Lady Killers Read online

  But she didn’t kill them all, of course. She wasn’t actually a god. And so, as she wasted away underground, the peasants who survived her took to calling her Saltychikha—a nickname with no real meaning, but a tiny sociolinguistic rebellion nonetheless. Aristocrats never referred to each other with diminutives like that, so the very existence of this nickname indicates that it was given to her by the serfs. “Saltychikha” suggested a simple village woman, someone who was a bit rough around the edges. It would have appalled Darya to hear her noble name so altered. The fact that the nickname stuck—even appearing a century later in the introduction to War and Peace—was a small victory for the souls.

  In 1779, Darya was transferred to a chamber carved out of rock with a small barred window. Rumor has it she slept with one of the guards and gave birth to a child, but she would have been almost fifty by that point. Moscow hadn’t forgotten about her—the “monster of humankind,” they called her, the “completely godless soul”—and curious kids would sometimes peek through the window to catch a glimpse of the abominable Saltychikha. When they did, she would growl and spit at them—confirming rumors of her brutality, and convincing everyone that she still hadn’t repented of her crimes. As far as we know, she never did.

  She remained imprisoned for a total of thirty-three years, until her death on November 27, 1801. The state councilor visited her once in her old age—curious, perhaps, if nobility could stay noble after decades underground. He noted that Darya had grown stout, and that “all her movements now betrayed that she went mad.” She was her own mistress no longer, after years of stumbling about in the darkness.

  ICEBERG ANNA

  Anna Marie Hahn

  One summer day in 1937, three generations boarded a train heading west to Colorado Springs: a pretty thirty-one-year-old blonde, an adolescent boy with the face of a cherub, and a very sick old man. The boy ran up and down the aisle of the train, bringing glasses of cold water to the old man, who was parched and querulous and slept fitfully. Then, to amuse himself, the boy slumped down in his seat and began to draw. He sketched for a while and eventually presented his work to the man: a picture of a skull.

  The sick old man looked at the drawing with terror in his eyes. “Witches!” he screamed, snatching the paper and holding it aloft. “Witches!” The little boy snickered at his dismay, and soon the whole train car was laughing, too. When he realized no one was going to help him, the old man folded up the paper and tucked it into his pocket, and then continued to sleep and wake and sleep again, as if he were struggling to fight through a nightmare.

  Love at First Sight

  Anna Marie Hahn had a tranquil, storybook childhood that was destroyed when adulthood descended on her too fast, like a lightning bolt, and a dark lover broke her heart. At least, that was what she wanted people to believe. She was born in 1906 in the idyllic Bavarian town of Füssen, which was perched on the edge of the Alps and known for its violin makers. Her father, George Filser, was a furniture manufacturer, and their family was religious, well-off, and respected. Anna was the youngest of twelve, though five of her siblings were dead. She was probably adored and spoiled by her entire family. Her mother, Katie, always admitted that Anna was her favorite.

  Into this whimsical German town crept a man named Dr. Max Matscheki. He was a famous Viennese physician working on a cure for cancer—“one of the greatest doctors in the world”—and as handsome as a movie star. He wooed nineteen-year-old Anna sweetly; they swayed together on the dance floor as he whispered romantic promises into her ear. “It was the kind of love that every young girl thinks about, this love at first sight,” said Anna. “I was happy then.” Matscheki swore he would marry her, and eventually, borne along on this idealistic narrative, Anna tumbled into bed with him. Why not? She was secure in his love and excited for their future together. But when Dr. Max Matscheki found out that Anna was pregnant, he balked. There was someone else, he said. A wife in Vienna. “It was just like a mountain falling on me,” said Anna. “Not killing me but just smothering me and crushing me.”

  The story was raw and poetic. There was just one problem: no Max Matscheki ever practiced medicine in Vienna. The doctor was a figment, a shadow lover, a stand-in for some ordinary man. But the child was very real, and when Anna’s conservative family found out she was expecting, they were mortified. There was no hiding a teenage pregnancy in their small, pious town. As soon as Anna’s son, Oscar, was born, the family decided she should get out of their sight altogether—and leave for America.

  Anna was actually happy to go after enduring the town’s gossip for nine long months. “I could no longer stand those things that people were saying about my misfortune,” she recalled. It took her two years to get a visa, and she left at age twenty-two, leaving her son behind until she could establish herself overseas. The trip across the ocean, away from Oscar, must have been excruciating. “The little pleasure that I have gotten out of life has been from my boy,” she said.

  Until the end of her life, Anna spoke fondly of Dr. Max Matscheki. Perhaps she liked the way the story made her sound: a dreamy, innocent, sexually appealing girl, tossed madly about on the waves of a foreign love affair. A victim. The tale about Oscar’s parentage was one of her most cinematic lies—sex and a cure for cancer!—but it was also her most innocent. Nobody died because of it.

  America!

  To fund her trip, Anna wrote to her uncle Max Doeschel, who lived in Cincinnati, and asked him for a loan. The two weren’t close—in fact, Doeschel had never heard from his niece before. Still, he sent her $236 and waited, unsure what sort of person to expect. Later, Anna would boast that he sent her a mind-boggling $16,000. But she was always lying about money.

  Anna arrived in Cincinnati in February 1929, a “pretty blonde” who spoke English well. She contracted scarlet fever almost immediately and was sick for several months, but by April she was healthy enough to find employment at a hotel. As soon as she began making money, she started behaving like a different person. Doeschel and his wife were confused by her generous income—she “was more than able to take care of her own financial needs”—especially since she hadn’t offered to repay their loan yet. She had a habit of making extravagant purchases and then acting secretive about them, as though to disguise the fact that they were “too expensive for a housework girl.” She even told them she was building a house, which didn’t make any sense. How in the world would she be able to afford that? But logic be damned: Anna wanted to be seen as the sort of person who could build herself a house if she wanted to.

  At the hotel where Anna worked, she met a mild, mousy figure named Philip Hahn. He was no romantic Viennese doctor, but she liked that he promised some sort of safe harbor. “He was nice to me and said he loved me and wanted to marry me,” she said. Then again: “I was afraid at first when he talked about marriage.” When Hahn agreed to act as Oscar’s father, Anna finally relented, and the two married a year later. By July 1930, Anna was ready to go back to Germany and get her son.

  Her aunt and uncle were blindsided when Anna returned to Cincinnati with a tiny blond boy in tow, since she’d never mentioned him before. Fed up with her lies and weirded out by her behavior, the two eventually decided to cut all ties with her, just as her nuclear family had done back in Germany.

  The United States had already begun its sickening economic collapse into the Great Depression, and Anna’s thoughts turned ever more toward money. She was addicted to betting on horse races, and often signed bad checks when she lost wagers. She opened a restaurant with her husband and then tried to burn it down for insurance money. She tried to burn down her own house for the same reason. Perhaps money fed into some huge romantic delusion she had, the same delusion that led her to insist that her uncle had sent her $16,000 for her trip to America—a fairy-tale amount, implying wealthy, indulgent relatives and a luxurious trip across the Atlantic. Regardless, gambling and arson soon stopped satisfying her, and she began to look for bigger game.

  Today,
some evolutionary psychologists have theorized that male serial killers are “hunters” while females are merely “gatherers,” sensibly collecting resources from their victims instead of doing it out of a deep and unslakable thirst for violence. Anna may have technically collected money from her crimes, but she was a hunter to the core. She set her sights on her victims like she was looking through a rifle scope and stalked them with heartless, single-minded purpose. And like a true predator, she preyed on the weak. She was actually kind of a sloppy criminal, but her victims were lonely and innocent and easy to fool. They thought the rest of the world had forgotten about them, and wanted desperately to believe that the blonde woman bending over them was something like an angel.

  “My Girl”

  One of her earliest paramours was a man named Ernest Kohler, her sixty-two-year-old landlord. Kohler was the owner of a large, lovely house, and in 1932 he was renting two of the rooms to the Hahns and another to a doctor who never locked his office. Sometimes Anna would sneak in and forge prescriptions for narcotics on the doctor’s blank prescription pads. But mostly she flirted with Kohler.

  Kohler died suddenly on May 6, 1933. His death was a windfall for Anna. He left her his beautiful old house, valued at $12,000, plus a car, $1,167 in a savings account, and heaps of expensive antiques. Sure, it was a bit awkward when the coroner’s office received several anonymous phone calls insisting that Kohler had been poisoned, but Anna carefully explained that no, he’d died of esophageal cancer. The coroner gamely checked his esophagus, found no poison, and sent Kohler to the crematorium in peace.

  For Anna, this was the perfect relationship. She liked her men elderly and lonely and preferably German, so they could bond over their shared heritage. These men were usually retired (which meant they were potentially sitting on healthy piles of cash) and neglected by society (which meant they were especially vulnerable to her charms). She offered herself up to them as a sort of attendant-cum-girlfriend, willing to nurse, cook, or flirt at the drop of a hat.

  These men must have pinched themselves: there they were, sitting around in their lonely bachelor apartments, and suddenly this golden creature appeared at their doors, willing to laugh at their jokes and cook them decadent, nostalgia-inducing meals. Sometimes she would even let them kiss her, and soon enough the men found themselves throwing around words like “engagement” and “honeymoon.” She was a miracle, really. A second lease on life. And such a treat to look at: vivacious, with big hazel eyes and a delicate beauty that was hard to capture on film.

  Anna’s next male friend was a sixty-three-year-old coal dealer named George E. Heis, who called her “my girl” and devoured her Hügelsheimer Pfannkuchen, the Bavarian pancakes she whipped up for him. When Anna coyly informed Heis she had divorced her husband (lies!), the smitten man began to drop hints about marriage.

  What was Philip Hahn doing all this time, anyway? He had become a very minor character in the play of Anna Hahn’s life. He disapproved of her friendships with elderly men, but Anna ignored his protests. She poisoned one of his meals once, but her attempt was so halfhearted we can only surmise that Hahn meant nothing to her; he wasn’t even important (or rich) enough to kill. Hahn, who became violently ill after the meal, suspected that she’d tried to murder him, and, understandably, their marriage began to cool. But he stuck around, perhaps for Oscar’s sake.

  Back at Heis’s apartment, Anna often sidled up to her aging paramour with innocent little requests for money, and he lent to her willingly—sometimes the cash out of his pocket, sometimes money from his business, the Consolidated Coal Company. By the time her “loans” reached two thousand dollars, the company’s credit manager popped up, demanding an explanation. Heis was forced to admit that he had a pretty new girlfriend and couldn’t say no to her. The credit manager, impervious to the madness of love, began pressuring Anna to repay her loans.

  This was something of a reality check for Heis. He began looking at Anna with colder, more dispassionate eyes, and he realized that not only did Anna ask him for money all the time, but her cooking often made him feel sick. In fact, some days he could barely get out of bed. Heis ran his suspicions past the credit manager. Was his girl trying to poison him? The next time Anna showed up with her signature dish—spinach sprinkled with white granules that seemed to be salt—Heis told her that he wanted his two thousand dollars back, and that he never wanted to see her again.

  Heis had no idea he was effectively signing death warrants for Cincinnati’s other aging bachelors, but his demands forced Anna to speed up her hunt. At the end of 1936, she met Albert Palmer, seventy-two, and they bonded over their mutual love of betting on horse races. Like Heis, Palmer called Anna his girl and devoured her cooking. They planned a trip to Florida together. She left him cloying little notes that probably drove him wild: “My Dear Sweet Daddy,” ran one note, “I’ll see you tomorrow then with all my love and a lot of kisses. Your Anna.” She sweet-talked him out of two thousand dollars, which she used in part to pay Heis.

  But eventually Palmer, too, grew wise. He began to ask Anna if there was any way she could start repaying her loan to him, and she responded by serving him dinners that wrecked his health. He may have also overheard neighborhood gossip about Anna’s recent affair with Heis. Hurt and furious, Palmer gave Anna an ultimatum: she could either repay the two thousand dollars right away, or she could become his girlfriend—permanently and exclusively. Anna never had to make that choice, because on March 26, 1937, Palmer died of what appeared to be a heart attack.

  Anna unearthed her next benefactor by showing up at a random apartment building and boldly asking a woman if “any old men lived here.” When she found out that a German immigrant named Jacob Wagner was renting one of the apartments, she told the suspicious tenant that oh, yes, that’s right, Wagner was her uncle—even though she hadn’t known his name minutes before. She then slipped a note under his door, organized a meeting, and hit it off with Wagner immediately. “I have a new girl,” Wagner boasted to a pal. His new girl often asked him for loans and assured him she was good for it by showing him a forged bankbook that indicated she had over fifteen thousand dollars in the bank. Was the number any connection to the imaginary sixteen thousand from her uncle? Maybe that was her dream amount: a number she associated with stability and fairy-tale happiness.

  Anna was getting sloppy. She was juggling multiple men, some of whom moved in the same circles as others. Her requests for money were becoming bizarre—if she really did have fifteen thousand dollars in the bank, why would she have needed a loan?—and she was now baldly hunting for victims by asking strangers where she could find “old men.” But that was Anna’s genius: targeting the isolated. She certainly made some people suspicious—the woman at Wagner’s apartment remembered her weird question forever—but for the most part, there simply wasn’t anyone around to care.

  While Anna pursued Wagner, she killed again for the low, low price of eighty dollars and a rabbit fur coat. She befriended an elderly widow by dressing up in a fake nurse’s uniform and offering her services, and then stole the valuables that the widow kept under her bed. (“I just loved to make old people comfy,” Anna said later.) She bought herself a beautiful coat with the profits and offered to find the “culprit” if the unsuspecting widow paid her eighty dollars. Afterward, she finished off the poor woman with a dish of poisoned ice cream.

  Back at Wagner’s apartment, things were getting creepy. Wagner began to look askance at Anna when his bankbook went missing, but Anna assured him she’d done nothing wrong and placated him with well-seasoned food and drink. Soon enough he was in the hospital, “semi-conscious, retching with pain, and in a state of shock and dying.” It was a horrifying sight. Arsenic can make its victims crazed with thirst; shortly before he died, Wagner begged a nurse for something to drink, whispering: “Ich könnte ein Fass voll Wasser trinken!” (“I could drink a barrel of water!”)

  Anna showed up at the nearest probate court like a classically trained actre
ss ready to play Lady Macbeth. After she’d cried a sufficient number of demure yet heartrending tears, she suggested that perhaps one of the deputies should search Wagner’s apartment, just in case there were any, say, important papers lying about? Sure enough, the deputy found a handwritten will on Wagner’s mantel:

  I hereby make my last will and testament and I am under no influence. I have my money in the Fifth Third Bank. After my funeral expenses and all bills are paid, I want the rest to go to my relative, Anna Hahn. I want Mrs. Hahn to be my executor. I don’t want any flowers, and I don’t want to be laid out.

  The will—surprise, surprise—was written by Anna herself, and the level of cold-blooded confidence Ms. Hahn displayed in directing authorities straight to her forgery is pretty impressive. She was a careless criminal, and part of her carelessness was due to her utter lack of empathy. Last will and testament? An old lady’s eighty dollars? Nothing was sacred to her; nothing got under her skin. And just like so many of her other con jobs, this one worked. At the time, authorities had no reason to suspect this charming, distraught blonde, and apparently nobody cared enough about Wagner to prove or disprove Anna’s place in his family tree.

  Her rampage continued: a few weeks later, she befriended sixty-seven-year-old George Gsellman, a German-speaking Hungarian immigrant who considered himself to be a bit of a ladies’ man. After meeting Anna, he boasted to one of his exes, “You wouldn’t marry me, and now I went and got a young blonde German schoolteacher.” Anna only managed to charm him out of a hundred dollars, but that was a lot of money for Gsellman. In fact, Gsellman’s banker noted that it was the largest sum his client had ever withdrawn.

  One night, an ecstatic Gsellman told two of his neighbors that he was getting married the next day! By morning, the bridegroom’s body was stiffening on his bed. There was a half-eaten meal on the stove, laced with eighteen grains of arsenic. This was far more than was necessary to kill a man, but who cared? Not Anna.