The jury trial for “the greatest mass murder in the history of the country” began at 10 A.M. Monday, October 11.
Gloomy skies that morning didn’t deter Cincinnati from turning out early and in large numbers to see the Blonde Borgia, the German housemaid, the Poison Angel, the Angel of Mercy—all names used by the newspapers to describe the woman on trial for her life. Four hours before the court opened, would-be spectators lined up four abreast in the corridor. Women, wearing Sunday-best hats and coats trimmed in fur, dominated the crowd once again. Some thought ahead and brought packed lunches. The aged, a few so elderly that they had to be helped to their seats, waited like everyone else for the little white admission ticket issued by the court for each session. Members of the press were issued their own credentials.
“Lollypop Joe,” a courthouse fixture, hawked peanuts, chewing gum, and candy in the hallways while others worked the crowds with sandwiches and coffee. An estimated 150 spectators—only six were men, it was reported—finally gained admittance to the courtroom and stuffed themselves onto the hard benches and the added chairs. Those left outside fumed and fussed for having waited so long for naught. Still, a sizeable number chose to remain in the hallway, hoping to gain access at a later session.
From the outset Judge Bell had made it clear that observers would not be permitted to stand. The three rows of folding chairs added for special visitors, such as members of the bar, were a rare sight in any Cincinnati court, but especially Bell’s. Everyone realized this would be a trial unlike any other in Cincinnati’s history.
“The courts are yours by reason of your being part of the public,” Judge Bell told the visitors, “but I want it distinctly understood that this trial will not be a performance. It is a serious trial in a court of justice. So long as the public confines itself to listening to the evidence, as many as can be seated will be admitted. But at no time will this court tolerate any interference or disturbances.”
Among Cincinnati jurists, none stuck closer to proper court procedure than Judge Bell. Off the bench, the fifty-seven-year-old jurist was said to be “friendly, considerate, and obliging,” but in his court he was stern and demanding.
As a young man in his hometown of Cincinnati, he worked on the railroad before turning to law. He passed the bar in 1908, after having attended evening law classes at the YMCA’s McDonald Educational Institute, one of the earliest part-time evening law schools in the United States. Cincinnati voters elected Bell Hamilton County prosecutor in 1922, and, after two terms in that post, he won a seat on the Court of Common Pleas in 1926. Since then he had tried more than eight thousand cases and had been reversed only four times, a testimony to his astute and strict interpretation of the law.
Chicago Daily News reporter Robert J. Casey was not alone in thinking that the selection of a jury panel, to begin this day, could be difficult. “There seems to be no one in the Cincinnati area who has not formed an opinion, one way or another,” he wrote. He was convinced that a large portion of the population had put Anna Marie in the same class with “the great typhoid epidemic of the ’80s—not quite so omnipresent, perhaps, but more deadly.”
The defense had its reservations, also, and hinted that it would seek a change of venue, but three days before the start of trial, and after much soul-searching with their client, Hoodin and Bolsinger issued a statement: “Mrs. Hahn feels that a jury can be drawn in Hamilton County which will judge her case honestly and fairly.” The game was afoot in Cincinnati.
In the beer halls throughout the Over-the-Rhine district the talk centered on the Blonde Borgia now capturing headlines every day. According to one neighborhood lyrist:
A bunch of the guys were whooping it up
in Bill Durbin’s Butchertown bar.
The night was fine, the beer was good,
but Annie wasn’t thar.
Many a man fondly remembered an encounter they had with Anna Marie, such as when she smiled at them, sang Lieder (songs) with them, or sat on their laps. “She called me darling,” recalled an infatuated customer in Bill Durbin’s Inn. “Gosh, she was a pretty woman.” said Durbin, himself an Anna Marie admirer. “She was awfully popular around here. She was so kind to old people. She always looked after them.”1
In the next breath, though, most thanked their lucky stars that they had not become attached to her—or worse, eaten a meal prepared by her. Others wondered how, with all her charms, she had been able to ingratiate herself to her victims so quickly.
At this point, the discussion invariably turned to sex. It was stated as fact that Anna Marie had spread arsenic on her ample breasts, which her male victims sucked. They ingested the poison and died happy. This scurrilous story arose after the prosecution, in pretrial hearings, declared that the state believed poison was administered orally by Anna Marie, but suckling was not what it had in mind.
In the Elmwood Place casinos where Anna Marie once hung out, bookies talked of the markers she had stuck them with. As one book-maker put it, “Anna Marie’s is a name more famous around here than Man o’ War,” the greatest thoroughbred of the 1920s.
Prior to the trial, Judge Bell received a letter from Joseph Sudbeck of St. Louis, asking that it be forwarded to Anna Marie’s attorneys. It read: “Gentlemen: If Mrs. Anna Hahn is in need of financial assistance, please let me know. My holdings consists [sic] of oil bonds and industrial bonds valued at $7,000,000 [$98 million in 2005]. Any financial assistance that I may give must be understood that it is a charitable donation, not a loan. I would like to hear from Mrs. Hahn attys [sic], also from Mrs. Hahn, stating that she will accept financial assistance to carry on her fight.”
Sudbeck, whose occupation was listed as a salesman, subsequently was arrested and charged with using the mail to defraud. He was all but penniless.
Oscar showed up with Philip for the first day of court, wearing his first pair of long pants. His mother, so proud, hugged and kissed him as photographers popped flashbulbs all around them. Philip leaned over and told his wife, “Regardless of our marital difficulties in the last few years, I absolutely believe in your innocence and will stick by you.” Anna Marie gave him a smile, but no kiss.
The defendant looked her best. She wore a black crepe dress trimmed with white silk braid, her hair coifed, a slight touch of rouge, and immaculately manicured fingernails. Around her neck was the gold crucifix she would wear until the day she died. A wedding ring and a diamond engagement ring adorned her left hand. After the photographers left the courtroom each day, she put on a pair of rimless eyeglasses.
Cincinnati Post columnist Alfred Segal, writing in his “Cincinnatus” column, was of the opinion that “what Mrs. Hahn wears at the trial is not in the least relevant since this isn’t a matinee. Nor is the fact that Mrs. Hahn was seen kissing her son a cause for photographs. After all, mothers have been kissing sons since Eve’s time.”2
Oscar, with Philip’s arm around him, sat behind his mother for a part of the morning session, then at the recess he was taken from the courtroom by Philip after Judge Bell ruled that “a murder trial is no place for children.” He barred from the courtroom everyone under the age of seventeen.
Ohio Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert N. Gorman, the first of several judges who would attend the proceedings over the next month, joined Judge Bell on the bench as an observer as jury selection began. Hoodin’s biggest opportunity in his young career to shine in Cincinnati’s biggest murder trial got off to a sickly start. He felt terrible, due to a heavy cold, and he had to leave much of the opening work to Bolsinger.
Outcalt questioned every talesman as to whether they accepted the death penalty and whether their verdict would be influenced by the fact that the defendant was a woman. The defense focused on determining whether potential jurors were biased against their client—for example, for being German, betting on horses, or having a bastard son. “Would it prejudice you either way if it should be brought out in the evidence that the defendant is the mother of a twelve-year-old boy born out of wedlock?” Hoodin asked.
At one point during his questioning, Hoodin invoked the ire of Judge Bell by asking Magdalene Mitchell, “Would you vote for acquittal if it were shown that numerous other persons were implicated in the [Wagner] murder—if it was murder?”
“You can’t ask that!” said the judge.
If the defense wanted to plant the seed that a killer other than Anna Marie was responsible for Wagner’s death, Hoodin succeeded in doing so, but during the trial the suggestion that “numerous other persons” might be involved never surfaced again.
The first to be seated on the jury was Emma Cassidy, a housewife and the spouse of a “dramatic artist.” When asked if she believed that women are equally responsible for their crimes as are men, she replied, “More so.” Mary Arnold,3 on the other hand, did not believe that to be true and thus was rejected as a juror. Mary Garland also was excused because she was first cousin to Outcalt. Seven men were passed over when each said they could not accept a verdict of death for a woman.
One who told her “inside” story as a talesman to the Cincinnati Enquirer was Stella Tragesser, a spinster living with her mother.4 She was number thirty-seven out of forty-six to be examined. At first she was nervous, but by the time she was called, at 9 P.M. Wednesday at Judge Bell’s first night session, she recalled, “I wasn’t the least bit nervous or excited and went strutting into the courtroom as though I might have been Myrna Loy.”5
Yet, when she realized she might be on the jury, she said she “actually prayed that they would call my name [to be excused] because even the mere thought of being a part of the tragedy ahead of me scared me beyond words.” She was the second to be seated, and she felt “doomed.”
After a day of adjournment Tuesday to observe Columbus Day, jury selection resumed. The photographers were again out in force prior to the opening of court. A smiling, amiable Anna Marie asked the group if there were any pictures of her in Monday’s out-of-town newspapers. When told that there were, she asked that clippings be sent to her.
For a time Philip also enjoyed the attention of the press. While on a break from his job at Western Union, he visited a newsstand to buy copies of the New York newspaper with his photograph in it.
Before the trial, the only attention Philip received was when a customer asked about sending a Western Union telegram. “Now everybody in Cincinnati knows him,” Casey told his Chicago readers. “When he steps into a night club or the old neighborhood saloon, he is ‘that husband of that Mrs. Hahn.’ People ask him if his wife poisoned anybody—and he says she didn’t.”6
Philip was “there” for his wife, yet he wasn’t. He offered his support, gave her a fan to use in the courtroom, and sent her a basket of fruit every Thursday while she was in the jail. He even posed for photographs with her on occasion, but she preferred that he not do so. She blamed him for her predicament inasmuch as he had turned over to police that bottle of croton oil. She never would forgive him for that, and yet, as her husband, he made an effort to do right by her.
“If you knew Anna as I know her—gentle, generous, motherly and always fearing to hurt someone’s feelings—you would understand how physically impossible murder in any form would be to her,” Philip told the press before the trial. Of course, he felt it necessary to lie a little. He knew well her temper, remembered their many arguments, and mulled over her many assignations.
“I would have been worse than a sap to live with Anna all these years and have no suspicion that something was wrong.”
Nevertheless, he professed her innocence and vowed not to be “such a heel” as to abandon her in her time of trouble. “Oscar and I are sticking with her to the bitter end,” he said, and he did, until she received the death sentence. Then, although he tried to visit her, she almost always rejected his requests. As time went by, he stopped asking.
The jury panel, said to be death-qualified inasmuch as each member accepted the ultimate penalty, was completed shortly before noon Thursday with the seating of Florence E. Bartlett, wife of the president of Cincinnati Discount Company. John Granda, a machinist with the Cincinnati Milling Machine Company, was the lone male, although Frederick Juergens, a mechanical engineer with Crosley Radio Corporation, would serve as alternate. Granda would be named jury foreman.
Veteran court observers could not remember an Ohio jury in a mur der trial so laden with women. It also was a rarity in the history of American jurisprudence, they said. The press promptly labeled the panel the “petticoat jury.”
Seated in the back row of the jury box were Mrs. Cassidy; Miss Tragesser; Mr. Granda; Mrs. Jennie Greenwald, widow; Mrs. Bartlett; and Mrs. Marjorie Bishop, wife of a tailor at Storrs-Schaeffer Company, where she worked, too.
In the front row were Edna Clark, wife of a retired Traction Company worker; Ella L. Black, widow; Frances G. Sullivan, widow; Georgia McDonald, a twenty-two-year-old divorcee and laundress, the panel’s youngest member; Anna Thompson, wife of a farm produce sales manager; and Alice Peters, widow. Alternate Juergens sat to one side of the jury box.
Immediately after the jurors were sworn in, several journalists bolted from the courtroom to get to telephones and call their newspapers. Not pleased that the decorum of his court had been violated, Judge Bell made it clear he would not tolerate such behavior again. But it did occur again: as soon as Judge Bell declared the noon recess and left the bench, press photographers seeking pictures of the panel stormed the courtroom, “literally taking possession of the place,” said Tragesser. “Some were on chairs, tables, every place, and in whatever direction we looked we were staring into the face of a camera. I was terribly frightened and wanted to be home more than I ever wanted to be in all of the twenty-eight years of my life.”7
Much of the press attention focused on Granda, a handsome, dark-haired man with dimples when he smiled and a cleft in his chin. Resplendent in a well-tailored green suit, he appeared as though “he stepped out of a bandbox,” said bailiff Ann Roberts. Ohio State Journal reporter Sarah L. Dush dubbed him the “Adonis of the jury.” Anna Marie gazed intently at every juror seated, but she seemed to take a particular interest in Granda.
Criminal Court Bailiff Charles Stagnaro, assisted by special bailiffs Nettie Douglas and Mrs. Roberts, had the responsibility for the care and feeding of the thirteen jurors impanelled. Each had come to court Thursday with extra clothes, enough to last several weeks of sequestering at the Hotel Metropole, on Walnut Street, two blocks from the courthouse. A modest hotel, its four hundred first-class rooms began at $1.75 a night.
During the week, Judge Bell said, court would be in session each day from 10 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. with one hour and a half for lunch. On Saturdays, there would be a two-hour morning session, and on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays the judge, despite Hoodin’s objection, called for evening sessions of about two hours.
Thursday night the jurors had their first dinner together in the dining room of the Metropole and became acquainted with one another. Among the most animated in her conversation was the tall and stately Mrs. Peters, described as “the most socially prominent member of the jury.” Her attire and demeanor were “faultless,” said the Chicago Daily Tribune, which also described Mrs. Bartlett as “one of the town’s more prominent matrons.”
After dinner, jurors and bailiffs retired to the large dayroom on the ninth floor that was exclusively for their use. “We had an awfully good time,” said bailiff Roberts, playing cards and games such as bingo and Monopoly. A few immediately wrote letters home, though all correspondence to or from the jury was censored to eliminate any mention of the trial itself. Family visits were permitted, but only in the presence of a bailiff.
That night the bailiffs locked the jurors in their rooms on the ninth floor, a procedure that initially unnerved a few on the panel. In the morning, promptly at 10 A.M., the state would begin to unfold one of the most bizarre, cold-blooded murder cases in the nation’s history.
1. Robert J. Casey, “‘Blonde Angel’ Still a Pal to Men She Didn’t Poison,” Chicago Daily News, Oct. 13, 1937, 3.
2. Cincinnatus, “At a Trial,” Cincinnati Post, Oct. 12, 1937, 8.
3. No relation to Olive Koehler.
4. Stella Tragesser, “Hahn Trial to be Vivid Memory!” Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 19, 1937, 12.
5. Myrna Loy was a popular Hollywood actress at the time.
6. Casey, “‘Blonde Angel,’” 3.
7. Tragesser, “Hahn Trial,” 12.