Witnessing the execution of a convicted murderer is always a bit surreal and frequently a creepy affair, but few rival the 1938 execution of Anna Marie Hahn, a German-born poisoner who died in Ohio’s electric chair.
“Illogically, irrationally, she was pleading for her life with persons who could not grant it, crying out for mercy to persons to had no authority to be merciful,” the United Press reporter who witnessed the execution wrote.
“Don’t do this to me,” she cried after a matron and three guards carried her to the electric chair. Anna managed to walk into the death chamber in the old Columbus prison, but collapsed in a heap when she saw the chair where she would die.
“Ow! Please don’t,” she said as they tightened the straps. “Think of my boy! Can’t you help me? Won’t anyone help me?”
The first woman to die in Ohio’s electric chair, Anna was the second woman to be executed in Ohio (the first was in 1840). She was executed for the murder of 73-year-old Jacob Wagner of Cincinnati in 1937 and was suspected in several other poisoning deaths.
After her second marriage ended in divorce (her first husband, a Viennese physician, died before she emigrated to America), Anna began working as a live-in “nurse” to elderly men in the Cincinnati German community. Her first client, Ernest Koch, died on May 6, 1932, shortly after Anna began working for him. He left her a house in his will.
Her next client, Albert Parker, 72, also died soon after Anna began caring for him. Prior to Parker’s death, Anna signed an I.O.U. for $1,000 that she borrowed from him, but after his death it was realized that the document was either discarded by him while he was alive or simply “disappeared.”
Jacob Wagner died on June 5, 1937 leaving $17,000 cash to his “beloved niece” Anna, and Anna began caring for George Gsellman, also of Cincinnati. For her service to the 67-year-old man before his death July 6, 1937, she received $15,000.
George Obendoerfer was the last to die, on August 1, 1937 after he traveled to Colorado Springs with Anna and her 12-year-old son. Police in Colorado said Obendoerfer, a cobbler, “died in agony just after Mrs. Hahn had bent over his deathbed inquiring his name, professing she did not know the man.” Anna’s 12-year-old son testified at her trial that he, his mother, and Obendoerfer traveled to Colorado by train from Cincinnati together and that Obendoerfer began getting sick en route.
While Obendoerfer was dying, Anna was stealing diamond rings and money from the owner of the hotel where she was staying.
After Obendoerfer died under circumstances Colorado police thought were too strange to ignore (he had a high level o arsenic in his body), they inquired of their Cincinnati colleagues for information about Anna. The message ended up on the desk of Detective Lieutenant George Schattle, who soon found himself investigating the deaths and illnesses of several people connected to Anna Anna. It turns out that there were 11 strange deaths and four illnesses — each with a connection to Anna.
George Heiss was one of the very few men who knew Anna who survived her ministrations. After Anna served him a mug of beer, he said a couple of house flies had sampled the brew and drop dead on the spot. Anna refused to share the drink with him and he ordered her from his home. However, Heiss was partially paralyzed from previous murder attempts.
Philip Hahn, the husband who refused to allow Anna to insure his life for $20,000, was also lucky. While he was fighting with Anna, her son was trying to drown out the noise by listening to the radio. It failed to work and Philip opened up the back of the device, only to find a bottle of poison hidden inside. He kept it and later turned it over to police.
Anna went to trial for Wagner’s murder in November 1937, adamantly expressing her innocence and supremely confident that she would be exonerated.
“They’ll be accusing me of stealing the moon next,” she told one reporter covering her trial.
The jury convicted her of murder based on the circumstantial evidence and Anna was sentenced to die. Her appeals fell on deaf ears, just as her pleas did on December 7, 1938.
After futiley begging for her life from the prison chaplain and the warden, Anna began reciting the Lord’s Prayer with the minister. The warden gave the signal and as she began the line “Deliver us from evil,” the lethal voltage hit her and she tensed in the chair.
In a minute Anna Marie was dead.