1934-1935

Today, 80 years later, the circumstances of actress Thelma Todd’s death remain a mystery, and the case still is one of Hollywood’s infamous unsolveds.

A deep cover-up precluded the truth about the incident from surfacing. On December 16, 1935, the famous, 29-year-old blonde was found dead in her garage, her beaten, slumped body behind the wheel of her brown phaeton. The cause of her death was ruled accidental carbon monoxide poisoning from her car’s engine.

One theory behind the fatal event, however, purported in the book, Hot Toddy, is that the powerful Mafioso, Charles “Lucky” Luciano, had her murdered. He wasn’t just a low-level syndicate soldier. He was a boss, the first official head of the modern Genovese crime family, and made his mark in New York by splitting the city into five such dynasties. Meyer Lansky and Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel were associates.

Luciano and Hot Toddy, as friends nicknamed her in her youth, began a casual relationship that evolved into a sexual dalliance by 1934. That year, the actress and her friend and neighbor, Roland West, opened a restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Café.

Exploitive Ulterior Motive

Luciano wanted to lease the top floor of her eatery to run a gambling club there, where he believed the wealthy Hollywood stars who frequented her café would spend lots of money. At the time, only poker and other player-against-player card games and horse race betting were legal in California. He sensed the strong-willed Todd wouldn’t permit it, so he employed devious tactics to get her to comply.

Luciano sent some of his goons to torment and wear down West, who managed the restaurant. They forced him to change vendors to those controlled by the mob and siphoned money from the business. As for Todd, Luciano got her addicted to speed, hoping it would make her submissive and willing to do whatever he wanted.

Over time, Charley Lucifer, as he was sometimes called, realized Todd was not a pushover, and she learned more and more about his underworld dealings. Their relationship deteriorated, and they saw each other less and less. Eventually, Todd started dating a businessman from San Francisco with whom she was infatuated.

Meanwhile, Luciano’s underworld nemesis in town, Frank Nitti, threatened to horn in on his interests — prostitution, gambling and drugs. Already, Nitti had shut him out of his shakedown of the movie industry after agreeing to include him. Consequently, to maintain an empire in Los Angeles, Luciano believed he needed Todd’s café more than ever.

He approached her with his plan. Despite knowing that refusing Luciano of anything could, and likely would, get her killed, she said no. For that, he saw her as a problem. He tried to persuade her to change her mind by other means, like having menacing men sit in the restaurant all day every day. Around Thanksgiving in 1935, he again pressured her face to face, to no avail.

“Toddy later told friends Luciano had wrangled with her all night about giving him the storage room for gambling,” wrote Andy Edmonds, the author of Hot Toddy. “He was insistent and vowed he would not walk away without the papers. They had argued violently in the car, Thelma refusing to give Luciano what he wanted.”

Luciano informed her that as of January 1, 1936, he’d be operating a gambling club on the third floor of her restaurant despite her protests.

Todd, though, remained resolute in her refusal to allow it. To thwart his plan, she turned the space into a steakhouse and opened it before he could move in.

The Slippery Slope

In early December, she called the Los Angeles district attorney’s office to relay what she knew about Luciano’s underhanded dealings and connections to other mobsters. She didn’t tell the person who’d answered the phone what her business was, only that she wanted an appointment to speak to the D.A. Little did she know that he was under Luciano’s control and that Luciano had an informant in the office.

In mid-December, Luciano insisted she go to dinner with him. She said no, but he forced her to join him. He took her to a secluded home where he grilled her about her knowledge of his “business” and what she’d told the D.A.’s office. She tried denying she knew anything, but Luciano knew better, became enraged and slapped her hard.

Todd spilled it all. Then figuring she was as good as dead, she purposefully provoked his fears of getting arrested for past actions and losing his foothold in the City of Angels. She claimed she’d hidden evidence, including photos, of his underworld operations and that she’d snitched on him to the FBI — both of which were bluffs.

Irate, Luciano made a phone call, in which he supposedly ordered a hit on Todd, drove her to a Christmas tree lot at her request where she picked out a tree then dropped her off at her home around midnight.

In the morning, her maid discovered her dead in the garage. Luciano left Los Angeles later in the day and never returned.

Sources

Casinos at Lake Tahoe in Stateline, Nevada, decades later, in 2008

1958-1959

Clarence Thayer grew ill with flu-like symptoms on Thanksgiving Day in 1958 while visiting his sister in Oakland, California. He was a well drilling contractor who lived in South Lake Tahoe. He and his wife Norma also owned a dry cleaning business that adjoined their home, which she ran and where he sometimes worked.

After an Oakland physician treated the 38 year old, he and his wife returned home. Soon after, he again got sick and sought care locally. When he failed to improve, he was admitted to Carson City Hospital, where he grew worse. He then was transferred to the Veterans Hospital in Reno, where he died on December 10 from what his physicians had diagnosed as pneumonia.

His mother, Lillie Thayer, requested an autopsy be done, and his widow agreed. That examination revealed the deceased’s kidney, liver and brain to be saturated with arsenic! Thus, the forensic toxicologist determined cause of death to be poisoning in small quantities over an extensive time period.

Toxic Source Found

El Dorado County Sheriff Ernest Carlson began an investigation and, early on, ruled out suicide. He administered polygraph tests to all persons of interest.

In interviewing Thayer’s mom Lillie, a 76-year-old former registered nurse, he learned she’d suspected her son was being poisoned for some time and that’s why she requested the autopsy. In separate conversations, she’d shared her suspicion with Norma who “didn’t say anything” and Thayer (Oakland Tribune, Jan. 4, 1959).

Carlson discovered Thayer never had told any of his treating physicians about the poisoning possibility, and it’s unclear why he hadn’t. He had, though, complained to a Lake Tahoe doctor as much as a year earlier about symptoms like the ones that resulted in his death.

In the Thayers’ dry cleaning establishment, Carlson found a few bottles and one mysterious Mason jar containing cherry soda and some jars of root beer concentrate — all tainted with arsenic.

More Details Emerge

During a lie detector test, the housekeeper, Mary Dalhoff, admitted to having taken about 15 bottles of the cherry soda to the dry cleaning business and placing them in the storage room. As far as she knew, she said, they were unadulterated at the time. She’d obtained them from the casino bar at Harrah’s Lake Tahoe, in Stateline, Nevada, on the south shore.

She denied knowing anything about the Mason jar or the concentrate. The results of Dahloff and her husband’s polygraph exams were “satisfactory” (Reno Evening Gazette, Jan. 26, 1959).

During Norma’s lie detector test, she said she’d moved the soda to keep it from freezing and after doing so, had seen her husband drink bottles of it from time to time.  

While the news media never reported the outcomes of widow Norma and mother Lillie’s polygraphs, presumably they showed no deception or were inconclusive because no arrests were made … ever.

The case went cold.

Sources

Photo from Wikimedia Commons: by Constantine Kulikovsky