Linda was not.
Police searched.
Investigators revisited the property.
Years later, further searches were conducted.
No confirmed remains belonging to Linda were found.
Her disappearance became the opening the defense would eventually use.
If John was murdered, perhaps Linda killed him.
Then she disappeared.
Maybe the postcards were real.
Maybe she left the country.
Maybe Gerhartsreiter's bizarre life was simply an enormous distraction.
It was not an absurd defense theory in the abstract.
Linda had vanished too.
Postcards apparently in her handwriting existed.
There was no body proving she was dead.
No prosecution for her murder.
And prosecutors never gave jurors a clear motive explaining why Gerhartsreiter would kill John.
That uncertainty became the heart of the trial.
The Case Goes Cold Again
Even after John's remains were found in 1994, investigators could not locate Christopher Chichester.
The identity was already dead.
The person behind it was living elsewhere.
Under other names.
This is where Gerhartsreiter's greatest criminal skill becomes obvious.
He did not merely leave town.
He abandoned identities.
If police search for Christopher Chichester and the person they want is working as Christopher Crowe or socializing as Clark Rockefeller, a conventional name search can fail.
The suspect is physically alive.
Administratively, he has disappeared.
Clark Rockefeller Marries
In the 1990s, Gerhartsreiter met Sandra Boss.
She was highly educated and professionally successful.
He introduced himself as Clark Rockefeller.
He claimed the kind of family background that explained wealth without requiring a visible job.
They married.
They had a daughter.
For years, Boss lived with a husband whose real name, nationality and past she did not know.
That alone would be an extraordinary con story even without murder.
Gerhartsreiter had effectively created a second birth.
He was no longer the German immigrant Christian.
He was Clark.
A Rockefeller.
A man whose lack of conventional employment could be explained by inherited wealth.
Whose eccentricities could be interpreted as aristocratic quirks.
Whose unwillingness to provide ordinary documentation could be absorbed into the mystique.
The deception endured for more than a decade.
Then the marriage collapsed.
The Divorce
Sandra Boss became increasingly suspicious.
The stories did not add up.
The money did not exist in the way Rockefeller wealth should exist.
Family connections could not be confirmed.
Background checks raised questions.
The marriage ended.
Custody of their daughter became deeply contentious.
Gerhartsreiter was granted limited supervised contact.
For a man who had built his life around controlling the story of who he was, the divorce represented something dangerous.
Boss was no longer believing him.
And she controlled access to their child.
In July 2008, Gerhartsreiter took action that finally destroyed the identity he had protected for years.
He kidnapped his daughter during a supervised visit.
The Kidnapping
The abduction occurred in Boston.
Gerhartsreiter arranged the encounter and escaped with the child.
A national search began.
Now the name Clark Rockefeller was everywhere.
Television.
Newspapers.
Police bulletins.
The FBI.
Photographs of his face circulated widely.
That publicity did what the San Marino investigation had never been able to do.
It showed the same face to people from different decades and different states.
And people began recognizing him.
Not as Rockefeller.
As someone else.
A man from Wisconsin remembered him.
Someone from California remembered Chichester.
Someone knew Christopher Crowe.
His identities began collapsing into one another.
The kidnapping had forced the con man to become famous.
Fame made anonymity impossible.
He was arrested in Baltimore on August 2, 2008.
His daughter was recovered safely.
Then investigators began asking:
Who exactly is Clark Rockefeller?
The Fingerprints
One of the great weaknesses of an alias is that the body does not change with the name.
Fingerprints remain.
According to a detailed Vanity Fair reconstruction, investigators obtained a print from a wine glass he had recently used and sent it for comparison.
The results and public tips helped reveal the identity trail.
Chris Gerhart.
Christopher Chichester.
Christopher Crowe.
Clark Rockefeller.
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
And with the Chichester identity came the San Marino case.
The missing Sohuses.
The backyard bones.
The truck.
The guesthouse.
The old homicide investigation was suddenly alive again.
Police Return to California
Los Angeles investigators took another look.
Technology had changed.
Witnesses could be reinterviewed.
Documents could be reconstructed.
Gerhartsreiter was no longer an elusive alias.
He was in custody.
The prosecution began building a case nearly three decades after John disappeared.
This required something much more difficult than solving a fresh homicide.
Memories had faded.
Witnesses had died.
Physical evidence had degraded.
One elderly witness at a pretrial hearing struggled so badly with identification that she mistakenly selected a television cameraman as the man she remembered.
That is what twenty-seven years does to eyewitness evidence.
Prosecutors therefore leaned heavily on objects and behavior.
The grave.
The bags.
The truck.
The blood.
The timing.
The aliases.
The chainsaw.
The chemical-drum question.
The carpet smoke.
The postcards.
The flight to Connecticut.
No single item was the smoking gun.
The case depended on accumulation.
The Case Against Gerhartsreiter
Prosecutors argued that the circumstantial chain worked like this:
John and Linda disappear.
Gerhartsreiter is living yards from where John's body is later found.
He has access to the area.
Witnesses see suspicious activity around the guesthouse.
A large bloodstain is later detected on its floor.
Gerhartsreiter had borrowed a chainsaw.
He had asked about disposing of chemical drums.
Dark smoke emerges from his chimney and he says he is burning carpet.
Fresh earth appears in the backyard.
John's body is ultimately found beneath it.
Plastic bags around the remains link to universities Gerhartsreiter attended.
Gerhartsreiter soon leaves California.
He resurfaces using another name.
He possesses the missing couple's truck.
When police begin asking about that truck, he alters his appearance and goes deeper into hiding.
He continues changing identities for decades.
Prosecutors asked jurors:
How many coincidences can one case contain before they stop being coincidences?
The Defense's Answer
The defense did not deny Gerhartsreiter was a liar.
That would have been impossible.
His entire adult life proved it.
Instead, defense attorneys separated deceit from murder.
Yes, he lied about being British.