Gerhartsreiter To Be Tried For Murder

The judge agreed there was enough evidence to try Christian Gerhartsreiter on charges of murdering John Sohus in 1985 after a week-long hearing where prosecutors called 23 witnesses.

Among the last to be questioned was Mihoko Manabe. She knew Gerhartsreiter by his alias Christopher Crowe and during his transformation to Clark Rockefeller. They dated and lived together until about 1994, after meeting while working at a NYC securities firm. The LA Times reports:

In 1988, Mihoko Manabe received a call at her New York apartment from a Connecticut detective looking for her live-in boyfriend, a man she knew by the name Christopher Crowe. She took a message and hung up.

When she gave Crowe the message, their lives were turned upside down, Manabe recalled in court Tuesday. The boyfriend told her that the person who called wasn’t with the police, but a bad guy who was after him. He dyed his hair and eyebrows blond, grew a beard, and insisted they shred documents. They began using P.O. boxes for their mail, threw away their garbage at public shopping malls and walked on opposite sides of the street.

Some months after, Manabe testified, he began using the name that would later gain national notoriety — Clark Rockefeller.

Gerhartsreiter will next appear February 9 in Alhambra Superior Court.

6 thoughts on “Gerhartsreiter To Be Tried For Murder

  1. I looked at the LATimes pictures of the victims and this guy & was shocked to recognize them all, from the 1980s. I recall speaking in German to him… what a tragedy.

  2. May have been a book signing at DANGEROUS VISIONS. Probably. Harlan came down and we had dinner later; such is memory.

  3. I remember in that old movie in which William Campbell played a re-named Caryl Chessman, which was in California, he got the gas chamber in the end. I presume that if capital punishment exists in California these days, it would be by lethal injection.

    I’m ashamed to say it, but I wish Gerhartsreiter would get the gas. Or the Hot Squat, the electric chair.

    It’s a good thing I’m not in the jury pool for Los Angeles County anymore. It would be a waste of my time and the county’s money, as there’s no way I could be objective in his trial, and being under oath, I’d have to admit it.

    I despise him.

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