BATS IN YOUR ATTIC, 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 I suspect 33 year old Dolly Oesterreich (pronounced "Ace-strike") (above) 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 to tell the truth.

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, where 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. Now 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 lives. And it worked. Sort of. For awhile. At least for Dolly.

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ORIGINAL SIN Chapter Four

 

“...the concentration of wealth (is) what the Republican party is all about.”

Kevin Phillips. “The Politics of Rich and Poor” 1990

The red BMW convertible raced northbound up the tree lined Lake Drive in the North Port neighborhood of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It powered toward the little park called the Gilman Triangle. 

The red headed driver reeked of beer as he blew through the stop sign at East Bradford Avenue. Homes and apartment buildings flashed past as he drifted over the center of the 2500 block of the narrow residential street.

It was another 3^rd of July evening, this one two years before Angela and Clifford Barnes would be brutally attacked some 900 miles to the east. The drunk behind the wheel was 38 year old Dennis Frankenberry (above) , a “precocious young advertising executive” and founder of the hottest firm in Milwaukee.  

He had just snared the multi-million dollar Miller Brewing Company account for his agency.  He was, as the saying went, “rich, white and over twenty-one”, and a regular donor to the Wisconsin Republican party.   

Dennis may or may not have seen the single headlamp looming in front of him. He must have felt the impact as the motorcycle crumpled against the kidney grill of his car. And he surely saw the two passengers as they were catapulted onto his hood, and then tossed aside to the pavement like crumpled trash.

The damaged BMW did not pause, and Dennis Frankenberry did not inquire as to the condition the victims he left sprawled on the street behind him. 

Twenty-one year old Toby Gargardeski got the worst of it, fracturing his skull. After surgery the next day Toby would be left in a coma, in critical but stable condition. His companion, 20 year old Melcio Montemoyer, also suffered head injuries, but his most serious injury was a badly fractured leg which would require several surgeries and would never fully heal.

The red BMW continued half a mile up Lake Drive before turning onto East Locust Street. When the car started to give out, Dennis pulled onto a side street, where he finally stopped. He burst into the nearest house, telling the startled occupants that he had just been an accident. They noted he reeked of alcohol and had “watery, red eyes”.  Dennis demanded a glass of water, then a phone. When the police arrived, summoned by a witness who had followed his escape, Dennis hid upstairs. The occupants admitted the cops, who took Dennis into custody. He spent Wednesday night in jail, and on Thursday morning, 4 July, 1985, he was released on bail.

On Monday morning, 8 July, 1985, Dennis Frankenberry was asked to appear with his attorney at the district attorney's office at 8:30 am to discuss the accident. He finally showed up at noon. After a short meeting, Dennis was free to leave again. 

This time he left the state, checking into a private hospital in Kansas to be treated for his addictions to cocaine and alcohol. In reporting his extraordinary treatment, 

The Milwaukee Journal would win no Pulitzer Prize for their coverage. They identified Dennis only as “an advertising executive”. The newspaper was a client of his firm, as was the state of Wisconsin.

It would be October before the city got around to charging Dennis Frankenberry, with reckless driving and leaving the scene of an accident. The October trial was quick. Dennis pled guilty as charged.  He was fined $300. 

And he was incarcerated. For 90 days. In fact he only spent his nights in jail. His days were spent in his office, working on anti-drinking and driving public service ads which would count toward his court ordered 250 hours of public service. In other words he was serving his sentences concurrently. Dennis was also furloughed to spend weekends with his wife and children.  The hypocrisy was noted by a few Milwaukee journalist, despite the official blanket thrown over Dennis' transgression. It was true, as one author has pointed out, that “While outside the correctional facility, Frankenberry committed advertising, not kidnapping and rape.” Still his treatment was the exception.

After only 66 days Dennis was “released” for “good behavior”. That left only the court ordered restitution to his victims. In early January of 1987 the lawyers announced that Toby Gargardeski, awake but struggling to read again and having short term memory problems, was awarded $990,000, and Melcio Montemoyer, just beginning to deal with the nerve damage in his leg and foot, was awarded $250,000. According to the courts, justice had been served. The crippled Melcio explained to the few reporters who showed up, “If it had been me, I would have probably gotten a longer sentence...but then we're no big shots.”  Nor were they white.

The public service ads produced by Frankenberry, Laughlin and Constable would win awards,

bringing the agency and Dennis to the attention of some even “bigger shots”, who, despite Dennis' new reputation, invited them to come to Washington to submit ideas based on theme's suggested by Atwater and Ailes.

Frankenberry's team submitted four ads the Bush campaign decided to put into production. There was the “Boston Harbor” spot (above), attacking Dukakis' environmental record, which was far stronger than Bush's.  There was “Tax Blizzard” which threatened a flood of IRS missives pouring into a middle class family home, building on the “tax and spend Democrats” trope. And there was the “Oath of Allegiance” ad which implied that Micheal Dukakis was unpatriotic. But the one that interested Atwater and Ailes the most was Dennis' “Revolving Door” spot.

“The Revolving Door” did not mention William Horton or his crimes. Atwater and Ailes knew such a blatant racist attack (“n---er, n---er, n---er”) would cause a media blow back. But it could serve as cover for such and attack.  As Ailes told Ad Age magazine, “News is who has the hottest attack ads and who can get the highest ratings.”  The odd fact that the man who would help destroy the weekend parole system in American had himself benefited from that same system did not seem to bother any of the participants.

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BATS IN YOUR ATTIC, 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 I suspect 33 year old Dolly Oesterreich (pronounced "Ace-strike") (above) 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 to tell the truth.

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, where 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 -