Fraudster who spent years posing as a Rockefeller heir found guilty in unsolved 1985 murder (2024)

The man who called himself Clark Rockefeller, a scion of the oil dynasty and heir to its fortune, was intelligent, witty, charming and a compulsive liar.

For decades, German-born con man Christian Gerhartsreiter duped people into believing a series of lies — that he was a Rockefeller heir, a cardiologist, a Hollywood producer, a Wall Street banker, a financial advisor renegotiating debt for small countries, a physicist, an art collector, and a ship’s captain.

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He duped his wife, Sandy Boss, into marrying him and after 12 years, when she realized he was not a Rockefeller, she went to private investigators “who told me they couldn’t tell me who I was married to,” she said.

Shortly after that discovery, his double life began to unravel and a darker secret emerged.

On Wednesday, Gerhartsreiter was convicted of a killing dating back to 1985.

Gerhartsreiter, 52, was found guilty of the first-degree murder of John Sohus, 27, a computer engineer, who was the son of his landlady in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino.

At the time, Gerhartsreiter was claiming to be a British aristocrat called Christopher Chichester, a baronet related to Lord Mountbatten, and had adopted a fake English accent.

Mr. Sohus’s wife, Linda, vanished along with her husband and prosecutors claimed that Gerhartsreiter had almost certainly killed her too, although he was not charged with doing so.

He was said to have arranged for forged postcards to be sent from Paris to the couple’s friends and relatives in America, making it appear that they had left the country.

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At the same time that the couple vanished, so did Gerhartsreiter.

Mr. Sohus’s bones were unearthed during excavation of a swimming pool at the San Marino property in 1994.

With no clues, the mystery went cold.

Meanwhile, Gerhartsreiter had moved to the east coast and gained entry to high society in Boston using other assumed names.

At one point he claimed to be the Hollywood director and writer Christopher Crowe, whose film credits include The Last of the Mohicans screenplay.

In fact, he was born in an impoverished region of Bavaria to a house painter and a seamstress and arrived in the United States at the age of 17.

In 1993, Gerhartsreiter met his wife when she was studying for her MBA at Harvard and was invited to a co*cktail party at his New York apartment. The theme was the game “Clue,” and they came in costume.

“I was Miss Scarlett and he was Professor Plum,” she recalled.

“I liked him. I thought he was intelligent, very funny, quirky, flattering and complimentary. A good person to get to know.”

They began dating and by 1994 she had graduated, had a finance job in New York and moved in with him. He told her he was an heir to the Rockefeller fortune but was on the outs with the rest of his relatives and never saw them.

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He said his parents had been killed in a car crash in 1978.

“I assumed that what he was telling me was true,” she said. “I didn’t have reason to think he was not the person he said he was.”

When he proposed marriage in June 1994, she accepted and they married the next year.

But once they married, she said his charming demeanor dissipated and he became demanding of secrecy in all their affairs. He handled finances but she provided the funds and signed blank cheques for him to use. She said he put charges on her credit cards and had none in his own name.

He installed multiple phone lines and had their mail delivered to post office boxes. They moved frequently.

He also had an aversion to certain places. He refused to visit California, which he said he hated, and would never set foot in Connecticut.

Unknown to her, he was under investigation in both places in connection with a missing persons case.

In 2007, Ms. Boss became aware that he was not Clark Rockefeller and left him, taking their six-year-old daughter.

In 2008, he was arrested for abducting his young daughter in Boston following a bitter divorce.

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The resulting publicity led California authorities to revisit the Sohus disappearance. They realized the man in custody in Boston was not an heir to the Rockefeller fortune but was the man who had lived in San Marino decades ago.

Gerhartsreiter was close to the end of his jail sentence for kidnapping and headed for freedom when the murder charge changed that. After a quarter century, authorities believed they had linked him to the disappearance of his old neighbour.

During the murder trial, prosecutors did not present a motive for the crime.

However, two plastic bags were found wrapped around Mr. Sohus’s skull. Both were from bookstores at two U.S. universities where Gerhartsreiter had studied.

Habib Balian, the prosecutor, said Gerhartsreiter was a master manipulator, adding: “He’s gotten away with it for 28 years. This is a search for the truth. He wanted John dead, for whatever reason.”

Defence attorneys suggested that Ms. Sohus, not their client, killed her husband.

But no motive was offered for her or Gerhartsreiter to have killed the young man.

Gerhartsreiter will be sentenced at a later date. He faces possible life imprisonment.

Ms. Boss, a wealthy management consultant, described her former husband as “an unpleasant human being” and compulsive liar.

The Daily Telegraph, with files from The Associated Press

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