The FBI, using fingerprint evidence, has verified Clark Rockefeller’s West German origins:

The FBI has exposed one of Boston’s “longest cons,” using fingerprints lifted off a wine glass and a 27-year-old immigration document to prove accused kidnapper Clark Rockefeller is really a serial fraud from West Germany.

FBI and Boston law enforcement officials announced yesterday that the bespectacled 47-year-old’s “true” identity is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, born in West Germany in 1961.

The Boston Herald reports some personal and professional criticism of the investigation:

[Katherine Jacoby, Linda Sohus’ sister] said she is angry at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department for not contacting her about the probe in which they identified Gerhartsreiter as a “person of interest” in her sister’s disappearance….

Police investigation expert Stacy Dittrich, a former Ohio detective who now works as a national crime consultant, agreed the sheriff’s department could have used dental records to identify the skeletal remains. “I just don’t understand why that hasn’t been done yet. That is the first thing that should have been done,” she said.

Homicide investigators have also received information from a Northern California art collector. He placed a phone call to Linda Sohus, asking about a painting he’d commissioned, possibly just a few hours before she disappeared. The Pasadena Star News reported on August 16:

Hours before she and her husband vanished 23 years ago, Linda Sohus seemed anxious, excited and frustrated….

“She basically said, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you,'” the art connoisseur recalled. “‘Things are just kind of crazy here. My husband’s gotten a job offer in New York and it looks like I’m going to have to move right away and I’m just running around like crazy.'”

Linda told the collector that her husband had taken a classified job working on a government satellite program, but couldn’t say more and quickly hung up. And then the newlywed couple vanished.

The Star News article also quotes Lydia Marano, Galen Tripp and Charles Lee Jackson II (current LASFS President).