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

After two or three weeks of knocking on the Barthels’ rotting door and calling them constantly, Liz finally spoke with the sister seen as the leader, Margaret, by phone. The two warring neighbors have very different accounts of what was said. But Scott recalls that it “led to the point of Liz saying, ‘If you guys don’t get rid of the rats, then we’re going to file a lawsuit, because we have no choice.’” Then, “Margaret said something to the effect of ‘Don’t bother because we’re just going to sell the house and get out of here.’”

But Barthel family friend Rene Robinson, who became their ambassador to the outside, says Liz Denham had scared the helpless sisters by threatening lawsuits, county inspections and publicity. Margaret, a former Redondo schoolteacher, is “extremely sensitive” to publicity — a fact, according to Robinson, that the Denhams were willing to exploit. Scott even videotaped the rats and posted the amateurish but skin-crawling images on YouTube.

Illustration by Chris Rahn

Max Taves

Horror house: The day the mop-up man arrived, exterminators removed multiple bags of dead rats.

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In an e-mail to Robinson, Liz clearly played hardball, threatening actions that had no hope of success:

“The article [in the Palisadian-Post] WILL print this Thursday. It is going to name their names, address and will have pictures. I will be working tirelessly to get inside that house via the Health Department, City Attorney and Building and Safety — who will at that point potentially red-tag and obviously shut down [Margaret’s nonpermitted guesthouse]. This could all obviously be avoided should they sell but if not — we will stop at nothing to solve this problem, which according to Margaret has been going on since 1984. This is simply a battle they can NOT win.”

The posturing had its effect, says Robinson. “[The sisters] were seriously believing everything these women [Liz Denham and her real estate agent, Elizabeth Stein] were saying as far as red-tagging their house and [that] they[’d] be thrown out and they’d have to leave.”

Robinson alleges that Liz, focused on the threat to 4-year-old Alex and newborn Sage, “had told me she didn’t care if — and these are her words — she didn’t care if, when they tore the house down, if the ladies were inside it or not.” Robinson calls this a “real case of elder abuse.”

The Denhams deny Robinson’s claim but acknowledge that the twins’ unwillingness to kill the rats left them unnerved, frantic and angry. Consensually or not, the Barthels decided to sell, and, oddly, they used the Denhams’ agent, Elizabeth Stein — with stipulations: When Stein had documents for the sisters to sign, she was to knock on their decayed front door and slip the paperwork underneath. Sometimes, Stein said, she would deliver papers under the door, drive around the block, knock, and signed paperwork would come sliding back out.

“My conversations with them have been enormously bizarre,” Stein told the Weekly. “They’re mentally ill. ... You wouldn’t believe the things they’ve told me — like, ‘Your children will rise up and kill you!’”

Marjorie herself has been happy, during court proceedings, to relate disquieting things she’s said to Stein: “I asked her if she was Jewish. ... I preached the Gospel for one half hour. ... After I spoke and preached the Gospel, the lord preaching it through me, her attitude completely changed.” One day, when Scott asked whether the sisters were afraid of being attacked by rats, Marjorie replied, “No, I have the blood of Jesus on my house every night.”

Even if Jesus isn’t on the case, the sisters have faced little threat from authorities. For ignoring the law, county health-code section 8.04.705 assesses only “a fee up to $285.00.” When inspectors Okohira and Malaguit returned in early November last year, the sisters didn’t even bother stepping outside.

As the egregiously ineffective inspectors knocked on the front and side doors and called out the sisters’ names, records show, they could hear the sisters moving around inside. As they peered in the window, the inspectors saw a rat — right at home inside the Barthel home. Yet it would take another week — and a second sighting inside — before the county Health Services Department thought to call the county’s Adult Protective Services. Even then, records show, the listless Inspector Okohira didn’t send the required report to Protective Services for a full week.

It’s hard to imagine a case more appropriate for Adult Protective Services than two elderly women drowning in biblical prophecy who live with packs of probably diseased rats. Yet there’s no record that Adult Protective Services ever sent anyone, even when City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo’s office finally — and ineffectively — stepped in.

Eventually, Barthel family friend Robinson and her husband came with chain saws one day. They cut down large, overgrown, rat-friendly thickets of birds of paradise, and, Robinson admits to the Weekly, “It was bad. It was infested.”

According to the meager records that portray only a fraction of what unfolded, county inspectors returned a week later and saw another rat through the window. Margaret refused to allow the inspectors, who had no search warrant, inside. The resulting county health report was a testament to how poorly the county dealt with the unchecked rat boom: Neither inspector knew the rats had chewed through the wood floors of the kitchen, living room and bedroom, allowing themselves free rein from a basement crawling with them, as the Weekly learned from court documents.