Dolly Oesterreich and Otto Sanhuber: The Lover Who Lived in Her Attic for 10 Years
In 1913, a Milwaukee housewife named Dolly Oesterreich answered her front door in nothing but stockings and a silk robe, greeted the 17-year-old repairman her husband had sent to fix her sewing machine, and started an affair that would eventually see him move into her attic full time. He lived there, on and off, for roughly a decade, fed and supplied with library books by the woman he called his sole reason for living, while her husband complained for years about strange noises and vanishing cigars and was told, repeatedly, that he was imagining it. Then, in 1922, the man in the attic came down with a gun in his hand, and Dolly's husband ended up dead on the floor.
Quick answers
Who were Dolly Oesterreich and Otto Sanhuber?
Dolly was a Milwaukee housewife who began an affair with Otto Sanhuber, a teenage factory repairman, in 1913, and eventually hid him in her attic for roughly a decade. Otto shot and killed Dolly's husband, Fred, in 1922.
Did Otto Sanhuber go to prison for the murder?
No. A jury found him guilty of manslaughter in 1930, but the seven-year statute of limitations had already expired by the time he was tried, so he walked free.
Was Dolly Oesterreich ever convicted of anything?
No. She was arrested twice, once in 1923 and again in 1930, but was never convicted of a crime connected to her husband's death.
Is the Oesterreich case a true story that's been adapted for film or TV?
Yes, at least four times, including a 1968 comedy starring Shirley MacLaine and a 1995 TV movie starring a young Neil Patrick Harris.
A German immigrant, a factory owner, and an unhappy marriage
Walburga “Dolly” Korschel was born in 1880 to German immigrant parents and grew up poor on a Midwestern farm. In her early twenties she married Fred Oesterreich, the wealthy owner of a successful apron manufacturing business in Milwaukee. On paper it was a good match. In practice, Fred drank heavily and worked constantly, and Dolly, by every contemporary account, was left thoroughly unsatisfied.
The Sewing Machine That Started It All
On an unusually hot autumn day in 1913, Dolly called Fred's factory and asked for someone to come fix her broken sewing machine. He sent 17-year-old Otto Sanhuber, born in Manhattan under the name Otto Weir and orphaned as a toddler, according to genealogical records placing him in the New York Foundling Hospital before he was informally taken in by a Wisconsin family named Sanhuber. When Dolly, then 33, answered the door wearing only stockings and a silk robe, the sewing machine went untouched and an affair began that would run for the better part of two decades.
The two initially met at hotels, but the cost and risk of that arrangement wore thin. Dolly decided it was simpler to bring Otto to the house itself, but neighbours soon noticed a young man visiting often and started asking questions. Dolly's solution was to tell them he was her “vagabond half-brother,” a man with no home, job, or family of his own, which conveniently explained both his presence and his lack of any independent life for anyone to check up on.
Moving a Lover Into the Roof
Eventually Dolly proposed something bolder still: Otto would quit his job entirely and move into the house's attic, where Fred never went. He agreed. He had no family to speak of, and by his own later account he grew to love Dolly “as a boy loves his mother” as much as anything else. He spent his days with Dolly and his nights reading the pulp adventure novels she brought him weekly from the library, chasing his own ambition to become a published pulp fiction writer himself. By 1918, five years into the arrangement, he'd actually managed it, getting some of his stories into print under a pen name while living, undetected, in the roof of the house whose owner was paying for the very paper he wrote on.
A Move to Los Angeles, and a Phantom That Followed
Fred, meanwhile, had begun to seriously doubt his own sanity. He heard footsteps and noises above his bedroom at night. His cigars kept disappearing. He mentioned it to Dolly repeatedly, and she told him, calmly and consistently, that he was imagining things and perhaps ought to see a doctor. He did. The doctor found nothing wrong with him.
In 1918, unaware that the source of his torment would simply follow him, Fred decided the family would move to Los Angeles. Dolly agreed on one condition: the new house needed an attic. She sent Otto ahead to get settled before Fred ever arrived, and by the time the family reached California, the now 22-year-old repairman was already quietly installed in his new home.
The Night It All Came Apart
The Oesterreichs' marriage kept deteriorating in California. Fred drank more, and the couple's arguments grew louder and more frequent. On the night of 22 August 1922, one of those arguments turned violent enough that Otto, listening from above and fearing Dolly was being seriously hurt, came down from the attic with two of Fred's own .25 calibre pistols. A struggle followed. Otto fired three shots into Fred's chest, killing him instantly, later telling investigators simply, “I thought her husband was killing her, I grabbed my gun.”
With Fred dead on the floor, the two lovers staged the scene to look like a botched burglary. Otto took Fred's diamond watch and whatever cash was in the room, locked Dolly inside a bedroom closet from the outside, tossed the key aside, and slipped back up to the attic. Dolly then screamed until a neighbour called the police. Since nobody had any idea a man had been living in the house's roof for the better part of a decade, officers had no way to explain how Dolly could possibly have locked herself into a closet, and she walked free as the grieving, robbed widow.
A Very Well-Provided-For Widow
Even with Fred gone and no husband left to hide from, Dolly didn't free Otto from the attic. She bought a new house, made sure it had an attic too, and kept the arrangement running much as before, though by most accounts their relationship had shifted by this point from romance into something closer to control. Otto would later tell a jury he considered himself Dolly's sex slave, a prisoner of his own devotion to her rather than a free man choosing to stay.
Dolly, for her part, was not short of options. She began seeing her own attorney, Herman Shapiro, and a second man, an aspiring actor and lawyer named Roy Klumb, simultaneously. It was this crowded personal life, not any lingering police suspicion, that eventually brought the whole arrangement crashing down.
The First Unraveling
Dolly made a genuinely careless mistake: she gave Shapiro Fred's diamond watch, the same one supposedly stolen in the burglary, as a gift. When he recognised it, she waved off his concern, claiming she'd simply found it wedged under a seat cushion and hadn't thought to mention it to police. Separately, she asked Klumb to get rid of the pistols used in the killing, and he dumped them in the La Brea tar pits.
In 1923, after a bitter breakup with Dolly, Klumb went to the police and told them exactly where he'd thrown the guns. Dolly was arrested. During the proceedings that followed, she made a second mistake, asking Shapiro to bring food to her attic-dwelling “half-brother.” Shapiro went, and Otto, starved of any male company for a decade, immediately and enthusiastically told him everything. Shapiro threw him out of the attic that same day, and a terrified Otto fled to Canada. Without Otto's testimony or any way to place him inside the house, and still unable to explain the locked closet, police were forced to drop the charges against Dolly. She walked free for the second time.
Seven Years, Then a Spiteful Phone Call
Shapiro and Dolly's relationship continued for years afterward, ending badly in 1930. Bitter over the breakup, Shapiro went to the police and told them what he knew about Otto Sanhuber, who had, by pure coincidence, just moved back to Los Angeles under a new identity. Detectives tracked him down, and once the story broke, it became a genuine media sensation. According to Atlas Obscura's account of the Los Angeles Times' 1930 coverage, papers dubbed Otto the “garret ghost” and reported that he lived a “bat-like life in hidden rooms,” a description that stuck so firmly the press began calling him the Bat Man of Los Angeles, years before the comic-book Batman had ever been dreamed up.
A Trial That Outdid Fiction
The 1930 trial drew crowds of reporters and photographers who followed Dolly and Otto everywhere. The deputy district attorney prosecuting the case dismissed Otto in court as “a perjurer of his own soul”, and the Los Angeles Times itself couldn't resist editorialising on just how unbelievable the whole saga had become, writing that fiction, in this case, had genuinely been outdone by real life.
Guilty, but Too Late
On 1 July 1930, a jury found Otto Sanhuber guilty of manslaughter over Fred's death. It didn't matter. The statute of limitations on manslaughter in California at the time was seven years, and eight years had passed since the killing. His conviction was rendered legally meaningless, and Otto walked out of the courtroom a free man. Dolly's own case that same year ended in a hung jury, and prosecutors declined to pursue her further. Between the locked closet in 1922, the missing testimony in 1923, and the expired statute of limitations in 1930, both of them had now escaped consequences for the same killing three separate times.
What Happened Next
Otto Sanhuber disappeared from public life almost as soon as the trial ended, and for decades it was widely assumed nobody knew what became of him. Genealogical research since has actually turned up an answer. According to records compiled on Find a Grave, Otto had already married a woman named Mathilde Schutt in Washington state in May 1924, six years before his own trial, under the name Walter M. Klein, the same alias he'd used for years. He and Mathilde stayed married until his death in 1948, living together, by the 1940 census, in Santa Monica, only a few miles from the house where it had all started. He was buried under the name Walter M. Klein, having spent his final decades hiding in plain sight rather than vanishing at all.
Dolly stayed in Los Angeles, found a new partner, and eventually married him; the couple remained together for roughly three decades. She died in Los Angeles on 8 April 1961, at the age of 80, having outlived the scandal by nearly four decades and never having spent a single day in prison for any part of it.
Hollywood Keeps Returning to the Attic
The case has proven irresistible to filmmakers for over half a century. It loosely inspired the 1968 British comedy The Bliss of Mrs. Blossom, starring Shirley MacLaine as a bored wife hiding her lover in the attic of the family brassiere business. A far more direct dramatisation followed in the 1995 TV movie The Man in the Attic, starring Anne Archer opposite a young Neil Patrick Harris as the besotted repairman. Lifetime returned to the story twice more, with 2018's Lover in the Attic and 2023's My Wife's Hidden Lover, also released as Body in the Attic, proof the case still has enough pull to fill a Lifetime Saturday night more than a century after it began.
A Case Built on Escaped Consequences
What makes the Oesterreich case endure isn't really the affair itself, since hidden lovers and unhappy marriages are true crime staples, but the sheer number of times the legal system almost caught up with Dolly and Otto and then didn't, right up until a simple calendar technicality let a convicted killer walk free. It sits alongside a handful of other cases where obsession curdled into violence and the fallout stretched on for years, including the aristocratic scandal at the heart of the Casati Stampa murders, and the quieter, more calculated menace of Dr Glennon Engleman's own double life, a reminder that the most unbelievable true crime stories are very often the ones where nobody involved ever really paid for it.
FAQ
How old was Otto Sanhuber when the affair began?
He was 17, and Dolly was 33, when their relationship started in 1913.
Did Fred Oesterreich ever find out about Otto before the murder?
Some accounts suggest he suspected something was wrong in the house for years, hearing noises and losing track of belongings, but there's no solid evidence he ever learned the specific truth before the night he died.
Why didn't Otto Sanhuber just leave the attic after the murder?
By most accounts the relationship had become one of dependence and control rather than simple romance, and Otto later told a jury he considered himself imprisoned by his own devotion to Dolly.
What happened to the guns used in the killing?
One was recovered from the La Brea tar pits after an ex-boyfriend of Dolly's confessed to dumping it there in 1923.
Did anyone ever find out what happened to Otto Sanhuber after his acquittal?
Yes, though only through later genealogical research. He appears to have quietly resumed married life under the name Walter Klein and lived in Santa Monica until his death in 1948.
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