| AFTERWORD

“The female of the species is more dangerous than the male.”

RUDYARD KIPLING

The Female of the Species

At the time of Anna Marie Hahn’s arrest on August 10, 1937, Cleveland had its own serial killer on its hands. Nine victims, or parts of victims, had been discovered by then, and the local newspapers dutifully recorded each grisly detail as it surfaced. Although there were known to be at least a dozen “torso murders” in Cleveland between 1934 and 1938, the case remains unsolved.1

The Hahn case attracted wider attention for several reasons. There was an arrest and trial. The killer was a vivacious woman and a German immigrant at that. Fresh in the minds of many at the time was the name of another German immigrant, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, executed in 1936 for the 1932 kidnapping and death of the infant son of Charles Lindbergh. The Hauptmann case was front-page news around the world.

Save for perfunctory obituary notices, at the time no notice was taken of the deaths Anna Marie wrought, despite the close-knit Over-the-Rhine community around which all of her victims lived. She went undetected in death after death, and with each life snuffed out avoided the notice of authorities. Jacob Wagner’s death was under investigation at the time of her arrest, but had it not been for the theft of the diamond rings in Colorado Springs, police might never have been able to charge her in any deaths whatsoever. But when all the pieces of the puzzle were spread out on the table, the case lit up the interest of newspapers throughout the land.

The speed with which the Hahn case moved along kept it front-page news. There were very few gaps in the story between the time of her arrest in August and her conviction on November 6, 1937. Thirteen months later, on December 7, 1938, she was executed. Sixteen months from arrest to death by electrocution. Four hundred and eighty-five days.

“There is no one definition for a female serial killer,” according to Robert K. Ressler, a criminologist and former FBI profiler who is widely credited with assigning the term “serial killer” to those who commit at least three murders at different locations, each one followed by a “cooling off” period. Dr. Katherine Ramsland, author of The Human Predator (New York: Berkley Books, 2005), defines serial killings as two or more in “distinctly separate incidents, with a psychological rest period between.” Others see serial killings as periodic multiple murders of virtual strangers to the killer.

A few identify Mary Creighton, who went to the chair in 1936 for the murder of her lover’s wife, as a serial killer, but most, including Ressler, do not. She was acquitted thirteen years earlier of two other murders.

It is remarkable how closely Anna Marie fits the profile of a female serial killer as defined in contemporary literature. For example, Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, author of The New Predator: Women Who Kill, notes, “Female serial killers murder their victims in plain view, for the entire world to see. But typically, no one believes that a woman could kill multiple victims, so the deaths are categorized as undetermined or unsolved. This is exactly why female multiple murderers can be considered more dangerous than male offenders: females can kill without anyone knowing what they are doing, and without anyone stopping them.”2

Of Schurman-Kauflin’s list of characteristics that make up the profile of women who kill, regardless of whether serial killings are a factor, Anna Marie matched all seven attributes:

Married or divorced
Woman less than thirty years of age (or early thirties)
Unemployed
A mother
High school dropout
Economically unstable
Unable to cope with stress.3

Schurman-Kauflin’s profile of female serial killers specifically also fits Anna Marie like a tailored suit:

Exhibit social competence
Worked at care-giving jobs
Planned the offenses
Controlled their mood during the crimes
Experienced a precipitating stress prior to the crimes
Showed interest in the news media after the crimes
Essentially hid the bodies.⁴

In Anna Marie’s case, the bodies were hidden by cremation or burial. Anna Marie also was aware of the procedures of an autopsy and familiar with her weapons, namely arsenic and croton oil. It is unlikely that she “showed an interest in the news media,” because, until she was arrested August 10, 1937, there were no reports of her crimes. Afterward, however, she both read newspapers and listened to the radio for news of what she had wrought. For a time, though, when prison officials thought she might be suicidal, they clipped out of the newspapers stories about her and denied her radio news broadcasts.

Schurman-Kauflin, who studied numerous female killers—but not Anna Marie—also found that such women befriend their victims and weigh “each person’s weaknesses and how those weaknesses can be exploited. Once a victim trusts her, the female serial killer ensures that the victim is vulnerable, and then she kills. She ensures that no one else is present and takes great pains to make sure that the body looks untouched.”5 Again, this was Anna Marie.

Michael D. Kelleher and C. L. Kelleher, the coauthors of Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer, arrived at much the same conclusions. They noted the financial gain, which was what interested Anna Marie:

 

The Profit or Crime (serial) killer is in the business of murder for an ancient and straightforward reason—to enhance her income. She is also organized, mature, meticulous, and manipulative. Although her numbers are not great among the ranks of female serial murderers, the Profit or Crime killer is a fearsome predator because of her intense motivation and highly dispassionate approach to murder. . . .

It is difficult to imagine a more callous murderer than the lethal caretaker who claims her victims in the name of profit. This serial killer deliberately seeks out individuals who are often completely dependent on her for care and support. In her morbid obsession with profit, she will carefully plan her crimes and dispassionately slay individuals who have come to trust her completely.⁶

 

Anna Marie was the eleventh woman in the United States to die in the electric chair. The first was Martha M. Place, who killed her stepdaughter in Brooklyn, New York. She was executed March 20, 1899, in Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York.

After Anna Marie, four years passed before the electrocution of another woman in the United States.

The State of Ohio abandoned death by electrocution in 2002. The last of 315 persons to die in Ohio’s electric chair was Donald L. Reinbolt, who was executed March 15, 1963.

Philip J. Hahn retired from Western Union in 1969 and died Sep tember 23, 1989, in a quiet suburb of Cincinnati at the age of eighty-six. He never spoke publicly about Anna Marie after her death.

Oscar Hahn dropped out of sight immediately after the death of his mother. Although the Filser family in Bavaria suggested that he return there, he reportedly was sent to live with a foster family in the Midwest and under an assumed name. Some believed he had been sent to the famous Boys Town in Iowa, but the school has no record of any thirteen-year-old, German-born boy from Cincinnati being admitted at the time. At the end of World War II, Oscar allegedly joined the U.S. Navy and was killed during the Korean War.

Judge Charles Steele Bell, who was elected to the Ohio Supreme Court in 1942, died at Good Samaritan Hospital on May 6, 1965. He was eighty-four.

Dudley Miller Outcalt became a Hamilton County Common Pleas judge shortly after the Hahn trial, but he left the bench in 1942 to serve as a colonel in the U.S. Army Air Force. On May 26, 1945, he was a passenger on a B-25 flight from Biloxi, Mississippi, to Washington, D.C., when the bomber crashed near the capital, killing all on board. He had celebrated his forty-eighth birthday on May 8.

Hiram Bolsinger Sr. died of a cerebral hemorrhage in front of the Norwood Baptist Church, Cincinnati, October 17, 1946. He was sixty-seven.

Joseph H. Hoodin, whose practice turned to corporate tax law, succumbed to a heart attack at his Cincinnati home on October 2, 1959. He was fifty-two.

George E. Heis, the “living victim,” lived until he was seventy-eight. He died in bed at his home on August 12, 1953.

Detective Captain Patrick H. Hayes retired from the Cincinnati Police Department on March 1, 1953, after forty-five years on the force. He died of natural causes March 8, 1969, at the Cincinnati home of a daughter. He was eighty-four.

December 8, 1938: The court dismissed the grand-jury indictment that charged Anna Marie with the murder of Gsellman.

November 1, 1974: Judge Rupert Dean, presiding administrative judge, Hamilton County Municipal Court, dismissed the fugitive from justice and grand larceny charges filed against Anna Marie on behalf of the Colorado Springs police. The charges, the first against her, had been on the court’s docket since August 14, 1937. It was the final legal action in the Hahn case.

 

 

1. For an excellent account of Cleveland’s torso murders, see In the Wake of the Butcher, by James Jessen Badal (Kent, Ohio: Kent State Univ. Press, 2001).

2. Dr. Deborah Schurman-Kauflin, The New Predator: Women Who Kill (New York: Algora Publishing Company, 2000), 13.

3. Ibid., 151.

4. Ibid., 162.

5. Ibid., 163, 164.

6. Michael D. Kelleher and C. L. Kelleher, Murder Most Rare: The Female Serial Killer (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 96–97.