Anna Marie Filser arrived in New York on February 11, 1929, with little baggage and little secrets.
On the deck of the SS Munchen, she pulled her cloth coat closely around her, leaned on the shoulder-high port railing, and took a deep breath of the frigid air. As the liner churned slowly through the dark water of the harbor, a cold wind whipped her short blonde hair and her Bavarian patterned scarf. Beyond, in the early dawn, Anna Marie could just make out the Statue of Liberty, its torch burning brightly. Soon New York City’s skyline came into view, too. Here, in an America still reveling in the Roaring Twenties, would be a new beginning for her.
As a child, Anna Marie had had a pious start in life. She was born June 7, 1906, the last of a dozen children—nine of them boys—of Georg and Katharina Filser. They raised their family in the idyllic Bavarian community of Fuessen, a few miles north of the snowcapped Alps. Nestled beside the Lech River, which flows north and into the Danube, the little red-roofed resort town sits at the entrance to “the king’s nook,” so called because of its proximity to the towering, white Neuschwanstein Castle, the last residence of King Ludwig II of Bavaria.
Fuessen also was a center of Catholic learning and craftsmen, some of whom made world-class lutes and violins. Georg Filser, a respected citizen, was a craftsman—a cabinetmaker and a furniture manufacturer. He and his wife, devout Catholics, raised their family in the church the Filsers in Fuessen had supported for generations.
At the time of Anna Marie’s birth, her parents had lost three children, two boys and a girl; all died at an early age. A fourth child, the eldest boy and one of five brothers to serve in the German army during World War I, was killed in action.1 Anna Marie’s brothers liked having a little sister in the comfortable home on Kempter Strasse, but she was closest to her only surviving sister, Katti, and to her mother.
Thoughts of her family and past were on Anna Marie’s mind as the small transatlantic liner made the twelve-day crossing from Bremen, Germany, docking at Manhattan’s Morton Street Pier shortly after eight that frosty Monday morning in February. Anna Marie was used to having life her way. As the youngest, she often escaped with but a mild rebuke when she strayed from her parents’ mark, which was quite often in her teenage years. Sneaking out a window at night to attend teen parties, for example, tested her parents, yet they allowed her liberties not granted her siblings. “Annie” was her mother’s favorite.
Still, mother and father saw to it that Anna Marie attended church and a parochial school where nuns prevailed as teachers. A quick if somewhat inattentive student, Anna Marie did well in home making skills, such as sewing and cooking. But she never completed her Hauptschule (high school) studies, although she would claim to have done so and to have attended “teacher school,” as well.
Perhaps for disciplinary purposes, her parents shipped her off to Holland for a short time to be near her wedded sister, now Katti Moergele, and to enroll in a private school. Anna Marie envied Katti, who had a good marriage and was raising a family. She prayed for the same, but it was not to be for her.
On the deck of the Munchen, she thought of all that she had left behind, including her son, Oscar. He was born May 31, 1925, the result of a starry-eyed teen’s “one gorgeous adventure,” Anna Marie would say.2 Her romantic indiscretion, followed by her pregnancy and the birth of her boy, were the reasons she headed for America. Her father and brothers were furious with her, and there had been many heated words spoken at home. Behind closed doors, the community of 2,300 souls “whispered things about my misfortune,” the young mother knew. Anna Marie was an embarrassment to her godly parents and to her brothers, all of whom were carving out respected positions in Fuessen. Georg Filser would have abandoned her altogether if it had not been for his wife’s pleadings. She thought it best that Anna Marie get out of town, and the United States was about as far as she could go. Frau Filser had one or two relatives in America, whom she hoped would help her daughter. Until Anna Marie could get herself established in America, though, three-year-old Oscar would remain under the care of her mother. Furthermore, in America Anna Marie initially was to keep secret that she had an illegitimate son.
So at twenty-two, Anna Marie was an outcast, traveling alone to an unfamiliar land. After having waited almost two years for a visa, she secured a second-class cabin on the Munchen, upgrading from third, thanks to a little money given to her by her mother and a loan from her Uncle Max in Cincinnati.
Max Doeschel wasn’t really her uncle; he was a stepbrother to Anna Marie’s mother. He had been in the United States since 1881 and hardly knew the present Filser family. It had been twenty-five years or more since he had corresponded with any family in Germany. For many years he worked as a carpenter at the Gambrinus Brewing Company in Cincinnati, then at the Dietz Washing Machine Company. By the time Anna Marie arrived, however, he was seventy-four and living in retirement in two rooms with his wife, Anna. Nevertheless, when Anna Marie wrote to him in 1928, requesting his help to allow her to come to the United States, he loaned $236 to the young woman he had never met. The sum was considerable at the time—it would be equal to $2,686 in 2005 dollars—but he gave it with the understanding that she would repay him as soon as she found employment as a housekeeper.
After an overnight run from New York, the Cincinnati Limited pulled into Cincinnati’s old Pennsylvania Railroad station at Pearl and Butler streets at 8:30 A.M., on time. Anna Marie had wired Doeschel the day before, asking that she be met at the Cincinnati terminal. Ida Pfeffer, Doeschel’s daughter, and her brother-in-law, Richard G. Pfeffer, a cousin to Anna Marie, comprised the welcoming party.
Pfeffer, a U.S. Secret Service agent, sized up Anna Marie as “a pretty blonde” with hazel eyes and a good command of English, which she spoke with only a slight accent. The pair warmly greeted the bubbly and charming German visitor, whom they took to the house at 3540 Evanston Avenue that the Pfeffers owned and the Doeschels shared. “As long as you are a good girl and do what is right, you will have a home here,” Uncle Max told his step-niece. She kept her silence about having a son.
Before she could find employment, Anna Marie fell ill, perhaps from the strain of the journey. She thought her illness to be scarlet fever, but within three weeks she regained her health and began getting housework jobs. The Doeschels and the Pfeffers soon noticed, however, that Anna Marie spent far beyond what she earned. Her relationship with them cooled, and they chose to avoid her whenever possible.
Without a word to anyone, Anna Marie suddenly moved out—“ran away,” she admitted—securing a furnished room on Walnut Street between Central Parkway and Twelfth Street. For a time, Max Doeschel had no idea where she had gone, and he was concerned. She had not repaid the loan for her passage and gave no indication of doing so. Yet he readily could see by the quantity and quality of what she had bought for herself while living under the same roof that she was doing well—very well, indeed.
Anna Marie maintained that she moved to downtown Cincinnati “to be near Uncle Charlie.” Charles “Karl” Osswald, a retired baker who lived six blocks from Anna Marie’s rented room, was even more distantly related to her than was Max Doeschel. Osswald’s wife, Mary, was Doeschel’s sister. She died April 3, 1929, leaving Osswald a lonely widower.3
While living downtown, Anna Marie advertised for a position as a housemaid, gave the Doeschels as a reference, and received several inquiries. One well-heeled and elderly gentleman of German heritage visited Anna Marie in her room, where she “interviewed” for him wearing only a silk kimono. When she told him that her Uncle Max’s home “wasn’t the proper place” for her, he was somewhat surprised, since she’d named Doeschel as a reference. After visiting Doeschel in his home, the gentleman decided not to hire Anna Marie because he couldn’t understand why she had traded such a nice, well-kept brick house for a rather dingy one-room apartment. He made a wise decision.
Anna Marie wasn’t in the rented room long, though. The next thing her friends knew, she had moved into one of Osswald’s top-floor rooms in a four-story tenement at 304 East Fourteenth Street, above Max Lasky’s confectionery at the corner of Sycamore Street. Osswald was seventy-one at the time, and she had just turned twenty-three. Professing to having been a nurse in Germany, she gave him care and companionship, and he gave her stock. In November 1929, she promised to marry him and care for him in his remaining years if he transferred to her ninety-nine shares of Union Gas and Electric, valued at several thousand dollars. He also gave her cash whenever she needed it, which was often.
What few but area bookies knew was that Anna Marie loved the thoroughbreds and wagered heavily and often on them. A friend she met shortly after arriving in Cincinnati introduced her to gambling, and she fell madly for it after winning $260 on a black nag with her first $2 bet at the track in Latonia, Kentucky. She went to area racetracks and gaming casinos in Ohio and across the Ohio River in Newport and Covington, Kentucky. More often than not, however, she took a streetcar to Elmwood Place, a small community bordering Cincinnati, known as a haven for illegal gambling. There Anna Marie became well-known to handbook operators, or bookies, along the village’s Vine Avenue, where establishments lured “suckers” to the area through bold newspaper advertising and the mob arrived in bulletproof limousines to rake in the day’s take. She set her loss limit at $50 a day (about $710 in 2005), but what she wagered each day grew as she found more sources to fund her fun.
In the spring of 1929, Anna Marie secured a job as a chambermaid at the five-hundred-room Hotel Alms, a turn-of-the-century establishment at the corner of McMillan Street and Victory Parkway. Her wages there were meager, yet she seemed never to want for money. If she needed some, she asked Uncle Charlie for it, and he never refused her. When she told Osswald that she still owed Uncle Max for her transatlantic trip, he gave her the money to repay him. She kept it for herself.
One of Anna Marie’s favorite forays was to Coney Island, a grand, 120-acre amusement park about ten miles east of downtown Cincinnati. There were a score of rides for five or ten cents, a huge pool that could accommodate ten thousand swimmers at a time, two roller coasters, the Moonlight Gardens dance hall, and a race track that today is known as River Downs.4
While on a boat ride to the amusement park with a date in the summer of 1929, she briefly met Philip J. Hahn, the man she would marry. His physique was a bodybuilder’s worst nightmare, slender as a rail and seemingly devoid of muscle. He also was as short as she—a smidgen over five feet—and his small, thin mustache gave him a rather mousy appearance. He noticed that the pretty blonde’s date paid little attention to her: “She didn’t want any attention,” he recalled. He struck up a conversation with her, but it wasn’t until they met again some months later at a German dance in the Marie Antoinette Ballroom at the Hotel Alms that they began to date.
Although she had led Osswald to believe she would marry him, Anna Marie chose Philip instead and never whispered a word to Osswald about it. And why would she? In a will created in 1929, he had made her the prime beneficiary of his estate, which at that time totaled some $13,000 ($148,000 in 2005). In the meantime, she was drawing on those funds with constant requests for money.
Philip, twenty-seven, and Anna Marie, twenty-five, wed on May 5, 1930, in Buffalo, New York. “He seemed so good and kind,” Anna Marie said of her husband. “He was the way to what I wanted, a home of my own and a home for my son.” She told Philip she had a son in Germany but said nothing about the boy’s father. Only later did she mention that Dr. Max Matscheki of Vienna, a shadowy figure, wooed her and fathered her boy, even though he was married. “I thought it was just one of those things,” Philip said of his wife’s love affair. “I didn’t ask her much about it.”
Just as well: It is unlikely he would have received a straight answer. Apparently Matscheki, who Anna Marie said died in 1928, was her own creation. No physician by that name was found to have practiced in Vienna. Her teenage affair was with a man never fully identified.
Upon their return from Buffalo, the couple visited the Doeschels and the Pfeffers and announced they were going to build a home in the College Hill section of Cincinnati. Where the money was to come from, Anna Marie never said. As far as anyone knew, she still was making up beds at the Hotel Alms and Philip was a telegrapher for Western Union downtown, a job he had held for fourteen years. During the visit with her Cincinnati relatives, she mentioned that she would soon return to Germany to see her family. She still said nothing about having a five-year-old son there; that she didn’t reveal until she returned from Germany with Oscar.
Tight-fisted Max Doeschel grew concerned anew. He still had not been repaid the money he loaned Anna Marie, and now he saw his $236 sailing away with her. He demanded repayment and mentioned his concern to Osswald. Having given Anna Marie the money to repay the loan, the old baker was shocked. He shelled out the money once again, paying Doeschel directly.
In subsequent years, Doeschel would tell friends that he regretted having sent Anna Marie the money for her trip to America. He died December 27, 1937, a few weeks after she was sentenced to death.
On July 7, 1930, shortly before her departure for Germany, Anna Marie received another twenty-seven shares of Union Gas and Electric from Osswald, which he later denied giving her. She also transferred $700, all his funds in the Eagle Savings and Loan Association, from his account to hers. Then she withdrew it all. Osswald had no idea yet that she had married Philip, or that she had a son, for that matter.
She returned to Bavaria, spent a glorious time with Oscar and a difficult one with her family. Several photographs of her enjoying happy days at the Oberammergau festival—a feather in her Tyrolean hat and a large beer stein in her hand—would appear in newspapers throughout the United States following her arrest. She returned to Cincinnati with Oscar in late summer and with Philip moved into a modest, newly constructed home at 6332 Savannah Avenue in College Hill.
Fortunately for Anna Marie, her husband worked nights when they were first married. This gave her considerable time to roam, much of which she spent caring for the elderly she met and visiting Elmwood Place handbook establishments, often with little Oscar in tow.
Between January 31 and March 26, 1931, she sold all the stock she had received from Osswald, which might explain how, in the worst of economic times, the Hahns managed to purchase from John Rinck a small bakery and grocery/deli at 3201 Colerain Avenue, on the corner of Bates Avenue in the Cincinnati suburb of Clifton, just north of downtown. At the height of the Great Depression, Philip quit his job with Western Union to join Anna Marie in the business. They struggled mightily, trying to make a go of it, but they did not fare well, even with Anna Marie spreading cream cheese on bagels and taking bets. Fifth District police never caught her at it, although they knew she was running a betting operation from within her establishment.
“We walked in and out of that place so often that we were able to break up the handbook,” recalled Detective Fred Stagenhorst.
Less than a year passed before the Hahns sold their business to Aloysius and Harry Franz in 1932. In the same year, the Hahns bought a nearby deli from William O. Laugle, at 3007 Colerain Avenue, but it, too, failed miserably. Anna Marie and Philip sold it three years later. They also lost their home on Savannah Avenue when they couldn’t make the mortgage payments.
Anna Marie continued to visit and comfort Uncle Charlie, ignorant still of her marriage, and accept handouts from him. On February 3, 1931, he made out a new will, leaving $5 to a stepdaughter in North Bend, Ohio, and $5 to a stepson in Los Angeles. The remainder was bequeathed to “my beloved niece, Anna Filser Hahn.”
In the spring of 1931, when Osswald finally learned the whole story—about the husband, the son, the house, the restaurant and all—he took his dealings with Anna Marie to his attorneys, Bates, Stewart & Skirvin. His suit, filed July 30, 1931, charged her with breach of promise and sought the return of the stock and cash, plus 6 percent interest. “She knew at the time the said representations were made that she was not going to marry plaintiff,” the suit stated, “but, on the contrary, intended to marry someone else and did.” In the face of the evidence presented, Anna Marie denied everything, and the case went to trial by jury. Before it could be adjudicated, however, there was reconciliation, and the court dismissed the suit on February 21, 1934. Evidently, all was forgiven.
When Osswald died on August 14, 1935, at age seventy-seven, a Deaconess Hospital physician listed the cause as chronic Bright’s disease and arteriosclerosis. A week later, Anna Marie received a check for $1,000 as the sole beneficiary of his National Biscuit Company pension death benefit. Osswald changed his beneficiary several times in his final years, each time reflecting the changes in his relationship with Anna Marie. Initially, Anna Filser was listed as the beneficiary, then Mrs. Anna Hahn, then “my estate,” and finally, “my great-niece, Mrs. Anna Marie Hahn.” His will was not probated “because there were no assets left in the estate,” his attorney revealed.
Anna Marie already had every last cent.
1. During World War I, Anna Marie and her sister, Katti, knitted sweaters, scarves, mittens, and caps for their brothers in service.
2. Oscar’s year of birth is uncertain. Mother and son claimed different dates at different times, ranging from 1924 to 1926, but 1925 seems most likely.
3. Some suggested Anna Marie had caused Mrs. Osswald’s death. It is not likely, however, and police developed no evidence to support the allegation.
4. Coney Island Race Track was closed between 1926 and 1933.