BATS IN YOUR ATTIC, Love and Other Crimes

 

I can’t say she was beautiful, but then photographs are a poor record of personality. The newspapers called her “comely”, which the dictionary defines as “pleasing and wholesome in appearance.” But Dolly Oesterreich (pronounced "Ace-strike") (above) was, when our story begins, about 33 years old, an age at which a woman, so we are told, reaches the peak of her sensuality. However, I suspect that Dolly had always been skilled at seduction.

For 15 years Dolly had been married to Fred Oesterreich (above), a man whose only selling point as a husband was that he was wealthy. He owned an apron factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was constantly berating his 60 seamstresses to work faster.

He pinched every penny and drove himself as hard as he drove his employees. Of course, he was better paid. As a result of his dedication to his job, the Oesterreiches grew richer. And Dolly grew lonelier. So it should have come as no surprise in 1913, when Dolly asked her husband to dispatch a particular repairman she had seen about his apron factory, to fix her personal sewing machine.

His name was Otto Sanhuber  (above) , and when our story begins, he was all of 17. Again it seems, the photographs do not do him justice, either. To the casual observer he looked like a mousy milk toast of a man. But Dolly must have recognized that, beyond Otto’s nebbish exterior, loomed an undiscovered Hercules of passion.

Dolly (above) answered Otto's knock attired only in a robe and slippers. She showed him to her bedroom, where she kept her Singer. She lounged on the bed while Otto adjusted her bobbin. Dolly brushed back her hair. Otto tightened her belts. Dolly lifted a leg. Otto greased her shuttle shaft. Dolly let her robe fall open. And according to Otto, he threaded her needle eight times that first afternoon.

They began by sneaking assignations in the Oesterrich home while Fred was at work, but a needling neighbor warned Fred about the man who was constantly coming and going from his house. Dolly was forced to hem and haw an excuse. Then the lovers substituted Otto’s depressing rooms, and then a hotel. But every rendezvouses ran the risk of rendering their affair. Eventually, Dolly conceived a simple pattern for their love. Otto quit his job and secretly moved into the attic of the Oesterreich home (above). A curtain was thus drawn and there would be no more comings and goings - none visible to the neighbors, anyway.

The thread of Otto’s life had found his spool. The hook of Dolly’s life had found her eye. For three years they pulled the wool over Fred’s eyes. For three years Otto slept above his mistresses’ marriage bed, slipping out of his hidden attic room by day to help Dolly with her housework, and once the dishes were done, to pump her treadle and spin her crank. There were loose threads, of course, that threatened to unfray the fabric of their lives. But with a little tacking, awl was mended.

Eventually Fred got the notion of moving his factory to Los Angeles, and in 1918 he bought Dolly a grand home on North St. Andrew’s Place (above)  in that city. Dolly made certain the new home had a tidy tiny attic pocket room, so Otto would feel at home too.  And for the next four years, life was a perfect fit for Dolly and Otto. And Fred. As long as Fred never noticed how much it was costing him to feed and clothe one woman.

This happy scene unraveled on the night of Tuesday, 22 August, 1922, when Fred and Dolly returned from a dinner party and a fight broke out. Fred lost his temper and actually struck Dolly. And that was when Otto, listening upstairs, rushed to the rescue from his hidden room,  carrying a .22 pistol. Now why did he have one of those? The two men struggled. Otto’s gun went off three times, and Fred went down. His thread had run out. A few moments later the police arrived to discover an apparent house robbery gone bad. The husband was dead on the living room floor and the hysterical wife was locked in the hall closet. Still, there was something which made the police suspicious. When sweated by the cops, Dolly insisted the couple had never fought. The police, many of them married men,  knew that had to be a lie, but they couldn't prove it.

Dolly was arrested, and charged (above) with the murder of her husband. While she was in lockup Dolly pleated with one of her lawyers, Herman Shapiro, to do her a tiny  favor. Dolly claimed to have an addled half-brother named Otto who lived in her attic, and who must be running short of food by now. Already under Dolly’s beguiling influence, Herman agreed to deliver sustenance to the man.

When he tapped on the hidden attic door, a be-speckeled little face appeared and wolfed down the food, and talked; he talked as if he had no one to speak to for years. He was, in fact, explained Otto, a sewing machine repairman who had come to fix Dolly’s machine years before, in Wisconsin,  and stayed, and moved cross country,  to be her “sex slave”.  Otto said nothing about Fred’s murder, but Herman was no fool. Being a lawyer, neither was he morally bound. He kept his mouth shut.

Without knowledge of Otto, the Police case against Dolly (above, center)  fell apart, and she was released. But Herman Shapiro found he now cottoned to Dolly, and he insisted that before anything romantic happened between them, Otto had to go. 

So, in 1923, Otto moved out of the attic. He went to Canada and established his own life. He even married (above). But, eventually, in search of work,  he moved himself and his new wife back to Los Angeles. In L.A. he got a job as a porter in a hotel. And Otto might have lived there happily ever after with his devoted wife, if only Herman Shapiro had sewn his own big fat mouth shut.

In 1930, eight years after Fred’s death, Herman finally realized the seductress (above) from Milwaukee was never going to marry him, after he discovered she was secretly seducing her business manager, Mr. Ray Bert Hendrick. Maybe the lady just couldn't help herself. A lawyer scorned, Herman went to the police and spilled the beans. He confessed the details of his encounter with the man in the attic. 

The police checked the long since abandoned Oesterreich homes in Wisconsin and Los Angeles and discovered Otto’s hidden abodes, and the veil was stripped from their eyes. Dolly's life quickly unraveled. 

Otto was arrested, and he made a full confession (above) about the night he burst out of his hidden room to confront the violent Fred, and how he shot him dead.. 

And he showed (above) his tiny room where he hid while the police searched the night of the shooting.

And Dolly was arrested again. And charged with murder again. 

Otto was convicted of manslaughter. But, since the statute of limitations for manslaughter was eight years, which had just run out, Otto was released immediately after his conviction. He then faded from history. I wonder if his marriage survived the revelations.  

Dolly’s trial ended in a hung jury, the majority favoring her acquittal. She was never retried, and lived out the rest of her life over a garage, surviving on the meager remains of the fortune that Fred had amassed - which would have infuriated Fred, had he not been dead. In the end I guess Dolly was still needling her poor hardworking and unaware husband.

Dolly did remarry in 1961, at the age of 75 (above, center). Her new husband was her long time business manager, Ray Bert Hendrick (above, left). She died just two weeks later.

It brings to mind the way that Leo Tolstoy began his novel Anna Karenina; “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”.  But this family was oddly particularly happy, because whatever it was that Otto and Fred and Dolly were doing together, it was tailored to fit their very own odd shaped shaped lives. And it worked. Sort of. For awhile. At least for Dolly.

- 30 -

THE MAD HOUSE OF LORD LUCAN

 

The murderer was Richard John (Lucky) Bingham (above), the Seventh Earl of Lucan.  There was never a mystery about that.  He was hard to miss, standing six feet four inches tall, dark and handsome and debonair and an arrogant entitled blue blood. You might think if he had been just an average guy, he might have never felt entitled to commit murder. But lots of average men to it every day.

He was a professional gambler and descended from a long line of royal cads. His great-great-great grandfather, the second Earl, gained infamy during the Irish Potato Famine as the very epitome of a heartless, greedy English landowner, throwing starving Irish peasants out of their homes. 

John’s Great-Great-Grandfather, George Charles Bingham, the third Earl (above), was the cad who ordered the charge of the Light Brigade. The Fifth Earl, George Charles Bingham, sat out the First World War in the House of Lords, but liked to be called “Major” a rank he achieved between the wars when there was no shooting going on. And John’s father had shocked the family by switching his alliance to the Labor Party in the 1930’s.

John chose his profession the way most gamblers do, right after a winning streak: he won twenty-six thousand pounds in two days, while playing backgammon. 

What John did not know was that his gambling local of choice, the Clermont Club (above), was in fact a den of thieves. The club's owner, gangster John Aspinall, described his upper class customers as pigeons...

... and described the Claremont as “…like robbing Fort Knox or the Bank of England - just a lot easier.” Lord Lucan was such a favored pigeon that Aspinall had a bust of him placed on display in the club

In November of 1963 John married the petit and pretty Veronica Duncan.  She gave birth to three children; a daughter, Frances, in October 1964, George (the heir) in 1967, and Camilla, born in June of 1970.

John seems to have always been a control freak, and one nanny would later claim that John beat Veronica with a stick wrapped in masking tape when she suffered from postpartum depression.  Veronica would not admit the abuse until decades later, admitting that John beat her with a cane to get the “mad ideas out of your head. .He could have hit me harder. They were measured blows. He must have got pleasure out of it because he had intercourse (with me) afterwards”.

Lady Lucan's untreated depression became worse after Camilla was born, and required medical assistance for herself,  and a young nanny, Sandra Rivett,   to help her care for the children.

Meanwhile, his Lordship had discovered that not only was the income of a professional gambler prone to ups and downs, it was also prone to its own addictions. By the mid 1970’s, after putting in his time at the backgammon table, John began spending the wee hours of each morning, playing what he had once labeled as the “mugs games” of roulette and craps and even bridge.

He was losing them all, of course. Because he was being  fleeced by his friend, the gangster John Aspinall (above).

The marriage bent under the strain of mounting bills and Veronica’s personal struggles, and the couple separated. John moved into an apartment a few blocks away from their five story London townhouse at 46 Lower Bellgrave Street (above) . (It was just around the corner from Buckingham Palace.) He hired a private detective to spy on his wife and gather information for what he was certain would be an eventual divorce.

Lord Lucan was now suffering from regular headaches, and drinking heavily. He became obsessed with regaining control of his children. Not that he actually wanted anything to do with them, on a daily basis. But when he could no longer afford the Private Investigator,  John turned to stalking Veronica himself.   

In March of 1973, John kidnapped his children and sued to gain legal custody.  But in June the judge sided with Veronica.  He labeled John’s behavior as “lawless” and granted Veronica full custody. All three children moved back into the mansion on Lower Bellgrave.  What with child support, alimony, Veronica’s medical care and the cost of a nanny, the judge’s decision left John in debt for forty thousand pounds. So John began to make other plans.

By 9:30 P.M. on the night of Friday 8 November 1974 the two younger children had been put to bed. Frances was watching television with her mother in the family room on the second floor when, just before ten, the new nanny, Sandra Rivett, (above) poked her head in the door and asked if there was anything else she could do before going home. On a whim Veronica suggested a cup of tea, and Sandra went down to the basement kitchen to put the kettle on. Thirty minutes later, when Sandra had not returned, Veronica went downstairs to see what had become of her. When she reached the darkened main floor she was attacked by a man wielding a bent pipe.

He struck her several times in the head. Veronica tried to cry out, but the man ordered her to “shut up”, and roughly shoved two gloved fingers down her throat. Veronica instantly recognized the voice as John’s. She fought back, bit his fingers, grabbed John by his testicles and squeezed as hard as she could. He released his grip and the two collapsed on the floor in heap. 

Gathering her courage and her voice, Veronica asked where Sandra was. John admitted he had just murdered the nanny.  In the dark of the basement he said, he had mistaken her for his wife (they were both 5’2” tall and slightly built). Thinking quickly Veronica assured John that Sandra would not be missed, and that in order to avoid a scandal she would help him dispose of the body. John led her to the second floor where they both told their daughter Francis to go upstairs to her own bedroom. In the master bedroom Veronica lay on the bed while John went in to the bathroom to wet a washcloth. And the second Veronica heard the water running she leapt off the bed, ran down the stairs and out of the house.

She stumbled down the street to the Plumber’s Arms Pub (above). In her nightdress and covered in blood, she made quite an impression. She gasped hoarsely to the startled patrons, “Murder, murder, I think my neck has been broken - he tried to kill me”  Back at the house, when John realized that Veronica had escaped, he ran for it. They found poor Sandra stuffed in a bloody sack near the basement door. She had been horribly bludgeoned to death.

John’s apartment was empty. The police would discover he driven forty miles to a friend’s farmhouse, and told them he had been passing the home on Lower Bellgrave when he saw an attacker through a basement window.  He said he had rushed in,  only to be knocked down by the attacker. Then he claimed, realizing he would be blamed for the murder he had run away.  He called his mother twice. The second time she asked if John wanted to speak to the police officer who was with her. John hung up. And then, after his friends went back to sleep, Lord Lucan disappeared.

Three days after the attack they found his car parked on a public street (above) near the docks in Newhaven. In the car was his passport and a note to a friend,  asking him to look after his children. In the trunk was a bloody length of pipe, bent by the beating administered to the innocent Sandra Rivett and then Veronica.

For decades the police continued to search for Lord Lucan, with dogs, and divers and detectives. An entire industry sprang up,  seeking the most famous missing royal murderer in recent history.  John was reported living happily in Australia, South Africa, and even India. 

But oddly enough none of this string of "Could-Be Johns" has displayed a gambling addiction, or an affinity to act like a snob.  In 1984 Scotland Yard tried to reopen the case but it ran into another series of dead ends. Eventually they gave up. 

The last suspected "John" was a man living in a van in New Zealand with a pet possum, a cat and a goat. But like all the others, he turned out to be somebody else.

Veronica Lucan, (http://www.ladylucan.co.uk/) never remarried,  and always insisted that John threw himself into the Thames estuary (the Solent), probably on 9 or 10 November.  And to tell you the truth, I agree with her.  Over time her mental illness slowly took control of her mind, and by the time she died at 80 years of age,  in October of 2017, she was estranged from her children, and died alone in her Belgrave apartment.

Still it makes a much more interesting story if Lord Lucan managed to escape to someplace, Tahiti maybe, or perhaps Ceylon. But like the famous missing Judge Crater in the United States, Lord Lucan will likely remain not dead, but missing, forever.  Because that’s the way most of us prefer our  harsh reality; with a softening dose of myth.

- 30 -

THE SILVER LINING OF CAPITALISM

 

I have noticed that in all things, drama attracts drama. Forty miles east of Coeur de'Alene, Idaho, there is proof of this. Through fissures opened by dramatic continental collisions over a billion years ago, water percolated up through sedimentary rocks. And where it pooled and cooled it left behind veins of silver, lead, and zinc. 

Then 190 million years ago this shattered wreckage was struck again, theatrically folding forested ridges upward until they broke, then shoving the amputated segments atop their own abandoned limbs, stacking the veins haphazardly through the new mountains. Fifty million years ago erosion found the weak points in the fault lines, opening the land to the human drama of ambition and greed.

Burke Canyon Creek (above), like a hundred other streams in the panhandle of Idaho, divides two of these ridges. To the southeast the 6,000 foot high twin Grouse Peaks are separate by a mile from the 6,000 foot high Tiger Peak to the northwest. Between them, at just 2,500 feet above sea level, snakes the 300 foot wide “Silver Valley”.  

Burke Canyon is so narrow, in the winter the bottom receives only two hours of sunlight. Shopkeepers had to close their awnings when the narrow gauge trains carried  the ore out of the mines and down the center of the canyon. The dead had to be carried out the same way, since there was no space to bury them in the canyon.

 But by 1891, the 11 mile long, constricted, twisting valley was dotted with one-street towns and the 100 mines they served; The Bunker Hill, The Burke, The Star-Morning, The Standard-Mammoth, the Hercules, The Gem, The Poorman Tigar, The Union, The Sunshine, the Frisco, The Tamarack.and The Hecla were just the biggest of the mines.

In less than a hundred years humans would extract from this dramatic landscape $5.5 billion worth of metal, including 37,00 metric tons of silver – half of all silver mined in the United States - 8 million tons of lead, and 3 million tons of zinc These were no paper profits. This was production,  rare metals pried from the earth. But the handful of owners who risked their capital to exploit this bonanza, and the 3,500 hard-rock miners who risked their lives a mile and more beneath this canyon for $3.50 a day, were all digging their own graves.  And maybe ours.

In the fall of 1891 the railroads which transported the ore once it was out of Burke Canyon, announced they were raising their rates $2 a ton. The Mine Owners Association, which effectively owned the canyon, responded by shutting down production. Three thousand miners were laid off, and untold store clerks, cooks, maids and laundresses lost their incomes as well. The standoff continued until the following April of 1892, when a compromise was reached and the mines announced they would reopen. But because of increased overhead the mines would rehire only 2,000 men, would add six hours to an already six day workweek, and for the 500 hundred unskilled miners, there would be a pay cut of fifty cents a day.

The workers at each mine formed unions, and were unified in their demand - $3.50 a day for all workers, skilled and unskilled. The Owners Association refused, and in June began advertising for replacement workers. Soon, every train which arrived in Wallace, Idaho, at the foot of the canyon, carried miners (“scabs”) from Michigan and Wisconsin. Union miners took to greeting the new arrivals with fists and clubs. The Owners hired Pinkerton “guards” to protect the replacement workers. Tensions increased, threats increased, violence increased. Two of the mines reopened with union miners, and two, the Gem and the Frisco, reopened with non-union miners.

When the sun rose over the narrow canyon on Monday, 11 July, 1892, the hills overlooking the Gem were covered with armed union men. At first light, the shooting began. After several hours of unproductive gunfire, the miners switched to more familiar weapons. A black powder bomb exploded a building (above) housing one of the stamps which broke up the ore before shipment. After a little more shooting the company men surrendered. The human cost was three dead. 

The union men marched their prisoners across the narrow street to saloons in the town of Gem, while company men still on mine property began sniping at them. Women and children ran for their lives, fleeing either up or down the canyon. Fifty more company men arrived and surrounded the saloons where their men were held. Three more men were killed, this time union men, and eventually, the union men surrendered in their turn.

Meanwhile, shooting had also begun at the Frisco mine, and three more company men had been killed. Yet another surrender prevented further loss of life. The sheriff and Federal Marshals escorted these company men down the canyon to Wallace. Pro-union forces now occupied both mines and had captured 2,000 rounds of ammunition, to boot. All of this had isolated the largest mine further up the canyon, the Bunker Hill, in tiny Burke, Idaho.

On day two of the “Burke Canyon War”, Federal troops arrived in Cataldo, twenty miles to the west, but the union men threatened to blow up the mines if they moved any closer. That left the company men in the closed Bunker Hill Mine cut off from support, heavily outnumbered and out gunned. The company men walked out without putting up any further fight.  All non-union mines in the Silver Valley were now shut down. It was only a matter of time before all would be forced to sign union contracts. It looked like the Union had won. And then somebody did something really dramatic, and really stupid.

It happened in Cataldo, where the narrow gauge railroad met the head of navigation for the Cour d'Alene River. There had once been a Mission nearby, and as daylight began to fade that Tuesday evening, 130 company men from the Gem and Frisco mines were gathered on the dock, waiting for a boat to allow them to escape this insanity. They had already been shot at and some had even been blasted. Then, out of the shadows, men now appeared on horseback and started shooting into the unarmed crowd. Panicked men began running in every direction, some even jumping into the lake. It does not appear that anyone was actually killed in this shadowed fusillade, but it was claimed that 17 were wounded. It was labeled “The Mission Massacre”, and most public sympathy for the union cause died right there.

On Wednesday, 13 July, 1891, Idaho Governor Wiley placed the entire county under martial law. A thousand state militia appeared, followed by a small but vocal pro-owner army of reporters. Before the week was out 400 union men were under arrest. So backed up had the courts become, that it would be a year before some of prisoners would have their chance to defend themselves. Very few would be found innocent. Many served years in prison. All union men were forced out of the mines, and the Owners Association reigned triumphant. The Wallace Free Press summed up what was lost, when it noted, “Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, is an old proverb, and labor is not trained in that school.”

Eight years later they all did it again. This time the Bunker Hill mine was blown up. But again the owners won. Six years later the two sides went at it again,  and then Governor Frank Steunenburg  called out National Guard. This time,  he boasted, “We have taken the monster by the throat, and we are going to choke the life out of it.” Union men responded by blowing up the governor. It took the skills of lawyer Clarence Darrow to keep the union man convicted of the Governor's murder, out of the electric chair . But the tit for tat never really ended, which helped ensure that by 1920 the 5,000 non-union miners in Silver Valley were the highest paid workers in the state.  They had to be, to get them to stay. 

But almost unnoticed at first, the real cost of all this drama began to surface. Around 1900 farmers downstream began complaining that the spring floods on the Coeur d'Alene River had poisoned their fields and killed their livestock. By the 1930's the south fork of the Coeur d'Alene river had become a dead zone. People drinking from the river became sick, even losing their hair. The farmers sued the mine owners, but the courts, already used to crush the union, now crushed the farmers. Still, there was so much lead in the Burke Canyon Creek, the miners began calling it “Lead Creek”. After the World Wars the price of silver began to fall. The mines began to close. And as they did, their political power began to wane.

In May of 1972,  91 miners died in a fire in the Sunshine Mine. And this time the disaster brought in the new Environmental Protection Agency. And what the EPA scientists found, scared them. They could find no fish in  Burke Canyon Creek.  By measurement, the water carried 550 pounds of zinc every day into the Coeur d'Alene River – so much that when the stream pooled, the water was yellow.  Twenty miles of streams in surrounding areas could support no fish, and 10 miles of tributaries of the Coeur d”Alene River had “virtually no life” in them. In those waters outside of Silver Canyon, lead and zinc levels were fifty times the federal safe water quality standard. How had it spread so far outside the canyon?  

Every day each mine had been dumping between 40 and 60 tons of lead into the air. Rain settled this poison into the  Coeur d'Alene river, and had contaminated Lake Coeur d'Alene, which had contaminated 160 miles of the Spokane River, which flowed out of the lake. Water fowl were dying each year in thousands, 21 bird species were at risk of local extinction. And human children living in the valley had the highest levels of lead in their blood ever seen - in the world.

The result was the 21 square mile Bunker Hill Superfund Site. When this cleanup is finally finished (if ever), it could cost taxpayers $1.4 billion – or just about 20% of the value of the ore removed from the “silver canyon” over the previous century, to enrich a few mine owners. In 1996, after twenty years of cleanup effort, EPA scientists put healthy trout in water from the Burke Canyon Creek. All were dead in four hours. Today, if you take a drive up Silver Canyon, you will pass the abandoned mine buildings, surrounded by chain link fences. Those fences were erected by the EPA, to protect curious tourists from dying of curiosity.

- 30 -