German Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter: convicted of the 1985 murder of his California landlady’s son.
Reuters/Los Angeles
A German-born con man who posed for years as a member of America’s wealthy Rockefeller family was convicted yesterday of the 1985 murder of his California landlady’s son, whose body was found buried in the backyard of a Los Angeles-area home.
A Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated for less than a day before returning a guilty verdict against 52-year-old Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
Gerhartsreiter, who faces a maximum sentence of life in prison for murdering 27-year-old John Sohus, showed little reaction when the verdict was read.
The remains of Sohus were discovered in 1994 buried in the backyard of the home in the Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, where he lived with his wife while Gerhartsreiter was renting a guest house on the property from Sohus’ mother.
Gerhartsreiter was living at the time under the guise of a British aristocrat named Christopher Chichester. By the time Sohus’ remains were unearthed by a work crew preparing to build a swimming pool on the property for a new owner, Gerhartsreiter had resurfaced on the East Coast under other assumed names.
But his double life unravelled after he was arrested in 2008 for abducting his young daughter in Boston following a bitter divorce and was revealed to have passed himself off for 16 years as a scion of the Rockefeller clan.
He was convicted in 2009 of kidnapping, assault and battery.