by Mark Seal
Did Chichester tell the Wetherbees the real story about Didi Sohus and her missing son and daughter-in-law? Trying to discover more, I contacted two of the Wetherbees’ decendants. They weren’t interested in talking. Didi Sohus’s only living relative would not discuss the murder investigation but did say that when he visited her in 1986, Didi was in ill health, hard of hearing, and desperately lonely. “She wanted me to move out there and live with her,” he said. (He declined.) As for Christopher Chichester, the attorneys who would represent him as Clark Rockefeller adamantly maintained that he had nothing whatsoever to do with the disappearance of John and Linda Sohus.
With Didi under the watchful eyes of Don and Linda Wetherbee, Chichester drove out of San Marino in mid-1985 in John and Linda Sohus’s truck, and possibly with $40,000 of Didi’s money—a sizable sum in those days—to launch his new life on the East Coast as Christopher Crowe. “It was his ante into the game, so he could go be somebody,” said Miley. “Once Chichester inserts the Wetherbees into Didi’s life, he disappears, because that’s what he’s supposed to do. That’s the plan. Now they take over. Now she’s distraught, because her adviser—which was him [Chichester]—is gone. So she puts all of her trust in the Wetherbees.”
He didn’t return to San Marino until November 1988. By that time he had become Christopher Crowe, and he visited his old home after having gone to California with Ralph Boynton to try out to be a bond salesman for Kidder Peabody. Reverting to the character of Christopher Chichester, he spent only one day in San Marino; Didi Sohus’s estate had just been settled, and he was there to collect his share. He never got it, however, because the Wetherbees “double-crossed him,” as Miley put it. “He shows up in ’88 when they execute the will, and they tell him to go fuck himself. They’ve spent the money.”
“We told him no, we couldn’t give him any more money, we’d lost it all in bad investments,” Linda Wetherbee said to Miley, adding that she and her husband felt that all of the proceeds from Didi’s estate were rightfully theirs—fair compensation for the time they had spent with her before her death. “I took care of her for the rest of her life,” Linda said. “I didn’t just take the money. We drove her to her doctors’ appointments, and we were her companions during those last two years.”
At that point, a nurse entered Linda’s room and insisted that Miley suspend his interview with her and come back another day. “The next time I went to talk to her, she was dead,” the investigator said.
The whole damned case was like that, he lamented: witnesses dying, district attorneys leaving their jobs just as they had begun to make progress, detectives becoming frustrated with the labyrinthine case and moving on, allowing the “person of interest” not just to remain free, but to climb the social ladder in the shoes of a Rockefeller.
After Clark and Sandra’s Quaker wedding in October 1995, something strange happened. The groom wanted everyone off Nantucket—Sandra’s parents, sister, and brother-in-law—so that he could be alone with his wife. They complied with his wishes, taking the ferry back to the mainland. It was then clear to everyone that Rockefeller was calling the shots in the marriage.
“At the time of your marriage or within the next few weeks or months, did you detect any change in your relationship?” Sandra was asked on the witness stand in the Boston courtroom.
“Well, I would say that the defendant, then my husband, started to show more temper,” she answered. “I had seen him be unhappy on a few occasions in the past and he always was very apologetic afterwards. He began to show temper more. And the second big change was he became much more directive about my movements.”
He insisted on walking his wife to and from work every day, she testified, and began being “less supportive” of her personal activities, including trying to control the time she spent with her friends. He became increasingly critical in his comments, she said, telling her, “This person is, you know, stupid or tacky or something. You really shouldn’t spend time with them.”
They moved into an apartment at Fifty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue in New York. Rockefeller was supposedly running Asterisk LLP, which, he told Sandra and others, advised Third World countries on their finances. “So that they would make good decisions about where to set interest rates and spending levels,” Sandra explained. He didn’t make any money in his job, because the nations that saw him as their financial savior were dirt-poor, and he felt that charging them a consulting fee would be “Unconscionable.”
It seemed completely plausible. While it is now clear that her husband’s job was a sham, Sandra had a real career at McKinsey & Company. “We work for large institutions and we determine with them what their problems are that they’re not solving themselves and then we help them structure work project plans to solve the problem. That’s what I do,” she told the court.
Despite her husband’s increasingly controlling manner, she rose swiftly up the McKinsey corporate ladder—eventually leading the company’s work for Senator Charles Schumer of New York and New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg—which Rockefeller would later say was partially owing to the unspoken influence of his name, “wherever it was to her advantage,” as he put it in an interview. “She usually did so in a very understated way, calling special attention to it by keeping it extra quiet. Sort of the: Psst, she is married to a Rockefeller.” As a friend of Sandra’s added, “Everybody knew she was married to a Rockefeller, and she could be all modest about it, like she didn’t care. But she cared.”
Her husband wielded his powerful name in much the same way: the less he said about it, the more it stood out. And no one had reason to doubt the authenticity of the name, just as no one had reason to doubt the authenticity of the art that hung on the walls of the newlyweds’ apartment. The paintings gave credence to the name and vice versa.
So why couldn’t he just sell a piece of art—which would certainly have fetched millions—to contribute financially to the marriage? Sandra replied that he told her the paintings were held in a family trust. “He said, ‘It’s a great inheritance and there’s a limit on selling it. We can sell it in ten years.’”
Until then it was theirs to enjoy. “We celebrated our first art purchase, a large painting by Rothko, on a cold, wet New York City afternoon,” read an article titled “The Spitting Image” in the magazine ARTnews, which was attributed to Sandra Boss but believed to have been written by her husband. “Our dealer and a Rothko expert had just arrived at our apartment when Yates, our 85-pound Gordon Setter, returned from his walk, jumped on his usual spot on the sofa, and shook his head. A four-inch swath of saliva emerged from his mouth.” It landed on the Rothko, and Rockefeller nonchalantly wiped it off with a paper towel, which Sandra wrote was the proof of her husband’s insistence that fine art and purebred dogs could live together harmoniously, despite their “slight incompatibilities.”
Mr. and Mrs. Rockefeller were similarly different yet compatible, at least in the beginning. “They were both very stiff, very formal; she was very distant in some ways, equally awkward,” said a friend who had gone to dinner with them on several occasions, which began with cocktails at one of Rockefeller’s clubs, usually the Lotos, the tony literary club housed in a Vanderbilt mansion, where the staff always greeted Clark with a chorus of “Good evening, Mr. Rockefeller.”
Once, they went to a club that had a splendid view of the skyline. Gazing out the window, the friend recalled, “I said, ‘Look, Clark, you can see Rockefeller Center from here!’ And he reached into his pocket and pulled out a key, and he said, ‘Yes, I have the key right here!’ That’s really the first moment I smelled bullshit. I just thought, ‘There’s no fucking way there’s one key to Rockefeller Center.’ What did Sandra say? Probably nothing. I just remember the way she would say his name—absolutely two syllables: ‘Oh, Cla-aaaark!’ And he would call her Sohn-dra.”
Although the friend’s husband, a respected professional with a recognizable name, was impressed, she wasn’t. “I was repulsed by the name-dropp
ing and the excessive wealth and the khaki pants and the polo shirt. Also, they weren’t really people that you wanted to be around. They weren’t warm. I found myself just kind of looking at the clock, thinking, ‘Please, God, let this dinner be over.’ I think other people were excited to be with a Rockefeller. It didn’t matter how awkward it was to be with them. It was worth it, because they were Rockefellers.”
The grandiose career, the silk ascots, and the museum-quality art collection (whose authenticity was never questioned) all gave credence to the con.
As her position at McKinsey grew, Sandra was away from her husband more and more, which left him with plenty of time to walk Yates in Central Park, where, he liked to say, “My dog was very much in love with Amelia, Henry Kissinger’s dog.” Broadway producer Jeffrey Richards crossed paths with Rockefeller while walking his dog through the park one day. They got to talking, and Richards told him he was producing a new play by David Ives, who had written All in the Timing. Rockefeller exclaimed, “I’ve seen that play six times!” He then hinted that he might like to become a backer of Ives’s next play. It would look quite wonderful to have a Rockefeller on one’s résumé, thought Richards, who arranged to introduce his new potential investor to Ives. Rockefeller offered to fly the play wright to the south of France on his jet, which he kept at Teterboro, the airport for private planes in New Jersey. However, neither the jet nor the investment ever materialized.
At home, Clark grew ever more focused on Sandra and her work. “Particularly in the early years, he was unhappy with the limited amount that I earned at my job and put a lot of pressure on me about it,” she testified. “I observed that he could get a job that paid, and contribute, and he said that was what he was doing in this nonprofit advisory arena that was very important and would lead to big things.”
What were those big things? “He said he was expecting that he might get an appointment of some kind as a result of the work he was doing,” said Sandra.
In cross-examination, the defense attorney Jeffrey Denner suggested that Rockefeller’s claims regarding high-level appointments—not to mention the $50 million he said he had paid to the U.S. Navy to settle his late father’s embezzlement lawsuit—might have stretched a normal person’s credulity.
“Now, you are an astute economist and business consultant, are you not?” the lawyer asked.
“At the time I was a twenty-six-year-old. I knew nothing about this kind of stuff,” she replied.
Sandra’s busy schedule at McKinsey gave Clark, who had no work of his own to do, even more time to engage in what was becoming his consuming occupation: walking his dog and collecting new friends. One was an artist named William Quigley, whose work was bought by politicians, entertainers, and business leaders. One day a friend informed him that she had been walking her dog in Central Park when a short man with a Gordon setter bumped into her.
“She said, ‘Bill, this guy took me to his house, and his art collection is unbelievable!’ ” Quigley told me. We were sitting in his studio in SoHo, in lower Manhattan, where his large, bright canvases were scattered all around us. A somewhat stocky man with long hair and an amiable demeanor, he quickly warmed up about Rockefeller, pulling out letters and other mementos from the copious time he had spent with the purported connoisseur. He said that his friend, who was Canadian, had never heard of the Rockefeller family. But the art stunned her. “You have to see it!” she urged Quigley, who was living in Los Angeles at the time. To sweeten the pot, she told Quigley she had shown her new friend transparencies of his work, and the great collector was impressed. “He wants to meet you!” she exclaimed.
“And I said, ‘Well, who is it?’”
The artist shot me a wry smile. “She said, ‘I really don’t know. He’s got a really big name, from a big American family, and I just forget.’”
“And I was like, ‘How can you not know? Is it Vanderbilt? Mellon?’”
“No, something longer,” the friend said.
They went round and round, but she couldn’t remember, until the next day, when she called Quigley and blurted out, “His name is Clark and he’s a Rockefeller!”
Quigley almost dropped the phone.
His friend had been walking her dog with a Rockefeller? The artist was floored—even more so when his friend told him, “Yeah, and he’s a really, really sweet guy. You’ve got to meet him.”
Quigley flew to New York and his friend set up the meeting. Arriving in the lobby of the collector’s apartment building, Quigley found a slight man dressed in what had become his daily uniform: baseball cap, polo shirt, blue blazer, khaki pants—the picture of preppydom. The man reeked of old money, good breeding, and impeccable taste. Immediately, Quigley knew he’d found Clark Rockefeller.
“Oh, you must be Quigley,” Rockefeller said coolly, employing the single name he would use to address the artist from that point forward.
They went up to Rockefeller’s apartment, where the great man offered the artist a glass of sherry, but he didn’t show him the art. Not yet. He had learned the power of restraint by then, how not showing all of his cards at once only added to his mystique. He asked Quigley how long he would be in town.
“Three days,” Quigley replied.
After some small talk, the artist took his leave. Two days passed, with no call from Rockefeller. Then, on the night before Quigley’s departure, his phone rang. “Quigley, I would like you to come up to my apartment and see the art,” said Rockefeller, instructing him to arrive at 10 p.m., when he would be taking his dog for his nightly walk.
They took the dog for a long walk around the park. Finally, Rockefeller said he was ready to return to the apartment and show his new friend his art collection. “We go into the apartment,” Quigley remembered. “It’s probably by this time ten-thirty, and I walk into this collection. I had been reading Lee Seldes’s The Legacy of Mark Rothko at the time, one of the greatest books I’ve ever read. It really gives you an inside story of the business of the art world.” Suddenly he saw on one wall Black on Grey, one of Rothko’s late landmark works, a version of which would sell for $10 million at Christie’s auction house in 2007. “That legitimized everything for me,” said Quigley. “I was like, Are you kidding?
“Down the hallway I see another Rothko,” Quigley continued. “Then I turned into the living room, a modest-sized room, which didn’t have a lot of elaborate furniture. Two black sofas with a lot of dog hair on them, and a little coffee table. Light hardwood floors that were kind of worn. It wasn’t anything that impressive.”
But there on the wall was another canvas almost inconceivable for a residence. “A ten-foot Barnett Newman,” he said, referring to the abstract expressionist pioneer who died in 1970. He added, “With a brown swipe on the bottom left-hand corner that he said his dog did. He was muddy one day and got brown dirt on the bottom of the painting, and Clark just left it.”
So typical of an aristocrat, Quigley thought. But there was more. “Two Clyfford Still paintings—one of my favorite artists,” he said. “Large paintings. And then a Robert Motherwell over his fireplace. And I remember there were either two or three Rothkos.”
The value was incalculable, but that wasn’t the main thing for the artist. The main thing was that all that art was right there under one roof, and not in a museum, which left him reeling. “I was very, very excited. Impressed. Not impressed like, ‘Wow, I met a Rockefeller.’ That was definitely part of the equation, but . . .” He seemed at a loss for words.
“I was really overwhelmed,” he said. “I mean . . . Mondrian. And I was looking at them very closely. I never had any doubts that they were legitimate, never thought that they were reproductions or anything. I looked at them very closely and I thought, ‘Wow, these are amazing paintings.’ And I felt like I had a bit of a relationship with a lot of these artists. I knew a lot of their work. I was showing with Manny Silverman at the time, and Manny is the premier dealer for this type of work in the United States, maybe. These guys were my heroe
s. So I think that’s what made Clark and me get along so easily in the beginning, because I actually knew the history of abstract expressionism. That was my forte.”
Quigley and Clark spoke for about forty-five minutes. “I don’t even think we sat down. I was so overwhelmed by the paintings. And then I petted the dog a little bit more, and then he said, ‘Well, it’s getting close to my bedtime, and it’s getting late. So let’s just stay in touch, and I’ll communicate with you.’”
Quigley flew back to Los Angeles, and he and Rockefeller stayed in touch. Clark even helped him with his Web site, as he had done with so many friends. “Clark and I started to develop a friendship by e-mail and by phone.”
Soon, however, Quigley moved to New York, where his affiliation with the important collector intensified. Later, when Rockefeller hit the headlines and Quigley was besieged by the media, he released a statement about his friendship with the supposed scion of the great family:It seemed he knew everyone in the art world, although he hated the idea of art for investment. He was a purist with impeccable taste, and we had a wonderful dialogue simply based on this. I would go to galleries where the dealer would pull out a whole collection of an artist’s work because Clark made a phone call.
Clark knew more about the history and aesthetics of art than most artists I meet. He was extremely well versed and schooled in art history and had very strong viewpoints on certain painters and artists. I was both complimented and excited about the romanticized, historic affiliation of being courted by a Rockefeller. Obviously, the family owned some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century. After seeing the collection I never doubted his identity. He took me to extravagant social clubs, where everyone referred to him as Mr. Rockefeller.
