Thursday, April 11, 2013

Gerhartsreiter Found Guilty

"‘Rockefeller’ faces at least 27 years for murder" by Brian Ballou  |  Globe Staff, April 10, 2013

LOS ANGELES — A Los ­Angeles Superior Court jury dramatically ended Christian Gerhartsreiter’s long tale of lies and deceit on Wednesday, convicting him of the murder of a California man in 1985, a crime that might never have been solved were it not for his missteps while living as Clark Rockefeller in Boston.

He should have been a reporter for an AmeriKa's ma$$ media instead.

Gerhartsreiter, 52, was found guilty of first-degree murder in the killing of John Sohus in San Marino, Calif., and he will face at least 27 years in prison, far from the circles of the rich and well-
connected he so constantly strived to be a part of. The murder occurred nearly 30 years ago, when Gerhartsreiter lived in a guest house in San Marino next to a main residence where John Sohus and his wife, Linda, resided. Linda also disappeared that year and has not been heard from since.

The six-man, six-woman jury needed just five hours to return its verdict, convinced by no single piece of circumstantial evidence but by the totality of it. They accepted prosecutors’ description of how ­Gerhartsreiter struck Sohus in the head repeatedly, crushing his skull, and then buried his dismembered body in the backyard of his guest house. Sohus’s remains were found when new owners dug for a pool in 1994.

Dressed in a blue sport coat and gray pants, Gerhartsreiter displayed no reaction when the verdict was read.

Ellen Sohus, the victim’s stepsister, wept.

“My first thought was, it’s ­finally over, and I was moved to tears; it’s finally over,” she said moments after the verdict. ­Ellen Sohus had helped reignite interest in her sibling’s murder during the many years it went unsolved....

Gerhartsreiter’s path of ­deception began when he left Germany for the United States in 1978 and featured stops in a number of areas across the country, including New ­England. 

My newspaper was deceiving long before then -- for the "greater good," of course.

He had lived a life of freedom and relatively high style since leaving California in 1985. But his fast-moving ­deception hit a roadblock in Boston in 2008, when — ­divorced from his wife, Sandra Boss — he caught the attention of authorities by kidnapping his then-7-year-old daughter, Reigh, from a Back Bay street and taking her to Baltimore.

He was arrested six days later, and slowly the web of phony names and heritage that ­Gerharstreiter had woven ­together came to light....

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RelatedA Trial I Couldn't Care Less About

Shows, doesn't it?