Perhaps the Somerton Man was a displaced spy or had been one in the past. Sounds like something someone of that type might be motivated to do, right? Completely clean up the record and leave only a fine-looking corpse? Lesson here is: make sure your mystery eclipses your identity.
On the sentimental side, he might’ve been an average military guy who came to Adelaide for an old love and ended up rejected by her—some deep cut from all the sad fallout of World War II. Whoever this guy was, the way he obscured his trail to that beach was ingenious. He performed a total erasure by leaving unanswerable questions in his wake.
As you factor him into our conversation, remember this: neither Somerton Man nor Weldon Kees had to contend with the World Wide Web. They were escaping from a way less connected life than the one we’re in now. Sure, there were ways to track people, but back then you didn’t even have to be a particularly clever liar to evade anyone who might be hunting you; it was usually as simple as a few carefully placed, simple lies and a dose of solitude. You’re going to have to escape from the Usain Bolt–equivalent of a black widow, while these guys were battling a garden spider with the Web-equivalent of erectile dysfunction.
We’re stuck with a universe of connected databases and metadata and algorithms and other sophisticated cyber-jargon. Let’s give a respectful nod to the ghosts of Mr. Kees and Mr. Somerton Man and admit that if either man’s story occurred today, we’d probably end up with more answers to our questions. There would be traces on social media, little snippets of info in online profiles. Even photographs forgotten on a Myspace account might be enough for a clever researcher to put two and two together and find a real name.
So let’s move on up to a much more recent case, a guy who’s still alive and kicking. A man whom friends called Clark and figured for a rich New England weirdo. His buried story, though, was a lot more fun, until it took a turn.
The completely banana-pants story of Clark Rockefeller is a lesson for anyone who has ever dreamed of simply becoming a new person in a new place. And Clarkasaurus Rex, who is the modern king of this thing we’re talking about, did it in style.
Unfortunately, Clark Rockefeller’s story is not the hero’s journey I’d like it to be. Clark had a real gift for not only getting off the grid, but for ensuring the grid forgot him completely—and living a seemingly normal life the entire time. That part is pivotal to our purposes here.
Admittedly, in the end, he wasn’t exactly a “good guy.” You’re about to hear a combination case study of a nearly perfect disappearance and a sinister cautionary tale.
Clark’s name first hit the news as a suspect in a kidnapping case. Even then, he was the sort of accused gent I might have readily defended during my time at the bar. Poor guy only got supervised visitation with his young daughter a few times a year—a daughter who otherwise lived overseas. Clark loved that kid, and while on one of those visits, he grabbed his daughter and fled in a waiting SUV. Dad of the Year, right? The love of a parent knows no bounds!
At first, Clark’s was a typical story of a parent who had grown desperate and snapped under the pressures of a post-divorce life. Then—insert the sound of a record scratch here—things got weird.
As the cops started looking for our buddy Clark, they quickly learned that he was not a rogue product of that Rockefeller family. Clark wasn’t some outlier from old money, the kind of rich guy who shakes diamonds like salt crystals onto his Salade Niçoise, well-versed enough to chat about the conditions of the surf off the Cape. No, this guy was… well, he was someone else entirely.
When he was arrested, he was nondescript Chip Smith, living in an apartment he’d purchased in Baltimore. Chip Smith would be the end of the line for this guy, who had been wearing a slew of different identities since the late 1970s.
Before he was Clark Rockefeller, he was Christopher Chichester. If you’ve ever seen Gilligan’s Island, you might remember the rich old guy who lived in the third bamboo hut on the left on that show: Thurston Howell III. If you spoke to him on the phone, you’d suspect Christopher Chichester was a dead-ringer for Thurston Howell.
He rented a guesthouse from the elderly Didi Sohus in San Marino, California. Didi had a son named Jon and a daughter-in-law named Linda. Chichester, Jon, and Linda all disappeared in 1985. Chichester bobbed back up on the grid a few years later in New England, trying to sell a truck registered to Jon Sohus. The buyer smelled something fishy (and it wasn’t just the prevailing scent of clam chowder hanging in the Northeastern air), so the transaction didn’t go down. Chichester vanished, and our buddy Clark was born.
If you’re already impressed with the guy—let’s start by looking at what he did right.
On the surface: no matter his current identity, he always committed to his shtick du jour. As Chichester, he presented himself as an old-money aristocrat, allegedly hinting at ties to English royalty for good measure. He purportedly worked in the television industry, and even had his own community cable access show. A regular silk-stocking man about town.
In another way, he kept his life very low key. Rented from a private citizen, likely got by on charm and didn’t even have to sign a lease, I’d bet.
But it all fell apart in Connecticut, the moment he realized he might have made a misstep trying to sell the truck of a missing man. He dropped out of sight and remodeled himself into Clark Rockefeller.
But we aren’t really digging into the creepy miracles and mysteries of the Clark Rockefeller saga unless we get back to his true origin story. He wasn’t even an American.
When he first arrived in the land of Stars and Stripes in 1979, the Clarkster’s name was Christian Gerhartsreiter. Of the Bavarian Gerhartsreiters, in Germany. He was an exchange student in high school, and our Mozart of misdirection seems to have begun concocting a plan even then. He studied American culture. He was a big fan of Gilligan’s Island, and studied Thurston Howell III’s uppercrust accent, not realizing it was a parody.
The man who would become Clark started enacting his plan in 1981 with a green card marriage. Then, he simply Anglicized his birth name to Chris Gerhart. But something was still amiss, so he evolved from caterpillar into Chichester.
To bottom-line this thing: even in a steadily connecting modern world, the man managed to evade any detection for thirty years.
If he hadn’t finally found a heart where his kid was concerned, he might still be tooling around New England today as that blue-blooded Rockefeller cousin.
This guy had a scheme ready at every turn. Rockefeller married the mother of his child in a ceremony that was legally meaningless. There wasn’t an actual marriage license filed in the county where it occurred (but I’m sure the reception was very nice). Once he was in the marriage, he convinced his wife to file taxes as a single woman, and he told her accountant that he was her brother. This man instinctively knew how to evade detection.
The kicker is: after 1985, he had a lot more motivation to be very good at making sure he was never brushed by the long arm of the law.
Remember how that couple, Jon and Linda Sohus, disappeared around the same time Christopher Chichester lit out from San Marino? Never to be heard from again until Chichester tried to sell Jon’s truck in Connecticut?
The authorities found Jon Sohus’s bones and a whole lot of other evidence Rockefeller didn’t realize he’d scattered around. In 2009, a jury found Clark guilty of Sohus’s murder. He won’t be out of jail till he’s a very old man.
Let’s have a refreshing glass of cucumber water and review: if there’s one thing linking all these disappearances so far, it’s confusion. These gentlemen all gave anyone chasing them a giant tossed salad of conflicting information. One guy, maybe he committed suicide. Maybe he went off to Mexico. The other guy just removed evidence of who he might have been (not to mention: he added a creepy code to the mix, and who doesn’t love that). And the third guy—his fatal flaw was loving his kid too much. And murder. That didn’t help, either.
Then there’s Joe, the guy who got it right. As we sit here right now, in our undisclosed locations, nobody really knows who the hell Joe was. Old Joe did everything his way, including shuffling off this mortal coil. On one hand his story is kind of sad. On the other, he might be the best example of a guy who did exactly what we’re talking about and made it work like a damned charm.
This guy. Up front, here’s why I thought he was a great case study for any seeker looking for the golden key out of their crappy life: he managed to survive, thrive, and then when it looked as though he might be in a situation in which he was compromised, Joey Newts fled and didn’t even leave a proper fingerprint behind.
His name wasn’t Joseph Newton Chandler III, obviously. No, the owner of that moniker was taking a dirt nap some thirty-three years when our man applied for a social security card in his name in 1978. Our hero likely roamed cemeteries or maybe even knew the original Joe Chandler (who died when he was only a kid). At the time the real Joe passed, social security wasn’t fully in effect and no number had ever been attached to the name. So new Joe really didn’t have to work too hard in the late ’70s to pick up a deceased kid’s birth certificate and tack a social onto the package.
What’s awesome about the new Joe Chandler? The guy was really, really boring.
Think about it: he acquired the basic papers he needed to rent an apartment or get a job in 1978 and then—zip. Never heard from until he died, a suicide in a Cleveland apartment in 2003.
His switcheroo from whomever he’d been to Joe wasn’t discovered until after he was dead. He’d been diagnosed with a dire form of cancer and decided to handle things his own way. He left behind over $80,000 in the bank, and the usual legal aftermath of death took its course. Investigators started looking for his heirs. But he had no heirs. And then—they discovered he wasn’t Joe, after all.
The mystery grew greater because he’d left specific instructions to cremate his remains. His remains naturally included his fingers. Which held his fingerprints. And before you say “You don’t need fingers to find fingerprints,”—puzzled investigators couldn’t find any prints to dust in his apartment, because it appeared he’d wiped it all down.
I’d like to take a little moment of silence to marvel at that. The guy had lived in his apartment for years, but no one could find a single usable print. And at the time he died, the cremation also made sure no one was getting the guy’s DNA, either. Case closed. Well, sort of.
A U.S. Marshal who investigated our guy told a reporter about eleven years after Joe offed himself that the fake Mr. Chandler had “lived the perfect life of someone on the run.”
He wasn’t wrong.
Joey Newts had no close friends. He let a few coworkers in just enough for them to learn some of his quirks—one guy told of Joe driving from Cleveland to Maine to shop, only to turn around and go home when he couldn’t find a parking space—but Joe had no bosom buddies. No true companions.
Joey Newts made no waves. Even though cops trying to figure out who the guy was have expressed suspicions he was a fugitive, Joey Newts didn’t commit any crimes that anyone knew of between 1978 and 2003. Clean as a whistle. He might have had a girlfriend or two over the years, sure, but he generally kept his head down and his feet shuffling along. He ended up being remembered as a slightly weird but low-key dude.
Joey Newts was just about the perfect case of how to change your identity and get away with it.
I’m not letting you in on all the fun if I don’t touch on the nature of the legend that grew up around old Joe after his long con became national news.
One theory about Joseph Newton Chandler III: he was the Zodiac Killer. There’s a good reason. In the few photos available of the guy (another good point to remember: be camera-shy), particularly anything made for an ID, it’s pretty easy to match his face up with some famous old suspect sketches of the code-writing maniac.
There were a lot of theories about Zodiac, and one was that he had engineering knowledge and, of course, that he was living in California. Joey Newts apparently lived in the Golden State at some point, and he had engineering skill. On top of all that, who but a wanted serial killer would have reason to not just disappear, but completely erase any trace of who he had been before?
Some also thought he could be D. B. Cooper. Cooper was a similarly built guy—thin, average height—who jumped out of a plane with $200,000 in ransom money in 1971 and was never heard from again. Straight up vanished into the great northwest. Cooper had the means and the reason to get the hell out of whatever he was up to before he took his wild ride, and who’s to say he didn’t lay low, trying on a few new names and lives before settling down as Joe?
I don’t really buy it. A thrill killer and a skyjacker? Those are a couple of guys who love to live on the edge. They probably need that adrenaline jolt to keep their tickers ticking. Joe got his new name in 1978 and then played it cool for a very long time. This guy wasn’t looking for fun: he was looking to be forgotten.
The ladies have been left out in my little recitation of theses known unknowns. See, I saved Lori Ruff for last intentionally. We’ll get into more details about detaching from your old grid and what that really means for you in a few, but I had to bring up Lori first because the late Ms. Ruff may have accidentally been one of the best of this little murderer’s row of Does. Accidentally, because she wasn’t the most mentally sound of the bunch. Normally, I’d insist that this requires a pretty cool, clear head. Lori had some issues and wasn’t very organized, but she’s the most recent case study I know about in which someone slipped off the grid and managed to stay off, even after she was dead and fingerprints and DNA were easily available.
Not to speak ill of the dead, but Texan Lori Ruff was pretty obviously a woman splintering into a million little pieces when she died by her own hand in 2010. She may have seemed like someone who had it all, at one point. A tall woman, very intelligent. But by the time she killed herself, her marriage had completely shattered, and her soon-to-be-former in-laws were seriously considering taking out a restraining order against her. She was incredibly secretive about herself, but obsessed with her husband’s genealogy. She was also hyperprotective of her child, and refused to let others hold the baby at all.