- I'm Craig Melvin and this is "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
- I was just like, Oh, my God!
This is really an answer.
It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something.
- A young couple vanishes.
Then, nearly a decade later,
a discovery in their own backyard
turns the mystery into a murder.
- They find a bag
and inside the bag is a human skull.
- Detectives have a suspect, then he disappears too.
- His trail had just stopped.
- Until this...
- Please, please, bring Snooks back.
- He kidnapped his own daughter
right from this Boston street
after claiming to be a Rockefeller--
Clark Rockefeller.
- I had a private investigator
try to find out who I was married to
and they couldn't find out.
- Now, a second chance for investigators to prove
that this mysterious con man was also a killer.
But was this case as clear cut as it seemed?
- There was no motive.
There was no reason he would have done this.
- We'll hear from the detectives
who helped crack this puzzling case
and from his ex-wife.
- I thought he was very intelligent,
funny, very charming.
- For decades, he got away with a web of lies.
Would he also get away with murder?
- I can fairly certainly say that I've never hurt anyone.
**
- Hello, and welcome to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
Con men are notorious for spinning lies
and holding secrets tight.
Add a dose for aristocratic appeal
and you might get the man you are about to meet.
A wannabe one-percenter.
And perhaps a murderer who would lead detectives
along a decades long trail of deceit.
Here's Mike Mike Taibbi with "The Phony Rockefeller".
**
- It was a brutal crime
buried over the years by dirt and lies,
but there he was finally
in a Los Angeles County courtroom
to stand trial for it all.
- He came here with nothing
and then he ended up as a fake Rockefeller.
- The world first came to know him
as a phony Rockefeller who made headlines
for duping a string of bright, if gullible, women.
- They couldn't tell me who I was married to.
- As followers of his story came to know,
he used his audacious talent for lying
to live the good life,
but was he more than just a clever con man?
Was he something darker? Something evil?
- Adds up circumstantially to a picture of a guy
who has probably committed a pretty brutal homicide.
- Those inside the investigation
reveal how they assembled a case for murder
from shards of evidence scattered over 28 years
and thousands of miles.
- There really isn't a smoking gun,
it's a lot of pieces to the puzzle.
- Where the pieces come together
to form a portrait of a killer.
If you were looking for a setting for a mystery,
San Marino in the early 1980s wasn't the place.
And the house on Lorain Road,
since rebuilt, hardly the ideal stage.
That's where quiet John Sohus lived.
- He was probably reasonably shy and reserved.
- Patrick Rayermann was John's childhood friend.
He remembers John as a bit of a mama's boy
and as he was, a bit of a nerd.
- John and I both shared a love of Star Trek.
We would compare theories about warp speed travel...
- You guys are middle school kids
and you're talking about warp speed, phasers and--
- Well, without advanced mathematics,
but yes.
- Eventually, John's enthusiasm
for science fiction morphed into a passion
for another galaxy that was certainly accessible
in the '80s, computers.
And then he discovered love.
Did you sense a connection between the two of them?
- I certainly had the sense that they were soulmates.
- Her name was Linda.
Like John, she loved science fiction
and fantasy.
Linda's pal, Sue Coffman says Linda and John
seemed to compliment each other
as opposites often do.
He was shy, she outgoing.
He was short,
she at six feet, towered over him.
- Between the two of 'em, I was like,
"This is the oddest coupling I've ever seen in my life."
- A quirky couple who just clicked.
Laughingly choosing Halloween
as their wedding day in 1983.
With money tight,
they started their life together
living in the house on Lorain Road.
Sue remembers Linda complaining about John's mom Didi
who liked her cocktails early and often on many days.
- His mom is a drunk and a smoker
and I really don't like being around her
and the smoke and everything.
She's just, you know, this poor old lady
but she says I just try and avoid her like crazy.
- But Linda and John couldn't avoid Didi
because the guest house on the property
where they might have setup house had a tenant.
With the renter in no hurry to leave
and the newlyweds stuck in the main house,
John and Linda focused on their careers.
They proudly made their first major purchase,
a new truck.
- They were so happy when they showed up at my house.
I don't even remember if they called first
or if they actually drove up one day
and said, "Look, we're in a car."
- With a new ride and a bit of money,
they planned a first road trip with Sue
to a big Sci-Fi convention in Phoenix.
But in early 1985, weeks before the event,
Linda called Sue with a puzzling announcement.
- First thing was, you know, we're going to New York.
And I'm like, "What are you going to New York for?"
"Well, um, John looks like he has an interview
"with a government job," or something.
- She says, we're gonna be back in two weeks.
- Yeah, we're gonna be back in a couple of weeks
in time for us to get our stuff together
and get this trip on the way.
- Except they didn't make it back in time.
And when the weeks rolled on with no word from her friend,
Sue naturally began to worry.
She told John's mother, Didi.
- She was like, "I don't know, they're-- they're in Paris."
And I'm thinkin' Paris, California.
You know, and she goes, "Oh, no, Paris, France."
I mean, she's just three or four sheets to the wind.
And I'm just kinda like, right.
- And something else made no sense at all.
It seemed Linda had abandoned her beloved cats
at a pet hotel.
- Her cats were her absolute loves of her life.
She would not have left her cats of her own free will.
- Linda's family was alarmed too,
and filed a missing persons report.
But when San Marino police followed up
by visiting John's mother Didi,
she told 'em the same strange story.
- Didi said that they weren't missing,
they were on a job interview that was secret.
- Detective's Tim Miley and Dolores Scott
with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.
Kind of weird on its own that Didi Sohus had said,
"My son and his wife are on this secret job interview."
- Right.
- I mean, she truly believed
that he was off on a secret mission job.
And that's what she had been told.
- It was so odd.
Was the young couple missing or not?
An officer knocked on the door to the guest house
where Didi's tenant lived.
- So he went back there to get some more information
as to what he might've known about Linda and John.
In fact, he came to the door naked.
- Butt naked? - Butt naked.
- The tenant in his birthday suit
said his name was Christopher Chichester
but had nothing to say about John and Linda.
There was nowhere to go with the missing persons case,
not then.
But something was about to change
around the question that hung in the air
that wasn't going away.
Where exactly were John and Linda?
- What is really behind the missing couple's
secret mission?
A discovery in their backyard prompts police
to take a closer look at that mysterious tenant.
- He said he was here by himself
and was a descendant of some royalty in England.
- When Dateline: Secrets Uncovered continues.
- No one seemed more worried about the whereabouts
of the missing John and Linda Sohus
than their good friend Sue Coffman.
- Something's not right. Something's afoot here.
- John's mom Didi had told Sue a crazy story
about the couple,
that is was some kind of a top secret job
that had taken them away to France.
Hard to believe until postcards from the couple
started arriving from Paris.
Sue got one of them.
- I just saw that it said John and Linda at the bottom,
I went... [gasps] Answers!
- Maybe she had been wrong to worry.
Maybe John's mother had been right all along.
Maybe John and Linda were off on some secret mission.
- So I just thought...
"She's off somewhere weird for whatever reason."
I kind of played with the idea of witness protection.
- The postcard suggested that John and Linda
were gone voluntarily, no foul play.
But then John's mother suddenly changed her tune.
- In July of 1985,
Didi calls the police and now she's distraught.
- Distraught because her guest house tenant
had moved out without a word.
And, as she now explained,
he was the one telling her secrets behind closed doors.
It turned out it was Chris Chichester
the very same man
who'd greeted police in the nude
and had nothing to say
who'd been feeding her information all along
about the couple's overseas mission.
Is she concerned that the guest house tenant
who disappeared might've been involved
in whatever happened to her son?
- She doesn't know.
She's just concerned that the only person
that she was contacting them through
was missing now, too.
She was concerned because she had no way
to contact her son.
- The guest house tenant source
about a secret government mission,
Chichester's friends around San Marino back then
might have thought it was just another
of his fantastical stories.
- This was a good one when he--
- Lisa Gallegos and Dana Farrar
knew Chichester as an eccentric
and amusing character.
- He was funny and he was charming.
- He was very interesting to talk to on many subjects.
He was very bright.
He knew about a lot of things.
He was witty.
You know, it was a lot of fun to hang out with him.
A film student at USC he told Dana,
often walking around campus
with a script or two under his arm.
- We'd go to old films together,
we'd talk about film.
- One of the movies the two of you saw together
was "Double Indemnity", a guy plotting a murder.
- "This is the best movie, Dana!"
You know, "We have to go see 'Double Indemnity'."
- He was a minor British Royal, a Baronet,
said the business card
he handed out around San Marino.
What did you think a 13th Baronet was?
- Well that was the funny part,
I had no idea.
- But she didn't question it.
And neither did Cori Woods.
- He said he was here by himself.
Didn't really have a family. Was from England.
And was descendant of some royalty in England.
- Cori and her family were thoroughly impressed
by the young aristocrat,
who after services at the Episcopal church
they attended together,
would dazzle them with his stories.
- He bought a castle in England,
and he wanted to ship it over here brick by brick,
so we could have, you know,
an authentic, English, you know, chapel.
- The charming young Brit had also become
the town's resident raconteur,
sometimes hosting parties at Lorain Road.
Oddly, though, he lived in the guest house,
Dana noticed that he seemed to have
the run of the entire property.
- I just said to him,
why do you keep going in your landlord's house, Chris?
Because it just seemed so off,
and he said-- I remember this so well--
he said, "Oh, they're away.
"They will not mind."
- And, of course, they, John and Linda, were away,
with only drunken Didi isolated in the main house.
And after Chichester, the tenant left,
she was an old woman wracked by loneliness
and lost hope, fading fast.
- You wanna talk about taking what wind was in her sails
out of those sails and leaving her in the doldrums,
it certainly did.
- She died a few years later,
by many accounts, a broken woman.
In San Marino, meanwhile, life went on.
The Lorain Road property found buyers,
and in May 1994,
almost a decade after John and Linda disappeared,
the new owners decided to install a pool.
They cleared the old backyard and started digging,
until the work suddenly stopped
and police were summoned to the scene.
- And they said that they had discovered a body.
Well, initially, of course, we thought,
no, this-this doesn't happen in San Marino.
- Trisha Guff was a San Marino detective
when the human skeleton was found.
- And they said, hey, there was a missing person
at that address, so there's a lot of information
coming together on that first day.
- It was a man's skeleton,
and that old missing persons report suggested
who that man was.
- I didn't need the DNA.
I didn't need the dental records.
I knew that was John.
- John Sohus's friend, Sue Coffman, heard
the details of how the body had been dressed,
jeans and a plaid shirt,
and the truth she dreaded hit home.
- And I said, that's exactly what John wore
like almost all the time.
That was his way that he liked to dress.
- The remains told more of the story,
blows to the head, six stab wounds in the back.
Not just murder, but a brutal murder.
A missing persons case that had gone permanently cold
was transformed in that moment to a very active,
super heated homicide investigation.
There were two other people who'd lived
at Lorain Road then, and were unaccounted for,
John's wife Linda, still missing,
and the tenant in the guest house.
Exactly where were they,
and was it possible one of them was a killer?
- Coming up...
Detectives get to work on that guest house
to see if it had any clues to give up.
- They found four pretty large blood spots.
- Bags of bones, a buried human skeleton,
not what you'd expect to find in a suburban backyard,
especially in a place like sleepy San Marino, California.
- It was a big story, huge story.
- Frank Girardot was the editor of the Pasadena Star news.
- It's May 1994,
the cable news networks are taking off,
there's a 24 hour news cycle,
and a body buried in a backyard is newsworthy.
- There was no question it was murder.
And if John had been killed and buried in his own backyard,
were Linda's remains in a shallow grave of their own?
The police looked, but found no signs in the yard.
- We found nothing.
- And the thing is is that after all that,
they had one body and nothing else.
- Two key questions remained unanswered,
where was Linda and where was the other person
who lived on the Lorain Road property then,
the guest house tenant, Christopher Chichester?
- So early on, the police decided
that they needed to find Linda
and they needed to find Chris.
There was only a couple of options
for how John's body got back there,
and how it got buried,
and those two options were unaccounted for.
Chris and Linda.
- Either one of them might have-might have done it,
or certainly would know something about who did it.
- Well, it was imperative that they find them.
- In any homicide investigation,
the spouse is a natural suspect,
often the first suspect considered.
And Linda was a large woman who could conceivably
have overpowered her husband.
But as police started interviewing anyone around town
who knew any of the occupants of the Lorain Road property,
tips about the guest house tenant,
Christopher Chichester piled up quickly.
Tips suggesting that he was the one
police should be looking at.
Even those once friendly with him
now recalled him in unsavory terms,
as a manipulator, Dana Farrar said,
always out for the next free lunch.
- He would show up at my apartment,
"Mmm, that smells good," you know?
And I-I think after a while, I just kinda kicked him out.
I was like, bye.
- More weird stories.
How the 20-something Chichester sometimes hit on younger girls.
Cori Woods said he asked her out
when she was only 12.
- And my mom said a very definitive, "No."
And then, after that, you know, it got a little weird.
And he started asking other inappropriate...
[chuckles] girls out.
- Not age appropriate. - Not age appropriate.
- Some dusty old stories, remains buried nearly a decade,
not a great start for a murder investigation.
But that guest house was still standing,
and detectives got to work seeing if it had
any clues to give up
about the man who once lived there.
- They did a-a [indistinct] on-- in the guest house,
and they found four pretty large blood spots.
- They couldn't tell if it was human or animal blood,
but detectives thought the spots could be evidence
of violence from years earlier.
And they also learned something else
that they guessed was important.
- A detective at San Marino had made a connection
that the tenant in the guest house
had the victim's truck.
- The truck had been John and Linda's prized possession,
and before they went missing in 1985,
they'd planned that first big road trip in it.
But years later, after they'd vanished,
it was traced to Connecticut and to the guest house tenant.
- I mean, why would he take
the missing persons couple truck
and the truck would end up in Connecticut?
- And what's more, records showed he changed his name,
from the Baronet Christopher Chichester
to Christopher Crowe, working on Wall Street.
And a deeper check found he'd had a long,
pick a name habit.
And he was no royal, not even a Brit,
but a German national now racing from new identities
like someone bent on covering his tracks.
- And that's when he disappears.
- He's just-he's just in the wind again?
- Right.
- And with that, the murder investigation stalled.
The years went by, and in San Marino
they might have forgotten all about
poor, dead John Sohus and his missing wife
and about the oddball tenant of the Lorain Road guest house
had it not been for this.
- Authorities search over land and sea
for a man and his seven-year-old daughter.
- A family drama playing out on a leafy Boston street
in the summer of 2008.
A custody battle that became a national story
because of the name at its center.
- The man who insists his name is Clark Rockefeller--
- One of America's famous names, of course.
But it was the face that got everyone's attention
back in California.
Trisha Guff, retired as a detective by then,
gasped when she saw the photo.
- When I saw the newspaper, I knew that was him.
- Could it be?
Could the fugitive with the famous name
at the center of a con man tale on the East coast
be the same man wanted on the West coast
for a darker, near forgotten crime?
Was there now a way to awaken the long dormant case
of the murder on Lorain Road?
- Coming up...
A Rockefeller accused of murder.
- Oh, my God.
This is really an answer.
It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something.
- Welcome back to "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered".
I'm Craig Melvin.
Cold cases by their nature are hard to crack.
Unlocking their secrets
sometimes takes a stroke of luck.
It was nearly 25 years
since John and Linda Sohus first went missing.
But friends and investigators were about to look
at the TV in disbelief at who was staring back.
Here again, is Mike Taibbi with "The Phony Rockefeller".
- The news out of Boston was crazy,
a head-scratcher that screamed front page.
- A bitter divorce, a bizarre kidnapping,
a famous last name--
- It all seemed worlds away
from that decades old cold case in California,
the unsolved murder of a quiet computer geek
named John Sohus who'd gone missing with his wife, Linda.
But to some, the unfolding story in Boston was a link at last
to that brutal, nearly forgotten murder.
- The women from the party recognized him,
and so did all of his neighbors in San Marino.
- Frank Girardot was all over the story.
- What the FBI's wanted poster did
was set off these sparks of recognition.
People knew that Clark was Chris.
- Clark Rockefeller,
yes, he said, one of those Rockefellers,
appeared to be the latest and boldest reinvention yet
of that guest house tenant who'd slipped under the radar
so many years ago.
It was an audacious lie,
now unraveling nightly on the 6 o'clock news.
The storyline was that this Clark Rockefeller
had been divorced after nearly 12 years of marriage
to a big money business consultant
named Sandra Boss.
And that in a bitter custody battle
after his quiet life of privilege had dissolved,
he kidnapped their little daughter, nicknamed Snooks,
and gone on the lam.
For the love of is daughter, the narrative went,
he'd risked everything.
- They sympathetic mother pleaded on national television
for her daughter's return.
- I ask you now,
please, please bring Snooks back.
- She wasn't much help to the FBI,
because like the public, she said,
she had no idea who her husband really was.
The con man had been passing himself off as a Rockefeller
in high society circles for well over a decade.
- And then they said, Clark Rockefeller
and put his picture up there,
and I almost fell off the elliptic machine.
- Socialite Roxanne West remembered meeting
Clark Rockefeller at a posh Manhattan art gallery.
- He was so mild mannered,
and very polite and a gentleman.
- Rockefeller, her new gentleman friend,
liked to send weird and provocative text messages.
One sent, he claimed, while he was giving a private tour
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Then, this one.
"In a submarine. Crowded. Strange.
"Thought of you just a minute ago."
- The texts were so wild and so farfetched,
we would just giggle and go,
"Where does he come up with this stuff?"
- There was something odd about him, but his name?
- One of my friends could have sworn
he was definitely a Rockefeller because of his bone structure.
- It was a convincing cover that had lasted years,
but by the time he was caught,
six days into his flight with Snooks,
the fraud was exposed and his real name,
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, in every front page,
top of the newscast story.
In California, investigators immediately reopened
the John Sohus homicide case
and the leads started pouring in.
- We got a lot of phone calls,
and a lot of people that did not come up--
come forward in '94, came forward in 2008.
So there were some new pieces of information
that we got as a result of the publicity.
- For Sue Coffman,
best friend of the still missing Linda Sohus,
it was reason to hope after all these years.
- Oh, my God.
This is really an answer.
It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something.
- If he did, he certainly wasn't telling the police.
But he did have plenty to say to Natalie Morales
in his televised interview.
- Are you a mystery man?
- I'd like to be known as a-- as a good man, if anything.
I, uh, like to be known as a quiet man
living a quiet life.
- He admitted using a string of fake names,
Chris Chichester, one of them.
- You assumed different identities.
- Yes, but for specific purposes,
much like a writer would take a pen name.
- But what about the murder of John Sohus?
Did he have anything to say about that?
- Did you kill John and Linda Sohus?
- My entire life, I have always been a pacifist.
I am a Quaker,
and I believe in non-violence.
And, uh, I can fairly, certainly say
that I've never hurt anyone.
- When I saw that, I thought that was the closest thing
to a confession I had ever seen or heard.
What do you say?
Did you kill John and Linda Sohus?
- I think you say no. - No.
But you don't say...
- I'm a Quaker. - I'm a Quaker.
- Even as Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping case
played out in Boston,
the California investigators were quietly at work
building a case for murder.
- So we basically had to do CPR on this case
and just get it up and-and running.
- To resuscitate the case, they went back to find
those folks who'd known the suspect
when he was calling himself the 13th Baronet,
Christopher Chichester.
To the episcopal church where he worked his charms
after Sunday services.
One man remembered Chichester asking to borrow a chainsaw.
And now, Dana Farrar told detectives
something that seemed like key evidence.
During one of Chichester's backyard Trivial Pursuit parties,
she'd noticed that a part of the lawn
looked like it had been freshly dug up.
- I said to him,
you know, "What's with your yard?
"What happened to your yard?"
And he just said, "Well, I'm having plumbing problems."
- Detectives were astounded at the implications.
- At that point, he's taking ownership of the grave.
Because that's exactly where John's body was found.
- And, the detectives poring over the evidence
from the Washington kidnapping case found this,
reason to believe their prime suspect
had totally rebooted his identity after San Marino.
- In Boston, we found some documents
and some computer hard drives.
His life begins roughly in 1988.
- What did that tell you? - Well, I would say
it's, uh, some evidence of a consciousness of guilt,
of trying to erase a part of one's life.
- But detectives couldn't erase the nagging questions
about Linda, the victim's wife.
Was she still alive?
And remember those post cards from Paris?
She had apparently sent them all
after the couple had disappeared.
I think you also couldn't eliminate the wife,
who's also missing and whose remains or body
have themselves not been found.
- Yes, that obviously
is something that we had to look at.
However, the more we dug into Linda Sohus,
we just couldn't find anything sinister
or any plausible reason why she would do this
or that she had the means to disappear and start a new life.
- Was the case trial ready?
The answer was at hand,
with Christian Gerhartsreiter
extradited from Boston to California,
now officially a defendant in a case of murder.
- The woman he wooed and fooled
as Clark Rockefeller takes the stand.
- I liked him.
I thought he was very intelligent,
um, funny, quirky,
um, very charming.
- When "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered" continues.
** - The State of California knew it was a high stakes gamble
to try and prove at trial that the con man
calling himself Clark Rockefeller
was also a murder
whose real name was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
After all, the case rested heavily
on pieces of circumstantial evidence 28 years old.
- We're concerned.
It was gonna take a smart jury to--
to put those together, so we didn't have a smoking gun.
- Gerhartsreiter pleaded not guilty,
and hired a pair of prominent Boston attorneys
to defend him, Jeffery Denner and Brad Bailey.
- There was no motive,
there was no reason he would have done this.
- We are, on the record of the matter
of the people versus Gerhartsreiter...
- Still, when the trial opened, prosecutor Habib Balian
confidently offered a series of friends and neighbors
with odd tales from around the time
John and Linda Sohus disappeared.
Jurors heard about the blood stains
found years later inside the guest house,
and then, testimony from a neighbor suggesting the tenant
had been trying to destroy possible evidence.
- I called him and said,
"Chris, what are you burning in the fireplace?"
- What was his response? - "I'm burning carpet."
- One church friend said the defendant
had tried to sell her a rug with a strange spot.
- Well, I found it looked a little like blood.
- Whose chainsaw was it? - It was mine.
- They heard that story about the borrowed chainsaw.
Now, what could that mean?
- For approximately how long, to the best of your estimation,
was it that he had this chainsaw?
- Several months.
- And Dana Farrar took the stand
to describe that backyard party the defendant hosted
just yards from the patch of freshly turned soil.
- It looked like someone had dug up part of the lawn
and there was dirt kind of, you know, crumbled dirt on top,
like someone had just been digging there.
I said, "What's going on with your yard, Chris?
"It's all dug up."
- What did he say?
- He said that he had been having plumbing problems.
- There is no plumbing to the left of that red line.
- He has a party, hosts a party,
feet away from where he buried a victim?
- Yes.
I can't explain it, but he did.
- But perhaps the strongest piece of circumstantial evidence
tying the defendant to the murder was this.
John Sohus's skull had been found
wrapped in two plastic university book bags,
one from USC,
the other from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.
- In doing a background on Gerhartsreiter,
he had attended both those universities.
- A physical connection, finally,
between the con man's real life
and those bones in the ground.
More evidence, after his San Marino days,
after the murder witnesses said,
the con man was no longer the expansive raconteur,
eager to work the room,
but was instead living like a fugitive.
- He told me that he was from Pasadena, California,
that his father was an anesthesiologist
and his mother was a child actress.
- In the late '80s,
Mihoko Manabe lived with the defendant,
then calling himself Christopher Crowe.
An unusual guy, Manabe testified,
who became paranoid and obsessed with privacy
after a detective called to ask about the truck
traced to his latest phony name,
John and Linda Sohus's truck.
- After the call, he was markedly different.
- And how was it markedly different?
- The furtiveness, the, uh,
cutting off of all social ties.
- The defendant told Manabe
it wasn't a detective who called,
but someone out to get him and his family.
She said he suggested they marry and go into hiding.
- He grew a beard and a mustache.
- Okay, what else?
- And then he started to wear contacts.
I helped color his hair.
- And while he was still living with Manabe,
he picked a new phony name out of thin air,
and it was a beaut.
At first it was just to get a table in a packed restaurant.
- Then they say, "Who can I make the reservation for?
And he says, "Clark Rockefeller."
- Manabe dumped him,
but he never dumped the Rockefeller name.
- It would help win him his biggest catch ever,
his gold plated wife Sandra Boss,
and keep his secret safe for years.
- Who did he introduce himself as to you?
- Clark Rockefeller.
- Did you ever doubt what he was telling you?
- In hindsight, I wish I had, but no.
I assumed that what he was telling me was true.
- Sandra Boss had spent the years
since that public kidnapping case
shunning the limelight, doing everything she could
to get as far from her ex husband as possible.
She even moved overseas to London with their daughter.
But now, as a witness for the prosecution,
she would have to divulge details
of their life together.
Details the prosecution hoped would show
how she had been used as a cover,
unwittingly helping a killer hide in plain sight.
- I liked him. I thought he was very intelligent,
um, funny, quirky,
um, very charming.
- The Stanford graduate told how back when she was getting
her MBA at Harvard,
they clicked while playacting at a Clue themed party.
- We were supposed to come as a character
and I was Miss Scarlet.
- Okay, was the defendant in character?
- Yes. - Who was he?
- He was Professor Plum.
- What did he tell you about himself?
- He said that he was raised in New York,
um, that he grew up in a town house
on the East side, Sutton Place.
He went to Yale beginning at 14 for math.
Did he claim to you association
with the well-known Rockefeller family?
- Yes. - How so?
- Constantly.
This Rockefeller doesn't like me
because I, you know, got angry at him
when he was a child at a party.
They married in 1995, or did they?
According to Boss, she later learned
that Rockefeller had found out how to tie the knot
without leaving a paper trail.
- We went through a wedding ceremony
in the Quaker Meeting House in Nantucket.
He claimed at the time
that he had filed all of the paperwork
so that it was recognized,
um, as a legal marriage,
except that he hadn't done so, so it wasn't.
I'd never been married before.
I didn't really know how these things worked,
so idiotically didn't think about it.
- The prosecution suggested that with his marriage to Boss
the con man had hit a double jackpot.
She earned north of a million a year,
giving her househusband and stay-at-home dad
control of the lavish family budget.
- Is that your signature? - Yep.
He said it was more convenient for him to pay the bills
if he had checks that were signed.
- And with no bank accounts of his own,
he could live the life of a Rockefeller
in Boston's insular Beacon Hill,
where few were likely to ask awkward
or incriminating questions.
- He was very clear right from the start
that he had a high need for privacy
because of his famous family.
- Boss recalled that he stopped traveling by plane
once ID was required.
And perhaps most telling for the prosecution,
she testified that her husband vowed
to never go to two places.
California where John Sohus was murdered,
and Connecticut
where police had once looked for him
in connection with Sohus' truck.
- "I do not enter the state of Connecticut.
"I will not put my feet on its soil."
He was very specific about Connecticut.
- What about California?
- Um, California
he also said that he hated and would not visit.
- But deep into their marriage,
his life of carefully crafted invisibility
began coming apart,
melting away with lie after lie,
says Frank Girardot,
who's written a book about the case.
- He told her that his mother was really a child actress
by the name of Ann Carter.
And she said, "Wait a minute, when we first met,
"you told me your mom's name was Mary.
"Now you're telling me your mom's name is Ann Carter."
- Did you just put your finger on his fatal flaw,
that in the end,
he just couldn't not lie. He couldn't help himself.
- This man, Clark Rockefeller,
couldn't keep his lies straight.
- By then, Sandra Boss told the court,
her marriage was in serious trouble,
headed toward divorce.
But the private investigators she hired
were stymied over a basic question.
- They couldn't tell me who I was married to.
- Eventually, she and the world found out
who Clark Rockefeller really was.
And prosecutors believed they'd made the case
that he was more than just a con man,
he was a murder.
- Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, he's guilty of murder.
- But the defense was ready to attack each item
of damning but circumstantial evidence
and to point the jury
to the figure hovering over the case,
the more likely suspect the defense would argue,
the victim's missing wife Linda.
- Remember those post cards signed by Linda
and sent from Paris?
- That supports the theory that Linda was alive
after the death of John Sohus.
- And if she was alive, was she the killer?
**
- A 6-man, 6-woman jury was all that stood
between Christian Gerhartsreiter,
AKA, Clark Rockefeller, and freedom.
He was nearing the end of his prison sentence
for kidnapping his daughter in Boston.
And now reasonable doubt
in what the defense called
an "old, cold, and still untold" murder case
seemed within reach.
- That's not spin.
That's not smoke.
- His defense team conceded right off
their client was a fraud and an oddball.
- This man used different names
since coming to the United States in 1978.
But attorney Brad Bailey said
none of that made him a murderer.
- This had nothing to do with covering up
a 28-year-old homicide
and everything to do
with perpetuating this Gatsbyesque recreation.
- In court, they attacked the forensic evidence
as weak and mostly non-existent,
and got the prosecution's own experts to admit that.
Not a single fingerprint or speck of DNA
to tie the defendant to the victim,
the blood stains,
or even those university book bags.
- That is correct, I did not detect a DNA profile.
- The defense also challenged the neighbor
who testified that she saw blood
on a carpet the defendant tried to sell her.
Had she really?
- And you don't know that that was blood, do you?
- Not absolutely.
- Another challenge, this one to Detective Tim Miley.
What about that chainsaw
the defendant supposedly borrowed once upon a time?
- Is there any allegations in this case
that this chainsaw was used
in connection with the murder
or the disposal of the body of John Sohus?
- Uh, no. - No?
So your answer is no, there's no proof of that?
- There's no proof of that.
- And in the absence of proof,
the defense offered an alternative theory
of the crime, another suspect,
their stepping stone toward reasonable doubt,
the still-missing Linda.
- We're gonna ask you to envision
whether John Sohus's missing wife
might've had just as much capacity
to sneak up behind her husband
and strike those blows.
- The defense pointed out
that she was bigger and stronger
than both her husband
and the man in the defendant's chair.
What's more, the theory went,
she, the wife, might well have had a motive.
While even the prosecution declined to suggest
any reason why the defendant wanted John Sohus dead.
- It made a lot more sense in terms of motive,
in terms of reason to kill,
that Linda had been the one who had done it.
- Wasn't there trouble in paradise,
the defense pressed the couple's friend Sue Coffman,
Linda desperate to move out of her mother-in-law's house?
- You knew that Linda was frustrated
about the living situation,
and those are words that you have used, correct?
- Yes, she was frustrated.
- Coffman seethed and sighed,
appalled at what was being suggested.
- I'm like, dude, you're so far off-base
that I can't even answer your questions with anger.
So I'm just gonna answer your questions.
- But it wasn't just the motive, the defense said.
Wasn't it also clear that Linda had survived
whatever had happened to John?
Since she was the one handwriting experts said
had sent postcards to friends weeks later from Paris.
- Linda Sohus is the writer of the two postcards
that you examined? - Yes.
- That supports the theory that Linda was alive
after the death of John Sohus.
- As for the testimony of Sandra Boss,
tales that seemed to suggest
their client was the most clever con man alive.
Well, why would so nimble a schemer
commit such a crude murder,
burying his victim's remains in plastic book bags
from universities he'd attended?
- That person would also be
one of the stupidest murderers
in the history of Southern California.
If he's this master con, master manipulator,
mastermind that they make him out to be,
he's gonna kill somebody,
bury 'em 10 feet from where he lives,
essentially leaving a plaque saying,
"Hey, guys, it's me that killed him?"
- Enough doubt, the defense thought,
if not for acquittal than to at least hang the case.
But prosecutors were ready.
They'd examined and eliminated the "Linda did it" theory.
Now just before trial,
they thought they'd solved the mystery
of those postcards she supposedly sent from Paris.
The con man, they would show,
had someone in Europe mail them for him.
He'd done it before,
a college girlfriend producing a postcard
he'd supposedly sent to her from London.
- "England is great."
- We know that he was attending an English class
at University of Southern California.
- He wasn't in England. - He was not in London.
So that explains away the postcards.
- The evidence was in.
And though much of it was damning,
it was almost all circumstantial.
The defendant, his lawyers said,
was confident on verdict day.
- He went into the courtroom
feeling upbeat, hopeful, and optimistic.
- It was a miscalculation, to say the least.
The jurors took only a few hours to decide.
- We, the jury in the above entitled action,
find the defendant, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter,
guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree...
- A guilty verdict reached quickly, jurors said,
and with little debate.
To Sue Coffman, it meant most if not all of the answers
about what had happened to her lost friends
John and Linda.
- In my heart, I know he's responsible
for whatever happened to make those two gone.
- Are you convinced that Linda is dead as well?
- Yes. - To the end,
he'd insisted his lawyers privately call him Clark,
as in Clark Rockefeller, and they did.
But the man who'd invented that name
and so many others,
who'd spent his adult life
convincing others to believe his lies
and to like him and reward him for those lies,
failed on all counts with a jury of his peers.
- Unfortunately, there was an interaction here
of somebody that they instinctively hated,
didn't understand and-- - They didn't like him at all.
- They hated him,
and they were laughing at him openly.
- Not a fitting end for a Rockefeller, perhaps,
but for a liar who was also a killer,
maybe just right.
- That's all for this edition of "Dateline: Secrets Uncovered."
I'm Craig Melvin. Thank you for watching.