CRIME: German Cooking

First woman sentenced to death in Ohio was Mrs. Julia Maude Lowther in 1931. She pleaded guilty in a second trial, got off with a life sentence. Second Ohio death sentence for a murderess was imposed last week on a plump and pretty 31-year-old Bavarian blonde named Mrs. Anna Marie Filser Hahn. Crime of which a Cincinnati jury of 11 women and one man found Mrs. Hahn guilty was poisoning a 78-year-old German-American named Jacob Wagner with arsenic and croton oil.

An excellent chance to become Ohio’s first female victim of the electric chair was by no means Mrs. Hahn’s only claim to distinction last week. By the time her trial ended, she had established herself to the jury’s satisfaction as one of the most amazingly assiduous heroines in the history of U. S. crime.

Police first interested themselves in Mrs. Hahn one hot day last August. The proprietor of a Colorado Springs hotel, which she had just visited in the company of an aging but adventurous cobbler named George Obendoerfer, notified them of the loss of $305 worth of diamond rings. After tracing the theft to Mrs. Hahn, police found that Cobbler Obendoerfer had died the day after his escapade, poisoned by arsenic and croton oil. Further researches into Mrs. Hahn’s career, which promptly took the form of exhuming corpses, suggested a curiously Teutonic fixity of purpose. Each corpse was that of an elderly, Cincinnati German-American for whom Mrs. Hahn’s fatal fascination had consisted of her skill at German cooking. Each contained ample traces of the favorite Hahn seasoning— arsenic and croton oil. By the time the corpses of four of Mrs. Hahn’s former friends had been examined, a variation in the monotonous pattern of Mrs. Hahn’s past finally appeared. This was a hardy sexagenarian named George Heis, for whom the only consequences of a late evening snack of beer, pancakes, spinach, arsenic and croton oil, prepared by Mrs. Hahn, was partial paralysis and indigestion. Still hale enough to be wheeled into court, George Heis quavered out the most damaging testimony at her trial — for which the prosecution had picked the case of Jacob Wagner apparently at random.

The trial developed that administering arsenic and croton oil to old men was by no means the defendant’s only foible. To establish the sincerity of her denial of this vice, defense attorneys shrewdly made a point of admitting their client’s guilt of thefts, adultery and forgery. Motive for Mrs. Hahn’s dealings with her elderly Cincinnati compatriots was established as mere robbery. Motive for the robberies was even more innocent — her addiction to gambling, preferably on horseraces.Of the $50,000 acquired from her old friends in the last eight years, Mrs. Hahn last week had barely enough left to pay her counsel fees.

Day the trial ended, one of Mrs. Hahn’s attorneys was absent. Sniffledhis partner, Hiram Bolsinger, who was present at the verdict despite a bad cold: “Joe . . . didn’t think he could stand the finish.” When Lawyer Bolsinger, 58-year-old German-American, promised to appeal the verdict, reporters asked him who would pay the will.” costs. Answered Lawyer Bolsinger : “We will.”