“This is an extremely simple request”
It began with phone calls. Persistent, repetitive calls with an odd objective, one those on the receiving end had no interest in considering. In March 1969, Rose Weisel began receiving a series of strange calls at her home in Los Angeles from an unidentified man. The man wanted to know if her husband was at home and if he ever worked for Arden’s Dairy. He called again, asking if her husband had worked as a milkman in early 1965. When she asked why he wanted to know this, the man explained he had a son that he believed was not his own and that her husband had been their milkman at the time he wife had become pregnant. She responded that this was sick and ridiculous and that he should seek help from a psychiatrist instead of harassing them. She asked if he had ever sought a blood test to prove paternity; he replied the tests did not prove anything. She asked how he had discovered their unlisted phone number. He had ways of doing so, he replied.
The calls continued daily for over a week. She began to notice cars driving around the block and parking across the street from their house; she suspected this had something to do with the calls. Her husband Herbert was away from home for much of this, working swing shifts until late at night. Some calls lasted as long as 10 minutes; the man was talkative and asked very precise questions. “You’re a very nice lady,” the man said to Rose. “I like to talk to you.” Fearing for the safety of their five-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son, the Weisels requested that the school only release their children to them, which was noted in the school’s records. The Weisels started picking them up from school each day.
Herbert Weisel, mistakenly believing his former employer had given out his phone number to this strange man, angrily wrote with certainty to the company on March 24: “Recently, my wife and I have been receiving harassing phone calls from an anonymous male caller stating that he used to be a customer on my route back in 1965. Since we have an unlisted phone, it is quite obvious that he received our phone number from your office and should we continue to receive any further such calls, we will be obliged to turn this matter over to our attorney. We hold your company responsible for divulging this information without our consent.”
The Weisels changed their unlisted number. They soon learned the man knew their address. Having lost the ability to communicate by phone, the man sent them an anonymous letter, postmarked March 28, that read in full:
Dear Mr. Weisel,
When I first spoke to you, you volunteered the statement that I could look at your records at Arden to verify that your leaving work there was unrelated to my wife’s pregnancy. Now that I’ve accepted your offer, you refuse to grant me permission and won’t even talk to me. This is an extremely simple request I’ve made and your lack of cooperation magnifies everything beyond proportion. As I told you, I am not accusing you of anything. And I am not accusing my wife of anything. She’s never done anything which could arouse my suspicions in any way whatsoever. If I had to bet every penny I have, I’d bet everything was okay. The possibility of anything being wrong is one-one hundredth of one per cent. And I was just trying to eliminate that one-one hundredth of one percent. If anything, you should feel sorry for me. There’s no indication that you even know my wife or have even seen her. But at the time of her accidental pregnancy, you quit work around the same time. It’s comical in one sense, with all the jokes about milkman. [sic] If this had happened to you, you probably would never have even given it a thought… But it takes all types of people to make up this world, and I unfortunately gave it a thought, although, a very, very small one. In any event, now that you refuse to let me look at your records at Arden, I naturally am more suspicious and the thought enters my mind that if you had nothing to hide, why would you care if I looked at your records? Why you wouldn’t want to give me complete peace of mind, and why you would want someone to have the faintest suspicions about you, I don’t know.
Your wife sounded like a very thoughtful, understanding person the first time I spoke to her, and I was very impressed with her. I didn’t expect her to hang up on me later. I’ll call again in a few days. I’ll expect you to show me the courtesy of talking to me and letting me look at the Arden records so that this ridiculous (I realize it’s as ridiculous as you do) matter can be cleared up. Thank you for your anticipated cooperation. If someone asked me to do the simple thing I’m now asking you to do, I wouldn’t even hesitate. I’d be happy to help the person out.
Sufficiently disturbed, Mr. Weisel phoned a cousin who worked as a lawyer and sent him the letter and the envelope, which bore the postmark of Los Angeles. This action accomplished little, with the harasser’s identity still a mystery.
Workplace Harassment
“You must be pretty crazy to think I’d have an affair with your wife or anyone else’s on the route!” Herbert furiously yelled at the man who now had the audacity to visit him at his new place of work, a technology company called Tasker Instruments. It was May 12 and Herbert had been summoned on the building’s PA system to meet a “neatly dressed man” who asked to speak to him outside, requesting his written authorization to gain access to Herbert’s work records at Arden Dairy. Herbert asked the man who he was and he refused to identify himself. Was he accusing Herbert of adultery? “That’s why I want to check the records,” the man replied, reiterating his request. Herbert became enraged: “I’m married with two children. I’ve never even seen your wife…You better get out of here before I deck you,” Herbert warned. The man promptly left.
The following day, Herbert phoned Arden Dairy and learned that someone had tried to obtain his work records and that his unwelcome visitor had “grilled” the security guard for details on Herbert before their encounter. After consulting with his lawyer, Herbert and a friend named Rod devised a scheme to reveal the identity of his harasser. Herbert told the man to meet him the next day at his workplace and promised that he would provide the man with the authorization he sought. Once they met again, Herbert instead handed the man a blank piece of paper with his lawyer’s business card folded inside, telling him to talk to his lawyer and asked him to stop jeopardizing his career by bothering him at work. As the man left, Rod followed him and wrote down the license plate number of the white Volkswagen the man drove. Herbert gave this information to his lawyer who promised to look it up through the DMV. The Weisels were finally on the path to discover who was relentlessly pursuing this “simple request” to invade their privacy.
Meet the Wife
Another day, another unwanted visit, this time at the Weisels’ home. The very next morning after their plan to identify the man had been put into motion, a woman showed up and tapped Rose on the shoulder while she was watering plants in their front yard. She explained that she was the wife of the man who had been bothering them and was invited inside to talk. Mr. Weisel saw a woman enter through the front door he described as 5’5” tall with short brown hair, wearing a plain housedress, and not wearing makeup. She was sorry for what her husband had been putting them through, she told them, but he was obsessed with the idea that his son was not his own, despite the child being “the spitting image” of her husband. The Weisels asked again about blood tests; they had taken them, the wife admitted, but her husband still doubted his paternity. Had he gone to see a psychiatrist as Rose had suggested? She had been trying to convince him to do this for a long time, the woman replied, but he consistently refused to seek help. “I know he’s sick,” the woman conceded. “He’s got a mental problem. The next thing he’ll do is check on the Fuller Brush man and every other salesman who came to the house.” She admitted she had never even seen Herbert before, had never been with another man, worked during the day, and had neither the time nor the interest in having an affair because of her love for her husband.
“Why did you come to our home?” Rose asked. The woman repeated her husband’s plea that they accede to his request for Herbert’s work records. “Maybe that will satisfy him,” she offered. Rose responded in anger: “I am sick and tired of all this.” She explained how the woman’s husband was making their lives miserable, forcing them to keep their children close out of fear for their safety, that they now picked them up directly from school as a precautionary measure, and that they had no intentions of granting any permission to such a person. “After the hell your husband has put us through, I’m not about to do anything for him,” Rose said. He was a not a dangerous man, the wife responded. Rose indicated that any man who denied his child and accused his own wife in this manner, was indeed capable of harming the person he seemingly believed to be the true father of his child. Rose now expressed her frustration with the woman having come to their home, threatening to go to the District Attorney to put a stop to the harassment. At this point, the woman became pale and began to cry. She did not want this to become public, she said, and did not want her friends to learn about this issue with her husband. Rose asked why she continued to live with a man who accused her of adultery. “Your husband better not show his face around our house,” Rose admonished. “If you’re living with a man like that, you deserve him.”
Herbert left the conversation to pick up his daughter at school. Driving around the corner, Herbert noticed a light-colored Volkswagen parked on the street. He recognized the man sitting in the car as their harasser, who was waiting patiently as his wife tried to succeed where he had failed. “Hi, Herb!” called out the man, waving to Herbert as he drove by.
Upon returning home, Herbert watched the harasser’s wife leave and he swiftly phoned his lawyer to describe the recent events. “We should go all out and sue these people,” the lawyer responded. Later that afternoon, the lawyer was visited by the mysterious couple, who offered to pay the Weisels $100 (worth $800 today) to drop the matter. Insulted, Herbert responded that he could not believe his lawyer’s abrupt reversal within a few hours. “I won’t consider any such offer after what that man has put us through!” he told the lawyer as he slammed down the phone.
Herbert did learn one valuable piece of information: the man’s name. He checked, and his harasser had been on his milk route back in 1965. The man’s house was in Glendale, about a 30-minute drive from the Weisels’ home in Lake View Terrace, a suburb of Los Angeles. It mattered little to the Weisels any longer who the man was. They were prepared to forget, chalking up the encounters to a “very bad experience.”
It was not until later the following year that Herbert’s memory was stirred by the sight of someone on television. He called Rose into the room, expressing with disbelief: “That’s the man who harassed us.” It turned out the man was not only a Deputy District Attorney, he was also the lead prosecutor for the highest profile murder trial of the decade. The story only became more disturbing after this point.
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