The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (12 page)

“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 rail-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

T
hough 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.

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.”