The Death Cell Confession of Anna Marie Hahn

True Crime Historian

Pulpular Media

True Crime

4.5 • 720 Ratings

🗓️ 19 August 2016

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

AN EYE FOR AN EYE-
A special edition of Yesterday’s News exploring the criminal justice system at its most extreme: Inflicting the Death Penalty.
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This episode comes at the request of a faithful listener in Cincinnati who wanted to hear more about Anna Marie Hahn, the first woman to be executed in Ohio's electric chair.
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Although ‘Arsenic Annie’ had stoically proclaimed her innocence right up until her dying day, Anna Marie Hahn left a handwritten 20-page confession in her death row cell on December 7, 1938, when they led her to Ohio’s electric chair, literally kicking and screaming.
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In the letter, she not only takes responsibility for six murders, she denies other poisoning attempts and goes into details about her life and how she began her series what the governor called cold-blooded and horrifying crimes when he made the final decision to take her to the chair.
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The letter is such a remarkable and revealing self-portrait, more entertaining than her pathetic execution, that I gave it to a professional actress, my friend and colleague Emily Simer Braun, to help bring out some of the nuances in this rare insight into the mind of a mass murderer.
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Music by Dave Sams
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www.truecrimehistorian.com/1938hahn

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Transcript

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0:00.0	November 7, 1937. When informed in the jail that the jury had reached a verdict a few moments after the noon hour,
0:14.7	the comely blonde was as stoical as usual and gave no more evidence of her feelings than she had on any day during the long trial.
0:23.8	Brought into the courtroom and seated at the defense table, she assumed the same attitude
0:28.9	she had maintained for more than three weeks of the trial, sitting straight in her chair,
0:34.1	with her hands folded over her handkerchief on the table before her. She turned neither
0:39.7	to the right nor the left, only her eyes traveling in the arc of sight before them, which
0:45.2	took in the reporter's table, the judge's bench, and the clerk's desk on the opposite side of the
0:51.2	room. Not once did she turn her head to view the throng in the courtroom.
0:57.9	Her color was heightened slightly, but the flush frequently was replaced by an ashen pallor,
1:03.3	the only sign of what her thoughts must have been and of the mental strain she was undergoing.
1:10.1	As Judge Bell assumed the bench and gave instructions
1:13.3	that there was to be no demonstration of any sort when the verdict was read,
1:17.7	she gazed intently at him.
1:20.2	Then, when the jurors filed in, she watched each one closely,
1:24.6	apparently seeking some sign in their faces which would give her hope.
1:29.7	She saw nothing there, however, for characteristically, each juror avoided glancing at her,
1:37.5	thus disclosing to students of criminal trials that the verdict was one which left no hope for the
1:43.7	blonde. The clerk of courts read the verdict was one which left no hope for the blonde.
1:50.7	The clerk of courts read the verdict, guilty of first-degree murder as she stands charged in the indictment, and Mrs. Hahn realized that there was no recommendation of mercy to save her
1:57.6	from the death chair. Her eyes bowed slightly, her eyes sought her hands the fingers of which were twitching nervously as she twisted her handkerchief
2:09.5	that was all the public saw if they had expected a break in the remarkable composure of the one who has been compared to the bourges
2:18.6	of history, they were disappointed, for she lost none of her apparent poise. Even when the jurors
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