Yes, he lied about being Rockefeller.
Yes, he lied about his education.
Yes, he used false Social Security information.
Yes, he ran when police became interested.
None of those facts, they argued, proves he murdered John Sohus.
A con man is not automatically a killer.
Then they pointed at Linda.
Could Linda Have Killed John?
The defense argued there was at least as much evidence against Linda as against Gerhartsreiter.
She disappeared.
She had frustrations.
She apparently wrote postcards after John vanished.
No body belonging to her had ever been found.
If Linda survived, she could have killed John and fled.
Defense attorneys called handwriting experts.
The experts said the Paris postcards strongly resembled Linda's known writing.
That gave the defense a concrete foundation.
Maybe she really was alive.
Maybe the prosecution had been seduced by the spectacular Rockefeller story.
Maybe Gerhartsreiter looked guilty because he was a professional liar, not because he was a murderer.
It was a clever defense.
But it had problems.
John and Linda's Marriage
People close to the couple described John and Linda as loving.
A childhood friend of John said he had not seen them fighting.
Linda did complain about living with John's mother.
She wanted greater independence.
But dissatisfaction with a mother-in-law is a long way from murder.
Friends also found the idea that Linda permanently abandoned her cats, job and relationships deeply inconsistent with the person they knew.
And there remained the largest problem for the defense.
If Linda killed John, how did John's truck end up with Christopher Chichester on the East Coast?
Why was John's body buried behind Chichester's residence?
Why did the body contain bags tied to Chichester's educational history?
Why did blood appear on Chichester's floor?
Why did Chichester disappear?
The defense could answer each clue separately.
The prosecution asked jurors to view them together.
The Paris Postcards Again
The postcards were the hardest piece to fit.
Handwriting experts believed Linda wrote them.
DNA showed an unknown man licked some of the stamps.
Records did not show John or Linda legally departing the United States.
One possibility was that Linda wrote them before her death and someone later mailed them from Europe.
The prosecutor suggested Gerhartsreiter could have arranged that.
Investigators later found international postcards stored among Gerhartsreiter's possessions, which prosecutors offered as evidence that mailing such cards through third parties fit his deceptive habits.
But the identity of the man who licked the stamps was never established.
That means the postcards remain one of the case's genuine unresolved puzzles.
They do not prove Linda survived.
They do not prove Gerhartsreiter staged them.
They simply exist.
A surviving fragment of a story whose context is missing.
No Motive
Another weakness in the prosecution case was motive.
Why kill John Sohus?
Prosecutors never produced a clean answer.
Money?
Property?
Conflict?
Access to the house?
Something involving Linda?
An argument?
They did not know.
The state argued that motive was not legally required.
The evidence could prove murder even if the reason remained unknown.
Defense attorneys emphasized the opposite.
Without motive, the entire case felt speculative.
A flamboyant liar with many identities had become an easy villain.
The jury had to decide whether the circumstantial evidence proved he was more than that.
March 2013
The murder trial opened in Los Angeles.
Twenty-eight years had passed.
John Sohus would have been middle-aged.
Linda, if alive, would have been in her fifties.
The young "British aristocrat" from the guesthouse was now a balding German-born defendant in court.
More than forty witnesses testified.
Some knew John and Linda.
Some knew Christopher Chichester.
Some knew Christopher Crowe.
Some knew Clark Rockefeller.
Few criminal trials have ever required a jury to reconstruct so many different versions of one person.
The prosecution was not simply trying to prove who killed John.
It was trying to prove all these names belonged to the same man.
And that this man had left something buried in San Marino before becoming someone else.
The Jury
After the weeks of testimony, the case went to jurors.
There was no DNA placing Gerhartsreiter on John's body.
No eyewitness saw the killing.
No confession.
No established motive.
And Linda remained missing.
Still, the jury did not deliberate for long.
On April 10, 2013, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was found guilty of first-degree murder.
The jurors accepted the circumstantial case.
One juror later explained the simplest part of the reasoning:
John's body was buried directly behind the defendant's residence.
How could he not know someone had dug a grave there?
The university bags also weighed heavily.
So did the truck.
The many aliases did not prove murder by themselves.
But they made flight and concealment easier to understand.
Sentence
Gerhartsreiter received a sentence of 27 years to life.
He represented himself during the sentencing phase after dismissing his attorneys.
He maintained his innocence.
He explicitly blamed Linda.
He said he believed she had killed John.
John's sister stood in court and asked the question the trial still could not answer:
What happened to Linda?
She said she believed Linda was dead too.
Gerhartsreiter gave no answer that solved the mystery.
Linda Sohus
Linda was twenty-eight when she vanished in February 1985.
Red hair.
Blue eyes.
Tall.
Interested in fantasy and science fiction.
A young wife who expected to be gone from California for about two weeks.
She remains classified as an endangered missing person.
No confirmed body.
No verified sighting.
No financial trail establishing a new life.
No passport record establishing France.
No confession.
No murder charge.
Her disappearance remains legally distinct from John's murder even though the two cases are obviously intertwined.
Why Wasn't Gerhartsreiter Charged With Linda's Murder?
Because prosecutors must prove individual crimes.
John had a body.
Fatal trauma.
A grave.
Physical evidence.
A place.
Linda had absence.
Suspicion.
Circumstantial overlap.
That can be enough in some no-body murder cases.
But prosecutors did not charge Gerhartsreiter with killing her.
Authorities have long treated him as central to the mystery, but suspicion is not a conviction.
This is one of the most important distinctions in the story.
It is reasonable to ask whether the same person who murdered John also killed Linda.
It is not historically accurate to present that as a legally proven fact.
Could Linda Really Have Escaped?
This remains the alternative theory.
Suppose Linda killed John.
She writes postcards.
She leaves California.
She begins another life.
Why has she never resurfaced?
Why no confirmed identity?
Why abandon friends?
Family?
Her beloved animals?
Why no record of international travel?
Why does Gerhartsreiter possess the Sohus truck?
Why does he disappear too?
Why is John's grave behind his guesthouse?