Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde -

The lock on the journal was never picked. A 1932 attempt by a San Francisco locksmith failed; he reported “a mechanism unlike any I’ve seen, possibly European or custom-made.” In 1951, the journal was donated to the Huntington Library with a condition: it could not be opened without permission of the “Van Wylde literary estate” — which no one has successfully claimed since Julian died childless in 1944.

In April 1928, Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde drove a rented Pierce-Arrow from Los Angeles to the Mojave, telling her housekeeper she was “going to see what Julian was so scared of.” She brought a .22 caliber revolver, three changes of clothes, and a leather-bound journal with a brass lock. cubbi thompson van wylde

Cubbi — born Cordelia Beatrice Thompson in 1899 to a Pittsburgh steel fortune — earned her nickname as a toddler when she couldn’t say “Cuddly” and called herself “Cubbi” instead. The name stuck. By eighteen, she had rejected debutante balls, bought a Stutz Bearcat with her own inheritance, and announced she was moving to New York to “write novels and make enemies of boring people.” The lock on the journal was never picked

She charmed jazz-age New York, vanished in the Mojave, and left behind a locked journal no one could open. If you’ve ever thumbed through a yellowed 1923 society page or squinted at a faded passenger manifest from the SS Majestic , you might have stumbled across a name that feels almost too peculiar to be real: Cubbi Thompson Van Wylde . Cubbi — born Cordelia Beatrice Thompson in 1899

But it’s what happened after the divorce that turns Cubbi from a footnote into a mystery.

Two weeks later, the car was found parked neatly off an unpaved road near Kelso Dunes, keys inside, tires full of air. The journal was on the passenger seat — still locked. No footprints led away from the car. No ransom note. No body.

In 1924, she married , an eccentric amateur archaeologist fifteen years her senior, who claimed to have found evidence of a lost Viking settlement in the Mojave Desert. The wedding lasted six months. The divorce lasted three years.