A love story
Murdered teen's former girlfriend remembers the lanky, shaggy-haired boy she adored
By Richard Foster CONTRIBUTING WRITER

When Chip Ellis went missing last May, friends and family posted fliers throughout the Richmond metro searching for answers to his disappearance. He was later found shot to death in the trunk of his car, which had been abandoned in eastern Henrico County. A classmate of Ellis' will serve two life sentences in prison for his death.

Chip Ellis and Katharina Knoll were in love.

The 18-year-old Midlothian High School seniors did the same things lots of other young couples do - they went to the movies, rented videos and made mix CDs for one another. But their romance was also unusual, with bittersweet scenes straight out of the movies.

"I remember when we first started going out, we were driving back from the Byrd Theater, and we drove in separate cars, and I was waiting for a stoplight behind him," recalls Katharina. Chip jumped out of his car and came over to her car. "I rolled down the window and he gave me a kiss and ran back to his car before the light turned green. It was just spontaneous."

But like some of the best big-screen romances, their brief romance ended in tragedy.

Ellis

Earlier this month, Louis Shawn Lindenfeld, 18, the son of a Richmond Sheriff's Office lieutenant, pled guilty to murdering Chip in a carjacking last May. Lindenfeld was given two life sentences in a plea agreement in which he avoided getting the death penalty.

On Mon., May 22, the fourmonth anniversary of his first date with Katharina, Chip visited the Midlothian Library to return some DVDs. While there, Chip bumped into Lindenfeld, a classmate he hardly knew. Chip, whom friends and family describe as a thoughtful, kind young man, offered Lindenfeld a ride home in his 2005 Nissan Sentra.

"I was reading my Harry Potter book on Monday night, and I was waiting for Chip to text-message me back or something because I had been calling him," Katharina recalls as she starts crying, "... and then his mom called me, and she asked if he was over because he hadn't come home."

Chip was reported missing. Friends and family put up fliers across the metro area for three days.

"I remember me and my Dad were driving out to Petersburg to put up more fliers," Katharina says, "and Chip's dad had called me and said they found his car and you need to get back here and...I started freaking out. I pretty much expected the worst."

Photographs of Katharina Knoll and Chip Ellis prior to Ellis' death show a young couple in love.

While they waited for word of Chip's fate, Katharina spent hours sitting in the driveway of the home where Chip lived with his three younger brothers and their mother, Sherri, executive director of the Midlothian Family YMCA. "I never prayed so hard for something in my life," says Katharina, sobbing from the memory. "I was just praying for a heartbeat, for breath, for anything."

Their worst fears were confirmed when police told them that Chip was found dead in the trunk of his car, which had been abandoned on a dead-end road in Henrico County's East End. The victim of a carjacking, he had been shot three times in the head.

Since then, life has been "surreal," Katharina says.

"I don't really cry that much [now] but I think about it all the time. When I'm not thinking about it, then I think about how I'm not thinking about it." Still, she marvels at the fact that soon after the murder, "I was able to listen to songs that I guess you could say were our songs...and be happy. I was able to look at pictures and not feel sad...I think Chip's spirit has blanketed over everybody...so that it won't be that hard for them."

The two almost didn't begin dating, despite their immediate mutual attraction when they met in a group of school friends who went to see the movie "Hostel."

A German native, Katharina had been going to high school in the United States, but planned to leave for Germany this summer to finish her final year of high school there. Chip wasn't sure at first if they should start dating, knowing that there would be distance between them. "We talked about it because I knew I was going to be going to Germany, and we didn't know what we were going to do when that point came...I was supposed to be the one that was leaving," Katharina says, sadly.

In the end, Chip told her that he wanted "to take every single day at a time and just appreciate it." He added, "And if things don't work out, just remember you made a difference in my life." Though Katharina says softly that "I think he made a bigger difference in my life."

Katharina's MySpace blog has a shrine to the lanky, blue-eyed, shaggy-haired boy she loved. Below his picture, in which he resembles a young John Lennon, she writes, "RIP eighth world wonder. I love you Chip and I know you're everywhere. When the clouds pass over the sun and everything's a shade of blue, I know you're there watching us through your eyes."

She remembers the two of them discovering the comedy "Time Bandits" together. That the

high school wrestler was a voracious reader and loved James Clavell novels like "Shogun" and "Noble House." That the boy who loved indie rock and Bob Dylan was immediately wowed by the fact that she had songs by French singer Edith Piaf on her iPod. That he thought to take her to an opera, "The Marriage of Figaro." She says proudly, "I don't know any other couple my age that would do that. I don't know of any other guy who would have had the idea to go to an opera. I really liked it, too."

She thinks back on him blindfolding her on their three-month anniversary and unveiling a picnic at his secret spot. He "made three different kinds of sandwiches just in case I would like one better than the others."

She thinks back on the boy who liked ghost stories and cemeteries and how they went to a cemetery with friends, wandering among the gravestones, looking for their birthdates.

Sometimes when they talked about the future, about being adults, he said he'd want to help children with speech problems. Sometimes he thought he'd be happy chartering a boat in Key West.

But just shy of what would have been their 10-month anniversary, Katharina was catching a plane from Germany to the United States to attend the sentencing of her boyfriend's murderer. She remembers seeing Lindenfeld at school, but knew him only as a familiar face in the hallways. The sentencing hearing was a blur; she could hardly pay attention to what was being said. "It was overwhelming," she says.

"I still don't know why Louis did what he did," she says. "It didn't have a reason. There's no excuse...Everything was taken away...I don't know if he realizes this, but yes, Louis Lindenfeld ruined his own life, but he took away Chip's...and that's, I guess, the ripple effect...it really put a hole in all these other peoples' lives too."

Katharina stays in touch by e-mail with Chip's family and praises their strength. She doesn't know how they do it.

"I was his girlfriend and yes, we were in love, but I never grew up with him," she says. "I never brushed my teeth next to him every morning. I never knew him the way his siblings knew him, so I can't even begin to imagine what it would be like to have somebody who's just been a part of your daily life for your whole life and all of a sudden he's not there anymore, and at some point you're going to get older than your older brother."

Katharina knows she will go on, but she wonders how she'll feel as the years go by. That's because she also knows she's been irrevocably changed by Chip's murder.

"I know that I've become more spiritual, not religious, but spiritual," she says, and then she remembers one day at Hollywood Cemetery when the two of them were pondering the great unknown - if there is life after death.

"I wasn't sure if there was anything after life...but with this experience, it's just like, how could somebody so great just end?"