During her first day on the witness stand, Anna Marie got nothing but a hammering from Prosecutor Dudley Miller Outcalt. The next day she got a vote.
On November 2, Election Day, a Cincinnati voter wrote in her name for a municipal judgeship, and election officials recorded it.
The jurors also voted on Election Day. Bundled in coats, hats, and gloves, and accompanied by their bailiffs, they trooped as a group by bus around to their voting precincts. John Granda’s was the last stop. His wife and daughter waited for four hours for him to show up, just for a hug and a kiss. Upon viewing this scene from the bus, the eleven ladies of the jury began to chant, “We want Johnnie! We want Johnnie!”
“If they want him, they can have him,” said a bemused Mrs. Granda, “but he will be back with me before long.” Her husband blushed.
H. Fuller Stevens, the affable manager of the fourteen-story, 1,000-room Hotel Gibson at Fifth and Walnut streets, tossed an election-night dinner for nearly two dozen members of the press covering the trial. During the evening, both Judge Bell and Prosecutor Outcalt dropped by, but the defense team did not. It was more concerned with how Anna Marie would withstand another day of Outcalt’s scorching cross-examination when the trial resumed on Wednesday.
Actually, the day in court proved to be somewhat anticlimactic. Hoodin had successfully argued that the defense had little or no money to pay the $300 per day expenses of its sole expert witness, toxicologist Dr. William Duncan McNally, an associate professor of medicine at the Rush Medical College, University of Chicago. Therefore, the court agreed to interrupt the prosecution’s case and the questioning of Anna Marie to first hear McNally’s testimony immediately upon his arrival from Chicago. He flew into Cincinnati’s Lunken Municipal Airport Wednesday afternoon and, under a police escort, was whisked at seventy miles an hour to the Hamilton County Courthouse.
As the former Cook County coroner’s chemist, McNally claimed to have examined thousands of corpses for poison, some of them riddled with “lead poisoning” from Chicago’s gangland wars. In an authoritative voice, he testified that drinking too much home brew or any number of rather common illnesses could have caused Heis’s symptoms. Hoodin handed McNally Anna Marie’s crocheted purse, which defense counsel had suggested could have been manufactured with arsenic in the lining. After examining it carefully, inside and out, the witness agreed, noting that “some clothing is loaded with arsenic” to protect against insect infestation.
When his time came to cross-examine the defense witness, Outcalt questioned virtually everything McNally had said, even reading a passage from the professor’s own recently published textbook, Toxicology. It made clear that paralysis was indeed one of the prime symptoms of arsenic poisoning.
“What is a lethal dose of arsenic?” the prosecutor asked.
McNally’s response coincided with previous expert testimony. “One-and-a-half to three grains,” he replied.
As for Anna Marie’s purse, Outcalt had but one question for McNally.
“If you found material that you could pick out with forceps, you would not consider the possibility of contamination from the material of the purse, would you?” he asked.
“No, I would not.”
“Thank you, Dr. McNally. No further questions.”
The testimony of the only expert witness for the defense appeared to veteran court observers to be more favorable to the prosecution.
At the noon recess and before the jury filed out of the courtroom, an angry Judge Bell had a statement to make. He had been informed, he said, that when the jurors arrived at the courthouse that morning, some “coward” had hurled at them “a vile insult,” which he later identified as “a bunch of rats.”
“If that occurs again, it is the wish of the court that you report the matter promptly to one of the bailiffs and have that person brought before the court. . . . Anyone who calls any name or uses vile language toward this jury will be brought before the court, and his punishment will not be light.”
Perhaps to relieve the tension in the courtroom, Hoodin found it necessary to stand and apologize to the court for having said “Good morning” to the jurors. Judge Bell smiled and said he did not view such greetings by the defense or prosecution as contempt of court.
However, the “vile insult” wasn’t the only unpleasantness associated with the trial. Hoodin revealed that three callers, each with a foreign accent, had recently threatened his life should Anna Marie go free. The matter was turned over to the police.
Just as the afternoon session resumed, a fire broke out at the nearby Garden Supply Company on Main Street, filling the courthouse corridors with the acrid smell of smoke. Despite their discomfort, however, few among several hundred waiting for the chance to get into the courtroom budged from their place in line. Once again every seat in the courtroom was occupied.
With a somewhat pale Anna Marie back on the stand, Outcalt resumed his devastating attack, pounding away at her credibility. He picked up where he had left off Monday evening, questioning the defendant about the pawn ticket and her use of the name Marie Fisher.
“You told me you had pawned the rings so that you could lend some money to a girl. How much did you lend her?”
“Ten dollars.”
“Now, Mrs. Hahn, when you were in Colorado Springs you were so short of money that you had to wire your husband for money, and he sent you $30.”
“Yes.”
“And in Denver a few days after that you found it necessary to ask a hotel to cash a check for $10, and still you say you loaned $10 to a girl you met in a public park?”
“Well, she said she wanted to get home, and I thought I would help her.”
“Where was she from?”
“Covington.” Quickly realizing that she had contradicted her previous testimony, Anna Marie corrected herself. “That is, she was from Texas, but she was going to Covington.”
Asked if that was the only time she had used an assumed name, Anna Marie acknowledged that on occasion she had used her maiden name, Filser, and on occasion, spelled it Felser, with an “e.” The prosecutor had laid another trap and opened the door to telling the jury the name of yet another victim of Anna Marie’s care.
Outcalt produced a document that gave Anna Marie power of attorney to gain access to the safe deposit box of Olive Louella Koehler at the Provident Savings Bank & Trust Company in Cincinnati. “Marie Felser” witnessed the document.
Hoodin immediately objected to the introduction of Mrs. Koehler’s name. At Hoodin’s request, the jury again left the courtroom before he began his argument. The state, he said, had not been able to prove that the seventy-nine-year-old widow, who died at Longview State Hospital on August 19, had been poisoned. Therefore, her name should not be introduced to the jury.
“Mrs. Hahn is no angel,” the young defense attorney admitted, blowing his nose into a white linen handkerchief, “and we do not say that she hasn’t done things that I personally would not have done. But her character is not at stake in this trial. This is simply a case of Mr. Outcalt loading the jury’s minds with prejudice to the point where the smartest lawyer and the smartest defense and the most innocent person in the world could never get out.”
Judge Bell overruled the objection, and before the jury once again, Anna Marie admitted that she had indeed signed the document as a witness, but she denied that she also had signed the name of the second witness, “Lee Radley.” Lee Radley was never identified, however.
Repeatedly Anna Marie answered the prosecution’s questions with “I don’t know,” “That’s not true,” or “I don’t remember.” When questioned about money that she said she had loaned various individuals, Anna Marie several times refused to name the borrowers, because she didn’t want to “bring anyone else’s name into this.”
Outcalt turned his focus to the bottle of croton oil that she purchased “for a physic.” It later was found in the Hahn home by her son, Oscar, and hidden from her by her husband.
“Did you know that croton oil was a poison?” he asked.
“No.”
“You didn’t know that three drops of croton oil would kill a man?”
“No. How would I know?”
“Mr. Deming, didn’t he tell you what the dose of croton oil should be?”
“No,” she replied. “I might have taken it and killed myself.”
Observers had expected Outcalt to delve deeply into the deaths of Wagner, Palmer, Gsellman, and Obendoerfer, but he asked Anna Marie relatively few questions about each of them. He focused instead on her relationship with the mysterious Ray, who took her and Oscar on “vacation” to Kentucky immediately after Wagner’s funeral.
“Now, this man Ray, Mrs. Hahn,” Outcalt began, his voice increasing in volume. “He’s a gambler over in Newport, isn’t he?”
Hoodin jumped to his feet yet again, objecting loudly to the question. Newport, a Kentucky community just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati, was for years considered the area’s vice capital. “Overruled,” said the judge.
“Yes.” Anna Marie spoke quietly now, fingering the crucifix that hung around her neck and nervously rapping her fingernails on the arm of the witness chair. She glanced quickly at her defense counsel for support, eliciting a reassuring smile from Hoodin.
“Now, haven’t you been over to Newport and played the hazard table where this Ray is a professional gambler?”
Uncertain where her accuser was going with this subject, Anna Marie answered cautiously. “I have.”
“That’s all,” Outcalt said abruptly, striding back to his table, confident his cross-examination had painted just the right picture of the defendant.
Just prior to shutting down for the night, Judge Bell agreed to Hoodin’s motion that the bottle of croton oil would not be accepted into evidence, since the prosecution did not establish that the oil was used in any of the deaths. It was a small victory for the defense.
“The state rests,” Outcalt quietly announced.
“The defense rests,” Hoodin stated. The spectators shifted in their seats. The trial was all but over.
Anna Marie looked blissfully at the jurors as they filed out, the hint of relief on her wan face.
Thursday morning final arguments began, each side having been allocated up to five hours. Once again the courtroom was packed to capacity, with a large overflow crowd in the hallways. Outcalt was up first, arguing for two-and-a-half hours for the state. His remaining time would follow the defense summation.
Outcalt impressed the press with his oratory. “He has a good courtroom presence, a clear, crisp, oratorical delivery, a logical mind and a long memory—none of which in this case did the defendant any good,” Casey wrote for Chicago Daily News readers.
“Five months ago yesterday,” Outcalt began, almost in a hushed tone, “Jacob Wagner died in agony. Five months ago tomorrow he was placed in his grave. We have come to investigate the circumstances. We have come to learn how it was brought about and upon whom the responsibility must rest for what we believe the evidence must show to be an atrocious crime.”
He recalled for the jury Anna Marie’s random search for her “uncle” in Wagner’s apartment building. She said relatives in Germany had written to her because they didn’t know his address.
“Mark that!” Outcalt told the panel. “He had lived at 1805 Race Street for years. She had lived at 2970 Colerain Avenue for a comparatively short time. But in the odd workings of her mind, it seemed credible that Wagner’s relatives in Germany should have known her address and not his.”
So, the defendant left a note under Wagner’s door, and “when she learned Wagner had a small amount of money saved for his old age, that marked the beginning of the end for him,” the prosecutor said.
Outcalt also reminded the jury of Wagner’s “missing” bankbook and the forged entries in her own bankbook that were “done with a purpose.” She produced her own bankbook that indicated a balance of $16,000, when, in fact, she had but a few dollars in that account. Anna Marie’s story that Oscar had made the false entry while practicing his typing didn’t hold up, Outcalt said. Yet, “she deceived Frank Kaessheimer, who was a businessman,” said the prosecutor, “and that meant that whoever made those entries was clever. It was no little boy.”
The defendant created another ruse with forged notes and checks to get Wagner’s money out of the bank, even after Wagner had died, Outcalt reminded the jurors. When the possibility of her arrest arose, she “found” his bankbook, she called the bank to say it had been found and produced a note from Wagner exonerating her, all in an effort to avoid the police.
“Would to God he had followed the advice of his friends and gone to the police,” said the prosecutor, looking toward the heavens. “If he had done that, you and I wouldn’t be here. Jacob Wagner would be living in his little room at 1805 Race Street; George Gsellman would be living quietly in his little room at 1717 Elm Street, and Georg Obendoerfer would be puttering around in his little garden at 2150 Clifton Avenue.
“But she prevailed on Jacob Wagner, and Jacob Wagner died. When she wrote this note for him to copy,” Outcalt said, holding it aloft, “she wrote not only an alibi for the bankbooks but for the murder she was to commit!”
Outcalt recalled how each of the victims—Wagner, Palmer, Gsellman, and Obendoerfer, plus the “living victim,” Heis—had been blinded by Anna Marie’s affections and how she then set upon them to gain control of their money, one way or another. And when she got what she could from each of the old men, she poisoned them.
“She murdered Wagner to get his money, and when she failed to, she killed Gsellman for his, and when that was not enough she killed Obendoerfer for his. . . . I know all these crimes were connected by the pressure placed on her to repay the money,” he said. The final “proof” of her deeds was the discovery “in the rafters of her cellar seventy-seven grains of arsenic, enough to kill twenty-six people!”
Striding quickly to where the diminutive defendant sat and pointing his finger at her, Outcalt thundered, “Anna Hahn is the only one in God’s world that had the heart for such murders! She sits there with her Madonna face and her soft voice, but they hide a ruthless, passionless purpose the likes of which this state has never known!”
As she had throughout his summation, Anna Marie just stared at Outcalt in contempt. If looks, rather than poison, could kill. . . .
Then Outcalt hit her with a haymaker that she obviously never expected. Tears came to her eyes when he brought Oscar’s name into his final argument, claiming that she used her son as her alibi.
“When Heis complained that his spinach tasted sweetish, Anna said she had put no sugar in it, but Oscar might have done so. It was Oscar again when arsenic was found in her cellar—Oscar was playing with the poison that had been in his chemical set. Oscar bought the food [for Obendoerfer]. Oscar put sugar in old George Heis’s food. She blames all these incriminating, inescapable circumstances on Oscar.”
It was a penetrating indictment, one that Outcalt knew would pierce the defendant’s very heart and remain in the minds of the jurors. With the prosecution’s two-and-a-half hours used up, it became the defense’s turn to paint its own picture of the accused; Outcalt would get another shot at Anna Marie after the defense’s five-hour summation.
The tall, bespectacled Bolsinger, who throughout the trial had played a support role to his law partner, Hoodin, introduced the final arguments for the defense, arguments that would consume all the hours allotted. In a short, disjointed statement, Bolsinger described life as “a set of circumstances. . . . Every one of us has at one time done wrong [such as running a red light], but we haven’t been caught or been compelled to face a jury.” Then he sat down. Hoodin, looking younger than his thirty years, rose to make the principal argument.
Gazing warmly into the impassive faces of the jurors, Hoodin spoke softly of the strain the trial had placed on everyone, yet “somehow we were brought closer together, and we have come to know each other.” The rasp in his voice revealed his personal strain, the result of the cold that still lingered. He smiled and continued. He would not, he said, contend “that Mrs. Hahn is an angel or a righteous woman. But keep in mind that because a person has gambled, because a person doesn’t get along well with her husband, because a person went on with a person named Ray isn’t any indication that that person committed murder.
“You will recall I asked you in the original examination whether you would hold anything like that against her. I am asking you again to please consider this case from the evidence . . . and please don’t take into consideration the little wrongdoings Mrs. Hahn has done.”
Repeatedly describing the prosecutor as “an actor,” Hoodin accused Outcalt of clouding the evidence. “Every smoke screen he can put before you to stop you from determining the issues in this case, he does,” the defense counselor said. “He asks about her associations with Ray, and asks if Ray isn’t a gambler. Her character is not at issue. What does it help you in knowing that she went somewhere with a man named Ray? He’s trying to show you that because she associated with a gambler, she must have killed Jacob Wagner.”
If she had killed Wagner and forged his will, “she would have written that Wagner desired to have his remains cremated and scattered the ashes to the winds, and no toxicologist or chemist, with all the marvels of science, would ever have discovered that Jacob Wagner died of arsenical poisoning.
“I say to you frankly,” Hoodin continued, “that I believe there is arsenic in the body of Jacob Wagner. But I don’t know how it got there and neither do you because the state has not presented any testimony to help you decide that most important point.”
The state only proved that Anna Marie received money from Palmer, he said, not committed murder. The same with the Gsellman case—purely a money transaction. As for Obendoerfer, he “drew $350 from the bank—no evidence what he did with it—but Mr. Outcalt wants you to believe that because Mrs. Hahn had $250 in the bank it must have been Obendoerfer’s money.”
Heis’s condition did not come from poison administered by his client, Hoodin maintained. “George Heis is no more suffering from arsenical poisoning that I am. His condition was brought on by drinking too much home brew!”
The young, diminutive defense attorney challenged the jury to remember what they had done on a particular date in an effort to lend credibility to his client’s testimony that she remembered very little when questioned by Outcalt. “How many can answer what you did on June 3, even if something happened in your life that day? I wonder if you could recollect the exact date. I couldn’t, and our legal minds are supposed to be trained to lots and lots of things.”
After five hours of summation and near exhaustion, Hoodin came to the climax. “God tempers justice with mercy,” he whispered, tears in his eyes. “I know you will return Mrs. Hahn to Oscar so she can take care of him.”
Anna Marie wept openly, dabbing at her eyes with her twisted handkerchief. The jurors, looking grim, were obviously touched by the argument. Two of them cast their eyes to the floor, lest anyone see their watering eyes.
“You are going to hear Mr. Outcalt demand the death penalty,” Hoodin whispered. “It’s within your power to take that spark of life from Mrs. Hahn. It’s in your power to give her mercy. It’s in your power to free her.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you to send Mrs. Hahn back to Oscar. Give him the opportunity in life he deserves.”
Outcalt began his final summation by turning the tears to smiles for many when he noted that his name had been mentioned so often in Hoodin’s closing argument “that I sometimes wondered if this were not the case of state versus Outcalt.”
He pointed out to the jury that it would be “a mathematical impossibility that all these deaths could be due to a mistake or accident.” Because each in their old age had sought the comfort and consolation of a woman, he said, Anna Marie was able to do what she did.
“I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say in this woman we see the most heartless, cruel, greedy person who has ever come within the scope of our lives!” the prosecutor all but shouted.
“Counsel for the defense has asked why we have brought this woman’s gambling activities into this case . . . and why we sought to prejudice the minds of this jury with slurring references to her association with ‘a man named Ray.’ I will tell you why. It is to show you that she constantly took that eleven-year-old lad, behind whose form she now seeks to stand, to handbooks. It is to show you that she took that boy, whom her counsel now asks you to return to her ‘so that he may have a chance in life,’ while she went on a five-day trailer trip to the mountains of Kentucky with her gambling paramour.
“I say to you, ladies and gentlemen, that if there is one chance for that boy, it is to erase from his mind forever the memory of such a mother!”
Thoroughly warmed now to his task, his voice even louder and his face even redder, Outcalt described the sort of woman who sat unperturbed at the defense table just a few feet away.
“She is sly. She made it her business to develop associations with lonely old men who had no relatives.
“She is avaricious, for no act was too low for her which might have resulted in her gaining a slight financial advantage.
“She is cold—as cold-blooded as no woman you or I ever saw. No other woman could have sat in this courtroom and listened for four weeks to the damning testimony that she heard with no show of any emotion.
“She is heartless, or she would not have been capable of dealing out deaths of agony to these old men.”
Picking up the “arsenic” purse in evidence, Outcalt waved it high in front of the jury. “In this purse you see as much a lethal weapon as if she had held a smoking gun in her hand,” he said. To prove that Anna Marie had bought the arsenic was not as important as to show that she possessed it, “and that we have done,” he said.
The state prosecutor saved for last his most dramatic moment.
“In the four corners of this courtroom there stand four dead men,” Outcalt said, looking about the silent, spellbound chamber. “Jacob Wagner!” he cried out, pointing to the far corner. “George Gsellman! Georg Obendoerfer! Albert Palmer!” he shouted, stabbing his finger in the direction of a corner with each name.
Outcalt quickly strode to the front of the defense table and singled out the pale, frightened defendant, all but putting his finger in her face. “From the four corners of this room, bony fingers point at her and they say to you, ‘That woman poisoned me! That woman made my last moment an agony! That woman tortured me with tortures of the damned!’ And then, turning to you, they say, ‘Let my death be not entirely in vain. My life can not be brought back, but through my death and the punishment to be inflicted on her you can prevent such a death coming to another old man.’
“From the four corners of this room those old men say to you, ‘Do your duty!’”
In a voice that began as a whisper and rapidly rose to its full power, Outcalt ended his plea. “I ask you, ladies and gentlemen, to find Anna Marie Hahn guilty of first degree murder as charged in the indictment!”
His job was done. Jurors and spectators alike, absolutely stunned by the forcefulness of the prosecutor’s attack, now took a breath, cleared a throat, or shifted position. Anna Marie never looked more pale, never more frightened, than in those final minutes of her trial.
In his fifteen-page charge to the jury, Judge Bell said it had three verdicts to consider: Guilty without a recommendation of mercy, making the death penalty mandatory; Guilty with a recommendation of mercy, resulting in a life sentence; or acquittal. Hoodin asked that a second-degree murder verdict or one of manslaughter be included in the court’s charge, but Judge Bell swiftly denied the motion.
After four weeks, the longest murder trial ever in Cincinnati was nearing its conclusion. The end was in the hands of the petticoat jury.