Yet the animals were left behind.
John's elderly mother remained in San Marino.
Linda's job remained.
Plans with friends remained.
The couple had not behaved like two people permanently abandoning California.
Yet the explanation circulated:
Government work.
New York.
Maybe Europe.
Maybe something secret.
And when a story involves classified government work, absence becomes strangely convenient.
No one can easily verify where the person went.
Questions can be answered with:
They cannot talk about it.
This was not evidence that a government job existed.
At trial, prosecutors treated the narrative as part of an illusion surrounding the couple's disappearance.
The defense challenged that interpretation.
What is certain is that John and Linda vanished after telling people they were leaving temporarily.
And then the postcards began.
Paris
Friends and relatives received postcards.
The cards appeared to come from France.
One showed the Eiffel Tower.
Linda's friend Susan Coffman received a message implying the couple had somehow ended up in Paris rather than New York.
The handwriting became one of the strangest pieces of evidence in the later murder trial.
Two document examiners called by the defense said they were highly confident Linda herself had written the postcards.
That sounded explosive.
If Linda wrote cards after disappearing from San Marino, perhaps she was alive.
Perhaps she really did leave.
Perhaps the entire murder theory was wrong.
But prosecutors had an answer.
Writing a postcard does not prove someone mailed it voluntarily.
They suggested Linda may have written the messages before disappearing permanently, possibly as part of some deception Gerhartsreiter had constructed.
There was another mystery.
DNA testing decades later found that stamps on two postcards had been licked by an unidentified male.
The DNA excluded both Linda and Gerhartsreiter.
Neither John nor Linda had records showing they traveled internationally, and neither had apparently obtained a passport for the supposed European journey.
So what did the postcards mean?
The defense said they supported survival.
The prosecution said they supported staging.
The jury never received a definitive answer.
Neither has history.
John's Mother
Didi Sohus initially believed her son and daughter-in-law were away.
According to later accounts, Christopher Chichester became part of the information chain between Didi and the supposedly traveling couple.
That would be significant if prosecutors were right.
It meant the man later accused of killing John was helping shape the mother's understanding of where her son had gone.
Didi would never learn the truth.
She died in 1988.
For years she had believed her son might simply have moved away and stopped contacting her.
The reality, according to the later murder verdict, was that his body had been buried in her own backyard.
April 1985
Linda's family became increasingly worried.
A missing-person report was filed.
San Marino police officer George Yankovich went to Lorain Road in April.
He approached the guesthouse.
He knocked.
Christopher Chichester answered the door.
Naked.
The officer asked him to put on clothing.
He refused.
He said he was a nudist.
The situation was strange enough to become one of the most repeated details in later true-crime coverage.
But underneath the bizarre surface was something important.
Police had physically encountered the future murder defendant only weeks after the Sohuses disappeared.
Yankovich later checked the name Christopher Chichester.
The law-enforcement database revealed another name associated with him.
Christian Gerhartsreiter.
The invented identity already had cracks.
But there was still no body.
No confirmed murder.
Adults are legally allowed to leave.
At that stage, police did not possess evidence proving John and Linda had been harmed.
So the strange naked man in the guesthouse remained a strange man.
Not yet a murder suspect they could arrest.
The Backyard
Around the period when John and Linda disappeared, people noticed unusual things around the guesthouse.
One acquaintance remembered seeing freshly disturbed soil in the backyard months later.
When she asked Chichester what had happened, he reportedly blamed plumbing problems.
Prosecutors would later tell jurors there was no relevant plumbing where the earth had been disturbed.
Nine years later, John Sohus' remains would be discovered in that general area.
Again, none of this looked like a complete murder case in 1985.
Fresh dirt can be landscaping.
Plumbing.
Gardening.
Construction.
Only after bones emerge does disturbed soil become sinister.
This case is filled with evidence whose meaning changed years later.
The Smoke
A neighbor remembered dark, foul-smelling smoke coming from the guesthouse chimney.
She contacted Chichester and asked what he was doing.
His explanation was unusual.
He said he was burning carpet.
The neighbor told him to stop.
She remembered the smell as offensive enough to complain.
But the timing was uncertain.
At trial, she could place the incident only generally around late 1984 or early 1985.
The prosecution used the testimony as one piece of a larger circumstantial picture.
It did not prove a body had been burned.
No forensic evidence established that John or Linda was destroyed in the fireplace.
The significance came from context.
A couple disappears.
A tenant burns carpet.
Blood is later found inside his guesthouse.
A body is later found behind it.
Separately, each fact is arguable.
Together, prosecutors said, they begin forming a pattern.
The Rug
Another church acquaintance remembered Gerhartsreiter trying to sell a rug.
The witness thought a stain on it resembled blood.
When the stain was mentioned, he did not offer much reassurance.
He rolled the rug up and left.
The rug was not later produced as definitive homicide evidence.
It became another circumstantial clue.
One more strange thing remembered only after a missing couple became a murder case.
The Chainsaw
Then there was the chainsaw.
A church acquaintance named William Stewart testified that Gerhartsreiter borrowed one around the period surrounding the Sohus disappearance.
Gerhartsreiter said he needed to cut tree branches.
He returned it months later.
The prosecution treated the borrowing as possible evidence that he had been thinking about body disposal.
But this detail needs an important correction because true-crime retellings often exaggerate it.
There was no proof that the chainsaw was used on John Sohus.
The California appellate record explicitly notes that point.
The chainsaw was circumstantial evidence of possible planning, not a proven murder tool.
The same appellate record also described testimony that Gerhartsreiter asked an acquaintance where someone might dispose of drums containing chemicals.
Again, prosecutors used this to suggest planning.
Again, no single conversation proved murder.
But the collection of unusual acts mattered.
Then Chichester Vanished
By May 1985, Christopher Chichester was leaving California.
He told acquaintances he needed to go back east because of family problems.
He was vague about where.
He would not provide a useful address.
Then he was gone.
John Sohus was gone.
Linda Sohus was gone.
The guesthouse tenant was gone.
Three people disappeared from one property within the same general period.
Only one would later reappear alive.
Under another name.
Christopher Crowe
On June 12, 1985, Gerhartsreiter applied for a post office box in Greenwich, Connecticut.
He was no longer Christopher Chichester.
He used the name Christopher Crowe.
On the application, he listed another authorized user.
"C. Mountbatten."
Another aristocratic name.
Another identity orbit.
Between 1985 and 1988, he worked in Connecticut and New York under the Crowe name.
He talked his way into financial businesses.
He presented himself as highly educated and well connected.
Somehow, a German immigrant with fabricated credentials could move from a California guesthouse into Wall Street environments and persuade people he belonged there.
The con was becoming larger.
But California followed him east in the form of one object.
A white Nissan pickup truck.