Saul Goodman - Get Off the Grid! - Saul Goodman's Guide to Staying Off the Radar

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.