A man who pretended to be an heir to the fabled Rockefeller fortune has been sentenced to 27 years to life for a California cold-case murder.
Christian Gerhartsreiter was sentenced on Thursday in Los Angeles Superior Court for the killing of John Sohus, who disappeared with his wife Linda in 1985.
The 52-year-old German immigrant, who fooled friends, lovers and a wife during an extraordinary three-decade charade, sacked his lawyers and represented himself at the sentencing hearing after a jury convicted him of first-degree murder.
Mr Sohus, a 27-year-old computer programmer who was the son of the defendant's landlady, vanished with his wife in 1985.
No trace of her has been found, but Gerhartsreiter - who insisted he was not a murderer - hinted at a recent hearing that he might have information about her whereabouts.
Mr Sohus' bones were discovered in 1994 buried behind a suburban San Marino home where Gerhartsreiter had lived.
The case remained circumstantial, though, with no DNA link to the defendant.
The trial focused on memories and bits of evidence, primarily the bones being found with a bag bearing the logo of a university once attended by Gerhartsreiter.
Witnesses testified about the stranger who came into their elegant town, befriending church members who invited him into their homes.
Their testimony exhumed the ghosts of the happy young newlyweds, who inexplicably vanished shortly before the man then known as Chris Chichester also disappeared.
It turned out he was off on a decades-long odyssey across the country.
Variously known as Chris Crowe, Chip Smith and Clark Rockefeller, he wormed his way into high society and important jobs, married a wealthy woman and controlled her funds.
But his identity finally unravelled when he kidnapped his own daughter during a custody dispute in 2007.
The resulting publicity led California authorities to revisit the Sohus disappearance.
He was near the end of his five-year sentence in Boston for kidnapping his young daughter, when he was charged with murder.
But with the passage of time and lack of a motive, the prosecutor had a difficult challenge.
"Sometimes you're afraid that this guy's conned so many people for so many years that this will be the one last time he pulls off his last con," the prosecutor after the verdict. "But that didn't happen."
The defence attorney at the time, Jeffrey Denner, said that Gerhartsreiter probably was his own worst enemy.
"The way he went through life deceiving people did not make him very likable to the jury," Mr Denner said. "But that doesn't make him a killer."
Jurors took six hours to convict him.
No comments:
Post a Comment