Missing California Millionaire Thelma Gaston Identified 45 Years After Her Disappearance
Share
Thelma Jeanette Gaston had lived a life filled with both success and tragedy. She was a businesswoman and real-estate investor-a career path that led her to become a self-made millionaire following the loss of her husband and only child in 1957.
By the 1970s, she was a big player with a large real-estate portfolio in Los Angeles and resided in the Century City area-a significant accomplishment for a woman of her generation.
In the late 1970s, when Gaston was approaching her eighties, she became acquainted with a salesman decades her junior named Lawrence Remsen.
In the summer of 1981, now 80 years old, Gaston disappeared from her Century City home without a trace. Left behind was a note stuck to her door that said she had gone out to look for her lost cat. Disappearing like this was unusual for Gaston, and the note she left behind did not seem like it was penned by the hand of the self-made millionaire. Neither Gaston nor her cat were seen again.
The authorities began investigating her disappearance and quickly turned their suspicions toward Remsen.
Police alleged that Remsen forged several letters, one of which informed a prospective buyer who was looking to buy a piece of land worth $4 million, that Gaston was supposedly allowing Remsen to control her funds while she "had some fun." The letter, investigators said, was penned by Remsen and stated: "I am changing my life," "everyone is after my money," and "I'm going to have fun and nobody is going to stop me."
According to police records, following Gaston's disappearance, Remsen attempted to sell off Gaston's land and purchase a Rolls-Royce.
Gaston's nephew, John Mittrick, a lawyer and the executor of her estate, said the letters were completely out of character for his aunt. He claimed Gaston had left half of her estate to his daughters in an unwitnessed will written the previous summer. The will, he said, had been stolen a month later along with his briefcase.
An official will dated 1979 named Mittrick as the executor and promised much of the estate to his daughters. A 1980 handwritten copy, locked in Gaston's desk in her home, featured the same handwritten will with Mittrick's daughters crossed out- a change Mittrick claimed was made by Remsen. An earlier official will, dated 1962, promised Gaston's fortune to her sister.
According to an article published in The Sacramento Union on October 18, 1981, Larry Remsen, then 39, was arrested on September 22 while crossing the border from Mexico into Eagle Pass, Texas. The article states that he was charged with first-degree murder, six counts of forgery, and four counts of grand theft.
Although there was no body, prosecutors charged Lawrence Remsen with Gaston's murder, and the case went to trial.
Sgt. Glen Varner, a homicide detective on the case at the time, said Gaston and Remsen had become friends around three years before she went missing. Varner added that, according to the victim’s friends, a romance had developed between the pair and that they had gone on a trip to Las Vegas at one point. He said there was evidence that Remsen had forged a power of attorney form so he could access Gaston's fortune. Records showed that he had transferred $20,000 of Gaston's money to a bank in the Cayman Islands.
Remsen denied murdering Gaston, claiming instead that she died in her home of natural causes, and that instead of contacting emergency services, he decided to dispose of her body. He claimed he threw her body into the ocean and acted as though she was still alive so he could gain access to her assets.
He was ultimately convicted of second-degree murder in 1983.
Although investigators were unaware at the time, Gaston's body had been discovered on November 28, 1981, by a civilian collecting firewood in a mountainous area near Sugar Loaf Mountain. The severely decomposed remains were found in a shallow grave and, despite investigators' best efforts, remained unidentified for over 40 years.
In 2026, thanks to investigative genetic genealogy and the work of investigators with the Riverside Sheriff's Coroner's Bureau and the Riverside Cold Case Homicide Team, the remains were finally identified as those of missing millionaire Thelma Jeanette Gaston-revealing that the answer to a 45-year-old mystery had been sitting unidentified in police records all along.
