In a cold case, chilling details
Figure in 1985 LA mystery holds parallels to Hub kidnap suspect
This story was written and reported by Michael Levenson, Maria Cramer, Eric Moskowitz, John R. Ellement, and Shelley Murphy
Two Los Angeles County homicide detectives were turned away from the Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street yesterday by inmate Clark Rockefeller, even as vivid similarities continued to emerge between the accused kidnapper in Boston and the possible murder suspect from the 1980s in San Marino, Calif.
In Boston, Rockefeller was a director of the exclusive Algonquin Club, said he was a physicist and an art collector, and spoke with a Brahmin or vaguely Scottish accent, friends and police have recently said. In San Marino, a man known as Christopher Chichester, who was the prime suspect in the disappearance of a young couple, joined the city's social clubs, said he was from England, and ingratiated himself with the town's moneyed elite, old acquaintances said yesterday.
Rockefeller's lawyer, Stephen B. Hrones of Boston, revealed yesterday that his client says he lived in California at some point, though Rockefeller cannot remember where and when, and that he denies any involvement in the presumed slaying.
As for Rockefeller's identity, Hrones said: "He doesn't remember anything before 1993. He thinks his name is Rockefeller."
"He's not claiming amnesia," Hrones added. "He's just saying he doesn't remember."
It's not the first time Rockefeller has said he had no memory. During his divorce proceedings, Rockefeller professed to have been so overcome by grief over the death of his parents in a car crash that he became a mute for 10 years during his childhood and suffered significant memory loss because of it, a person with knowledge of his case told the Globe yesterday.
The Los Angeles County detectives were hoping to interview Rockefeller about Linda and John Sohus, the couple who went missing from their San Marino home in 1985. At the time, police wanted to question Chichester, who was living in a converted garage on the Sohuses' property, but Chichester disappeared before investigators could locate him. In 1994, workers digging a pool in the backyard of the home discovered human remains in three plastic bags, which they presumed were those of John Sohus, but never definitively determined. Neither Linda nor her remains have been located.
The detectives' request to interview Rockefeller was rejected by the inmate, who is under no obligation to cooperate with them. Rockefeller is staying in the general population at the jail and, in the words of one prison official, "is behaving himself."
Nonetheless, Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, said yesterday that authorities there will renew efforts to identify the remains, even as they attempt to identify Rockefeller.
"We're going to use all tools available to us to try to determine who that individual was, who the remains belonged to, and who this individual in Boston is," Whitmore said.
Old acquaintances of Chichester in San Marino, who got their first look at photographs of Clark Rockefeller yesterday and read news accounts of his life in Boston, expressed shock at the similarities, physical and otherwise, between the two men.
"I near jumped out of my chair," said Daniel B. Banks, a neighbor who attended church with Chichester in the 1980s in nearby San Gabriel. "I saw his picture on there [and said], 'That's not Clark Rockefeller; that's Chris Chichester.' "
Boston police said they linked a fingerprint taken during the investigation of Rockefeller's daughter's kidnapping to a print on a stockbroker license application filed years before. Rockefeller was captured Saturday in Baltimore and charged with kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Boston last week.
According to securities industry filings, a man using what police suspect is another alias for Chichester - Christopher Crowe - took preliminary steps to get a license. However, it was not clear from incomplete records reviewed yesterday where Crowe first applied to take the stockbroker test, or whether he provided fingerprints as routinely required by federal regulators during the 1980s and today. Crowe did not become a broker, records show.
The fingerprint link sent detectives racing to unravel any connection between Rockefeller and Chichester, between the recent kidnapping and the long-unsolved case. Yesterday, the German consulate in Boston said it had been contacted by the FBI, which was asking for information about a German citizen named Christian Gerhard Streiter. At one time, California authorities believed that was Chichester's true identity, according to a 1995 episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries," which profiled the Sohus case.
"This is one of those situations that can be hard to get your hands around," said Damon Katz, a spokesman for the FBI's Boston office. "What we believe is that this individual has had a long history of deceit in several places, and we don't know yet whether those deceptions constituted crimes or covered up crimes."
Other revealing details emerged in interviews yesterday. During his divorce proceedings last December, Rockefeller told various parties that after his parents died in a car crash when he was very young, he was raised by his godfather in New York City.
He also said during the divorce proceedings that he had been home-schooled - and thus has no academic records - because he spent those 10 years as a mute.
Chichester showed up in San Marino in the early 1980s, in his 20s, wearing fine suits and speaking in a slight British accent, said Ken Veronda, headmaster of Southwestern Academy, a local prep school, who knew Chichester. The young man joined the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and the Church of Our Saviour, an Episcopal congregation where many members had inherited wealth.
San Marino residents said Chichester was active in the Fathers' Night show, a musical comedy that raised funds for local schools. Two decades later, in Cornish, N.H., Rockefeller played Mars, the Roman god of war, in a community production. Last year, Rockefeller took an improv comedy class in Cambridge.
"From what I remember, everyone was intrigued when he first got into town," said Tricia Gough, a former San Marino police detective. "He was quite the storyteller, very articulate, very interesting guy. I think, over time, people came to realize that he wasn't very genuine, was rather affected, and he wore out his welcome."
Chichester rented his apartment from John and Linda Sohus and John's mother, Didi. Linda Sohus, who stood about 6 feet tall, was into mysticism and fantasy and held a costumed wedding on Halloween when she married John Sohus around 1983, said Linda's half sister, Kathy Jacoby. John was a small-framed "computer geek," so they made for a visually unusual couple, she said.
The couple went missing in early 1985, leaving some friends to believe they had gone on an extended sojourn to Europe. Jacoby filed the initial missing-persons report in April 1985. She said she suspected something was not right because Linda had disappeared without her cats, which she left at a kennel. Kennel workers later sought payment.
"If she wanted to up and move out of California and start fresh elsewhere, she would not have left her animals behind," Jacoby said. "She would not have done that."
Jacoby said Didi Sohus, who died of a heart attack in 1988, was a lonely woman who babbled about Linda and John being on a Secret Service mission in Europe and who said that a third party had contacted her about them.
Jacoby said she thought that Linda and John were planning a trip to Connecticut, not Europe, so that John could interview for a job, when they disappeared. But later her family received a postcard, purportedly from Linda, from France.
The case went cold until May 1994, when workers digging the pool for the home's new owners discovered remains wrapped in plastic bags and buried about 4 feet underground.
"When my brother went missing, it broke my father's heart," said Ellen Sohus, John's half-sister. "And when he found out where his remains were, it devastated my father. My father died six years ago, but he often said he thought about my brother every single day and would never be at peace until his murder was solved."
Many longtime members of Chichester's church suspected he was somehow involved in the case, said Banks, the church member. Chichester had borrowed a chainsaw from a church member shortly before the couple - and Chichester - disappeared, Banks said.
He said the lender of the chainsaw wants to remain anonymous. "It's one of those things he did that he and I agreed, years later, you don't do," Banks said. "You don't loan your chainsaw."
Chichester surfaced next in 1988, when he tried to sell a truck belonging to John Sohus in Greenwich, Conn., police told "Unsolved Mysteries." The seller used the name Christopher Crowe, the same name used on the stockbroker application, to sell the truck to the son of a local minister, who reported the episode to police after the man could not produce the truck's paperwork. Greenwich police did not return calls yesterday.
Seven years later, in 1995, Rockefeller married Sandra L. Boss in a Quaker ceremony on Nantucket in which no license was required, and afterward, no marriage certificate was filed. They had a daughter, Reigh, in 2001.
Divorce proceedings began last year. A court official who witnessed the 20-minute proceeding in a Boston courtroom said the couple sat near the front of the courtroom with their lawyers to argue over custody of the girl.
The court official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that Rockefeller, who looked disheveled, clutched his cellphone nervously and glanced furtively around the room, as if looking for help.
Rockefeller emerged in the public eye after he was accused of kidnapping Reigh in Boston July 27 during a custody visit supervised by a social worker. He is being held on charges in that case. 