“Attic Man”: The 1920s Murder That Shocked Los Angeles

Behind a Fatal House “Robbery” Was a Torrid Love Triangle

When the Los Angeles police showed up at the large house at 858 North Andrews Boulevard on the hot summer night of August 22, 1922, answering a neighbor’s call of hearing gunshots and a woman’s frantic cries, they found the man of the house, rich businessman Fred Oesterreich, lying on the floor, shot dead.

Locked in a closet from the outside was his younger wife, Dolly Oesterreich. When police freed her, she told of a strange man who broke into the house to rob them, shoved her into the closet, and killed her spouse.

With only the husband’s watch missing, something about the crime didn’t seem right to the police, but on the surface they accepted the story of a burglary gone wrong. Just how “not right” the situation was at North Andrews Boulevard, few people could have ever imagined when the details of the love triangle came to light, and it has the power to shock even today.

The man who killed Fred Oesterreich was her lover, Otto Sanhuber, a man who had been living in their attic for years — and the entire time was kept secret from Fred. Nor was this the first house of theirs Otto lived in.

Just who was the real Dolly, the woman dubbed a “naughty vamp” during the lurid murder trial that dominated headlines of the day? Born in Germany in 1880, Walburga “Dolly” Korschel immigrated to America but found life pretty grim on a farm-until, when she was in her early 20s, she married the wealthy Fred Oesterreich, owner of a Milwaukee apron factory.

After a while, married life seems to have been less than scintillating for housewife Dolly, with reports her husband drank a lot and didn’t thrill her in the bedroom. But all of that changed the day that a 17-year-old employee of the apron factory named Otto came to the Oesterreichs’ house to fix her broken sewing machine. The stories conflict a little on this point, but supposedly Dolly had already spotted teenage Otto at the factory and knew he was on his way over — so she met him at the door in a silk robe, stockings and perfume.

Dolly and Otto threw themselves into a lurid affair, meeting in hotels or at her house during the day, whenever and wherever they could. But the neighbors questioned the sight of a young man coming and going from the Milwaukee house, prompting Dolly to sputter about a “vagabond half-brother.”