The Perfect Soldier

It was a Tuesday morning in the spring of 1994, and a construction crew in San Marino, California, was doing what construction crews do — digging. The backyard patio of a modest property on Loraine Road needed work, and so the men broke ground, turned soil, and went about their business in the particular unhurried way of people who expect nothing more remarkable from the earth than dirt. What they found instead would set in motion one of the strangest, most serpentine investigations in the history of American crime — a case that wound through decades, crossed a continent, and finally unraveled a man who had spent the better part of his adult life pretending to be someone he was not.

The bones were human. That much was established quickly. And they had been there a long time.

What no one knew yet — what would take years, the work of determined detectives, a missing persons case from another era, and a DNA laboratory — was whose bones they were. Or who had put them there. Or why the person responsible had vanished so completely, into so many different lives, that finding him would require the kind of patience that most institutions simply do not have.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Because before there were bones, there was a man named John Sohus. And John Sohus deserves to be known.

He was twenty-seven years old in 1988, a young man of enthusiasms and gentle nerdy warmth — the kind of person who could talk your ear off about science fiction or computers and somehow make you glad he did. Those who knew John described him as good-natured, earnest, a little awkward in the way that people who care deeply about ideas sometimes are. He had grown up in the San Marino area, the adopted son of Didi Sohus, a woman who would later become a fixture of the investigation — not as a suspect, but as a mother who simply could not stop looking. John had studied and worked in fields adjacent to technology and media, and by all accounts he was figuring out his life with the quiet optimism of someone who believed the future was going to be interesting.

He had married Linda Mayfield in 1985. Linda was in some ways his opposite — more mercurial, prone to dramatic statements, given to telling people she worked for the CIA, which she did not. Their marriage was complicated, by most accounts, and their circle of acquaintances tended to find Linda harder to warm to than John. But they were a couple, they were building something together, and in the fall of 1988 they were living in the guesthouse behind Didi Sohus's home on Loraine Road in San Marino, a quiet, wealthy enclave just east of Pasadena where the streets are wide and the lawns are well-kept and very little of consequence is supposed to happen.

Also living on the property, in the main guesthouse, was a young man who had introduced himself as Christopher Chichester — a name he offered with a certain aristocratic flair, along with vague claims of connections to British nobility. He was charming, oddly formal, and possessed of a remarkable ability to make people believe things about him that were not true. He had arrived in the San Marino area sometime around 1983, and had embedded himself in the local social scene with a confidence that discouraged close questioning. He claimed to be in the film business. He borrowed money. He made impressions.

In February of 1988, John and Linda Sohus told people they were going on a trip. A note arrived at Didi Sohus's home, in Linda's handwriting, saying they had gone away for a while. Postcards followed — from France, apparently. Didi accepted this for a time, the way mothers accept things when the alternative is too difficult to consider. But the weeks became months, and the months accumulated, and John and Linda did not come back. No one could reach them. No verifiable trace of them surfaced anywhere.

Didi Sohus eventually filed a missing persons report. Investigators made note of it. But in 1988, before the internet had made the world smaller, before DNA databases had made the dead more identifiable, two young adults who had apparently left of their own accord were not, on their face, a priority. The case sat. Life moved on around it, the way life does.

Christopher Chichester had by then also disappeared from San Marino. He had moved on, leaving behind some unpaid debts and a truck — John Sohus's truck, as it turned out — which he had shipped to the East Coast before departing. In Connecticut, in New York, in social circles far removed from Southern California, a man surfaced who called himself Clark Rockefeller. He claimed, with remarkable aplomb, to be a scion of that Rockefeller family — the oil dynasty, the American aristocracy, the name that opens doors before you even reach them. He was sophisticated, peculiar, brilliant-seeming, and utterly convincing to the people who encountered him. He married a successful businesswoman named Sandra Boss, who held a Harvard MBA and ran a consulting firm, and who would later say, with the stunned exhaustion of someone reassembling their own memories, that she had believed him for years. They had a daughter. They lived well.

Meanwhile, in San Marino, the earth kept its secret.

Until 1994, when the construction crew found the bones.

The remains were fragmentary, scattered across a relatively small area beneath the patio — evidence, forensic investigators would note, consistent with the body having been buried there and disturbed over time by the settling of the earth and the work of small animals. Investigators began a methodical excavation. The bones were sent to the Los Angeles County coroner's office. But identifying them was not simple. The science of the early 1990s had limits, and without a clear match to a missing person, the case moved slowly.

Investigators began reviewing their files for missing persons from the area. The name Sohus surfaced. Didi Sohus, still waiting, still hoping, was contacted. She provided information. She provided, eventually, what investigators needed to run a comparison. It took years — years during which the science of DNA analysis was itself evolving — but in time, the bones were confirmed to belong to John Sohus.

Only John. Linda Sohus has never been found.

The discovery of John's remains transformed what had been a missing persons case into a homicide investigation. And the question that investigators now carried with them everywhere was the same question that had been lurking, unspoken, since 1988: where was Christopher Chichester?

The answer, it turned out, was hiding in plain sight — behind the name Clark Rockefeller, behind the name Chip Smith, behind a succession of personas stretching back across the Atlantic Ocean to a small town in West Germany, where a young man named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter had grown up dreaming, it seemed, of being someone else entirely. He had come to the United States in the late 1970s as a foreign exchange student and had simply never returned to the life he came from, constructing instead a new one — and then another, and another — out of borrowed names, invented histories, and an almost supernatural audacity.

Investigators pieced this together painstakingly, following the threads of his various identities through records and recollections and the testimony of people who had known one version or another of this man and had no idea they were all describing the same person. The Christopher Chichester of San Marino and the Clark Rockefeller of Boston and New York were the same human being. The shipping of John Sohus's truck from California to Connecticut — in John Sohus's name, by someone who was not John Sohus — was documented. The timeline of Gerhartsreiter's departure from San Marino aligned, with grim precision, to the period when John and Linda Sohus had vanished.

But proving it was another matter. Gerhartsreiter was not in custody. He was not even, for many years, clearly located. And the evidence, while suggestive, was circumstantial — the kind of case that requires either a confession, which no one expected from a man of his elaborate self-discipline, or the slow accumulation of detail upon detail until the picture becomes undeniable.

What finally broke the case open — or rather, what finally brought Gerhartsreiter within the reach of the law — was an entirely separate crime.

In 2008, in Boston, Clark Rockefeller kidnapped his own daughter during a custody visit, following a divorce from Sandra Boss that had been both bitter and illuminating — illuminating because Boss, in the course of separating her life from his, had begun to understand the magnitude of what she had not known. When Gerhartsreiter fled with the child, the FBI became involved. Within days, he was apprehended in Baltimore. And the investigation that followed his arrest — the unspooling of his true identity, the reconstruction of his many lives — led investigators directly back to San Marino, to Loraine Road, to the bones under the patio.

He was convicted of parental kidnapping in Massachusetts in 2009 and sentenced to four to five years. But Los Angeles County prosecutors had been building their case, and in 2013, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter stood trial for the murder of John Sohus.

The trial was, by any measure, a remarkable proceeding. Prosecutors argued that Gerhartsreiter — who sat in the courtroom with the composed, slightly bemused air of a man who found the proceedings somewhat beneath him — had killed John Sohus in or around February of 1988, buried his body beneath the backyard patio of the Loraine Road property, and then assumed control of John's truck, shipping it east as he fled toward his next invented life. They argued that the motive, while not established with absolute certainty, likely involved the Sohus property or money — John and Linda had access to resources that Gerhartsreiter, perpetually constructing an expensive fiction, perennially needed.

The physical evidence included the bones themselves, the documentation of the truck's shipment, records placing Gerhartsreiter in San Marino during the relevant period, and testimony from witnesses who had known Christopher Chichester and could speak to his behavior, his manner, his presence on the property. Forensic experts testified about the condition and location of the remains. Former neighbors and acquaintances described a man who was always performing, always slightly off, always somehow more interested in managing your perception of him than in actually knowing you.

The defense argued that the case was built on inference and insinuation — that there was no direct evidence placing their client's hands on John Sohus, that Linda Sohus had never been found and could not be accounted for, and that decades had passed between the events in question and the trial itself, rendering certainty impossible.

The jury disagreed.

After deliberating, they returned a verdict of guilty of first-degree murder. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was convicted of killing John Sohus. He was sentenced to twenty-seven years to life in state prison.

He appealed. His attorneys raised questions about the sufficiency of the evidence, about procedural matters in the trial, about the challenges inherent in prosecuting a case where so much time had elapsed and so much of the record was necessarily incomplete. The California Court of Appeal reviewed the conviction and upheld it. As of this writing, Gerhartsreiter remains in California state prison, serving his sentence, eligible for parole consideration at the outer reaches of a timeline that accounts for his age.

Linda Sohus has never been found. Whether she was also a victim, whether she was a participant, whether she fled of her own volition to some destination that remains unknown — these questions have never been answered and may never be. Her absence is one of the case's permanent wounds, a mystery within a mystery, a chapter without an ending.

What the case did answer, definitively, was something that investigators and journalists had long suspected: that the man who called himself Clark Rockefeller, who had charmed his way through decades of American life, who had attended cocktail parties and sat in boardrooms and married a Harvard MBA and been accepted, without question, into some of the most privileged circles in the country — that this man was a killer. That the charm was a tool. That the personas were armor.

And there is something in that worth sitting with, for a moment.

We tend, as a society, to place enormous trust in confidence — in the person who walks into a room as though they own it, who speaks with authority, who wears their identity like a bespoke suit. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter understood this intuitively, in a way that most people never articulate, and he exploited it for decades. The name Rockefeller did not just open doors; it foreclosed questions. The affect of the aristocrat, the casual reference to wealth and connection, the slight condescension that the truly privileged can deploy without seeming to try — all of it worked, again and again, on intelligent, successful, worldly people. Sandra Boss was not naive. The families of San Marino were not rubes. And yet.

What it cost John Sohus — his life, at twenty-seven, before he had the chance to become whoever he was going to become — that is the fact that matters most and that gets most easily buried beneath the strangeness of the story. The sheer novelistic outrageousness of a man who lived ten lives, who called himself a Rockefeller, who sat in a courtroom and appeared faintly inconvenienced by the proceedings — all of that has a way of pulling focus from the quiet young man who liked science fiction and computers and who died, prosecutors argued and the jury found, at the hands of someone he had the misfortune of living near.

Didi Sohus waited for answers for a very long time. She passed away before the trial concluded. She knew her son's bones had been found. She knew someone had been charged. Whether she knew, in the end, that the jury had spoken — that is less certain.

John Sohus is buried in California. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is in a California prison. And somewhere in the long record of this case — in the trial transcripts, the appellate rulings, the investigative files — the story of a young man's life and death is documented, adjudicated, and finally, formally, known.

It took twenty-five years. But it is known.