06-12-09

Guilty On Two Counts

Family Wants Answers

After 5 days of jury deliberations, Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka Clark Rockefeller, was found guilty on 2 out of the 4 counts he was charged with. He was found guilty for kidnapping and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon (the car). He was found not guilty for another count of assault and battery or for using a false name.

While the jury brought in the guilty verdict, the sister of a California man who disappeared, back in 1985, wants to know what Gerhartsreiter know about the cold case.

Ellen Sohus' brother has been missing for almost 25 years, along with his bride, Linda, and knew Gerhartsreiter as Chris Chichester, at the time, one of his many alias'.

“We’re very hopeful we’ll finally have justice,” Sohus said in a telephone interview from Arizona.

California authorities have declined to say whether they will seek his return. But they have said Gerhartsreiter is under investigation for the suspected murders of newlyweds Jonathan and Linda Sohus, his landlords in San Marino.

In 1988, three years after the couple disappeared, Gerhartsreiter turned up in Connecticut driving Jonathan Sohus’ pickup truck, police have said. In 1994, investigators dug up bones in the couple’s back yard they believe belong to a man, but they were never identified.

Sohus is afraid Gerhartsreiter could be deported before the California case is addressed.

“It would be heartbreaking to get this close and not have our voice heard,” she said.

Sohus said her father was tormented by his son’s death right up until he died several years ago.

“This has always been an issue looming in the back of our hearts,” she said. “It truly haunted my dad every day.”

“Part of our hope,” she said, “is not only to have closure for ourselves, but closure for our dad and to have his wishes fulfilled.”

During this time, aka Christopher Chichester, portrayed himself as a student working toward an MFA in film, at the University of Southern California, just 9 miles from San Marino.

Chichester was living in the lower income area of San Marino, rent-free in a guest dwelling behind the main house of Ruth “Didi” Sohus, known to everyone as a reclusive alcoholic.

The drama began when Didi’s adopted son, John, a geeky man in his 20s who had a low-level job in the computer department of Jet Propulsion Laboratory in nearby Pasadena, moved in with his mother. He arrived with his wife, Linda, a vivacious redhead and aspiring artist who worked as a clerk at the Dangerous Visions science-fiction bookstore. “They made an odd couple,” Lili Hadsell, who was then on the San Marino police force, told me. “He was short, curly-haired, and dorky. She was tall, big-boned, attractive.” Jann Eldnor, who got to know John well when Didi would bring him in for haircuts, adds, “They came with four cats and a horse.”

More than 20 years later, after Clark Rockefeller allegedly kidnapped his daughter, investigators came upon an astonishing video about the years he had lived in San Marino: a July 1995 segment of the Unsolved Mysteries television series, called “San Marino Bones,” which begins with a scene of workers digging a pit for a swimming pool. They discover three plastic bags containing human skeletal remains.

“Immediately, speculation turned to a couple who went missing from the house in 1985 … John Sohus and his wife, Linda,” the actor Robert Stack says in the voice-over. “Though married for two years, John and Linda still lived with John’s mother, Didi Sohus, by all accounts an alcoholic. However, the most intriguing character would prove to be a mysterious young man who went by the name Christopher Chichester.” As Stack says this, a photograph of a suave, bespectacled young man wearing a suit and tie fills the screen.

In early 1985, according to the program, John and Linda told friends they had landed an important job with a U.S.-government satellite program. Although they were sworn to secrecy, Linda let it slip to a friend that they both had to report immediately for duty in New York, but that they would return to San Marino in two weeks to pack up their things. Eight weeks later, since there had not been a word from them, Linda’s sister called Didi Sohus for an explanation.

Unsolved Mysteries re-created a scene of Didi, in a pink housecoat, with a drink in her hand, grabbing the phone and slurring, in a half-whisper, “John and Linda went to Europe on a top-secret mission! For the government!” She told the police, who had been contacted by Linda’s family, that she had a “source.” This source was giving her updates on her son and daughter-in-law, who, except for two postcards purportedly from Linda and postmarked Paris, France, were never heard from again. Five months after their disappearance, Didi Sohus filed a missing-persons report on the couple, suddenly wise to her so-called source. “He’s gone, too,” she told police. “Just disappeared!” Robert Stack tells the TV audience, “According to Didi, the mysterious contact was none other than her guesthouse tenant, Christopher Chichester. However, he had recently moved, leaving no forwarding address.”

The skeletal remains were uncovered in May 1994. Immediately questions arose regarding Chichester, who, according to a neighbor, had borrowed a chain saw from him about the time John and Linda were leaving for New York, in spite of the fact, Edward Savio says, that he had “never picked up a fucking tool in his life.” Investigators interviewed Dana Farrar, who recalled the day she accepted Chichester’s invitation for a game of Trivial Pursuit. The whole backyard was dug up. “What’s going on in the yard, Chris?” she asked. “Oh, I’m having some plumbing problems,” he said.

Along with the human bones, investigators found a flannel shirt and blue jeans, John Sohus’s standard dress. (Using the chemical luminol, they also detected traces of blood on the floor of Chichester’s apartment.) But what about Linda? “When John and Linda moved back into Didi’s house, they discovered the man in the back, Christopher Chichester,” says Jann Eldnor. “And John now started to put his nose in what Chichester was doing. He sees his mother’s condition, and he’s thinking this Chichester maybe is taking money from his mother. So he might have started to question Chichester. Also, Chichester had his eye on all the ladies, young and old. So right away he must have had his eye on John’s wife, Linda. It might not take long for Linda to start having a liking for the guy. And John, well … “

“The authorities would like to speak to the young man known as Christopher Chichester,” Robert Stack says at the end of the segment about the case. “They now know that his real name is Christian Gerhartsreiter, a native of Germany.”

Before skipping town, Chichester had gone to get a last haircut at Jann of Sweden. “A family member has died in England, and I have to go back and take care of the estate,” he said. He had gotten all he could out of San Marino, including the pickup truck that belonged to the missing couple.

In late 1988, the truck turned up in Greenwich, Connecticut. A man calling himself Christopher Crowe had tried unsuccessfully to sell it to the son of a local minister. In the course of their investigation police discovered that Christopher Chichester and Christopher Crowe were one and the same. By then the strange young man had vanished again.

Read full resource stories...

http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view/2009_06_12_Kin_of_Calif__couple_eager_to_get_hands_on_Clark/srvc=home&position=6

http://www.vanityfair.com/magazine/2009/01/fake_rockefeller200901?currentPage=3

http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/06/rockefeller_jur_4.html