by Walter Kirn
She asked her host about the disturbed earth and he told her it was the work of plumbers.
Farrar thought no more about the game night until 1994, when her husband saw a photo of Clark, or Chichester, on an episode of Unsolved Mysteries devoted to the Sohus case. John’s buried skeleton had just been found, and Robert Culp, the show’s host, was asking viewers for information about the missing boarder. Farrar called the police. How they handled her call, or any others they may have fielded after the program aired, is itself an unsolved mystery.
Bailey, a former prosecutor, attacked her credibility scattershot, an approach he would use throughout the trial, particularly with female witnesses. His questions were long and framed as skeptical summaries of Farrar’s previous statements to the authorities. He implied that her willingness to humor Clark in his seemingly preposterous claims about his noble pedigree stemmed from some base, ulterior motive—a desire for prestige by proximity, perhaps. He insinuated that she’d called the cops not to aid the cause of justice but to seek attention, to feel important. He hinted that her involvement in the case arose from her unfulfilled career ambitions as a journalist.
He accused her, that is—without coming out and saying it—of being a certain kind of woman: conceited, disingenuous, and dissatisfied. The universal misogynist caricature.
I’d never gone in for academic gender theories, but Bailey’s cross-examination strategy—with Farrar and other women to come—convinced me that the culture of criminal justice has a fundamentally masculine tilt. Repeatedly, in a manner that I suspected was typical in modern courtrooms, he portrayed the female mind as intrinsically unreliable, ruled by emotion, immune to logic, prone to pettiness, swayed by lust, and corrupted by vanity. It rarely spoke plainly. It was seldom candid. It was composed of layers of hidden agendas. It put up a front, behind which was another front. It either aimed to please or to conceal, which were often the same thing. The only way to get the truth from it was to push and prod until it snapped. Make it angry. Make it cry.
Farrar got angry. Steely, rather. A gate came down over her face. A short-haired woman with a confident bearing, she squared her shoulders, set her sturdy jaw, and deflected sally after sally from her needling, patronizing interrogator. Clark sat up extra straight to back his man. The words exchanged hardly mattered by this point; the match was chemical and primal. It was also subliminally symbolic. In his opening statement, Bailey had asked the jurors to close their eyes and imagine Linda Sohus—like Farrar, a solid specimen—striking her diminutive husband dead. A live display of flashing female ire might help them perform this desired mental exercise.
“Do you recall telling folks at the Los Angeles Times, when you saw this photograph of him, ‘That’s him, I know those beady eyes?’”
“That might have happened,” said Farrar, visibly suppressing her indignation at Bailey’s implied portrayal of her as a wicked busybody.
“It doesn’t sound very friendly, does it?”
“Well, this wasn’t the person I thought I knew, was it?”
“I have nothing further,” Bailey said.
He’d failed to drive home what seemed to be his point, that something about Clark provoked hysteria in a certain type of woman, and maybe this partly accounted for his being here, the victim of a witchy warlock hunt. Maybe next time. The witness was excused. It didn’t help the defense that a San Marino police officer who’d gotten up before Farrar described, in testimony that was later struck as hearsay, a report from a neighbor of the Sohus’s about Chichester burying something in the backyard.
I SUPPOSE THAT IF you can cut a man in three and store his remains in plastic for a time while devising some way to dispose of them more permanently, you can also drink iced tea and play a companionable board game near his grave. Though why would you want to? Dostoyevsky might know. Some guilty urge to confess without confessing or some arrogant urge to bring others to the scene and exult in their blindness to its meaning? Maybe Clark was testing his own nerve that day. If he could calmly answer trivia questions about old TV shows while sitting near a corpse, in range of the beating of its telltale heart, then nothing would ever rattle him again.
The problem of the Trivial Pursuit game, however, wasn’t as baffling as it seemed. It wasn’t even a psychological matter. It was literary, cinematic. I knew from several sources that my old friend was a fanatical lover of film noir (as Farrar’s doughnut remark had just confirmed) and a fan of Hitchcock in particular. He’d surely seen Rope, Hitchcock’s 1948 Technicolor reworking of the case of Leopold and Loeb, the wealthy young self-described Nietzschean “supermen” who sought to demonstrate their superior intellects by kidnapping and killing a Chicago boy in 1924. The card party was a straightforward homage to the movie’s protracted central scene.
I watched Rope that night on my computer while sitting on my deck in Malibu with heavy surf shaking the pilings of the building. The movie was the second selection of what I would later come to call the 2013 Clark Rockefeller Film Festival, a four-week event that finally taught me more about the defendant’s thinking than I was able to learn inside the courtroom. The first film I watched was Hitchcock’s version of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel, Strangers on a Train. It involved that anachronistic theme, a common one in the middle of the last century, before the culture’s hallmark homicides became mass slaughters by firearms in public places, of the “perfect murder.” Robert Walker plays Bruno, the mother-smothered creep, unctuous and sexually ambiguous in a manner not dissimilar to Clark, who throttles an acquaintance’s hated wife. The plot is an elegant contrivance, but what grabbed me was Walker’s sticky portrayal of the wheedling character, who was closer to Clark in affect and comportment than anyone I’d ever met in life.
Rope was a different story, with direct dramatic parallels to the Sohus murder. Brandon and Phillip, the killers, are friends from prep school who live together in a fine New York apartment glittering with crystal and antiques and blessed with a view of rooftops and office towers worthy of the Sky Club. They strangle a former classmate, David (an “inferior being” and the “perfect victim”) and stash his body in a wooden chest. Brandon sets two candelabras on the chest in preparation for a social evening that will include the victim’s fiancée and the headmaster of the boys’ old school (played by Jimmy Stewart) who introduced them to German nihilism.
“I always wished for more artistic talent,” Brandon, the sociopathic dandy, reflects before the gathering. “Well, murder can be an art too. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.” Phillip is less brave, and wonders aloud if they ought to cancel the party. Brandon will have none of it. “The party,” he says, “is the inspired finishing touch to our work. It’s the signature of the artist. Not to have it would be like painting a picture and not hanging it.”
Part Agatha Christie novel, part Noel Coward play, Rope confines itself to a single evening of uneasy, ironic, corpse-side chitchat. Brandon delights in the tension, but Phillip hates it, particularly after his old teacher reveals to the guests that he, Phillip, once amused himself by wringing the necks of live chickens. This detail froze me. At lunch with Girardot a few days earlier, I’d learned about a sex scandal dating back to the early 1980s and centered at the Episcopal church, St. James, where Clark first entered Pasadena society and befriended the priest. Girardot had covered the story for his paper, but suppressed its most horrifying aspect: the decapitation of poultry inside the church. As men from the church’s inner circle performed sex acts with immigrant laborers, they sprinkled themselves in fresh chicken blood. There was no proof that Clark played any role in this, but Girardot had his suspicions.
I finished watching Rope, got on the Internet, and researched the Leopold and Loeb case. Through the sliding glass doors of my apartment the moon-silvered ocean reared up in waves that broke across the sand and slid back down in sheets and lines of foam. I read that Loeb, the crime’s instigator and mastermind, had actually enrolled at the University of Chica
go at the same age that Clark had told me he’d entered Yale: fourteen. He’d been tutored by nannies until then—another chiller. To aid in a potential getaway, Loeb and his partner spent months before the murder checking into hotels under false names and establishing alternate identities.
The murder, a crime of consummate dispassion (it gave us the term “thrill kill”), occurred on May 21, 1924. The fourteen-year-old victim was chosen at random, as he was walking home from school. The killers lured him into their rented car and attacked him from behind, driving a chisel into his skull. When he failed to succumb immediately, his assailants jammed a sock down his throat. They drove through Chicago in their bloody car until they reached a swamp they’d scouted earlier. They poured acid on the body and then pushed it into a culvert. When they got home they wound down by playing cards.
In court, when asked to estimate the date of the graveside Trivial Pursuit game, Farrar had answered: “Well, USC finished in early to mid-May, and I left on June 13 [for Europe], so sometime in there.”
Perhaps Clark’s homage to the dinner party in Rope was also a kind of anniversary party.
The lucky break that led to the solution of the Leopold and Loeb case was almost as unlikely as the chance unearthing of John Sohus’s plastic-wrapped remains. While hiding the victim’s body in the swamp, Leopold dropped his glasses. Only three pairs had ever been sold in the Chicago area. He told police he’d lost them during a birdwatching trip. Then he broke down and confessed, as did his partner. To save their beloved sons from hanging, the killers’ families hired Clarence Darrow, the era’s crusading voice of reason with the famously unruly hair that he was always sweeping back out of his eyes as though to convey the importance of seeing things clearly. His twelve-hour closing statement in the case was an eclectic oratorical opus that drew on philosophy, poetry, and psychology to argue that human beings are pawns of fate, their actions determined by forces beyond their wills.
“Nature is strong and she is pitiless. She works in her own mysterious ways,” said Darrow, “and we are her victims. We have not much to do with it ourselves. Nature takes this job in hand, and we play our parts.”
The state’s attorney, Robert Crowe, preached an older, homelier theology:
“I think that when the glasses Leopold had not worn for three months, glasses that he no longer needed, dropped from his pocket at night, the hand of God was at work in this case. He may not have believed in a God, but if he has listened and paid attention and thought as the evidence was unfolded, he must begin to believe there is a God now.”
Darrow’s eloquence spared the killers the gallows and led, experts say, to the gradual decline of capital punishment for murder. Since Clark, if convicted, faced life in prison at worst for a crime that might once have earned him death, Darrow was in a sense his benefactor. But if Clark understood this—perhaps as a result of reading up on Leopold and Loeb—I doubt that he harbored any gratitude. I doubt that Darrow’s enlightened liberalism meant any more to him than Crowe’s Old Testament God. Nietzsche’s Übermensch, however, would hold appeal for him. “Aren’t people stupid,” I recalled him often saying, and shamefully I recalled myself agreeing, though the pretexts for his comment now escaped me. A thread of contempt was woven through our friendship, shared contempt for all who weren’t quite . . . Us. How could one dine at the Sky Club and not feel it?
The building rumbled, half at sea. The moon shone full and dominant, streaming out fine, excitatory white particles that always keep me from sleeping on such nights. My thoughts, of a kind I wasn’t used to yet—visual, stacked, out of sequence, ungrammatical—formed a dark slurry as I lay in bed. Movies, even cynical, vicious movies, had always been a comfort zone for me. They imposed and secured certain boundaries on reality. As I perceived the matter, the images weren’t playing on the screen but moving slightly behind it, just in back of it, and the screen was indeed a screen, protective, solid. It had lost its integrity now. I didn’t trust it. Not all that many months ago, on assignment for the New Republic, I’d stood near a cordoned-off movie theater parking lot in Aurora, Colorado, the day after a young madman named James Holmes had celebrated the opening night of that summer’s Batman movie by dressing as The Joker and gunning down scores of people in the audience. In the parking lot I could still see the victims’ blood. The sight was sickening, but I was ready for it; a massacre had occurred here, after all, and that meant gore. What I wasn’t prepared to see, and they were everywhere, were all the trampled paper buckets and trails of popcorn.
SEVEN
OTHER THAN ELMER and Jean Kelln, the old California dentist and his wife who had picked Clark up on that rainy German roadside and were surprised to receive his call soon afterward informing them that he was in Connecticut working as “a ski instructor,” Edward Savio was the only witness who’d known the defendant in his original form, before he started reprogramming himself. It was Savio’s parents who took in Christian Gerhartsreiter as a foreign exchange student in Berlin, Connecticut, a grayer, less fanciful, harder-trudging town than San Marino, that rosebush on a cake. Their home served as the research lab, the incubator, for the experimental selves to come.
“Did you notice him changing his personality and the way he acted around different people in different situations?” Balian asked Savio, a handsome novelist and screenwriter in the fantasy–science fiction mode.
“Yes. He would start to tell a story, and if the person didn’t respond well, if they kind of went like [Savio mimed exasperation or skepticism], you know, like that might be a little bit of BS or might be too much, he would notice it, he would stop. You would never hear that story again and he would move on.”
Having grown up to be an author, or, as he styled himself on the Internet, a “neo-confabulator” (Battle for Forever and Idiots in the Machine were a couple of his books), Savio was well equipped to describe the defendant’s creative process, its mechanisms and themes. It began with careful linguistic modifications: “He tried to affect what I think at the time he thought was an American accent. And he would practice things, each just with me sitting there, like ‘Pass me the bread . . .’” There were also adjustments of behavior, customized for the audience at hand. Around jocks, according to Savio, the defendant was “more relaxed.” Around people he deemed his social inferiors “and didn’t feel were worthy of his time,” he would “just be very short” and “wouldn’t even affect his speech much.”
I felt a sense of recognition, hearing this. The careful edits and revisions practiced by the ambitious German eighteen-year-old as he gentrified and Americanized himself (“We talked about sort of living the American dream,” remembered Savio) resembled literary operations that I performed daily at my desk. The difference was that my artistic guesswork occurred in isolation, while Clark got to test his drafts and sketches in front of a living, responsive audience. I imagined the satisfaction he must have felt when one of his tales or invented manners hit home, drawing a smile or a nod, causing a face to soften and turn receptive. I had to wait months or years for the equivalents of such communicative rewards, and when they came—if they ever came at all—it was in the disembodied form of letters, e-mails, and reviews. There was much to envy in his approach. He didn’t live by writing, he wrote by living.
That’s how I’d started, too, come to think of it. With poses.
In 1975, when I was twelve, my family packed a U-Haul van, snapped a Yale padlock on its rear loading door, and left predictable rural Minnesota for burgeoning, anarchic Phoenix. My father longed to enter private practice after years at 3M, the company that made Post-it notes, Scotch Tape, and a panoply of humdrum widgets suited to the Office Age. Having always fancied himself a maverick, too large of soul for petty corporate politics, he pined for the sagebrush swagger of the West. He bought a four-wheel-drive Ford Bronco, cowboy boots, and a leather vest, grew a mustache, started lifting weights, and reinvented himself as a tough hombre. My mother didn’t change; she was still a nurse. She dressed conservati
vely around the house and put on her whites when she left for the ER.
I made some alterations of my own, more out of social necessity than choice. My huge and befuddling new middle school located next to Central Avenue, the city’s filthy, felonious main drag, was rife with impenetrable in-groups. Some of the cliques amounted to junior gangs. There were Latino gangs, black gangs, white gangs, and two native gangs, one Navajo, one Hopi. After my first invisible month among them, I started juicing up my past. I told some Mexican girls with cigarette breath and precociously mascaraed lashes that I’d served time in a juvenile detention camp for stealing a chain saw and cutting down some power poles. I also told several stories about a bloodhound that I’d supposedly owned in Minnesota. It had tracked down a lost little deaf girl and saved her life. It had also saved my life by dragging me from a car wreck. I offered a large scar on my right knee and a smaller one on my right hand as evidence of this awful accident. (The knee scar came from falling off my bike, the hand scar from fumbling a knife while carving a pumpkin.) I named the dog Sherlock and told people he drowned during a fishing trip on Lake Superior, when a storm came up and swamped our boat, and Sherlock, instead of swimming for the shore, paddled off into oblivion chasing my floating Minnesota Twins cap. My sense was that half the kids I told believed me and those who didn’t either didn’t care or appreciated hearing my crap because it meant I would have to listen to theirs.
My father’s law practice tanked within a year, a casualty of crackpot clients seeking patents for mileage-boosting magnets and spider venom–based arthritis salves. We ended up back where we’d started, in Minnesota, but farther out in the country than before. Some kids at the school had little reason to be there; they were farm kids, and farming was all they’d ever do. Others were sons of plumbers and backhoe operators, already apprenticed to their fathers’ trades. I downplayed my collegiate ambitions to blend in with them, feigning enthusiasm for cars and sports and faking crushes on the popular girls, those devious semen stealers whose secret wish, I feared, was to be pregnant and married by nineteen, all snug in a trailer on their parents’ land. Then came the breakaway moment, the SAT exam, which I did well on; its verbal section seemed designed for a loquacious opportunist like me. My scores brought an offer of early admission to Macalester College in Saint Paul. I grabbed my chance. Once there, I stopped suppressing certain interests of mine such as writing poetry and picked up some new ones—punk rock, hallucinogens—sometimes from classmates I found especially impressive.
