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The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair (True Crime Series (Kent, Ohio).) by Diana Britt Franklin
Book Summary InformationAuthor: Diana Britt Franklin Edition: Paperback Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published) Published: 2006-10-30 ISBN: 0873388747 Number of pages: 244 Publisher: Kent State University Press
Book Reviews of The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair (True Crime Series (Kent, Ohio).)Book Review: Comfort Food Killer Summary: 5 StarsIt's been more than a month since I devoured The Goodbye-Door but I can't stop thinking about it! The true story of this serial murderer is interwoven with the familiar threads of the yin rejection by family and friends counterbalanced with the yang of revenge in the form of seduction: charisma is used as the tool of killing. Diana Franklin's masterful research and brilliant reporting traces the short, tragic life of Anna Marie Hahn, a pretty young German woman who arrives penniless in the U.S. Somewhere along the way she must have heard "The way to a man's heart is through his stomach." She cooks familiar comfort foods for her victims and cunningly provides a digestive in the form of fast-acting poison. The author unravels a tale of consequences as one financial crisis for Anna Marie leads to the death of one unsuspecting old gentleman, and then another and another and yet more. With heartless lack of remorse, the "heroine" leaves her victims to suffer, never believing for a moment that the tables will turn. In the end the reader is forced to confront and analyze every side of the debate about capital punishment as the author forces us to witness the horror of the execution chamber. You may read a thousand true crime thrillers. You'll never forget this one! *****five stars.
Summary of The Good-bye Door: The Incredible True Story of America's First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair (True Crime Series (Kent, Ohio).)Nicknamed the "Blonde Borgia," Anna Marie Hahn was a cold-blooded serial killer who preyed on the elderly in Cincinnati's Over-the-Rhine District in the 1930s. Told here for the first time is Anna Marie's gripping story, an almost unbelievable tale of multiple murders, deceit, and greed.Born in Bavaria in 1906, Anna Marie brought shame to her pious family when as a teenager, she gave birth to an illegitimate son, Oscar. Shipped off to America in 1929 where she initially lived with the elderly relatives in Cincinnati, she married Philip Hahn, a Western Union telegrpher, with whom she bought a new house and opened a delicatessen/bakery. Pressed economically by the Great Depression, the ever-resourceful Anna Marie found other ways to get the money to support her passionate pasttime -- betting on horses. She tried burning down the house, then the deli, for the insurance, and she tried killing her husband, also for the insurance. Then she took to befriending the neighborhood elderly, latching on to their life savings before feeding them arsenic with deadly results. How many did she dispatched in this way? Some say as many as a dozen. For weeks her Cincinnati trial for "the greatest mass murder in the history of the country" was a front-page sensation across the nation. Thousands of curiosity seekers came daily to the courthouse to try to get a glimpse of Anna Marie. Nearly 100 witnesses gave damning testimony against her, and the jury's guilty verdict put her on the path to the electric chair. Finally, when all appeals were exhausted, Anna Marie, age 32, was executed on December 7, 1938, at the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus. In a handwritten "confession" found in her cell, she admitted to four murders.
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