From Attic Lovers to Legal Battles: The Intriguing Saga of Dolly and Otto

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Welcome to the Eastern Crime Zone, the podcast that takes you inside and back to the world. I'm your host, Cassie Malay, and each week I'll guide you through the twists and turns of some of the most fascinating cases in history, from the familiar to the obscure. We'll deep dive into the details and explore new angles you've never considered before. But I don't want this to be a one-sided conversation. I want to hear from you too. If there's a case that's been on your mind, head over to EasternCrimeZone.com to leave me a voicemail, or sign in to my DMs on Instagram at @EasternCrimeZone. Who knows, your suggestion just might be featured on an upcoming episode. So sit back, grab your detective hat and get ready for a journey through the criminal underworld. This is the Eastern Crime Zone. Our story starts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1913, and revolves around Dolly Osterich, originally named Walburga Korshel, born in 1880. Not much is known about her early life, but later Dolly would marry Fred Osterich and become his housewife. Fred Osterich was a very successful apron maker and he owned a factory. They shared German roots, a fondness for strong beer and hardy German cuisine. Of course, both had blonde hair, a full-figured build, and Dolly was 36 and Fred was 40. This is where their similarities stop. Their personalities were very, very different. Fred was often seen as unpleasant and had a sour disposition, and he had a penchant for over-indulging and alcohol. Dolly, on the other hand, possessed an unquenchable sexual desire which Fred failed to satisfy. Fred was always coming home late, always busy or, frankly, too drunk to get it up. Her loud and aggressive complaints started a lot of arguments which led to neighbors calling the police, all because he could not satisfy Dolly in the bedroom. From the beginning of the marriage, dolly was rumored to have invited many lovers into their home during the day while Fred was working. Dolly soon found herself attracted to one of Fred's employees at the factory, a very young employee, probably about half her age. Actually, Otto Sandheuer was a meek, very shy, small and modestly built adolescent. Otto himself had no idea how old he actually was. He estimated his age to be between 16 and 17 years old. There are conflicting stories about his origins. Later, at a testimony at his trial, it would be stated he was born as Otto Ware and adopted into the Sandheuer family. Regarding the actual paper trail, the 1900, federal and 1905 Wisconsin Census lists him as the Wisconsin-born son of George Sandheuer. The 1910 Federal Census lists him as born in Germany and the 1917 World War I draft card lists his birthplace as New York, new York, and later a marriage certificate would state he was born in New York to Jacob M Klein and Mary H Ware. This is probably the closest to the truth, since his birth certificate shows he was absolutely born in Manhattan as Otto Ware. One hot autumn day in 1913, dolly asked Fred to send one of the factory's repairmen to the house to fix her showing machine. When the approximately 17-year-old Otto knocked on the Osterich's ordinate double-entry door, dolly then 33, answered wearing stockings, a silk robe and nothing else, naturally. Sure enough, dolly put Otto to work, but not on the sewing machine, if you pick up what I mean. From this point forward, otto became a regular guest at Fred and Dolly's home, even if Fred wasn't aware. Now, the reason they met up at Dolly and Fred's home rather than somewhere else was that it was the most convenient spot. They did occasionally go to hotels or to Otto's boarding house, but both weren't the best option. The boarding house wasn't very comfortable and not very private, especially for a married woman, and hotels were rather expensive for Dolly, who did not have her own money and had to ask her husband for money and explain where it was going. And Otto didn't make very much working at the Abram factory, just enough to sustain his life. But after a while of meeting up at Dolly and Fred's home it was becoming very clear this couldn't keep happening. Neighbors were starting to talk and one neighbor actually told Fred what his wife was up to when he was at work. And obviously Fred confronted Dolly and in response she said everything was a lie and he must have believed her. So Fred let it go, at least for now. And Dolly needed to come up with a solution of what to do so that she could keep seeing Otto. It wasn't a question to her whether she was going to or not, she absolutely was. She felt like he was a necessity in her life at this point. So Dolly came up with the completely reasonable solution to move her lover into her home's attic. A compact hideaway was located in the attic, conveniently situated right above the master bedroom. It could only be entered via a small trap door in the ceiling. Dolly decorated it with a cot, a table, a chair and a few other household items and she told Otto to just quit his job at the Abram factory. And for some reason he actually agreed and one day, when Fred was safely out of the way, she installed her lover in his new apartment right above her marital bed. Now don't get me wrong. Otto did not mind. He had no family to speak of and, as the LA Times reported in 1930, he said he grew to love Dolly as a boy loves his mother. Years later he added, dolly was the first person in his life to give him love and affection, which is sad, but the mother comment is deeply creepy. When Fred was away, otto would come down and attend to the housework. He took great pride in his talent for washing floors, preparing food and doing laundry and of course he took care of Dolly's sexual needs as well. Dolly brought Otto books from the library in return to help him buy his time, which oddly led to a writing career. Otto began penning articles and stories, several of which Dolly had published for him under a pen name in pulp magazines. Now, if you don't know, pulp fiction magazines were the descendants of the 19th century Penny Dreadful For 10 cents. Readers could satisfy their curiosities with tales of sex, murder, addiction and madness. Pulps like Argosy were famous for cover art featuring half-dressed damsels in distress awaiting a rescue hero, maybe. When Dolly answered her front door in her flimsy silk robe, otto saw an opportunity to live his art in real life. Dolly put a padlock on the door to the attic and carried the key herself, so that Fred would not be able to just slip up there when she wasn't looking. Her husband asked about the padlock once, and she replied I want to keep my furs in a safe place, and I guess Fred bought that too. There was one distinct advantage to this arrangement. Well, there were probably several, but this one was a big one. Otto was now living directly above his lover and her husband, their bedroom to be exact. He needed to be extra careful when he moved around unless he wanted to be accidentally discovered by Fred. The position of the attic meant that Otto could also hear the sounds of the woman he adored making love with her husband. After one night of marital passion, jealous Otto confronted Dolly. She reminded him that she couldn't leave her husband. She had no skills and no funds of her own, so she had to stay married, and that meant that she would occasionally have to have sex with Fred. From what it sounds like Dolly didn't really enjoy having sex with Fred anyway, so maybe she brought this up to Otto and Otto did eventually agree he would not harass her about her marital lovemaking. Fred, on the other hand, feared he was losing his sanity. He'd occasionally hear strange noises coming from the direction of the ceiling. Food he could swear he had just seen a short time before would suddenly be gone and his cigars began disappearing. One evening Fred was in his garden and happened to look up right at the window in his attic. Dolly had repeatedly warned Otto not to go near that window, but he had disobeyed this just this once, and the two men may have looked directly at each other for a split second before Otto pulled back. Dolly was able to somehow convince Fred that he needed to go to the doctor because he was imagining things. Fred agreed and told his wife that he would see a physician about his curious symptoms. The physician advised Fred to take it easy and wrote out a prescription for a tranquilizer. In 1910, writer and lever Otto had lived in the Ostrich attic for about three years. At this point the couple had decided to move and went to check houses. Dolly would only agree to a home with an attic. She may have told Fred that she wanted a secure place for her beloved furs. In a new residence, otto was not directly above the Ostrich's bedroom so he did not have to overhear the couple in their most intimate moments. Fred also did not hear Otto clearing his throat or coughing, but obviously the Austro-Aque marriage continued to deteriorate. Fred was drinking all the time and he was silent and depressed or loud and argumentative. At this point in the timeline they have been together seven years, with Otto living in the attic. At approximately age 24, otto was sexually vigorous and he and Dolly were deeply in love. He was also enjoying some success as a writer, pending stories that appeared in various pulps that earned him and Dolly a few extra dollars. The years passed, with Fred becoming ever more of a grouch and his wife finding regular solace in her loving attic man. One late evening in 1918, a confrontation occurred. The Austraics were out at a party. Fred and Dolly got into an argument as usual, and Fred went home in a huff, leaving his wife behind. The aging factory owner strolled into his kitchen to find a short, slim, very pale and probably vitamin D deficient 32-year-old man seated at a table enjoying a nice leg of lamb, little suspecting that he was dealing with an occupant of his own home who had been living there most of his life. Fred Austraic tossed the much smaller man onto the street and when Dolly came home from that party, her husband related the strange story of a man eating in their kitchen. And Fred had definitely not been imagining things. After all, otto had spent an uncomfortable night sleeping out in the open. After his unceremonious expulsion, otto met up with Dolly and they talked A lot and Dolly advised Otto to move to Los Angeles and she would try to join him at a later time. He would do this with his money from writing those pulp fiction magazines. Is this the end of their affair? Of course not. He agreed and moved to LA. The two communicated through the post office box that had already been set up for sending and receiving Otto's literary efforts, and Otto got a job as a porter in an apartment complex. He didn't really care for Los Angeles After spending so many years of his life in an attic, coming out only when Fred was gone or at night, after he had gone to bed, the sunshine struck him with an unpleasant harshness. In the meantime, dolly was working on her husband, telling him that they should move to LA. He was eventually convinced. I get the idea that Dolly was a very convincing sort of woman. She's able to stalk all these men into doing whatever she wants, so I'm wondering what her trick is and if she maybe wrote it down for me somewhere. The couple stayed in LA at a hotel while they looked for a house to buy. It wasn't really easy for the couple to find one that was acceptable to Dolly, because few California homes at this time had attics. While the Austraics looked for a home, dolly and Otto would meet up in various cheap hotels for hookups. Eventually, dolly found a large nice home with an attic on North Street, andrews Place, in an affluent area. Of course, otto moved into the attic. Later, he would say he was willing to live cooped up in the attic in order to be near the only person in the entire world who cared whether he lived or died. He resumed his life of making love to Dolly and doing the housework during the day and since it was prohibition, the couple also made bathtub gin. At nights he continued to read and write short stories that she would type up and send off to publishers. On August 22, 1922, their arrangement went south Fast. That evening Dolly and Fred got into another heated argument. During this argument Otto heard a thump and of course he heard most of the argument. And when he heard this thump he assumed that Fred was getting physical with Dolly. And this scared Otto to death and he wanted to help the woman he loved. So he grabbed two 25 caliber handguns and rushed down the stairs. Now that is Otto's version of events. Let's be clear that Fred Osterreich has never been able to tell his version of the next events, so take everything I say with just a little bit of salt. According to the stories told by both Dolly and Otto, fred recognized Otto as the culprit he had found in his home before leisurely helping himself to that generous leg of lamb. According to a rage, fred tackled Otto, grabbing for the guns, then putting his hands around Otto's neck. One hour both of the guns went off and Otto pulled the trigger again and again, shooting Fred a total of three times. Otto believed they could make it appear that burglars had intruded into the family home and murdered Fred. For once he gave the orders and Dolly complied. Dolly and Otto then staged the scene to look like a robbery gone wrong, with Otto locking Dolly in a closet before once again hiding himself away in the attic. Police arrived on site shortly thereafter, thanks to a call from the neighbors who heard the gunshots, figuring there was no way Dolly could have locked herself into that closet, the detectives bought her story hook line and sinker. Dolly inherited Fred's substantial assets and subsequently moved to a new house yes, this one also had an attic. And yes, otto once again came along. Despite the fact that Fred was now out of the picture and Otto had no reason to hide anymore, he continued to live in Dolly's attic and the two continued on exactly as before. The loss of Fred apparently left a hole in Dolly's life, however, and she started seeing two other men her estate attorney, herman Shapiro, who is important, and a businessman named Roy H Clem. At this time, things began to go awry. For reasons unknown, dolly gifted Herman with Fred's diamond watch, which was supposed to have been stolen during the robbery she and Otto had set up. Herman recognized it immediately, but Dolly explained the situation away, stating that she found the watch underneath a seat cushion after the crime had taken place. Around that time, she asked Roy to discard one of her rifles, saying it looked like the weapon that killed Fred, and she didn't want police to come across it and suspect her of the murder. Roy, who was obviously a few eggs short of a dozen, obliged to request and toss the gun into the La Brea Tarpits. Dolly then asked a neighbor, who was obviously also missing a few eggs, to get rid of the second rifle, and he obliged as well, burying it in his backyard. Roy didn't take it lightly when Dolly later broke up with him and went straight to the police to tell them about the gun he had disposed of. Detectives wound up uncovering it on July 12, 1923, almost a year after the murder, and Dolly was arrested. When her neighbor read about the arrest and the other rifle's recovery in the newspaper, he too dug up the gun that he had buried and marched straight down to the station. Though neither weapon produced much evidence due to deterioration, things only got worse for Dolly from here. While she was in jail, she asked Herman, who she was still seeing, to bring food to Otto, who remained scrolled away in the attic. Herman was not thrilled about meeting Otto and learning of his exploits with Dolly, and demanded that Otto leave the attic-dweller, headed to Canada after this, and, amazingly, the charges against Dolly were soon dropped. The story obviously doesn't end there, though. When Dolly and Herman broke up in 1930, he shredded. When Dolly and Herman broke up in 1930, he too headed straight to the police to spill the beans, just as Roy had done seven years prior. Dolly was arrested yet again, this time for conspiracy. Otto, who had returned to LA by then, was also arrested for Fred's murder. The arrest and subsequent trial became a media circus, with the press dubbing Otto the Batman and the Batman of Los Angeles due to his many years of attic dwelling. Otto's testimony is recorded and Otto described an average day for him in the Los Angeles Austro-Icouse in the years preceding the killing. He said, quote I made up the beds and changed the linen about two times a week. They loved to sleep clean and I made up the beds for them and put away their clothes and dusted Fred's clothes because he had some beautiful things and I would keep them in order for him and dust them and dust his shoes, you know. So he would look neat always and then I would wash the dishes if he wasn't home and if he was he would wash them. Mrs Austro-Ic would dry them because I couldn't then, and I would get the vegetables clean and they were clean. Everybody praised her how clean her things were and scrubbed the floors and kept it clean and kept the floor neat. You know she loved to have a beautiful floor and dusted it. You know, end quote. The edible nature of this relationship was underlined when Otto spoke of the way he occasionally tried to manipulate Dolly, not having anything else at his disposal. I mean, he had no life outside of her, he had no money to use as a bargaining chip, he had really nothing over her. So he would use refusing to eat as a weapon, much like a child would during a dispute with their parent. He said quote it was sort of a defense. I had no other weapon. I did it deliberately. I would go in my attic and I would stay there and I would not come out, except just when needed and I would fast. I wouldn't eat anything, that is all, and I had peace. Maybe it was foolish of me, but I did not. That was my best way of doing it. And she would begin to feel sorry for me, I think, and talk softly to me and bring me food. Set it there. Well now, like in that house, at that little door, you know, end quote. Though the jury did wind up finding Otto guilty of manslaughter because of the seven-year statute of limitation had run out. By the time of the verdict he faced no jail time and walked away absolutely as a free man After spending the better part of a decade living in the attic, though something tells me he really wouldn't have minded jail. He would have gotten more sun anyway. Dali's jury was miraculously hung and she too walked away with her freedom intact. Otto changed his name to Walter Klein after this and got married to a woman named Matilda. Not much else is known about his life after the trial and I'm assuming the Batman would like it that way. He passed away on March 22, 1948, at age 60 in Hollywood, california. As for Dali, her life was still very dramatic. After the trial. She sued a lot of people. Some would say she developed a taste for litigation. She sued a jeweler in 1931 for about $3,500. For jewelry, she said she gave him for safekeeping in 1928. She was also sued by several people for misrepresenting real estate that she had leased to them and she lost both of those cases. And apparently she wasn't finished with her former attorney and ex who had turned her in Herman Shapiro. She must out a grudge against that one because in 1932, she won a case against Herman for $90,000 in real estate. In 1935, herman reported to police that he had been receiving death threats and threats of bodily harm and attributed them to Dali. He had just won a lawsuit against her for $140. He showed the investigators where he had broken ribs from a scuffle with Dali's business manager, Ray Hedrick. Dali and Ray were called into the investigators' office and given a slap on the wrist and told to leave Herman alone. Dali then found love with Ray, who she dated for over 30 years before marrying him in 1961. They only married at this point in their relationship because Dali was sick and, as her husband, ray would be able to make medical decisions for her. And less than two weeks later she passed away on April 8th, 1961, at age 80 in Hollywood, even though at their wedding she would try to claim she was in her 60s. And then Ray inherited millions in real estate. And that is all I have for you as far as this case goes. But the story did inspire a feature film called the Bliss of Miss Blossom and a made for TV movie starring Neil Patrick Harris called the man in the Attic. Even though that is the end of today's case and today's episode, that is not the end of me and you. We can do this again in just a few days, when I put out my next episode about the giggling nanny Doss, who is a serial poisoner, and trust me, you don't wanna miss this one. It's fascinating. But seriously, if you ever find yourself in a situation where you think there's someone living in your attic and your wife keeps telling you you know you might wanna check that out. And remember my favorite phrase question everything.