Kathy Jacoby knew something was wrong soon after her half-sister Linda Sohus disappeared along with her husband Jonathan in the spring of 1985.
Sohus told Jacoby they were going on a job-hunting trip to Connecticut. But they never returned to their San Marino home. Linda Sohus abandoned her job at a bookstore as well as her four cats.
Jacoby, then 22, lacked the money to hire a private investigator. So she became her own detective. That April, she called her sister's boss, mother-in-law and friends and filed a missing-persons report with San Marino police. Jacoby eventually received a postcard purportedly from her sister postmarked from France, but that only heightened her concern.
Nothing came of her detective work, and her sister's case languished for decades. Jacoby looked for Sohus in crowds, stopping each time she saw the back of a tall, stocky blond, waiting until the woman turned, hoping that it might be her sister.
It never was.
The case of the young couple was largely forgotten until this month, when investigators named a Boston man who is being held there on unrelated kidnapping charges as a "person of interest" in the disappearance and suspected killings of Linda, 28, and Jonathan Sohus, 26. Authorities believe that the man, Clark Rockefeller, lived in the Sohus' guest house as Christopher Chichester at the time the couple disappeared. Rockefeller has denied any involvement with the disappearance.
The reopening of the long-cold case has forced friends and family to reexamine memories of the couple's disappearance.
John and Linda Sohus were both avid science-fiction fans, and their disappearance fueled rumors and speculation among those who knew them from the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society and Dangerous Visions Bookstore in Sherman Oaks, where Linda Sohus worked. Friends believe they met either at a society meeting or at the bookstore.
The bookstore's owner, Lydia Marano, 56, of Northridge, received a postcard from France similar to Jacoby's after the couple disappeared, which made no sense, she said. Linda Sohus was a clerk at the bookstore, and John Sohus had a low-level job working with computers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. They could not afford a trip to France, Marano said.
Marano said she wondered at the time how the couple could have gotten the money for the European trip.
"They were both very naive," she said.
