Synopsis

Young, blonde and attractive for her day, Anna Marie Hahn did not look like a serial killer.  She did not terrorize Cincinnati the way the Boston Strangler gripped that city in the early 1960s or Jack the Ripper terrorized London in 1888.  Yet, once revealed in 1937, her crimes were no less shocking to the nation.

Born Anna Marie Filser in Bavaria in 1906, she was the youngest of twelve children of well-to-do parents.  As a teenager, she had an illicit love affair - she said it was with a handsome Viennese doctor - and bore a son, Oscar.  Given the circumstances, her family felt it best if she went far away - to America.

She arrived in Cincinnati in 1929.  The following year, she married Philip Hahn, a mousy Western Union telegrapher, who quit his job at the height of the Depression to help his wife run a restaurant/bakery and then a delicatessen they had bought.  Neither venture was successful, and they lost virtually everything, including their Cincinnati home.

Anna Marie loved betting on thoroughbreds far more than spreading cream cheese on a bagel, anyway.  To support her habit, she befriended elderly neighbors, particularly German-speaking gentlemen, who willingly compensated her for her companionship.  Once she had their money or control of it, she callously watched while each died an agonizing death from the arsenic that she fed them.

Her murderous ways were discovered through an incredible twist of fate.  She was arrested in Cincinnati on August 1, 1937. She never saw another day of freedom.  After a sensational jury trial that captured headlines nationwide, Anna Marie, 32, earned the death penalty as the "biggest mass murderer of the century."  She spent a year on death row at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus before being dragged to the electric chair on December 7, 1938.  She was the nation's first female serial killer to die in the chair and the first woman in Ohio to be put to death in "Old Sparky."

Anna Marie professed her innocence again and again, right up to the day she died, but afterwards her twenty-page, handwritten confession to four murders came to light.  Anna Marie is buried in Columbus, Ohio.