The 103-year-old Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus looked like a penitentiary should. Its weighty blocks of Ohio limestone rose three stories, creating a forbidding countenance in gray—dark and brooding. The largest penal institution in the world when it was built possessed a “massive grandeur,” said one historian. It stood as “a silent and frowning warning to the observer of the majesty of the law and the consequences which are sure to follow and overtake those who insult or violate its imperial dignity and sovereign mandates.”1
Behind walls thirty-six inches thick were 4,189 bank robbers, burglars, rapists, murderers, ruffians, and thieves.2 It was a city of scoundrels, and all were male, even the guards. Now there was inmate Number 73228—Anna Marie Hahn—the lone female, who joined the pen’s list of celebrated prisoners.
Inmate Number 30664, for example, was William Sidney Porter, better known as the short-story writer, O. Henry. Convicted of embezzlement of a Texas bank, he was imprisoned on April 25, 1898. During his three years and three months inside, he wrote the first of the short stories that would make him famous.
Other notorious inmates through the years included gangster George “Bugs” Moran; Confederate general John Hunt Morgan, who in 1863 made the prison’s most famous escape; Cleveland’s Solly Hart, public enemy No. 1, who served twenty years as the warden’s chauffeur; and Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was imprisoned for killing his wife in suburban Cleveland in the 1950s.
As Anna Marie and her guardians arrived at the prison, a December evening chill descended on Columbus. It had been a long and trying day for the prisoner, but now she would enter what would be her home for the remainder of her life.
A small crowd, mostly reporters and photographers, had waited for several hours for her arrival. When at 5:15 P.M. the cry went up, “Here she comes!” everyone rushed to the car. Flashbulbs popped repeatedly as the diminutive Blonde Borgia stepped from the vehicle, Stagnaro on one side of her and Mrs. Burkhardt on the other. “But what drew the eyes of all,” wrote Charlotte Sherwood of the Columbus Citizen, “was her hair: beautiful blonde hair, almost red in the light, that fell nearly to her shoulders.”3
Warden Woodard and prison physician Dr. Eugene D. Clarke accompanied Anna Marie and a gaggle of officials and journalists through three iron security gates, across the yard to the prison hospital and up three flights to the cell that had been built for her in the tower. She dropped her coat on the bed and plopped down in a chair, exhausted and tearful. She never noticed that her name and prison number already had been hung on the wire mesh surrounding her spacious cell.
The furnishings were luxurious in comparison to what other death-row prisoners had. There was a white cast-iron bed, a rocking chair, a large table where she could eat her meals and write her letters, a second chair where she now sat, and next to the bed a small table on which someone had placed a Bible. Two large but somewhat threadbare rugs covered a portion of the wood floor. The “private” bathroom, installed for her use only, wasn’t a room at all but wide-open so the prisoner would be visible at all times to the matrons, who occupied an adjacent, open room of their own.
The ten windows were draped with muslin curtains, the first in the history of the penitentiary. From only one, looking east, could Anna Marie see beyond the prison wall. Barely in sight were elevated railroad tracks but not “The Bridge of Sighs,” the nearby railroad trestle spanning the Scioto River at Scioto and Spring streets. It was said that at night, when all was quiet, prisoners heard the clickety-clack of trains crossing the bridge and sighed.
The first four matrons, hired at $100 a month each to guard Anna Marie day and night, were introduced to her upon her arrival. She shook each woman by the hand and repeated each name. “You’ll have no trouble with me,” she told Kate Swift, Esther A. Lyle, Adelaide Schultz, and Harriet C. Mercer. Mrs. Lyle and Mrs. Schultz were both widows of former Ohio Penitentiary guards. Mrs. Swift had been matron to Julia Maude Lowther, the only other woman sentenced to death in Ohio’s electric chair. Lowther, who was imprisoned in the Columbus City Jail rather than the penitentiary, won a new trial in 1931, pleaded guilty to a general charge of homicide, and received a life sentence at the Marysville reformatory. Mrs. Mercer was the alternate and relief matron. If any matron ever needed immediate assistance, she could ring an alarm solely for Anna Marie’s area. The matrons also had a telephone.
After a quick examination, Dr. Clarke pronounced the prisoner fit. Mrs. Burkhardt said a tearful good-bye, promising Anna Marie that she would visit her again, but there is no record that she ever did so. Grace Woodard, wife of the warden, stopped by for the first of many visits. She took an immediate liking to the state’s newest and most notable death-row inmate. But then, Anna Marie always had had that innate ability to charm everyone she met. “She is the bravest woman I ever saw,” Mrs. Woodard said after her initial visit. She also revealed that several who prepared Anna Marie’s first supper in the penitentiary—bacon and eggs, potatoes, bread and butter, peaches, and coffee—cried while doing so.
Although her husband announced that Anna Marie would receive no special privileges over the coming months, Mrs. Woodard saw to it that she did. For example, Anna Marie wore her own clothes, not the standard, striped prison issue.
In the morning, the Protestant chaplain, the Reverend Kleber E. Wall, stopped by with copies of the Christian Herald, Reader’s Digest, and National Geographic. She invited him to return often. She also received a visit from Bertillon superintendent Samuel M. Current, who fingerprinted and photographed her for the penitentiary’s records.
She spent her first Sunday quietly. She listened to a church service on the radio and ate a dinner of steak, mashed potatoes, and peas. It was the same meal served to the other inmates in the dining hall she never would be allowed to enter. Warden Woodard reported that she was “getting along just fine,” and that the first visit on Saturday from Oscar, Philip, and Hoodin did not appear to upset her.
For Philip it was a difficult time, too. He knew his wife did not wish him to be there. On the other hand, she wanted to make sure that he and his parents were taking good care of Oscar, which they were. “Until this trouble came, Oscar thought I was his real father,” Philip said, and outwardly they appeared to have a good relationship.
He told a Cleveland Plain Dealer reporter that he had tried to “keep my self-respect. I’ve always been, well, dapper, like the papers said. I’ve kept right on with my work, going everywhere and being seen, because I’ve done nothing to be ashamed of. I’ve tried to take care of Oscar as a father. So, you see, I cannot talk about his mother—well, anyway, not more than I have to. Perhaps one of these days I’ll have plenty to say.”4 One of those days never arrived.
Shortly after his wife took up residence at the penitentiary, Philip received a package from her. It contained four neatly folded, expensive pink silk slips and the pearl-buttoned white satin blouse she had worn for her trip from Cincinnati to the Columbus prison. Maggie Hahn explained that her daughter-in-law “was afraid they’ll ruin them in the prison laundry.”
Anna Marie’s incarceration was barely three days old when Assistant State Fire Marshal Harry Callan, accompanied by Columbus Fire chief Edward P. Welch, took prison authorities to task following a tour of the facilities. Callan announced that the forty-two-year-old hospital building was “a terrible firetrap,” a charge initially denied by Warden Woodard. Still fresh in everyone’s mind, however, was the April 21, 1930, blaze—set by three prisoners in an escape attempt—that claimed the lives of 322 inmates. Woodard soon agreed with the fire marshal’s assessment, including the recommendation that the all-wood hospital building in which Anna Marie resided be abandoned. Planning for a new death row that would include new accommodations for Anna Marie began immediately.
Anna Marie had barely settled into the humdrum life of a death-row prisoner; now she would have to move. She had not been occupying a cell on death row itself; that was on “L” block near the west wall, and the electric chair was in a small, brick building in the southeast corner of the prison. Warden Woodard planned to put Anna Marie, the condemned male prisoners, and the electric chair together on the second floor of the prison chapel, which was deemed relatively fireproof.
When she did move, her furnishings moved with her into a wire mesh cell a mite smaller but “nicer” than what she had had, the warden said. A few feet away, but out of sight, were eight small cells for the men on death row. The electric chair occupied the room beyond the cells, behind a soundproof wall.
“There is nothing ‘nice’ about it,” commented Anna Marie. “It’s only closer” to the electric chair.
The changes afforded Frederick L. Rike, chief engineer at the prison, the opportunity to automate “Old Sparky,” which had taken 206 lives in a span of four decades. For many years it was held that inmate Charles Justice built Ohio’s electric chair while serving time for burglary and larceny. Just legend, say historians, although he may have performed some electrical work on the chair. What is true about Justice is that after winning parole, he committed murder, returned to the penitentiary, and was executed in the chair on October 27, 1911.
According to Warden Woodard, inmate Harry Glick, a cabinetmaker, built the chair in 1896. Two years later Glick was released, but in 1912 he also returned to the prison after fatally shooting of a police officer. Glick died in his cell five years later.
By the luck of the draw, seventeen-year-old William Haas of Cincinnati, known as “the Boy Murderer,” inaugurated the era of death by electrocution. His execution had been scheduled for April 20, 1897, but a burned-out dynamo in the electric plant supplying power to the untried chair gave Haas one more day of life.
“The eyes of all Ohio were turned upon this first experiment in using God’s weapon to kill a man,” H. M. Fogle wrote in “The Palace of Death.”5 There was considerable interest in the first use of the chair, “not only throughout the state of Ohio but the entire civilized world [and] arguments pro and con were advanced. . . . The advocates of this new method knew, of course, that everything would depend upon the result of this night’s work.”6
As a result of the delay, Ohio’s first use of “Old Sparky” became a double—and successful—execution. Convicted murderer William Wiley, also of Cincinnati, went to the chair moments after Haas’s corpse was removed from it. The two convicts had drawn lots to see who would go first. Haas lost, yet gained a measure of fame as a pioneer.7
Rike rewired the old chair so that the current was automatically applied in three successive and measured doses. By pressing three buttons simultaneously, three guards in the transformer room one floor below activated the chair. The guards knew one button was “hot,” but not which one.
Had the United States Supreme Court not agreed to hear an appeal on her behalf, Anna Marie would have been the first in the automated chair. Instead, it was Thomas B. Williams, a twenty-year-old convicted murderer, on June 27. While tightly strapped into the device, he sang several verses of “This Is a Mean Old World,” tapping out the rhythm with his left foot. He followed that number with one verse of “Lead Me On” before the warden halted the macabre, impromptu performance and proceeded with the execution.
Hoodin and Bolsinger turned every page in every law book to win Anna Marie her freedom, or, at the very least, an escape from the death sentence. Remuneration no longer was possible. Anna Marie had mortgaged her home for $5,000 for the defense team, but that’s all there was. The law firm had spent $8,000 of its own money, yet it continued on with admirable doggedness.
Having won an indefinite stay for his client on March 3, pending the conclusion of the appeal, Hoodin appeared before the seven judges of the Ohio Supreme Court in Columbus on March 25 to seek their review of the trial. Although Anna Marie was not present for the fifty-minute hearing, once again many female spectators were.
“This woman was tried as a hunted animal,” Hoodin said of his client. Reiterating many of the same points he made before Judge Bell in November, he said Anna Marie had been denied a fair trial because the prosecution’s introduction of other poisonings linked to her “so inflamed the jury that they were unable to get to the true facts of the case.”
Outcalt denied that any evidence had been improperly introduced. “Each one of those crimes is tied up together,” he argued.
In a unanimous seven-word decision on April 13, Ohio’s highest court declined to review Anna Marie’s conviction. “There is no debatable constitutional question involved,” the court ruled. It set May 4 as her new date with the electric chair.
“I had a feeling the court would rule against me,” Anna Marie said upon hearing the news from Warden Woodard and the Catholic prison chaplain, Father John A. Sullivan. Loud wailing could be heard well after they had left her cell. By the time Hoodin, Bolsinger, and Sidney Brant arrived, she had composed herself once again. They brought her a few dollars so she could buy cigarettes, but she refused it, asking that lilies be purchased for Father Sullivan’s altar for Easter services.
One option the defense team considered was an application for commutation of her sentence, but Anna Marie “is hardly interested in a commutation,” said Hoodin, so he returned to the Ohio Supreme Court April 22, seeking a new hearing on constitutional issues. Within the week the high court denied the request, after which Anna Marie changed her tune. She told Hoodin “that if my life were spared, I could show all these people that I did not do the things that they say I did. I think that they would find out sometime that I didn’t do them. I could show them that I was not the woman that I was painted [to be] at my trial.”
Hoodin needed Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Carl V. Weygandt to sign off on an appeal to the United States Supreme Court. When he could not be located immediately, Hoodin filed for a stay of execution with the office of Ohio’s governor, Martin L. Davey. A day later Weygandt scheduled a hearing for Tuesday afternoon, one day before the scheduled execution date.
With an eleventh-hour hearing set, the defense team let it be known that it had new evidence that would “bust this case wide open.”
In an extraordinary, unprecedented action, state welfare director Margaret Allman, who was responsible for state prisons, told the newspapers that Anna Marie would be available for a cell-side interview May 2. Hoodin feared his client wasn’t up to it and asked Mrs. Allman to reconsider, but she refused.
Forty-eight hours before she was to die, more than twenty-five reporters from as far away as Chicago and New York sat and stood outside the wire mesh of Anna Marie’s cell. At Hoodin’s insistence, only Charles Rentrop of the Cincinnati Post and Joseph Garretson Jr. of the Cincinnati Enquirer were allowed to question the prisoner, relaying questions posed by the remainder of the press corps.
Anna Marie wore a high-necked white satin blouse, with her crucifix, and a navy blue skirt. Her nails were polished a neutral pink and her hair waved loosely. She wore no lipstick and only a light dusting of powder over a hint of rouge.
On her desk was a vase of tulips and roses, a crucifix, her rosary beads and Bible, several books with German titles, and some letters she had received. There also were a number of photographs of her son in her cell as well as pictures of the infant child of defense attorney Brant and the smiling faces of several children and motion picture actresses, whose pictures were cut from magazines.
At the outset, Anna Marie told the reporters that she did not feel she had received a fair trial.
“In what respect?”
“In every respect. The prosecution brought things into my trial to blacken my character without reason. They told lies about me.”
“But, Anna, didn’t you admit some of those things on the witness stand?”
“We all do things in life we shouldn’t do. Not all of us are perfect.”
“How do you feel now about having so many women on the jury?”
“I did not know women could do such a thing to another woman. After being a mother myself, I didn’t think any woman could do such a thing.” In hindsight, she said, an all-male jury would have been better.
“How do you feel about dying?”
“If I am not going to live, if I have to go, I will be ready. . . . I would not be afraid to die. I have no fear whatsoever.”
The reporters took her at her word, having observed her steely resolve since the day of her arrest. Throughout her imprisonment, she refused to reveal the turmoil inside her. She was, in fact, afraid of death, but she also was convinced that her conviction would be overturned or her sentence commuted.
“Do you see a chance to save your life?”
“I feel there may be a chance yet. I never have felt any other way.”
“Anna, are you innocent?”
“I am.”
“In whom do you place your hope for life?”
“In the governor. I have always admired the way he makes speeches and has handled his office. He will be fair in this. I still believe they do not want to take my life. It is not for myself that I want to live. It is because when I am gone the stain will be on him,” she said, looking at a picture of her son on the bedside table.
Anna Marie said she had begun writing about her life, but stopped. “It was so sorrowful that nobody would believe it. The public would not want to read it.”
She said she had heard through the prison grapevine about the three executions since she came to death row.
“Well, Anna, what was your reaction?”
“I had a great feeling for Everett Jones because he never had a chance in life. I, too, never had a chance. I feel that I have had nothing but sorrow in my life.”
“But wasn’t that sorrow of your own making?”
She shrugged. “No.”
“How did it come about?
“There are a lot of things that happened in my life.”
During each of the executions, matron Esther Lyle later explained, “Mrs. Hahn froze up and her whole attitude was one of extreme tension for several hours.” The remainder of the time she had displayed “amazing fortitude,” Mrs. Lyle said.
In the first five months of her incarceration, Anna Marie received more than five hundred letters, mostly from well wishers. Eight more arrived on the day of the mass interview but none from her family in Germany, she said. An elderly man in Kentucky offered to take her place on death row. “It’s a shame to take the life of a pretty young woman,” he said. A woman in Kentucky wrote to say she was making a personal appeal to Ohio’s governor on Anna Marie’s behalf. Another asked that the lapin fur coat Anna Marie wore upon entering the penitentiary be willed to her.
“The idea! I won’t do it! Just because she wants my coat! I do not think it was a nice letter.”
She was asked if she had written her final farewell to her mother. There was silence, save for faint strains of music from the prison band rehearsing in the yard. Anna Marie looked down at her hands, then glanced at Hoodin, who said nothing.
“I’d rather not answer that,” she said softly. Nor did she care to comment on the fact that she no longer wore her wedding ring. She had allowed Philip to visit but twice since her arrival at the penitentiary, she said, adding that he could come again if he wished. He never did. The split was complete.
Oscar and his welfare were her only interest, she said. She revealed that he wanted to be a surgeon or a chemist.
“Would you want him to study in Germany?”
“No.”
“Because of Hitler?”
“Suppose?” she replied, smiling. Anna Marie had made it clear in the past she did not support Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime that came to power after she had left Germany.
One reporter wanted to know about the flakes of arsenic found in her purse, a damning piece of evidence presented by the prosecution. Anna Marie said she had no idea how they got there.
“I didn’t have any idea what arsenic was before my trial. I don’t believe there was any arsenic in that purse. I certainly didn’t put it there if there was. I didn’t purchase the purse until July.” It was that month that she traveled to Colorado with her son and Georg Obendoerfer, who died there from arsenical poisoning.
Anna Marie also spoke scornfully of Detectives Patrick H. Hayes and Walter Hart, whom her defense counsel accused of making “vile” comments to her. “I remember Captain Hayes and Detective Hart very well, indeed,” she said, adding sarcastically, “They are very fine gentlemen.”
It was alleged by authorities that she had received $70,000 or more from her victims, but she denied receiving any amount of money whatsoever.
“That’s just like the thousands of other lies they told about me,” she said. “Those statements that I received all that money from the men are not true. Do you want to know about my big fortune? I haven’t a cent in the world, and I never did have a cent that didn’t come into my hands in a perfectly honest way.”
Rentrop asked which horse Anna Marie liked in the Kentucky Derby, a race to be run that Saturday. Although during her trial she admitted to having bet often on horse races, “I haven’t any pick,” she replied. “I don’t even know who is running.”
When the extraordinary interview ended, Anna Marie shook hands with a few reporters she recognized from her trial and sat back down in her rocking chair. The last of the journalists to leave heard her crying softly.
The following day, Anna Marie obtained copies of the Columbus and Cincinnati newspapers that carried the interview and read each avidly. She smiled when she read that Columbus Dispatch reporter Kay Murphy viewed her as a “phlegmatic enigma,” whose face gives no clue as to “what goes on behind her almost passive countenance.”
She also received a visit from Hoodin, who pleaded with his client to tell the truth. She insisted that she had been telling the truth all along.
“If you want me to admit that I poisoned those people, and you promise that you’ll save me, Mr. Hoodin, I’d rather die in the electric chair.”
That specter was removed, temporarily at least, when Judge Weygandt stayed the execution pending an appeal to the United States Supreme Court on constitutional grounds. “Whew! What a relief,” said Hoodin, who immediately asked the Court to review the conviction. Because the Court was in summer recess, it would be fall before it rendered its decision.
Anna Marie heard the news of Weygandt’s stay—or she almost did—on the radio in her cell. “You listen. I can’t,” she told the matron, cupping her hands over her ears. When she saw the matron smile, Anna Marie smiled, too. Another reprieve, but as the months of waiting went by, the daily death-row routine wore on her. The sewing she so enjoyed—projects including a pair of embroidered altar cloths for Father Sullivan and a bedspread and chair covers for herself—all but stopped. She favored the radio—she preferred classical music—and newspapers more than novels now. Other than occasionally scrubbing the floor of her cell on her hands and knees, she exercised little. Consequently, she gained weight on prison fare.
“She paces up and down her cell like a wild, caged animal, smoking one cigarette after another,” said matron Kate Swift. “Often she stops to stare at the ceiling for minutes, only to resume her pacing. Then she stops and stares at the wall or floor. Sometimes she continues this until 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning.”8
The spring and summer of 1938 was a relatively quiet period for the woman who, by July, had been on death row longer than any of the men incarcerated there. She met two new matrons, Rene A. Tipple and Josie O’Bleness, who replaced Mrs. Swift and Mrs. Schultz, both of whom left the penitentiary. Mrs. O’Bleness’s late husband, Frank, was a witness to Ohio’s first electrocution in 1897. Now his widow faced the prospect of watching Ohio’s first electrocution of a woman.
Out-of-town newspapers that had reporters in Columbus for the twice-canceled execution dates now waited for a third date to be set. Still, oddities occurred, such as the story about one Andrew Gunther, forty-one, of Milwaukee and Chicago.
Gunther arrived in Cincinnati, where he told police that a woman he knew as Anna Baumann was, in fact, Anna Marie Hahn. He said he had met her after responding to her classified advertisement for matrimony. They met in Chicago on June 16, 1936, he said, and after they had spent several days together, the woman, who Gunther described as German-born, took a particular interest in his financial affairs. “She said before she married him, he would have to put equal [dollar] amounts in [the] bank,” Cincinnati police notes reveal. “He put in $790.00, and they were to be married Friday [June 19]. He was all ready [but] she did not show up. He went to [the] bank and found Anna had drew [sic] out all but $9.00. He swore out a warrant.”9
After telling this story to the police, Gunther next showed up at the penitentiary, asking to see Anna Marie. Warden Woodard became suspicious. His prisoner said she had never heard of Andrew Gunther. The warden, who refused to make his prisoner available, suspected Gunther was a Chicago newspaper reporter seeking an exclusive interview with Anna Marie. When Woodard showed Gunther the prison’s Bertillon photograph of her, he was not able to identify her. Woodard sent the man packing, and he never was heard from again.
When, on October 10, the United States Supreme Court rejected Anna Marie’s appeal for a hearing, she took it hard. Hoodin thought she was in “apparent shock.” He and Bolsinger plotted their next legal maneuver. Their client wanted them to “take every step possible” to save her life.
Judge Weygandt set December 7 as the new date for her execution.
The Blonde Borgia—a moniker that she said stabbed her “right in the heart”—conducted her final death-row interview with Cincinnati and Columbus reporters on the morning of November 22. The reporters found her “cheerful” as she sat in her rocking chair in a brown silk polka-dot dress covered by a flowered brown smock. She still found it hard to tell the truth, though.
“I am going to tell you for the first time what I really went to Colorado for. It was to obtain a cancer-cure formula developed by Oscar’s father, a Viennese physician,” who, she said, was “one of the greatest doctors in the world.” She said she worked beside him in his laboratory. Shortly before departing for Colorado, she obtained the formula from Germany, she said, continuing her tangled tale.
“I went to Colorado to find the brother-in-law of Oscar’s father, who is also a doctor and who I thought could help me introduce the formula. When I reached there, I learned that the doctor had gone to Arizona with his tubercular wife. His wife has since died.”
Why had she not mentioned this at her trial, a reporter wanted to know.
“Oh, they wouldn’t have believed me, and they would have accused me of experimenting on those old men. I know this sounds crazy, but crazier things than this have happened.”
During her time as a matron, Katie Smith became convinced that Anna Marie was knowledgeable about various medical compounds and their potency. In a secret hiding place in her home, Anna Marie said, was a formula for a medicine that had cured Oscar of infantile paralysis in Germany.
Anna Marie described as “silly” the inferences that she was romantically linked to Obendoerfer.
“I could have had all the young men I wanted,” she said. “They had no right to infer that there was anything immoral in my associations with him or any of those other men. In all my life, I have never done anything immoral.”
The reporters wanted to know if it was true that she had written her life’s story. Actually she had begun to do so shortly after taking up residence in the penitentiary, using a typewriter loaned to her by Ann Duffy, secretary to Ohio attorney general Herbert S. Duffy (unrelated to Ann), but the machine was removed and the project was abandoned after prison authorities raised a flap over her having it. Miss Duffy said she only was trying to do “a good turn.” Mrs. Smith later revealed that Anna Marie believed what the do-gooder wanted in return was the prisoner’s story. “All that you have talked about is getting this story,” Smith quoted Anna Marie as having said to Miss Duffy. “You have never mentioned what you’ll give me for it.”
At the press conference, though, Anna Marie made no mention of this. Instead, she said she gave up on the writing because she was “too nervous to keep my mind on it, but when I get to Marysville, I will write the story, and it will be almost unbelievable.”
On the morning of Thanksgiving Day, most of the prison population attended a ten-act vaudeville show, a dance-band performance, and two wrestling matches. The noontime dinner that followed included roast pork and dressing, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce, mince pie, and coffee, topped by cigars for all. Anna Marie didn’t get a show or a cigar, but she did eat the same meal—alone in her cell.
“I am at peace with the world,” she said, convinced that the governor would commute her sentence.
1. Marvin E. Fornshell, The Historical and Illustrated Ohio Penitentiary (Columbus, Ohio: self-published, 1908), 9.
2. In April 1955, the penitentiary inmate population reached a record 5,235. The facility was closed in 1979 and demolished in 1998.
3. Charlotte Sherwood, “Sun Fades, Raw Dusk Wind Whips Anna Hahn, Who Braves Pen Reporters, Then Weeps Alone,” Columbus Citizen, Dec. 2, 1938, 1.
4. Regine Kurlander, “‘I’m Not Ashamed,’ Says Philip Hahn,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, Dec. 30, 1937, 13.
5. H. M. Fogle, The Palace of Death (Columbus, Ohio: self-published, 1908), 136.
6. Ibid., 145, 146.
7. Ronald L. Reinbolt, 29, was the last to be executed in Ohio’s chair, on March 15, 1963.
8. Kate Swift, “Matron Reveals How Anna Hahn Awaits Chair,” Columbus Sunday Dispatch, November 20, 1938, B-1.
9. Captain Patrick H. Hayes, personal notes, undated.