Dateline NBC - Behind Closed Doors: The Phony Rockefeller

Episode Date: April 28, 2021

In this Dateline classic, young newlyweds, John and Linda Sohus simply vanish. There was no reason to suspect foul play until an eerie discovery tied to a case that made international headlines, and was linked to the name of one of America’s most famous families. Mike Taibbi reports. Originally aired on NBC on January 27, 2012. Justice came in August 2013 for John Sohus. His wife Linda is still missing. 

I was just like, oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something. A young couple vanishes. Then, nearly a decade later, a discovery in their own backyard turns the mystery into a murder. They find a bag, and inside the bag is a human skull. Detectives had a suspect. Then he disappeared, too. His trail had just stopped.

Until this. Please, please, bring Snooks back. He'd kidnapped his own daughter after claiming to be a Rockefeller. Clark Rockefeller. I had a private investigator try to find out who I was married to, and they couldn't find out. Now, a second chance for investigators to prove that this mysterious con man was also a killer. But was the case as clear-cut as it seemed? There was no motive. There was no reason he would have done this.

Hear from the detectives who helped crack this puzzling case. And from his ex-wife. I thought he was very intelligent, funny, very charming. For decades, he got away with a web of lies. Would he also get away with murder? I can fairly certainly say that I've never hurt anyone. Tonight, the mystery of the man with so many faces. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline Behind Closed Doors. Here's Mike Taibbi. It was a brutal crime, buried over the years by dirt and lies.

But there he was, finally, in a Los Angeles County courtroom to stand trial for it all. He came here with nothing and then he ended up as a fake Rockefeller. The world first came to know him as a phony Rockefeller who made headlines for duping a string of bright, if gullible, women. They couldn't tell me who I was married to.

As followers of his story came to know, he used his audacious talent for lying to live the good life. But was he more than just a clever con man? Was he something darker? Something evil? Adds up, circumstantially, to a picture of a guy

who's probably committed a pretty brutal homicide. Those inside the investigation reveal how they assembled a case for murder from shards of evidence scattered over 28 years and thousands of miles. There really isn't a smoking gun. Would the pieces come together to form the portrait of a killer?

If you were looking for a setting for a mystery, San Marino in the early 1980s wasn't the place. And the house on Lorraine Road, since rebuilt, hardly the ideal stage. That's where quiet John Soas lived. He was probably reasonably shy and reserved. Patrick Rehrman was John's childhood friend. He remembers John as a bit of a mama's boy and, as he was, a bit of a nerd. John and I both shared a love of Star Trek.

We would compete with each other, trying to out-trivia the other individual, compare theories about warp speed travel. You guys are middle school kids and you're talking about warp speed phasers? Well, without advanced mathematics, but yes. Eventually, John's enthusiasm for science fiction morphed into a passion for another galaxy that was suddenly accessible in the 80s, computers.

The nerd became the prototype for today's tech geek, a digital explorer living happily at home with his mom well into his 20s. And then he discovered love. Did you sense a connection between the two of them? I certainly had the sense that they were soulmates. Her name was Linda. Like John, she loved science fiction and fantasy. Linda's pal Sue Kaufman says Linda and John seemed to complement each other as opposites often do.

He was shy, she outgoing. He was short, she at six feet, towered over him. Between the two of them, I was like, this is the oddest coupling I've ever seen in my life. A quirky couple who just clicked, laughingly choosing Halloween as their wedding day in 1983. With money tight, they started their life together living in the house on Lorraine Road. Sue remembers Linda complaining about John's mom, Deedee, who liked her cocktails early and often on many days.

His mom is a drunk and a smoker, and I really don't like being around her and the smoke and everything. And she's, you know, she's a poor old lady, but she says I just try and avoid her like crazy. But Linda and John couldn't avoid Dee Dee because the guest house on the property, where they might have set up house, had a tenant. She goes, we can't live there because that's where the renter is. And I'm like, oh, renter's paying money. You guys can't. Renter gets the better place. With the renter in no hurry to leave and the newlyweds stuck in the main house, John and Linda focused on their careers. They proudly made their first major purchase, a new truck. They were so happy when they showed up in my house. I don't even remember if they called first or if they actually just drove up one day and said, Look, we're in a car.

With a new ride and a bit of money, they planned a first road trip with Sue to a big sci-fi convention in Phoenix. But in early 1985, weeks before the event, Linda called Sue with a puzzling announcement. First thing was, you know, we're going to New York, and I'm going, what are you going to New York for? Well, John looks like he has an interview with a government job or something. She says we're going to be back in two weeks. Yeah, we're going to be back in a couple of weeks,

in time for us to get our stuff together and get this trip on the way. Except they didn't make it back in time. When the weeks rolled on with no word from her friend, Sue naturally began to worry. She called John's mother, Deedee. She's like, I don't know, they're in Paris. And I'm thinking Paris, California, you know. And she goes, I don't know, Paris, France. I mean, she's just three or four sheets to the wind. And I'm just kind of like, right. And something else made no sense at all. It seemed Linda had abandoned her beloved cats at a pet hotel.

Her cats were her absolute loves of her life. She would not have left her cats of her own free will. Linda's family was alarmed, too, and filed a missing persons report. But when San Marino police followed up by visiting John's mother, Deedee, she told them the same strange story. Deedee said that they weren't missing. they were on a job interview that was secret. Detectives Tim Miley and Dolores Scott with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department. Kind of weird on its own that Dee Dee Soas had said,

my son and his wife are on this secret job interview. Right. I mean, she truly believed that he was off on a secret mission job, and that's what she had been told. It was so odd. Was the young couple missing or not? An officer knocked on the door to the guest house where Dee Dee's tenant lived. So he went back there to get some more information as to what he might have known about Linda and John. In fact, he came to the door naked. Buck naked. Butt naked.

The tenant in his birthday suit said his name was Christopher Chichester, but had nothing to say about John and Linda. There was nowhere to go with the missing persons case, not then. But something was about to change around the question that hung in the air, that wasn't going away. Where exactly were John and Linda? And who or what was really behind the missing couple's secret mission? That's what everyone wanted to know. When we come back, that mysterious tenant living like a peasant

with a royal pedigree. He said he was here by himself and was descendant of some royalty in England. When Behind Closed Doors continues. No one seemed more worried about the whereabouts of the missing John and Linda Soas than their good friend, Sue Kaufman. Something's not right. Something's afoot here. John's mom, Dee Dee, had told Sue a crazy story about the couple, that it was some kind of top-secret job that had taken them away to France. Hard to believe until postcards from the couple started arriving from Paris.

Sue got one of them. I just saw that it said John and Linda at the bottom. I went, answers. Maybe she'd been wrong to worry. Maybe John's mother had been right all along. Maybe John and Linda were off on some secret mission. So I just thought, she's off somewhere weird for whatever reason. I kind of played with the idea of witness protection.

The postcard suggested that John and Linda were gone voluntarily, no foul play. But then John's mother suddenly changed her tune. In July of 1985, Dee Dee calls the police, and now she's distraught. Distraught because her guesthouse tenant had moved out without a word. And, as she now explained, he was the one telling her secrets behind closed doors. It turned out it was Chris Chichester, the very same man who'd greeted police in the nude and had nothing to say, who'd been feeding her information all along

about the couple's overseas mission. Is she concerned that the guesthouse tenant who disappeared might have been involved in whatever happened to her son? She doesn't know. She's just concerned that the only person that she was contacting them through was missing now, too. She was concerned because she had no way to contact her son. The guest house tenant, the source about a secret government mission?

Chichester's friends around San Marino back then might have thought it was just another of his fantastical stories. This was a good one. Lisa Gallegos and Dana Farrar knew Chichester as an eccentric and amusing character. He was funny and he was charming. He was very interesting to talk to on many subjects. He was very bright. He knew about a lot of things. He was witty.

You know, it was a lot of fun to hang out with him. A film student at USC, he told Dana, often walking around campus with a script or two under his arm. We'd go to all the films together. We'd talk about film. One of the movies the two of you saw together was Double Indemnity, a guy plotting a murder. This is the best movie, Dana. You know, we have to go see Double Indemnity.

He was a minor British royal, a baronet, said the business card he handed out around San Marino. What did you think a 13th baronet was? Well, that was the funny part. I had no idea. But she didn't question it, and neither did Corrie Woods. He said he was here by himself, didn't really have a family, was from England, and was descendant of some royalty in England. Corrie and her family were thoroughly impressed by the young aristocrat, who, after services at the Episcopal church they attended together, would dazzle them with his stories.

He bought a castle in England, and he wanted to ship it over here, brick by brick, so we could have, you know, an authentic English, you know, chapel. The charming young Brit had also become the town's resident raconteur, sometimes hosting parties at Lorraine Road. Oddly, though he lived in the guest house, Dana noticed that he seemed to have the run of the entire property. I just said to him, well, why do you keep going in your landlord's house, Chris? Because it just seems so off.

And he said, I remember this so well, he said, oh, they are away. They will not mind. And of course they, John and Linda, were away, with only drunken Dee Dee isolated in the main house. And after Chichester, the tenant, left, she was an old woman wracked by loneliness and lost hope, fading fast. You want to talk about taking what wind was in her sails out of those sails and leaving her in the doldrums. It certainly did.

She died a few years later, by many accounts a broken woman. In San Marino, meanwhile, life went on. The Lorraine Road property found buyers, and in May 1994, almost a decade after John and Linda disappeared, the new owners decided to install a pool. They cleared the old backyard and started digging, until the work suddenly stopped and police were summoned to the scene. And they said that they had discovered a body. Well, initially, of course, we thought, no, it doesn't happen in San Marino. Tricia Guff was a San Marino detective when the human skeleton was found.

And we said, hey, there was a missing person at that address, so there was a lot of information coming together on that first day. It was a man's skeleton, and that old missing person's report suggested who that man was. I didn't need the DNA. I didn't need the dental records. I knew that was John. John Soas' friend, Sue Kaufman, heard the details of how the body had been dressed, jeans and a plaid shirt, and the truth she dreaded hit home.

And I said, that's exactly what John wore, like, almost all the time. That was his way that he liked to dress. The remains told more of the story. Blows to the head, six stab wounds in the back. Not just murder, but a brutal murder. A missing persons case that had gone permanently cold was transformed in that moment

through a very active, superheated homicide investigation. There were two other people who'd lived at Lorraine Road then and were unaccounted for. John's wife Linda, still missing, and the tenant in the guest house. Exactly where were they? And was it possible one of them was a killer? Coming up, detectives get to work on that guest house to see if it had any clues to give up. It did. They found four pretty large blood spots. When Dateline continues.

Bags of bones. A buried human skeleton. Not what you'd expect to find in a suburban backyard, especially in a place like sleepy San Marino, California. It was a big story, huge story. Frank Girardo was the editor of the Pasadena Star News. This is May 1994. The cable news networks are taking off.

There's a 24-hour news cycle, and a body buried in a backyard is newsworthy. There was no question it was murder. And if John had been killed and buried in his own backyard, were Linda's remains in a shallow grave of their own? The police looked, but found no signs in the yard and found nothing. And the thing is, is that after all that, they had one body and nothing else. Two key questions remained unanswered. Where was Linda and where was the

other person who lived on the Lorain Road property then, the guesthouse tenant, Christopher Chichester? So early on, the police decided that they needed to find Linda, and they needed to find Chris. There was only a couple of options for how John's body got back there and how it got buried, and those two options were unaccounted for. Chris and Linda. Either one of them might have done it or certainly would know something about who did it. Well, it was imperative that they find him. In any homicide investigation, the spouse is a natural suspect, often the first suspect considered. And Linda was a large woman who could conceivably have overpowered her husband.

But as police started interviewing anyone around town who knew any of the occupants of the Lorraine Road property, tips about the guesthouse tenant, Christopher Chichester, piled up quickly. Tips suggesting that he was the one police should be looking at. Even those once friendly with him now recalled him in unsavory terms. As a manipulator, Dana Farrar said, always out for the next free lunch. He would show up at my apartment, mmm, that smells good, you know. And I think after a while I just kind of kicked him out. I was like, bye. More weird stories. How the 20-something Chichester sometimes hit on younger girls.

Corey Wood said he asked her out when she was only 12. And my mom said a very definitive no. And then after that, you know, it got a little weird, and he started asking other inappropriate girls out. Not age-appropriate. Not age-appropriate. Some dusty old stories remains buried nearly a decade, not a great start for a murder investigation. But that guest house was still standing,

and detectives got to work seeing if it had any clues to give up about the man who once lived there. They did a luminol in the guest house, and they found four pretty large blood spots. They couldn't tell if it was human or animal blood, but detectives thought the spots could be evidence of violence from years earlier. And they also learned something else that they guessed was important. A detective at San Marino had made a connection that the tenant in the guest house had the victim's truck. The truck had been John and Linda's prized possession,

and before they went missing in 1985, they'd planned that first big road trip in it. But years later, after they'd vanished, it was traced to Connecticut and to the guest house tenant. I mean, why would he take the missing person's couple truck, and the truck would end up in Connecticut? And what's more, records showed he'd changed his name from the baronet Christopher Chichester to Christopher Crowe working on Wall Street. And a deeper check found he'd had a long pick-a-name habit. That he was no royal, not even a Brit,

but a German national now racing through new identities like someone bent on covering his tracks. And that's when he disappears. He's just in the wind again. Right. And with that, the murder investigation stalled. The years went by, and in San Marino, they might have forgotten all about poor dead John Soas and his missing wife,

and about the oddball tenant for the Lorraine Road guest house. Authorities search over land and sea for a man and his seven-year-old daughter. A family drama playing out on a leafy Boston street in the summer of 2008. A custody battle that became a national story because of the name at its center. The man who insists his name is Clark Rockefeller. One of America's famous names, of course, but it was the face that got everyone's attention back in California. Trisha Guff, retired as a detective by then, gasped when she saw the photo. When I saw it in the newspaper, I knew that was him. Could it be? Could the fugitive with the famous name at

the center of a con man tale on the East Coast, be the same man wanted on the West Coast for a darker, near-forgotten crime? Was there now a way to awaken the long dormant case of the murder of Lorraine Rowe? Coming up, a Rockefeller accused of murder. Oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something. When Behind Closed Doors continues. The news out of Boston was crazy. A head-scratcher that screamed front page. A bitter divorce, a bizarre kidnapping, a famous last name.

It all seemed worlds away from that decades-old cold case in California. The unsolved murder of a quiet computer geek named John Soas, who'd gone missing with his wife Linda. But to some, the unfolding story in Boston was a link at last to that brutal, nearly forgotten murder. The women from the party recognized him, and so did all of his neighbors in San Marino. Frank Girardo was all over the story. What the FBI's wanted poster did was set off these sparks of recognition. People

knew that Clark was Chris. Clark Rockefeller, yes, he said, one of those Rockefellers, appeared to be the latest and boldest reinvention yet of that guesthouse tenant who'd slipped under the radar so many years ago. It was an audacious lie now unraveling nightly on the 6 o'clock news. The storyline was that this Clark Rockefeller had been divorced after nearly 12 years of marriage to a big-money business consultant named Sandra Boss,

and that in a bitter custody battle after his quiet life of privilege had dissolved, he'd kidnapped their little daughter, nicknamed Snooks, and gone on the lam. For the love of his daughter, the narrative went, he'd risked everything. The sympathetic mother pleaded on national television for her daughter's return. I ask you now, please, please bring Snooks back. She wasn't much help for the FBI because like the public, she said, she had no idea who her husband really was. The con man had been passing himself off as a Rockefeller in high society circles for well over a decade. And then they said, Clark Rockefeller, and put his picture up there, and I almost fell off the lifting machine.

Socialite Roxanne West remembered meeting Clark Rockefeller at a posh Manhattan art gallery. He was so mild-mannered and very polite and a gentleman. Rockefeller, her new gentleman friend, liked to send weird and provocative text messages. One sent, he claimed, while he was giving a private tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Then this one. In a submarine, crowded, strange. Thought of you just a minute ago. The texts were so wild and so far-fetched,

I used to just giggle and go, where does he come up with this stuff? There was something odd about him, but his name? One of my friends could have sworn he was definitely a Rockefeller because of his bone structure. It was a convincing cover that had lasted years. But by the time he was caught, six days into his flight with Snooks, the fraud was exposed and his real name, Christian Carl Gerhardt Strider, in every front page, top of the newscast story. In California, investigators immediately reopened the John Solis homicide case, and the lead started pouring in. We got a lot of phone calls. A lot of

people that did not come up, come forward in 94, came forward in 2008. So there were some new pieces of information that we got as a result of the publicity. For Sue Kaufman, best friend of the still-missing Linda Sawis, it was reason to hope after all these years. Oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something. If he did, he certainly wasn't telling the police, but he did have plenty to say to NBC's Natalie Morales in his only televised interview. Are you a mystery man? I'd like to be known as a good man, if anything. I'd like to be known as a quiet man living a quiet life. He admitted using a string of fake names, Chris Chichester one of them. You assumed different identities?

Yes, but for specific purposes, much like a writer would take a pen name. But what about the murder of John Soas? Did he have anything to say about that? Did you kill John and Linda Soas? My entire life I've always been a pacifist. I'm a Quaker, and believe in non-violence and I can fairly certainly say that I've never hurt anyone. When I saw that, I thought that was the closest thing to a confession I had ever seen or heard. What do you say? Did you kill John Alenosoas? I think you say no. No, but you don't say, I'm a Quaker. Even as Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping case played out in Boston,

the California investigators were quietly at work building a case for murder. So we basically had to do CPR in this case and just get it up and running. To resuscitate the case, they went back to find those folks who'd known the suspect when he was calling himself the 13th Baronet, Christopher Chichester. To the Episcopal Church, where he'd worked his charms after Sunday services, one man remembered Chichester asking to borrow a chainsaw. And now, Dana Farrar told detectives something that seemed like key evidence. During one of Chichester's backyard trivial pursuit parties, she'd noticed that a part of the lawn looked like it had been freshly dug up.

I said to him, you know, what's with your yard? What's happened to your yard? And he just said, well, I'm having plumbing problems. Detectives were astounded at the implications. At that point, he's taking ownership of the grave because that's exactly where John's body was found. And the detectives pouring over the evidence from the Boston kidnapping case found this. Reason to believe their prime suspect had totally rebooted his identity after San Marino. In Boston, we found

some documents and some computer hard drives. His life begins roughly in 1988. What did that tell you? Well, I would say it's some evidence of a consciousness of guilt, of trying to erase a part of one's life. But detectives couldn't erase the nagging questions about Linda, the victim's wife. Was she still alive? And remember those postcards from Paris? She had apparently sent them all after the victim's wife. Was she still alive? And remember those postcards from Paris? She had apparently sent them all

after the couple had disappeared. I think they also couldn't eliminate the wife, who's also missing and whose remains or body have themselves not been found. Yes, that obviously is something that we had to look at. However, the more we dug into Linda Soas, we just couldn't find anything sinister or any plausible reason why she would do this or that she had the means to disappear and start a new life.

Was the case trial ready? The answer was at hand, with Christian Gerhardt's writer extradited from Boston to California, now officially a defendant in a case of murder. Coming up, the woman he wooed and fooled as Clark Rockefeller takes the stand. How he tricked even a Harvard MBA. I liked him. I thought he was very intelligent, funny, quirky, very charming. When Dateline continues. The state of California knew it was a high-stakes gamble to try and prove at trial that the conman calling himself Clark Rockefeller was also a murderer whose real name was Christian Carl Gerharts Schreider. After all, the case rested heavily on pieces of circumstantial evidence 28 years old.

We're concerned. It was going to take a smart jury to put those together, and we didn't have a smoking gun. Gerhardt Schreider pleaded not guilty and hired a pair of prominent Boston attorneys to defend him, Jeffrey Denner and Brad Bailey. There was no motive. There was no reason he would have done this. We are on the record of the matter of the people versus Gerhard Schreider. All counsel are present. Still, when the trial opened, prosecutor Habib Balian confidently offered a series of friends and neighbors with odd tales from around the time John and Linda Soas disappeared.

Jurors heard about the bloodstains found years later inside the guesthouse. And then, testimony from a neighbor suggesting the tenant had been trying to destroy possible evidence. I called him and said, Chris, what are you burning in the fireplace? What was his response? I'm burning carpet.

One church friend said the defendant had tried to sell her a rug with a strange spot. Well, I felt it looked a little like blood. Whose chainsaw was it? It was mine. They heard that story about the borrowed chainsaw. Now, what could that mean? For approximately how long, to the best of your estimation, was it that he had this chainsaw? Several months. And Dana Farrar took the stand to describe that backyard party the defendant hosted just yards from a patch of freshly turned soil. It looked like someone had dug up part of the lawn and there was dirt kind of you know crumbled

dirt on top like someone had just been digging there. I said what's going on with your yard Chris it's all dug up. What did he say? He said he had been having plumbing problems. There is no plumbing to the left of that red line. He has a party that hosts a party feet away from where he buried a victim? Yes. I can't explain it, but he did. But perhaps the strongest piece of circumstantial evidence tying the defendant to the murder was this. John Sowess's skull had been found wrapped in two plastic university book bags, one from USC, the other from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In doing a background on

Gerhard Schreider, he had attended both those universities. A physical connection, finally, between the con man's real life and those bones in the ground. More evidence? After his San Marino days, after the murder witnesses said, the con man was no longer the expansive raconteur eager to work the room, but was instead living like a fugitive. He told me that he was from Pasadena, California, that his father was an anesthesiologist and his mother was a child actress. In the late 80s, Mahoko Manabe lived with a defendant, then calling himself Christopher Crowe,

an unusual guy, Manabe testified, who became paranoid and obsessed with privacy after a detective called to ask about the truck traced to his latest phony name, John and Linda Sowess's truck. After the call, it was markedly different. And how was it markedly different? The furtiveness, the cutting off of all social ties. The defendant told Manabi it wasn't a detective who called, but someone out to get him and his family. She said he suggested they marry and go into hiding. He grew a beard and a mustache.

Okay, what else? And he started to wear contacts. I helped color his hair. And while he was still living with Manabe, he picked a new phony name out of thin air, and it was a beaut. At first, it was just to get a table in a packed restaurant. And they say, who can we make the reservation for? And he says, Clark Rockefeller. Manabe dumped him, but he never dumped the Rockefeller name. It would help win him his biggest catch ever, his gold-plated wife, Sandra Boss, and keep his secrets safe for years.

Who did he introduce himself as to you? Clark Rockefeller. Did you ever doubt what he was telling you? In hindsight, I wish I had, but no, I assumed that what he was telling me was true. Sandra Boss had spent the years since that public kidnapping case shunning the limelight, doing everything she could to get as far from her ex-husband as possible. She even moved overseas to London with their daughter. But now, as a witness for the prosecution,

she would have to divulge details of their life together, details the prosecution hoped would show how she'd been used as a cover, unwittingly helping a killer hide in plain sight. I liked him. I thought he was very intelligent, funny, quirky, very charming. The Stanford graduate told how back when she was getting her MBA at Harvard,

they clicked while play-acting at a Clue-themed party. We're supposed to come as a character, and I was Miss Scarlet. Okay. Was the defendant in character? Yes. Who was he? He was Professor Plum. What did he tell you about himself?

He said that he was raised in New York, and that he grew up in a townhouse on the east side, Sutton Place. He went to Yale beginning at 14 for math. Did he claim to you the association with the well-known Rockefeller family? Yes. How so? Constantly. This Rockefeller doesn't like me because I, you know, got angry at him when he was a child at a party.

They married in 1995. Or did they? According to Boss, she later learned that Rockefeller had figured out how to tie the knot without leaving a paper trail. We went through a wedding ceremony in the Quaker Meeting House in Nantucket. He claimed at the time that he had filed all of the paperwork so that it was recognized as a legal marriage, except that he hadn't done so, so it wasn't. I'd never been married before. I didn't really know how these things worked. So, idiotically, didn't think about it.

The prosecution suggested that with his marriage to Boss, the con man had hit a double jackpot. She earned north of a million a year, giving her house husband and stay-at-home dad control of the lavish family budget. Is that your signature? Yep. He said it was more convenient for him to pay the bills

if he had checks that were signed. And with no bank accounts of his own, he could live the life of a Rockefeller in Boston's insular Beacon Hill, where few were likely to ask awkward or incriminating questions. He was very clear right from the start that he had a high need for privacy because of his famous family.

Boss recalled that he stopped traveling by plane once ID was required. And perhaps most telling for the prosecution, she testified that her husband vowed to never go to two places, California, where John Soas was murdered, and Connecticut, where police had once looked for him in connection with the Soas' truck. I do not enter the state of Connecticut. I will not touch my feet on its soil. He was very specific about Connecticut. What about California? California, he also said that he hated and would not visit. But deep into their marriage, his life of carefully crafted invisibility began coming apart,

melting away with lie after lie, says Frank Girardo, who's written a book about the case. He told her that his mother was really a child actress by the name of Ann Carter. And she said, wait a minute. When we first met, you told me your mom's name was Mary. Now you're telling me your mom's name is Ann Carter. Did you just put your finger on his fatal flaw that in the end, he just couldn't not lie? He couldn't help himself. This man, Clark Rockefeller, couldn't keep his lies straight. By then, Sandra Boss told the court her marriage was in serious trouble,

headed toward divorce. But the private investigators she hired were stymied over a basic question. They couldn't tell me who I was married to. Eventually, she and the world found out who Clark Rockefeller really was. And prosecutors believed they'd made the case that he was more than just a con man,

he was a murderer. Christian Carl Gerhardt, right? He's guilty of murder. But the defense was ready to attack each item of damning but circumstantial evidence, and to point the jury to the figure hovering over the case, the more likely suspect, the defense would argue, the victim's missing wife, Linda. Coming up, remember those postcards signed by Linda and sent from Paris? That's the theory that Linda was alive after the death of John Sohas. And if she was alive, was she the killer? When Behind Closed Doors continues. A six-man, six-woman jury was all that stood between Christian Gerhardt Strider, a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller, and freedom.

He was nearing the end of his prison sentence for kidnapping his daughter in Boston, and now reasonable doubt in what the defense called an old, cold, and still untold murder case seemed within reach. That's not spin. That's not smoke. His defense team conceded right off their client was a fraud and an oddball. This man used different names since coming to the United States in 1978. But attorney Brad Bailey said none of that made him a murderer. This had nothing to do with covering up a 28-year-old homicide and everything to do with perpetuating this gaspy-esque recreation. In court, they attacked the forensic evidence as weak and mostly non-existent and got the prosecution's own experts to admit that. Not a single fingerprint or speck of DNA to tie the defendant to the victim, the bloodstains,

or even those university book bags. That is correct. I did not detect a DNA profile. The defense also challenged the neighbor who testified that she saw blood on a carpet the defendant had tried to sell her. Had she really? And you don't know that that was blood, do you? Not absolutely. Another challenge, this one to Detective Tim Miley. What about that chainsaw the defendant supposedly borrowed once upon a time? Is there any allegation in this case that this chainsaw was used in connection with the murder or disposal of the body of John Sohs? No. No. So your answer is no, there's no proof of that? There's no proof of that. And in the absence of proof, the defense offered an alternative theory of the crime,

another suspect, their stepping stone toward reasonable doubt, the still- an alternative theory of the crime, another suspect, their stepping stone toward reasonable doubt, the still-missing Linda. We're going to ask you to envision whether John Silvis's missing wife might have had just as much capacity to sneak up behind her husband and strike those blows. The defense pointed out that she was bigger and stronger than both her husband and the man in the defendant's chair. What's more, the theory went, she, the wife, might well have had a motive, while even the prosecution declined to suggest any reason why the defendant wanted John Soas dead.

It made a lot more sense in terms of motive, in terms of reason to kill, that Linda had been the one to have done it. Wasn't there trouble in paradise? The defense pressed the couple's friend, Sue Kaufman, Linda, desperate to move out of her mother-in-law's house. You knew that Linda was frustrated about the living situation, and those are words that you have used, correct?

Yes, she was frustrated. She shared that frustration with you, didn't she? Yes, she did. Kaufman seethed inside, appalled at what was being suggested. I'm like, dude, you're so far off base that I can't even answer your questions with anger. So I'm just going to answer your questions. But it wasn't just a motive, the defense said. Wasn't it also clear that Linda had survived whatever had happened to John, since she was the one handwriting experts said had sent postcards to friends weeks later from Paris? Linda Sohos is the writer of the two postcards that you examined? Yes.

That supports the theory that Linda was alive after the death of John Sohas. As for the testimony of Sandra Boss, tales that seem to suggest their client was the most clever con man alive, well, why would so nimble a schemer commit such a crude murder, burying his victim's remains in plastic book bags from universities he'd attended? That person would also be one of the stupidest murderers in the history of Southern California. If he's this master con, master manipulator, master mind that they make him out to be, he's going to kill somebody, bury him ten feet from where he lives, essentially leaving a plaque saying, hey guys, it's me that killed him.

Enough doubt, the defense thought, if not for acquittal, then to at least hang the case. But prosecutors were ready. They'd examined and eliminated the Linda did it theory. And just before trial, they thought they'd solved the mystery of those postcards he'd supposedly sent from Paris. The con man, they would show, had someone in Europe mail them for him. He'd done it before, a college girlfriend producing a postcard he'd supposedly sent to her from London. England is great. We know that he was attending an English class at University of Southern California. He wasn't in London.

He was not in London. So that explains away the postcards. The evidence was in, and though much of it was damning, it was almost all circumstantial. The defendant, his lawyers said, was confident on verdict day. He went into the courtroom feeling upbeat, hopeful, and optimistic. It was a miscalculation, to say the least. The jurors took only a few hours to decide. We, the jury, in the above entitled action,

find the defendant, Christian Gerhardsreiter, guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree. A guilty verdict reached quickly, jurors said, and with little debate. To Sue Kaufman, it meant most if not all of the answers about what had happened to her lost friends, John and Linda. In my heart, I know he's responsible for whatever happened to make those two gone. Are you convinced that Linda is dead as well? Yes. To the end, he'd insisted his lawyers privately call him Clark,

as in Clark Rockefeller, and they did. But the man who'd invented that name and so many others, who'd spent his adult life convincing others to believe his lies and to like him and reward him for those lies, failed on all counts with a jury of his peers. Unfortunately, there was an interaction here of somebody that they instinctively hated, didn't understand. They didn't like him at all. They hated him, and they were laughing at him openly. Not a fitting end for a Rockefeller, perhaps, but for a liar who was also a killer, maybe just right. That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt. Thanks for joining us.