Tag Archives: Clark Rockefeller

Charges Soon Against “Rockefeller”?

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The Boston Herald speculates that charges may soon be forthcoming against “person of interest” Christian Gerhartsreiter in the Sohus murders.

Assistant Suffolk District Attorney David Deakin would not comment on whether California authorities are close to charging Gerhartsreiter, 47, in connection with the San Marino missing persons case of his former landlords, Jonathan and Linda Sohus.

However, he told Suffolk Superior Court Judge Margaret Hinkle that Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department Sgt. Detective Timothy Miley’s affidavit in support of a warrant to search six computer hard drives Deakin’s office holds in evidence against Gerhartsreiter in his pending parental kidnapping case is “17 or 18 pages” long and lays out the case they’re building against the chameleon con artist.

Meanwhile, Gerhartsreiter’s lawyers are considering a plea to the child kidnapping charges he faces for abducting his daughter last summer.

Herald reporters have also managed to make the prisoner’s haircut resemble news:

Gerhartsreiter, 47, who’s battling baldness behind bars in addition to a parental kidnapping charge, paid to have a hairstylist brought into Nashua Street Jail to give his do a modern makeover, rather than trust his tresses to the Big House barber shop, the Herald has learned.

Snapshots 10

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Seven developments of interest to fans.

(1) There’s a wacky music video tribute to John Williams making its way around the web, where a fellow sings four parts a capella while combining some of Williams’ memorable movie themes with filk-style lyrics.
 
(2) Follow this link to NBC News’ excellent summary of the Clark Rockefeller case, “Famous name, infamous life.” From the interview:

Natalie Morales: Did you kill John and Linda Sohus?

Clark Rockefeller: My entire life, I’ve always been a pacifist. I am a Quaker and I believe in non-violence. And I can fairly certainly say that I have never hurt anyone.

(3) Bob Baker, whose marionettes performed in a Star Trek episode, now is 84. Just like the big corporations, his LA puppet theater for kids could use a bailout. (Which episode? It was Baker manipulating Beauregard, the highly animated plant spooked by the “salt-vampire” in the first Star Trek episode ever broadcast, “The Man Trap.”)

(4) The New York Times discovered “An Otherworldly Opera That Speaks Klingon“:

Mr. Schfeld, 26, who speaks English, German, Dutch and what he calls basic Klingon, started creating the opera in the summer of 2007 as his masters thesis at the Interfaculty ArtScience program, affiliated with the Royal Conservatory, in The Hague, where he lives. With a group he founded, the Klingon Terran Research Ensemble, he performed parts of the opera at the Zeebelt Theater in The Hague, most recently in July. They can be seen on YouTube clips linked to his Web site, www.ktre.nl

(5) David Klaus recommends an article for its revelation of “a new twist on ‘they’re out to get me’ – ‘they’re out to watch me,’ as paranoid schizophrenia manifests itself as a belief they’re in The Truman Show or The Matrix.”

One man showed up at a federal building, asking for release from the reality show he was sure was being made of his life. Another was convinced his every move was secretly being filmed for a TV contest. A third believed everything — the news, his psychiatrists, the drugs they prescribed — was part of a phony, stage-set world with him as the involuntary star, like the 1998 movie “The Truman Show.”

(6) Aaron Ross Powell tells about his experience selling a draft novel on Amazon’s Kindle.

(7) The economic crisis has killed a manga publisher:

In what looks to be a reaction to the economic downturn, manga publisher Broccoli Books, the U.S. branch of Broccoli International, a Japan-based international producer of anime, manga, games and pop culture merchandise, will close at the end of this year.

Broccoli Books is based in Los Angeles.

[Thanks to David Klaus, Francis Hamit, and Andrew Porter for these links.]

Experts Analyze Sohus Handwrtiting

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David Klaus sends along this link to an August 23 story which I don’t recall posting before. It reports how three experts studied handwriting evidence in the Sohus disappearance case, contributing very little to solving the mystery. They examined a letter and a receipt known to have been written by Linda Sohus prior to her disappearance.

Rockefeller Update

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On September 10, a court authorized the district attorney to receive copies of certain documents from the Rockefeller/Boss divorce proceedings.

Christian Gerhartsreiter was living under the name Clark Rockefeller when he was arrested on charges of kidnapping his daughter. He also has been identified as the Christopher Chichester wanted for questioning in connection with the 1985 disappearance of LASFSians Linda Mayfield and John Sohus.

According to the Boston Globe:

The Suffolk district attorney has secured the release of the separation and divorce pacts between the mystery man known as Clark Rockefeller and his former wife, Sandra Boss, Rockefeller’s attorney said yesterday…

“There are affidavits that go into extremely personal matters that are unrelated to the criminal charges,” [Rockefeller attorney Stephen] Hrones said. “The district attorney’s just on a fishing expedition. He doesn’t really need all this other information.”

Boss also opposed the release of information from the divorce file, Hrones said, adding that prosecutors sought the records to present to a grand jury considering an indictment against Rockefeller.

There was also a new charge formally leveled against Rockefeller on September 3:

A man calling himself Clark Rockefeller, who is accused of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter and is being investigated in a California couple’s disappearance, was charged Wednesday with giving a false name to police.

Snapshots 2

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Nine developments of interest to fans:

(1) The end of the story run here about decommissioning ceremonies for Star Trek: The Experience has been written at Trekmovie.com:

On Monday September 1st, 2008, over 1500 fans gathered in the Space Quest Casino inside the Las Vegas Hilton, to pay their final respects and observe the final decommissioning ceremony of Star Trek: The Experience.

(2) Harlan Ellison has sued Paramount alleging the studio is withholding payment after licensing the rights to the plot of his “City on the Edge of Forever” Star Trek episode to Simon & Schuster. 

(3) What the Talking Squid says is true:

Just look at what Zadie has done here: she has managed to write an exceptionally interesting introduction to a man who was not particularly interesting by any of the standard measures.

(4) In 2006, while they were in the neighborhood for L.A.con IV, the Heinlein Society paid a visit to the LaurelCanyon (Los Angeles hillside home that Robert and Leslyn Heinlein bought in 1938:

The house…is partly described in several stories, including “Year of the Jackpot” and “And He Built a Crooked House.” Later, the Manãna Literary Society would often meet in this house, as described in Anthony Boucher’s Rocket to the Morgue.

(5) Thanks to arrangements made by Steven Silver, the official Hugo Awards website will soon have a photo of the 1982 Hugo to fill that page, instead of the little red “x” that’s been heroically performing that duty. The Chicago Worldcons of 1982 and 1991 used Lucite Hugo rockets instead of the more familiar chrome-plated rockets produced by Peter Weston — and when there was a raised-pinky objection on the Smofs list to calling these “plastic” Hugos, Dave Locke blinded them with science:

I dunno what they were, but Lucite is defined as a transparent thermoplastic acrylic resin. Maybe I’m wrong, but that sounds like one of the many sins below the ‘plastic’ umbrella.

(6) All this talk about historic Hugos has prompted Taral Wayne to claim his share of the credit for the 1978 Hugo trophy:

I was downloading photos of the Hugo awards and noticed that the credit line for the 1978 Phoenix Worldcon was blank. I don’t know who designed the base per se… What I can say now is that the art on the engraved plaque on the base is a piece of art of mine. It was also used as a logo for the con, and put to various other uses. I don’t have one of the Hugos of course, but received a copy of the engraving anyway.

(7) Astronomers began discovering “hypervelocity” stars only recently: so far, they’ve spotted more than a dozen.

The stars stood out because they traveled faster than any stars ever seen — fast enough to completely escape the Milky Way. Here’s what some astronomers think may be happening. A binary star system — two stars bound by their mutual gravitational pull — skirts by the supermassive black hole. One star in the system enters orbit around the black hole, while the other star flies free of its companion. The first star eventually falls into the black hole, while the second star shoots away from the black hole at extreme speed.

(8) Janice Gelb asks, “Have you see the Diagram prize for the oddest book title of the year?” The Guardian has also posted a slide show of some of the covers.

(9) And there’s a brief note in the September 4 edition of Los AngelesTimes about how things are progressing in the Clark Rockefeller case:

Prosecutors in Massachusetts said Wednesday that they are close to securing an indictment for kidnapping against the man who portrayed himself as Clark Rockefeller, as authorities in Los Angeles continue to explore his possible connection to a double murder.

[Includes links via the Nashville club newzine, and Andrew Porter.]