The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (25 page)

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

I
n 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, nothing, 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.

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.”