Dr. Fred C. Swing buttoned up his heavy wool overcoat as he left the Palace Theater downtown. He had just seen Angels with Dirty Faces, a 1938 gangster film starring James Cagney, Pat O’Brien, and Humphrey Bogart. Billed as a “taut, tidy melodrama,” the movie ends with Rocky, Cagney’s tough-guy character, going to the electric chair. “Oh, please! I don’t wanna die!” Rocky pleads. “Oh, please! Don’t let me burn!”
Now Swing, a former Hamilton County coroner, walked briskly along the dark streets to the Ohio penitentiary to witness a woman “burn.”
A quiet crowd of perhaps one hundred curiosity seekers—it would grow almost tenfold by execution time—had gathered outside the prison’s Spring Street entrance. Police kept traffic moving through the area, although more than a few motorists wanted to linger outside the massive walls. Reporters and photographers had been milling about the penitentiary since midafternoon, waiting to hear if Anna Marie had won yet another stay of execution.
Shortly before 7 P.M. the news arrived that Judge Underwood had denied the last-ditch appeal. For the journalists attending the execution, Warden Woodard provided an evening meal in his quarters. Guards frisked all witnesses entering the penitentiary. No cameras were permitted.
The majority of those who knew firsthand the Anna Marie Hahn story and had witnessed her icy calm in times of great stress believed that when she sat in the chair she would be just as composed, just as cold, as she had been throughout her trial and incarceration. Kate Swift, who spent ten months as prison matron to Anna Marie, told the Columbus Dispatch that she was convinced that when it came time for the execution, “she will walk there [with her] head up, showing no emotion whatsoever.”
When Rene Tipple asked Anna Marie to write a letter to Warden Woodard for her, asking that he excuse her from accompanying the prisoner to the death chamber, Anna Marie chided her for her lack of intestinal fortitude. “I have more courage than you. I am not afraid to die. I have such courage that I know no fear.”
Josie O’Bleness revealed, however, that in “her last twenty-four hours, Anna Hahn changed from the poised, confident, proud, and even vain woman she had been continuously since she was first arrested into a little witch—a demon with a wild look in her eyes. When she knew the jig was up, she became the true Anna.”1
Joseph H. Hoodin, Sidney Brant, and Sidney Kahn arrived at the prison shortly after seven. Woodard excused himself from the dinner table to accompany the three attorneys to Anna Marie’s cell. Within a few minutes he returned to his dinner guests, tears in his eyes. “The situation is pretty good over there,” he said, but he lied. Anna Marie was hysterical. Prison psychiatrist Dr. George D. Woodward and the matrons tried to calm her, to little avail. Hoodin and Kahn returned shortly thereafter, also in tears. Brant stayed in Anna Marie’s cell, and she clung to him, begging for help. He put his arm around her shoulder in comfort. How blanched and frail she was, he thought. Father Sullivan, who wore a purple stole, knelt by the seated Anna Marie, holding her hand as he spoke the holy viaticum.
“Oh, Heavenly Father, I can’t go! I want to see Mr. Hoodin! I won’t go until I see Mr. Hoodin!”
“Mr. Hoodin won’t be here,” Colonel Walker softly told her. “He can’t come now.”
It was 8 P.M. “It’s time,” Walker said quietly.
“No! I am not going!” the condemned woman shouted.
“Oh, yes, Anna, you are going,” Walker firmly replied. “You might as well make up your mind.” Mrs. O’Bleness and Mrs. Lyle helped the prisoner to her feet.
The thirty-three witnesses, each a bearer of a pink admission card that read, “Dec. 7, 1938. J. C. Woodward, warden,” already were seated in the death chamber. The card became a grim souvenir for some. For the first time in many years, folding chairs were set up for an execution; such was the interest in Anna Marie’s death. On a nearby table, copies of the Ohio Penitentiary News went unread. The News, an internal periodical, never reported on executions, anyway.
Walker led the entourage out of the Anna Marie’s cell, followed by Father Sullivan and Mrs. Tipple. Mrs. O’Bleness and Mrs. Lyle kept pace behind, each holding an arm of their sagging prisoner. Brant, newspaper reporters Dush and Foster, and three guards brought up the rear. “I walked the road of anguish with Anna Marie Hahn last night,” Dush of the Ohio State Journal wrote for her newspaper. She and Foster, of the Columbus Dispatch, were the first female reporters to accompany a condemned prisoner to the death house.
The procession moved agonizingly slowly toward the good-bye door that led to the chair. On the way, it passed the cells holding eleven condemned men: George Wells; Harry Chapman; Henry Dingledine and his father, Harry Dingledine; Albert Lippe; John Williams Cline; Harvey L. Roush; Lafe Williams; Frank Tracy; Stephen Figuli; and Willie Caldwell. All would follow her path to the chair except Wells and Lippe, whose sentences were commuted to life.
Wells, twenty-two, took a particular interest in Anna Marie’s walk, because his execution, for killing an Akron grocer during a holdup, was scheduled for one week later. As it turned out, Wells was the only one of the eleven to leave the penitentiary alive. After the governor commuted his death sentence, he was granted parole on June 15, 1966.
Figuli, twenty-one, went to the chair two weeks after Anna Marie. During her year on death row, ten men were electrocuted.
As she passed each cell, the condemned men bade farewell to a woman they were seeing for the first and last time. “Good luck,” one said. “God bless you,” said another.
“Good-bye, boys,” Anna Marie replied, never looking at any of them.
For her farewell appearance, she chose faded blue pajamas, a flowered brown smock she had made while in the penitentiary, rolled down stockings, and street oxfords on her tiny feet.
It was 8:07 P.M. when the good-bye door to the enormously bright, white chamber swung open, sucking the last bit of courage from Anna Marie. There, facing her squarely, was the state’s instrument of death. She took but three of the thirteen paces toward “Old Sparky,” then collapsed into a heap on the floor, moaning, crying. Two khaki-clad guards rushed over to the door to help the matrons and prison physician Dr. Keil raise the prisoner from her knees. Together they carried her into the chair, despite her struggle to be free.
“Oh, no! No! Oh, no!” she cried, legs thrashing.
Dr. Keil, the senior of three physicians present, waved a small vial of smelling salts under her nose. The condemned had to be conscious to be executed.
“No! No! Don’t do this to me!” she screamed, her voice sending a chill through the witnesses and prison personnel alike. The death chamber was designed to be soundproof, but the men on death row, still standing, heard her shrieks.
“Oh, don’t! Please don’t! Think of my baby!”
Experienced hands quickly fastened the leather straps around her wrists and ankles.
Anna Marie struggled, and whimpered, and pleaded and wailed.
She quickly glanced around the room and spotted the witnesses. One was Cincinnati Post reporter Charles Rentrop, the only witness she elected to be there. (The condemned could choose three witnesses.)
“Isn’t there someone to help? Can’t you think of my baby? Anybody? Just anybody? Please help me!”
The waist strap, cinched tight, pulled her back against the chair, restricting her writhing. Her legs, too short to reach the rubber-matted floor, dangled freely still.
She spied gray-haired Warden Woodard standing off to one side.
“Mr. Woodard,” she screamed, “don’t let them do this to me!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Hahn. We can’t help it, you know,” he replied, his eyes filled with tears. He failed to disguise his distaste for the task ahead, and yet, when earlier asked by news photographers to pose with an empty “Old Sparky,” he did so willingly.
Anna Marie’s golden locks, once so perfectly coiffured, were now in disarray. At the urging of Mrs. Woodard, the hair had been combed to cover the small, round patch the matrons had shaved on Anna Marie’s head. “It will provide some dignity,” Mrs. Woodard explained. Now a guard pulled the locks aside, placed a copper disk on the shaved spot, and fastened a chinstrap to hold the disk in place. Anna Marie screamed in terror yet again, writhing wildly in the chair. Dr. Keil wafted the smelling salts under her nose once again. Nearby sat a bucket of water, to be used should the prisoner’s hair catch on fire.
In a pitiful wail, Anna Marie acknowledged her predicament. “No one is going to help me!” With her stockings rolled down and her pajama leg slit up to her knee, a guard quickly fastened an electrode clamp to the calf of her right leg. She looked at Father Sullivan. “Come closer, Father,” she implored. “Won’t you help me?”
The priest, tears in his eyes and Bible in hand, put a comforting hand on hers, now securely strapped to the arms of the chair. In between sobs she remembered the lethal position she was in. She warned the cleric, “Don’t touch me. You might be killed.” His was the last face she was to see.
A guard slipped the fitted, black leather mask, with an opening at the nose, over her face. She now was in the shadow of death.
Standing aside, Father Sullivan began the Lord’s Prayer.
“Our Father, who art in Heaven . . .”
Between sobs Anna Marie repeated the phrase, as did the three matrons and several others in the death chamber. Most mumbled a few words, transfixed on the macabre scene in front of them.
“Hallowed be Thy Name . . .”
“Hallowed be Thy Name . . .”
“Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done . . .”
“Thy kingdom . . .” Anna Marie’s voice cracked. “. . . will be done.”
“And forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .”
Just muffled moans came from behind the death mask. “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil . . .”
“Lead us not into temptation but deliv . . .”
A light behind the chair flashed from green to red. Mrs. Lyle quickly closed her eyes, not wishing to witness the initial surge of electrical current. Anna Marie’s body stiffened and slightly rose out of the deadly chair. Her thumbs turned upward. She made no sound.
A frightful whirring—sounding “like a Fourth of July sparkler,” a reporter wrote—filled the room as 1,950 volts surged through Anna Marie for ten seconds. A wisp of smoke, ghostly in character, curled toward the ceiling. The voltage automatically dropped to 500 volts for forty seconds, then surged to 1,950 volts for another ten seconds. Father Sullivan and Brant turned their heads away. “The odor of burning flesh permeated the room,” wrote James L. Kilgallen, reporter for the New York Journal-American.
Dr. Keil stepped forward. Placing his stethoscope on her chest, he listened for a heartbeat. He conferred briefly with Dr. Woodward and Dr. John I. White, each having also examined the lifeless form. After his examination, Dr. White whispered to his associates, “The heart is still beating.” They waited twenty or thirty seconds, then Dr. Keil listened once again for a heartbeat. Suddenly he turned to the witnesses and forcefully pronounced that “a sufficient current of electricity has passed through the body of Anna Marie Hahn to cause death at thirteen-and-a-half minutes after eight o’clock.”
Father Sullivan administered extreme unction, anointing Anna Marie’s forehead. “I am surprised she broke,” Warden Woodard said, noting that nobody before her in the chair had protested as violently as did Anna Marie. He wiped his moist eyes. “I had expected her to remain cool.”
Thirty-two years of a twisted, even macabre, life had been snuffed out. “Old Sparky,” having seated only men for more than forty years, had claimed its first woman. Three days later Anna Marie’s prison photograph, an ugly portrait that revealed none of her attractiveness, hung on the death-chamber wall alongside those of the 213 men the state had previously executed.
Immediately following the execution, the O’Shaughnessy Funeral Home on East Town Street picked up the body and prepared it for a limited viewing the following day. Nearly one hundred persons, who had learned where the body had been taken, were allowed to pass by the open casket, most of them seeing Anna Marie for the first time. The morticians had curled her hair and attired her in a white Palm Beach suit with white buttons and a white silk knitted blouse that the matrons had picked out from Anna Marie’s limited prison wardrobe. Almost at the last minute, a large floral display of gladiolus, bronze chrysanthemums, and red tea roses arrived. “With deepest sympathy—Friends in Cincinnati” the card read. Everyone assumed that the flowers, the only ones by the casket, had come from the defense team.
Some weeks earlier Hoodin had asked the Filser family in Fuessen if they wanted Anna Marie’s body returned to her home in Bavaria. It was best that the State of Ohio bury her, they said.
Father Sullivan, deeply moved by the events of the previous twenty-four hours, conducted a brief, private service at the funeral home. Hoodin, Brant, and Kahn were there, along with Mrs. Woodard and matrons O’Bleness, Tipple, and Lyle. Bolsinger remained in Cincinnati with Oscar, as did Philip.
Anna Marie is buried at the Catholic Mt. Calvary Cemetery, within a stone’s throw of downtown Columbus. In accordance with Canon Law of 1917, she was laid to rest in unconsecrated ground because she had shed blood. In 1983, however, all the ground in the cemetery was blessed. A very simple, weathered headstone, made by inmates at the penitentiary, marks the grave today at Cathedral Single C, Row 9, Grave 8, but her name is no longer discernible on it.
After months of spirited public discussion during Anna Marie’s trial and incarceration, the execution was almost anticlimactic, although a woman in Cleveland sitting on a jury in a first-degree murder case was so overcome with emotion by reports of Anna Marie’s death, that she was excused from the panel. A few politicos felt the legislature should abolish capital punishment. “A monstrosity of revenge,” said one; but another correctly predicted that any bill to do so “will be laughed at and will not have a chance.”
For years after, Father Sullivan wept before family and friends when he spoke of Anna Marie.
“Anna Hahn wasn’t all bad,” Mrs. O’Bleness commented the following day. “She had many good qualities that have been forgotten in the light of her crimes. She was kind, of a sweet disposition, charitable, gentle, and immaculately clean about her person—until that last day when she became a lost soul, unkempt and untidy. . . . But, in spite of her remarkable disposition, there was that indomitable wild streak in her that led to her downfall.”2
1. Josie O’Bleness, Kay Murphy, “True Anna Hahn Seen as Last Day Slipped by, Matron Says,” Columbus Dispatch, Dec. 8, 1938, B-8.
2. Ibid.