stupid, careless, greedy mistake on her part—and a fatal one.

With the rings rattling around in her pocket, she finally checked Obendoerfer into the hospital, registering him as a homeless person. He died there, without ever reaching the paradise he had been promised.

Cincinnati’s Number One Female Criminal

At the beginning of August 1937, police in Cincinnati opened a secret investigation into the death of Jacob Wagner after receiving a tip from one of his friends, who’d noticed a strange woman hanging around Wagner’s house in the days before he died. Meanwhile, detectives were heading over to Anna Marie Hahn’s place on a seemingly unrelated charge: the theft of two diamond rings, which Anna had pawned for $7.50 on her way back to Cincinnati.

When the police showed up at Anna’s doorstep, she protested her arrest loudly. At first, they took her in on charges of grand larceny, but arresting Anna was like tugging on a loose string—suddenly, everything seemed to be unraveling. They discovered that she had nursed Jacob Wagner right before he died, that she’d been in Colorado Springs around the time a Cincinnati resident named Obendoerfer died suspiciously, that she had poison hidden in the rafters of her house, and so on, and so on. This pretty jewelry thief was starting to seem like the biggest criminal Cincinnati had ever produced.

The day after her arrest, warrants of “fugitive murder and larceny” were signed against her by one Detective Walter Hart. In reaction, Anna combed her hair, smiled, and told the press they were welcome to take her photo. “Here I am, boys,” she said—blonde, hazel eyed, and icily calm. “Make this a good picture of me.” Was she afraid of all this accumulating evidence? She was not. “How can they make such a charge?” she asked. “I can face anything there is to come.” Mother’s Prayers

Something in Anna’s case appealed to the women of Cincinnati. It wasn’t that they empathized with her, per se, but they were desperately curious to see how she acted in court, and the fact that she was a mother touched their hearts. On the day of Anna’s arraignment, the courtroom was crowded with fifteen women to every man, women that had waited long hours outside the door to make sure they were the first ones inside. Anna showed zero emotion in the courtroom, but it didn’t matter. When Oscar ran up to whisper something in her ear, several of the women wiped their eyes and one juror sobbed openly.

The jury skewed as female as the audience. It consisted of eleven women and one very good-looking man, and the press quickly nicknamed the lot of them “the Petticoat Jury.” Journalists were understandably excited about this case, which was already shaping up to be fiery, sensational, and rife with opportunity for long editorials.

In fact, the only people who didn’t seem to care about the case were Anna’s siblings back in Germany. Upon being notified that their sister was arrested, they responded that they were “uninterested” in the case’s outcome and were going to hide the news from their aging mother so as not to upset her. Still, Anna convinced herself that one of her sisters would show up once the trial had officially started. “It would be a comfort to me to have some member of my family with me,” she mused.

Anna was thinking about her family a lot in jail, especially her mother. She sent her a telegram that read, “Just pray for me.” (Her siblings never bothered showing it to their mother.) During one of the prison’s Sunday services, she requested a hymn called “Mother’s Prayers Have Followed Me,” unaware of the irony: her mother had no idea where Anna was or what she’d been doing.

Other than Oscar and Philip Hahn, none of Anna’s family ever showed up to support her. They’d written her out of their lives a long time ago. They were officially “uninterested.” Not shocked, appalled, heartbroken, or righteously indignant—uninterested. Did that mean, perhaps, they were also unsurprised? Had they always detected a darkness in Anna? Even in her youth, did they sense her cruelness, her lack of empathy, and pull away from her as soon as they could drum up an excuse?

“That Woman Tortured Me with Tortures of the Damned!”

Anna’s trial was set for October 11. She would be tried for the murder of Jacob Wagner, because the prosecution thought his would be the easiest one to prove. They had the handwritten will and an expert who could prove it was forged. And they had the exhumation results, which showed that there was enough arsenic in Wagner’s body to have killed him twice over.

The prosecutor, Dudley Miller Outcalt, was the best in the biz, a brilliant orator with a flair for courtroom drama. The press adored his fiery opening statement, during which he declared that he would prove Anna Hahn “killed so many men that there is not another person like her on the face of the earth.” On the other side of the aisle, Anna’s defense team quaked; they had never handled a serious criminal case of any sort, much less a major murder case. Plus, one of their members, Joseph Hoodin, was suffering from a bad cold. Hoodin ended up being a rather pitiful figure; at one point, he declared that he was planning to bring out fifty-three witnesses to prove Anna’s innocence, but he was only able to deliver two. He eventually called the gig “a job nobody can handle.” In contrast to these intense, emotional lawyers, Anna was developing a reputation as an ice queen. Every time she appeared in court, she was impeccably turned out—her fellow prisoners, obsessed with their celebrity cell mate, would do her hair—with a gold cross around her neck and flat, emotionless eyes. In prison, she read the newspaper articles that tried to analyze the “phlegmatic enigma” of her personality, amused. Her denial was calm, consistent, and relentless. “They’ll never get a confession out of me, because I can’t confess to something I never did,” she told a reporter. “But I supposed the death of anyone past sixty anywhere in the country now will be laid to me.” Her calm seemed to mask a certain delusion, because things were not looking good for Anna Hahn. Arsenic had been found in the bodies of not just Wagner, but Palmer, Gsellman, and Obendoerfer, and on October 22, the judge declared that the prosecution could now admit the other poisonings into evidence, instead of just discussing Wagner’s murder. Witness after witness took the stand to skewer her. There was the tenant who remembered Anna inquiring if “any old men lived here,” the neighbors who talked about her abnormally unflustered attitude toward death, and bank employees with records of her suspicious financial behavior—bringing in checks that didn’t quite look right, and so on. Handwriting experts determined that Wagner’s will had been forged by Anna herself. A toxicologist studied Anna’s favorite summer purse and found grains of arsenic all over the lining. Doctors presented the horrified jury with the brains, livers, and kidneys of the murdered men, floating gruesomely in jars of preservative.

The prosecution’s star witness was George Heis, he of the poisoned spinach and the unpaid debt to the Consolidated Coal Company. He became known as their “living witness,” and his presence in the courtroom was ghastly and damning. Really, the prosecution could not have asked for a more incriminating visual: George Heis, skeletally thin, confined to a wheelchair, pointing at Anna with shaking hands and telling the jury that this was the woman who had tried to murder him in cold blood.

Finally, both Oscar and Anna took the stand. Oscar had been coached to give certain answers, and he spoke carefully: yes, he brought Obendoerfer water; no, he didn’t realize that the old man was dying. The boy only slipped up once, when he admitted that his mother had initially asked him to lie about meeting Obendoerfer on the train. Anna was even calmer than her son. The prosecution tried their best to crack her, but Anna wouldn’t crack. If she had a conscience, it remained buried deep inside her, invulnerable to remorse, rhetorical pressure, and the looming threat of a guilty verdict.

Outcalt’s closing remarks brought down the house. “Anna Hahn is the only one in God’s world that had the heart for such murders!” he cried to the jury. “She sits there with her Madonna face and her soft voice, but they hide a ruthless, passionate purpose the likes of which this state has never known!” Hoodin’s response was lackluster: sure, Anna wasn’t perfect, but then again, who was? He went on to claim that the prosecution couldn’t prove precisely how the arsenic got into Wagner’s body. No one bought the argument. Hoodin’s only stroke of genius occurred when he reminded the jury that Anna was a mother. As everyone in the courtroom wept, Hoodin urged them to spare her so she could return to her boy. Even Anna managed to drum up a tear or two.

But it was too late to humanize her. Outcalt stood up again to finish his speech, calling Anna sly, avaricious, cold-blooded, and heartless. And then he pulled out his grand finale. “In the four corners of this courtroom there stand four dead men,” he cried, and pointed at each corner as he bellowed their names: “Jacob Wagner! George Gsellman! Georg Obendoerfer! Albert Palmer!” The jurors were breathless. Outcalt continued in a thunderous voice. “From the four corners of this room, bony fingers point at her and they say to you, ‘That woman poisoned me! That woman made my last moment an agony! That woman tortured me with tortures of the damned!’” It was a brilliant rhetorical flourish: bringing the dead men to life in horrifying contrast with the accused, who sat there, pale and motionless, looking for all the world like she was carved out of wax.

The stunned petticoat jury returned the harshest verdict possible: guilty—without a recommendation of mercy. This meant that the death penalty was mandatory. As the ruling was read aloud, many of the jurors had tears standing in their eyes. Anna did not.

The True Anna

In December 1937, while her lawyers scrambled to find a way around the death penalty, Anna was moved to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, where a special cell was built to isolate her from the rest of the inmates. She was the only female prisoner there. At first, the matrons in charge of her were impressed by the tiny blonde woman. “She is the bravest woman I ever saw,” said the wife of the warden. Obsessive strangers wrote to Anna, offering to take her place in jail or asking if they could have her clothes after her execution.

It was there that Anna decided to write her “confessions,” and they are full of deluded excuses. A psychiatrist might spot a couple of classic psychopathic traits in the document, including “blame externalization”: she tried to pin her crimes onto various childhood sicknesses, accidents, and surgeries, and expressed a lot of confusion about why she did them, as though she were utterly nonresponsible for her actions. “I was sitting there hearing a story like out of a book all about another person,” she wrote. “I couldn’t in my mind believe that it was me, Anna Marie Hahn, who loved people so well and wanted friends all the time. God above will tell me what made me do these terrible things. I couldn’t have been in my right mind when I did them. I loved all people so much.” Her lawyers kept up the desperate battle for Anna’s life, claiming that she was “tried as a hunted animal,” because the introduction of the other murders as evidence had biased the jury beyond all hope. As Anna’s execution date loomed nearer and nearer, they took their protestations to the governor of Ohio to see if he would reduce Anna’s sentence to life in prison. Anna was convinced he would. On December 1, Oscar testified in front of the governor’s executive secretary, asking for his mother’s life as a Christmas present.

The sentimental display didn’t work. When Anna learned her final bid for life had failed, she collapsed, screaming, “Oh my God! I didn’t think he could do that to me! He should let me live for my boy!”

Anna had always been a shape-shifter. She had a psychopath’s charm: it could be directed with laser-like precision, and if she focused it on someone, they became convinced that she was warm, loving, vivacious. If she didn’t bother to charm someone—like her relatives, and various suspicious neighbors—she appeared secretive and devious, a “strange woman” who wore fake nurse’s uniforms and seemed weirdly unmoved when her elderly friends died. And now, with all hope gone, a new Anna emerged—wild, hopeless, completely undone. She would pace around her cell in the middle of the night, sobbing and chain-smoking cigarettes. At points, she would cry out, “My God! What about Oscar?” “In her last twenty-four hours,” reported one of the matrons who guarded her, “Anna Hahn changed from the poised, confident, proud, and even vain woman she had been continuously since she was first arrested into a little witch—a demon with a wild look in her eyes. When she knew the jig was up, she became the true Anna.” Beneath the Mask

The day before her execution, Anna and Oscar spent hours together. Anna couldn’t touch her lunch. When visiting hours ended, and the matrons began to hint it was time for Oscar to leave, Anna started kissing Oscar’s face repeatedly.

The matrons told her again that Oscar had to go. She ignored them and continued to kiss him. Finally, one matron had to physically tear Oscar away from her. “Don’t take him from me!” Anna screamed. Oscar wept as he was led from his mother’s cell, and Anna leapt at her matrons with such violence that she had to be injected with a sedative.

For years, Oscar had been her little blond sidekick, accompanying her on the most gruesome of adventures. He was the only family member who never left her. (Hahn, ever passive and forgettable, had slowly drifted out of the papers during the trial.) They say psychopaths don’t feel love, but her last moments with her son imply—if not love, then dependence, even obsession. Anna may have seen Oscar as an extension of herself, a tiny mirror she’d created with her shadow lover, an escape hatch. But at the end, she lost the willing little actor who kept begging and begging for her innocence, and then she was truly alone. He was adopted by another family, and they changed his name.

On December 7, 1938, Anna walked down death row, as condemned men wished her “good luck” and “God bless you” from their cells on either side of the corridor. “Goodbye, boys,” she responded. Her hair was disheveled, her face was grey, and she wasn’t wearing the gold cross that she’d worn throughout her trial.

The moment the door to the execution chamber opened, Anna collapsed at the sight of Old Sparky, the electric chair. It had never held a woman before. “Please don’t. Oh, my boy. Think of my boy. Won’t someone, won’t anyone, come and do something for me?” she cried, looking around the room at people who had no ability whatsoever to save her—the attending priest, the three physicians, the horror-struck journalists. “Isn’t there anybody to help me? Anyone, anyone. Is nobody going to help me?” Throughout her life, Anna Hahn had been utterly callous in the face of death. She could stare at a weakened old man, covered in his own vomit and poisoned by her own hand, and say that she barely knew him. She dealt in death as though it were just another one of her con jobs, like the forgery and the bad checks and the stolen rings. But now that death was staring back at her, Anna couldn’t take it. She had to be carried, thrashing and screaming, to the electric chair.

A guard attached one electrode to a shaved place on her head and a second electrode to her bare calf. As Anna locked eyes with the priest, the guard fitted a black leather mask over her face. The priest asked her to repeat the Lord’s Prayer after him, and she did so, crying behind the mask. Some of the journalists in the room repeated the prayer along with her. As she stumbled over the line “Lead us not into temptation but deliver—” three guards pressed three buttons, and an electric current surged through her body. The sound was “like a Fourth of July sparkler,” according to one of the journalists. Her body rose slightly out of the chair and her thumbs turned upward.

Afterward, the physicians checked for a heartbeat and found none. “I am surprised she broke,” said the warden, who had tears in his eyes. “I had expected her to remain cool.” She’d been cool for years, but Death, of course, would always be more cold-blooded. The warden noted that no convict in the prison’s history had ever been as terrified as Anna Hahn was when she faced the electric chair.