Episode 102: Devil in the Details

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In January of 2018, the Bush family were pulled from sleep at 4 a.m.

by a loud noise inside their Utah home.

They did the same thing any of us would do.

They climbed out of bed and nervously explored their house for signs of an intruder.

Nothing, though, was out of place or disturbed.

Later that morning, though, they discovered where the noise had come from.

A sinkhole had opened in their garage floor.

But while that might be shocking enough, it wasn't the most unusual part of their experience.

No, it's what they found in the newly opened cavity that was truly frightening.

In the space that had existed below their garage, they discovered shelves, clothing, a woman's handbag, even a small collection of children's toys.

Together, it all hinted at a disturbing truth.

For as long as they'd lived there, there was a room beneath their home that had once been used by people on a regular basis.

Some people think it was an old section of the basement that had been walled off during a remodel in the 1970s, while others believe it might have been a bomb shelter.

Whatever it was, the Bush family had never been aware of its existence.

I think it's fair to say that most of us live very busy lives.

We spend our days bouncing between responsibilities and commitments, and in the process, we sometimes miss key details.

Maybe they're not as significant as a basement bomb shelter, but lots of things slip past us during our crazy lives, and that can be dangerous.

Some details might hint at forces beyond our control, or dangers lurking in the shadows.

In a world full of the unusual, the unexpected, and the unexplainable, minding the details is an essential part of the human existence.

When we don't, we put ourselves at risk.

Because sometimes the things we miss are the very things that haunt us the most.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this

is Lore.

We don't know a whole lot about her early years.

Walberga was born to immigrant parents in Chicago in 1880, just nine years after the Great Fire burned much of the city to the ground.

We know that her father left when she was just eight years old, and we know that four years later, she and her sister Magdalene had to take jobs to help support their family.

Walberga met Fred when she was just 14 and he was 17.

He worked as a salesman in his father's shoe store and she as a laborer in a factory that manufactured baby bonnets.

Three years later, they were married.

and started building a life for themselves.

Part of that new life involved moving north to Milwaukee, where Fred set up his very own shoe store, following in his father's footsteps.

It was a big gamble, but it quickly paid off.

Soon, he was able to open more locations, and as the money rolled in, his wife was able to stop working outside the home.

But Fred had his sights set even higher.

He wanted to move into manufacturing.

His first factory manufactured men's caps, and the second one produced aprons.

Each one was was more successful than the last, and with every new hit, Fred's business reputation grew exponentially.

Everyone respected him as an entrepreneur and lauded him as a solid family man.

And while he and his wife never had children, he was known around town as a good provider.

Wealth brought new change.

The couple moved up to a lavish mansion in a posh neighborhood and became active socialites in the evenings.

They attended frequent parties and bought expensive items for their home.

But beneath that thin veneer of perfection and success, there were cracks forming.

Fred took to drinking a bit too much and too often, which began to cause problems at home.

The couple fought constantly and those arguments were often loud enough that their high society neighbors could hear the shouts.

But Fred wasn't alone in his flaws.

The stories told about Wahlberga make it clear that she had a bit of a wandering eye.

With a husband who traveled often and worked long hours, she had taken to flirting with other men.

And that appetite found a target one day in the autumn of 1913 when she needed help with a broken sewing machine at home.

The repairman was actually sent to her house by her husband.

The mechanic, a young man named Otto Sandhuber, who was barely 17, turned out to be someone Walberga knew from her days in Chicago.

He had been the adopted boy who moved in with the family next door, but left years later when he discovered that he was not their biological child.

Walberga and Otto began an affair that day that would pick up speed as time went on.

At first they met in a hotel, but soon she was inviting him over while Fred was away on business.

The trouble was, When your home is known as a place where people shout and scream, neighbors have a tendency to become nosy, and those nosy neighbors took notice of Otto's arrivals and departures.

Dolly tried to do a little damage control.

The man visiting her house was just her half-brother, she told someone.

He was a bit of a vagabond, and she was just doing the right thing by offering him a warm meal and a place to get out of the cold.

I can't say for sure.

But my guess is that her lies didn't quite convince anyone who heard them.

Looking back, most historians assume that it was one of those neighbors who eventually told Fred about the affair.

He confronted his wife and he told her to end it.

Forced to choose between her lover and her lavish lifestyle, she quickly chose the latter.

All of Otto's regular visits stopped and life seemed to return to normal.

But again, life wasn't very normal inside that house.

Fred's drinking had increased over the years, and he had begun to believe that their house was haunted.

Items would often be found in locations where Fred didn't remember placing them.

Sometimes noises could be heard in distant parts of the house.

I don't know if he was a believer in the supernatural before moving to Milwaukee, but his experiences in the house quickly turned him into one.

Because of that, and also maybe a desire to move his wife away from her old lover, Fred decided it was time to create a West Coast branch of his manufacturing business.

In 1918, the couple moved to Los Angeles, and Fred got to work on setting up new factories and building the necessary support business around them.

Walberga was in charge of moving them into their new home, one that she had hand-picked herself.

She had a reputation for never giving away expensive items, so she had insisted that they find a home with plenty of storage space.

and setting up their daily lives in that enormous house took up much of her time for a while.

But the change didn't help Fred's drinking problem or his nerves.

Rather than leaving the ghost behind, he was certain that their new home was just as haunted as the last.

His experience in the new home was so unsettling that if he ever found himself alone there, he would call upon a friend or two from work to come over and keep him company.

Maybe Fred noticed the little details in a way that most people never do.

Maybe he just got paranoid when he drank.

We don't know what his thoughts and motivations were, but we do know that he slowly began to fear that the worst was just around the corner, that a phantom haunted his life and meant to do him harm.

But as frightening as it would have been for him to admit, Fred

was absolutely right.

The murder happened quickly.

After weeks of unpacking and setting up their life in that new Los Angeles mansion, Walberga, who everyone had taken to calling Dolly, was ready for a night out.

She and Fred headed to a friend's home on August 22nd, 1922, to do just that.

When they returned home around midnight, though, their world fell apart.

Across the street, a neighbor named Mrs.

Norton remembered waking up when something in her bedroom fell over.

While she was awake, she noticed more shouting from Fred and Dolly's home and sat up to listen for a moment.

Norton's roommate, Mrs.

Rawson, independently awoke at the same time and heard the shouting as well and went to her window to look at the big mansion.

Down the street, another neighbor named Jay Ashley heard the shouting as well.

And then, all three of those witnesses heard something else.

Gunshots.

Ashley immediately called the police and then rushed outside to have a better look.

Other neighbors arrived as well and together they all decided to enter the home of Dolly and Fred and see if they could catch the gunman.

After kicking in the front door though, all they managed to find was a room in disarray.

and Fred's dead body sprawled out on the floor.

That's when they noticed the pounding and muffled shouts from somewhere else upstairs.

The neighbors sprang to the rescue and began searching the mansion for anyone else who might be there.

After a bit of searching, they discovered a locked closet upstairs and the desperate cries of Dolly coming from the other side of the door.

Someone found the key somewhere else in the house and unlocked the door and soon Dolly was explaining what had happened after they returned home.

She had gone upstairs to undress, she said, while Fred had stayed below to take take care of some business.

She heard a loud thump, and then after a moment of silence, three gunshots.

Before she could step out of the closet and go see what had happened, a dark shape had pushed her back in and locked the door, leaving her to fear the worst for her husband Fred.

Each of those three gunshots, it turns out, had struck him in the struggle.

There were two wounds above the heart and another in the side of his head.

Fred had been dead before the neighbors even broke into the house, and when the police arrived, all they could do was ask questions and help search the crime scene.

All evidence pointed to an armed robbery.

Fred's cash was gone, as was his gold watch and a handful of other expensive items.

But there was no sign that any of the doors or windows in the house had been forced open from the outside.

and no neighbors witnessed anyone exiting the mansion prior to their arrival.

So while the clues were there, the full picture seemed to be eluding them.

Initially, the police arrested a local group of thieves led by a man named James Casey who had been suspected of similar crimes before.

He even owned the same type of pistol that had fired the shots that killed Fred.

But they were released the very same day after it became clear that there was no evidence linking them to the murder.

So for a long while, The crime just went unsolved.

A year later though, something changed.

A short while after Fred's death, Dolly had begun a relationship with a man named Roy Clum.

He was a friend of theirs from Milwaukee who now worked in Hollywood as a film producer.

And for many months, they seemed to get along and make the most of their new phase in life.

But not long after they began to see each other, Dolly made a very unusual request.

She handed him a pistol.

and asked him to dispose of it in the La Brea tar pits.

She explained that she was worried the police might find it suspicious that she owned the very same type of gun that was used to murder her husband and thought it might be better to get rid of it and keep things simple.

Roy, hoping for his relationship with the wealthy widow to grow into more, agreed to do it.

But that relationship soured a few months later and Roy, looking back and putting the pieces together, decided to tell his story to the police.

As a result, Dolly was arrested and put on trial for Fred's murder.

Things got even trickier when the police came to arrest her and noticed that her new lover, Herman Shapiro, a man who also happened to be her attorney, was wearing a gold watch identical to the one that had been stolen in the robbery.

Shapiro explained that it had been a gift from Dolly.

The clues were adding up, and as the trial got underway, it became increasingly likely that Dolly would be charged with the murder of her husband.

But there was one major flaw in the prosecution's argument, one that her lover and lawyer Herman Shapiro was quick to point out.

If Dolly was the killer, how did she get locked inside the closet?

Maybe, some thought,

there really was a phantom, after all.

Fred hadn't been the only person to experience unusual activity in that home.

Sometime between his murder and Dolly's arrest and trial, Dolly had a friend from Milwaukee come visit her.

Marjorie Tex knew Fred and Dolly well, and when she received word about the murder, she decided to visit Dolly and keep her company.

Upon arriving in that big house in Los Angeles, Marjorie felt as if something was off.

At first, she chalked it up to staying in a house where a murder had taken place.

I think any one of us would have felt uneasy in a situation like that, so it's hard to blame her for being nervous.

But there were other things that contributed to her uneasiness.

For example, she wandered upstairs one day when Dolly wasn't home, but was overwhelmed by the feeling of being watched, as if she wasn't alone.

The house made noises, and while it probably was the work of her overactive imagination, she still had a difficult time shaking the feeling.

It happened in the basement too, and after a while, she simply stopped visiting those locations alone.

Once, she even saw something, a vision or shimmer of activity from the world beyond the veil.

She described it as the shape of a man, but fleeting and partial, as if the spirit were incomplete, and on one occasion, The shock of it all was enough to cause her to pass out right there in the upstairs hallway.

Eventually, it all became a bit too much for Dolly and her visitors, so in January of 1923, she sold the big mansion and bought a new home in another part of Los Angeles.

Herman Shapiro moved in with her, and he continued his legal work while she took on the massive job of getting all her things moved into the new house.

All those closets and attic spaces wouldn't fill themselves, after all.

And then in July of 1923, Dolly was arrested and the trial began.

A case was made against her and Shapiro built his own defense.

But in the middle of all of that, Dolly pulled Shapiro aside and whispered a cryptic message to him.

He's there, she told him with a noticeable amount of panic in her voice.

He's there.

Shapiro was utterly confused, but before he could ask her to be more specific, Dolly went on.

My vagabond half-brother, she explained.

You need to go make sure he has something to eat.

And then she gave Herman instructions, very specific instructions.

Bewildered but intrigued, Herman went home that day and did everything Dolly had asked him to do.

He prepared a meal, probably placing all of the items on a serving tray, and then took it all upstairs.

Not to a guest room though, but to Dolly's room.

Once there, he stepped inside the closet and, doing exactly what Dolly had instructed him to do, he whistled.

A moment later, a panel in the wall at the end of the closet slid open.

It was like a dark hole in his reality, a hidden space inside the home he thought he knew inside and out.

But here it was, a secret room that only Dolly had known about.

Well, Dolly and one other person.

Hello, Herman, came the voice from inside the opening.

And then a face appeared.

Over the course of the afternoon, the man in the wall told Herman everything.

He explained that Dolly had always maintained a long string of lovers, even when Fred was alive.

Beginning with her affair 10 years prior with Otto Sanhuber in Milwaukee, and eventually leading up to men like Roy Clum and Herman himself, Dolly had never stopped cheating.

Herman was suspicious, though.

Why are you living in the walls of this house?

He must have asked him.

And how do you know about all these other men?

The stranger in the hole in the wall probably smiled.

Because,

he replied, I am Otto Sanhuber.

It was a stunning revelation.

Otto Sanhuber, the sewing machine repairman that Dolly had broken up with a decade before, was right there, living in their home.

Naturally, Herman wanted to know more.

He was an attorney, after all, and he was very good at asking questions, so he managed to tease a bit more information out of the young man.

It turns out that Otto never left when Dolly pretended to break off their affair.

He simply moved in and stayed.

All those times when Fred felt as if he wasn't alone, as if someone were watching him and sometimes moving items he left around the house, all those times, it was really just Otto.

And he'd been there ever since, moving from house to house as Dolly went through life.

For an entire decade, Otto was her secret lover, hiding in the walls when he needed to and roaming the house when he was alone.

No one had ever seen him in all those years besides Dolly, except for that one chance encounter with Marjorie Tex, who mistook him for a ghost.

But Otto had one more story for Herman.

He knew what happened the night Fred was killed, and it would change the way people viewed the tragedy forever.

According to him, the night Fred and Dolly returned home from their party, Fred was very drunk.

Almost from the moment they walked into their home, the couple began one of their typical arguments.

The neighbors had heard screaming, after all, and it wasn't from the attack.

And that argument, Otto claimed, began to get violent.

Fearing for Dolly's safety, Otto told Herman that he climbed out of his hiding place in the attic and grabbed one of Fred's revolvers.

Then, as quietly as he could, he rushed downstairs to stop the fight.

Fred saw him, recognized him, and in his drunken rage began to attack the younger man.

It was during the struggle that the gun went off twice into Fred's chest.

And after the older man fell to the ground, Otto shot him one last time in the side of the head.

After that, it was a simple matter of hiding some valuables, making a mess of the room, and then locking Dolly inside the closet to make it look like a burglary had gone wrong.

And for months, the police had fallen for it.

Herman was stunned.

Dolly was currently on trial for Fred's murder and here was the solution to all of their problems.

So you might imagine that he called the police and had Otto taken into custody, securing the freedom for the woman he loved.

But that's not what he did.

Instead, he told Otto to run.

Trying to put ourselves in Herman's shoes, it sort of makes sense.

Dolly wasn't going to be convicted of murder.

No one could explain how she could have locked herself in the closet with the key that was found elsewhere in the house.

It was definitive proof that someone else had been in there with her, and the court was convinced that someone was the real killer.

If Herman brought Otto to the police, sure, they would finally know who that someone was.

But it would also drag Dolly through the mud and Herman's reputation right along with her.

Telling Otto to run was Herman's way of protecting his future.

So he handed the young man a bag and and told him to pack and leave.

And that's what Otto did.

He headed north to Canada, and Dolly continued on with her trial.

The state of California spent a year and a half trying to prove that Dolly was the killer, but in the end, they couldn't do it.

They couldn't prove that she had locked herself in a closet after committing the crime.

Sometime in early 1925, She walked away, an innocent woman.

The killer, they believed, had slipped through their fingers, vanishing into the night like some phantom or ghost.

In the end,

that wasn't too far from the truth.

The devil is in the details.

It's a phrase we hear often, and it has a lot of meanings.

That project you thought would be simple, but turned out to take you twice as long.

That IKEA bookshelf you can't seem to build correctly because you missed one tiny little step.

Getting pulled aside by airport security because you forgot to leave your pocket knife at home.

Some things are often made more frustrating by our lack of attention to the details.

Looking back, it's easy to believe that Fred should have paid more attention.

Otto Sanhuber had lived in his home for nearly a decade.

Multiple homes, countless moments when he felt as if he were being watched, as if his home was haunted.

In retrospect, Fred was exactly right.

He just didn't know it.

The disturbing realization here is just how normal Fred was.

He was just a guy with a busy life who was doing the best he could to manage it all.

But in the process, he missed some key details that could have saved his life.

I'm not sure most of us are any different today, especially with the new distractions of modern technology and 24-7 news networks.

There's always something else to notice.

But are we noticing the right things?

I'm certainly not suggesting that someone is living in your attic, but we have to stop and wonder if most of us would even notice.

Maybe Dolly understood that.

Maybe she knew how distracted people were and how easy it would be to hide something as significant as a secret lover inside the very place she called home.

Or maybe she just took a chance and got lucky.

Fred never managed to put the pieces together.

And let's be honest, would you?

Like a lot of her relationships, Dolly and Herman's fell apart after a few years.

He was a disgruntled lover and probably had a bit of regret about sending Otto off into the great unknown rather than turning him into the police.

But in 1930, a second chance walked into his life.

Otto Sanhuber, you see, had returned to Los Angeles.

He was living under an assumed name, Walter Klein.

He was working as a janitor, and he wasn't alone.

Otto had gotten married in the seven years since his flight from Dolly and Herman's home, but Otto's arrest came as a complete shock to his wife.

It turns out, She had no idea about his past.

In the end, I suppose,

things aren't always what they appear to be.

Sometimes,

they're worse.

The story of Dolly Eisterreich and Otto Sandhuber is a bizarre tale for sure, and one that highlights how little we tend to pay attention to the world around us each day.

And while I've done my best to give you a comprehensive tour of their bizarre love affair, I don't want to leave you wondering what happened to Otto in the end.

The answer, it turns out, might not be as tidy as you would hope.

I'll tell you all about it after this short sponsor break.

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Otto Sanhuber went to jail in 1930 on a tip from Herman Shapiro.

We know this, and most of us, I think, are glad for it.

But it's hard to deny how attractive the story is, and that's always been the case.

When his arrest went public in 1930, the press had a field day.

A phantom lover who lived in the attic, a wealthy couple torn apart by infidelity and hidden secrets, an unsolved murder.

It was everything an eager reader wanted to know about, and so articles began to pop up all over.

One journalist at the time wrote this amazing bit of summarization.

If you went to see the terror and the phantom of the opera on a town movie bill, came home and read two or three of Edgar Allan Poe's choicer tales of horror, ate three Welsh rare bits, and then went to bed, Your resulting nightmare might be something like this amazing drama that Los Angeles police, after eight years of delay, have finally uncovered.

Otto Sanhuber went on trial and the press began to give him nicknames.

The Ghost of the Garret, the Attic Phantom.

One paper even called him the Batman of Los Angeles because he lived in what was essentially a cave in the dark and came out to do his business at night.

It would be yet another decade before the Caped Crusader we know today as Batman would appear in a comic book, but Otto Sandhuber was apparently the first.

And he was a bit of a hero, in his own mind, at least.

During his grand jury testimony in 1930, Otto told the court about a burglary that had taken place prior to the murder.

He had managed to slip out of his hiding place and frighten the thief off by throwing a bottle of ink at the man.

After that, he paid better attention to where Fred kept his guns, just in case.

In the end, Otto was convicted of manslaughter, but not murder, and since the statute of limitations for manslaughter had passed, he walked away without any jail time.

After that, Otto Sanhuber disappeared from the pages of history like a ghost vanishing into thin air.

Whatever became of him later in life is a mystery.

The philosophical principle known as Occam's Razor states that the best explanations are often the simplest.

We might have minds that are prone to wild imagination and frightful stories, but most of the time, that noise we hear in the house isn't a ghost or a phantom.

Maybe it's just a noisy pipe, or voices from the neighbors next door, or just the wind.

Or, as in Dolly and Fred's case, perhaps it's just a person living in your attic.

After all, the truth, as I've often said before,

is a lot more frightening than fiction.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Sam Alberty and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

And you can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place: theworldoflore.com/slash now.

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And as always,

thanks for listening.