Milwaukee, 1913.
The air was heavy with late-summer warmth, the kind that made lace curtains stick to polished windows and turned quiet neighborhoods into echo chambers for gossip.

Inside an elegant home on the better side of town, a sewing machine stopped working.

For most people, it would have been a minor annoyance. For Walburga “Dolly” Oesterreich, 33 years old, wealthy by marriage, and trapped in a life that was starting to feel more like a gilded cage than a dream, it was the beginning of something that would drag three lives into a decade-long nightmare.

Her husband, Fred Oesterreich, owned a successful apron factory. He was a self-made man, hardworking, respected, and increasingly drunk. Their home was large, nicely furnished, and filled with everything money could buy—except warmth.

Dolly called Fred at the factory and complained:
the sewing machine was broken.

He promised to send someone.

A few hours later, a 17-year-old repairman named Otto Sanhuber walked up to the Oesterreichs’ front door. He was thin, shy, and earnest, with the slightly hunched posture of someone used to being overlooked. He worked for Fred’s factory, fixing the machines that kept the business running.

He knocked on the ornate double doors, tool bag in hand.

Dolly answered wearing only a silk robe and stockings.

The sewing machine remained broken that afternoon. But the invisible machinery of three people’s fates began to grind into motion.

Their affair started that day.

 

A House of Respectability, a Life of Secrets

On the surface, the Oesterreichs were a respectable couple.

They lived in a good neighborhood. They had money. They hosted dinners. Fred worked long hours at the factory, coming home later and later, smelling of liquor more often than not.

Dolly, outwardly, played the role expected of her: the attentive wife, the good hostess, the woman who knew when to smile and when to stay quiet.

Inside, she was bored. Lonely. Angry. She had desires that the social rules of 1913 America had no place for—especially not for a married woman. Especially not for a woman being slowly abandoned by a husband who preferred the company of his factory and his bottles.

Otto was the opposite of Fred in almost every way.

He was young.
He was gentle.
He listened.

At first, they did what many people in forbidden affairs do: they met in hotels. Anonymous rooms, borrowed hours. Then, as their confidence grew, they took a bigger risk.

They began meeting in the Oesterreichs’ own marital bed while Fred was at work.

It was reckless. Dangerous. And electrifying.

Neighbors noticed the young man visiting. Doors in 1913 weren’t as soundproof as secrets needed them to be. Curtains twitched. Voices lowered. Eyes narrowed.

Dolly tried to explain it away. She told people Otto was her “vagabond half-brother,” a poor relative she was helping.

But gossip is a hungry thing, and it wasn’t satisfied.

The questions kept coming. The visits kept raising eyebrows. The rumors kept building.

Dolly needed a solution. Not just for a week. For good.

What she came up with was outrageous.
And Otto said yes.

 

The Attic Agreement

On paper, it sounds like madness.

Dolly suggested that Otto quit his job and move into the attic of the Oesterreich home. Fred never went up there, she told him. It was essentially dead space. They could turn it into a hiding place, a private world just for the two of them.

No one would see him arrive. No one would see him leave. Because he wouldn’t.

The price of this arrangement was brutal: Otto would have to abandon all human contact except Dolly. No friends. No family. No coworkers. No neighbors. No walking down the street. No sunlight without risk.

His world would shrink to a few square feet above the ceiling of the bedroom where Dolly and Fred slept.

To most people, the idea would have been terrifying. Insane. Unthinkable.

But Otto was a shy orphan, lonelier than most, with dreams of becoming a writer and no real anchor in the world. Dolly was older, experienced, dominant. She offered him something that felt like love, purpose, and belonging all at once.

In that imbalance lay the seed of everything that followed.

Otto agreed.

The attic was accessible through a panel in the ceiling of the bedroom closet Dolly shared with Fred. The space held a simple cot, a lamp, some books, and writing materials. No luxuries. No decorations. No windows.

Just enough to survive—and nothing else.

 

Life in the Ceiling

Here’s how their impossible arrangement worked.

Every morning, as soon as Fred left for the factory, Dolly would check that the coast was clear. Then Otto would quietly lower himself from the closet panel and step into the home as if he were a ghost slipping down from another world.

They did chores together. They talked. They ate. They made love—by Otto’s later account, sometimes as many as eight times a day.

For a few hours, the house was theirs.

Then, as evening approached and Fred’s return grew near, the rhythm changed. The clock became a threat. The sound of a car on the street, a neighbor’s voice, a door slamming—everything sharpened into potential danger.

Otto would scramble back up into the attic. Dolly would close the panel.

By the time Fred walked through the front door, tired and irritable, his house appeared perfectly normal.

Dinner was ready.
The house was clean.
His wife was waiting.

What he didn’t know was that a young man was lying just a few feet above his head, listening to every word, every argument, every snore.

At night, Otto lived in near-total silence. He couldn’t risk being heard. He moved carefully along the rafters. He read by lamplight. He wrote science fiction stories—strange, imaginative tales that he passed down to Dolly, who mailed them to publishers.

The attic became his world.
The rafters became his streets.
The space between the boards became the bars of a prison he had chosen.

When Fred noticed odd things—cigars disappearing, liquor levels dropping faster than he remembered—Dolly gaslit him with practiced ease.

You’re drinking more than you think.
You misplaced them.
You’re imagining things.

When Fred heard unusual sounds, Dolly distracted him. A drink, a touch, a diversion. Anything to pull his attention away from the ceiling.

For five years, this continued.

Five years of living above a husband’s bed.
Five years of listening to a life without participating in it.
Five years of being both a secret and a prisoner.

 

A New City, the Same Secret

In 1918, Fred announced a major change.

They were moving to Los Angeles. He planned to open a West Coast factory, expanding his apron empire.

Dolly agreed—but with one condition.

Their new house had to have an attic.

In Los Angeles, attics weren’t common. The architecture differed from Milwaukee’s. But Dolly was relentless. She searched until she found a house overlooking Sunset Boulevard that had the hidden space she needed.

She sent Otto ahead. By the time the Oesterreichs arrived in California, the 22-year-old was already installed in his new attic prison, waiting like a shadow.

Life resumed its strange pattern.

By day, the married couple navigated their public life: a businessman and his wife in a new city. By day, out of sight, Otto continued his surreal existence above them, emerging only when Fred wasn’t home.

By night, he listened to their arguments.

Because in Los Angeles, something had changed.

Fred’s drinking was worse.
His temper was shorter.
The fights with Dolly were louder, longer, more violent.

For Otto, who depended entirely on Dolly—not just for food and shelter, but for every scrap of human connection—those arguments weren’t just noise.

They were a threat.

 

The Night Everything Came Down

On the evening of August 22, 1922, Dolly and Fred came home from a night out. Their evening quickly soured.

Voices rose.
Insults flew.
Something heavy hit the floor.

From the attic, Otto froze.

He heard Dolly shouting. He heard movement that sounded like a struggle. In his mind, he saw the woman who had fed him, sheltered him, loved him—however twisted that love might be—being hurt by the man who didn’t even know he existed.

Otto grabbed two .25 caliber pistols.

He climbed down from the attic, heart pounding, adrenaline drowning out reason. Whatever had kept him in the shadows for ten years—fear, obedience, a strange sense of loyalty—snapped.

He stepped into the room.

Fred recognized him instantly.
The young repairman. The fired employee. The ghost from the factory.

We don’t know exactly what words were exchanged. We know Fred lunged. We know Otto panicked.

We know the guns went off.

Three bullets struck Fred Oesterreich. Two in the chest. One in the head.

He died almost instantly on the floor of his own home, with his wife and her secret lover standing over him.

The equilibrium of that house—strange, sick, and precarious as it was—shattered in an instant.

 

A Murder Rewritten as Burglary

Panic followed.

Dolly and Otto had spent a decade hiding one lie. Now they had to hide a far worse one.

They moved quickly.

To the outside world, this couldn’t be a lover’s quarrel gone deadly. It had to be something else. Something random. Something plausible.

They staged the scene as a burglary.

Otto took Fred’s expensive diamond watch—an item that would be easy to claim as stolen. They left other valuables untouched, hoping the chaos of the scene would mask the inconsistency.

Dolly climbed into the bedroom closet. Otto locked her in from the outside and tossed the key across the floor. Then he climbed back into the attic with the pistols and the watch.

When he was safely hidden again, the house fell quiet—except for Dolly’s screams.

Neighbors heard. Phones rang. Police arrived.

They found Fred dead, Dolly locked in the closet, and just enough confusion to make everything feel off.

Her story was simple:
A burglar had broken in.
Fred had resisted.
The intruder shot him, stole his watch, and locked her in the closet before fleeing.

On its face, it half-worked.
But details betrayed the lie.

How had the burglar locked her in and still left the key behind? Why had only one item been taken? Why were there no signs of forced entry?

The police were suspicious. They questioned her. They probed. But suspicion is not the same as proof.

Without a witness, without forensics advanced enough to unmask the staging, and with Dolly convincingly distraught, they couldn’t make the case stick.

She was released.

And in the attic above, Otto stayed where he had always been: unseen, unheard, unimaginable.

 

Eight More Years in the Rafters

The murder could have been Otto’s exit.

Fred was gone. Dolly was a widow. Otto, theoretically, could have left the attic, stepped into the world, built a life of his own.

But that isn’t what happened.

He stayed.

For eight more years, Otto continued to live in Dolly Oesterreich’s attic.

The dynamic shifted. With no husband downstairs, the risk of discovery shrank. Dolly even gave him a typewriter. No more fear of keys clacking when someone came home unexpectedly.

Otto wrote more—stories, fragments, possible futures that never came. He remained the ghost of the house, emerging when Dolly wanted him, shrinking back into the attic when she didn’t.

And Dolly? Now free from her marriage, she did something that revealed just how disposable Otto really was to her.

She took another lover.

His name was Herman Shapiro, the attorney Dolly hired after she became a suspect in Fred’s killing. Herman was intelligent, ambitious, and respectable—a man with a career, a reputation, and his feet firmly planted in the world.

While Otto remained confined above her head, Dolly entertained Herman in the rooms below.

The man who had given up a decade of his life for her stayed in the ceiling.
The new man slept in her bed.

The psychological cruelty of it is difficult to overstate.

For Otto, this likely twisted the already warped lines of love, loyalty, and self-worth. He had built his entire existence around Dolly. Now he was a secret she could set aside whenever something better came along.

But still, he stayed.

 

The Watch That Broke the Story

In 1930, Dolly made a mistake.

She gave Herman a gift: Fred’s diamond watch—the same watch she had reported stolen the night of the so-called burglary.

Herman recognized it from the case files and newspaper reports. He knew what it meant.

The “burglary” had been a lie.

If she had lied about that, what else had she lied about?

As their relationship soured over money and mistrust, Herman made a decision.

He went to the police.

He signed an affidavit revealing something that, at first, seemed impossible:
For over a decade, he claimed, a man had been living in Dolly Oesterreich’s attic.

Police began investigating. They eventually found Otto working as a hotel porter in Los Angeles—a job that allowed him to work nights and sleep during the day, habits born from his years of hiding, listening, and moving only when others weren’t looking.

He had finally, quietly, left Dolly’s house years earlier. But the damage done to his life was permanent.

He was arrested for murder.
So was Dolly.

 

The “Bat Man” on Trial

The story hit newspapers like an explosion.

Headlines screamed.
Columns filled with lurid details.

Otto was dubbed the “Bat Man,” the “Ghost in the Garret,” the “Attic Lover.” Dolly was cast as a manipulative femme fatale, a woman whose appetite and cunning had bent a young man to her will and cost her husband his life.

Reporters feasted on the strangeness.

A lover in the attic for ten years.
Self-imposed imprisonment.
A secret life unfolding just feet above a husband’s oblivious head.

At trial, Otto’s defense was stunning.

He claimed Dolly had enslaved him. That he was her “sex slave,” trapped by her control, isolated from the world, emotionally dependent on her in a way that erased his ability to choose freely.

He said he loved her “as a boy loves his mother.”

It was a deeply unsettling description—equal parts devotion and distortion.

The jury found him guilty of manslaughter.

And then came a twist almost as unbelievable as the attic itself:

The statute of limitations for manslaughter had expired—by one year.

Otto walked free.

Dolly’s trial ended in a hung jury. Most jurors leaned toward acquittal. Without a clear, unanimous verdict, prosecutors eventually dropped the charges in 1936.

In the end, neither Dolly nor Otto served a single day in prison for Fred Oesterreich’s death.

 

Life After the Attic

Freedom did not bring Otto the life he’d once dreamed of.

He changed his name to Walter Klein, moved to Canada for a time, married, and eventually returned to Los Angeles. He worked as a hotel porter, doing quiet, invisible work for guests who would never guess the life he’d lived.

He never became a published writer. The stories he wrote in the attic stayed with him—unrealized, like the life he might have had if he’d walked away in 1913 instead of climbing into the ceiling.

Dolly stayed in Los Angeles.

She found yet another boyfriend, a man she stayed with for three decades. They finally married just two weeks before she died in 1961 at age 80.

She outlived both the scandal and most of the people who remembered it firsthand.

 

A Story Too Strange to Be Fiction

The case has been retold over and over in films, TV movies, and true crime articles—not because of the murder alone, but because of the sheer impossibility of what came before it.

A teenage boy agreed to live in an attic for ten years.
A woman managed to hide a full-grown man in her home under her husband’s nose.
A house became a stage where one person lived in the light and another in the shadows, separated only by wood and silence.

It sounds like something out of a pulp novel—one Otto might have written by lamplight in his cramped attic world.

But it wasn’t fiction.

For a decade, Otto Sanhuber crept through Dolly Oesterreich’s home like a rumor. He listened to her husband’s footsteps. He read book after book to fill the space where a life should have been. He wrote stories no editor ever accepted. He made love to a woman who called their arrangement devotion while keeping him hidden like contraband.

And when jealousy, fear, and twisted loyalty finally pushed him down from the ceiling with two pistols in his hands, three bullets ended one man’s life and exposed a secret that should never have been possible.

No prison cell ever held Otto Sanhuber.
But for ten years, he lived in one.

Not made of bars.
Made of rafters, silence, and a love that looked more like control.

It was the strangest cell imaginable: an attic above a married couple’s bedroom, where every creak could mean discovery, where daylight was a risk, and where the price of staying was losing the world outside—and himself.