The Haunting Death of Olive Thomas
A century ago, Olive Thomas was a rising star of stage and screen renowned for her beauty. Today, she is famous for the tragic circumstances surrounding her death.
6 min readOct 4, 2019
A ROUGH START
Oliva R Duffey was born on October 20, 1894, to James and Rena Duffey in Charleroi, Pennsylvania. After the death of her father in, 15-year-old Olive left school to help her mother support her two younger brothers in 1909. She found employment at Joseph Horne’s Department Store in Pittsburgh, where she earned $2.75 a week selling gingham.
Olive married Bernard Krug Thomas in 1911. She was just 16 years old. Around this time, Olive left to visit an aunt in New York and decided never to return to her husband. She did, however, retain his name.
Initially, Olive took another clerk job at a department store in Harlem. But this sort of existence could not satisfy her wild spirit.
