Palisades Rathouse: Unchallenged by Health Officials, Elderly Twins Fed Local Vermin Population

Before long, the clues pointed next door — to 1018 Fiske, a Spanish Colonial–inspired stucco. “You start to realize that, as you go to that property, ‘Wait a minute. Something isn’t right here,’” says Scott. He hadn’t paid much attention to the house next door. But now, he noticed, “You couldn’t see in any of the windows. I don’t know if it was tarp, but it wasn’t just curtains. It was blacked out. You couldn’t see in the house. The front door was rotted.”

When he crept closer,the odor — “a urine stench” — was “unbearable.” By the end of their first long weekend in the Palisades, Liz was stressed out, peering at shadows. The more she peered, the more rats she saw. Standing in her own master bedroom, she found herself at eye level with a group of rats who clearly had a routine, slipping methodically in and out of drains and cracks on her neighbors’ outside wall.

Ted Soqui

“Whoa! That’s something a person doesn’t forget.” —Rat Busters' Louis Rico

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She saw three rats squeeze out of a roof drain in a precision, shoulder-to-shoulder group, Ratatouille-style. Another rat pack traveled along the dusty, reeking hedge on the property line. The hedge was a rat highway, and it swayed under its commuters’ weight.

Liz knocked on her neighbors’ rotting front door, but no one answered. They soon learned from other neighbors that the owners were 78-year-old twins Margaret and Marjorie Barthel, who rarely left the house — and never at the same time. When one of them did go out (and many people could not tell them apart), she wore heavy clothes, a wide-brimmed hat and large glasses as she pushed a shopping basket from Ralphs. It was always filled with large bags — of dog food. They haven’t owned dogs for years.

For Tom Hofer, who grew up one house away during the 1960s and ’70s, the house holds a special, scary place in his childhood memories. “That was the house that you just didn’t walk up to on Halloween,” he says.

Siegrid Hofer — Tom’s mother, still lives there and is used to holding her nose as she walks past the stench. “At one time,” Siegrid tells the Weekly, “they had dozens of dogs and cats in their house. Now, they consider rats pets.”

Neither Barthel sister returned repeated calls from the Weekly. All quotes from the sisters in this article are from recent court depositions. As best as can be surmised, the Barthels’ unhealthy love for animals can be traced to their poor childhood in Michigan. In court documents, Marjorie recalls one significant event when the family dog ate a roast her mother was cooking on the back porch. The next day, the dog “repaid” the poor family with a pheasant it caught.

As adults, at least on the surface, they seemed to have lived normal lives. Marjorie worked for 20-plus years as a manager at Southern California Edison and volunteered for the Gloria Gray Pet Haven Show, which gave her access to a constant stream of animals in need, and many of them ended up at 1018 Fiske. Margaret was a longtime Redondo Beach schoolteacher.

After a neighbor, George Kunz, continually complained about their owning at least 10 cats and five dogs, the sisters moved away from the Palisades in 1983 to a 20-acre parcel in Santa Ynez. Marjorie became a full-time steward of their new “wildlife sanctuary” while Margaret kept teaching, supporting her sister and the menagerie at Santa Ynez. But in 2002, the two sisters returned to the Palisades, and feeding feral animals, including rats, became an obsession.

By Monday morning, their fourth day on Fiske, the Denhams had heard only bits of this story. But it was enough. The moment Los Angeles County government opened for business that day, the Denhams were on the phone to the Vector Management Program, a smalldivision of Public Health, a $2 billion agency. When Liz Denham finally reached a live person, she was hysterical: The kids can’t play outside. Rats are all over the neighbors’ house. We’re scared. Please help us.

The response from health bureaucrats, says Scott, was apathy. “They basically said, ‘Yeah, we’ll be out there — within the next two weeks.” But Scott had been on the county Public Health Department Web site, which warns that rats carry plague and typhus and can infect humans with either, through bites or fleas, or contact with their urine, feces or nests. In fact, in 2006, the department caught a rodent carrying the bubonic plague. In large red letters, the county Web site warns parents to keep children away from dead rats.

Louis Rico, owner of Rat Busters, arrived the very next day, Tuesday, and he didn’t exactly need a Thomas Guide or GPS to find his way. Rico had, he admitted to the Denhams, worked for the previous owner, Natalie Garner, in 2005, soon after she moved in. What the exterminator told them gave them pause:The Denhams shouldn’t expect cooperation from the two ladies next door.

Rico has spent a quarter-century killing undesirable domestic animals throughout Los Angeles. Eight years ago, he decided to specialize where the real money is: killing rats and mice in mostly expensive spots like the Palisades, Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks, which all share characteristics rodents love. They are close to the hills, offer thick vegetation and easy access to water, and come with house pets whose food rodents pilfer. But of all these areas, the Palisades is among the most alluring to rats, he says. It’s lush, and its garbage cans are brimming.