The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  “Before the two of you got married, did he discuss any other source of income that he had besides the debt restructuring or the Third World consulting?”

  “No. He, in fact, made a point of saying that he had been cleaned out in his assets settling the lawsuit. So he kind of said, ‘Take me as I am.’ ”

  And she did. Who he was, however—and what he had done before entering Boss’s upwardly mobile life—would remain a mystery to her, at least for the time being, something she seemingly never thought about, much less asked her fiancé about.

  Sandra’s sister, Julia, and Charles Knapp beat Clark and Sandra to the altar by six months. They were married in an elaborate ceremony in St. Thomas Church, with a reception afterward in the Great Hall. Julia and Charles were graduates of Yale, class of 1990, and Charles was a member of the Whiffenpoofs, the hallowed Yale tradition, started in 1909, in which fourteen Yale seniors are selected to comprise the world’s oldest and most famous collegiate a capella singing group. So, of course, Charles’s class of the “Whifs,” as they were called, sang at the wedding.

  Not to be outdone, Sandra and Clark held their engagement party on the same day as Sandra’s sister’s wedding, so guests just moved from St. Thomas Church to Clark’s apartment. “It was a Stilton and sherry party,” remembered one of the guests. “And the dog, Yates, kept licking the cheese. They kept telling the dog, ‘Yates! No face on the table.’ ”

  By then, everyone knew Sandra’s fiancé’s quirks and eccentricities. Even his birthday was odd and rare, special unto him. “I hosted his thirty-second birthday, along with Charles Knapp, in a beautiful room on the second floor of the Landmark Tavern in New York,” said Tom Rizer. “Clark’s birthday comes only every leap year, because he was born on the twenty-ninth of February, at least that’s what he claimed.”

  Actually, his birthday was February 21, 1961. But again, who cared, or dared, question him as he continued to create his own folklore? By then, he had become a master at making people believe whatever he told them. Even the crowd he fell in with in New York, intelligent, extremely well-educated people who had attended the same privileged East Coast prep schools and colleges that Rockefeller claimed to have attended, were convinced he was somebody. “We always assumed that Sandy knew the full story [of who he really was], and just wasn’t telling us,” said John Wells. Added someone else who knew Rockefeller well: “We thought he was someone’s [meaning a Rockefeller] illegitimate son, whose mother had been paid off and then died, and he was seizing the family name of his birth father who wouldn’t acknowledge him, out of spite. It was like a parlor game between us. Julia, Sandy’s sister, would never be any part of this. She was very upset about it. She just didn’t want to talk about it.”

  I asked the obvious question: “Do you think Sandy believed everything Clark told her?”

  “I think she wanted to,” said the friend. “I asked her about it once, and she got really offended. I was drunk and rude, and I said, ‘How do you know that he’s really Clark Rockefeller and not some axe murderer on the lam?’ She said, ‘I’m his fiancée. I’m going to be his wife. I would think that he would tell me more about his past than he would tell you!’ ”

  But however suspicious they were of Clark’s life, his friends told me, the truth would outstrip their wildest speculations.

  The Boss-Rockefeller wedding was held on October 14, 1995, in the Quaker Meeting House on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the summer getaway spot of choice for many of the wealthiest people in America. There were only seven guests—“my sister, her husband, my parents, and three people who were associated with the Nantucket [Quaker] Meeting House,” Sandra testified—plus one dog, Clark’s Gordon setter.

  But Sandra and Clark were both devout Episcopalians. Why were they married as Quakers? It was the result of another of his soon-to-be-famous snits, and once again it concerned his “niece,” Alice Johnson.

  “He went to the vicar of St. Thomas to see if she [Alice] could be a member of the church and be confirmed without going to the confirmation class,” recalled Rockefeller’s friend Tom Rizer. “After all, she was a Rockefeller, Clark insisted—she shouldn’t have to go through any of that. And they turned him down. He said he wouldn’t even go to St. Thomas again, because they turned him down. And so he became a Quaker.”

  He told Sandra a different story. “He said that he was having increasing problems at St. Thomas with people pressuring him to make donations, which is plausible,” she told the grand jury. “It’s a rich church, and they do ask people for money. He was excited about the simplicity and purity of the Society of Friends. It was very democratic and it was kind of, each individual’s spiritual life was the only thing that mattered.”

  The historic Quaker Meeting House on Nantucket couldn’t provide Rockefeller with much in the way of social connections, but those he had already gotten from St. Thomas. What the Quakers did offer was the ideal wedding ceremony for someone desirous of keeping his name and personal information out of the public record.

  “If you want to have a wedding where you don’t have to deal with legal stuff, Quaker is the way to go,” said John Wells. Before the wedding, Sandra said, she “signed all of the legal forms to be given to the town clerk” and entrusted her husband with the task of mailing them in to be filed “so that we could get the marriage license. He one hundred percent assured me that everything was done.”

  He never sent the forms to the town clerk. Thus they were married without a license, in a ceremony that was strange, to say the least. First, there was the matter of Rockefeller’s family. His parents were dead. Other Rockefellers had been due to attend the nuptials, Clark said, but at the last minute a problem arose and he disinvited all of them. Not to worry, he assured Sandra, she would meet them in the future. In their place, Yates, the only guest on the groom’s side, would serve as “Best Dog.”

  Then there was the ceremony itself, held in the simple, stark Quaker Meeting House, which was built in 1838 to house the congregation that had previously met at the home of early Quaker Mary Coffin Starbuck. Yates ambled down the aisle, drool dribbling from his mouth, and the seven guests sat on stiff wooden pews as Rockefeller and Boss stood silently facing each other. “In a Quaker wedding, you sit around until somebody says something,” explained one of the wedding guests, adding that the bride and groom recite their own vows. As Sandra Boss said during her grand jury hearing, “The thing that’s interesting about the Society of Friends is that there is no officiant. When you go to a Quaker service, everyone kind of speaks as moved.” The guest with whom I spoke couldn’t recall what Rockefeller and Boss said to each other, only that “it was all over pretty quick, and we went out to a restaurant and had dinner in Nantucket.”

  Then the newlyweds retired to the quaint little house they had rented to enjoy their first night as husband and wife. They honeymooned for a week on Nantucket before returning to their lives in New York City.

  Part Two

  CHAPTER 11

  “San Marino Bones”

  At roughly the same time that Clark Rockefeller launched his new life as the husband of Sandra Boss in New York City, a sign from the long-missing couple John and Linda Sohus rose up from the grave. Until then, John and Linda had been mainly forgotten, their disappearance unsolved and unnoticed by the world at large. Two people of little importance, they were soon erased from the memory of even those who had known and worked with them.

  Only one person refused to forget them, Linda’s best friend, Sue Coffman. From the moment Linda and John went missing—with their cockamamie story about going to work for some top-secret government spy program and those subsequent bizarre postcards sent by Linda from Paris—Coffman knew in her heart that something wasn’t right. There was, as she would tell anyone who cared to listen, “a big hole in my life, a big question mark in my head.” At times she felt she was going crazy trying to answer the endless questions and piece together the puzzle of her friends’ disappearance.

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nbsp; “I’d have dreams,” she said as we sat in the living room of her house in Orange, California, not far from Disneyland. A thin, intense woman, a wife and the mother of a young son, she was still very much on a mission to find her best friend, and she printed chronologies she’d assembled of the mysterious case on her computer while showing me pictures and paraphernalia of the disappearance she had spent almost thirty years attempting to crack.

  Linda Sohus was always central to her dreams, Sue Coffman said, and I tried to imagine the big, redheaded artist and science-fiction fanatic flying through her friend’s sleep like one of her fancifully drawn horses. “Linda would show up in my dreams and say, ‘What are you worrying about? I’m right here.’”

  “Why didn’t you call me?” Coffman would ask her friend.

  “Well, I was busy,” is all Linda would say.

  Coffman came to feel that her dreams were omens, directives urging her to keep pressuring the cops to find out what had happened to Linda. “I was so excited in my dreams, because I thought I wasn’t dreaming. I felt like I was in the here and now.”

  Several times the police responded to her incessant calls by saying they were reopening what was by then a missing persons case. But nothing new ever turned up. Sue read me a note from one detective early in the case. “He said, ‘She’s twenty-one. She can leave if she wants and go where she wants. There’s nothing to investigate.’ He said, ‘Don’t worry about it. Stop looking for them.’

  “His research claims that Linda and John live in France and never want to be involved with their old lives again,” she told me, adding, “Did I believe it? No.”

  Even the discovery of John and Linda’s pickup truck in Greenwich, where it was almost bought by a local minister’s son from the mysterious Christopher Crowe—who the authorities knew was really Christopher Chichester and before that Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter—didn’t give the cops enough dots to connect. But Coffman couldn’t abandon her quest for answers.

  “Dear Kathy,” she wrote Linda’s half sister on March 15, 1990, five years after Linda and John had gone missing.

  Hope you remember me—Linda’s old friend from ages back? How are you and have you heard anything new about Linda’s disappearance? . . . Even though it’s been 5 years now (can you believe it?) I still can’t accept her disappearance. Sometimes weeks will go by that I don’t think of her, and then all of a sudden I’ll have a dream or remember stuff we used to do, and I’ll get angry at myself for not doing more to find her.

  The last time I talked to you I had a new angle on the case, with their pick up truck having been found back east somewhere with new registered owners. I was really looking forward to having some answers, but after 3 months went by and no one called me from the detective’s office, I called them back. That was around March of last year. I found out then that the detective I had established a rapport with, no longer was in that department.

  Coffman would run into such problems repeatedly. Detectives moved on to new posts and dropped unsolved cases. Relatives such as Linda’s half sister eventually decided they had to move on with their lives. “Kathy—I sent you this letter last year and never got a reply,” Sue Coffman wrote Linda’s half sister almost two years after her first letter. “If you’re not interested in the search anymore (I realize it’s been almost 7 years now—I guess Linda’s either on witness relocation or dead), I’ll understand. But can you please let me know you received this letter. That way, I’ll stop bugging you, this is still on my mind.”

  She was relentless. After reading a Dear Abby column “about the Salvation Army being able to locate lost relatives,” she sent off for a packet of forms. She was told that only blood relatives could fill them out. Finally, as a desperate, last-ditch effort, she sent a letter to a show she had watched on television, Unsolved Mysteries, starring Robert Stack, which presented facts and restaged scenes with actors about unsolved and frequently forgotten cases. She didn’t know anyone who worked on the program. She just sent it over the transom to the production company’s Burbank, California, address.

  “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO LINDA CHRISTINE HOPE BLACKFOOT MAYFIELD SOHUS?” she began her letter of September 23, 1993. In three single-spaced typed pages, she laid out the whole, implausible story of Linda’s life and disappearance. “I don’t have the money or the wherewithal to hire a private detective, and the police seem to think that since she’s an adult she has the right to disappear (and now that it’s been over 7 years, they say the file is closed and she is ‘dead’), but there are just too many idiosyncrasies in this whole story. Below is a list of items pertaining to her disappearance that just don’t jive.”

  She listed each and every one: the murky government spy job, the six cats Linda left behind, the pickup truck they abandoned on Lorain Road, which the bank could never find to repossess, and which later turned up in Greenwich, Connecticut. Coffman even confessed that she felt the cops might be in on it. “It may just be coincidence, but each time in the years past that I have contacted the Police Department regarding the disappearance, a different detective has been assigned to the case. Each time they seem to be getting close to an answer, that detective is conveniently transferred,” she told Unsolved Mysteries.

  She asked them to consider the story “for a possible segment,” explaining that her life “has one big hole in the middle of it because I just don’t know where she is. I want to get on with my life. . . . If she’s alive, I want desperately to see her again. If she’s dead, then I can close that chapter in my life and go on. It’s the not knowing that drives me crazy. I can’t just shrug it off. . . . We were too close.”

  At the bottom of the letter, she addressed her friend directly: “Linda, I have so many things to tell you about!”

  Unsolved Mysteries sent her a form letter thanking her but expressing apparent lack of interest. Eight months after Coffman wrote the letter to Unsolved Mysteries, however, Linda Sohus, in a sense, answered it herself, in a typically surreal way.

  “Holy shit!” a neighbor remembered someone screaming, after Jose Perez, the Bobcat operator working on the crew of California Pools, unearthed something peculiar shortly after noon on May 5, 1994. He was digging a thirty-six-foot-long pit for a swimming pool in the yard behind 1920 Lorain Road in San Marino. Once the home of Didi Sohus, the property was currently occupied by Bob and Martha Parada and their three-year-old son. They had bought the house in 1986 from Didi, the lady who had moved to a trailer park after the mysterious disappearance of her son, John; her daughter-in-law, Linda; and her tenant, Christopher Chichester.

  The new owners had replaced the dilapidated old house with a new two-story brick dwelling. They had left the guest quarters out back intact, however, and decided to put in a swimming pool. On that May morning in 1994, Perez was in a Bobcat bulldozer digging when his blade struck something hard four feet beneath the ground. He assumed it was trash because of its rank smell. Nothing unusual, Perez later told the Pasadena Star-News, “I’ve done 6,000 pools and found a car, a horse, and a dog.”

  As he hopped down off the Bobcat to move the trash out of the way, his father, Jose Perez Sr., who was also on the digging crew, went over to see why the work had stopped. It turned out that the Bobcat’s blade had broken a fiberglass box in pieces. Inside the container, the crew members could see plastic bags. Jose Perez Sr. grabbed a metal pipe and started poking at the contents of the bags.

  That’s when Jose screamed, according to Bill Woods, who heard the shout at his home a few doors down on Lorain Road. One of the bags contained a human skull, “with some hair,” Perez told the local newspaper. “He dropped it on the ground and saw what looked to be teeth and a jaw,” read the police report about the incident. The newspaper added, “Perez said he saw other pieces of bone, including a forearm and a portion of a spine, near the bag.”

  The newspaper report went on, “The Parada family was trying to remain calm as investigators tried to figure out who buried the body.” One police lieutenant commented, �
��It’s definitely a whodunit.”

  The pool crew flagged down a passing police car. One of the first officers to arrive on the scene was Tricia Gough. I met Gough, a statuesque brunette wearing a long-sleeved black T-shirt with a biker insignia, at a Starbucks coffee shop fourteen years later. She was now teaching school instead of investigating homicides, but, like most others who found their way into this story that day, she had an indelible memory of it.

  “The outline of the pool had been dug, and then, kind of over to the side, that’s where the remains were,” she said, “in plastic bags, the kind you would go to the store to get—like grocery bags. The body was all bundled up in these bags, completely clothed, in jeans and—if I remember—a plaid shirt. There were socks. When we took it to the coroner’s office, they cut the materials off. There were toe bones in the socks. It was a body completely wrapped in plastic.”

  Was it John Sohus? The diminutive size of the skeleton fit, as did the jeans and flannel shirt, which were what Sohus wore practically every day. As far as concrete evidence went, though, there wasn’t any: DNA tests weren’t possible, because John was adopted and his biological parents couldn’t be found. Dental records could have solved the problem, but Gough was told that John’s dentist’s old files had been lost.

  The police then focused their attention on Christopher Chichester, of whom Gough said many people in San Marino had been enamored. “People really wanted him to be a part of their scene,” she said. “But from the description, he came off as a phony, a pretender who wanted to be in with money. All those people didn’t see that. His story was that he came from a family of rich industrialists. Well, if you’re that rich, why are you living in a guesthouse behind a house that is beat-Up, weedy, and in ill repair?”