The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (18 page)

The detective who received the Teletype was Daniel Allen. A lieutenant by the time I saw him in Greenwich, Allen met me at the police station and took me to breakfast at a little café on Greenwich Avenue, the rich town’s main drag. I felt like I was back in San Marino, for Greenwich is also a tidy, affluent place with clean, crisp air and Norman Rockwell values. As we sat eating bacon and eggs, Allen, a lifelong resident of Greenwich, told me about the day he first heard the name Chris Gerhartsreiter.

“It was a routine job, another department seeking information—a typical missing persons request,” Allen said, adding that it was just one of dozens of messages that came across the Teletype during his 4 p.m. to midnight shift that day. “A missing persons case is a noncriminal matter. Once you become an adult, if you decide to pick up and move and not tell anybody—well, that’s not a criminal matter.”

Of course, the story of Linda and John Sohus was much more complex than that, but Allen could not have guessed that at the time. “People disappear for many reasons,” he said, trying to impress upon me how what I was seeing as an extraordinary case had a very ordinary beginning. “This was a three-year-old California missing persons case. San Marino was looking for information to make sure the missing couple was okay. Since the couple’s truck showed up here in Greenwich, they thought someone might know their whereabouts.”

Allen thought it would be a quick, simple job: interview this individual—“Chris Gerhartsreiter / AKA Chichester,” as the Teletype had identified him—and report his findings to California. Allen soon discovered that the man was by that time going by the name Christopher Crowe, but the more information he compiled, the more he got the same feeling I’d been having. As he put it, “I just didn’t know who this guy really was.”

After breakfast, Allen drove me to the place where his investigation into the missing couple began: Christ Church, the imposing stone edifice where Christopher Crowe had found a spiritual home and where, on the day before our visit, President George H. W. Bush’s brother Prescott had been memorialized after his death at eighty-seven.

Allen had gone to the church in 1988 to interview the Reverend John Bishop and his son, Chris, the film student, who had befriended Crowe. The reverend was on vacation, but Chris told the detective all about the truck with the missing title. I had read Allen’s report detailing his interview with Chris Bishop: “Some time in July of this year, he approached the Crowe subject about needing a truck for an upcoming film that he was in process of making. Crowe indicated that he did have a truck for sale but had no title.”

The title was “out of California,” Crowe had told his friend, so if Chris Bishop wanted the truck, he would “have to make an effort” on his own to get the title from the California Department of Motor Vehicles—Crowe didn’t have the time or inclination to do it himself.

Chris contacted the California DMV and was told that he would have to send a check for $10 to cover the processing fee for a title search. Chris, at age seventeen, didn’t have his own checking account, so he asked his parents to send a check from their account, which the reverend and his wife did. Shortly thereafter, Chris received a call from a bank. He was told that, contrary to Crowe’s assurance that he owned the truck free and clear, payments on it had stopped, so there was a large outstanding loan on the vehicle. The entire balance of the loan would have to be paid before the title could be released.

Chris confronted Crowe. “You’re trying to rip me off!” he said, but Crowe professed to know nothing about the title mess.

From there, things got even stranger. Allen interviewed Crowe’s various landlords in Greenwich, one of whom “related that during a conversation with Crowe one day, he learned that Crowe had a pickup truck. He never saw the truck, as Crowe had it garaged at an unknown location.” A check of the records of the Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles showed that, indeed, a Christopher K. Gerhartsreiter was residing or had at some point resided in the state, but his driver’s license had expired and he had provided no forwarding address. According to a police report, “The investigators called the telephone number for Crowe . . . but the New York telephone company indicated that the number . . . had been disconnected.”

Detective Allen spoke to people who had known and housed Crowe. Over and over Allen heard the bizarre assertion that Crowe was the director of
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, which he quickly realized did not add up. He discovered that the man he and his colleagues were seeking—with his multiple names, dubious occupations, and ever-changing addresses—had not left any sort of trail that police could use to track him down.

Allen and other investigators must have turned to one of the few sources of clues they had: a list of American Express charges made by Christopher C. Crowe Mountbatten, compiled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff ’s Department. From the list of charges:

On Sept. 28, 1988, Crowe shopped at Bloomingdale’s in New York City.

On Oct. 3, 1988, Crowe took in a play at the Eugene O’Neill Theater on Broadway.

On Oct. 4, he moved from his last known address in Greenwich—#7 Loch Lane—forwarding address unknown.

On Oct. 14, he reported his vehicle, a Chrysler station wagon, stolen in Stamford, Ct., where, he told police, he had parked the car to take a train to Boston. Six days later, the station wagon was recovered in New York City. But Crowe would wait almost a month before showing up where his car was towed, paying the towing charges but refusing to retrieve the car. (On the advice of his attorney, Crowe said, adding that his attorney was named Solomon Rosenbaum, but giving no contact information for the individual.)

On Oct. 22, 1988, he picked up his mail for the last time from the post office box he had rented in Greenwich.

It quickly became clear that this Christopher Crowe didn’t want to speak with Daniel Allen. The detective tried to reach Crowe by phone, but his calls went unanswered. Every time he got close, the trail would turn cold. The information Crowe had provided on various official documents turned out to be largely fictitious. The last Greenwich address he had given, on Loch Lane, did not exist. “Crowe had made up the street number 8 when he had the phone service put in at 7 Loch Lane,” Allen wrote in one report. When they ran the social security number Crowe had written on various forms, they discovered that it wasn’t assigned to Christopher Crowe, but to a Steven J. Biodrowski, a USC film student who had met Chichester when he was a regular presence at the school. Biodrowski had no inkling that Crowe/Chichester was using his social security number.

When the police contacted Chrysler Financial, from which Crowe had leased the vehicle he later reported stolen, they learned that “Crowe indicated on his credit sheet that his father’s name was H. Crowe, of #34 Rock Ridge Ave., Greenwich, Ct. It should be noted that #34 Rock Ridge Avenue is the residence of Mr. [John] Maddox, previously identified in this report.”

The identity of Crowe’s purported mother was equally nebulous, Detective Allen learned after contacting the woman who knew him at the Greenwich Public Library. Crowe had told her that his mother was an actress whose stage name was Gloria Jean. There was indeed a Hollywood actress and singer named Gloria Jean, who appeared in twenty-six films between 1939 and 1959, including
Never Give a Sucker an Even Break
. But when Allen contacted Actors’ Equity looking for information about her, he “was informed that Gloria Jean was a member but had discontinued her membership in 1956.” Another dead end.

The good people at Christ Church had a work address for Crowe, but it was presumably S. N. Phelps and Company, which he had long since left. Investigators in San Marino checked an early address he had once given in
that
city—for the beautiful estate on Circle Drive—but discovered that the house at that address hadn’t been occupied since 1977, a year before the immigrant’s arrival in America. Investigators contacted a woman I’ll call Rose Mina, with whom Crowe had reputedly been staying in New York—she worked at Moody’s Investment Services—but she “related that she had not seen him since giving him the message to contact the investigator.” A call to the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Hartford was similarly unhelpful. “The department had no record of the individual Gerhartsreiter, Chichester or Crowe with the DOB 2/21/61,” wrote Detective Allen.

“When I reached out to Crowe and he wasn’t forthcoming, I let the authorities in California know that it seemed that he wasn’t going to voluntarily come and see me,” Allen told me. “They asked me to make personal contact with him, and that’s when I went to Kidder Peabody, his place of employment.”

I said my understanding was that Crowe had been at Kidder strictly on a trial basis. Allen shook his head. “My impression was he was working for the company,” he said. “His actual place of employment was Kidder Peabody. I went down to New York. It was a big investment company. I waited for him to come to work, but he ended up calling in sick that day.”

At this juncture in our morning together, I began to press Lieutenant Allen a bit. I didn’t understand how he could be so calm and matter-offact about a case that had been driving me crazy. “Weren’t you obsessed with the case?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Did you feel you were chasing a ghost?” I asked, telling him that that was the way I felt as I boomeranged across the country and abroad, following the shadow of the man with multiple identities.

“I want to be very careful with this,” Allen said, measuring his words. “As time went on and I was given additional information, I started to raise some suspicions about his true identity. As I came up with the different names, it did raise some concerns at the time.”

“Some
concerns
?” I asked. But lying isn’t a crime, Allen explained, unless it leads to a crime or is done in the aftermath of a crime; and a person can’t be arrested for dodging the police when no crime appears to have been committed. “We couldn’t issue a warrant, couldn’t detain him,” Allen said. “California had a missing couple, but there was nothing in their investigation that indicated any type of foul play or criminal activity. Legally, we couldn’t detain him or force him to cooperate.”

Allen seemed reluctant to get into deeper details. Either his memory had faded, or he felt it would be inappropriate for him to talk about the intricacies of his investigation. But I already had all of his records from the case, and they spelled out everything clearly. When Allen arrived at Kidder Peabody, he met Crowe’s supervisor, Ralph Boynton, who told the detective essentially the same story he would relate to me twenty years later.

On their trip to Los Angeles, Crowe had discussed his family background with Boynton. “He talked about his parents’ being in the secret service of some clandestine organization, and said that they were agents on the run,” Boynton recalled. “He told me he had lived near the San Gabriel Mountains and was interested in going back to see that part of California. I let him talk. I got the impression that he had sort of a gray background, cloaked in espionage, and he was worried about his parents being apprehended by somebody.”

Crowe declined to join Boynton on his flight back to New York, apparently opting to stay in California for a little while. According to credit card statements and other documents in my dossier, he stayed at the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles, then made a quick stop in his old hometown of San Marino, dropping in on a prayer session at the Church of Our Saviour on Halloween—the third anniversary of the wedding of John and Linda Sohus, as it happened. He stayed only long enough to have a quick supper and inform the parishioners that “he had been banking in Hong Kong and was in San Marino for the day, on his way to Oregon,” according to a statement from one of them.

Crowe flew from San Diego to San Francisco, where he stayed at the St. Francis Hotel and dined at Ernie’s, then one of the city’s best restaurants.

Back in New York, Boynton was at home taking a nap when he was awakened by a telephone call. It was his old friend Richard Cook, a vice president at S. N. Phelps and Company.

“Do you know a guy named Christopher Crowe?” he asked.

“Yeah,” said Boynton.

“I’ve heard bad things about him,” said Cook. “I’d stay away from him.”

“Gosh, I wish I’d known that before I went to California with him!” said Boynton.

By then, Crowe had apparently also returned to New York. As Cook later told police, before calling Boynton at home to warn him about his rogue salesman, he had tried Boynton at the office.

“Mr. Cook attempted to call Mr. Boynton at Kidder Peabody but was informed that Mr. Boynton was out of town until Friday,” wrote Detective Allen. “Upon further speaking with the individual on the telephone, it was learned that it was Chris Crowe, the subject wanted in connection with this incident.”

Boynton picked up the story. “A few hours later, I got a call from the Greenwich Police Department. The detective asked, ‘What were you doing in California with Christopher Crowe?’ ”

Boynton explained that he and Crowe had been making sales calls for Kidder Peabody.

“The next thing he said was, ‘Where is the pickup truck?’ I said, ‘I don’t know anything about a pickup truck. I rented a Hertz car.’ Then the detective said, ‘Crowe’s a person of interest in a missing persons case in California. Do you mind if we come in and interview him?’ ”

Boynton told Allen that of course he could come to Kidder Peabody’s offices and interview Crowe. “Every morning for three days, at six in the morning, when I went to work at my office on Wall Street, the Greenwich police and the Connecticut state police were there, waiting for Christopher Crowe,” Boynton said.

But Crowe never showed up. He must have caught wind of the investigation, because after calling in sick on the day of Detective Allen’s first visit to Kidder Peabody, he placed another call to Boynton. He said he had to leave New York immediately to deal with an emergency concerning his mother and father. According to Boynton, “He said, ‘My parents have been kidnapped! They’re on the run or in harm’s way!’ ”