LA investigators want to grill father

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department declared Clark Rockefeller a "person of interest" yesterday in the disappearance of a newlywed couple from a wealthy suburb in 1985, adding a gruesome new dimension to the bizarre mystery over Rockefeller's true identity.

Two Los Angeles homicide detectives arrived in Boston late yesterday, trying to determine whether Rockefeller is the mysterious guesthouse tenant who disappeared at about the same time that his landlords, John and Linda Sohus, were last seen alive in San Marino, Calif.

Nine years later, in 1994, a construction crew digging a pool in the yard unearthed several trashbags holding human remains that authorities believe - but could never prove - were those of John Sohus. Neither Linda nor her remains were ever found.

The tenant, Christopher Chichester, who also used multiple aliases, was always a focus of the investigation, but left before he was ever questioned, according to authorities at the time.

LA County homicide detectives became involved over the weekend when Rockefeller's fingerprints, taken after his capture in Baltimore Saturday afternoon, apparently matched the prints on an old license application under a different name. That name, in turn, has been linked to the Sohus case. A law enforcement official said yesterday it was an application for a stock brokerage license filed with a federal regulatory agency.

The Globe first reported in yesterday's editions that authorities were investigating a link between Rockefeller and a long-unsolved California slaying.

"This person back in your jail is now a person of interest in our investigation of that case," said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

Later, Whitmore added: "One of the things we are going to try to determine is: Is he Chichester?"

Commissioner Edward F. Davis confirmed yesterday that the FBI had linked Rockefeller's fingerprint to an alias in California in the 1980s. "Clearly he has been living as a con man," Davis said.

Yesterday, Rockefeller, 48, wearing his same wrinkled khakis and light-blue polo shirt, was flown to Boston aboard a commercial flight and eventually escorted into Boston Municipal Court under heavy security. There he was arraigned in the abduction of his daughter on a Back Bay street July 27. A judge ordered him held without bail. No plea was entered.

In court, Assistant District Attorney David Deakin said investigators' knowledge of Rockefeller goes back only to 1993, when he met Sandra L. Boss, whom he married in 1995 in Nantucket. Boss, a 41-year-old senior partner at McKinsey & Co., thought her husband had obtained a marriage certificate, but later she learned he never got one, Deakin said. They divorced in 2007, and Boss was given full custody of their child, while Rockefeller was granted only supervised visits three times a year, Deakin said.

But Deakin said that for at least a year and a half, Rockefeller planned to abscond with his daughter. He met with realtors in Baltimore to look for homes for him and his daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, then began telling friends he planned to take her on a trip to Bermuda or Peru on his sailboat.

Deakin said Rockefeller's purpose was to misinform his friends so that "those people would inadvertently give false information to cover his tracks."

"We can't even verify that he is a United States citizen," Deakin said.

But his lawyer, Stephen Hrones, insisted yesterday that Rockefeller is standing firm on his identity, and the lawyer denied any connection between Rockefeller and the California case.

Hrones asked how his client could "get a fair trial when the police department is leaking all this to the press?"

Hrones also declined to say whether Rockefeller had seen or spoken to Reigh since he was captured Saturday in Baltimore, where police believe he was trying to build a new life with her.

"He's saying he loves her and misses her," Hrones said after Rockefeller's arraignment. "She was the most important thing in his life."

The possible connection to the old San Marino mystery sent a chill through the law enforcement community.

The Sohuses' former home at 1920 Lorain Road is a two-story, brick-and-stucco house in a San Marino neighborhood of manicured lawns, palm trees, and flowers. Nobody answered the door yesterday afternoon, and gray garbage bags had been taped to the windows to block the view inside.

But a man who answered at the back gate - and introduced himself as the father of one of the homeowners - declined to comment and directed questions to his daughter, who bought the home two decades ago with her husband. She was not home yesterday afternoon.

John and Linda Sohus were reported missing on April 8, 1985, Whitmore said.

Lili Hadsell, a former police officer from San Marino, said that on Monday night, she received a call from a detective in her old district who asked what she remembered about the case of John and Linda Sohus, who were in their 20s at the time of their disappearance.

"They just said they were looking into it," said Hadsell, who is now chief of police in Baldwin Park, Calif. "I was actually thrilled because I thought, 'Well good, maybe they've got some kind of lead and it would be nice to find out what the mystery is after all these years."

In 1985, Ruth D. Sohus, John Sohus's mother, worried when she hadn't heard from her son and his wife and called police to file a missing persons report, according to Hadsell.

Police never found the couple, and never tracked down a tenant - Christopher Chichester - who had been staying at the guesthouse on the property, Hadsell said. She said she remembered little about Chichester, but said he was in his 20s and went by at least one alias.

"He was just very elusive," Hadsell said. "We were never able to pin anything down on him, never were really able to figure out where he came from, what he had done. [He was] one of these people that kind of appeared and then disappeared and no one seemed to know anything about him."

Sohus's mother would call police from time to time, asking about any developments.

She died in 1988, believing that her son and his wife decided to leave for Europe without saying goodbye or taking the car, said Marianne Kent, a friend of Ruth Sohus, who was known as "Didi."

"She always believed he was alive, and she didn't understand why he didn't write. She said, 'I guess now that he's married, he has a life of his own,' " said Kent, now 79. "She lived for that boy."

Once, a relative of Linda Sohus received a postcard from Europe that apparently was from the couple, but she never heard from them again, Kent said.

A backhoe used during the swimming pool excavation in 1994 had damaged the bones, but a fracture pattern on the skull revealed that the person was struck one to three times in the head before death, said Steve Dowell, the tool-mark expert for the Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner and Sheriff's Department, who studied the remains.

The blows could have come from a 2-by-4, Dowell said, adding, "It could have even been a hammer."

Yesterday, the Pasadena Star-News website quoted from what it described as a Sheriff's Department press release issued in 1994, when the remains were discovered. The release described Chichester as a con man who "surfaces in affluent neighborhoods and mingles in social circles by making friends with wealthy, influential people."

Globe correspondent Mitchell Zuckoff and Milton Valencia of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com. Moskowitz can be reached at emoskowitz@globe.com