An ‘O.J.’ to Call Our Own

Every little town has its mansion on the hill, the baronial castle that towers over the bungalows and three-bedroom ranchers. In this shady village, east of San Francisco, the big house is a two-story brick colonial, complete with pool, stable and equestrian arena. It belonged to the late Dean Lesher, publisher of the Contra Costa Times and dozens of smaller newspapers.

Lesher died four years ago, leaving both house and newspaper “empire,” as the Contra Costa Times calls it, to his second wife, Margaret, a former Texas beauty queen. She eventually sold the business for $360 million, but kept the estate and remained a philanthropic force and society bright light--the “Jackie” of suburban Contra Costa County, as she would be called two weeks ago, at her funeral.

Now as it happens, the Lesher estate is located just around the corner from my own three-bedroom rancher, and so this telling of a mysterious death that more than one neighbor has described as “Orinda’s O.J.” can open with a personal vignette. One day last winter my daughter and I pedaled our bikes past the Lesher estate and spotted something strange. A cowboy dressed in an American flag shirt was spurring a buffalo across the big corral out front.

“Howdy,” he said, after we stopped to watch.

He was a handsome, chatty fellow, who spoke with a Western twang. He told us all about the slobbering buffalo, named Harvey, about how often he had appeared in television commercials and state fairs and even movies. Grinning, the buffalo rider also volunteered something about himself: He had secretly married Margaret Lesher. “Gonna be announced there in the paper tomorrow,” he said, and sure enough it was.

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The groom was T.C. Thorstenson, who at 39 was a quarter-century younger than his wealthy bride. In the wedding announcement, they anticipated a life of travel and adventure. A month or so later, the Contra Costa Times ran a big spread on the many ways to cook buffalo meat. It made me wonder if the former Mrs. Dean Lesher still held some sway over the food section, and if so, what this feature might portend for the marriage.

Such bemused speculation was supplanted by a darker mystery May 15. Lesher, it was reported, had been found dead in an Arizona lake. Thorstenson said he had awakened in their campsite at 3:30 a.m. and discovered that both his wife and his speedboat were missing. The body turned up the next day, in nine feet of water, 25 feet offshore. The boat, key in the ignition, tank full of gas, had drifted across the lake.

She was clad only in her underwear; her jeans and sweater were discovered on the boat. Thorstenson told a Contra Costa Times reporter that she had sipped a couple glasses of champagne before bed. He speculated that she woke up, noticed the boat adrift, and tried to swim out to retrieve it. Their marriage, he added, had been fine; in fact she was a “happy camper.”

He wore a black cowboy hat to the funeral, and the Contra Costa Times ran a front page picture of the cowboy softly kissing the corpse. That same day, the San Francisco Chronicle offered less sentimental reportage: Maricopa County detectives, it disclosed, were “evaluating” reports that an ex-wife on three occasions was beaten by Thorstenson, and that he had ended an engagement with a rich Arizona woman after she insisted on a prenuptial agreement. Subsequent reports indicated that Lesher, troubled that Thorstenson had not come clean about an ex-wife, had been contemplating a revision of her estate plan.

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There is little dignity in a tabloid death. Since her departure, the many foibles of Margaret Lesher have been on public display. Neighbors who knew her barely as the woman in the pearl white Humvee have learned posthumously about her plastic surgeries and her Prozac, her homophobia and her determined campaign to catch herself a “Christian cowboy.”

Last week the Maricopa County coroner declared the death an accident, but the detectives said their case is not closed. The same holds true in the neighborhood and throughout the county. “Did he do it?” is a conversational opener heard everywhere, no elaboration required. Backyards fairly buzz with forensic analysis.

While I hold my own with the back fence gumshoes, the shared fascination has begun to feel tawdry--just as the Simpson case eventually left Americans wondering how they had been sucked into something so depraved. What gives these lurid cases, I wonder, such gravitational pull? Is it class envy, morbid curiosity, the sexual subtext? Is it particular to these times, or part of timeless human behavior? I also wonder: How did Lesher’s clothes come to be on that boat if, in Thorstenson’s scenario, she drowned while swimming out to retrieve it?