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.
"One of the most sordid murder trials ever staged in an American courtroom" unfolded in Columbus, Ohio, during the summer of 1929. The case against Ohio State University professor Dr. James Howard Snook scandalized a nation reveling still in the waning era of speakeasies, bathtub gin, flappers and machine gun-wielding mobsters.
Gold Medal Killer, by Diana Britt Franklin with Nancy Pennell, tells for the first time the true story of this sensational and brutal crime.
Snook, 49 at the time of the murder, was a full professor of veterinary medicine at the Ohio State University in Columbus. He had a wife, an infant child, and a pair of Olympic gold medals for pistol shooting.
In the spring of 1926, he met Theora Hix, a 21-year-old medical school student at the university. For three years they had a wild, passionate relationship that knew no bounds.
But when she became too demanding and threatened to kill his wife and child, he took her to a secluded shooting range and bludgeoned her to death with a ball-peen hammer. Just to make sure she was dead, he deftly slit her jugular vein with his pocketknife.
Police arrested Snook within two days of the brutal murder, slapped him until they had a confession, and charged him with murder. The defense put Snook on the witness stand before the jury, a gallery of 200 spectators and more than 30 reporters from across the land.
In his cross-examination of the defendant, the dashing, ambitious, "pretty-boy" district attorney explored every sordid detail of the lovers’ sexual proclivities. So shocking was the testimony that not even the New York tabloids would print it.
For 28 minutes the jury deliberated Snook’s fate. Sixteen minutes were devoted to prayer; then it returned a guilty verdict that put Snook on the path to the electric chair. He was executed February 28, 1930, in Columbus, 260 days after Theora’s murder.
Snook is the only Olympic champion to die in the electric chair.
