by Mark Seal
He also felt sure he could make a difference in San Marino, either by being elected to the city council himself or by being the puppetmaster of a city council member. “He felt that he had ideas and that if he pushed either me or my husband into running for office that he could sit behind the scenes and tell us what to say,” Carol Iliff said, adding that Chichester even suggested moving in with the couple.
“Actually, I’m wearing out my welcome a bit with the friends who have been giving me lodging,” he told the Iliffs one day. “Would you mind if I stayed with you for a month or so, until I can get resettled?”
Joe, who was on the road most weeks, didn’t think that was a good idea. It was only a two-bedroom house and not nearly large enough for his wife and Christopher Chichester. “My husband traveled every other week and he wasn’t going to have some guy living here in the house with me,” Carol later recalled.
After his first year in the area, Chichester was growing in confidence and attitude—not just in San Marino, which was becoming too provincial for a man of his name and nobility. With all of his social and television activities, it was a wonder that he had time for anything else. But he was living yet another active life as a student. He loomed extremely large as a big man on campus nine miles down the freeway, at the University of Southern California film school.
“I met Chris through my aunt Victoria,” said Dana Farrar, a dark-haired, friendly woman. It was a sunny Southern California afternoon and we were sitting on her back patio staring at a stack of photographs of the young man who called himself Christopher Chichester. She had not seen him for a very long time, but the pictures brought him back in all of his glory.
The first one showed Dana, then a fresh-faced beauty, grinning beside Chichester, an extremely thin young man in tight jeans and a V-neck sweater smirking crazily with three cone-shaped party hats on the top and sides of his head. In a second picture, he was peering contemplatively into a glass of wine, which he held with his pinky extended. In a third picture, he was making a funny face and twisting his fingers menacingly toward the camera—posing, Dana Farrar said, he was always posing.
“Aunt Victoria lives in San Marino,” Dana continued. “She’s ninety-two years old.”
Victoria was a true Super Marino matron. She met Chichester shortly after his arrival, at a Friends of the Library dinner.
“She was sitting with a neighbor, some old man from across the street, and Chris somehow struck up a conversation with her,” Dana continued. “At the time he used to give out business cards that said, ‘Christopher Chichester, Thirteenth Baronet,’ or something.”
“The Friends of the Library dinner was some kind of a charity event, where mostly it would be retired people, senior citizens, philanthropists,” said Dana. “I don’t know how he, Chichester, got there. But that’s where she met him.”
He had charmed her aunt, convincing her that he was involved in film production or something having to do with the film industry at USC, referring to the celebrated film school. “I was a student at USC at the time in journalism, and my boyfriend wanted to get into the film school very badly. Aunt Victoria thought Chris could help my boyfriend get into film school.
“She took us out to brunch with him,” Dana continued. “Oh, he was very charming. He was a lot of fun. He knew a lot about a lot of things.” But he was affected. He spoke in a clipped half-British, half-indiscernible accent, she said. “He would draw out the vowels at the end of every word.”
“Day-nahhhhhh,” she said, mimicking the way he said her name. “I think he must have studied American movies or something. It’s amazing to me. I speak German. I studied German for six years, and I couldn’t pick up a German accent with him at all.”
The accent was difficult to pinpoint, as were the details of his studies at USC.
“I can just remember being in the restaurant with Aunt Victoria and Chris and trying to pin him down, saying, ‘What are you actually doing? What is your job?’ He kind of just danced around everything.”
But he knew enough to keep the interest of his companions. Shortly after that he dropped the name Arthur Knight, the most impressive teacher of that era in the school. Dana and her increasingly starryeyed boyfriend took him to mean, I’m a teacher’s asssistant in Arthur Knight’s class. Arthur Knight was the famed author, film critic, and teacher who had taught future directors like George Lucas in his fabled Introduction to Film class, and had brought in guest lecturers like Orson Welles, Frank Capra, Clint Eastwood, and Chichester’s personal favorite, Alfred Hitchcock.
He gave the impression that he would “have a word with Arthur,” meaning he would talk to Arthur Knight about seeing what influence he might be able to bring to help Dana’s boyfriend get into film school. After the brunch, which Chichester ate ravenously, the parties said goodbye. Although Chichester never quite got around to introducing Dana’s boyfriend to Arthur Knight—or to helping him get into the film school—the brunch was the opening bell on Dana Farrar’s increasingly peculiar friendship with the young Englishman.
At USC, Dana began seeing him everywhere—in the library, at film screenings, dashing between classes. Always with a film script under his arm, he insisted that he was completing studies for his master of fine arts in film.
Dana and her friends could never bring themselves to ask why he was driving an old Plymouth Arrow if he was so wealthy. Nor did they question why his preppy clothing sometimes smelled from lack of dry cleaning—or was it just the musty scent of old money?—or why he had a habit of showing up unannounced at Dana’s apartment at mealtimes. “Oh, that smells so delightful, Day-nah!” he would say, until she either showed him the door or, more often, gave him a meal. He would wolf down food as if he hadn’t eaten for a week, and Dana thought what everyone else did: it all went with the territory of being rich, royal, and eccentric.
The professors knew him as well, and one of them, his English professor Geoffrey Green, assumed he was enrolled, because he was somehow on his roster of students. “I had a printed list from the registrar, and to get on it he would have had to sweet-talk someone in the registrar’s office into letting him into the class,” he remembered. “I did not admit him or add him to the class. His name was on the list.” However, the USC admissions department had no record of a Christopher Chichester, or a Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, enrolled in the school or ever paying tuition.
“He came to my attention because he was in my prose fiction class in the English department at USC,” Green continued. “He was a very active participant in the class and he came to see me during office hours. He was going by the name Christopher Chichester and he claimed at that time that he was descended from the Earl of Chichester, and he showed me some coat of arms, and he also said he was related to the Chichester who had sailed around the world.
“He told me that he lived in a mansion, that he had an extra room in the gatehouse where someone could stay as a guest, and various other things. He said he wanted to make films. He said he was going to be a significant writer, filmmaker. Like a philosopher of aesthetics. He was very outspoken, and he needed to be right.”
Chichester frequently invited Dana Farrar to movie screenings, including repeated showings of his two favorite films—Double Indemnity and All About Eve—at the art houses he loved, like the New Beverly in Beverly Hills. She went with him often. He also managed to get a friend of hers tickets to a special premiere of Barbra Streisand’s new movie Yentl at USC, tickets that were very tough to get. But when he asked Dana and her friends to the opening of the Marcia Lucas Post Production Building, a state-of-the-art multimedia facility named for the wife of Star Wars director George Lucas, she thought he had to be kidding. Chichester insisted that he wasn’t, adding that, of course, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, director Robert Zemeckis, and other Hollywood stars would also be in attendance.
“I’m getting you in!” he told Dana, and sure enough, somehow he did.
Once inside, Chichester acted the host, as the ra
il-thin film aficionado in the V-neck sweater went about the fine art of making introductions and excelling at the highest Hollywood art form: the schmooze.
“He loved dangerous women,” Dana said, recalling the films they saw and discussed when they went for coffee and conversation. His talk usually centered on his obsession with film, especially film noir, and the queens of the genre, like Barbara Stanwyck, whose performances fascinated him.
Someday, very soon, he would direct his own film noir movies on the scale of his heroes; for now, his life was seemingly consumed with watching them and, rather more chillingly, internalizing them.
CHAPTER 5
The Secret Mission
Though everyone in San Marino loved to talk about Christopher Chichester, no one seemed to know where he had actually lived during his sojourn in their community—that is, until the end of his time there. His last known residence in San Marino, 1920 Lorain Road, has since become among the most infamous addresses in the city.
He landed there thanks to the recommendation of two friendly young parishioners at the Church of Our Saviour, the Whitmore sisters, Muffy and Tasha. They met Chichester at a Bible study group and soon felt obliged to adopt the young European, whom they referred to as “cute little Chris.” They would invite him over to their house regularly for meals with them and their parents, and he always readily accepted. He would drive over in his clunker of a car, sporting a well-worn tweed jacket and tie—the sisters considered that so typical of the upper classes, where being flashy is looked down upon.
“I’d love to show you my house in Glendale on the Hill,” Chichester would tell them, alluding to one of Southern California’s most affluent neighborhoods. While they suspected that perhaps he might not really live there, they were too polite to challenge him or invite themselves for a visit.
Once, one of the sisters asked Chichester if he had met their grandmother. “She moved up from Bermuda to be near us, and she had been living in a lovely guesthouse over on Lorain Road, with slip covers on the sofa and an Oriental carpet on the floor.”
“Had been living?” Chichester inquired.
“Yes, but not anymore. She moved out, and into the Episcopalian home for the aged.”
Not long after that, Chichester knocked on the door of the two-bedroom, Spanish-style house at 1920 Lorain Road, located squarely in Sub Marino, near the border with San Gabriel. It’s easy to imagine how the encounter must have gone. He would have flashed his broad smile and perhaps presented his calling card. The woman at the door, whose name was Ruth “Didi” Sohus, would have been dressed, as she almost always was, in a tattered housecoat. She would likely have had a lit cigarette dangling from her lips and, even though it was long before the cocktail hour, a tumbler of her drink of choice—vodka cut with sherry—in her hand.
“Christopher Mountbatten Chichester,” the dashing young man would have said, extending his hand. “And you must be Mrs. Sohus.” As so many San Marino matrons before her had done, the woman would surely have blushed, smiled, and held out her hand, which Chichester would have grandly kissed. Thus began a most unlikely relationship.
When Christopher Chichester arrived at 1920 Lorain Road, both the house and its owner had seen much better days. Didi Sohus had moved there with her parents when she was two years old, and she’d had a typical San Marino upbringing. A picture of the class of 1935 at a prestigious private girls’ school in neighboring San Gabriel shows Didi as a petite brunette in a long white gown, smiling broadly and holding an enormous bouquet of flowers. Her parents gave her a convertible when she was still in her teens, and after being presented to Southern California society as a debutante, she graduated from USC. She went to work for a newspaper and flew her own small airplane—daring activities for a woman of her era.
Men, or her taste in them, would be Didi’s downfall. Her first husband was named Barney, but even Didi’s oldest friends couldn’t recall anything about him, including his last name. Husband number two, Harry Sherwood, was a Marine officer stationed at Camp Pendleton, about seventy miles south of San Marino. Harry had a son, who followed in his father’s footsteps and became a Marine, then joined the U.S. Border Patrol and the Customs Service as an investigator. He died young. Didi’s third husband, Bob Sohus, was a stockbroker. She was beyond childbearing age when they married, but she desperately wanted a baby, so they adopted a six-month-old boy, John, whose teenage mother had given him up.
They lived in Didi’s childhood home on Lorain Road. Didi’s mother, Frieda Detrick, whom everyone called Mama D., lived in a guesthouse on the property. It was not at all fancy, just a bedroom and bath, for it would be in violation of San Marino’s strict building codes if the Sohuses had rented the “accessory dwelling unit” for money.
One day in 1960, when John was still a toddler, Didi and Bob had a fight during which, according to Bob, Didi slugged him, or as Bob later put it, “She fattened my lip.” After that he moved out, leaving her to raise John on her own. Mama D. helped out, but one morning she failed to show up for breakfast with her daughter and grandson. “I’m too frightened to go back there and see if anything’s wrong,” Didi told a neighbor, who went to the guesthouse and found Mama D. dead. After that, John was all that Didi had left. She took a part-time job in an auto garage in nearby Pasadena to pay the bills, and she spent the rest of her time with her son.
John was something of a mama’s boy, smart but shy, a loner who suffered from diabetes and ulcers. His absentee father would remember him as very trusting and easily manipulated. Unlike most boys in San Marino, John wasn’t into sports or cars; he didn’t even show any interest in getting a driver’s license, preferring to ride his bike to school. He didn’t find his true passion until he was a teenager, when someone introduced him to computers. He was so fascinated by the machines—primitive though they were at that time—that he stole one from his high school and kept it in his bedroom until school officials realized it was missing and demanded that he return it.
Computers were going to be his life, he decided, and he threw himself into them completely. Rather than going to college, he hung out with fellow techies at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. In addition to computers, he discovered with these new friends a second love: the elaborate role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons. Through this game John connected with his future wife.
The redheaded, part–Blackfoot Indian Linda Mayfield, who was more than six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, dwarfed John Sohus, who stood five feet five. Like him she had been a social misfit, dropping out of school in tenth grade, waitressing and searching for herself, until she got into science fiction. She was a passionate fan of Star Trek and Dungeons and Dragons, and she loved to paint and sketch. She drew scores of fanciful ducks and bunnies, but her specialty was horses—usually wildly decorated stallions or unicorns, often depicted flying through the air trailing branches of flowers. Early on, Linda took up horseback riding, and when at age sixteen she moved from her childhood home in Venice Beach to live with her grandmother in the Los Angeles suburbs, her grandmother bought her a horse.
After quitting school, Linda spent a good part of her time at the tabernacle of science fiction, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS). She became a member in July 1976, when she was twenty. Founded in 1934, LASFS is the world’s oldest ongoing science-fiction society. Its members have included author Ray Bradbury and super-fan Forrest J Ackerman, editor of the landmark horror magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. Today the club, housed in a ramshackle building on Burbank Boulevard, is a meeting place for writers and artists, geeks and nerds, Trekkies and conspiracy theorists. Robert Bloch, the author of Psycho, was a member, and his book The Eighth Stage of Fandom, about the addictive pull of science fiction on its followers, is considered a bible of the society. Bloch described the progression of fandom from the first stage, “Reader interest,” to the last, in which the individual is “tottering on the brink of the abyss,” trapped in a world of fantasy with �
��no way to retrace his steps. He can only take the plunge, over the edge of the precipice.”
Linda Mayfield may not have been at the edge of the precipice, but she was a serious fan. She took a clerking job in a Los Angeles science-fiction bookstore called Dangerous Visions. There, surrounded by such titles as The Trouble with Humans and Monsters, Mutants and Heavenly Creatures, Linda found a home.
Whenever she returned to reality, however, she found that she was still unlucky in life, especially when it came to love. She had been engaged at age eighteen, but the groom bailed. Eight years later she was engaged again, to a young man who lived in San Marino. He worked as a night watchman and asked a friend, John Sohus, to stay in the house with Linda while he was away. A friendly little puppy of a man, John Sohus wouldn’t be much in the way of a bodyguard. He was short and pudgy, with Coke-bottle glasses, but he absolutely adored Linda from the moment they met. They bonded over games of Dungeons and Dragons and other areas of science-fiction fandom. And when his friend decided against marrying Linda, breaking up with her abruptly just before Christmas in 1982 and leaving her crestfallen and depressed, John was there to offer his support. They made for a somewhat strange, Mutt-and-Jeff pairing, but they soon fell in love and moved into John’s mother’s house. Christopher Chichester was already ensconced in the guesthouse.
From all indications, Chichester was living there as early as late 1982 and at least by 1983. “I attended a barbecue at the Lorain house on July 4, 1983, and Linda and John were living there by that time,” remembered Linda’s best friend, Sue Coffman. “That’s when Linda mentioned the ‘strange boarder’ who lived in the back house.”
Didi Sohus felt that Linda Mayfield wasn’t nearly good enough for her son. As John and Linda spent more and more time together, Didi became more of a recluse—wearing her housecoat morning, noon, and night, letting old newspapers and other clutter pile up to the ceiling. Her life had revolved around John, and now she was losing him. She didn’t even attend her son’s wedding, which took place in the backyard of Sue Coffman’s house at midnight on Halloween in 1983. A few guests showed up as Dungeons and Dragons characters and all manner of monsters. The bride and groom, however, as well as the bride’s family, dressed conventionally.