She was known as the “woman who could not cry.”
Not a tear rolled down Dovie Blanche Dean’s cheeks when she learned of the death of her husband, Hawkins Dean, 68. Nor did she sob when police questioned her about the arsenic in his corpse.
Dean, 53, maintained her stone-cold expression throughout her trial for his murder. She remained eerily unmoved as she waited for a call from Ohio’s governor to save her from the electric chair.
The “Ice Queen” was how reporters described her.
“I just can’t cry and carry on,” Dean told a reporter from the Cincinnati Post after a jury found her guilty of her husband’s poisoning. “I’ve buried two of my six children in my lifetime, and I’ve never shed a tear.”
Hawkins, a farmer who lived near Owensville, Ohio, became ill in early August 1952, just four months after he wed Dovie. Hearing of his condition, Mae Perry, his grown daughter from a previous marriage, rushed to her father’s bedside.
Dovie told her that Hawkins had been sick and vomiting for a week. She thought it was a virus, so she did not call a doctor.
Perry got her father to a hospital. In a week, Hawkins had recovered enough to be sent home. But a few days later, he started vomiting again and was dead in 24 hours.
Suspicions of foul play emerged when Perry received a letter from an attorney. It contained a copy of her father’s will, drawn up on Apr. 12, 1952. In the document, Hawkins said he planned to marry Dovie Myers and wanted to leave his entire estate — worth about $27,000 (roughly $300,000 today) — to his new bride.
Perry requested an autopsy, which revealed enough arsenic in his body to kill two men.
Batavia Prosecutor Ray Bradford called in the widow and two of her relatives — Carl Myers, Jr., her son from her first marriage, and Clyde Bryant, 44, a son-in-law — for questioning. Bryant was quickly released.
After days of intense grilling, Dovie broke down. She said her son did it.
When Myers learned his mother had pinned the crime on him, he became hysterical and begged her to tell the truth.
“It has boiled down to you or your son,” a detective told her. “Don’t you want to change your story?”
“And take the blame myself?” she responded.
Moments later, she said, “I did it,” and calmly dictated and signed a confession describing the murder in detail.
“I placed a few drops of rat poison in Mr. Dean’s milk on Tuesday noon, Aug. 5, 1952, and again on Wednesday, Aug. 6. I gave Mr. Dean a few drops in fresh, warm milk from the cow.”
Self-defense was the motive, she said. Soon after the wedding, she realized Hawkins was “unable to perform his husbandly duties.” His impotence left him so distraught that he threatened to kill himself and his new bride.
“I got him before he got me,” she told investigators.
“When Dean made a will giving his wife a life interest in his estate, he signed his death warrant,” prosecutor Bradford told the jury at Dovie’s trial in December 1952.
A psychiatric panel declared her sane, so her defense attorney tried to play on the jurors’ sympathy. Dr. Robert Buckley, a psychiatry professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, started it off by discussing her most baffling personality trait — her lack of tears.
“She was sad and very melancholy and on the verge of tears several times, but the tears wouldn’t come,” he said. He offered no definitive reason for her emotional state. One newspaper speculated it was because she had no tear ducts.
Her defense team tried to connect her icy demeanor to a mental disorder brought on by a life of hardship. She married young and had six children. In 1938, her husband went to jail for raping one of their daughters. The girl later died in childbirth. A son died in a boiler explosion.
She met Hawkins when she moved from West Virginia to live with her daughter in nearby Batavia, Ohio. Hawkins soon proposed, although Dovie said, for her, romance played no role in this union.
“He needed a housekeeper and I needed a home,” she told reporters.
Four months after their Apr. 13 wedding, he was dead.
The jury was not moved by her life story.
“DOVIE DEAN IS DOOMED BY JURY” was the Dec. 14, 1952, front-page banner headline of the Cincinnati Enquirer.
It took 45 minutes to reach the verdict, with no recommendation of mercy.
Dovie spent the months after her conviction crocheting, working on jigsaw puzzles, singing hymns, and reading the Bible. “Since I came here, I’ve turned it all over to God to let him straighten it out,” she told the Cincinnati Post.
The Ice Queen was the second woman sentenced to die in Ohio’s electric chair. The first — serial killer Anna Marie Hahn, aka “Arsenic Anna”—was, like Dovie, stoic throughout her trial. But at her first sight of the hot seat, Hahn collapsed and started shrieking, “No, no, don’t do that to me.”
Reporters wondered if Dovie would also crack at the last moment.
On Jan. 15, 1954, wearing a blue checked cotton dress made special for her execution, the gray-haired granny entered the death chamber and sat down in the electric chair. She said nothing and looked at no one.
“DOVIE DIES CALMLY, STILL WITHOUT TEARS,” the Cincinnati Post informed its readers on Jan. 16, 1954.