The pressure Heis and Osborne put on Anna Marie to pay back the money she had borrowed accelerated “the most gruesome premeditated poison murder plot in crime annals.”1
Albert J. Palmer, a seventy-two-year-old retired railroad watchman known as “Berty” to family and friends, was the first among Anna Marie’s elderly friends to die in 1937. A Parisian by birth, Palmer lived a quiet life in a three-story walk-up at 2416 Central Parkway, just a few blocks south from Heis’s home. His sister, Anna, shared the same address.
In the tight little Over-the-Rhine enclave, Heis may well have known Palmer, but it is unlikely that either man knew the other was being romanced and conned by the same woman at the same time. For Anna Marie, it was an extraordinary high-wire act.
One of Palmer’s few interests was horseracing. He frequently visited the gambling casinos in Elmwood Place, such as The Blade and the Walk-a-Show on the opposite side of Vine Avenue, a mob-owned casino that also held marathon dances. He first met Anna Marie at The Blade in the waning days of 1936, and their mutual fascination for wagering on the horses established a strong bond between them. Together, and sometimes with little Oscar, too, they would take the streetcar to The Blade, her favorite handbook establishment, play the ponies all afternoon, and return to their neighborhood in the early evening. Usually Philip was at work by the time they returned, so Palmer would often stop at Anna Marie’s house for a beer and a bite to eat.
Monsoon-like rains and even snow hit Cincinnati in January. It poured barrels, not buckets. The mighty Ohio River rose to record heights; twenty-one feet of water covered the diamond at Crosley Field, home to the Cincinnati Reds and night baseball, and water rushed through the second stories of dozens of commercial buildings and homes. Electricity and clean drinking water were not to be had. To conserve precious energy, residents were ordered to burn but one light in their homes. Many had neither light nor water. When the nineteen-day deluge ended, eight were dead and fifty thousand homeless. Yet, through it all, Anna Marie and Oscar visited Palmer two or three times a week, and the three of them dined on her cooking, which upset Palmer’s stomach.
Palmer soon considered Anna Marie to be “his girl,” and made no secret about it. He told neighborhood friends, “I am going to the blonde woman’s house,” and off he would go, with a smile on his lips. He also spoke excitedly about a trip to Florida he and Anna Marie had planned.
When she sought money from him, which was often, she cuddled and cooed until he shelled out. She managed to sweet talk him—he loved it—into giving her $2,000. She, in turn, prepared for him a promissory note, due December 1938, but she kept possession of it. With Palmer’s money, she paid Osborne $900 and promised him she would soon pay the remaining $300. She sent Osborne checks now and then, but each bounced—insufficient funds.
She wrote Palmer nearly two dozen perfumed love notes, too—hand-delivered by Oscar—which he carefully saved in a small tin box tied with a blue ribbon. One of the letters began, “My Dear Sweet Dady [sic],” and was signed, “With all my love and a lot of kisses, Your Ann.” Another note in her hand said, “Honey, I have to have $100. . . .” Then there was a February 12 Valentine’s Day card with a verse that read:
The friends that we cherish
As finest and truest,
Aren’t always the oldest
Nor are they the newest.
They’re the friends who’ve stood by
When we need them sincerely,
And that’s why I cherish
Our friendship so dearly.
It was signed, “Anna and Oscar.”
Nobody ever proved that she had intercourse with Palmer or any of her other elderly chums, but Cincinnati police believed that she did. At the very least, they thought, she provided the gentlemen she befriended with sexual gratification, if not intercourse. There is no question whatsoever that these lonely souls basked in the lavish affections of an attractive woman in full flower. However, for Anna Marie the name of the game was M-O-N-E-Y, not S-E-X.
In late February 1937, Palmer inexplicably came to his senses and demanded Anna Marie repay the money he had loaned her. Perhaps what fostered the turnabout was his hearing from neighborhood gossips about Anna Marie’s “affair” with Heis. At the time, however, the once-robust Palmer was feeling poorly. Bouts with stomach cramps, diarrhea, and vomiting invariably followed each dining experience with Anna Marie. Between January and March, his health deteriorated rapidly, according to his sister, Anna, who became alarmed upon seeing her brother in so much distress. Grocer Peter T. Toner, who lived on the second floor of the same apartment house as Palmer, and Anna Horstmeyer, who lived on the first floor, also voiced concerns.
When Heis and Consolidated Coal’s Osborne were turning up the heat on Anna Marie, Palmer did so, too, threatening her with legal action. He gave her a choice: Become his girlfriend on a permanent and exclusive basis or repay him. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do either.
Anna Marie became frantic, desperately seeking a way out of her relationship with Palmer. Her egress fortuitously appeared when, on March 26, 1937, he died of an apparent heart attack. The death certificate noted his passing was due to influenza and coronary disease. He died virtually penniless, his personal savings of nearly $5,000 all but depleted.
Three days after Palmer drew his last breath, Anna Marie applied to the Hazel Meyer Employment Bureau for a position as a practical nurse or a companion, stating that she was a “widow with experience.” She also noted on her application, “Compensation not important.” Although she failed to secure a job through the agency, she had no problem finding more old folks to nurse: she unearthed Jacob Wagner simply by knocking on neighborhood doors.
Wagner, a seventy-eight-year-old widower, immigrated to the United States from Germany about 1885. He settled in Cincinnati and became a gardener to several prominent families in the area, including George R. Balch, president of the Cincinnati Realty Company. For Wagner’s years of faithful service, Mrs. Balch presented the gardener with his proudest possession, a gold pocket watch. He was known as a gentle man, who often favored neighborhood children with pennies from his pocket.
In retirement, he lived for eighteen years in a small apartment at 1805 Race Street, a four-story tenement in the Findlay Market area of Over-the-Rhine. His sink was in the hallway, and, because he had been a tenant for so long, he had a key to the community toilet in the hallway so that he could use the facility in private.
His neighbor Elizabeth Colby recalled vividly a visitor to her third-floor apartment, the same floor on which Wagner lived. It was May 13, 1937, and she had just come home from work. She was tired and preparing dinner for herself and her divorced daughter, Josephine Martin, when there came hard, repeated knocks at her door. Not feeling up to visitors, Mrs. Colby first decided to ignore the caller, but changed her mind when the knocking continued. At her door was a well-dressed, well-coiffured stranger, who asked if “any old men lived here.” Mrs. Colby immediately felt uneasy because the woman proceeded to walk right into the center of the room for a good look around.
“What do you mean, ‘old men’? There are several old men in the building. One lives just down the hall there.”
“I knocked on that door, nobody answered,” Anna Marie said. That afternoon she also had knocked on the doors of at least three other tenants, including those of Nannie Werks and Ida Martin.
“Mr. Wagner must be out then,” Mrs. Colby responded.
“Wagner? That’s the name,” said Anna Marie. “Wagner.” In her German pronunciation, it came out as vahg-ner.
Anna Marie identified herself as Wagner’s niece, and said she had a letter for him from relatives in Baden-Baden, Germany, concerning a family inheritance. (This all sounded strange to Mrs. Colby, given that the woman professed not to know the name of the person she sought.) She asked Mrs. Colby for a pencil and a piece of paper on which to write a note, which she slipped under Wagner’s door. She promised to return another time, which she did several days later, leaving another note for Wagner.
Mrs. Colby told Wagner about the young woman’s visit. “Ach, I don’t know anyone like that,” he said. “Nein, Nein. Da muss ein Fehler sein.” (“No, no. There must be some mistake.”) Yet, within days he and Anna Marie did meet. He visited her in her home, and she visited him in his apartment, the only woman ever known to do so, neighbors said. He even told a friend, “I have a new girl.” Another old man had fallen for Anna Marie’s charms, at least for a few days.
Two weeks and two days after Anna Marie knocked on Mrs. Colby’s door, Wagner visited Arthur J. Schmitt, assistant vice president at Fifth Third Union Trust Company. He reported that a woman, a “Lehrerin” (schoolteacher), had stolen his bankbook when he had briefly left his apartment to fetch a pail of beer to share with Anna Marie. The passbook, which revealed that he had more than $4,000 on deposit, had been hidden under his mattress. He showed Schmitt two passbooks of Anna Marie’s, which she had given him: one was foreign with no balance, the other from Security Savings and Loan in Cincinnati. The latter had a bank-generated, machine entry of $3, but also several typewritten entries totaling $15,000 more. Those were forgeries, Schmitt surmised, and he urged Wagner to bring the passbooks back on Tuesday, after the Decoration Day (now Memorial Day) holiday, if he wanted to prosecute.
Anna Marie later explained that Oscar made the typewritten entries while practicing on a new typewriter.
The passbooks were Anna Marie’s variation of the bait-and-switch con game. She planned to take Wagner’s passbook with $4,831 in it and give him in return, as security, her bankbooks showing a total of more than $15,000 on deposit. Actually, she had no money in the accounts at all. Even the $3, deposited in Oscar’s name in 1936, had been withdrawn in May, leaving a zero balance.
On his way home from the bank, Wagner met a friend of thirty years, Joe Elbisser, also seventy-five, a retired shoemaker. “You’ll need a cane pretty soon,” said Elbisser, teasing his friend. “I have two. You can have one if you need it.” Wagner declined, but revealed that he was upset about the “stolen” bankbook.
Upon leaving Elbisser, Wagner joined two other friends, Otto Mackles and Frank Kaessheimer, at Kirsch’s, a popular Elder Street watering hole. Recounting the story of the bankbook and what Schmitt had said, Wagner showed them Anna Marie’s two bankbooks, slipping them back into his pocket moments before she entered Kirsch’s, too. Wagner accosted her and accused her of stealing. “My bankbook is gone,” he said, “and nobody else took it but you. You are the only one in my rooms.” He told her he had within the hour reported the theft to Schmitt, who suspected her bankbooks were forged. As it had been with Heis and Palmer, Anna Marie suddenly felt trapped by circumstances gone awry.
Embarrassed by Wagner in front of strangers, she became indignant, accusing Wagner of misplacing his bankbook. In her mind, she also sentenced him to death.
“Where are my two bankbooks?” she demanded.
“They’re gone, too,” Wagner lied.
“Come, we will go to your place and look for them,” she said. Before they left, Wagner reached under the table and surreptitiously passed to Kaessheimer the two bankbooks in Anna Marie’s name. “Keep them until I get back,” he whispered.
Within ten minutes the pair returned to the café with Wagner’s bankbook—Anna Marie had “found” it—and the old gardener retrieved the pair of bankbooks Kaessheimer had been holding. Anna Marie telephoned Schmitt at the bank to say that Wagner’s missing book had been found.
The following day, Mrs. Colby spotted Wagner and Anna Marie together again. Four days after Anna Marie first visited her, Mrs. Colby had moved next door to a third-floor apartment at 1809 Race Street. Now, from her tiny porch, she looked right into Wagner’s third-floor apartment, across the alley about ten feet wide. It was a hot day. Wagner’s window was wide-open and the curtains pulled back to allow in what little breeze there was in the air. Mrs. Colby spied Anna Marie in Wagner’s room. At first Anna Marie was in a rocking chair, then she rose and prepared and poured him several glasses of what appeared to be orange juice. Again Mrs. Colby felt uneasy. She thought it “not right” that a young woman, particularly that young woman, should be with Wagner in his apartment. She called her daughter to the window to view the scene. Mrs. Martin, who also watched Anna Marie pass a glass of juice to Wagner, did not share her mother’s concern for propriety, however; after all, the woman was Wagner’s niece.
Monday, Decoration Day and a holiday, was a special day for Anna Marie’s handsome son, Oscar. Together they celebrated his twelfth birthday. Little did either realize it would be the last time they would observe his birthday together. Wagner, on the other hand, did not feel like celebrating anything. He felt just awful.
By Tuesday evening, June 1, Wagner was writhing in agony on his bed. For nearly twenty-four hours he had been vomiting, passing blood, and battling diarrhea. At nine that evening Anna Marie sought a doctor. She first went to the nearby office of Dr. Richard Marnell, but he was not in, so Anna Marie found the portly, ruddy-cheeked neighborhood physician, Dr. James H. Clift, a 1919 graduate of the Eclectic Medical College in Cincinnati. He had a rather freewheeling practice at 28 Findlay Street. He never kept any patient records of any kind, for instance, and conducted what he described as a cash business.
Clift followed Wagner’s “niece” to the old gardener’s room a block away. Throughout his examination, Anna Marie served as a translator, although Wagner understood English and spoke it, albeit poorly. Dr. Clift never realized that, however. The physician prescribed bismuth-paregoric pills for diarrhea and, although he did not feel Wagner’s condition to be critical, suggested that Wagner go to a hospital.
“Is he going to die?” Anna Marie asked.
Dr. Clift said he didn’t think so, but advised that he needed care. Anna Marie, who revealed that she had been a nurse in the old country, said she would look after the old man.
Earlier that same Tuesday, Schmitt had expected Wagner to visit the bank with Anna Marie’s two bankbooks Schmitt had inspected earlier. Instead, Anna Marie showed up with a note purportedly written by Wagner. Full of grammatical and spelling errors, it read:
I am very sorry what happent Saturday nith my book I found unter a paper on the self it all was a mistake and I don’t want my niece Mrs. Hahn to be acuced of anything. I bin sick since Saturday Evening and leave it up to Mrs. Hahn to straighten this matter out. [signed] Jacob Wagner.
Although he actually had been fine on Saturday, Wagner now was very sick, indeed. Tuesday night he had tried to get out of bed and fell, giving himself a nasty gash on his head. Neighborhood gossips later whispered that Anna Marie had done the damage, but head-bashing was not her style. Yet early the next morning, another resident and septuagenarian, Anna Decker, offered to help attend to Wagner and his injury. “No, the room is too dirty,” Anna Marie said, blocking the door to Wagner’s room. “Mr. Wagner does not want anyone to come in,” so Mrs. Decker left Wagner’s niece and nurse to deal with it.
Wagner did not like Dr. Clift’s bedside manner, or so Anna Marie said, so Wednesday afternoon she visited Dr. Marnell’s office twice, urging that he come by, which he did a little after 2 P.M. After his examination, which he conducted without Anna Marie in the room, Dr. Marnell thought that Wagner appeared chronically ill and needed to be hospitalized. She called for an ambulance. When it arrived, Wagner was carried down the three flights of stairs in a chair and placed on a stretcher. Anna Marie rode with him in the ambulance to Good Samaritan Hospital, arriving at 3:30 P.M.
Hospital room admitting clerk Laura Boehm watched as Anna Marie signed Wagner into the hospital. Anna Marie wrote on the admittance form that she was his niece, his nearest relative, and responsible for the hospital’s charges. Nothing would be too good for her Uncle Jake, she told Boehm. “Give him the best room in the hospital and the best of care. He has plenty of money.” As for herself, Anna Marie told them that she was worn-out from caring for Wagner for the past week.
“You know how it is with relatives,” Anna Marie commented to Mrs. Boehm. “They never know you, only when they need you.”
Dr. Marnell visited Wagner in Room 190 about 8 P.M. and saw that his condition had worsened considerably. “He was semi-conscious, retching with pain and in a state of shock and dying,” the physician said. Elizabeth Morabek, a World War I German army nurse, checked on the patient later in the evening and saw a terrifying image of a man in agony. Tears streamed down his cheeks, and he sweated profusely. His fists were so tightly clenched he could not ring for help. He writhed in pain and begged for water. He barely got out the words, “Ich könnte ein Fass voll Wasser trinken!” (“I could drink a barrel of water!”) Wagner died just past midnight, Thursday, June 3.
Before Wagner passed on, Anna Marie had returned to his home. “Poor old Uncle Jake,” Anna Marie told Ida Martin, his concerned neighbor. “He’s awful sick. There are a lot of things in there [in Wagner’s quarters] you can use. I will give them to you. He’s not coming back.”
She was right there. When Anna Marie returned to Good Samaritan at 8 A.M., she learned that Wagner had succumbed. Her “uncle” now became a virtual stranger to her. She refused to sign for an autopsy, professing that she hardly knew the deceased. She only helped other tenants force open the door to Wagner’s apartment the previous day, she said, and saw to it that he got to the hospital.
Dr. Marnell had not signed a death certificate because he was unsure of the cause of death, hence the need for an autopsy. Another physician, Dr. Francis M. Forster, explained the situation to Anna Marie, noting that if she didn’t authorize an autopsy, Wagner’s death would be turned over to the county coroner for investigation. Anna Marie wanted no part of that, so she signed.
Her own funds depleted—she had but $1.10 in the bank—Anna Marie quickly worked to wipe out Wagner’s. She left the hospital and headed straight for the Fifth Third Union Trust branch. There she delivered to Schmitt a second note, written in English, and signed “Jack Wagner.” It read: “Please give Mrs. Hahn a check 1000 dollars bal. in her name.” She had a withdrawal slip for $1,000, but Schmitt refused to honor it because it was written in pencil and incomplete. He gave Anna Marie another withdrawal slip, properly filled out, and suggested that she have Wagner sign it at Deaconess Hospital, which is where Anna Marie told Schmitt Wagner had been taken.
Two hours later, she returned with the receipt signed and a third note from Wagner: “I am giving Mrs. Hahn full power of everything.” While she completed paperwork to have the $1,000 transferred to her account, Schmitt called Deaconess Hospital. No patient named Wagner there. When confronted with that information, Anna Marie said she had made a silly mistake. Wagner was a patient at Good Samaritan Hospital, she remembered. Schmitt called there, too, and discovered to his surprise that Wagner had died in the middle of the night. When he challenged the woman, she admitted, with tears in her hazel eyes, that she had signed Wagner’s name to the check because he “wanted me to pay his expenses.” She pleaded with Schmitt not to turn her in to the authorities for forgery, describing how awful it would be for her, a woman estranged from her husband, if her son didn’t have his mother to care for him. Schmitt bought her tearful story, and once again Anna Marie managed to escape the scrutiny of the law.
She came away from the bank empty-handed, but she was not without further resources. At home she carefully penned Wagner’s will:
I hereby make my last will and testament and I am under no influence. I have my money in the Fifth Third Bank [sic]. 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.
Although she had met Wagner only two weeks before, she now possessed a document that awarded her every asset he had.
That afternoon, with the will in hand, she returned to the building where Wagner had lived, where she found Anna Eberhardt and Anna Decker, both elderly friends of the deceased. Neither Mrs. Eberhardt nor Mrs. Decker read English, yet Anna Marie put before them a handwritten document, in English, which she said required their signatures. The document, Anna Marie explained sweetly in German, was required to admit Olive Louella Koehler to the hospital for treatment. (Hospitalization required no such document.) Anna Marie made no mention that it was Wagner’s will the ladies were being asked to witness. The women refused to sign anything, saying that it would be more proper if Koehler’s sister, Mary Arnold, signed the paper. Even though all but Mrs. Arnold lived in the same apartment building, Eberhardt and Decker had no idea that Koehler needed to be hospitalized.
Charles Dotzauer, a probate court deputy, considerately greeted the grieving Anna Marie at his office the following morning and agreed to meet her that afternoon at Wagner’s apartment to search for a will. Lo and behold, there it was, on the mantel underneath a newspaper. Dotzauer looked at it, saw it was signed and dated January 10, 1936, but not witnessed, which meant it could not be accepted for probate. Charmed by Anna Marie’s sweetness and at her urging, Dotzauer took the document with him, nevertheless.
1. Gerald B. Healy, “School Teacher Faces Trial for Poison of Two Elderly Men,” International News Service, Oct. 11, 1937.