The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (14 page)

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.

CHAPTER 6

Christopher Crowe: Greenwich, Connecticut

W
hen a crew arrived to clean the dwelling behind the main house at 1920 Lorain Road, where Christopher Chichester had lived, they found it was a single large room with a green concrete floor, a tiny bathroom, and a bed pushed against a wall. The place was a wreck, trashed and disorderly, with litter strewn about on what little furniture there was. It was clear that the last tenant had left in a rush and taken anything that may have been of value with him.

Chichester’s disappearance left a void in San Marino. The young man who had been able to talk about
anything
, who knew the answer to every Trivial Pursuit question, had left a couple of bigger questions in his wake: why had he left and where had he gone? No one seemed to have seen him depart. But couldn’t he at least have said goodbye to those who had given him their friendship and trust? And couldn’t he have at least paid the lunch bills he’d racked up at the Rotary and City clubs?

When he did surface, three months after his disappearance, no one in San Marino would know about it, and wouldn’t for years. He drove John and Linda Sohus’s 1985 Nissan pickup truck, with a homemade camper on the back, clear across America, toward another coast, where in June 1985 he came to rest in the ultimate bastion of Waspy wealth: Greenwich, Connecticut. There he would once again put to use the knowledge that had served him so well in San Marino:
“The bigger the lie, the more it will be believed,”
as the German propaganda minister Joseph Goebbles is famously quoted as saying.
Gullibility has no limits as to class or pedigree
. This time, he didn’t look in the telephone book for a new name. Instead he turned to the movies, particularly those of Alfred Hitchcock, and came up with Christopher Crowe.

It certainly had a nice ring, as it should have. The real Christopher Crowe was an accomplished writer, director, and producer who had just been named executive producer of a new television series titled
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, based on the original 1955 series, in which Hitchcock had introduced each mystery with his trademark “Good evening,” along with the theme music, “Funeral March of a Marionette.”

The series premiered in the summer of 1985, just as Christopher Chichester was leaving San Marino. On June 12, when he rented a post office box in Greenwich under the name Christopher C. Crowe, he showed the clerk a document stating that his real name was C. Mountbatten.

Following his successful pattern in San Marino, he promptly made himself known at a local church. In this case, he chose the rich, prominent, very social Episcopal parish of Christ Church. Since its founding in the nineteenth century, Christ Church had included among its members the mother of President George H. W. Bush, several Rockefellers, and many other distinguished figures.

The pastor, the Reverend John Bishop, would later say that Crowe had just appeared at the church one day, saying “he was new to the area and was looking to make friends.” The reverend said Crowe “became an active member of the church and held a position of usher.” A member of the congregation added, “When Crowe arrived in the area, he was assisted by members of Christ Church. . . . When one of the worshippers posted a note in the church that he had a room for rent . . . Crowe applied for the room, and after checking Crowe’s references, he rented the room to Crowe.” The room was in a house at 34 Rock Ridge Avenue, and the owner was John Callahan Maddox.

As I drove into Greenwich, I couldn’t help but admire the nerve of this cunning chameleon in selecting his next destination. According to a description in a 2008
Los Angeles Times
story: “The ritzy enclave north of New York City, home to dozens of hedge funds and scores of investment bankers, stands out from other upper-crust communities around the suburbs of New York, even Scarsdale and Chappaqua. Greenwich is the only one, for example, that has white-gloved police officers directing traffic along its lightly traveled main street. . . . The median household income in Greenwich last year was $115,644, compared with $49,314 for the U.S. as a whole.” The median price of a house there was just under $1.5 million.

When I pulled up in front of 34 Rock Ridge Road, I was stunned. It was a grand estate on what was surely one of the best streets in Greenwich. The house was a sprawling three-story mansion set on four acres of rolling land. The driveway was filled with luxury automobiles. When Christopher Crowe came to take up residence here, it was the home of an elderly couple, John Maddox and his wife, Gretchen.

I found in the dossier of papers I’d been given the following relevant report: “Mr. John C. Maddox, the owner of #34 Rock Ridge Avenue, was contacted by telephone, at which time he related that the Crowe subject had rented a room from him approximately two and half to three years ago . . . That Crowe was driving a small camper-type vehicle, which looked like Crowe had done some type of work on same to make it a camper.”

Perhaps that explained where he had slept during the three or four missing months after he left San Marino, I thought as I read.

“Mr. Maddox further related that . . . he found Crowe to be a compulsive liar, based on past incidents where Crowe lied to several people about his background,” the report continued.

These remarks were made by Maddox three years after he had taken Crowe in as a tenant. After checking Crowe’s references at the time, however, Maddox had been sufficiently convinced to lease the young man a three-room, one-bath apartment with its own entrance on the third floor of the ten-bedroom house.

Maddox was long deceased by the time I arrived in Greenwich, but his daughter helped me fill in some blanks. Her father was a blue-blooded member of the eastern establishment, she said, a retired advertising executive who belonged to several private clubs, including the esteemed Metropolitan Club, founded by the likes of J. P. Morgan, William K. Vanderbilt, and William C. Whitney in 1891, in an Italianate mansion on East Sixtieth Street in New York City. An inventor, Maddox often spoke about his passion—quantum physics—at Christ Church. He was seventy-four when Crowe arrived in 1985. His children had all left home, so John and Gretchen had the big empty house to themselves. To supplement their income, the couple began “quietly renting rooms for single people,” according to Maddox’s daughter. When the fraudulent newcomer saw a notice posted on a local bulletin board, he called the number listed and soon after arrived with his few belongings.

“I think my mom mentioned that he didn’t have much furniture at all,” said the daughter. “But he had lots of electronic equipment. And he seemed to ingratiate himself with the members of the Episcopal church and convince them—now, this is hearsay, through my mom—that he was able to do some computer work for them and maybe get their mailing list computerized.”

She took a long breath.

“And, of course, he gets ahold of that mailing list. The names of those people in Greenwich would be a rather refined collection of names, if you know what I mean. This
is
Greenwich, Connectict! And this
is
the Episcopal church in Greenwich, Connecticut. It’s where all the moneybags are! And he seemed to find a way into the local papers whenever there was a picture taken of people who had either connections or political power or something. His picture kept showing up in the paper along with all the well-known people.”

Indeed, when I leafed through my dossier of records and found the one pertaining to the young man’s time in Greenwich, I discovered this: “During a G.O.P. meeting, Crowe did have his picture taken with members of the G.O.P., including Prescott Bush [brother of President George H. W. Bush].”

I asked Maddox’s daughter what her parents thought of Crowe. “They were so
snowed
!” she said. “He was good-looking. He was charming. He was kind of intriguing to them. He had proper manners and he dressed well, and my mom would be impressed with that.”

Naturally, Christopher Crowe would have been more than impressed with John Maddox, with his aristocratic connections and his late-life passion for light music boxes. “When he retired, he became this really eccentric inventor,” said his daughter. “One of the things he was really excited about was to put music with a visual component. He did the first music boxes or music machines.” She described these as a system of lights that would dance along with the music.

“I don’t know if Christopher Crowe ever saw my dad’s video stuff,” she said. “But if my dad had someone who was interested in his conversation about it, well, then that person would be invited immediately to the basement.”

I could envision Christian Gerhartsreiter, eyes wide, watching the swirling lights, entranced with the soaring classical music, lucky, as always, to have landed in a privileged place and secured an inside track.

The 34 Rock Ridge address only added to the young man’s luster, and the Christ Church parishioners more than likely complimented him on his happy choice of lodgings as he passed out church bulletins and escorted worshippers to their seats.

“He was involved in the Cotton Club, a group for singles,” the genteel longtime church secretary told me in the parish office, before directing me to the church’s public relations director, who, she assured me, had also known Crowe. I found the PR director in the church’s gift shop, with her mother, who runs the store. It was Thanksgiving, and they gave me an ornamental turkey made of Popsicle sticks, in the same spirit of generosity that a young arrival in town who wanted to make friends would have surely encountered.

Christopher Crowe quickly became such an accepted addition to the community that the late Reverend Bishop began to take an interest in him, even introducing him to his son, Chris. “Christopher Crowe was very good friends with the reverend’s son, Chris Bishop, who is a priest,” one woman said. “You need to speak with him!”

“There is a film producer, a young guy about your age, in our church,” Reverend Bishop told his son one evening. “He seems very nice. You should meet him.” Chris Bishop was a student at the Columbia University film school in New York City, so he got excited. He told me, “I was like, ‘Wow! Sure! Make a connection with a film producer? You bet!’ So I met him. He wasn’t the sort of person I would normally hang out with—very odd, nerdy in a sense, very preppy in a way. But he knew
a lot
about the film business.”

Crowe soon admitted to him that he was the producer of the new series that everyone was talking about,
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
, and then summed up his career. “He had done his homework,” Chris Bishop told me. “Christopher Crowe had produced a couple of low-budget TV projects [
Darkroom
and
The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries
]. Then he was hired as the director of the new
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
series.” There was nothing, it seemed, that the Christopher Crowe of Greenwich didn’t know about Alfred Hitchcock, the reverend’s son added. “He would talk to me about it like he was doing it. He knew endings, he knew people, and he showed up with a bootleg copy of the pilot episode before it was even on TV—and he showed it to me.”

What’s more, Crowe seemed eager to help Bishop find
his
way in film. “I gave him a couple of the early screenplays I’d written,” said Bishop. “His critiques were very intelligent and useful. He’d certainly studied in film school. He had a 16-millimeter film—no sound, very well shot. He brought it up to my house when I was editing my student film. I had a 16-millimeter projector, and he showed his film to me.”

He paused, thinking back before continuing. Then he said, “He’s very good at what he does. He’s a very competent bullshitter. Every utterance out of his mouth is a lie. But he’s good at it.”

One day Crowe asked his new friend to drive him to Lincoln Center in New York City, where he was directing an episode of the new series. Bishop eagerly consented. “He was walking around in expensive suits—he went to the umpteenth degree with this,” said Bishop. Sure enough, when Bishop dropped him off, there were crew members all around with the Hitchcock logo on their jackets. Crowe grabbed his briefcase, thanked Bishop, and ran off, presumably to lead the extensive crew in turning out another episode. In fact, he wasn’t producing anything but an elaborate series of lies.

“He was really good, an absolute psychopath, sociopathic liar,” said Bishop. “He gave out to me that he was from a wealthy family in L.A., and he did say he had relatives in Bavaria, but he was from the U.S. One of the weirdest incidents that ever happened: we were in Greenwich, and he said, ‘Can you give me a lift somewhere?’ and I said, ‘Sure.’ Then he said, ‘I need you to drop me off at my mom’s house. She married this really rich guy.’”