Ebook The GoodBye Door The Incredible True Story of America First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair True Crime History Diana Franklin 9780873388740 Books

Product details Series True Crime History Paperback 244 pages Publisher The Kent State University Press; First Edition edition (September 11, 2006) Language English ISBN-10 0873388747

The GoodBye Door The Incredible True Story of America First Female Serial Killer to Die in the Chair True Crime History Diana Franklin 9780873388740 Books Reviews

• Diana Franklin did as good a job putting this puzzle with missing pieces together as well as anyone could have. She was able to reconstruct the time line of Anna Marie Hahn's life and to trace her movements, sometimes hour by hour. The research that she did was quite thorough, even to the point of investigating Anna's family and her life in Bavaria. What she wasn't able to do, unfortunately, is get inside of Anna Marie Hahn's head and figure out exactly when and why she turned into a liar, a grifter, thief and eventually a murderer. It wasn't for lack of trying, though, since it seems that Hahn left behind no journals, correspondence, or insights into her psyche aside from her final "confession," which even then wasn't all that forthcoming or truthful. It's just as well that Franklin stuck to what she could find and didn't try to speculate on how Hahn's mind worked. In addition to describing Anna Hahn's long trail of deception, Franklin pays quite a bit of attention to all of the generous and vulnerable people that Hahn preyed upon. At the end of the book, Hahn comes across not necessarily as evil or sociopathic (although she may well have been) but as greedy, self-absorbed and pathetic.
• This book must have been quite an undertaking for the author as all the primary players in this drama are long dead. However, the story is well researched, very well written, and almost devoid of typos and grammatical errors. (I think I found one.) "The Good-bye Door" tells the story of Anna Marie Hahn, the first female serial killer to die in the electric chair. Anna Marie was a young Bavarian immigrant who came to America partly to escape her past. She settled in a largely German area of Cincinnati and later sent for her young son.
  
  Adept at social relationships (as are many sociopaths), Anna Marie soon ingratiates herself to elderly men in the neighborhood. She bilked them out of whatever money she could and then systematically poisoned them. However, Anna Marie is an enigma. In some cases, she was willing to kill for relatively small amounts of money and the "gain" for her appears to be very little... unless you consider that she may have enjoyed poisening her victims. In the end, at the age of 32, when death was imminent and Anna Marie was forced to reckon with her own demons, she begged pitifully and screamed as she was strapped into Old Sparky.
  
  Oddly, Anna Marie always claimed to love her son, Oscar, who was 12 at the time of her death. She often stated that everything she did was to provide for him. While her son does appear to be perhaps the only person she felt any real affection for, I believe even this love was selfish and tainted by her own vanity and narcissism.
  
  While it is unclear how much Oscar knew of her muderous activities, Anna Marie exhibited no emotion when she had Oscar serve the arsenic-laced food to the victims. Did Oscar ever see her poison the food? Did Oscar ever assist his mother in poisoning the meals she "lovingly" prepared for the elderly men in her care? No one will ever know... but I suspect he knew a great deal more than he was ever willing to say. Certainly, Oscar exhibited problems maintaining appropriate peer relationships and had learned from his mother how to lie with ease. Given that Anna Marie did NOT shield her son from these ammoral activities, nor the grotesque manner in which the victims were forced to suffer and die, it can only be concluded that even the love she claimed to feel for Oscar was shallow and lacking in humility and honesty.
  
  Anna Marie was certainly not raised by abusive parents or forced to live in abject poverty and suffering. If anything, she was probably coddled by her mother and rarely held accountable for her actions. When she did burn the bridges with her remaining family members, she was shunned and ignored. Not one person from her family of origin expressed any sympathy for her plight, and not one family member ever attended her trial. Having suffered the consequences of a tainted relationship with Anna Marie for many years, perhaps they already knew what many others failed to see until it was too late.
• I am still reading this book, however, it is an amazing story about the first woman in the US to be sent to the electric chair. This book intriqued me because I discovered that this woman serial killer had made an attempt to kill two of my distant relatives back in the 30's. Her method of killing people was by the use of arsenic. It is a facinating read to me, especially, because my distant family members are not only listed as surviving her evil method of disposing of people, but they are written about in the book. I believe this would be an excellent read for anyone who enjoys murder mystery type novels, especially true ones!
• I've read a lot of murder/true crime/historical stories in the last year and have really enjoyed them. This one, well this one was a little dry and long-winded at times. The first third of the book gives the main character's background and tells us all about her crimes. The rest of the book it seems, is about the trial, the witnesses, and so many names, I had to keep going back and checking who was who.
  The author tells us right up front that there wasn't a lot of background on this story and I thought I saw a couple things repeated in the book, perhaps to take up space since there wasn't much else to report?
  I'm determined to finish it, I'm almost there with three chapters of the 20 to go, but it's really dragging by. The other day at work, I read during my lunch hour and it put me to sleep. But finish I will, and then I'll go back to Erik Larson's books.