by Mark Seal
After it came to light that Chichester was an impostor, she said, suddenly everybody acted as if they had known it all along. “Especially all the lovely ladies,” said Gough, meaning the San Marino widows who had taken the young stranger in, ferried him to and from church, swallowed him hook, line, and sinker.
“Apparently he hung out in Alhambra a lot,” she said, referring to a town that borders San Marino. Gough learned that Chichester would go to Alhambra with John and Linda Sohus, who had friends there. “He liked to read, and he got a connection with Linda Sohus through that,” she added. “He is one of those people who will say whatever you want to hear to fit in. Like, ‘You like books? Oh, I do too!’ You don’t have to have read a book in your life. You can get the other person to talk. Like a chameleon, a changeling, he becomes what he needs to become to fit in.”
“Who do you think killed John Sohus?” I asked her.
“I felt like Chichester was involved, and still do,” she said. “The only thing I never really had a strong feeling about was the wife, Linda. My gut feeling was that she was probably involved in some way. I don’t think she is dead. I think she is probably out there somewhere.”
Out there somewhere with her six cats—which were the dead giveaway for Gough. As everyone said, Linda’s cats were her children, and that was why Gough was convinced Linda had sent someone to pick them up just before they were to be put down, someone who knew her whereabouts after John Sohus was dead, someone who most likely knew Christopher Chichester. “I don’t believe in coincidences like that,” she said.
In January 1995, ten months before Clark Rockefeller married Sandra Boss, John and Linda Sohus were suddenly national news. An Unsolved Mysteries segment titled “San Marino Bones” appeared on television screens across America, thanks to Sue Coffman’s unrelenting pressure and the revived interest in the case after the skeleton believed to be that of John Sohus was dug up in his mother’s backyard.
The episode begins with the swirling Unsolved Mysteries logo. “May 1994, San Marino, California, just north of Los Angeles,” intones the host, actor Robert Stack. “Excavation for a backyard swimming pool came to an abrupt halt when workmen made a grim discovery: three plastic bags and a fiberglass box containing dismembered sections of a human skeleton.”
There is a close-Up of two members of the pool excavation crew unwrapping a plastic bag containing a decomposing human skull, with a voice-over of a detective: “We didn’t know who this person was, and we were later told by uniformed officers from San Marino that in 1985 the people that lived in that house had reported two people missing.”
Then the camera cuts to photographs of John and Linda Sohus on their wedding day, the runty computer geek in a gray suit and aviator glasses alongside his bride, a gargantuan gal with a white veil billowing around her face, her eyes unfocused and staring off into the distance. “The two missing persons were John Sohus and his wife, Linda, both in their late twenties,” says Robert Stack. “Their sudden disappearance had mystified everyone who knew them. A grisly discovery was a macabre twist in a nearly ten-year-old mystery. It suddenly appeared that either John or Linda Sohus may have been the victim of foul play.”
Stack walks toward the camera in a book-lined office. “Detectives probing the disappearance encountered a cast of characters that might have been dreamed up by a mystery writer. Though married for two years, John and Linda still lived with John’s mother, Didi Sohus, by all accounts an alcoholic. However, the most intriguing character would prove to be a mysterious young man who went by the name of Christopher Chichester.”
The screen fills with the picture of the bespectacled individual in question, wearing a suit and tie, his mouth agape in what appears to be his usual high-society lockjaw position.
The show then reenacts the life of the missing couple, their claustrophobic existence under the roof of Didi Sohus, leading up to “the break they had been hoping for”—an important, top-secret job with the government—and their disappearance. The show most dramatically recreates Didi’s exchanges with the couple’s friends and relatives, and ultimately the police, some of whom are portrayed by the real officers who investigated the case.
“Hello,” the actress playing Didi slurs drunkenly after picking up a jangling telephone. She is wearing a ratty pink housecoat and holds an early-afternoon cocktail in her weathered hand.
“Is Linda back from her trip yet?” asks the actress playing Linda’s half sister.
“I’m not supposed to tell you anything,” Didi says defiantly. Then, after pause, she adds, “A mission!”
“A mission? What mission? What are you talking about?” asks the half sister.
Giving only scant details about the government job that John and Linda ran off to accept, Didi abruptly ends the conversation by announcing, “Well, that’s all I can tell you,” and returns to her drink.
“Didi refused to identify the person she called her source,” says Robert Stack. “With no evidence of foul play, the authorities were powerless to investigate further.”
The Unsolved Mysteries segment then recounts the facts of Didi’s removal from San Marino and her death. “Nine months later, the case unexpectedly sprang to life,” says Stack as the camera cuts from Didi’s ravaged face to John and Linda’s white pickup truck, cruising to a stop beside what appears to be a church. An actor resembling Christopher Chichester hops out of the truck and walks up to a young man holding a broom on the church steps—the minister’s son.
The reenactment shows Chichester, who has now become Christopher Crowe, showing off the truck to the minister’s son, explaining that he doesn’t have the title and the buyer will need to get it himself from the California Department of Motor Vehicles. After sending off for the title—and being informed that there is an outstanding lien on the truck, due to an unpaid bank loan—the minister’s son decides against purchasing the vehicle. But the title search has alerted the San Marino police that the truck belonging to the missing couple is in Greenwich, and eventually leads to Greenwich police detective Daniel Allen discovering that “Mr. Chichester and Mr. Crowe were the same individual.”
The screen fills again with the image of Crowe/Chichester posing in a suit and tie.
“It was a stunning discovery,” says Stack. “Crowe, Chichester—by any name, the enigmatic ex-tenant seemed to be the one person who might be able to shed light on the Sohuses’ disappearance. But Christopher Crowe, alias Christopher Chichester, had vanished again. . . . Consequently, the investigation stalled again—Until the dismembered skeleton was uncovered in May of 1994.”
Forensic anthropologists showed that the remains were those of a slight young man, which was of course consistent with the physical description of John Sohus. But there were no dental records to prove that the body was actually his. Even more perplexing for the investigators was the state of the corpse—there were no bullet holes or other incriminating evidence to prove that the remains were the result of murder. But the bones, which were buried in three separate plastic bags, with the skull encased in a fourth, made the investigators suspect foul play.
Then another stunning discovery is revealed with the reenactment of a scene in which police detectives enter the guesthouse behind Didi’s house. They spray the cement floor with a chemical called luminol, which, Stack explains, “will emit a distinctive glow when it comes into contact with blood, even when the stains were wiped away years before.”
There was more about the luminol test in the documents I had pertaining to the case: the elderly woman who lived in the Sohus guesthouse before Christopher Chichester had sewn ticking—a decorative strip of cloth—along the bottom of the sofa. When Chichester left the guesthouse, he took the ticking with him, even though, the report noted, “It would only fit on that particular sofa.” Two patches of carpeting were also missing.
When the detectives arrived at the guesthouse in 1994, they felt that because the ticking had been taken, perhaps it held some “incriminating evidence,” meani
ng human blood. That was why they decided to test the floor with luminol. The report explained that the date of the luminol test—June 21, 1994—was the summer solstice, the longest day of the year. Luminol tests require total darkness so that any traces of blood will glow. The investigators had to wait until 2 a.m., when the moon had gone down. “Luminol was applied to the cement floors in the guesthouse on the former Sohus property,” says Stack. “Within moments, it would become apparent if there was evidence of murder.”
The detectives, wearing gas masks, turn off the lights and stare down dramatically at the floor, on which a large splotch lights up—“a copious amount of something put on that floor, and in our opinion that was blood,” explains the San Marino police detective on the show.
“The telltale glow was unmistakable,” says Stack. “But whose blood? Was John Sohus murdered in the guesthouse and buried in the backyard? If so, what happened to Linda? Officially, both John and Linda Sohus are still missing, perhaps having the time of their lives gallivanting across Europe.”
The segment ends with Robert Stack’s voice-over with a picture of Christopher Chichester Crowe. “Authorities would like to speak to the young man known as Christopher Chichester. They now know that his real name is Christian Gerhartsreiter, a native of Germany. He speaks fluent English and has used the names Christopher Crowe and Christopher Mountbatten. Gerhartsreiter was born in 1961. He is five feet eight, 150 pounds, and has very thin, dark blond hair. While he is not a suspect, authorities hope he can shed some light on the disappearance of John and Linda Sohus. If you have any information about this case, please contact the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Homicide Bureau or call your local law enforcement agency.”
The authorities now knew almost everything—their investigator had determined the impostor’s real name, birth date, nationality, and description, even his last known whereabouts and assumed name in Greenwich, Connecticut.
And yet they really knew nothing, because he had already shed all traces of the man sought by the authorities and—thanks to Unsolved Mysteries—America’s television audience. He was no longer known by any of the names in his past or in the public record. Now he was Clark Rockefeller, and at the time of the Unsolved Mysteries segment he was living a grand life on the upper East Side of New York City, with his Harvard Business School fiancée, the smart, beautiful, and absolutely oblivious Sandra Boss.
CHAPTER 12
The Last Will and Testament of Didi Sohus
In hopes of getting to the bottom of what happened in San Marino, I arranged to speak with the lead investigator on the Linda and John Sohus case, Timothy Miley, a sergeant in the homicide bureau of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. We met in a hotel bar, and Miley, who had worked hundreds of homicides, told me about perhaps the most twisted and daunting case of his career.
“This is like a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle,” he said. “There are going to be some gaps in it, but I think you’re still going to see the picture and you’ll be able to tell what it is.”
He then told a story that seemed plucked from the reels of film noir that had so enamored the young immigrant through all the stages of his identity. Miley began by explaining how Christopher Chichester made his living in San Marino. “He was getting money here and there from a lot of the little old ladies. There were a whole bunch of little scams where he was trying to talk their husbands into $10,000 here and $15,000 there.” Although no one was willing to admit to actually having given Chichester money, Miley felt sure that some of them had. “He had enough to live on, but he never had a job.”
Miley continued, “I don’t think he’s brilliant; he’s a manipulator. He finds people who are manipulable and he works that.” In his alcoholic and dementia-stricken landlady, Miley suggested, Chichester saw the chance for a major score: Didi Sohus had a valuable home, plus antiques her mother had left her and sizable investments in stocks and bonds. He allegedly set about manipulating her into leaving him her estate.
Chichester’s main obstacle would have been Didi’s sole heir, John Sohus. She would have to disinherit her beloved son in order to make anyone else the beneficiary of her will. And that is exactly what Didi did after John took off on his “secret mission.” Following John and Linda’s disappearance, Didi revised her will to state, “I intentionally and with full knowledge of any consequences, specifically disinherit and omit any provisions for John Robert Sohus . . . in this will.” In Miley’s view, “To get her to change her will, he had to lead her to believe that John and Linda had abandoned her, didn’t care about her anymore.”
The investigator laid out his theory about what happened to John and Linda. First, Chichester convinced the couple that he had gotten them government jobs in New York. They were to fly east separately, John before Linda. The day of Linda’s planned departure, however, she was seen crying in her pickup truck in Loma Linda, California, in front of the home of Elmer and Jean Kelln, the couple Chichester (then Gerhartsreiter) had met while hitchhiking in Germany. Chichester had gone to the Kellns’ to pick up some boxes. John Sohus was likely dead by this time, killed by “blunt force trauma. A flat hard object across the back of the head,” according to the coroner’s criminalist, Miley said, but Linda could not have guessed that. She was likely crying because Chichester kept changing the plans on her. She was supposed to be on her way to New York, but instead she was still stuck in California. She was confused and scared, and perhaps beginning to suspect that Chichester had been lying to her and John all along.
I asked Miley if he thought Linda and Chichester were romantically involved or somehow in cahoots.
“I don’t,” he said. “Everyone else does.”
“So what happened to Linda?” I asked.
“I think she’s dead, buried somewhere out in the desert,” said Miley. “I don’t think she’s alive in France and mailing postcards.” To back up his contention that the postcards that Linda’s friends and family received from her were phony, Miley noted, “She never had a passport, never entered or exited the country. She had no financial means of doing this . . . and she was not sophisticated enough to get a fake passport or a fake ID.”
Chichester remained on Lorain Road for approximately four months after John and Linda vanished, “to continue whatever manipulation he had going on with Didi,” Miley said. With the young couple gone, Chichester ruled the roost. “He had absolute run of the house. So one can insinuate that that means he was controlling Didi at that stage.”
I knew a bit about the period Chichester had spent alone with Didi in her house after John and Linda’s departure, both from the sheaf of documents I had been given during the trial in Boston and from my interviews with neighbors. One resident recalled that Chichester had come over to borrow a chainsaw, which the neighbor thought was odd, because Chichester was so slight that he seemed incapable of performing any serious manual labor. “He said he needed it to cut brush,” the neighbor later told the police. A San Marino police report quoted another neighbor who said that around that same time Chichester was burning something in the fireplace at 1920 Lorain Road. The smell was “putrid, like nothing I’ve ever smelled before,” the woman said.
In May 1985, Chichester invited his friend Dana Farrar, the film student at USC, over for a game of Trivial Pursuit. When she and another friend arrived, they discovered that Chichester wasn’t in the guest dwelling out back but in the main house. Didi Sohus was nowhere to be seen. They sat on the patio, where Chichester had the game set up. Several times he went into the house for iced tea and other refreshments, acting as if he owned the place. “They’re away. They won’t mind,” he said when Farrar asked him where his landlady and her children were.
At one point, Dana looked up from the game and noticed something strange. The backyard had been dug up, obviously very recently. It looked as if someone had made a big hole and then filled it in with fresh dirt.
“What’s going on in the yard, Chris?” she asked.
“Oh, nothi
ng, really,” he said. “Just having some plumbing problems.”
Tim Miley also spoke of Don and Linda Wetherbee, whom I had come across in my own research into the life of Didi Sohus. They lived twenty minutes from San Marino, in a trailer park in the city of La Puente, where they operated a business selling trailers, Linda’s Mobile Homes.
Although they were a world away from the cosseted bubble of San Marino, the Wetherbees came to be Didi Sohus’s closest friends in her final years, tending to her after she had been “abandoned” by her son. They handled the sale of Didi’s house on Lorain Road after she supposedly became too ill and destitute to live there alone, and they sold her a mobile home practically next door to their own, in La Puente, becoming her sole caretakers. They also became the administrators and beneficiaries of her will. Don Wetherbee died in 2001, and Linda seven years later, but Tim Miley had tracked Linda down shortly before she died. She was old and frail, living in a nursing home, but her mind was still sharp, and she laid out what the sheriff’s investigator called “the foundation for a confession.”
“She talked very low in volume, real meekly,” giving answers to “pointed questions,” Miley said.
“How did you meet Didi?” was one of the first questions he asked.
“Through the guy in the guesthouse,” she replied.
“The Wetherbees get introduced to Didi. They take over her life,” Miley told me. “Upon selling her house, the Wetherbees borrow $40,000 from Didi. That’s in her will, and that $40,000 loan is forgiven when the final will is executed.”
“What happened to that $40,000?” Miley asked Linda Wetherbee.
“We gave it to him [Chichester],” she said, adding that it was part of the deal they had made with him—his fee for introducing them to Didi. After Didi’s death, Chichester was to receive another payment, perhaps as much as $100,000, which he and the Wetherbees figured would represent 50 percent of her estate—the proceeds from the sale of her house, her trailer home, her investments, and her personal possessions.
