Almost Like a Tigress: The Story of Annie Hunning

About 8:00 o’clock Saturday evening, December 9, 1911, thirty-six-year-old Martin Hunning, a farmer living in an isolated area south of Murphy in Jefferson County, Missouri, arose from the kitchen table and went to the telephone to call a neighbor. The phone, which had just been installed, was situated near a window, and as Hunning was waiting for the central switchboard to connect him to his neighbor, somebody fired a shotgun through the window. The blast tore half of Hunning’s head off, and he fell instantly dead. Hunning’s thirty-five-year-old wife, Annie, rushed to the door of the cabin and heard a man’s voice say, “We’ve got to beat it. They’ve got a telephone.”

From that statement, Annie deduced that there must have been two men involved in the murder, but it was too dark for her to see. Turning back in fright, she stepped over her husband’s dead body to telephone for help and then “dropped in a swoon.”

At any rate, that was what she told neighbors who answered her call, and none of them questioned her version of events. At least not at first. Volunteers patrolled the roads around the Hunning home until daylight on Sunday, when a search party was organized. The first sign that Annie might not be telling the truth came when the search party found the tracks of only one person around the window through which Hunning was shot. Bloodhounds were brought in, but they lost the scent of the suspect when the searchers came to the edge of a cliff. 

On December 12, Hunning’s funeral was held at a nearby church, and the dead man’s widow and his elderly mother were “the chief mourners.”

One theory of the crime was that an ex-convict who held a grudge against Hunning had killed him for having helped send the man to prison, but Jefferson County prosecuting attorney Albert Miller placed little stock in that idea. He was, instead, developing his own theory.

On December 14, four and a half days after the murder, twenty-eight-year-old Joseph Seidl, a neighbor of the Hunnings, was arrested on suspicion, as a result of Miller's investigation of “neighborhood gossip” about an "eternal triangle" involving Seidl and  the Hunnings that had been spreading since the morning after the murder.

Seidl was arrested for questioning but released after several hours. Asked about the rumors involving her and Seidl, Annie denied that there had been any "domestic infelicity" in her household, and she said she knew Seidl had not killed her husband. 

Despite Seidl’s release, Prosecutor Miller remained dogged in his determination to ferret out the facts behind the murder. On December 18, he announced that he had ordered the exhumation of Hunning’s body for the purpose of convening a new coroner’s inquest. He summoned several neighbors of the Hunnings to the December 19 inquest, and they testified that Annie's reputation for morality was not good and that she was known to have a close relationship with Joseph Seidl. Annie's own father testified as to an angry confrontation he had witnessed between his son-in-law and Seidl the previous summer. At the end of the inquest, both Annie Hunning and Joseph Seidl were arrested and taken to the Jefferson County Jail at Hillsboro.

On Sunday morning, December 24, Seidl finally broke down, after an all-night interrogation, and confessed to an amorous relationship with Annie. He put the blame for the illicit  affair squarely on Annie, saying, "She  tempted me, and I yielded." Seidl still maintained, however, that he had not killed Annie's husband.

Annie was also grilled at length, but she refused to break. Afterwards, the officer who questioned her marveled at her strong will and said that she had eyed him defiantly, "almost like a tigress." 

A joint preliminary hearing was held for Seidl and Annie Hunning on December 29, and the justice ruled that they should be held to await the action of a grand jury. The next day, Miller announced that he had enough evidence to file first-degree murder charges against the pair without waiting for a grand jury. 

Miller filed the charges in early January 1912, and the trial was set for March. Part of the evidence Miller had in his possession were some love letters Seidl and Annie  had exchanged since their incarceration that a trusty had turned over to the prosecutor. Confronted with this new evidence, Annie finally admitted that she had foreknowledge of her husband's murder, but she downplayed her own complicity in the crime. 

When Seidl was told of Annie's story, he begged to differ. He signed a statement that Annie was in on the crime from the beginning and had set the stage for it by placing her sewing machine near the window with a lighted lamp on it, which he used to guide his aim for the murderous shotgun blast.  

A couple of days after giving their confessions, Mrs. Hunning and Seidl repudiated them, saying they had only done so under duress and that they thought they were only admitting to their romantic involvement, not to the murder. However, Seidl’s confession, which was published in full in St. Louis newspapers, was very damning in its detail, as were the confiscated love notes.

Annie's and Seidl’s cases were severed, and his trial began first, in late March at Hillsboro. His confession was admitted as evidence over strenuous objections from the defense. The jury returned a guilty verdict on April 3 with a sentence recommendation of life in prison. 

Annie's trial began immediately after Seidl's concluded, with Seidl serving as the state's star witness. He told how Annie had promised they would get married and that she had over a $1,000 she would give him if her husband were out of the way. He admitted on cross examination that she'd never specifically asked him to kill Martin Hunning, but she knew about the plan all along.

Annie testified in her own defense, repeating the story she'd told from the beginning of hearing a voice outside her window. She admitted being "unduly friendly" with Seidl, but she claimed not to know that he was the one who killed her husband. 

Annie's first trial ended in a mistrial after the jury deadlocked, but at her second trial in mid-May, the jury returned a verdict of guilty and fixed her punishment at life imprisonment.

In late May, Annie and her lover were transferred together to the state prison at Jeff City. Annie was paroled in December 1919 after serving only seven and half years of her scheduled life sentence, and she was restored to citizenship in February 1921. Seidl remained in prison, but he, too, was discharged under parole in 1922.

The story above is a condensed version of a chapter in my latest book, Gangster Queen Bonnie Parker and Other Murderous Women of Missouri https://amzn.to/3OA5fbX.