Who Killed Thelma Todd? Details Surrounding Her Mysterious Death After ‘She Was Threatened’

In 1934, Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café became the place to be seen on Los Angeles’ Pacific Coast Highway. Housed in a beautiful Spanish-style building, it encompassed a fine dining restaurant serving lobster and oysters, a ballroom with a bandstand, and a private nightclub called Joya’s, where the namesake star and co-owner would throw frequent parties.

Thelma, a native of Massachusetts who arrived in Hollywood at 19, viewed the enterprise as her retirement plan. “Thelma enjoyed her career, and cared deeply about it, but she was savvy enough to know that Hollywood careers didn’t last forever,” explains Michelle Morgan, author of The Ice Cream Blonde: The Whirlwind Life and Mysterious Death of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd. She hoped the café would provide “stability when she got older,” Morgan says.

Despite Thelma’s best efforts, it didn’t go that way. On December 16, 1935, her body was discovered behind the wheel of her Lincoln convertible parked in the garage of her sometime lover. Her death by carbon monoxide poisoning was initially ruled a suicide but later reclassified by a grand jury as “accidental.” “Hollywood didn’t want another celebrity murder on their hands,” explains Morgan. “It was much easier for everyone to just dismiss it.”

There were several people who wanted Thelma silenced. “When she began running the café, gangsters based in Los Angeles saw it as a good opportunity to run gambling tables there,” says Morgan. “Thelma wanted nothing to do with this side of the business, and as a result she was threatened. She also received bizarre letters from someone who threatened her life on numerous occasions.”

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The Details Surrounding Thelma Todd’s Mysterious Death

On December 14, Thelma attended a party thrown in her honor at the Trocadero restaurant by Stanley Lupino and his daughter, Ida. She appeared in high spirits, despite a brief spat with her ex-husband, Pat DiCicco, at the venue. “She was a beautiful soul,” says Morgan, who describes Thelma as outspoken and generous. “She was always ready to help someone in need.” Thelma also loved a party, so when her married lover and café co-owner, director Roland West, said he was headed home, Thelma opted to remain.

Her chauffeur dropped her off at the apartment she shared with West at around 4 a.m., only to find the door locked. Clad in a thin evening gown, she is thought to have climbed 270 stairs up the palisades to where her car was parked in a garage. Investigators speculated that Thelma turned on the car to keep warm and died of asphyxiation — but not everyone is convinced. West “locked the door of her apartment,” says Morgan. “This has always been seen as a strange move on his part, especially when he slept through her trying to get inside.”

The mobsters Thelma defied by not allowing gambling in her café had reason to want her dead. “I think she was murdered,” says Morgan. “There were too many threats, too many stories of gangsters pestering her, and too many questions as to why on earth Thelma would want to walk up a large hill in the middle of the night, to fall asleep in a garage.”