Tag Archives: Christian Gerhartsreiter

Gerhartsreiter Indicted for Murder of John Sohus

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Christian Gerhartsreiter has been charged with the murder of John Sohus. Sohus’ remains were found in 1994, buried in the backyard of a San Marino home that once belonged to his mother. Gerhartsreiter, living under an assumed name, had been a tenant in the Sohus’ guesthouse.

John and his wife Linda, both LASFS members, disappeared in 1985. Linda is still missing.

The Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office filed the charges on March 15. In the single-count indictment prosecutors allege Gerhartsreiter used a “blunt object” to kill John Sohus.

The Boston Herald reports that prosecutors are seeking Gerhartsreiter’s arrest and extradition from Massachusetts, where he is serving time for kidnapping his daughter during a custody dispute:

Ellen Sohus, John Sohus’s younger sister, said she received a call from Los Angeles authorities earlier this afternoon telling her about the charges against Gerhartsreiter.

“We feel like that this has been a very, very long ordeal over the last 25 years and it gives us hope that we will have closure, finally,” she said in a telephone interview from her home in Arizona.

The statement by prosecutors today was the first time they had acknowledged that they had determined the remains found in the yard belonged to John Sohus.

Gerhartsreiter’s lawyer, Jeffrey Denner, who represented him during his kidnapping trial, said his client is innocent.

Christian Gerhartsreiter was living under the name Clark Rockefeller when he was arrested on charges of kidnapping his daughter. He has admitted being “Christopher Chichester”, previously sought as a “person of interest” in the Sohus disappearance.

Vanity Fair, in a 2009 article, said that during the 1994 search “along with 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.)”

Clark’s Other Identity

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“Who Is Clark Rockefeller” will air March 13 on Lifetime.

Eric McCormack of Will & Grace fame will play Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who masqueraded as a Rockefeller scion, is serving time in prison for kidnapping his daughter, and remains a “person of interest” in the 1985 disappearance of two LASFS members John and Linda Sohus.

The trailer includes the briefest flash of human bones lying in the ground, the only specific hint I found in any of the promotional material that the Sohus disappearance is part of the story.

Jury Convicts Clark Rockefeller

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Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka Clark Rockefeller, has been sentenced to four to five years in a Massachusetts prison after being found guilty of kidnapping his daughter.

The jury returned its verdict on Friday, June 12, ending 26-1/2 hours of deliberations over five days. The jury also found him guilty of assault and battery with a deadly weapon on a social worker. They rejected his insanity defense, but found him not guilty on two lesser charges.

After the conclusion of the hearing, the jurors returned and gave a joint statement:

“This was a complicated case, and not as clear-cut as it might have seemed to those who followed it in the media,” the jurors’ statement said.

“We are confident that our verdict is fair and just, and based only on the information we were legally allowed to consider,” it continued. “Our verdict is a unanimous one, as the law requires, and all of us stand by the verdict completely. “

The jurors said the terse statement was their final word on the case. They did not take questions.

When Gerhartsreiter completes his sentence, he faces removal from the country by immigration authorities.

A grand jury in Los Angeles is continuing to investigate his possible role in the 1985 disappearance and deaths of John and Linda Sohus, two LASFS members. The LA Times had speculated that if Gerhartsreiter was found not guilty of kidnapping, local authorities might be forced to file charges before he could be deported. Now LA authorities will not be compelled to take urgent action.

Half Already Think Rockefeller Is Guilty

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Pretrial wrangling continues in the Clark Rockefeller kidnapping case:   

Jurors hearing the sensational Clark Rockefeller kidnapping case next month will never see a taped four-hour interview he gave Boston police and the FBI because officers ignored his request to remain silent…

But the court has refused to drop the charge that Rockefeller used a false name, for the probable cause of avoiding deportation.

Meantime, a poll of Suffolk County (MA) residents show nearly half believe Rockefeller is guilty of kidnapping. His attorneys are maneuvering for a possible change of venue.

There have been no new developments in the Sohus disappearance case, where Rockefeller/Gerhartsreiter is a person of interest.

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.