Just after eight o’clock tonight, the state of Ohio carried out its first execution of a woman in history, sending convicted serial killer Anna Marie Hahn to the electric chair at Ohio State Penitentiary in Columbus. The 32-year-old, described as small and blond, was strapped into the chair as a room full of silent witnesses looked on. She had spent her final hours composing a 20-page handwritten confession.
Hahn confessed to poisoning five elderly men across Cincinnati’s German immigrant community, admitting to every name, every poison, and every victim. Her death sentence was automatic after a jury found her guilty of murder without recommending mercy. The verdict came after a four-week trial that 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 a four-year killing spree driven by greed and a desperate need to fund her gambling addiction.
The execution was scheduled for 8 p. m. , and for months Hahn reportedly believed Ohio would never execute a woman.
That belief proved fatal. Her final day was marked by grief and panic. She requested no last meal, reportedly too consumed by fear to eat.
Her 12-year-old son, Oscar, spent much of that day with her before being led away to the prison chapel as his mother was taken to her death.
Witnesses said Hahn walked down the death house corridor past the cells of 12 condemned men, each of whom stepped forward and stood silently. She called out to them, saying goodbye and asking God to bless them. Then she collapsed just outside the execution chamber door.
Guards and matrons carried her inside and placed her into the wooden chair.
As she was strapped in, Hahn stretched her arms toward the witnesses and screamed, begging a man named Mr. Woodard not to do this to her. She cried out about her boy, asking if nobody was going to help her.
Turning to the prison chaplain, Father John Sullivan, she whispered a strange warning, telling him to be careful or he would be killed.
Father Sullivan began reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and Hahn joined him word for word. In the middle of that prayer, the switch was thrown. At 8:13 p.
m. , Anna Marie Hahn was pronounced dead. She was 32 years old.
Ohio had never executed a woman before, and the state had gone to extraordinary lengths to ensure no legal obstacle remained before the sentence was carried out.
The story of how Hahn arrived at that execution chamber began years earlier in Bavaria, Germany, where she was born in 1906. She came to the United States in 1929 after a 𝒔𝒄𝒂𝓃𝒹𝒶𝓁 involving a pregnancy and a claim about a Viennese doctor who did not exist. Her family sent her to relatives in Cincinnati, where she married fellow German immigrant Philip Hahn in 1930.
Court records show that Philip Hahn became mysteriously ill not long after the marriage. He survived, but the marriage did not last. With no real caregiving experience, Hahn talked her way into becoming a live-in attendant for elderly men in the German community.
At the same time, her horse race betting debts were growing out of control.
Prosecutors argued that she devised a calculated plan to find vulnerable elderly men, gain their trust, manage their finances, and then poison them with arsenic and croton oil. The poisons were difficult to detect in the 1930s, and Hahn’s role as a caregiver provided the perfect cover. Elderly men in her care falling ill and dying did not raise suspicion.
Her first known victim was Ernest Kock, 73, who died in May 1933. He left her his house. Albert Parker, 72, loaned her 1,000 dollars, and when he died, the IOU disappeared.
Jacob Wagner, 78, rewrote his will to leave her 17,000 dollars, calling her his beloved niece. He was not her uncle. He was her victim.
George Gesselman, 67, died after she worked her way into his finances and walked away with 15,000 dollars. The final victim was Georg Oberndorfer, also 67, a cobbler who traveled with Hahn and her young son to Colorado Springs in the summer of 1937. Oberndorfer became sick on the train and died in a hotel room shortly after arriving.
When authorities confronted her, Hahn told them she did not even know the man, despite having crossed state lines with him. She then offered to pay for his funeral, which raised immediate suspicion. An autopsy ordered by Colorado authorities confirmed arsenic poisoning.
That single autopsy opened the door to a much larger investigation.
Investigators exhumed the bodies of Hahn’s previous victims, and toxicology reports confirmed poisoning in multiple cases. A search of her Cincinnati home uncovered a staggering stockpile of poison. One detective said there was enough poison found to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 half of Cincinnati.
This was not a woman who made a single mistake. This was a woman who was prepared and ready to 𝓀𝒾𝓁𝓁 again.
One man, George Heiss, had escaped her scheme. He testified at trial that he saw flies drop dead almost instantly after landing on a mug of root beer Hahn had brought him. He dismissed her and sent her away, but he never told the police.
That failure, prosecutors noted, likely cost four more men their lives. Heiss’s testimony was among the most powerful evidence against her.
Hahn’s own son, then 12 years old, testified at trial that he, his mother, and Oberndorfer traveled together by train and that Oberndorfer became sick before they arrived. The testimony of her own child carried enormous weight in the courtroom. The jury deliberated for less than three hours before returning a guilty verdict with no recommendation for mercy.
On November 10, 1937, Judge Bell formally sentenced Hahn to death by electrocution. She maintained her innocence as the sentence was read. Her attorneys appealed all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but the court refused to block the sentence.
On December 1, 1938, she was transferred to the Ohio State Penitentiary to await her fate.
In her final hours, Hahn stopped pretending. She wrote 20 pages by hand from her death row cell, admitting to the poisonings and expressing deep confusion about what she had done. She also poured out her fear for what would happen to Oscar after she was gone.
Her attorney later sold that confession to the Cincinnati Enquirer, with the condition that all money go into a trust fund for the boy.
That promise was kept. Oscar eventually settled with a foster family in the Midwest, served in the United States Navy during World War II, and lived a relatively normal life. His mother’s crimes marked him forever, but he was never held accountable for them.
He was simply a child caught in the wake of a monster.
Anna Marie Hahn’s victims were not strangers chosen at random. They were elderly, hard-working men with roots in Cincinnati’s close German immigrant community. They had spent their entire lives building something small but meaningful.
They simply needed a little help in their final years, and that need is exactly what she used against them.
Ernest Kock, Albert Parker, Jacob Wagner, George Gesselman, and Georg Oberndorfer. Five men who trusted someone they believed was helping them. Each one was financially drained before being poisoned.
Each death was arranged to look natural, and each time Hahn walked away richer. It took four years and a cross-state death to bring her operation to an end.
The reaction across Cincinnati’s German-American community was one of complete shock. These were people who had welcomed Hahn into their circle, trusted her with their elderly, and never once doubted her intentions. The discovery of the poison stockpile shattered that trust.
The public spectacle of her trial made headlines across the nation.
The jury was unusual for the era, made up of eleven women and one man. Hahn came to court each day looking composed and put together, with clean clothes, neat hair, and a calm expression. She performed innocence as if it were second nature.
But the evidence was overwhelming, and the jury was not fooled.
Prosecutors described the case as a mass murder-for-profit scheme. Every victim had been financially drained before he was poisoned. Wills were manipulated, documents were forged, and estates were quietly stolen.
Hahn’s motive was not insurance or revenge. It was plain, direct financial theft, driven by the debts she could not escape.
As she waited for death, Hahn reportedly told herself that Ohio would never execute a woman, that someone would step in at the last moment. Nobody did. In her final hours, she stopped fighting the inevitable and turned to confession.
The 20-page document she left behind was the closest thing to remorse she ever showed, though even that was overshadowed by fear for her son.
The execution chamber was a single electric chair sitting under cold, hard light. Witnesses described the scene as grim and silent. Hahn’s last moments were anything but calm.
She screamed and begged for help, thinking of her boy, and then, with the Lord’s Prayer on her lips, the current was switched on. The state of Ohio ended her life in a matter of minutes.
Anna Marie Hahn spent years poisoning men to secure money and freedom. In the end, the only thing she secured was her own place in history as the first woman the state of Ohio ever executed. Her victims deserved so much better.
They were lonely, trusting, and vulnerable, and they paid for their kindness with their lives.
The legacy of this case stretches far beyond the execution chamber. It served as a warning about the dangers of blind trust and the ease with which a calculated killer can hide in plain sight. Hahn used her identity as a mother and caregiver as weapons.
She weaponized compassion itself, and that is what makes this story so deeply unsettling.
Tonight, Ohio closed a dark chapter. The state carried out its first execution of a woman, but the questions raised by Anna Marie Hahn’s crimes will linger long after the switch was thrown. Why did she do it?
How did she get away with it for so long? And how many more might have died if one hotel autopsy in Colorado had not changed everything?
Before the switch was thrown, Hahn left behind a document that admitted everything. Every name, every poison, every victim. That confession, written by her own hand from death row, is now part of the historical record.
It stands as a chilling reminder that the most dangerous predators often look like the people we trust most.
Anna Marie Hahn was pronounced dead at 8:13 p. m. on December 7, 1938.
She was 32 years old. The first woman executed by the state of Ohio. Five men are gone because they believed a kind woman who claimed she was there to help.
Somewhere in a prison chapel, a 12-year-old boy sat alone waiting for a mother who would never walk out.
