Call Me Clark

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was born in Siegsdorf, Bavaria, in 1961 and came to the United States at seventeen. He cycled through invented names and biographies. By the early 1980s he was calling himself Christopher Chichester, a British baronet, and renting the guest house behind the San Marino, California, home of an elderly widow, Ruth Sohus, who was known as Didi.

In February 1985 Didi’s son John and his wife, Linda, vanished. Chichester told people the couple had taken secret government work. In June, postcards postmarked in Paris arrived for their family and friends. He left California soon afterward. In 1994 new owners digging a swimming pool found human remains in the yard, and in 2010 DNA identified them as John Sohus. He had been struck on the head and stabbed. Linda has never been found.

By then he was Clark Rockefeller. He married McKinsey executive Sandra Boss in 1995; an investigator she hired could find no record of him before 1993, and they divorced in 2007. On July 27, 2008, he took their seven-year-old daughter, Reigh, from a supervised visit in Boston and was caught six days later in Baltimore. That case exposed his real name. He was convicted of kidnapping, then charged with the Sohus murder, convicted in April 2013 and sentenced to twenty-seven years to life, reduced on appeal in 2015 to twenty-six to life.