The 101st anniversary, today, of a variation on the locked room mystery: one in which the prime suspect is locked in a closet (from the outside), and her husband lies dead on the living room carpet. Oh, and her gun-toting lover’s been hiding in their attic for ten years
Yes, this the story of “naughty vamp” Walburga Oesterreich, who called herself Dolly (as well one might), and “had been a Milwaukee housewife, married to a dour, hard-drinking apron manufacturer named Fred Oesterreich”.
She told him one day that her sewing machine didn’t work, so he sent Otto Sanhuber from his factory home to fix it. But since an earlier visit to the factory, ‘Dolly’ had had her eye on this smouldering specimen of masculinity.
To be fair to Dolly, this was back in 1913, long before that photo was taken, when Otto was 17 and she was 33, had been married for 16 years, and didn’t like her husband. Anyway, she apparently greeted Otto at the door dressed in “a silk robe, stockings, heavy perfume and nothing else”.
He took the hint.
At first, apparently, they met in hotels, and then at the Oesterreich’s home, but neighbours “in the epicenter of a moral conservatism that characterized pre-sexual revolution America … grew suspicious”. Either that, or Fred found out. Accounts vary.
Anyway, Dolly hatched a clearly flawless plan. Otto would move into the attic, where he would have a bed and a desk (at which to write science fiction), and Dolly would supply him with “nautical adventure books”, and apparently a regular damn good seeing to.
Wikipedia says he says they had sex up to eight times a day, and links to the L. A. Times to corroborate this — an article which mentions nothing of the kind. Shenanigans there certainly were, though. Until 1918, when Fred opened a factory on the West Coast, requiring a move to LA.
So, away they went, to a new house. With an attic. Into which Otto moved. One source (which may be overdoing things a bit) suggests that Fred still had his suspicions…
But, essentially, things went OK until the Oesterreichs had a massive row on 22 August 1922. It sounded so bad to Otto that he grabbed two pistols and went to defend his lover. Fred recognised Otto, got understandably angrier, and there was a struggle, in which Fred was shot.
Police were suspicious, but couldn’t prove anything. Dolly moved to a new house, which — not entirely surprisingly — had an attic. The attic had a typewriter, because (a) Otto had sold some stories and bought one, and (b) only Dolly would hear it now.
But…
She also started a thing with a businessman, Roy Klumb, and told him she had a gun
that looked just like the one that killed her husband. And she worried that the police might find it and suspect her of murder. Would he get rid of it for her?
Klumb threw the gun into the La Brea Tar Pits. She told the same story to a neighbor, who buried the second gun in his yard.
When she split up with Klumb, he went to the police, who found the gun, and — in July 1923 — arrested Dolly. (Yes, this is all still in the first year after the murder.) It made headlines, of course, so the neighbour took the other gun to the police station
While Dolly was in custody, there was an increasingly isolated and hungry man in her attic, so she
pleaded with Shapiro to buy groceries for Sanhuber and to tap on the ceiling of the bedroom closet to let him know he should come out.
So, it looked like they’d gotten away with it. Or they would have done, if it hadn’t been for that pesky break-up. Because, when Dolly and Herman Shapiro split, seven years later, he went to the police. Dolly was arrested for conspiracy, Otto for murder.
Then there were headlines galore, about the ‘Man Bat’ with the cave-like existence, “sex slave” of an older woman — including the one at the top, which comes with this understated standfirst:
…and a drawing of the house and attic, complete with prone corpse.
Yes, there may be many tellings of this story, but how many come with this cover?
The jury didn’t buy the idea that Otto was enslaved, and convicted him of manslaughter — but the statute of limitations had expired, so he walked free, changed his name, and moved to Canada. Dolly got a hung jury, and charges were eventually dropped in 1936.
The case inspired a short story, which spawned a play, and then a film — a comedy in which no one dies — co-written by Denis Norden, and starring Shirley MacLaine and Richard Attenborough (with Freddie Jones, Willie Rushton, Frank Thornton, Clive Dunn, John Cleese…)
