The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crimes (23 page)

The Italians were presumed to have been done to death by the State for murder. Yet, in their death, as at their trial, they had been bound up with their radicalism. Divesting the men of their radicalism and their foreign birth, their innocence of the murders would have been shown to the world, in the opinion of many capable lawyers and commonsense laymen. Therefore, in a real sense the men gave up their lives for their beliefs. They were foreigners, slackers, and radicals, and were thus stigmatized during the unfortunate, hysteric days of their arrest.

Many thousands followed the bodies of the two men to Forest Hills Crematory on 27 August. The rain poured on the funeral throng, and when it was all over a policeman wiped his brow and remarked with a sigh, “Well, I hope to Christ it’s over now.”

But it was not over.

A year later a committee of lawyers (John W. Davis, Elihu Root, Bernard Flexner, Charles C. Burlingham, Newton D. Baker) sponsored publication of the legal records in the case. A cryptic reference in the Lowell Committee’s report led the lawyers to ask both President Lowell and the defense counsel for an explanation. It was disclosed that the Lowell Committee, by private inquiry, had convinced itself that it had destroyed Sacco’s alibi, which was that he was in Boston applying for a passport to Italy on the day of the South Braintree crime. Witnesses recalled seeing him because on that day an Italian group gave a dinner to Editor Williams of the
Transcript
. The Lowell Committee insisted that the dinner date was 13 May. When a file of
La
Notizia
showed that the witnesses were correct, and it transpired that Williams had been tendered dinners on both dates, the Lowell Committee omitted reference to the rehabilitation of the Sacco alibi, though the thirty-two pages of examination apparently demolishing it remained. President Lowell privately apologized to the witnesses. He refused, however, to permit them to publish the incident in
La
Notizia
. No mention of this incident appears in the Lowell record, but the defence counsel’s version has never been disputed. The only reference that appears is the cryptic statement which mystified the lawyers’ committee sponsoring the record, that those present “look in the books produced by the witness”.

This incident is one of the high watermarks of the entire case. In fact, when President Lowell said he had ascertained that Mr Williams had been tendered a dinner on 13 May and not on the Sacco alibi date, Attorney Thompson threw up his hands. His dejection was complete, but it was then suggested that the witnesses bring the
La
Notizia
files to Thompson’s office. This was done, and Thompson with his own eyes read the account of the Williams banquet on 15 April. From the depths of despair Thompson’s spirits rose to transports of ecstasy. His witnesses were telling the truth! The Sacco alibi, apparently so important when destroyed by President Lowell, would surely now be equally important to the defense, for it had been rehabilitated by the newspaper item.

Why was this important alibi testimony omitted?

The stenographer said that Dr Lowell had instructed him not to take colloquies.

This interesting correspondence may be found as an appendix on page 5256a of
The
Sacco
–Vanzetti
Case
, published by Henry Holt and Company. President Lowell’s reply is there given to Mr Flexner. He says that the files of
La
Notizia
showed that the Italians had tendered a luncheon to Mr Williams on 15 April (the date of the South Braintree murders), and that the Committee subsequently assumed in its deliberations there had been two affairs for Williams.

When the record was printed and the correspondence made public many newspapers referred to it editorially and
The
New
York
World
,
The
Springfield
Republican
, and
The
Baltimore
Sun
regarded the correspondence as disquieting. They viewed it as a challenge to Dr Lowell.
The
Springfield
Republican
of 2 March, 1929, ended its editorial with these words:

“To this day Mr Lowell has taken no action whatever to clarify his attitude in dealing with the Sacco alibi and he leaves the public in the face of the record as now amplified, to wonder how he could have viewed the alibi as ‘serious’ when he thought he had destroyed it, but apparently as not ‘serious’ after it had been rehabilitated.”

An interesting and hitherto unpublished sidelight on developments subsequent to the execution was concerned with an inquiry into the relation of the Morelli gang of Providence, freight-car thieves and bandits, to the South Braintree robbery. Madeiros had “confessed” that he had been with the gang that did the South Braintree job. There was reason to believe that it was the work of the Morellis. An enormous amount of material was gathered by the defense on this phase of the situation. In 1929 a meeting of liberals was held in the New York home of Oswald Garrison Villard, and $40,000 was pledged to pursue this inquiry. One of the Morellis appeared to be willing to make a clean breast of the case. It was planned to drain the pond where the holdup men were supposed to have thrown the empty money boxes. But the stock market crash came and pledges were not collected; the pond was never drained.

“Doubt that will not down,” said Walter Lippmann in his full-page editorial in the New York
World
on 19 August 1927.

On each anniversary of the execution of the two men these doubts arise again—they are rehearsed at the meetings in Boston where those who believe Sacco and Vanzetti innocent gather once a year.

A bronze plaque sculptured by Gutzon Borglum, bearing the images of Sacco and Vanzetti, was offered to the State of Massachusetts on 22 August 1937, ten years after their death. The offer kicked up a row, and Governor Charles F. Hurley, Democrat, rejected the plaque which bore these words of Vanzetti:

“What I wish more than all in this last hour of agony is that our case and our fate may be understood in their real being and serve as a tremendous lesson to the forces of freedom so that our suffering and death will not have been in vain.”

The tragedy of the Sacco–Vanzetti case is the tragedy of three men—Judge Thayer, Governor Fuller, and President Lowell—and their inability to rise above the obscene battle that raged for seven long years around the heads of the shoemaker and the fish peddler.

(Fred Oesterreich, 1922)

Alan Hynd

You just couldn’t make this case up. There is a sense of the surreal about the story of sex-crazed Mrs Walburga Oesterreich who kept her lover Otto Sanhuber hidden in the attic, away from her husband Fred. Admittedly, the affair began in Milwaukee and burned brightly there for fifteen years, but when the bizarre ménage moved west, the murderous outcome might have been made for Hollywood; indeed, southern Californians would boast it could only have happened in Los Angeles. The case defeated the LA legal system, and no one ever discovered what really happened when the bullets began to fly. If this were fiction, remarked the true crime author Alan Hynd (1908–1975), you would say it was overdrawn.
“But,” he added, “the whole incredible series of events is a matter of cold official record.”

There were, back in the year of 1903, in the comfortable and robust city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, three ill-assorted persons—a forty-year-old man, his thirty-six-year-old wife, and a seventeen-year-old boy—who, thrown into unique juxtaposition, became participants in a plot that not only lent impressive weight to the theory that truth is stranger than fiction but which twisted the long arm of concidence all out of shape. The goings-on in which these three became involved lasted for nineteen long years and didn’t come to light until after one of them shot the other one to death in the city of Los Angeles, a municipality that somehow seemed a most fitting place to serve as a backdrop for the climax of a bizarre series of events without counterpart in the annals of crime.

Fred Oesterreich, one of the three principals in our chronicle, was an arrogant, round faced German who ran an apron factory in Milwaukee. He was in the habit of blustering through the factory, which employed about fifty men and women, verbally lashing the workers on to greater effort. Had the workers taken a poll to determine whom they hoped the factory would fall in on there is little doubt who would have won.

Oesterreich’s wife, Walburga, was a well stacked woman of medium height who, though mostly of German origin, had just enough Spanish in her to make her interesting. The lady was, as it turned out, what a certain Hollywood motion-picture producer might call an over-sexed nymphomaniac. Walburga had a low, musical voice, smouldering dark eyes and a Mona Lisa-type smile. She worked in the apron factory as a forelady and was very popular with the workers because, after her husband had blustered through the place balling out everybody, Mrs Oesterreich would follow in his wake, picking up egos and returning them to their owners.

Fred and Walburga Oesterreich, who had been married for fifteen years and who were childless, were not a happy couple. Oesterreich had, from his wife’s point of view, several failings. Although he was worth about a quarter of a million dollars in 1903, the man was, like many Germans, a careful custodian of a buck. The couple lived in an ugly mustard-colored frame house that was big enough to require the services of two maids but Oesterreich would not allow his wife even one servant. Worse yet, the man was a heavy drinker. Worst of all, he had come to be painfully deficient on the connubial couch.

It was this latter failing that Mrs Oesterreich, what with that Spanish blood and all, simply couldn’t overlook. She used to get into terrible battles with Fred in the watches of the night, taunt him about his unforgivable deficiency, and punctuate her remarks by throwing small articles of furniture at him. She raised enough racket several times for neighbors to call the police. If Fred was a lion in the apron factory, he was a mouse at home; Walburga was by, all odds the stronger personality of the two.

One day, when one of the sewing machines in the Oesterreich factory broke down, the third principal in our chronicle entered the scene—a seventeen-year-old youth by the name of Otto Sanhuber. Otto, who bore a striking resemblance to nobody in particular, was a wizened little fellow, not quite five feet tall, with rumpled brown hair, a receding chin, and watery blue eyes behind silver-rimmed glasses. He was so painfully shy that he blushed when a lady so much as spoke to him.

Just as Otto was completing his repair job, Mrs Oesterreich spied him. What Walburga saw in little Otto is a tribute to the woman’s powers of perception. Here was a nondescript youth, less than half the woman’s age, who had never gotten so much as a second glance from the girls down by the Milwaukee beer vats. Yet, Mrs Oesterreich saw in Otto exactly what she was searching for.

Mrs Oesterreich, the sly one, saw to it that there was plenty of repair work at the factory for the bashful youth. In a few months Otto had grown to like and trust her.

One day a sewing machine that Mrs Oesterreich kept in the master bedroom at home broke down, no doubt by design, and she asked her husband what she should do about it. “Why,” said Oesterreich, “get that kid to fix it—that kid who’s been coming around the factory.”

It was a raw autumn morning when little Otto called at the Oesterreich home. Mrs Oesterreich, who answered the door to the boy, was rouged to the ears, drenched in a bitchy perfume and, as it turned out, was wearing nothing but silk stockings, bedroom slippers and a fancy purple silk dressing gown.

Leading Otto to the bedroom, Mrs Oesterreich propped herself up on the bed while the boy addressed himself to the machine. As he labored, Otto got an occasional whiff of that perfume and, every once in a while, he would sneak a look at the voluptuous lady on the bed. Every time he looked it seemed that he saw less of the dressing gown and more of Mrs Oesterreich.

W-e-l-l, as the outrageous facts in the office of the District Attorney of Los Angeles County were one day to disclose, a situation such as that in the Oesterreich bedroom that autumn morning could progress in only one direction. And it sure as hell did. By the time Otto Sanhuber left the house late in the afternoon he and the lady more than twice his age had put an intrigue in motion.

Otto, as Mrs Oesterreich had so correctly divined, possessed the biological endowments that were the answer to a nymphomaniac’s prayer. He would have been worth a chapter all by himself in the good Doctor Kinsey’s
Sexual
Behavior
in
the
Human
Male
.

Things rocked along very nicely for the next three years, with Otto, who still kept his job with the sewing-machine company, sneaking into the Oesterreich home when Mrs Oesterreich made one excuse or another to be absent from her duties at the apron factory. Mrs. Oesterreich couldn’t have been happier.

Somehow or other, probably through a neighbor, Fred Oesterreich got wind of the fact that his wife was receiving a visitor on those days she was not at the factory. The apron magnate questioned his wife and she, looking him straight in the eyes, assured him that there was nothing to the story.

Mrs Oesterreich, fearful of discovery, was nonetheless reluctant to let go of little Otto, now that she had found him so she hit upon an inspired plan. She decided to have Otto move into the Oesterreich home, without her husband knowing it, as a permanent guest.