Katherine “Toni” Oppenheimer (1944-1977) was an American translator and the daughter of J. Robert Oppenheimer

Toni Oppenheimer was one of the many children born at Los Alamos. When J. Robert Oppenheimer became the Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Oppenheimer family moved with him to New Jersey. Toni was 3 years old at the time.

A few years later, she was enrolled at Miss Fine’s School in Princeton, where she was an exemplary student. She was a shy girl who was admired for her level-headedness. That emotional maturity made her the rock of a household that was frequently unstable.

How did Katherine ‘Toni’ Oppenheimer commit suicide?

After her parents’ deaths, Toni inherited the St. John beach house and moved to the island around 1973. She married and divorced a local musician and ran a Cruz Bay restaurant called The Out. Toni was only 32 years old when she committed suicide; her ex-husband found her hanging from a beam in her family beach house in 1977.

Toni had been active in community events on St. John and left her family land to the people of the island. The land was officially deeded to the government of the Virgin Islands in 1980 and was originally neglected. The structure was vandalized and strewn with graffiti when it was finally destroyed during a hurricane.

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