by Mark Seal
Despite Didi Sohus’s disapproval of their union, Linda and John continued to live with her on Lorain Road. As a bookstore clerk and a low-level computer programmer, they earned very little, but they were determined to move into a place of their own—along with Linda’s six cats—as soon as possible.
Life with Didi was fairly unpleasant for the young couple. She slept days and drank nights, screaming “Johnny!” at all hours and giving the couple very little, if any, privacy. “God, will she ever stop?” John and Linda would ask each other as her dementia grew. She took to pounding on their bedroom door to get their attention, and they finally resorted to putting a padlock on it. They were desperate to get out of Didi’s house—and to get Didi out of their lives—but they had very little money and no stability in their jobs. They were trapped.
Dangerous Visions, the store where Linda worked, was the largest science-fiction bookstore in L.A. It sat on the corner of Ventura Boulevard and Woodman Avenue in the Valley, the flatlands of the Los Angeles basin to the west of the city proper. Named for the landmark 1967 collection of science-fiction stories by Harlan Ellison, the bookstore had been owned and operated since 1981 by a bestselling sci-fi author, Arthur Byron Cover, and his wife, Lydia Marano. On the morning of February 8, 1985, Marano stopped by her store and found it dark and locked. Linda Sohus, the clerk who was supposed to be on duty, apparently hadn’t shown up. Annoyed, Marano opened the store herself and dialed Linda’s home number.
A seemingly drunken Didi Sohus picked up. “They’ve gone to Paris,” she said.
“Paris, Texas?” asked Marano.
“No, dear, Paris, France,” Didi said and hung up.
Linda had told her friend Sue Coffman a slightly different but equally improbable story: John had been offered the opportunity of a lifetime, a “top secret” government job in New York. They had to drop everything and fly to the East Coast immediately.
“Apparently it had to do with his abilities as a systems analyst with computers,” Coffman would later say. “Linda told me that she had also been hired by the government, but she didn’t know what they would want her for. All she could figure was that her artistic abilities might be useful for design or computer graphics purposes. I assumed that since she was married, if the husband was needed, it would just be easier to hire the wife also.”
Linda said she couldn’t tell Sue anything more about the mysterious job, but she assured her friend that she wouldn’t be gone long. She promised to be back in time for the trip to Phoenix the two had been planning. They were going to attend a science-fiction convention, and they would drive there in Linda and John’s brand-new pickup truck. Just before leaving San Marino, Linda dropped off her six cats at the local “cat hotel” and paid for two weeks of food and board. She assured the clerk there that she would be back for her precious pets soon.
In fact, John and Linda were back on Lorain Road within days of their supposed trip to New York, but only long enough to pack up a few belongings and excitedly inform Didi that they were off to Paris! Didi was shocked, but she wished them well and they took several of her credit cards to use on the journey.
Over the next two months, the owners of the Dangerous Visions bookstore got two calls about Linda. The first was from someone at Robinsons-May, a Los Angeles–area department store, checking on Linda’s qualifications, because, the caller said, she had applied for a job. The second call was from a credit card company; Linda had purportedly applied for a credit card and given her employer as a reference.
There was no word from the missing couple themselves, however. Linda never returned to pick up her cats from the cat hotel, but just before the proprietors were going to have to have them put down, an anonymous person, claiming to have been sent by Linda, retrieved the animals. Linda’s half sister, Kathy, eventually grew concerned and called Didi.
“Is Linda back from her trip yet?” she asked, according to a later report.
“I’m not supposed to tell you anything,” Didi said. She paused and added conspiratorially, “They’re on a mission!”
“What mission?” Kathy asked. “What are you talking about?”
“Well, that’s all I can tell you,” said Didi. Kathy’s subsequent phone conversations with her were not much more informative; depending on how drunk Didi was, they were sometimes completely incoherent.
Sue Coffman got a similar brush-off when she called Didi. “I wish I could say more, but I’m not allowed to,” Didi told her, meaning that any leak of information could “jeopardize” their top-secret mission. “I’m just supposed to say that they’re okay and that I don’t know when they’ll be coming back.”
A friend of Linda Sohus’s who had met her at Dangerous Visions called Didi after almost a month had passed with no news from Linda. “I looked up the only Sohus in that area, which turned out to be John’s mother,” the friend, known as “PanLives,” wrote on a Web site. “I called, expecting to be embarrassed about being such a worrier. She, Didi, answered. I told her who I was and that I was wondering if everything was okay. She immediately broke down in tears and said that she didn’t know where he was or what was going on. It got a little incoherent, and then France came up. I said, ‘France? I thought they were working in New York?’ She just kept crying.”
Finally, more than two months after John and Linda had disappeared, someone called the police. Two officers arrived at Didi’s house at 7:30 p.m. on April 8, 1985. They knocked on the door, and Didi opened it a crack. The officers said they’d been told that her son and daughter-in-law were missing. Did she know where they had gone?
“They’re not missing!” Didi would later be quoted as saying. “Everybody keeps asking me, and I keep telling them they’re on a secret mission!”
The cops shot each other a look. “Can you tell us how we can reach them?” one asked.
“I have a source,” Didi said, adding that this person could reach John and Linda whenever necessary. Didi said she couldn’t reveal who the source was, though, because if anyone else tried to contact the couple, it could jeopardize them and their top-secret government mission.
“Okay?” she said and went back into the house.
Then three postcards arrived, each mailed on the same day and each with a picture of the Eiffel Tower on the front and a Paris postmark. One was sent to the co-owner of Dangerous Visions: “Not quite New York, but not bad. See you later, Linda and John.”
Another went to Sue Coffman: “Missed New York—Oops! But this can be lived with. Love, Linda and John.”
The third postcard was to Linda’s mother, which was odd, since the two had been estranged for some time. “Took a wrong turn in Europe,” it read.
Nobody really paid much attention to the missing couple, at least not right away. Almost ten years later, however, when the missing persons case would make headlines, San Marino buzzed with speculation. Why had John left San Marino for New York the day before Linda, as someone familiar with the case insisted? And why had John asked for two weeks’ advance pay from his boss at Dual Graphics, the computer programming company where he worked, promising to pay it back, only to abscond with the cash, which wasn’t at all like honest Johnny Sohus? Did any of this have to do with their boarder, Christopher Chichester?
For a month after the couple left town, he remained in his guest quarters at 1920 Lorain Road. By this time he seemed to have full run of Didi Sohus’s house. He even invited people over to play his favorite board game, Trivial Pursuit.
In John and Linda’s absence, Didi let Chichester drive their pickup truck. One day he drove it over to Loma Linda, to the home of Elmer and Jean Kelln, the couple he’d met in Germany seven years earlier. “I’ve finally arrived!” he told them. “I’ve finally made it in the movie industry!”
He said he was not merely having success as a film producer but that he had purchased a house in San Marino. He said that the actress Linda Evans, who was then starring in the hit series Dynasty, lived right next door, and that the houses were so
close he could see over her fence. How could the Kellns know that Linda Evans lived in Los Angeles and had never lived in San Marino? They believed everything Christopher told them, even that he was working in a studio mailroom to make extra cash, and that he clipped unmarked stamps off envelopes and sold them.
Later, he showed up at their house again, this time bragging that he had just made $5,000 by selling film emulsion he had picked up for nothing at USC. Why would a rising producer do something like that? He was on his way to the Cannes Film Festival, he explained with a wink, and needed a little pocket money for champagne and caviar.
The Kellns’ son, Wayne, pulled up shortly after Chichester did one day. Seeing the unfamiliar truck parked in front of his parents’ house, Wayne got out of his car and looked inside. The driver’s seat was empty, but a large woman was sitting in the passenger seat. She was huge, he would later recall, a strawberry blonde with a red face, looking as if she had been crying.
Wayne walked up to the front door just as Chichester was coming out, carrying a box of things he’d stashed at Elmer and Jean’s for safekeeping.
“Hi, Wayne,” he said.
“Hi,” said Wayne, sensing that something was strange—not that Chris was at his parents’ house, because he visited often, but that he was with a woman. Wayne had never seen Chris with a woman before.
“Unfortunately, this is my last haircut with you,” Chichester told Jann of Sweden one day in the spring of 1985.
“Really?” asked the Swedish cowboy.
“Yes, a family member has died in London, and I have to go back immediately and settle the estate,” he said. He shook hands with Jann and went downstairs to the street, where he got into John Sohus’s pickup truck and drove away. Jann Eldnor, Elmer and Jean Kelln, Didi Sohus, Dana Farrar—none of them ever saw Christopher Chichester again.
Five months after John and Linda left, Didi Sohus broke down and called the San Marino Police Department. Two officers were immediately dispatched to her address. Didi invited them into the house and asked them to sit down. She said she wanted to file a missing persons report.
“I thought I knew what was going on, but now . . .” she began.
“Have you had any contact with John and Linda at all since they left?” they asked.
“Well, I’ve been sending their mail through my source,” she said, “the man who has been in contact with them. He’s been the one telling me what’s been happening.”
He had told her, she said, that John and Linda were working for Dassault Aviation, the French aerospace giant, which his family partially controlled and which had branches around the globe. He had also told her to give him Linda’s prized saddle and any mail for the couple, which soon included a flurry of past-due notices from banks, credit card companies, and department stores. And, she added, he was shipping it all to what she presumed was a way station for the couple, in Iredell County, North Carolina. Why there? She didn’t know. He, of course, was none other than Christopher Mountbatten Chichester.
“We’ll need to talk to this individual,” one of the officers said.
“You can’t!” said Didi. “See, that’s why I’m worried. He’s gone too, just disappeared.”
After putting the police on the case, Didi Sohus continued her sad descent. Crippled by a stroke and mounting medical bills, she eventually sold her house and moved into a trailer park in La Puente, twenty miles from San Marino. “If Johnny comes looking for me, please tell him where I am, because he’ll come to you,” she told a neighbor on Lorain Road. “He’ll want to know why I’m not there.”
She never had any word from her son and daughter-in-law. In the fall of 1988, she had a heart attack and died. Her request to have her body cremated and her ashes scattered at sea was carried out by her designated trustees, Linda and Don Wetherbee, who were complete strangers to Didi before the couple sold her a mobile home near their own.
Though few people had taken much notice of Didi in her decline, her will aroused considerable interest. California reporters Frank Girardot and Nathan Mcintire later reported that she left behind an estate worth approximately $180,000, according to court records. She forgave a $40,000 loan she had made to Linda and Don Wetherbee. She also left them the proceeds from the proposed sale of her mobile home, which would amount to $32,000. As for John Sohus, a year before Didi’s death she filed a new last will and testament, disinheriting her only son. Why had Didi Sohus really moved into a trailer home? Why did she disinherit her only son from her will? Why did she leave her entire estate to Linda and Don Wetherbee, whose only apparent connection to the deceased is that they sold Didi her trailer home? These questions were not answered—or even asked—in the mid-1980s.
By then, the man who called himself Christopher Chichester was far from San Marino and no longer needed Didi Sohus or her shelter.
In 1994, six years after Didi’s death, the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group ran an article with the headline COLORFUL CAST OF CHARACTERS: “Detectives try to unravel mystery of old home on Lorain Road.” The story related the unhappy details of Didi Sohus’s life and the sorry state of her house. “The cast of characters proved irresistible to the young Melanie Whitehead,” wrote reporter Bernice Hirabayashi. “In the 1960s, she stood on tiptoe to catch a glimpse of her neighbors over the backyard fence. ‘As a kid, I can remember just peeking over the wall and watching them,’ she said. ‘Everything was overgrown. I don’t think they ever took care of the yard.’”
The article went on to describe the principals in the story: “There was the main character, Ruth ‘Didi’ Sohus, the USC debutante, who took to drinking and socked her husband, Bob Sohus, in the face during a marital spat. There was the adopted son, John Sohus, and his wife, Linda, who shared an obsession with science fiction and fantasy . . . and then there were Didi’s illegal tenants—transients who rented the guesthouse in violation of city codes.”
It was a perfect situation for a tenant who wished to keep his living arrangements hidden. As one Super Marino widow told me, “You have to give him credit. Was there anyone that people in San Marino knew less about than Didi Sohus and those two?” By “those two” she was referring dismissively to John and Linda Sohus.
As usual, Jann of Sweden, who had cut John Sohus’s hair since he was a child, had a much closer perspective. “Oh, I knew Didi,” he told me. “Chichester was living there on Lorain Road with her, and he had plenty of space.” He was saying that Chichester was living with Didi first, perhaps as early as late 1982, even before John and Linda moved into the house on Lorain Road.
Jann looked to see if I was getting the gist of what he was trying to say, and when I nodded yes, he said, “All right. So, they move in and they discover the man in the back, Christopher Chichester.” He shot me a knowing smile. “The son, John, now starts to put his nose into what Chichester is doing. He sees his mother’s condition and starts thinking, ‘Maybe this Chichester is taking money from my mother.’ And he starts to question Chichester.”
Jann seemed sure he was onto the truth as he continued: “Now, for sure, Chichester had his eye on all the ladies, young and old. So right away he maybe kept an eye on John’s wife, Linda. And because he treats the ladies really special, it might not take long for Linda to start to have a liking for the guy. Meanwhile, the husband, John, might be more irritated, and Chichester suddenly . . .” Jann pantomimed Chichester picking up a large object and getting set to swing.
I cut him off there, because he couldn’t possibly have proof that Chichester suddenly did anything. However, back in my hotel room that night, I found that Jann wasn’t the only one speculating in this direction. A Pasadena Star-News account quoted Frank Wills, the former San Marino police chief: “According to Wills, investigators speculated that Chichester and Linda Sohus became romantically involved sometime prior to her and her husband’s disappearance. ‘There was speculation that [Chichester] was in love with the female,’ Wills said. ‘He had a very elaborately devised story and convinced her that
he was a secret agent.’ Wills noted that detectives also believed that Chichester was jealous of John Sohus, and that jealousy may have led to murder.”
I pulled out the sheaf of documents I had been given during the trial in Boston and found a neatly typed report from the San Marino Police Department, prepared after officers had interviewed Didi Sohus’s next-door neighbor. “Mrs. Sohus seemed to drink a great deal,” the woman said. Regarding Chichester, who “taught at the school of filmmaking” at the University of Southern California, she said he was “odd, a real strange guy. . . . He did not discuss his family, except to mention that he was wealthy and well-connected in England. She did not remember seeing any friends visit him. . . . She thought Chichester was having financial problems. She said the mailman would comment on how many bills Chichester received and how creditors frequently asked for him.”
There was also a report in which Didi discussed her son and daughter-in-law with the police. “She said that the subjects appear to be in a great deal of debt. She is constantly receiving calls and notices from banks and businesses asking for their whereabouts, e.g., Bank of America, Sears, Broadway, Holiday Hotel for Cats.”
I put down the papers and tried to visualize the house at 1920 Lorain Road in 1985: one married couple, six cats, and Christopher Chichester—all strapped for cash—and a lonely, loopy landlady who was pretty wealthy by comparison. This was a setting any true student of film noir couldn’t help but relish. And Chichester, who was well versed in the genre, actually found himself living in it.