She was found.
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## John Sohus: A Life Reduced to Bones and Evidence
It is worth pausing, at length, on the person at the center of the California murder case — the person whose fate the trial was trying to establish and whose killer the jury found.
Jonathan (John) Sohus was twenty-seven years old in 1985. He was a computer programmer in the early years of the personal computer industry — a period when people with that specific expertise were at the beginning of what would become a transformation of global commerce and daily life. He was the son of Ruth “Didi” Sohus, who had taken in a tenant and watched her son living his ordinary life in the same neighborhood.
He had recently married Linda. They were, by available accounts, building the kind of domestic life that most people build: a home, a partnership, plans for the future. They were not wealthy. They were not famous. They were two people in their twenties in Southern California trying to establish themselves.
The violence done to him was severe. The forensic evidence established that he was struck in the head at least twice with a rounded blunt object and stabbed six times. His body was then cut into three parts — a detail that speaks to an effort not merely to kill but to make disposal possible and to reduce the likelihood of discovery. The remains were buried in the backyard of the house where his mother rented a guesthouse to the man who would later be convicted of killing him.