The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (24 page)

She asked them to consider the story “for a possible segment,” explaining that her life “has one big hole in the middle of it because I just don’t know where she is. I want to get on with my life. . . . If she’s alive, I want desperately to see her again. If she’s dead, then I can close that chapter in my life and go on. It’s the not knowing that drives me crazy. I can’t just shrug it off. . . . We were too close.”

At the bottom of the letter, she addressed her friend directly: “Linda, I have so many things to tell you about!”

Unsolved Mysteries
sent her a form letter thanking her but expressing apparent lack of interest. Eight months after Coffman wrote the letter to
Unsolved Mysteries
, however, Linda Sohus, in a sense, answered it herself, in a typically surreal way.

“Holy shit!” a neighbor remembered someone screaming, after Jose Perez, the Bobcat operator working on the crew of California Pools, unearthed something peculiar shortly after noon on May 5, 1994. He was digging a thirty-six-foot-long pit for a swimming pool in the yard behind 1920 Lorain Road in San Marino. Once the home of Didi Sohus, the property was currently occupied by Bob and Martha Parada and their three-year-old son. They had bought the house in 1986 from Didi, the lady who had moved to a trailer park after the mysterious disappearance of her son, John; her daughter-in-law, Linda; and her tenant, Christopher Chichester.

The new owners had replaced the dilapidated old house with a new two-story brick dwelling. They had left the guest quarters out back intact, however, and decided to put in a swimming pool. On that May morning in 1994, Perez was in a Bobcat bulldozer digging when his blade struck something hard four feet beneath the ground. He assumed it was trash because of its rank smell. Nothing unusual, Perez later told the
Pasadena Star-News
, “I’ve done 6,000 pools and found a car, a horse, and a dog.”

As he hopped down off the Bobcat to move the trash out of the way, his father, Jose Perez Sr., who was also on the digging crew, went over to see why the work had stopped. It turned out that the Bobcat’s blade had broken a fiberglass box in pieces. Inside the container, the crew members could see plastic bags. Jose Perez Sr. grabbed a metal pipe and started poking at the contents of the bags.

That’s when Jose screamed, according to Bill Woods, who heard the shout at his home a few doors down on Lorain Road. One of the bags contained a human skull, “with some hair,” Perez told the local newspaper. “He dropped it on the ground and saw what looked to be teeth and a jaw,” read the police report about the incident. The newspaper added, “Perez said he saw other pieces of bone, including a forearm and a portion of a spine, near the bag.”

The newspaper report went on, “The Parada family was trying to remain calm as investigators tried to figure out who buried the body.” One police lieutenant commented, “It’s definitely a whodunit.”

The pool crew flagged down a passing police car. One of the first officers to arrive on the scene was Tricia Gough. I met Gough, a statuesque brunette wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt with a biker insignia, at a Starbucks coffee shop fourteen years later. She was now teaching school instead of investigating homicides, but, like most others who found their way into this story that day, she had an indelible memory of it.

“The outline of the pool had been dug, and then, kind of over to the side, that’s where the remains were,” she said, “in plastic bags, the kind you would go to the store to get—like grocery bags. The body was all bundled up in these bags, completely clothed, in jeans and—if I remember—a plaid shirt. There were socks. When we took it to the coroner’s office, they cut the materials off. There were toe bones in the socks. It was a body completely wrapped in plastic.”

Was it John Sohus? The diminutive size of the skeleton fit, as did the jeans and flannel shirt, which were what Sohus wore practically every day. As far as concrete evidence went, though, there wasn’t any: DNA tests weren’t possible, because John was adopted and his biological parents couldn’t be found. Dental records could have solved the problem, but Gough was told that John’s dentist’s old files had been lost.

The police then focused their attention on Christopher Chichester, of whom Gough said many people in San Marino had been enamored. “People really wanted him to be a part of their scene,” she said. “But from the description, he came off as a phony, a pretender who wanted to be in with money. All those people didn’t see that. His story was that he came from a family of rich industrialists. Well, if you’re that rich, why are you living in a guesthouse behind a house that is beat-Up, weedy, and in ill repair?”

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,” meaning 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.”