Lady Killers by Tori Telfer

Author:Tori Telfer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

Beneath the Mask

The day before her execution, Anna and Oscar spent hours together. Anna couldn’t touch her lunch. When visiting hours ended, and the matrons began to hint it was time for Oscar to leave, Anna started kissing Oscar’s face repeatedly.

The matrons told her again that Oscar had to go. She ignored them and continued to kiss him. Finally, one matron had to physically tear Oscar away from her. “Don’t take him from me!” Anna screamed. Oscar wept as he was led from his mother’s cell, and Anna leapt at her matrons with such violence that she had to be injected with a sedative.

For years, Oscar had been her little blond sidekick, accompanying her on the most gruesome of adventures. He was the only family member who never left her. (Hahn, ever passive and forgettable, had slowly drifted out of the papers during the trial.) They say psychopaths don’t feel love, but her last moments with her son imply—if not love, then dependence, even obsession. Anna may have seen Oscar as an extension of herself, a tiny mirror she’d created with her shadow lover, an escape hatch. But at the end, she lost the willing little actor who kept begging and begging for her innocence, and then she was truly alone. He was adopted by another family, and they changed his name.

On December 7, 1938, Anna walked down death row, as condemned men wished her “good luck” and “God bless you” from their cells on either side of the corridor. “Goodbye, boys,” she responded. Her hair was disheveled, her face was grey, and she wasn’t wearing the gold cross that she’d worn throughout her trial.

The moment the door to the execution chamber opened, Anna collapsed at the sight of Old Sparky, the electric chair. It had never held a woman before. “Please don’t. Oh, my boy. Think of my boy. Won’t someone, won’t anyone, come and do something for me?” she cried, looking around the room at people who had no ability whatsoever to save her—the attending priest, the three physicians, the horror-struck journalists. “Isn’t there anybody to help me? Anyone, anyone. Is nobody going to help me?”

Throughout her life, Anna Hahn had been utterly callous in the face of death. She could stare at a weakened old man, covered in his own vomit and poisoned by her own hand, and say that she barely knew him. She dealt in death as though it were just another one of her con jobs, like the forgery and the bad checks and the stolen rings. But now that death was staring back at her, Anna couldn’t take it. She had to be carried, thrashing and screaming, to the electric chair.

A guard attached one electrode to a shaved place on her head and a second electrode to her bare calf. As Anna locked eyes with the priest, the guard fitted a black leather mask over her face. The priest asked her to repeat the Lord’s Prayer after him, and she did so, crying behind the mask.

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