Episode Details

For decades, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter lived a life built almost entirely on lies.

The German-born con man reinvented himself again and again, adopting identities that allowed him to move through wealthy American circles as a film producer, aristocrat, financier, and eventually “Clark Rockefeller”—a man who convinced friends, employers, and even his own wife that he belonged to one of America’s most famous families.

But one of his earliest identities would eventually connect him to murder.

In the 1980s, Gerhartsreiter called himself Christopher Chichester and lived in a guesthouse behind a home in San Marino, California. The property belonged to the family of John and Linda Sohus, a young married couple who mysteriously disappeared in 1985.

Years later, new owners began digging a swimming pool in the backyard.

They uncovered human remains.

The victim was eventually identified as John Sohus, whose skull had been fractured and whose body had been dismembered and buried in bags beneath the property. Linda Sohus has never been found.

By then, the mysterious Christopher Chichester had long since vanished and Christian Gerhartsreiter had moved on to new names and new lives.

His elaborate deception finally began unraveling after another extraordinary crime. In 2008, while living as Clark Rockefeller, Gerhartsreiter kidnapped his own daughter during a custody visit following his divorce. He was captured in Baltimore, and the publicity surrounding his arrest helped investigators connect the sophisticated Boston “Rockefeller” to the man once known as Christopher Chichester.

That connection eventually brought Gerhartsreiter back to California to face trial for John Sohus’s murder.

In April 2013, a jury convicted him of first-degree murder, finding that he had killed Sohus using both blunt and sharp instruments. He was later sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.

Gerhartsreiter denied killing John and maintained that Linda Sohus was responsible, but prosecutors rejected that account. Linda’s disappearance remains one of the haunting unanswered questions surrounding the case.

This is the true crime story of Christian Gerhartsreiter, the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller—a master impostor who spent decades creating new identities until a murder buried in a California backyard finally helped expose the man behind them all.

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