by Walter Kirn
I had Nazis on the brain that day, the result of two movies I’d watched the night before. The first one was a five-minute student film shot in 1984, which I found on the Internet. Called Suspension, it was a vile little production set in a gloomy morgue or surgical theater. A lovely young woman lies sleeping on a table dressed in a some sort of institutional smock. Above her face is a blinding ceiling lamp, the kind used in hostile interrogations, and next to her stands a bespectacled young doctor brandishing an oversize syringe. It’s him. It’s Clark. It’s Joseph Mengele. It’s a baby-faced angel of ice-cold Aryan death. He turns to fill the syringe from a glass vial and, just as he does, the woman’s eyes twitch open. She sees the harsh light. She comprehends her fate. She struggles up off the table, drugged and woozy, and flees down a hallway. Herr Doktor hears her, looks. Cut to her motionless body back on the table. Cut to the ceiling light, distorted, glaring. Blackness then. Darkness. A single blurry credit: “Chris Chichester.”
The second movie was less distressing. Orson Welles’s The Stranger, the director’s first venture into noir, was made in 1946 and is thought to be the earliest Hollywood film to incorporate actual footage of concentration camps. Welles plays Franz Kindler, a fugitive Nazi war criminal posing as a Connecticut prep school teacher named Charles Rankin. One day a former confederate from the fatherland, who is being tracked by an Allied Nazi hunter, Mr. Wilson, played by Edward G. Robinson, shows up to rendezvous with Kindler, who kills his old Reich-mate and buries him in the woods so as to throw Robinson off his trail. When Kindler’s girlfriend’s pet Irish setter sniffs out the body and starts to dig it up, Kindler slays the dog as well. We don’t see this crime, of course (movies, even contemporary graphic ones, shun any representation of such acts; horses may appear to die in battle scenes, but dogs and cats expire offscreen); we just see the creature dead afterward. To catch Kindler, Wilson must convince the girlfriend that Rankin, a seemingly upper-crust American, is really the German mass-murderer—a suspicion borne out at a dinner party one night when Rankin extemporizes about his country of origin as though he’s studied the place in depth but never spent much time there himself: “The German sees himself as the innocent victim of world envy and hatred, conspired against, set upon by inferior peoples, inferior nations. He cannot admit to error, much less wrongdoing . . . He still follows his warrior gods, marching to Wagnerian strains, his eyes still fixed upon the fiery sword of Siegfried. And in those subterranean meeting places that you don’t believe in, the German’s dream world comes alive and he takes his place in shining armor beneath the banner of the Teutonic knights.”
I ATE LUNCH THAT day with Frank Girardot at Philippe, a downtown culinary landmark with pushed-together long communal tables, sawdust-covered floors, and glass refrigerated cases displaying dishes of Jell-O and rice pudding. For Los Angeles literary pilgrims in search of Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled ghost, Philippe is the spot. Girardot fit in perfectly. He’s a Chandleresque character himself, a newshound whose local knowledge is brewed from shoe leather, antacid tablets, day-old doughnuts, and black coffee. In his briefcase he kept a knotted tie that he could throw on to interview high mucky-mucks and whip back off again for street reporting. His car was a black Ford sedan with a huge motor, manufactured chiefly for police use. He’d been at the job since 1984, before which he sold lightbulbs door-to-door. In the courtroom he filed two stories a day and oversaw the Pasadena paper from the laptop balanced on his knees.
“I’m with you on the phone idea,” he said. He lifted the bun off his French-dip turkey sandwich and squirted hot mustard on the meat. “I’m with you on the guilty-mind shit too. You know about his Social Security number? The one he used after the murder, in Connecticut?”
I shook my head.
“It belonged to Son of Sam. There’s more, though. He had a phony birthday, too: February 29th. It’s Richard Ramirez’s birthday.”
“Who’s Ramirez?”
“The Night Stalker. You remember.”
I did, but faintly. Girardot clued me in, speaking between bites and sometimes during them. Ramirez was the Satanic-minded serial killer who terrorized the same area where Clark lived—the San Gabriel Valley—at the same time that Clark became a murderer. Ramirez’s specialty was home invasions that ended in sadistic torture sessions, often with gruesome sexual elements followed by ritualistic desecrations of his victims’ remains. In one case, he carved out a woman’s eyeballs and took them with him in a jewelry box. Another time he used a tube of lipstick to draw a pentagram on a victim’s wall. According to Girardot, one of the reasons the Sohus missing-persons case drew less official attention than it might have was the fixation on tracking down Ramirez, whose murder, rape, and mutilation spree—arguably the most baroquely depraved in American history—was reaching its height just then.
“So Clark would have known this was going on?” I said.
“You kidding? The Valley had a werewolf loose.”
A werewolf Clark honored by borrowing his birthday. Clark, the blue-blazer and gin-and-tonics man. The Gordon setter fancier. The Yalie. Tony Bennett’s next-door neighbor. A Quaker. An Episcopalian too.
We came up with a nickname for him that day at lunch: Hannibal Mitty. It made Girardot laugh. I laughed too, but not from so deep down. Frank was a tough one, a guy who’d seen it all, but he’d never quite seen this one, he admitted. Maybe no one had. Maybe this was new.
Gatsby the Ripper was our second choice.
NINE
HE’D SPECIALIZED IN duping women, though in some cases it was closer to hostage taking and Cold War–era mind control. One after another, in no particular order, they took the stand like agents of vengeful fate in a classical tragedy, incriminating him by bits and pieces. At times during their testimony Clark’s third attorney, Danielle Menard, a silent local counsel who asked no questions during the trial, would lean in close to him, whispering and smiling, behaving almost like a girlfriend. With her Chanel bags and her high-heel shoes, she was a glamorous addition to what must have been an extremely expensive defense team that no one could quite figure out how he was paying for. (Denner and Bailey wouldn’t discuss the matter.) An attractive blond in her late thirties given to wearing skirts and attention-grabbing low-cut tops, Menard appeared to have a double function: to comfort and calm Clark in moments of distress and to show the jury that he was harmless, someone a woman could huddle with unafraid.
Elaine Siskoff was Clark’s first known girlfriend, and she said he was her first boyfriend. She met him as Christopher Gerhart, a fellow student at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee in 1980–81. She believed he was from England. Eager to obtain a green card, he asked her to marry him and she refused. He married her sister instead. In January 1982, Siskoff received a card from him postmarked England. The card informed her that he was busy writing and teaching Sunday school to ten-year-olds. She never heard from him again. The card was a ploy; according to immigration records, the defendant never left the country after arriving in 1979. The card bore a sinister similarity to those sent out in the name of Linda Sohus, supposedly from France, after she vanished.
Kathleen Roemer, a neighbor, knew the defendant in San Marino. He ran the Chichester Family Trust, he told her. They attended a concert one night. She didn’t like him and didn’t want to see him again. He was so full of “crap,” she testified, “his eyes were brown.” One week she traveled to northern California to house-sit for a relative, leaving urgent instructions with her family not to tell the defendant where she’d gone. A few days later a FedEx package arrived at the house where she was staying. It contained a box of chocolates and a love note. She never found out how he obtained the address. The prosecution used her testimony to demonstrate the defendant’s guile and sneakiness. I studied her with an eye toward Clark’s taste in women. She was thirty years younger when he’d asked her out, but her on-the-square-side face was probably not all that different now. I compared her to my memory of Sandra, who’d had a rounder face but a simi
lar head-on bearing. I decided Clark went for women of strength, apparent strength. My stereotyping was premature, though; when I saw the woman he’d stayed with longest next to Sandra I erased my mental chalkboard and decided that the exercise was ridiculous given Clark’s singularly flexible character.
Mihoko Manabe took the stand during the trial’s second week. A slender woman of Japanese descent who seemed pained to be there, she had known the defendant in New York from 1987 to 1994. She fell in love with him, made a life with him, and unwittingly helped him shake the cops after they linked him to the missing couple through the stolen truck. Manabe was the rare witness who didn’t get snappy with Clark’s attorneys or contextualize away her gullibility. In the trial’s long parade of fools, she was the soft-spoken Queen of Sorrows.
Balian made her speak up to tell her story. She’d met the defendant as Christopher Crowe, the notional brother of Cameron Crowe (best known at the time as the writer of Fast Times at Ridgemont High) and a self-described former producer of the 1980s revival of the TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents. She was working in New York as a translator at Nikko Securities, an investment bank, where Crowe was the head of the bond desk, for no clear reason. He had previously worked for the Greenwich, Connecticut, investment firm of SN Phelps, and he went on to work for Kidder Peabody. Bankers seemed to have a weakness for monogrammed hustlers full of tea and toast; someone would meet Clark at a yacht club and he’d end up running something for the person. The fine young fugitive from California had struck out in show biz, which flaunts its phoniness, but somehow he just couldn’t miss on Wall Street.
His hold on Manabe seemed to grow in proportion to the scale of his deceptions. When the management of Nikko fired him after learning that Crowe was not his name, she believed his explanation that he was a British royal in disguise. His real name, he told her, was Mountbatten, as in Lord Mountbatten (1900–1979), military hero, uncle of Great Britain’s Prince Philip, last Viceroy of India, and as superbly credentialed a nobleman as Crowe could harvest from his encyclopedias. Crowe also told Manabe he had a grandmother, Elizabeth, who lived in Windsor, England. In a manner that must have further flummoxed her, he mentioned that he hailed from Pasadena, the son of an anesthesiologist father and an actress mother. He left her to fill in the blanks as best she could, probably confident that, like most of his targets, she’d give up quickly and take his word for things. Or not take his word and say she did.
One day in 1988, a policeman called Crowe and Manabe’s home, asking to speak to him. Crowe convinced Manabe that the lawman was actually a villain plotting to harm him in some dark intrigue. For their own protection, they would have to go underground, he said, and he would have to change his identity. He would now be Clark Rockefeller, a man whose existence she helped render plausible by providing him with a credit card bearing his new name—on her account, of course. When he quit working, she supported him. When he quit driving, she chauffeured him. She broke off relations with her friends and family, helped him dye his hair and eyebrows blond, and accepted his proposal of marriage. Manabe, too, had acquired a new identity. She was the woman who wasn’t there.
“And whose idea, was it to walk on opposite sides of the street?” Balian asked.
“It was his idea,” Manabe said.
“Whose idea was it never to walk into your building together so no one would know you guys were together?”
“It was his idea,” she said quietly.
“I’m sorry?”
“His idea.”
“Whose idea was it to stop getting mail at your apartment and start using P.O. boxes?”
“It was his idea.”
My pity for the self-effacing witness was largely self-pity, transferred. With Clark, as I knew, it was always his idea. One stopped having one’s own when in his company. What made this dynamic painful to recall was just how bad his ideas often were. Once, during a phone conversation years before, I mentioned to him that I’d recently started writing for The Atlantic. He fell silent, which puzzled me—I would have expected some show of recognition for the name of the country’s oldest magazine, a New England institution. I filled him in on The Atlantic’s history and said that it had recently changed hands. “I should have bought it myself,” Clark said. “Too bad. Perhaps the new owner wants a partner?” He asked me to pass this idea on to my editor, who could send it up the chain. I did so. The publisher wasn’t interested.
Manabe’s decision to shield her betrothed (who never followed through on his proposal) contorted and constricted her life for years. She agreed to shred their household trash and discard it at remote locations as far away as Pennsylvania. She kept quiet about the phony name he used (“some Jewish name, Abraham or something”) when they paid rent to their landlord. She agreed to flee with him to Europe, and didn’t question him when he scotched the plan. She accepted his explanation that the passport with his photo in it—a German passport, not a British one—was an artful fake. She cooperated with his demand that she avoid the closet in their apartment where he stored various files and private documents and which he called his “office.”
“And when you would try to go in [to the closet], what reactions, if any,” asked Balian, “would he have?”
“He would get angry,” Manabe said.
It was one of the very few moments in the trial when evidence was presented of Clark’s bad temper. It struck me because I couldn’t remember an instance of seeing him in an ugly mood. Only after his divorce from Sandy, when he grumbled for most of one winter over the phone about the injustice of the financial settlement and his grievous longing for his lost daughter, did I even discover that he had moods. Even then, though, I envied his composure; after my divorce I’d lost my marbles, sobbing in front of strangers, throwing things, pounding the steering wheel of my car so hard once that I broke a small bone in my right hand. Clark and I drifted apart during those years partly because I sensed that my distress was alien to him, too raw. I avoided his calls, ignored his e-mails, failed to alert him when I traveled east, and didn’t let on that I’d been there when I came back. I’d been to New Hampshire a couple of years earlier and stayed the weekend at his strange old mansion—an unsettling visit; I’d blocked it from my mind—but whenever he asked me back, I made excuses, even when he implored. I was crumbling, a wreck; he wouldn’t understand. His money and position kept him placid. He lived in a cloud castle. I lived down below. I’d lost my family, my home, and I was broke. Go crying to a Rockefeller. Right.
Manabe escaped him in 1994 when she met someone else, her future husband. She knew by then that her life was not her own and that if she stayed with Clark it never would be. One day she walked out, abandoning their apartment, which originally had been her apartment. He called now and then, once to say he’d moved to Boston, and sometimes he e-mailed her from an address that ended in “Harvard.edu.” But he wasn’t in Boston; he’d never left New York (he was still in the apartment), and his only link to Harvard was the new woman he’d become involved with, Sandy Boss, who’d graduated from its business school and whom he’d marry the same year—or perhaps had already married when he called. Manabe was free, though; she’d fled the hall of mirrors.
She didn’t look once at Clark, nor he at her. When she was excused and walked across the courtroom, she fixed her gaze on the exit. He lowered his. If it was shame he was feeling, or just feigning (the jurors’ faces were full of loathing toward him after hearing Manabe, so looking ashamed was the prudent move), he never showed any sign of it again.
“Did you love him?” Balian had asked her.
“Yes, I did.”
“Did you believe he loved you?”
“Yes,” she said.
THE WEEK THAT MANABE testified, a man named Patrick Rayermann was sworn in. Balian called him not to talk about Clark but to humanize the victim, whom he’d grown up with, counted as a close friend, and portrayed as “warm” and “generous” and “excited about the future of humanity.” I was grateful for t
he change of subject and for the witness’s optimistic tone. Rayermann, a blond, blue-eyed retired army colonel who served in the Space and Missile Defense Command, told the court of his days as an Explorer Scout in a post that John Sohus also belonged to. It was attached to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a branch of Caltech that puts spacecraft into orbit for the U.S. government.
“We discovered early on,” said Rayermann, articulating with military precision and drawing from Clark what appeared for all the world to be a look of respect and admiration, “a mutual interest in the future of science and space exploration and science fiction, most notably Star Trek. And we used to enjoy, in particular, sharing, trying to stump each other on Star Trek trivia. Because we were early Trekkies.”
“In a number of ways,” Rayermann continued fondly, describing his and John’s circle of friends, “we were like the characters currently presented on the TV show The Big Bang Theory. You know, we were having a lot of fun together. But other people might be a little surprised as we described or compared theories about the real Big Bang that started the universe, or how we could get to faster-than-light space travel, or maybe actually talking about a current project at JPL that was working to orbit a new satellite or launch a deep-space probe to really bring some of this to reality.”
These details thawed a cold spot in my memory, calling me back to a weekend of many years ago that I wasn’t eager to revisit. Remembering it in the light of Rayermann’s testimony brought up a host of reflections, theories, and questions, one of which I’d long been living with but had never expected to have cleared up, since no one I knew was qualified to address it. This had changed. When Rayermann finished testifying, I followed him out into the hall and asked. I didn’t explain the question’s origin so as not to prejudice his answer; I posed it as a matter of geopolitics, as an inquiry into the history of espionage.