At Wagner’s funeral and burial on Saturday, June 5, at the Baltimore Pike Cemetery, only three mourners were at the graveside service: Mrs. Eberhardt, Mrs. Decker, and a tearful Anna Marie. As she left the cemetery, Anna Marie told the elderly widows, “This is too bad. This is the second uncle I have buried this month.” It wasn’t the first time the two women thought Anna Marie’s comments to be odd. Her revelation a few days earlier about Mrs. Koehler having to go to the hospital also puzzled her two neighbors.
Mrs. Koehler, a seventy-nine-year-old widow, lived in a building at 104 West Elder Street that was connected by a fire escape to the Race Street apartment building where Wagner lived. Anna Marie met her one day in May while on her way to visit Wagner. With Osborne still relentlessly pursuing her to pay up the $300 she still owed Consolidated Coal, Anna Marie was again desperately in need of cash.
Dressed in a quasi-uniform perhaps suitable for a home nurse, she identified herself to Mrs. Koehler as a Salvation Army worker whose job it was to make the elderly and infirm “comfy.” The venerable woman loved having company, especially helpful German-speaking company, and she appreciated having such a sweet German lady caring for her, which Anna Marie began to do while still making Wagner comfy, too.
Shortly after Anna Marie began visiting her, Mrs. Koehler missed a small valise of valuables she had hidden under her bed. She suspected the wallpaper hangers who had been in the building had stolen it. Anna Marie offered to get the luggage back, for a fee. Mrs. Koehler wrote her a check for $80 to pay the thief for the return of the contents of the case, which included jewelry, papers, and cash totaling $188. A week later Anna Marie professed failure, even though she knew just where the bag was. It was now under her bed, and in her closet was a new rabbit fur coat, bought on sale and paid for in full with cash from the valise.
In a gesture of kindness in the heat of an early summer, Anna Marie twice bought ice cream—on June 22 and June 23—for Mrs. Koehler and her ninety-five-year-old sister, Mrs. Mary Arnold. Each time, after eating the ice cream Anna Marie served, Mrs. Koehler became violently ill with stomach pain, nausea, and diarrhea. Mrs. Arnold, who barely tasted the ice cream the first time and took none the second time, felt uncomfortable for a spell but did not suffer like her sister did.
A Civil War widow on a pension, Mrs. Arnold lived nearby, above a neighborhood grocery and confectionery store at 1812 Race Street where Anna Marie bought the ice cream. Mathilda Propheter, who owned the small shop, disliked the local blonde gadabout right from the start. She called the Salvation Army office in Cincinnati and discovered it had no record of a home health care worker named Mrs. Hahn. When on the evening of June 24 Anna Marie came into the store again, Mrs. Propheter mentioned that Mrs. Koehler was very sick.
“Well, she lived her life,” Anna Marie replied. Mrs. Propheter was livid at the woman’s callousness. The next day she found Anna Marie back in the neighborhood and upstairs, trying to ingratiate herself to Mrs. Arnold by posing as someone else.
“Bist du das, Lillian?” (“Is that you, Lillian?”) asked the nearly blind Mrs. Arnold upon Anna Marie’s arrival. Lillian Meyer was the old woman’s good friend.
“Ja, sie ist es” (“Yes, it is”), replied Anna Marie, her face all but hidden by a rather large, broad-brimmed straw hat. She urged the old lady to drink some beer she had brought, but Mrs. Arnold refused it. So Anna Marie busied herself with tidying up Mrs. Arnold’s one room, all the while searching it. When she raised the corner of the mattress and saw $200 “hidden” there, she could not resist. The money fit easily into her pocket.
“Lillian” volunteered to do some clothes shopping for Mrs. Arnold, but just as the old woman was signing a blank check for that purpose, Mrs. Propheter arrived, realized what was going on, and confronted the visitor.
“Why are you deceiving these old people?”
“She was so happy to think it was Lillian visiting her.”
“But what is your interest in these old people?” Mrs. Propheter demanded.
“Oh, I love them,” Anna Marie replied.
“Well, we don’t like you around here. To us, you look like a mess.”
Now it was Anna Marie’s turn to be angry. “I have a good reputation,” she insisted, her face flushed. “I run a big hospital on Colerain Avenue.”
Mrs. Propheter demanded a phone number from Anna Marie to check on her story, which she did the next day. When she called the number, she discovered she was talking not with a hospital administrator but with nineteen-year-old Olive Winter, a secretary in Dr. Vos’s office in Anna Marie’s home. After hearing Mrs. Propheter’s story, Winter suggested that she notify the authorities. The next day the police received a call from Mrs. Propheter, but they took little note of what they considered to be a domestic squabble among neighbors.
On July 10 Mrs. Koehler entered Longview State Hospital for the insane. Her sister shakily signed the lunacy warrant, and a friend and neighbor, Blanche Mullikins, signed the commitment papers.
Four days earlier, on the morning of July 6, neighbor August Schultz had discovered the body of sixty-seven-year-old George G. Gsellman in his $5-a-week, fourth-floor attic room at 1717 Elm Street where he had lived for a year. Mrs. Koehler’s home was three short blocks away. Gsellman, a German-speaking Hungarian immigrant who enjoyed smoking his carved meerschaum, once owned a farm in Symmes Township, Hamilton County. However, shortly after his divorce in 1920 from his Hungarian-born wife, Elizabeth, he moved to Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine district.
Gsellman was not wealthy, although he appeared otherwise. He had worked in Cincinnati as a railroad crossing gateman and lived on the $25-a-month income a small annuity produced. He prided himself on being a natty dresser and “quite a ladies man,” who enjoyed the nightlife, according to neighbors. In his closet, for instance, he had six suits and thirty white dress shirts, all hung uniformly on hangers. Each shirt had a gold button inserted in the front and back buttonholes at the neck to which a starched collar could be affixed. Yet, when he was found dead on the bed of his small, one-room tenement home, he was nude save for a pair of slippers on his feet. A pair of neatly creased pants with thirty-six cents in the pocket hung over the back of a chair.
Today Gsellman might be described as “a health nut.” In writing his life’s story, recorded in a manuscript found in his room, he penned his “Fifteen Rules of Health.” Rule Number 12 was “Do not allow poisons to enter your body.” Neighbors and then police noticed that on July 5 the small table where he ate his meals alone, night after night, had been set for two. Two pots were on the stove, one containing meat and the other gravy. City chemist Dr. Otto P. Behrer later determined for the police that together the meat and the gravy were laced with almost eighteen grains of arsenic trioxide, enough to kill two dozen men.
Earlier that summer Gsellman’s marriage proposal to an unidentified woman had been rejected. When he next ran into her, he told her, “You wouldn’t marry me, and now I went and got a young blonde German schoolteacher.” He told friends that he was going to marry “a blonde woman and move to California.” He even had a wedding day in mind—July 6.
The blonde was, of course, Anna Marie. She knew Gsellman slightly, and perhaps because he always appeared so dapper and prosperous, she believed he had money to burn. Two weeks before he died Anna Marie came knocking on his door and pursued the relationship in earnest. After years of loneliness, Gsellman was swept off his feet by Anna Marie’s charm and affections. On July 1, when she asked for $100, he willingly withdrew it from his bank, although his banker could not recall Gsellman ever withdrawing such a large amount. Nevertheless, Anna Marie was on a roll again and able to send Osborne $50. He kept up the pressure for $250 more.
When she appeared at Gsellman’s hillside tenement house on the morning of July 6, Schultz accosted her. He recognized her as the visitor who had been with Gsellman the night before. Both Schultz and his wife had seen Anna Marie several times during that evening, helping Gsellman down the stairs to the second-floor bathroom and back up to his fourth-floor garret.
“No use going upstairs,” Schultz told Anna Marie upon her arrival. “Gsellman is dead.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Anna Marie replied, acting stunned by the news. It seemed to Schultz that she would faint, but she quickly composed herself and went up to the room anyway. After a few minutes there, she left the building.
The day after Gsellman’s body was discovered, Detective William Sweeney arrested Anna Marie, but not for murder. He brought her into police headquarters on a $10 bounced check charge, which she resolved immediately, paying her debt to the Alms & Doepke Department Store with cash Gsellman had given her.
And so she continued her deadly ministrations to the elderly, undetected.