The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair, and: The Fairer Death: Executing Women in Ohio (review)

"I never did it!" cried Anna Marie Hahn, shortly after a Cincinnati "petticoat" jury of eleven women and one man declared her guilty of first-degree murder as charged in an indictment that accused her of killing seven men for their money. Hahn, accused of befriending elderly men in the 1930s, stealing their life savings, and then poisoning them with arsenic, was the nation's first female serial killer to die in the electric chair. Diana Britt Franklin's The Good-bye Door relates the details of Hahn's life, from her 1906 birth as the youngest of twelve in the Bavarian village of Fuessen, to a romantic indiscretion in her teens that was followed by a pregnancy and the birth of a son in 1925, to her immigration to the United States in 1929, and the decade she spent in Cincinnati, working, marrying, and in 1938 being convicted of murdering seven men. Hahn's life is stranger than fiction and stands in stark contrast to classical accounts of pious, hard-working German immigrant women, most of whom did domestic work for wages until they married, bore an average of seven children, kept immaculate homes, and attended Mass regularly. This labyrinthine tale of the first female serial killer to die in the electric chair in 1938 provides a counter-narrative that turns on infidelity, deception, forgery, and death.

Franklin, who has had a distinguished career as a journalist, public relations executive, and author, spent five years researching Anna Marie Hahn's life and bases this sordid story of "a widow with experience" largely on the 1,500-page trial transcript and newspaper accounts published in Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Columbus, New York, and Colorado (where one of Hahn's victim's was poisoned). Hahn's case, as Franklin puts it, "captured the fancy of the nation's press," and over the year and a half between the beginning of her trial and her execution, her story repeatedly made front-page news.

The Good-bye Door tells Hahn's story well and includes striking photographs of Hahn and the major figures in her trial, sentencing, and imprisonment, as well as an Afterword that compares Hahn with contemporary profiles of female serial killers and provides updated biographical data on the primary characters in Hahn's story, including her husband and son. Franklin's book ends with a useful appendix listing Hahn's victims and those who survived her attempts to poison them. In the telling Franklin raises some important questions that historians rarely ask. For example, in an era when deadly poisons could be obtained relatively easily, how often did women slowly murder the men for whom they cooked? One suspects after reading Hahn's "incredible true story" that this may have happened more frequently than we previously thought. Did women's apparent invisibility in a patriarchal culture, combined with their choice of "weapon," give them the latitude to commit murder and remain undetected? Franklin's telling of Hahn's exploits suggests an affirmative answer to this question.

Franklin argues, based on her reading of the Cincinnati newspapers' accounts, that no special notice was taken of Anna Marie's mounting number of victims, beyond a routine obituary notice. Each of the men she killed, as well as the five people who were said to have survived her poison (including her husband and mother-in-law), lived in the supposedly close-knit Overthe Rhine community of German immigrants in Cincinnati. But no one put the pieces together until Hahn was arrested in Colorado for...