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

Fulfilling the aphorism “Location, location, location,” in spite of 1018 Fiske’s enormous problems, once the sisters put it on the market last November, it quickly attracted two prospective buyers, for an asking price of around $1.2 million. If the sisters seemed crazy, they were also shrewd: They asked that a developer interested in buying the property sign a contract, swearing that he would not testify in court about what he saw in the house, says Denham lawyer Barak Lurie.

By early December, however, the developer was too weirded out by the house, and pulled out. And the Barthels were visited by an angel. “You know why I didn’t sell the house?” recounts Margaret in her deposition. “I’ll tell you why. At the last minute, an angel appeared in the name of my nephew [Richard Otto], who said, ‘You want to stay here? I know what it means to you. I will take it over. I’ll pay it. I’ll get it done for you.’ And he did.”

Illustration by Chris Rahn

Max Taves

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

Related Content

• Awesome Twerk Video Means School Suspension for SoCal Kids
  May 2, 2013
• Beverly Hills Courthouse Closure Decried By Business; It's A Westside Legal Hub
  January 31, 2013
• Beverly Hills Jewelry Robbery Nets Whopping $1.43 Million Take
  January 29, 2013
• Now Open: SugarFish in Beverly Hills Bar Nozawa Coming Soon
  April 19, 2013
• Subway Route Under Beverly Hills Becomes An Issue In L.A. Mayor's Race
  January 4, 2013

More About

• Natalie Garner
• Rene Robinson
• Louis Rico
• Trials
• Civil Trials

Otto offered to front the extensive renovation costs if the sisters would sign papers transferring their $1.2 million property to a trust he would inherit once they died. The sisters say they took the offer, reluctantly. It was far more important to Marjorie and Margaret that they continue to do the lord’s work, hastening the second coming of Christ one rat at a time. Marjorie says shetold Liz, “If you’re afraid of a few rats, read the Book of Revelation.”

Nobody who knows the Barthels — not their nephew Jeff Luks, to whom the Weekly spoke, not friend Rene Robinson, not their former lawyer, Adam Rossman — can say what strain of Christianity they follow. Perhaps just a really paradoxical interpretation of the Though Shalt Not Kill commandment. (Paradoxical because the sisters aren’t vegetarians. They love chicken.)

“To ask them to kill animals is to ask them to do the worst possible thing you could do,” says Elizabeth Stein. Robinson tries to explain what the two women believe in sympathetic terms: “They really have a very strong feeling as far as all creatures are pretty much fair and have a right to live and exist. It’s their religious belief not to harm anything — God’s creatures.”

Naturally, the exterminator is less sympathetic. “I’m a Christian,” says Rico. “I go to church all the time, okay? People like that make us look bad. You know what I mean?”

“It sounds like animal hoarding,” says medical expert Dr. Emanuel Maidenberg, of UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine, 30 seconds into a conversation about the Barthels. “It’s a form of hoarding. Some people will collect unnecessary items of any kind, and some people will collect animals.” The psychiatrist and expert on obsessive-compulsive disorder isn’t diagnosing anybody, but the signs are there: Lots of animals. Legal problems with animals. And the “We’re protecting them” defense.

Veterinarian and epidemiologist Gary Patronek, who coined the term “animal hoarding” and pioneered research into the malady, says such women “are living in their own little world that they’ve constructed, and these animals are serving an important role in that world. ... These animals provide something very different than what they do for a typical pet owner.”

Lest there be any doubt, the Barthel sisters were using animals to fill their own voids. “I’ve never had children, never gotten married,” Marjorie says. “And they had been such a source of comfort. They’re a therapy. ... And it’s just their ... unconditional love, their savage loyalty and their sweet forgiveness are traits that human beings could really, really follow and adopt.”

The roof rat, or black rat, is the more agile cousin of the Norway rat, and its deftness is clearly on display in Denham’s YouTube video. “That group might be a family,” says Dirk Van Vuren, a wildlife biologist at UC Davis, while watching six well-fed rats scurrying around the Barthels’ home. Van Vuren narrates the action for the Weekly: The rats “want something to eat, and they’re not all going to fit in that house. They are somewhat territorial, and it could be time for them to disperse. It’s probably time to venture into the neighbor’s yard.”

The UC Davis biologist resists estimating how many extra rats the sisters’ activities have produced on the Westside, saying only that it’s been “well into the thousands,” just since 2002.

But scientists at the National Pest Management Association were willing to try. The number of wild rats the Barthels bred in one year— if they began with a single male and a single female — is, by the association’s calculations, 2,258. That number of rats would be capable of devouring 10,931 pounds of food and excreting 56,400 rat droppings.

But the sisters fed the rats for much longer than a year. They did so from the time they returned from Santa Ynez in 2002 until late 2007 — not to mention possible rat-feeding during the decades that Margaret continued teaching in Redondo to support their refuge in Santa Ynez.

Theoretically, during a second year, 2,258 rats in the Palisades could grow “a thousand-fold,” to more than two million rats, says Greg Baumann of the association. That’s only a mathematical figure, because the food needed to sustain two million rats would be impossibly huge, and cats were in the area.