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  Witches

  Poison is for weaklings, they say. The English poet Phineas Fletcher (1582–1650) may have been the first to coin the term “coward’s weapon,” but the opinion has not dissipated in the centuries since; even a character in George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones recently sniped that poison was a gutless way to kill. Poison is sneaky, it’s slow, and you can poison someone without spilling a drop of their blood or awkwardly making eye contact with them midimpalement. As such, it doesn’t get a lot of cred for being scary. Poisoners simply don’t terrify people the way, say, disembowlers do.

  But that’s unfair, because poisoning requires advance planning and the stomach for a drawn-out death scene. You need to look into your victim’s trusting eyes day after day as you slowly snuff out their life. You have to play the role of nurse or parent or lover while you sustain your murderous intent at a pitch that would be unbearable for many of those who’ve shot a gun or swung a sword. You’ve got to mop up your victim’s vomit and act sympathetic when they beg for water. While they scream that their insides are on fire, you must steel yourself against the dreadful sight of encroaching death and give them another sip of the fatal drink. A coward’s weapon? Not so much. Poison is the weapon of the emotionless, the sociopathic, the truly cruel.

  Anna Hahn was not a coward. She knew how to draw death out, to make it hurt like hell. Her final victim was a lot like the others, but for some reason, Anna was exceptionally nasty to this man. She poisoned him until he was writhing in his own feces. His last days were a nightmare sequence of pain and hallucination, and she killed him hundreds of miles from his home.

  Johan Georg Obendoerfer was a semiretired cobbler, a widower, and the proud grandpa of eleven grandchildren. One day, he was surprised at his shop by a charming, blonde, German-speaking lady who dropped by to see if he could fix one of her high-heeled shoes. Perhaps Anna—who was still seeing Gsellman at the time—already knew what sort of man worked there, and the broken heel was just a ruse. Regardless, Obendoerfer fell hard for her.

  After a few weeks of dating, Obendoerfer seemed like a changed man. He shaved off his mustache to appear younger, and he began dropping hints about getting engaged. Anna told him, coquettishly, that they should take a vacation together before she really committed. She claimed to own a beautiful home on a cattle ranch in Colorado, and she told Obendoerfer that they should bring Oscar, check it out—and if they liked it, maybe the three of them could move there for good. Obendoerfer loved the idea, so Anna quickly murdered Gsellman and began to plan the trip.

  Obendoerfer had never been happier. A second life was opening before him like some sweet-throated flower: a bride, a marriage, acres of wild American land to call his own, and even a kid. On July 20, 1937, he packed his satchel and strode over to Anna’s house, grabbing a celebratory beer on the way. Anna had prepared a delicious dinner to kick off their journey—a dinner seasoned with those white granules with which she so loved to cook. By morning, Obendoerfer was so sick that Anna and Oscar had to help him into the cab.

  The three of them pressed on anyway, taking the train from Cincinnati to Chicago—where Anna checked herself into a fancy hotel with Oscar and tossed Obendoerfer into a cheap motel room nearby—and then on to Denver, where they disembarked for a few days. On their first morning there, Anna and Oscar went to check on Obendoerfer and found him writhing in bed, splattered with feces and vomit. Anna pretended to soothe him by feeding him cool chunks of watermelon as Oscar watched, but Obendoerfer couldn’t keep anything down. So she left the man in his misery and busied herself with the tricky business of stealing his life savings.

  Anna wrote a letter to his banker in Cincinnati, claiming that Obendoerfer was planning to move to Denver, wanted to transfer his money to the Denver National Bank, and needed one thousand dollars to tide him over in the meantime. For the next week, she haunted the Denver National Bank to see if the money had arrived, growing more and more frustrated as the days went by.

  Meanwhile, Obendoerfer’s hotel room had gotten so disgusting that the housekeeping staff refused to go inside. After the hotel owner peeked in and saw Obendoerfer curled in a fetal position, moaning and surrounded by his own filth, he urged Anna to take him to the hospital. Anna scoffed that she barely knew the man. Then she bundled Obendoerfer onto a train to Colorado Springs.

  At this point, Obendoerfer surely suspected he was being poisoned, but he was lost in a fog of agony. All he could do was beg for water and stare blankly out the train window. When Oscar showed him the skull drawing, Obendoerfer seemed to muster the strength to accuse the two of them—witches, witches!—but everyone simply laughed at his terror. He must have curled against the glass then, with the skull drawing folded next to his heart, wondering blearily how he had mistaken these witches for angels.

  The fact that Oscar was right there next to the dying man is one of the creepiest parts of Anna’s story. Oscar probably didn’t understand the full extent of what was happening, but still, he saw it all. He smelled the vomit, he witnessed the old man’s agony, he watched his mother feed Obendoerfer chunks of poisoned watermelon. (Anna carried a salt shaker of arsenic with her, and would liberally “salt” Obendoerfer’s food.) With his soft curls, perfect features, and attentive, intelligent face, Oscar certainly helped Anna seem nonthreatening, even Madonna-like. So some people who knew him said he was a “mean little kid” who killed animals for fun and once shot a BB gun at his friend. So what? Maybe his mother kept him around because he made her look good.

  In Colorado Springs, Anna and Oscar left Obendoerfer to fend for himself while they went sightseeing. When the two arrived back at the hotel, Anna noticed that the door to the owner’s private rooms was slightly ajar. Peeking inside, she saw two diamond rings sparkling on the dresser. She pocketed them, but as she was leaving the room, she ran smack into the hotel owner’s wife, who was naturally suspicious. Anna explained that she was simply curious how the rooms looked. The theft of those rings in broad daylight was a stupid, careless, greedy mistake on her part—and a fatal one.

  With the rings rattling around in her pocket, she finally checked Obendoerfer into the hospital, registering him as a homeless person. He died there, without ever reaching the paradise he had been promised.

  Cincinnati’s Number One Female Criminal

  At the beginning of August 1937, police in Cincinnati opened a secret investigation into the death of Jacob Wagner after receiving a tip from one of his friends, who’d noticed a strange woman hanging around Wagner’s house in the days before he died. Meanwhile, detectives were heading over to Anna Marie Hahn’s place on a seemingly unrelated charge: the theft of two diamond rings, which Anna had pawned for $7.50 on her way back to Cincinnati.

  When the police showed up at Anna’s doorstep, she protested her arrest loudly. At first, they took her in on charges of grand larceny, but arresting Anna was like tugging on a loose string—suddenly, everything seemed to be unraveling. They discovered that she had nursed Jacob Wagner right before he died, that she’d been in Colorado Springs around the time a Cincinnati resident named Obendoerfer died suspiciously, that she had poison hidden in the rafters of her house, and so on, and so on. This pretty jewelry thief was starting to seem like the biggest criminal Cincinnati had ever produced.

  The day after her arrest, warrants of “fugitive murder and larceny” were signed against her by one Detective Walter Hart. In reaction, Anna combed her hair, smiled, and told the press they were welcome to take her photo. “Here I am, boys,” she said—blonde, hazel eyed, and icily calm. “Make this a good picture of me.” Was she afraid of all this accumulating evidence? She was not. “How can they make such a charge?” she asked. “I can face anything there is to come.”

  Mother’s Prayers

  Something in Anna’s case appealed to the women of Cincinnati. It wasn’t that they empathized with her, per se, but they were desperately curious to see how she acted in court, and the fact that she was a mother touched their hearts. On the
day of Anna’s arraignment, the courtroom was crowded with fifteen women to every man, women that had waited long hours outside the door to make sure they were the first ones inside. Anna showed zero emotion in the courtroom, but it didn’t matter. When Oscar ran up to whisper something in her ear, several of the women wiped their eyes and one juror sobbed openly.

  The jury skewed as female as the audience. It consisted of eleven women and one very good-looking man, and the press quickly nicknamed the lot of them “the Petticoat Jury.” Journalists were understandably excited about this case, which was already shaping up to be fiery, sensational, and rife with opportunity for long editorials.

  In fact, the only people who didn’t seem to care about the case were Anna’s siblings back in Germany. Upon being notified that their sister was arrested, they responded that they were “uninterested” in the case’s outcome and were going to hide the news from their aging mother so as not to upset her. Still, Anna convinced herself that one of her sisters would show up once the trial had officially started. “It would be a comfort to me to have some member of my family with me,” she mused.

  Anna was thinking about her family a lot in jail, especially her mother. She sent her a telegram that read, “Just pray for me.” (Her siblings never bothered showing it to their mother.) During one of the prison’s Sunday services, she requested a hymn called “Mother’s Prayers Have Followed Me,” unaware of the irony: her mother had no idea where Anna was or what she’d been doing.

  Other than Oscar and Philip Hahn, none of Anna’s family ever showed up to support her. They’d written her out of their lives a long time ago. They were officially “uninterested.” Not shocked, appalled, heartbroken, or righteously indignant—uninterested. Did that mean, perhaps, they were also unsurprised? Had they always detected a darkness in Anna? Even in her youth, did they sense her cruelness, her lack of empathy, and pull away from her as soon as they could drum up an excuse?

  “That Woman Tortured Me with Tortures of the Damned!”

  Anna’s trial was set for October 11. She would be tried for the murder of Jacob Wagner, because the prosecution thought his would be the easiest one to prove. They had the handwritten will and an expert who could prove it was forged. And they had the exhumation results, which showed that there was enough arsenic in Wagner’s body to have killed him twice over.

  The prosecutor, Dudley Miller Outcalt, was the best in the biz, a brilliant orator with a flair for courtroom drama. The press adored his fiery opening statement, during which he declared that he would prove Anna Hahn “killed so many men that there is not another person like her on the face of the earth.” On the other side of the aisle, Anna’s defense team quaked; they had never handled a serious criminal case of any sort, much less a major murder case. Plus, one of their members, Joseph Hoodin, was suffering from a bad cold. Hoodin ended up being a rather pitiful figure; at one point, he declared that he was planning to bring out fifty-three witnesses to prove Anna’s innocence, but he was only able to deliver two. He eventually called the gig “a job nobody can handle.”

  In contrast to these intense, emotional lawyers, Anna was developing a reputation as an ice queen. Every time she appeared in court, she was impeccably turned out—her fellow prisoners, obsessed with their celebrity cell mate, would do her hair—with a gold cross around her neck and flat, emotionless eyes. In prison, she read the newspaper articles that tried to analyze the “phlegmatic enigma” of her personality, amused. Her denial was calm, consistent, and relentless. “They’ll never get a confession out of me, because I can’t confess to something I never did,” she told a reporter. “But I supposed the death of anyone past sixty anywhere in the country now will be laid to me.”

  Her calm seemed to mask a certain delusion, because things were not looking good for Anna Hahn. Arsenic had been found in the bodies of not just Wagner, but Palmer, Gsellman, and Obendoerfer, and on October 22, the judge declared that the prosecution could now admit the other poisonings into evidence, instead of just discussing Wagner’s murder. Witness after witness took the stand to skewer her. There was the tenant who remembered Anna inquiring if “any old men lived here,” the neighbors who talked about her abnormally unflustered attitude toward death, and bank employees with records of her suspicious financial behavior—bringing in checks that didn’t quite look right, and so on. Handwriting experts determined that Wagner’s will had been forged by Anna herself. A toxicologist studied Anna’s favorite summer purse and found grains of arsenic all over the lining. Doctors presented the horrified jury with the brains, livers, and kidneys of the murdered men, floating gruesomely in jars of preservative.

  The prosecution’s star witness was George Heis, he of the poisoned spinach and the unpaid debt to the Consolidated Coal Company. He became known as their “living witness,” and his presence in the courtroom was ghastly and damning. Really, the prosecution could not have asked for a more incriminating visual: George Heis, skeletally thin, confined to a wheelchair, pointing at Anna with shaking hands and telling the jury that this was the woman who had tried to murder him in cold blood.

  Finally, both Oscar and Anna took the stand. Oscar had been coached to give certain answers, and he spoke carefully: yes, he brought Obendoerfer water; no, he didn’t realize that the old man was dying. The boy only slipped up once, when he admitted that his mother had initially asked him to lie about meeting Obendoerfer on the train. Anna was even calmer than her son. The prosecution tried their best to crack her, but Anna wouldn’t crack. If she had a conscience, it remained buried deep inside her, invulnerable to remorse, rhetorical pressure, and the looming threat of a guilty verdict.

  Outcalt’s closing remarks brought down the house. “Anna Hahn is the only one in God’s world that had the heart for such murders!” he cried to the jury. “She sits there with her Madonna face and her soft voice, but they hide a ruthless, passionate purpose the likes of which this state has never known!” Hoodin’s response was lackluster: sure, Anna wasn’t perfect, but then again, who was? He went on to claim that the prosecution couldn’t prove precisely how the arsenic got into Wagner’s body. No one bought the argument. Hoodin’s only stroke of genius occurred when he reminded the jury that Anna was a mother. As everyone in the courtroom wept, Hoodin urged them to spare her so she could return to her boy. Even Anna managed to drum up a tear or two.

  But it was too late to humanize her. Outcalt stood up again to finish his speech, calling Anna sly, avaricious, cold-blooded, and heartless. And then he pulled out his grand finale. “In the four corners of this courtroom there stand four dead men,” he cried, and pointed at each corner as he bellowed their names: “Jacob Wagner! George Gsellman! Georg Obendoerfer! Albert Palmer!”

  The jurors were breathless. Outcalt continued in a thunderous voice. “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!’”

  It was a brilliant rhetorical flourish: bringing the dead men to life in horrifying contrast with the accused, who sat there, pale and motionless, looking for all the world like she was carved out of wax.

  The stunned petticoat jury returned the harshest verdict possible: guilty—without a recommendation of mercy. This meant that the death penalty was mandatory. As the ruling was read aloud, many of the jurors had tears standing in their eyes. Anna did not.

  The True Anna

  In December 1937, while her lawyers scrambled to find a way around the death penalty, Anna was moved to the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus, where a special cell was built to isolate her from the rest of the inmates. She was the only female prisoner there. At first, the matrons in charge of her were impressed by the tiny blonde woman. “She is the bravest woman I ever saw,” said the wife of the warden. Obsessive strangers wrote to Anna, offering to take her place in jail or asking if they could have her clothes after her execution.

  It was there that Anna decided to wri
te her “confessions,” and they are full of deluded excuses. A psychiatrist might spot a couple of classic psychopathic traits in the document, including “blame externalization”: she tried to pin her crimes onto various childhood sicknesses, accidents, and surgeries, and expressed a lot of confusion about why she did them, as though she were utterly nonresponsible for her actions. “I was sitting there hearing a story like out of a book all about another person,” she wrote. “I couldn’t in my mind believe that it was me, Anna Marie Hahn, who loved people so well and wanted friends all the time. God above will tell me what made me do these terrible things. I couldn’t have been in my right mind when I did them. I loved all people so much.”

  Her lawyers kept up the desperate battle for Anna’s life, claiming that she was “tried as a hunted animal,” because the introduction of the other murders as evidence had biased the jury beyond all hope. As Anna’s execution date loomed nearer and nearer, they took their protestations to the governor of Ohio to see if he would reduce Anna’s sentence to life in prison. Anna was convinced he would. On December 1, Oscar testified in front of the governor’s executive secretary, asking for his mother’s life as a Christmas present.

  The sentimental display didn’t work. When Anna learned her final bid for life had failed, she collapsed, screaming, “Oh my God! I didn’t think he could do that to me! He should let me live for my boy!”

  Anna had always been a shape-shifter. She had a psychopath’s charm: it could be directed with laser-like precision, and if she focused it on someone, they became convinced that she was warm, loving, vivacious. If she didn’t bother to charm someone—like her relatives, and various suspicious neighbors—she appeared secretive and devious, a “strange woman” who wore fake nurse’s uniforms and seemed weirdly unmoved when her elderly friends died. And now, with all hope gone, a new Anna emerged—wild, hopeless, completely undone. She would pace around her cell in the middle of the night, sobbing and chain-smoking cigarettes. At points, she would cry out, “My God! What about Oscar?”