By Frank C. Girardot and Nathan McIntire, Staff Writers
Linda Sohus. (Courtesy)
SAN MARINO - Hours before she and her husband vanished 23 years ago, Linda Sohus seemed anxious, excited and frustrated.
Sohus, an artist known for paintings of fanciful centaurs, unicorns and bunnies, had recently booked a commission from a Northern California art collector whom she had met in Anaheim.
The man, who asked not to be identified because he has been interviewed by Los Angeles County sheriff's homicide detectives in connection with the Sohuses' disappearance, said he spoke to Linda on the phone perhaps hours before she disappeared from the San Marino home she shared with her husband, John. He believes the conversation took place in the late evening of Jan. 31, 1985.
The couple disappeared in the first week of February 1985, according to law enforcement sources.
The collector only wanted a painting he had ordered from Linda Sohus, whom he recalled affectionately as Cody.
"She basically said, 'I'm sorry I didn't get back to you,'" the art connoisseur recalled. "'Things are just kind of crazy here. My husband's gotten a job offer in New York and it looks like I'm going to have to move right away and I'm just running around like crazy.'"
Linda told the collector that her husband had taken a classified job working on a government satellite program, but couldn't say more and quickly hung up. And then the newlywed couple vanished.
Bones discovered at the Sohuses' Lorain Road home during a May 1994 swimming pool excavation are believed to be those of John Sohus, though authorities have never definitively matched him to the skeleton.
Authorities have identified Christian Gerhartsreiter, who was then using the alias Christopher Chichester, as a person of interest in the couple's disappearance. Gerhartsreiter lived in a guesthouse on the Sohuses' property.
The latest incarnation of Gerhartsreiter, Clark Rockefeller, is behind bars in Boston. He is accused of the July 27 parental abduction of his daughter, Reigh "Snooks" Boss, in
Boston.
And the remainder of what is believed to be John Sohus' skull sits in the Los Angeles Department of Coroner.
Yet the case's most baffling question, the fate of Linda Sohus, remains unresolved, and stories about her whereabouts have varied widely.
The first person to notice her disappearance was Lydia Marano, her boss and the owner of the now-defunct Dangerous Visions bookstore in Sherman Oaks. Linda was supposed to open the store over the weekend in early February 1985.
"I went in to cash a check and the store was dark. I was furious to say the least," Marano said.
Marano immediately called Ruth "Didi" Sohus, John's mother and the owner and co-habitant of the Lorain Road residence where the couple lived.
Didi told Marano that the couple had gone to Paris.
"And I said, 'Paris, Texas?'
"'No dear. Paris, France,' Didi said.
"And then she promptly hung up on me."
Linda Sohus never returned to Marano's bookstore, or to her San Marino home. Marano said Linda put her cats in a boarding facility and abandoned her prized horse.
"It made it appear that she was going somewhere or had gone somewhere," Marano said.
Marano received a postcard from the couple on April 29, 1985, with a Paris postmark. It read: "To Lydia- Not quite New York, but not bad. See you later, Linda and John."
Familiar with her handwriting, Marano believes the postcard was authored by Linda.
"I'd looked at her handwriting every day for two and a half years," Marano said.
Sheriff's homicide detectives asked the art collector for copies for three letters purportedly written by Linda Sohus in the weeks before her disappearance. He's hoping forensic handwriting analysis will reveal whether Sohus wrote the postcard to Marano.
Although she never directly heard from Linda Sohus again, Marano said she received two phone calls about Linda within the span of a few months. The first came from a representative of a department store.
"One was from Robinson's-May checking on Linda's qualifications for a job," Marano said. "They said she applied for a job."
Marano declined to recommend her because she left her position at the bookstore without any notice.
"The other phone call came a month or two later and it was about a credit card," she said.
The credit card company was also looking for a referral.
Both the art collector and Marano described Linda as quiet but pleasant. She was an artist and a member of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS) and had a passion for science-fiction that she shared with her husband. Under the pseudonym "Cody," Linda drew and painted animals and fantastic creatures for the society's amateur publication.
"I think she was naïve," Marano said.
"She tended to draw Hallmark-like critters. Really nice unicorns and horses," Marano said. "Very funny Easter bunnies and turkeys."
The art collector described Linda's work as "interesting."
"She had two styles. One was a very high contrast. The other was standard fantasy art."
Linda was also a large woman - she was about 6 feet tall, weighed 200 pounds, and stood more than six inches taller than John. Marano said she was muscular from tending to horses.
"I've always thought that if somebody tried to kidnap her they would have had a hard time," Marano said.
She was also very much in charge of her household, the art collector recalled.
"Every time I called down there to talk to Linda she was always the one that answered the phone," he said.
Marano never met Gerhartsreiter, and the first inkling of his possible involvement came when she watched an "Unsolved Mysteries" television episode about the Sohuses' disappearance.
"I suddenly felt like I had been dropped into a mystery novel," she said.
"I've even looked at old photos that go back to its opening just to see if I could see him in the background."
Until recently, the art collector said he had no idea a houseguest lived with Linda and her "geeky" husband.
"Nobody who knew them ever heard one word about this person," he said.
Charles Lee Jackson, the current president of LASFS, also remembered Linda as shy.
"I don't remember her as being very forceful or sociable," he said.
"There weren't a lot of people that knew her really well who are still alive."
Galen Tripp is one of the few. He knew Linda as a fellow member of LASFS, and recalled her as "a very pretty woman."
"My understanding was she did some modeling in her youth," Tripp said. "She had a very beautiful face."
Tripp said Linda lived with a couple in LASFS before she met John. They had a falling out, however, when Linda accused the girlfriend of throwing nails into her horse's stable to injure it.
Unlike others who knew her, Tripp remembered Linda as being strong-willed.
"I never thought of her as the victim type or the type that would be suckered by a con man," he said.
"She did seem to me a very strong personality."
John, who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, left less of an impression. Outside of his family, very few people who knew him remember him at all.
Ellen Sohus, John's half-sister, remembers her brother as intelligent - even nerdy - and kind.
"He was what I call the original computer geek," Ellen said.
"He was fascinated with computers and electronics; he was a Trekkie. He loved 'Star Trek' - he knew everything about 'Star Trek.'"
John worked also loved listening to FM-radio personality Dr. Demento, Ellen recalled, and was an aficionado of the fantasy role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which he played with students at Caltech.
Tripp, who said he met John "a few times," also didn't recall much about the man.
In recent weeks the couple's disappearance has been a topic of much discussion among area sci-fi fans who gather every Thursday in North Hollywood, Tripp said. This week the club displayed some of Linda's art work.
As for the art collector, he's thought about the couple often since that final phone call.
He tried to reach Linda weeks later, and instead spoke to John Sohus' mother.
"I asked 'have you heard anything from them?' She just started crying. Basically it was incoherent," he recalled. "She said, 'I haven't heard - I don't know what's going on.'
"She said something about France. I thought they were moving to New York," he said.
The art collector said that he was in touch with several computer users in the mid-1980 s and had a friend who had access to raw wire feeds archived by The Associated Press and United Press International. Nothing surfaced, he said.
Over the years, the art collector held out some hope for the couple, but in recent weeks that faith has waned.
"It's really sad. You see all these things on the news about tweakers and people getting themselves into trouble and dying," he said. "It's not the kind of thing you'd usually associate with geeky science fiction fandom people who were really nice and didn't deserve what they got. Somehow they got sucked into this guy's con game and it doesn't seem right."
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restless
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