When the jury returned its surprising guilty without mercy verdict, it set off a flurry of activity in Cincinnati and Columbus, including a promise from the defense to appeal Anna Marie’s case “all the way to the top” of the judicial system.
Many who followed the Blonde Borgia’s trial—that included virtually everyone in Cincinnati—thought Anna Marie would be convicted of poisoning Jacob Wagner and spend the remainder of her life in prison, but few expected the jury to impose the ultimate penalty—death in the electric chair. A headline in the Cincinnati Enquirer noted prevailing opinion: “Penitentiary Officials Doubt That Blonde Ever Will Go to the Electric Chair.”
Upon learning of the verdict, Philip Hahn briefly met with reporters. Throughout the trial it was clear to one and all that he was no longer close to his wife—a dash of arsenic in the stew will do that—but outwardly he continued to stand by her side.
“No matter what has happened, I’ll stick by my wife,” he said, with eyes filled with tears. “This has been almost too hard to take.”
He rarely was present in the courtroom during the trial, even though he was working nights at Western Union and might have been able to attend the day sessions. As the trial progressed, he kept abreast of most major developments by tapping out in Morse code the stories reporters sent with Western Union each evening to newspapers throughout the land.
When Judge Bell dismissed Foreman John Granda and the eleven women on the jury with him, a swarm of reporters and photographers rushed to the jury room to determine how the panel had reached its verdict. It was “bedlam,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported.
The jury took two ballots. The first came at their meeting on the morning of November 6 when they unanimously and quickly agreed that Anna Marie was guilty, but one vote was cast with a recommendation of mercy. The panel reviewed some of the testimony and took a second ballot at noon. The vote was unanimous: no mercy.
Anna Thompson, who turned sixty-five the day deliberations began, initially voted for mercy. She explained that she had a daughter, Aurdelle, the same age as Oscar. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of that boy going through life with the memory that his mother had been executed. But when we talked it over, it seemed better for the boy to be taken away from his mother. So, I voted with the rest.” During the reading of the verdict, however, she cried.
Several agreed that the defendant’s purse that was shown to contain arsenic was the most damning of the 137 prosecution exhibits placed in evidence. “We knew that nothing could come into that purse through that piqué lining,” said juror Marjorie Bishop, the wife of a tailor and a seamstress herself. “I know that the insides of purses are made of cotton piqué, finely woven. Nothing goes through them.”
The poison in the purse was “the deciding factor” for him, too, Granda said. “It indicated premeditation.” He also noted Anna Marie’s stoicism throughout the trial. “If I had been in her shoes,” he said, “I would have shown plenty of emotion, believe me.”
On several occasions during the trial, Granda looked up and found Anna Marie gazing at him. “At those times I wasn’t sure whether she was guilty or I was,” he said. “There was something—like a little madness—in her eyes.”
Oscar’s fate without his mother also was discussed. “We thought of this boy growing up, perhaps on the verge of success, and then having the fact of his mother having died in the electric chair to darken his career,” explained Emma Cassidy, a great-grandmother and the wife of a thespian. “Then we considered Mr. Outcalt’s statement that only if the memory of such a mother was erased forever from his mind would Oscar have any chance for a normal, happy, successful life.”
About her more-than-three-weeks on the jury, Mrs. Cassidy said, “I don’t think I could have stood this another day, and I don’t want to do it again.”
Stella Tragesser, an assistant bank cashier, said “Mrs. Hahn had a way of studying each of our faces, . . . and it was her cold stare that made me wonder what she really thought of each of us.” Tragesser did not find the defendant “beautiful” or even particularly pretty, but “rather nice looking, and, while she was extremely cold, there was something about her that attracted you.”1
It also was revealed that the thirteenth juror, alternate Frederick Juergens, was “the life of the party” during the panel’s twenty-three days together. Often he would produce his accordion and liven up the scene at the Hotel Metropole. As the alternate, he did not participate in the jury’s deliberations.
Ella Black, a middle-aged widow, “had no reluctance about voting for the death penalty. We’re all close friends here now, too. We’ve had such good conversations. You know, this experience is a highlight in our lives.” Frances Sullivan agreed. She revealed that the panel had formed the AMH (Anne Marie Hahn) Club and would henceforth meet annually at the Hotel Metropole on October 11, the date the trial began. “We’ve had a lot of fun . . . in these weeks,” she said. Within days, however, others on the panel vociferously denied that such a club had been formed. It never did meet.
As the jurors left the courthouse together, one Chicago reporter described them as “giggling nervously” as they posed one more time for photographers. Huddled together on a cold November day, the group “looked like a woman’s club which had just come from a murder mystery movie.”2
Newsboys already were on the street, shouting out the headlines on the latest editions. “Mrs. Hahn found guilty!” “Anna Hahn to die for murder!” “Mrs. Hahn denied mercy by jury!”
The newspapers that had reporters at the trial published editorials and opinion columns on the verdict. Alfred Segal of the Cincinnati Post noted, “Mrs. Hahn may derive consolation from the fact that she couldn’t have expected any less. . . . Her crimes will be in local conversation a long time to come . . . and she will be mentioned not for cleverness but for surpassing cold-bloodedness that played with lonely old men and when through with them, poisoned them.”3
The Cincinnati Times-Star editorial pointed out that “the majesty of the law has been asserted in Cincinnati. . . . When sentence is pronounced upon Anna Hahn she will be the first woman in Hamilton County to have been condemned to death. But the crime for which she was tried was one of the most shocking in local history.”4
The conviction of Anna Marie “will help to fortify one’s confidence in the jury system,” Cleveland’s Plain Dealer noted. The editorial described her crime as “particularly diabolical.” Still, it continued, “many were frankly surprised that the jury brought in the verdict it did,” given the fact that the defendant was a pretty, young mother and the jury was primarily female. “One wonders if the verdict would have been the same had the jury not been mainly of women.”
The Columbus Dispatch observed—correctly, as it has turned out—that Anna Marie “left a trail of death and human misery in her wake, the full extent of which, perhaps, will never be known.”
It was Anna Marie who now was in misery in the jail. She ate and spoke very little all weekend. Even when Oscar and Bolsinger came for a fifteen-minute visit she hardly said a word. (Philip tried to visit her, but she had him turned away.) She cried while singing a hymn at a Sunday service in the jail. Neither a personal visit from jail chaplain Reverend Alexander Patterson nor the arrival of a $5 bouquet of roses from an anonymous “Good Samaritan” failed to console her. More tears flowed when she opened a letter from her mother, who made no mention of the trial.
Fearing a suicide attempt, her keepers increased the watch and moved out her cellmate, Mabel Hill. One rumor had it that Anna Marie would take her life with poison she had hidden inside her crucifix. Such was not the case, jailer Andrew Frank said.
So unexpected was the verdict that authorities had made no plans to incarcerate a woman headed for the electric chair. Anna Marie wanted to remain in the Hamilton County Jail, to be near Oscar, but that was out of the question for anyone sentenced to death. It was suggested that she be taken to the Columbus City Jail or the Ohio Reformatory for Women at Marysville, about twenty-five miles northwest of Columbus, but the warden there thought Anna Marie’s presence would be “disruptive.” Authorities discovered later that Ohio law did not allow death penalty prisoners to be incarcerated at the reformatory, either. The remaining choice was the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, which had the electric chair but no facilities whatsoever for a female inmate.
A week of debate ended with Warden James C. Woodard’s decision that the penitentiary’s first female prisoner in twenty-one years would be placed in a cell constructed for her on the third floor of the prison’s hospital. Convict labor, wearing black-and-white-striped prison garb, hastily remodeled an area that had been used as a dormitory for a dozen or so convicts working the night shift in the prison’s power plant. A heavy wire mesh screen enclosed the 27 x 21–foot area, which was almost three times what she had enjoyed at the Hamilton County facility and much larger than the 5 x 7–foot cells occupied by male prisoners on death row.
On the Monday following the verdict, Hoodin and Bolsinger filed a motion for a new trial, and Judge Bell scheduled a hearing for a week later, November 15. According to the defense motion, Anna Marie did not deserve the death penalty, based on the evidence; there was misconduct by the prosecution; and there were irregularities in court procedures.
“The prosecutor’s misconduct itself was so flagrant as to warrant a new trial,” Hoodin charged during his two-and-a-half-hour oration in Judge Bell’s courtroom, crowded with visitors again. He called Outcalt’s closing argument “inflammatory.” His introduction of the names of Gsellman, Obendoerfer, and Palmer were a “surprise” to the defense, Hoodin maintained, and therefore never should have been introduced. “Mrs. Hahn was not tried for one offense but for five,” Hoodin said, including Heis. “I don’t think Mrs. Hahn got a fair trial.”
“My conception is,” Outcalt snapped, “that when my duty has been best done, it is least pleasing to defense counsel.”
When Hoodin pointed out that the state did not produce a single eyewitness in the Wagner case, Outcalt responded.
“If the state should be required to produce an eyewitness in poison cases, all persons who have been convicted as poisoners were convicted unjustly.” Outcalt added that the state had been “scrupulously fair in presenting the evidence.”
“What do you think is going to happen?” Warden Frank asked Anna Marie as he escorted her back to jail after the hearing.
“Oh, I suppose the motion will be denied,” she responded. It was.
On the morning of November 27, upon appearing before Judge Bell for the last time, she heard her fate.
Following many hours rereading the trial transcript and reviewing the law, Judge Bell produced a thirty-two-page opinion that he provided both sides rather than read it in court. In it he said he found the evidence “so overwhelming that no verdict other than guilty could have been reached by the jury. The verdict is not contrary to law.” The defense’s argument that the client was tried for five offenses was, in the judge’s opinion, “an incorrect statement of the situation.” He cited Ohio law that held the introduction of “any like acts or other acts of a defendant” was admissible. Finally, he found no misconduct on the part of the prosecuting attorney.
Speaking in court and summarizing his ruling, Judge Bell stated that “the court has arrived at the conclusion there is no prejudicial error in the record, and that the motion should be, and is, overturned.”
Turning his attention to the red-eyed, diminutive woman standing at the bar before him the jurist asked, “Do you have a statement to make, Mrs. Hahn?”
“I have,” a strong and determined Anna Marie replied. Looking squarely into the eyes of Judge Bell, she declared, “I am innocent, your Honor.”
“You stated that to the jury, Mrs. Hahn, and the jury found against you.” He paused momentarily to give Anna Marie time to add to her statement. When she did not, he turned to reading her death sentence.
“It is ordered, adjudged, and decreed by the court that the defendant, Anna Marie Hahn, be taken hence to the jail of Hamilton County, Ohio, and that within thirty days hereof the sheriff of Hamilton County shall convey the said defendant to the Ohio Penitentiary and deliver her to the warden thereof, and that on the tenth day of March, 1938, shall cause a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, to pass through the body of the said defendant, the application of such current to be continued until the said defendant is dead.”
Judge Bell then added: “And may God, in His infinite wisdom, have mercy on your soul.” He fought with his emotions, only giving up once he had returned to his chambers. There, in private and behind a locked door, he cried.
As she had throughout her long ordeal, Anna Marie remained impassive during Judge Bell’s death knell, but once back in jail she collapsed into loud sobbing. Maude Burkhardt, the jail matron who accompanied Anna Marie to court and back, wept alongside her prisoner. When Anna Marie felt faint, Dr. William T. Lindsay, the jail physician, quickly came to her side.
Three days later, defense counsel was back before Judge Bell, requesting a stay, pending further legal maneuvering by the defense. The judge ruled it was a matter for the Ohio Court of Appeals, which received an appeal for a stay later that Tuesday.
Bolsinger also lit a fire, of sorts, by “leaking” to the local press that there were “new developments” in the case that would prove to be “a sensation.” The defense had received an anonymous letter from a jealous woman Wagner knew, Bolsinger said, and she was responsible for his death. It read in part: “I just can’t stand this tearble thing my consious is driving me crayz. I am the one Poisoned Mr. Wagner, not Mrs. Hahan . . . heaven knows she is innocese.”
While the defense distributed copies of the letter to reporters, Outcalt debunked it, saying that it was “written by some crank.” Wagner had no interest in any other women other than Anna Marie, the prosecutor said. The secret killer issue fizzled in a few days, then surfaced again when Outcalt received another “hoax” letter from “someone with a perverted sense of humor,” he said. The letter said, in part: “Poor, dear Mrs. Haan didn’t not do the orful murder of Mr. Waggner. And that brave lady who commed forth to confess she done it—she is a liar; she didn’t do nothing of the sort. . . . I hate to admit it, but I killed Mr. Waggoner myself . . . so let Mrs. Haan go.”
Judge Bell, Hoodin, Bolsinger, Outcalt, and others received numerous letters and postcards from throughout the country following the trial. “If you let that Hahn woman free, we [will] blow up the courthouse!” was one of the threats received. Another wrote to criticize the jury and its verdict. “They more than murdered that poor little boy [Oscar]. I was in court and witnessed the distressing tragedy of a child’s love for a criminal mother. . . . It’s enough to make the boy hate the world forever.” A third told Judge Bell, “You have no idea of the favorable opinion your handle of the case has engendered, not only for the law but also for Cincinnati.” Pearl M. Hoon of Cincinnati requested a seat at Anna Marie’s execution. “In making up your list of witnesses to the electrocution of Mrs. A. M. Hahn, please include me. I certainly wish to witness that,” she wrote, adding that she had had “no end of embarrassment due to the similarity of names.”
Anna Marie received mail, too. Clifford Ennis of Clarendon, New York, wrote to inquire if she would be interested in placing Oscar “in a good home, a place where he can grow up without his relationship being a handicap. . . . This offer is sincere, motivated by the desire to do good, and I have a fondness for boys.”
George Berry of Latoma, Kentucky, offered to make a $25 donation to Anna Marie’s defense fund if she would acknowledge her appreciation “by knitting a sweater for a boy eight years of age.”
Wednesday morning, December 1, Bolsinger, Sidney Brant, and Sidney Kahn argued before the appeals court that Anna Marie be permitted to remain in the Hamilton County Jail during her appeals process. Outcalt argued that already the case had cost the county dearly—an estimated $10,000—and now the prisoner was properly a ward of the state and should be incarcerated at the Ohio Penitentiary.
Presiding judge Simon Ross and judges Stanley Matthews and Francis Hamilton agreed. Their ruling from the bench was that the prisoner should go to the penitentiary forthwith.
“Oh, no! No! They can’t do that!” Anna Marie cried upon hearing the news on the radio.
The penitentiary was ready to receive Anna Marie, so Sheriff George A. Lutz decided to move her to Columbus that very afternoon, within the hour, in fact. At the jail, Mrs. Burkhardt helped Anna Marie gather up her few personal things and pack a small valise that still bore steamship stickers from her travels. A deputy sheriff picked up Oscar at the Washington School and brought him to his mother’s side. After a few minutes together, they walked arm-in-arm down the stairs to the waiting sheriff’s black sedan, Oscar carrying the case. Both were smiling.
“Are you going to miss your mother?” she asked her son as parting neared.
“Not so much,” he replied, teasing her even now. “It don’t do any good.”
“Be sure to be a good boy and mind your grandparents and your father,” she told him, holding his face in her hands and kissing him. This time there were no tears—at least, not until Oscar was out of sight. Then she softly cried.
Anna Marie left Cincinnati squeezed into the backseat of the sedan between Mrs. Burkhardt and Julia Kies. Because a December chill was in the air, all three wore heavy fur coats—Anna Marie’s was her favorite blocked lapin—so it was a tight fit. Mrs. Kies’s husband, Deputy Sheriff Raymond B. Kies, drove with bailiff Charles Stagnaro beside him in the front seat. In the bailiff’s pocket were Anna Marie’s commitment papers and her death warrant. A second car, carrying Sheriff Lutz, Deputy Chief George J. Heitzler, and William J. Wiggeringloh, chief of the Hamilton County police, followed through the streets of Cincinnati. “I’ll be back here for another trial,” Anna Marie said quietly but firmly. Once beyond the city limits, the second car sped ahead. The three officers were headed for an Ohio Sheriff’s Association meeting in Columbus.
In Cincinnati, Bolsinger released a statement from Anna Marie that he had written out in pencil for her in her jail cell. She thanked her jailers for her good treatment during the one hundred and thirteen days she spent in their care. She also proclaimed her innocence once more. “I feel at this time that my innocence will be established as I am innocent of the crime charged against me. I hope and pray that the party having any knowledge of the crime will get in touch with my attorneys.”
The two-and-three-quarter-hour drive north on what was known as the Three-C Highway (linking Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland) traversed gently rolling farmland through Montgomery, Wilmington, Washington Court House, and Mount Sterling to Columbus. The trip was quiet but not quite uneventful. About halfway, outside Wilmington, Stagnaro noticed a rather pale-faced Anna Marie had put her head on Mrs. Burkhardt’s shoulder. (Both Mr. and Mrs. Kies told reporters the prisoner had fainted.) Stagnaro, whose cigar smoke filled the sedan and may have been the cause of Anna Marie’s swoon, ordered a brief stop at a roadside stand to get her a cup of black coffee.
As dusk approached, the car arrived in downtown Columbus and turned onto Spring Street. The ominous Ohio Penitentiary loomed just ahead.
1. Stella Tragesser, “Hahn Trial to Be Vivid Memory!” Cincinnati Enquirer, Nov. 19, 1937, 12.
2. “11 Women Doom Anna to Chair,” Chicago Herald and Examiner, Nov. 7, 1937, 1.
3. Alfred Segal, “Mrs. Hahn,” Cincinnati Post, Nov. 8, 1937, 8.
4. Editorial, “The Hahn Trial,” Cincinnati Times-Star, Nov. 8, 1937, 6.