Sohus sister asks Rockefeller to explain

Demands facts on missing pair

COURTESY OF LYDIA MARANO/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILEJohn and Linda Sohus sometime prior to their 1985 disappearance. Remains found nine years later at the couple's home in California are being tested on suspicion they are his. (COURTESY OF LYDIA MARANO/ASSOCIATED PRESS/FILE)

The sister of a man who disappeared in California in 1985 and is presumed dead demanded yesterday that Clark Rockefeller shed his aliases and explain what happened to her brother and sister-in-law.

"I believe he knows what happened to them, and I want him to tell the truth," Ellen Sohus said in a telephone interview from Arizona, where she lives.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department has identified Rockefeller, who is in custody in Boston in a family kidnapping case, as a "person of interest" in the disappearance and presumed slaying of John and Linda Sohus. Rockefeller was living in a guesthouse behind their home in San Marino in 1985, using the name Christopher Chichester, authorities have said.

The married couple, in their 20s, disappeared that year. Ellen Sohus is the younger adoptive sister of John Sohus.

Dana Farrar, a former friend of the man she knew as Chichester, recalled seeing freshly overturned dirt in the backyard of the house in summer 1985 and said that Chichester repeatedly entered the Sohuses' house to borrow items, telling Farrar that the couple was away and would not object.

Bones believed to be those of John Sohus were recovered from the yard in 1994 by pool excavators. The Los Angeles County Department of the Coroner has cremated or lost some of those remains. The body of Linda Sohus has never been found.

Through his defense lawyer, Stephen Hrones, Rockefeller first said he did not remember anything before 1993, saying he had once lived in California but did not recall where or when. Earlier this week, Hrones said his client remembers "bits and pieces" of his life and recalled living in the Sohus guesthouse under the name Chichester. He knows nothing, Hrones said, of the disappearance or possible deaths of the couple.

Ellen Sohus is not convinced. "His defense attorney, I would imagine, is doing his job and trying to protect his client," she said. "It's very aggravating to me that we are only getting bits and pieces. I don't believe he is having selective memory recall."

Rockefeller is being held without bail at the Nashua Street Jail after being arrested July 27, accused of violating a probate court custody order and kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter. Boston police and the FBI tracked him to Baltimore, where he was living under an assumed name, and arrested him the following weekend. The child has been reunited with her mother.

Rockefeller's arrest and the decision by producers of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries" to update its report on cases they detailed in the 1990s, has generated intense new interest in the 23-year-old missing persons case in San Marino.

Ellen Sohus said her family is finally optimistic that the end of the mystery is in sight.

"A lot of times, people don't have the opportunity to hear the truth in their own tragedies," she said. "But I believe, my family, we are now being given an opportunity to know the truth. There are so many people focused on finding the truth that I just have to believe that the truth will be revealed."