On August 1, 1937, doctors at Memorial Hospital in Colorado Springs called the police about a patient who had died of an illness they could not explain. He was Georg Obendoerfer, sixty-seven, a retired cobbler from Cincinnati, who had come west by train with a younger woman and her son and had begun to sicken on the way. As he lay dying, the woman leaned over his bed to ask his name and then told the police she did not know him. An autopsy found high levels of arsenic in his body. The woman was Anna Marie Hahn, thirty-one, a German immigrant who had spent the past four years looking after old men in Cincinnati's German community, several of whom had died soon after she arrived.
She was born Anna Marie Filser on July 7, 1906, in Füssen, Bavaria, the youngest of twelve children of a furniture maker, George Filser, in a family that was comfortably off. At nineteen she became pregnant with a son, Oskar, and told her family the father was a Viennese cancer researcher named Dr. Max Matscheki; no record of any such man has been found, and the father's identity is unknown. In 1929 her family sent her to the United States, leaving the boy in Bavaria. She lived with relatives in Cincinnati, Max and Anna Doeschel, and in 1930 married another German immigrant, Philip Hahn. She went back to Germany for Oskar and brought him over.
She gambled, and she found money among the elderly widowers of the German neighborhoods, offering herself as a housekeeper, a nurse or simply a friend. Ernest Koch, seventy-three, whose name also appears as Kohler, met her shortly before he died on May 6, 1933, and left her a house in his will. Albert Parker, seventy-two, died soon after she began caring for him; she had signed an IOU for money she borrowed from him, and after his death it could not be found. Jacob Wagner, seventy-eight, died on June 3, 1937, and left seventeen thousand dollars to his "beloved niece," Anna Hahn, though he had no living relatives and she was no relation. Within weeks she was caring for George Gsellman, sixty-seven, who died on July 6, 1937, after paying her fifteen or seventeen thousand dollars; the accounts differ. At least one man escaped. George Heiss noticed that flies drinking from the beer she had brought him fell dead, told her to take a long swallow herself, and when she refused, fired her.
The Colorado inquiry began with larceny. She was held first on a complaint that she had stolen diamond rings and money from a hotel owner in Colorado Springs, and the questions about the rings led quickly to Obendoerfer. Detectives in Cincinnati traced her purchases of poison back three years, and exhumations of two of her former charges showed that they had been poisoned too. Rather than wait for Colorado to extradite her, Ohio arrested her on August 10, 1937, and charged her with the murder of Jacob Wagner.
Her trial opened on October 11, 1937, in the Hamilton County Court of Common Pleas before Judge Charles S. Bell and a jury of eleven women and one man. Prosecutors Dudley Outcalt, Loyal Martin and Simon Leis built the case on Wagner and on greed, and a chemist testified that Wagner's body held enough arsenic to kill four men; jars holding organs from Wagner and from one of the other men were passed among the jurors as exhibits. Her son took the stand to describe the train ride west with Obendoerfer. Her lawyers, Joseph H. Hoodin and Hiram Bosinger Sr., told the jury that the publicity had poisoned every witness from Wagner's neighborhood, and that whatever else she was, she had not killed him. After four weeks the jury was out about two hours. On November 6 it found her guilty of first-degree murder with no recommendation of mercy, which under Ohio law made death mandatory, and each juror affirmed the vote when polled. Judge Bell sentenced her on November 10.
She was electrocuted at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus on December 7, 1938, at thirty-two, the first woman to die in Ohio's electric chair. She was buried in Mount Calvary Cemetery in Columbus. Wagner was the only death a court ever ruled on. The other four men are counted as hers because of the arsenic, the money and the pattern the prosecution laid out, not because a jury weighed them.