Lady Killers Page 15

  “In her last twenty-four hours,” reported one of the matrons who guarded her, “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.”

  Beneath the Mask

  The day before her execution, Anna and Oscar spent hours together. Anna couldn’t touch her lunch. When visiting hours ended, and the matrons began to hint it was time for Oscar to leave, Anna started kissing Oscar’s face repeatedly.

  The matrons told her again that Oscar had to go. She ignored them and continued to kiss him. Finally, one matron had to physically tear Oscar away from her. “Don’t take him from me!” Anna screamed. Oscar wept as he was led from his mother’s cell, and Anna leapt at her matrons with such violence that she had to be injected with a sedative.

  For years, Oscar had been her little blond sidekick, accompanying her on the most gruesome of adventures. He was the only family member who never left her. (Hahn, ever passive and forgettable, had slowly drifted out of the papers during the trial.) They say psychopaths don’t feel love, but her last moments with her son imply—if not love, then dependence, even obsession. Anna may have seen Oscar as an extension of herself, a tiny mirror she’d created with her shadow lover, an escape hatch. But at the end, she lost the willing little actor who kept begging and begging for her innocence, and then she was truly alone. He was adopted by another family, and they changed his name.

  On December 7, 1938, Anna walked down death row, as condemned men wished her “good luck” and “God bless you” from their cells on either side of the corridor. “Goodbye, boys,” she responded. Her hair was disheveled, her face was grey, and she wasn’t wearing the gold cross that she’d worn throughout her trial.

  The moment the door to the execution chamber opened, Anna collapsed at the sight of Old Sparky, the electric chair. It had never held a woman before. “Please don’t. Oh, my boy. Think of my boy. Won’t someone, won’t anyone, come and do something for me?” she cried, looking around the room at people who had no ability whatsoever to save her—the attending priest, the three physicians, the horror-struck journalists. “Isn’t there anybody to help me? Anyone, anyone. Is nobody going to help me?”

  Throughout her life, Anna Hahn had been utterly callous in the face of death. She could stare at a weakened old man, covered in his own vomit and poisoned by her own hand, and say that she barely knew him. She dealt in death as though it were just another one of her con jobs, like the forgery and the bad checks and the stolen rings. But now that death was staring back at her, Anna couldn’t take it. She had to be carried, thrashing and screaming, to the electric chair.

  A guard attached one electrode to a shaved place on her head and a second electrode to her bare calf. As Anna locked eyes with the priest, the guard fitted a black leather mask over her face. The priest asked her to repeat the Lord’s Prayer after him, and she did so, crying behind the mask. Some of the journalists in the room repeated the prayer along with her. As she stumbled over the line “Lead us not into temptation but deliver—” three guards pressed three buttons, and an electric current surged through her body. The sound was “like a Fourth of July sparkler,” according to one of the journalists. Her body rose slightly out of the chair and her thumbs turned upward.

  Afterward, the physicians checked for a heartbeat and found none. “I am surprised she broke,” said the warden, who had tears in his eyes. “I had expected her to remain cool.” She’d been cool for years, but Death, of course, would always be more cold-blooded. The warden noted that no convict in the prison’s history had ever been as terrified as Anna Hahn was when she faced the electric chair.

  THE NIGHTINGALE

  Oum-El-Hassen

  Oum-El-Hassen was a Moroccan dancing girl gone bad. Not “bad,” you know—impudent and bewitching and unrestricted—but bad: evil, heartless, and inscrutable. She began her public life as a gorgeous cabaret girl and ended it with public humiliation, her once-beautiful face veiled in white. Her story trickled down from her trial in Fez to the tiniest American newspapers, like the San Antonio Light and the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, which reported breathlessly that this famous North African beauty was now the cruelest of them all, but never really stopped to fact-check her story. She was the beauty and the beast, a total enigma, forever doomed to be portrayed through someone else’s eyes.

  Oum-El-Hassen, who went professionally by the name Moulay, was born in 1890 in the “white and dazzling” city of Algiers, the coastline capital of Algeria. She grew into an ethereal beauty and a wonderful dancer, and began working as a prostitute at the age of twelve. Before long, she was being lauded as “the most beautiful cabaret girl in Northern Africa.”

  Though her role in society was an inherently vulnerable one, Moulay was smart about it. She noted those who were in power, and she chased their loyalty. At the turn of the century, Algeria was part of French North Africa, and so Moulay chose to adore the French—especially French soldiers. Later, a journalist would write that there was a “savage friendship [between] French blood and her own,” and Moulay apparently vowed that she would never sleep with a man who wasn’t a member of the French army. Her loyalty to the soldiers was certainly appreciated, but it was also uninvited. A woman can be loyal to an army, but an army is rarely loyal to a woman.

  Years later, the French writer Colette would observe bleakly that if Moulay hadn’t been so shrewd, her life would have followed a sad and familiar arc: beautiful prostitute found dead in a ditch. But Moulay was never fated to be one of that “uncertain and miserable number” of young dead girls. She knew violence was inevitable in her line of work, and so she chose the side of the violent.

  One Thousand Frenchmen

  Young Moulay was a clever businesswoman, and by the time she reached her twenties, she was running a popular brothel in Fez. Here, she entertained French officers and all sorts of important city officials with “gaiety, luxury, young dancers, fine firm Berber women, inscrutable Chleuhs, passive daughters of the South.” (This description was written by a French journalist, and is perhaps representational of how these French officers interacted with Moulay’s dancers: plucking their favorites from an impersonal and dehumanizing lineup.) Though much of Moulay’s private life is a mystery, we do know that she was in love once. For five years, she lived with a French colonel, and at one point she gave birth to a baby girl, whom she sent back to her sister in Algeria. In general, her life was going well. She was wealthy and respected. And things were about to get better.

  On March 30, 1912, Sultan Abdelhafid of Morocco signed the Treaty of Fez without really letting the people of Fez know what was going on. This treaty turned Morocco into a French protectorate, and Moroccan nationalists took the signing as a huge betrayal. They stewed in silence for a week or two—days that were “heavy with menace,” according to an eyewitness—and then, on April 17, Moroccan troops rose up against their French commanders and subsequently “spread to the streets of Fez in search of any European they could find.”

  It was a bloodbath. As the rioters streamed through the streets, Moulay turned her back on her countrymen and hid thirty French officers in her brothel instead. When protestors pounded at her door, expecting to search the place, they were shocked to be greeted by Moulay, who was brandishing a gun. She took a bullet in the hand for her pains, but ended up shooting one of the rebels in retaliation. That day, as the officers quivered in her back rooms, over seven hundred people were slaughtered in the streets—mostly Moroccans.

  An ocean away, the histrionic American press reported a more colorful version of the story. They claimed that Moulay disguised the officers as prostitutes: shaving their moustaches, dyeing their skin darker, plastering their faces with makeup, cloaking them in wigs and turbans and silk robes, and handing them fans with which to hide their masculine features. She then arranged them into a seductive tableau, carefully positi
oning her regular girls in front of the soldiers.

  And so, the story goes, when the furious rioters broke down the door, they were first distracted by this alluring scene, and then taken aback by Moulay, who was holding a pistol at eye level and daring them to come closer. She demanded they leave her business alone, and then, in a kinder tone, suggested they come back to enjoy her girls another day, when everyone was a bit calmer. Most of the rioters agreed to this idea, but when one showed signs of recognizing a French officer, Moulay shot the Moroccan through the heart.

  Drag or no drag, the French were endlessly grateful to Moulay for services rendered. “She is rich, she is loved, she is adulated,” crowed their newspapers. The officers rewarded her with eleven thousand francs, and people started to murmur that she should be appointed to the prestigious Legion of Honor. Moulay herself was incredibly proud of what she’d done, and later changed the number of officers she’d saved from thirty to sixty. But respectable France couldn’t stomach the idea of bequeathing their highest award to a prostitute who ran a cabaret, and so she was ultimately passed over. The rejection “broke her heart,” reported the San Antonio Light, “because it permitted respectable women to snub her.” That was the thing about Moulay: she wanted to be adored, but she chose people who wouldn’t, or couldn’t, openly love her.

  Despite this rebuff, Moulay’s passionate loyalty to the visiting army did not abate, and in 1925 she saved French lives again. A high-ranking Moroccan official was planning to kill a garrison of French soldiers by orchestrating a religious uprising during an annual festival, and Moulay caught wind of the plot. She went straight to a French general to warn him, and the general in turn managed to shut down the revolt. Numerically speaking, she’d just done the French an even bigger favor than she had during the 1912 Fez riots. Later, when she had fallen from her “adulated” position, she liked to remind people that she’d saved the lives of “one thousand Frenchmen.”

  But for now, she was still famous, beloved by the French army, and queen of the Fez underground. She may have been the madam of a brothel, but she was as respectable and respected as a woman in her position could hope to be.

  Then she vanished.

  The Body in the Basket

  No one really knows why Moulay went deep underground, or what she did there. Maybe she lost a lot of money. Maybe the colonel finally broke her heart. Darker rumors abound: she got mixed up with drug traffickers; she became involved in the “white slavery” trade; she started smoking hashish and sank slowly into the haze of addiction. Eventually, she lost her brothel license and at some point moved out of Fez and relocated to the seedy part of Meknès, a city about fifty miles southwest. She ran her new brothel with the help of a “sordid, fetid” old servant named Mohammed Ben Ali, who quickly became her right-hand man.

  This brothel was not the swanky cabaret where Moulay had amused France’s highest-ranking officers with “gaiety, luxury, young dancers.” Instead, her new business was frequented by crueler men who didn’t expect things to be fancy—or even clean. Moulay, for her part, just didn’t seem to care about much anymore.

  “The men she receives are demanding, the women she offers them languish,” reported Paris-Soir. Her business was notable for its “grime and beatings” and the “odious practices” of its orgies, and the results showed on the starving, bruised bodies of the girls who worked there. Moulay was paranoid that her girls would secretly beg for help during their “amorous conversations” with patrons, and so she sometimes hid behind a curtain to spy on them.

  Perhaps Moulay grew irrationally angry every time she looked at these girls, who were no longer the “fine firm” specimens she’d paraded before the French army years before. These new prostitutes, skinny and damaged, were a visual reminder of her fall from grace. And so she began to abuse them, helped along by Mohammed Ben Ali. The girls were starved and locked up so that they couldn’t escape, and beaten at the slightest provocation. At least seven of them were struck so fiercely and so often they were eventually crippled.

  By autumn 1936, Moulay was about forty-six years old. She was no longer supple and young; her looks had “dissolved in the fat of middle age.” Her days of luxury and adulation were far behind her, and her life was filled instead with violence—and one particularly horrible secret.

  Children sometimes frolicked in the streets outside Moulay’s brothel, and one day a group of kids stumbled across something that piqued their interest: a heavy basket tied shut with string. They scrambled over each other to open it. Nothing could have prepared them for the contents inside. “Feet, hands, a head and its hair, a torso and young breasts” loomed out of the basket—a sick shadow box, a body in pieces. The broken flesh was surrounded by mint, fennel, and thyme, all stuffed inside the basket to disguise the smell of decay.

  Soon the police were knocking on Moulay’s door, demanding an explanation. Moulay received them, haughty and dismissive. Yes, she said, the dead girl was Cherifa, one of her former “boarders”—a euphemism if there ever was one—but she had no idea how Cherifa had ended up in the basket. She then reminded the police that she’d saved the lives of a thousand Frenchman, in case anyone had forgotten to keep track.

  Mohammed Ben Ali wasn’t so cool under pressure, and as soon as the police turned to him, he began to babble about revenge and beatings and strangulation. But Moulay silenced him immediately. “Mohammed is a fool,” she said. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

  The skeptical police investigated Moulay’s house anyway. They discovered weapons in Mohammed Ben Ali’s room and a couple of suspicious bloodstains. As they continued to search, they heard strange noises coming from behind one of the walls—a faint scratching, and then a mewling that sounded a lot like a cat.

  Moulay told them that it was indeed a cat. She’d been having repairs done on one of the walls, she said, and the feral animal was accidentally plastered up in the process. The police made as if to knock down the walls, and Moulay calmly dissuaded them, saying that she’d already hired a professional to come and free the cat. He would be able to do a cleaner job, she cooed. She was so convincing that the police were about to leave, when from behind the wall, they heard the voice of a child: “Help! There are four of us here and we are dying.”

  Colette Attends the Trial

  Word of the sensational crime spread quickly across the city, and Moulay became a celebrity once again. This time, it was an unpleasant fame. Hustlers began selling jewels to the morbidly curious, swearing that they were “snatched from the throat” of Moulay herself. In anticipation of drama, gory details, and general human tragedy, the French papers sent their best journalists to Fez to cover the trial.

  The celebrated French writer Colette showed up in Morocco less interested in the back-and-forth legalities of the trial and more interested in knowing the unknowable Oum-El-Hassen. In the courtroom, Colette sat very near to Moulay—so close she could have touched her—and eyed the now forty-eight-year-old woman like a hawk. Moulay was dressed entirely in spotless white robes. She held a white handkerchief over her mouth, so that the only visible parts of her face were her curved nose and her “very dark green-brown eyes, lavishly treated with blue kohl.” But when she lifted away the handkerchief to speak, all traces of elegance were lost: she was missing teeth, and her mouth was “flat, ungracious, made for gossiping, invective and—perhaps—cruelty.”

  There was a horrific spread of evidence at the front of the courtroom: a little shrine of household items allegedly used to kill and dismember poor Cherifa. There was the infamous basket that held Cherifa’s hacked-up body, a pot in which Cherifa was supposed to have been boiled, a knife, a revolver, a garrote, and a “pestle for grinding scalps rather than almonds.” Saddest of all were the pink and white pieces of cotton that had been wrapped around the mutilated limbs. There was no sign of blood on any of this fabric because, according to Mohammed Ben Ali, Cherifa had been too thin to bleed.

  The murder of this dancing girl appeared
to be merely a synecdoche for Moulay’s “chamber of horrors” as a whole. Everybody was pretty certain that Moulay had killed again and again during her time in Meknès. After all, only about half of her “boarders” were accounted for. The prosecutor, M. Julin, announced, “Of 14 girls known to have been inmates of this house in a year, three have disappeared, four are dead, and seven have been tortured so badly that they will be invalids for life. Once a girl entered this haunt she was never seen again outside.”

  Another of the dead girls was finally identified: her name was Aicha, and she was a dancer at Moulay’s house of horrors long before Cherifa arrived, but “lost her health and looks under the abuse until she was no longer of interest to the guests.” With no use for Aicha anymore, Moulay allegedly murdered her with a loaf of bread stuffed full of strychnine.

  Aicha and Cherifa were, at the very least, named in the press, but Moulay’s other victims were fated to remain nameless forever. Her business was a place of utter darkness, a fetid drain where the poorest and youngest beauties of society seemed to catch, spin, and disappear. The details of the other two deaths—as well as those three missing girls—never surfaced, and no one came forward to mourn them.

  The Hot Tea Dance

  Neither Colette nor the French reporter Paul Boué—on location for Paris-Soir and calling in his reporting by phone—provided a detailed narrative of the night Cherifa died. (We do, however, have a date: November 21, 1936.) Somehow, though, a dramatic retelling of that fateful night wended its way into the American press. The account is more interesting for its speculative detail than for its accuracy—the American journalist seems to be trying to cram every exotic cliché he can into the story—and so it ends up telling us more about the Western press’s opinion of Moulay than about Moulay herself. This is both intriguing and torturous. We want to know what happened, but instead, we get a flattened, exoticized, eroticized story of a girl who dances like a trapped princess and a woman with the cruelty and heartlessness of a witch.