by Walter Kirn
“Next summer I might like to stay with you,” he said. “I think Montana might just do the trick for me.”
“Stay with me?”
“On your ranch,” he said. “While I look for a property of my own to buy. I’ve got the Pipers on the job.”
I told him “No.” I said it wouldn’t work. My refusal was automatic and unyielding. He tried to soften me by playing up his troubling nervous symptoms. He even brought Shelby into it, describing a fight she’d had in Central Park with another dog whose owners were suing him. She had nowhere to roam now, but Montana would solve this problem. “Impossible,” I said. I cited my baby. I cited lack of space. He answered that he didn’t need space. Did I own a garage? He could live in my garage. I said, “You’re joking.” He said he wasn’t. He said that he’d lived in a tiny guesthouse once, a single room with nothing but a bed, and had never been happier in all his life.
THE DEPUTY DISTRICT ATTORNEY trying the case, Habib Balian, was a gangly, sweet-faced fellow with a long nose and animated, double-jointed hands. His manner was fetchingly boyish and distracted, causing Judge Lomeli to compare him, in what became a trial-long running joke, to the rumpled TV sleuth Columbo. For literate court watchers, this joke had punch, since Columbo was a modern homage to Inspector Porfiry in Crime and Punishment. He traps Raskolnikov in a cat-and-mouse game after the murder of a pawnbroker by toying with the accused’s half-conscious urge to confess obliquely to the killing through strange, self-sabotaging acts at odds with his arrogant intention to commit the “perfect crime.” To me Balian also resembled, physically, a young Armenian Lincoln.
During his opening statement, which ran all morning and was interrupted by a lunch break, Balian sometimes had trouble working the computer that let him show PowerPoint projections of photos, diagrams, and other evidence. Among the first slides that he put up were shots of John Sohus’s skeletal remains, both in the form that the swimming-pool diggers found them—bagged and wrapped and scattered in the pit—and as the coroner reassembled them. The pictures were dingy and confusing. The remains looked like pieces of garbage, like scraps of trash. They shocked me at first but I soon grew used to them. What I didn’t grow used to was the strenuous stage squint that Clark affected when he viewed them. I interpreted the expression as his answer to a highly specialized challenge: how to seem concerned about a dead man whom one has been charged with killing and dismembering without appearing personally concerned.
Balian used the computer again after the lunch break. He’d reached the climax of his narrative about the defendant’s elaborate life of fakery in the decades between the murder and his capture. Though the court had forbidden any overt mentions of the kidnapping of little Snooks, Balian was permitted to show a clip of Clark’s bizarre appearance on the Today show shortly after his arrest in Baltimore.
“All right, so in 2008,” said Balian, looking at the screen, which displayed an image of a red-haired Clark wearing his chunky clear-lensed Ray-Ban Wayfarers and sitting across from a female interviewer, “the defendant went on national TV. He is still trying to convince everyone that he was not Christian Gerhartsreiter, and he was asked, ‘Did you kill John and Linda Sohus,’ and you’ll see what he says. First he’s asked who he is.”
The tape:
“Is there a real name that we should be calling you?”
“Clark Rockefeller.”
“Clark Rockefeller, you say, is still your real name?”
“I believe so.”
“You believe so?”
“Yes.”
“But you’re not sure?”
“Well, from what I’ve heard lately it may not be, but as far as I know it’s my name.”
The footage brought smirks from the jurors. They couldn’t help themselves. I chose to react with a loud chuckle, hoping Clark would hear me. He knew I was right behind him, he knew my voice, and I wanted to unsettle him. I too was a fairly complicated reader of complicated human situations (when I wished to be), and what I’d learned was that, inside a courtroom, everyone has an effect on everyone else. There are feedback loops within feedback loops, that is, and they spin in all directions. To the jury, I was a journalist with a notepad whose reactions were legally irrelevant but important for that very reason, because I presumably channeled a point of view—the informed opinion of the media—that juries are forbidden to pay attention to but are bound to pick up hints of here and there. To Clark’s top-dollar, imported Boston attorneys, who knew that I was not only a reporter but their client’s disillusioned former friend, I was a potential shaper of their public reputations because I might choose to praise or criticize them in the article and book I was writing. To Balian, I was a surrogate, outside juror whose behavior might indicate what the actual jurors were thinking about his case. To Clark? I must have been one more demon in the chorus. My feelings toward him would shift from day to day, but on the day of the bones I truly loathed him, indulging a dark capacity in my nature for which I might never have a sounder excuse. Plus I felt safe that day; he was trapped, hemmed in, and I was flanked by allies, my fellow reporters, who shared my mocking disposition.
The clip from the Today show wasn’t finished. Balian pushed Play and the interview resumed.
“What do you remember about your childhood?” the interviewer asked.
“Well, I remember clearly going to Mount Rushmore in the back of a woody wagon. And being, uh, uh, an aficionado of station wagons, I, uh, believe it was a ’68 Ford. With the, uh, flip-up headlights.”
“So you have a clear memory of this car—”
“I have that—”
“—But nothing else?”
“I have a clear memory of once picking strawberries in Oregon.”
I restrained myself this time, no chuckle necessary. As the TV Clark dug deeper into his pile of half-formed, bogus recollections (“There are certain things that I haven’t forgotten. For example, the garbage strike in New York, I remember that very clearly”), the courtroom Clark visibly labored to dematerialize. What could be harder for a first-rate thespian than to watch himself performing old, fourth-rate bits while being observed in the round, from every angle, by an audience made up entirely of critics? But that was the thing: he wasn’t a first-rate thespian, not on TV and not in life, because I could remember his past performances, subtracting from them my then-cooperative spirit. For instance, the time he told me at the Lotos Club that his sister was locked up in a mental hospital, which he said was proof of his family’s callousness. The problem was that he’d told me not long before that he had no family: his parents had perished in a car wreck while driving up to visit him at Yale, he said, and he had no other siblings. “What family do you mean?” I should have asked him, and I recall wanting to do so. But I didn’t. A spry old waiter had just delivered our drinks as well as a fresh bowl of nuts—why spoil the moment? (Years later, as though he’d filed away his statements and noted a future need to clarify them, he’d say that his “family” was an aunt and uncle.)
It wasn’t Clark’s acting that dazzled, I realized now, it was his directing, his use of props, and his reliance on atmospheric assistance. On the Today show broadcast, though, away from his sets and casts of extras, with no one to help him but a bearded old lawyer, later fired, who seemed both complacent and annoyed, arch little Clark, the pretentious semiamnesiac, was purely summer stock.
“Did you kill John and Linda Sohus?”
“My entire life,” he said, his voice like a figgy pudding or an aged cheese, “I’ve always been a pacifist. I’m a Quaker and, uh, I believe in nonviolence. And, uh, I can fairly certainly say that I’ve never hurt anyone, physically.”
Balian quite wisely left it there, no commentary, no telegraphic gestures, nothing but silence and a screen gone blank and memories of a fudgy, moldy accent. I wished the trial itself could end there too, with the damning, supercilious echo of a man declaring his innocence not directly, with a plain denial, but with a roundabout, syllogistic utterance meant to
prove him incapable of violence because he belonged to a sect that preaches gentleness. A full confession could not have been more damaging. Did the jurors appreciate what they had just seen?
Their expressions were intentionally hard to read; they were taking their work more seriously now. For confirmation of my sense that Balian had put Clark in a tight spot, I nudged Girardot next to me, whose fingers were spider-legging across his keyboard. He nodded, well aware of what I wanted; we’d become friends, and he knew the case in detail, having been there when the body was exhumed, but he was reluctant to compromise his dignity by granting me the showy wink I craved. He believed the defendant was guilty too (“Guilty as shit,” he’d told me one day at lunch when we were trading theories about the crime), but he didn’t long to see him horsewhipped the way that I was starting to. Like Linda Deutsch, the ace legal reporter from the AP, whose career dated back to the Charles Manson trial, Girardot predicted that Clark would be acquitted. I took their word for this, but their seeming detachment about the prospect was impossible for me to share. They didn’t fear him knocking at their door one day, “Long time, no speak.”
BRAD BAILEY, WHO’D FLOWN in from Boston with his partner, the white-haired, patrician-looking Jeffrey Denner, opened Clark’s defense. Handsome, tall, and formidably gesticulative, with a flap of brown hair that swung across his eyes whenever he grew animated, he was a man of imposing physicality who liked to wave his glasses in the air, jut out his chin, and arch his full, dark eyebrows. While Balian’s appeal was to the head, to the faculty of reason, Bailey aimed at a lower, emotional center, at the meeting point of the libido and the gut. Big bones shifted under his suit as he stood up and loomingly approached the jury box. “You tell me,” he said to Judge Lomeli, “if I’m invading the province of the jury at any point.” He wasn’t genuinely seeking boundaries; he was indicating his aim to cross them.
His opening statement was light on substance but packed with rhyme and syncopation. Johnnie Cochran’s singsong line from the O. J. Simpson trial—“If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit”—seemed to be his inspirational text. It appeared he’d decided that LA juries were as childish as the cynics claimed.
“Now, over the next few weeks you’re going to learn a lot about a case that is, as you already know, quite old—twenty-eight years—was once quite cold (I submit the evidence will show for twenty-six years), but which still involves a story that is still untold. And as you listen to the evidence in this case unfold, I want you to think about that phrase: ‘Quite old, once cold, story still untold.’”
The verse was impossible not to think about, since Bailey repeated it every few minutes, a Beat poet–hypnotist costumed as a lawyer. Between recitations, he heaped derision on the charges against his client, dismissing the murder investigation as “an unidentified bones-in-a-bag case” and “a case about some bones, unidentified human bones in some plastic bags.” This naked attempt to depersonalize the victim, to reduce him to a fossil, struck me as both risky and repulsive, but Bailey persisted with the tactic. “And you’ll hear, as the evidence unfolds, there was a little bit of difficulty in identifying them [the bones] because Mr. Sohus was adopted, and because a large portion of them were inadvertently cremated.”
Having reduced John Sohus to debris—perplexing, adopted, incinerated debris—Bailey shifted his focus to the defendant, whom he sought to humanize. As Clark sat up straight, exhibiting himself, a stage magician assuring an audience that there was nothing up his sleeves, Bailey listed his client’s assumed identities, casting them as silly, harmless stage names. They didn’t prove Clark was a killer on the run, they showed him to be a snaky flim-flam artist plying an age-old California racket. “As if our client were the first person in this city to try to reinvent himself,” he said. This pretty good zinger scored him his first point. Some jurors’ heads bobbed.
His next move, which he performed in the grand manner, with lots of admonitory finger-wagging and melodramatic vocal swoops, was to incriminate the missing woman. Everyone close to the trial knew this was coming, including Ellen Sohus, John Sohus’s sister, an angular, sleekly dressed Tucson psychotherapist who sat across from me in a cordoned-off section that allowed her to mourn and meditate unmolested. Before she vanished, Linda had acted oddly, telling friends that she and John had been recruited by persons unknown for some kind of confidential government mission that would take them to the East Coast. The mission would call on John’s computer background and also on her art training, she’d said, though how painting centaurs and fairies in rainbow colors could aid the cause of national security went unexplained, and apparently no one asked her. Whether she found the tale credible herself was also impossible to know; she may have been forced to recite it from a script.
“And we will ask you,” Bailey said, “as you hear this evidence, to start considering whether this might have been part of a premeditated, prearranged way for her, Linda Sohus, to start covering her own tracks, a way for her to confuse her friends, or to set up a getaway, or create a smoke screen for after she had murdered her husband, as she may have been planning for whatever reason, for whatever motive she might have had.”
My own preliminary theory concerning Linda’s strange behavior, which I’d tried out on Girardot, was that Clark had killed John first and used his disappearance—or even his corpse—to make Linda fear that she too was in peril and needed to throw the assassins off her trail. With another defendant this notion might seem far-fetched, but I knew from experience about Clark’s gift for spinning seductive, conspiratorial yarns. There was also a chance he’d told Linda that he himself was a target of the evildoers. Either way, the talk of secret missions originated with him, I had no doubt. Clark’s narrative DNA was unmistakable.
Bailey, rising to operatic levels of assonance and alliteration, proceeded to tag Linda with all the traits—duplicity, fabulism, cunning—belonging to the man who’d likely murdered her. He accused her of practicing “the three Ds of Detach, Divert, and Disappear,” which I hadn’t known until then comprised a trio. He maintained that “as what’s untold begins to unfold in this case that’s old and was once quite cold,” the jury would learn that Linda too had at times employed an alias, “Cody” (the name with which she’d signed her unicorn paintings). How she differed physically from Clark was also deemed incriminating. While he weighed a mere 140 pounds and stood a skimpy five foot six, she was a 200-pound six-footer whose stout Amazonian frame was built to order, Bailey implied, for such taxing labors as bludgeoning and grave digging.
Clark looked smugly pleased with Bailey’s statement, and especially with its flattering conclusion. With mind-snapping, topsy-turvy logic, Bailey argued that his “conman” client was simply too “smart” and “crafty” to wrap the skull in “not just one bag, but two bags” of a kind that would flatly link him to the crime. To leave such a “calling card” would be beneath him. The underlying conclusion was clear: the very fact that this murder had been solved (forget the freakish twists of fate involved, from the kidnapping to the swimming-pool excavation; and forget that Linda’s fate remained an enigma) demonstrated that Clark had not committed it. He was too brilIiant, too slippery, too shrewd. He was the type that got away with murder, not the type that got charged with it. If Clark had slain John Sohus, we wouldn’t be here, and Clark most certainly wouldn’t be here. Yet here he was. There must be some mistake.
SIX
BALIAN WOULD CALL two sorts of witnesses during the trial: specialists and laymen. The specialists would address the case in narrow terms, according to their expertise and training. They would speak about bloodstains in the guesthouse, the physiology of the fractured skull, the faded logos on the bookstore bags, and the timeline of the defendant’s movements after he left California in the truck and began his new life of escalating impostures on the East Coast. What they couldn’t illuminate, however, was the fathomless human genius for credulity, wishful thinking, and self-deception that had allowed Clark very nearly to get
away with murder, and with so much else. This was the job of his friends, employers, and lovers. I saw parts of myself in nearly all of them, and each time I did I felt angrier and sadder, if a bit less lonesome. We were the fools who were never supposed to meet, the very opposite of a conspiracy, who’d worked together for his betterment, oblivious and separate.
“Never once in all your relationship did he, this allegedly wealthy guy, ever pick up a check,” said Bailey, cross-examining one of the first witnesses. “From what you could see, right?”
“He bought me a doughnut after we saw Double Indemnity,” the witness, Dana Farrar, replied.
Now a special education teacher, Farrar had studied journalism at USC and knew Clark in his guise as a footloose baronet. He told her he’d been raised in South Africa. She ran across him on campus now and then with scripts from the film library tucked under his arm. She assumed he was a student. She once let him lead her through some bushes to crash a party hosted by George Lucas.
On a spring evening in 1985, a few months after the murder, Clark had invited her to join him and some others in a game of Trivial Pursuit. Farrar participated, though she believed that Clark was, in the words of her father, “as full of shit as a Christmas goose.” Tables were set up in the backyard between the guesthouse and the main house, which Clark entered several times during the party to fetch glasses, spoons, and sugar for the iced tea he served. He said his landlord was gone and wouldn’t mind. At some point during the game, Farrar looked over to her right and spotted what she described in court as as a “rectangle” or “strip” of “crumbled dirt” measuring “two or three feet wide by about five to eight feet long.”