The Sohus Truck
John and Linda had recently acquired a Nissan truck before disappearing.
Afterward, the truck also vanished from California.
Years later, Gerhartsreiter was connected to it in Connecticut.
He offered the vehicle to an acquaintance.
When the man tried to resolve the title, he discovered problems.
The truck belonged to the missing Sohuses.
This revived interest from San Marino police.
Connecticut authorities began trying to contact the man then known as Christopher Crowe.
This was potentially catastrophic for Gerhartsreiter.
A man using a false identity had possession of property belonging to a couple who disappeared from the same California address where he had lived.
That is not proof of murder.
But it is extremely difficult to explain innocently.
Instead of clearing things up, Gerhartsreiter changed behavior.
Going Into Hiding
His girlfriend at the time, Mihoko Manabe, later described what happened when police interest followed him to Connecticut.
Gerhartsreiter became frightened.
He said danger existed.
He altered his appearance.
Dyed his hair and eyebrows.
Grew facial hair.
Shredded documents.
Disposed of trash away from home.
Changed names.
It was the behavior of someone who understood that identity itself was dangerous.
During a trip, he suddenly used another name.
Clark Rockefeller.
The name would become his masterpiece.
Why Rockefeller?
The brilliance of the Rockefeller identity was not that everyone should immediately believe an obvious heir existed.
It was ambiguity.
The Rockefeller family is large.
Old.
Wealthy.
Complex.
Most ordinary people cannot name every member.
If a confident man claims to be a distant Rockefeller, how do you disprove it casually over dinner?
Gerhartsreiter learned to provide enough detail to discourage questioning.
He dressed the part.
Spoke the language of wealth.
Joined prestigious clubs.
Collected art.
Presented himself as eccentric in exactly the way people sometimes expect inherited wealth to produce.
Odd behavior did not undermine the performance.
It could reinforce it.
He did not need to behave like a normal person.
He was supposedly a Rockefeller.
The Social Con
This is one aspect of the case that fascinates modern true-crime communities almost as much as the murder.
How could so many educated people believe him?
The answer may lie in how confidence works inside elite networks.
A person arrives at a private club.
Someone respectable introduces him.
He speaks intelligently.
He understands cultural references.
Nobody wants to be the person who rudely asks a wealthy stranger to prove his ancestry.
Status becomes self-authenticating.
One person's belief becomes evidence for the next person.
Gerhartsreiter exploited that.
By the 1990s, he was not merely hiding.
He was thriving.
The man once living in a rented California guesthouse had constructed a social identity powerful enough to enter New York and Boston circles as Clark Rockefeller.
Meanwhile, San Marino Forgot
The Sohus mystery did not vanish completely.
But it went cold.
No bodies.
No known crime scene.
No proof the couple had not voluntarily left.
Christopher Chichester was gone.
The truck provided suspicion, but not a homicide prosecution.
Then the property changed owners.
John's mother died.
Years passed.
And in 1994, someone decided to install a swimming pool.
The Excavation
The construction workers began digging.
The backyard had been ordinary ground for almost a decade.
Then the excavation exposed human remains.
Plastic bags.
Bone.
A skull.
The missing-person case transformed instantly.
Someone had been buried at the Sohus home.
The body lay behind the guesthouse once occupied by Christopher Chichester.
Investigators collected everything they could.
But forensic science in 1994 had limitations.
The remains were badly deteriorated.
John Sohus had been adopted, complicating comparisons.
Authorities strongly suspected the remains were his.
Definitive DNA confirmation would take years.
In 2011, advances in testing and a sample from John's biological sister allowed authorities to identify the remains conclusively as John Sohus.
John had never left for secret government work.
He had never relocated to Europe.
He had been in the backyard.
Three Feet Down
The grave was roughly three feet deep.
It was positioned behind the guesthouse in a place shielded from easy view from the main residence and neighboring properties.
That location would later become powerful circumstantial evidence at trial.
Who could dig there without attracting attention?
Who occupied the building closest to the grave?
Who had access?
The prosecution's answer:
Christopher Chichester.
Christian Gerhartsreiter.
The defense had a different answer.
Linda.
What the Skull Said
Forensic pathologists reconstructed John's skull.
It showed massive trauma.
At least three severe impacts were described.
Any of them could have rendered him unconscious.
The damage was not consistent with a minor accident.
The court record also described evidence of multiple sharp-force injuries.
This changed the case from suspicious disappearance to homicide.
Someone had attacked John violently.
Then someone had hidden his body.
But a dead John did not automatically prove Gerhartsreiter killed him.
The prosecution still needed to solve the problem that would dominate the 2013 trial.
No eyewitness had seen the murder.
No surviving DNA linked Gerhartsreiter directly to John's remains.
No fingerprint connected him to the grave.
No murder weapon could be definitively identified.
Twenty-eight years had passed.
The case would be circumstantial.
Almost entirely.
Blood in the Guesthouse
Investigators examined the guesthouse.
Chemical testing revealed old bloodstains on the concrete floor.
Some had been wiped while wet.
One stain covered a large area.
The blood had been invisible to the naked eye.
Unfortunately, the technology available when the stains were first tested did not allow investigators to determine whose blood it was.
So the stain could not become the perfect forensic link prosecutors wanted.
Still, its location was significant.
John was buried behind this guesthouse.
The man accused of killing him had lived inside it.
And someone had cleaned blood from the floor.
The Plastic Bags
Then came one of the strangest clues.
Plastic bags associated with the remains had university logos.
USC.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
Both institutions intersected with Gerhartsreiter's earlier life.
He had taken film-related classes or spent time around USC.
Before arriving in California, he had attended the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
The Wisconsin bag was especially interesting because it was not some generic local item likely to appear randomly in a Southern California backyard.
Prosecutors called the bags his accidental calling cards.
The defense correctly pointed out that plastic bags can move between people.
A university bag does not carry the owner's fingerprint through history.
But jurors heard the coincidence.
A body buried behind the defendant's residence.
Wrapped with items connected to two places from the defendant's biography.
Another link in a circumstantial chain.
Where Was Linda?
The discovery created another mystery instead of solving the first.
John was in the backyard.