True Crime Campfire - Crockefeller: The Story of a Killer Con Man

Episode Date: November 17, 2023

How many times have we seen it—a rich and/or powerful person gets in some kind of hot water, and all it takes is a quick “Do you know who I AM?” to fix it? I don’t really get why people are so dazzled by money and pedigree, but it seems to be a constant theme throughout history—and it’s as alive today as it’s ever been. So it’s not a big surprise that some people who lack money and connections decide to fake them, and do so with great success. Learn the right way to dress, the right names to drop, the right places to go, and you might just sneak your way into the club. A skilled con artist can rise pretty high if they know what they’re doing. And some of them are so determined to run with the cool kids that they’re willing to murder anybody who gets in their way. Join us for the story of one of the strangest cons in American history—a tale of fraud, murder, kidnapping, and fake identities that spanned more than thirty years.Sources:The Man in the Rockefeller Suit by Mark SealInvestigation Discovery's "Vanity Fair Confidential," episode "The Sinister Mr. Rockefeller"Investigation Discovery's "Deadly Rich," episode "I Am Clark Rockefeller"Unsolved Mysteries, season 7, episode 11https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_GerhartsreiterFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfirehttps://www.truecrimecampfirepod.com/Facebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello campers. Grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. How many times have we seen it? A rich and or powerful person gets in some kind of hot water and all it takes is a quick, do you know who I am? to fix it. I don't really get why people are so dazzled by money in a pedigree, but it seems to be a constant theme throughout history. And it's as alive today as it's ever been. So it's not a big surprise that some people who lack money and connections decide to fake them and do so with great success. Learn the right way to dress, the right names to drop, the right places to go, and you might just sneak your way into the club. A skilled con artist can rise pretty high if they know what they're doing. and some of them are so determined to run with the cool kids that they're willing to murder anybody who gets in their way.

Join us for the story of one of the strangest cons in American history. A tale of fraud, murder, kidnapping, and fake identities that spanned more than 30 years. This is Crokefeller, the story of a killer con man. So, campers, for this one, we're in Boston, Massachusetts, July 27, 2008. Seven-year-old Snooks Rockefeller was having a fun day. She didn't get to see her dad much these days since his and mommy's divorce, but today was a visitation day. It was a Sunday, bright and sunny out, and Snooks was wearing her red and white sundress. As most seven-year-olds do, Snooks adored her dad, and she was looking forward to spending the day with him,

as they walked along the sidewalk together, her bouncing on his shoulders as the social worker followed a few steps behind. Snooks wasn't sure why that guy always had to be there when her dad visited, but he always was. From her perch on her dad's shoulders, she saw a black SUV pulling up a little ways ahead, and as it stopped, her dad turned and said something to the social worker, something about a historic building he was pointing at across the street. And when the social worker turned to look, it was so weird, her dad suddenly pushed the man down and ran toward the black SUV.

Quickly, he lifted her down from his shoulders and shoved her into the back seat. Snooks hit her head on the roof of the door as he did and it hurt. She started crying, but her dad jumped into the back seat right behind her and started to comfort her. Drive, go, he said to the driver. And as they sped away, Snooks could see the social worker running behind the car, waving his arms and yelling. At least we got rid of him, Daddy said. Sandra Boss, Snooks' mom, and Clark Rockefeller's ex-wife,

answered her phone to the frantic voice of the social worker. I've lost him, he said. He's got her. Sandra dropped the phone and ran. News cameras would show her at the scene of the abduction, sinking down to her knees as the full realization of what had just happened hit her. She knew her ex-husband wasn't the man she thought he was when she married him. She'd been learning more and more lately about just how true that was, just how many lies he told her.

But she hadn't expected him to kidnap their daughter. Why would anybody expect something so insane from Clark Rockefeller, of all people? The Rockefellers were American royalty, one of the richest and most powerful families in the world. They were legendary. And Clark had charmed the hell out of everybody when he'd first rolled into town years earlier. He'd met Sandra when he hosted a clue-themed costume party. He went as Professor Plum, Sandra, or Sandy, as her friends called, came as Miss Scarlet.

I can't explain why, but meeting your spouse at a clue party in fancy dress seems like a red flag. It just feels like that. Well, it, you know, turns out you're correct. But they hit it off big. One of Sandra's friends later told Vanity Fair, at that party, I think she fell in love with them. Sandy's friends describe her as a woman with her feet firmly on the ground, not a snob or anything like that. she made friends with everybody. Sandy was a wealthy person in her own right,

with a degree in business from Harvard and a high-flying million-a-year job at a financial consulting firm. But, I mean, this guy was a Rockefeller. And he was so humble about it. He'd be like, oh, I'm from the poor side of the family. And he obviously didn't care about money. The guy worked for a non-profit organization

that consulted with third world governments at no charge. He had a sad origin story. He told Sandy his parents had died in a horrible car craft, when he was younger, and he didn't have any immediate family left. Clark and Sandy married in 1995 in a small ceremony at the Quaker Meeting House on Nantucket. Just a few of Sandy's people were there. Nobody from Clark's family came. Clark and Sandy moved in together in New York after the wedding, and they were happy for a while.

Their friends felt like they were perfect for each other, and they were all excited to have a Rockefeller in town. And in 2001, Clark and Sandy had a little girl. They called her Snooks, and from the moment she was born, her father was her number one fan. He was obsessed with his new little daughter, and they were joined at the hip. But as Snooks passed the baby stage and became a precocious little girl, Clark and Sandra started to clash over parenting philosophy. By now, they'd moved to Boston, partially, so that Snooks could enroll in a prestigious kindergarten, which has to be one of the dumbest phrases I have ever uttered out loud.

Prestigious Kindergarten. Jesus, Jones. They have gold inlay blocks. That's how you know it's prestigious. The gold fish crackers are real gold. They have the gold flakes over all of their snacks. God. Sandra had this radical idea that kids needed, I don't know, rules and boundaries,

while Clark thought his baby girl could do no wrong and could never bring himself to tell her no or try to curb her behavior in any way. Ugh, way to create a monster, man. Yeah, Sandra was absolutely right, but Clark didn't like being told no either, and it caused enough conflict that in 2007, Sandra served him with divorce papers. Clark didn't take it well. He moved out, but only a few blocks away, and a fierce battle over money and custody began. The divorce took a while to wrap up, but it finally did in the winter of 2007, and Sandra came out on top. She got the house and full legal custody of Snooks. Clark got $800,000 in cash, two cars, Sandy's engagement ring, and a few supervised visits a year with his daughter.

Some of the couple's friends felt like Clark had basically traded his daughter for cash by agreeing to that settlement, which didn't fit with the loving, caring dad they'd always known him to be. I mean, this guy was devoted to his kid. Had money become more important to him than she was, or did he have a plan all along? Not long after the divorce, Sandra got a job offer across the pond in London, and she asked the family court judge for permission to take it and bring snooks with her. The judge agreed, as long as Sandra would bring the little girl back to the states for Clark's court-ordered visitation a few times a year. And that was that. Clark Rockefeller had not gotten what Clark Rockefeller wanted. He was not used to that. It would not do. When Sandra arrived at the scene of her

daughter's abduction on July 27th, she was beyond distraught. According to the people who were there that day, she seemed totally convinced that she was never going to see her daughter again. He's gone, she insisted. You'll never find him. Why was she so fatalistic about it so early? Well, Sandra knew something about her ex-husband that most people didn't. Like people tend to do during a custody battle when the divorce was going on, Sandra and her attorney had started digging into Clark Rockefeller's past. Sandra had never done that before. but she'd been having suspicions for a while now, and it didn't take long for her to uncover some stuff

that made her stomach hit the floor. Clark had always told her his parents had died in a horrible car accident. His mom's name was Anne Carter, he said, a Hollywood actress. But when Sandra and her family looked her up online, they found that Anne Carter was still alive. And this was just the tip of the iceberg. Sandra had wondered for years why they never got invited to any Rockefeller family functions,

why none of Clark's famous relatives had ever reached out to them, even when the baby was born. There was no one thing that made her suspect her ex-husband. It was more a constellation of little things that didn't add up. Now, Sandra looked at the detectives working her daughter's case with tears in her eyes. He's not who he says he is, she told them. I don't know who he really is. And holy shit, was that ever an understatement? Sandra didn't know it at the time, but the little bit she knew about her husband's past was just the beginning.

The first breadcrumb in a trail of lies that would eventually lead to a bag of crumbling bones, buried in a backyard in California more than two decades before. Right before he kidnapped his daughter, Rockefeller had told his driver, also a close friend, that the social worker was an annoying family friend he wanted to get rid of and paid him to help, which I guess was why the driver didn't call the cops, after watching Clark pushed the poor guy down and shove snooks in the car, despite the fact that the social worker had tried to run after the car. Like, that's a really annoying family friend, right?

Damn. Yeah, we're probably past, like, Kimmy Gibbler and Steve Urkel at that point, I think. Yeah, exactly. Like, I wonder exactly what he said to the guy. Because most people, I would just be like, damn, dude, really? Like, that's harsh to push the dude down. And now he's chasing the car. Like, should we maybe see if he's okay?

But no, he just went. Clark directed his friend to drop him and the little one off a few miles down the road, where a cab picked them up and took them to the Boston Sailing Center, where another friend was waiting. Clark's friends all knew he didn't drive, just one of those adorable old money eccentricities, you know, and this friend, a woman, thought she was just driving him in Snooks to visit family in New York. Clark sat in the back seat with Snooks the whole time,

playing games with her and showing her stuff out the window, heartwarming father-daughter stuff. his friend had no idea she was helping him abduct his daughter. Yeah, I guess in his friend's mind, the physical assault at the beginning was just another bit of old money eccentricity. Yeah, he gets a lot of mileage out of that, as you'll see. I'm just going to start acting badly and then be like, well, I'm rich, so it's fine. Exactly. Clark had her drop them off at Grand Central Station.

As he got out of the car, he tossed a wad of cash on the passenger seat to think thank her for her time. And that, as far as authorities knew, was that. Clark Rockefeller, or whoever the hell he was, was Gonzo. So was the little girl. And investigators were left with an ice-cold trail. No social security number. No bank records. No birth certificate. No evidence to show that this man had ever existed. Clark Rockefeller was a fiction. The Rockefeller family had never heard of him. The one thing they did have was a wine glass. The day before the kidnapping, Clark had visited a friend and shared a bottle of wine, and much to everybody's relief, the friend hadn't washed the glasses yet. And on the one Clark had drunk from, they found a perfect

fingerprint. It was their one and only lead, but it was a good one. The print came back as a match to a man named Christian Carl Gerhardzreter, a German citizen who had come to the States when he was just 17 years old. Christian grew up in the 60s and 70s in a little town called Bergen in the Bavarian mountains. And his family life sounds kind of interesting. His mom was very quiet and introverted, but his dad was an artist and a huge personality, like kind of a local celebrity. Everybody hung on his every word when he talked, like that kind of guy. And those are big shoes to fill, and I wonder if that's why young Christian, a short, skinny kid who had a tough time fitting in at school, developed an obsessive need to be somebody. He was smart. He absorbed information like a

sponge, like he'd always forever after kick everybody's ass at trivial pursuit, and as a young kid, he developed an obsession with America, mostly from watching American movies, which is really not the best way to learn about a country. You tend to get an idealized view, or at least an unrealistic one. Christian's favorite movies were Hitchcock mysteries and film noir, the kind where nobody is quite who they seem to be, and that would set the tone for his entire life. He was always spouting some fantastical bullshit or other. It got on the other, and he got on the other kids' nerves. He'd finagled his way to the States in the mid-70s on a tourist visa that eventually turned into a student one. And that's where the 2008 investigators picked up his trail.

One of the first families to get Gott by Christian was the Savio family in Berlin, Connecticut. I think it's ironic that it was Berlin, Connecticut. He's from Germany. That's so funny to me. He'd showed up in town claiming to be an exchange student, even though he'd already graduated from high school back home, and the Savios took him in and helped him enroll at the local High School. Ed Savio was a teenager too at the time and paints a vivid picture of what it was like to live with Christian. He initially made a great impression, or at least a big one. He was, as much as it pains me to say it, charming. I can't imagine because I have come to hate this man with the fire of a thousand sons, but everybody, and I mean everybody says he was incredibly

engaging. So I guess we have to believe it's true. Yeah, I suspect part of it was just that people like having people with cool accents around. Like, Americans especially, we are suckers for cool accents, especially European ones. I mean, look at you. Mr. Whitney has an accent. I know. He got you hook, hook, line, and sinker. He's running a long con. Just kidding, Mr. Whitney, we love you.

But it soon became clear to the people of Berlin, Connecticut, that this guy considered himself far too good for the likes of them. Christian made putting on airs into an art form. He lounged around the Savio's place like a Roman emperor, barking orders at the mom of the house who had made the colossal mistake of extending her very American hospitality to his arrogant ass. He complained constantly about the food, and he refused to do any work around the house, including his own damn laundry. Oh, man.

Laundry is for poor people, he told Ed Savio. His parents would never require him to perform such a plebeian task. His parents were wealthy, Christian said, massive lie. He'd grown up with a staff. Instead of pulling his weight, he spent hours in front of the TV. His favorite show was Gilligan's Island. All right. Now, I got to take this part because I'm pretty sure Katie hasn't seen literally every episode of that show like I have.

How dare you? It was a staple on Nick at Night. But you're better at accent, so proceed. Okay, fair enough. Now, I really hope all of y'all have seen at least one episode of Gilligan's Island, because if you have, it'll make what I'm about to tell you 10 times funnier. Okay. Now, remember the character Thurston Howell III, like the rich guy who called his wife Lovie?

That ridiculous character? Well, this was who our boy Christian decided to use as his model to become a true blue-blooded American. I shit you not. Thurston Howell III was his template right down to the accent. forever after when he was trying to con his way into a wealthy community he'd pull out the Thurston Hale accent y'all know the one right like that

rich prick accent where they're far too important to bother moving the lower half of their jaw when they talk oh hello lovey like that shit that ridiculous accent was the one he used and people bought it oh my god he started calling himself Christopher Gerhardt Strider and then

Chris Kenneth Gerhard. He thought it sounded more American. He still didn't fit in with kids his own age, though. They thought he was a weirdo, and he was. He was more into classical music than rock, and he told stories that didn't seem believable. He graduated from high school and got a job as a DJ at a classical music radio station, but two years into his life with Asavios, they'd had more than enough of him. For one thing, he was always saying shit like, how can you live like this in this boring little town and meatloaf again and then came the last straw one afternoon the daughter of the house whose name by the way creepily was snooks came home from an after-school activity on a rainy day to find herself locked out chris was right inside sitting on the couch watching

tv but he refused to get up and let her in couldn't be bothered so the poor kid who i think was about nine at the time, had to stand out in the rain and wait for her mom to come home and let her in the house. And Mama Bear was pissed. She kicked Chris out on his ass and good for her. Oh my God. I would have done worse. God. I would have committed a felony. God. It was time for Chris to move on anyway. He had big dreams. Hollywood dreams. He wanted to make movies. So his next move was to enroll at the University of Wisconsin with a major in film. And of course, he wove a big old web of lies to everybody he met there. Said he was from Boston, which he proved, I have to steal myself for this because I, it's, he proved by eating Boston cream

pies all the time. Because surely nobody who's not from Boston would ever do that, right? It's illegal, in fact, to eat a Boston. a cream eye. God. God. What the? Do you guys get it now? Why I fucking hate this guy? Yeah.

He is the unqualified worst. He dressed super preppy, which I imagine was kind of weird for a film school student in the 70s. He loved La Cost. One friend told writer Mark Seale, he believed in the alligator, which has to be one of the funniest sentences ever spoken in the history of time. It's either a bit. a very specific cult or like a kind of passei luxury brand either way it's the hilarious it's hilarious leaves in the alligator everything about chris from his phony accent the clothes he wore was calculated to create an image of wealth and privilege one of christopher's professors at the

film school geoffrey green told investigation discovery he was very interested in films that involved identity questions or stolen identities yeah wonder why Hmm. Every now and then, immigration would pop up and be like, hey, bro, if you're going to graduate and you're not going to be a student anymore, you got to go back to Germany. But Chris wanted no part of that. So he managed to convince his girlfriend's sister to marry him just so he could get a green card. We say he's charming, right? That's a big ask. And she did it. He sold her a whole sob story about how if he went back to Germany, he'd get drafted into the army and he'd probably die. I suspect this was a lot easier to do back then, because it wasn't easy at all for my husband and me. Like when we got married, we had to jump through a hundred different kinds of hoops to prove we were a legit couple and then I wasn't just trying to get him a green card. But Chris and his new bride didn't have any trouble at all. Chris got his green card. His wife ended up divorcing him unceremoniously a few years later when she wanted to get married for real. But like they never lived together. It was not a real marriage at all.

But, you know, he'd gotten what he wanted out of her and her sister too, apparently, who was his actual girlfriend at the time, and it was time to jet on out to California. Chase's dream of being a filmmaker. He ended up in San Marino, a wealthy town like all the towns he picked, and he made a capital S. Spelash. Oh, and he had a new name, Christopher Chichester. Now, my dude had always been a liar and a scam artist, but in San Marino, he pulled out all the stops. He told people he was English nobility. Even had business cards made that said Christopher Mountbatten, Chichester, 13th Baronet of Chichester. Ooh, baronet, snazzy. One of his tactics when arriving in a new town was to find the richest church and ingratiate himself with the congregation, and that's what he did

in San Marino. He spoke with a posh-sounding British accent, which I suspect was preposterous, but evidently it was good enough to fool people. And he really chewed the scenery with the landed gentry routine. He'd kissed the women's hands when he met them and people just thought he was hot stuff. Maybe this is the filthy American peasant in me, but if a man scratched that, anyone tried to kiss my hand, I think my first instinct would be to slap them. Do not touch me with your filthy lips, dude. I don't know you. I would just obsess about it until I was able to go wash my hands. Like, that little place where he kissed my hand would be glowing like neon in my brain, like, I need to go wash it off. Yeah, I'd much rather have the two little air kisses

by the cheeks than that. That's totally fine. Christopher Chichester seemed to know something about everything. Music, art, movies, politics, the stock market, anything you wanted to talk about. Sir Christopher was great at weaponizing the older lady's maternal instincts against them. He'd make puppy eyes at him and talk about being the poor relation from a wealthy old British family and the ladies would just fall all over themselves to feed him and let him stay at their houses and set him up with their daughters. They figured he was the black sheep of a fine old English family whose parents decided to send him across the pond to seek his fortune. Christopher spent most of his days at the University of Southern California Film School nearby. He didn't actually

enroll. He was just there all the time. And he got to know everybody from the professors to the film librarian. Everybody liked having him around. And with his army of older ladies in San Marino, taking care of his every need, Christopher never had to worry about where his next meal was coming from. Or his housing. Enter Didi Sohus. Like Christopher himself, Didi was kind of a local celebrity. She'd grown up the beautiful pampered daughter of a wealthy family, and she had a gorgeous house and a comfortable amount of money. Not super rich, but well to do. She and her ex-husband had divorced years earlier when D.D. hauled off and punched him in the mouth, and for years, it had just been her and her son John. But now, John was grown and out of the house, and

D.D. was lonesome. And she drank. A lot. She had a nice little guest cottage on her property, and when she heard about the charming young English gent who needed a place to stay, she offered it to him. Rent free. She was just glad of the company. And Christopher Cheechester immediately worked his way into her life. He started running, errands for her, bringing home little treats, telling her entertaining stories about his family and his life in England, talking to her about movies. He told everybody he'd worked on the show Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and Dee Dee was fascinated by that. It was a perfect situation for a conman like Chris. Here was this vulnerable older woman, half in the bag at any given moment of the day,

sitting on a gorgeous San Marino house and a pile of money. And it was there for the taking. All he had to do was cozy up to her. Get her to trust him? It was going great. until needy son John came back with his new wife Linda. John Soas was a man ahead of his time, a computer programmer almost before computers were a thing. He'd build them at home, out of old TVs, and he worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. Linda was chasing a career as a fantasy artist, painting unicorns and other mythological creatures. And she also worked at a sci-fi and fantasy bookstore called Dangerous Visions, which sounds like someplace I'd like to be right now. L-A-O.

We can record the podcast there. Let's go. They were sweet, talented nerds in love and a cute couple. John was 5'6 and Linda was six feet tall with bright red hair. She towered over him and he loved it. They got married on Halloween and had a masquerade party for their wedding reception, which that alone makes me love them and know we would have been friends. Absolutely, me too. And in 1983, shortly after they got married, John and Linda moved in with D.D.

They couldn't have the guest house because Christopher Cheechester was already there. So they took the spare bedroom. It was a little bit tense right from the jump. D.D. was very needy, usually drunk, and she didn't have any boundaries. She'd barred right into their bedroom without knocking to the point where they had to put a lock on the door. And according to some friends of the family, there was tension between Dedy and Linda. Dedy didn't think Linda was good enough for her son. Ooh, that sounds like a fun situation for everybody. Now, Christopher didn't have the same access to Dee Dee anymore. John was polite to the guy, but some sources say that he quickly started to have some uneasy feelings about his mom's rent-free tenant. In fact, he may have started poking around into his mom's finances after a while, making sure everything was okay. author Mark Seale thinks Linda may have had a thing for Christopher Cheechester and vice versa.

But one of her good friends told the ID channel that Linda thought Christopher was creepy, called him The Renter and didn't like interacting with him. So I don't buy it. I don't think either one of them was into the other. I think this was all about money. Mm-hmm. But there is a strange story about Cheechester showing up at a friend's house one afternoon with a tall red-haired woman in the passenger seat of the truck.

The woman was crying, and Christopher didn't introduce her to his friend or bring her inside with him. Not long after that, in February of 1985, John and Linda Soas suddenly disappeared. Linda had apparently dropped off her six cats at a kennel, telling them she'd be back for them in a couple weeks. She told a couple of friends that she and John were going to New York to interview for an amazing government job and make arrangements to move there if they got it. I can't tell you much about it, Linda said. it's top secret stuff, something to do with satellites. It was all kind of cloak and dagger. Exciting. But the friends didn't get the impression that they were just planning to move there right

away. I mean, what about the cats? The two weeks passed, and Linda never came back to pick them up. And she loved those cats like children. No way would she ever abandon them. By the way, just so y'all don't worry, somebody did eventually come get the cats, okay? It's not clear who, but I assume it was a friend of Linda, so the kitties were okay. After a while, some of John and Linda's started to worry, and they tried to talk to Didi about it. But Didi never seemed worried when Linda and John's friends would call, just kind of vaguely annoyed and drunk. They're not missing, she'd say. They're just working. Where they were, tended to vary from call to call, often depending on how drunk she was at the time. They're on a mission, she told one friend, a top secret mission. I'm not really

supposed to tell anyone. At one point, Didi said she'd gotten a couple of postcards from Linda, not from New York, but from Paris. Kind of Miss New York, oops, one said, but this can be lived with. Strange, stilted language. No details, no explanations. But for the moment, that was enough for Didi. If you pressed her,

she'd sometimes say she had a source for information about John and Linda and the jobs they'd left town to take. The man who got them the jobs. Christopher Cheechester. But despite Dede's reassurances, as time went by and nobody heard from Linda or John, Other people close to them were really starting to freak out, and they contacted the police.

In April, just a couple months after John and Linda went incognito, Detective George Yankovich showed up at Dedi's door. After talking with her for a bit, the detective asked to speak to the renter in the guesthouse, and Dedy showed him where it was. Christopher Cheechester always knew how to make a first impression, and his meeting with Detective Yankovic was no exception. He opened the door, buck-ass naked, and covered in dirt. I've been digging in the garden.

he said casually, then disappeared into the bedroom for a moment to grab a towel and his driver's license. Who opens the door buck-ass naked? Who does that? Who does that? That's bananas. That's crazy. That's what he did. John and Linda were on a trip, Christopher said. Standing in the doorway, the detective could see some carpet missing from the floor of the guesthouse, some green and yellow plastic bags strewn across the couch. Weird dude, he thought, but there didn't seem to be anything fishy going on here. Both Dee Dee Dee Dee's Soas and her tenant said that John and Linda weren't missing just away for a while. There wasn't really anything more the San Marino

PD could do. Later, Detective Yankovic would kick himself for not following Christopher Chichester into that bedroom. He believes that if he had, he'd have found John and Linda's bodies in there, that Gerhart Strider was probably in the process of dismembering or moving their bodies

when he knocked at the door. Where he'd been storing him in the meantime, God knows, but it sounds plausible to me. That might be why he was naked, so he wouldn't get blood on his clothes. When John's bones were unearthed from the yard years later, they found them in those same green and yellow plastic bags that the detective had seen on Chris's couch that day in 85. Bags they eventually identified as coming from the campus bookstores of the two universities where Chris had spent time. University of Wisconsin and University of Southern California.

Now, why our boy decided to up and leave town at this point, rather than sticking around and stealing as much more of Dee Dee's money as he could, I'm not sure. But I'm guessing that visit from the detective had a lot to do with it. Mm-hmm. Before long, the charming Englishman had dropped off the map in San Marino, taking John Soas' pickup truck with him. Didi, alone now in her big, empty house, finally realized something was wrong and tried to get the police to look into the case.

But there really weren't any leads to follow, except for the truck. They did enter the truck into the system. Dedy's alcoholism got worse, and eventually she sold her house and moved into a truck. trailer. When she died in 1988, she left her substantial estate to the people who'd sold her the trailer. She barely knew them. D.D. had written John out of her will a couple of years after we went missing. Maybe she thought he'd just abandoned her. Or maybe she gave up hope. Yeah, that's sad. Meanwhile, Christopher Cheechester had moved on to bigger, better things. He was going by Christopher

Crow now, and he'd relocated to Greenwich, Connecticut. He'd given up the filmmaker thing by now and decided to try his hand at being a finance bro. Like every good con man. Every single one. Absolutely. It's like we can, we should start playing con man bingo, honestly. Yeah. Like they're related to some old family in America, check.

He's related to some English royalty check. He's a finance bro. There's actually another Chris who tried the same shit, same family, like tried to pass himself off as a Rockefeller. Christoph Rokin-Corps is a whole different case and it's still fake Rockefeller. It's wild. Honestly, if I were the Rockefellers, I would have, like, I would have a team of people on this. Because it feels like, I feel like I could claim to be a Rockefeller at this point.

And, like, people would be like, yeah, she could be a Rockefeller. The Rockefellers need a team of scam busters. Yeah, exactly. God. Although maybe it's good, maybe it's good press, you know? Mm-hmm, true. No press is bad press. He did keep the filmmaker dream alive in one way.

Christopher Crowe was the name of the producer on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and our boy claimed to be one in the same. If you looked at the credits, you'd see the name right there. Chris had zero experience in finance, but that never stopped him before. He lost one job before he even made it past the background check in New York. Guess why? Just guess, Camper. Say it out loud right now.

Because when they checked, the social security number he'd given them, it came back as belonging to David motherfucking Berkowitz, aka son of Sam, the serial killer. Settle, man. Way to fly under the radar. And way to pick the biggest freaking dork of a serial killer, too. Berkowitz? Really? Yeah. The most shlobby loser serial killer. And we've covered Elliot Roger. Okay? I get it. He is... I think it was, um, I think it was, um, Last podcast on the left, they insinuated. He smelled like milk all the time. And I think it's true. You can just tell by looking at Berkowitz. God. It is unfathomable to me why he would do that. I can't think of a worse New Yorker to pick than that smelly weirdo. And, you know, it just doesn't make any sense to me because he did it on purpose.

That's what blows my mind. This wasn't an accident. He didn't just pick a random numbers and it just happened to be fucking Berkowitz. No, I think he enjoyed it. I think he thought he was being real close. clever and that they wouldn't be able to figure it out. It's like, dude. It's like the one thing, it's like the one thing you have to do right as a con man is get a social security number that's accurate. And instead, he's like, hmm, let's get the one that's locked up in the pen that has a record a mile long. I just killed a couple people. So I'm going to play a little funny. I'm going to, you know, sometimes these jokes are just for me. Yeah. It's like the, it's like Dennis Raider and the serial killer thing for those that don't remember. They're all, they all have

terrible senses of humor these people. They really do. For those that don't remember, Dennis Raider, aka BTK, when he resurfaced, made sure to eat cereal at the scene of one of his crimes and then wrote the cops and was like, I'm a serial killer. Yeah, he sent him cereal boxes as well. Yeah, he's a fucking. God, I hate him so much. Anyway. Anyway, back to this idiot. He got fired from another company because, you know, he had.

zero experience and he sucked, but he managed to scam his way into a job eventually with a firm called Kidder, Peabody, and company, and he hung out there for a while. Mr. Social Butterfly, as always. But not everybody at the office was charmed by Chris. He was an odd duck, and he had a temper. One time, he flipped his shit on a co-worker's friend because the guy innocently picked up some knick-knack off his desk. If you ever touch anything of mine again, I'll bring my luger, he said. Oh, interesting, because when guns had come up in an earlier conversation at the office, Christopher said he knew nothing about them. He was a pacifist, a Quaker. Uh-huh.

Sure you are, bud. Christopher Crowe was enjoying his new life, but in 1988, three years into Chris's new identity, Karma poked her head out and said, hello. Under relentless pressure from one of Linda's good friends, Sue, the San Marino PD had decided to take another look at the cold case of the missing people, John and Linda Soas. And when they looked into the truck that Dee's former tenant, Christopher Cheechester had been driving at the time of the disappearance, they got a hit all the way across the country in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Somebody called Christopher Crow had initiated a sale of the truck, but the buyer ended up backing out at the last minute when Crow told him he didn't have the title. documents. Greenwich Sergeant Daniel Allen got a call from the San Marino PD about the truck and asked him to look for a guy named Christopher Cheechester. Alan couldn't find a Christopher Cheechester, but he did find a guy who looked just like the picture the San Marino detective had sent, Christopher Crow. They went to talk to him at work and got his boss instead. Crow hadn't come to work that day, but Sergeant Allen left a message for Christopher to call him back about the truck. Needless to say, that was it for the Christopher Crow identity.

Our boy went into hiding and stayed there for the next four years. All we know for sure about this time is that he spent most of it hold up in a girlfriend's apartment, letting her support him while he fiddled around on his computer all day and probably promised her God knows what until she finally got sick of him and left. We do know that at one point he bought tickets for India, so I suspect he was thinking about fleeing the country now that he knew the San Marino PD were looking for him. But he didn't. He stayed put, hiding in plain sight, using other people's credit cards here and there

until finally he re-emerged like a lion-ass little butterfly with yet another new identity. And this one was a doozy. Clark Rockefeller, the cousin from the poorer side of the Rockefeller family, blazed onto the Manhattan scene in 1992. As usual, he beeline for a wealthy Episcopalian church

and started finessing the congregation and they ate it up. He got a small but tasteful apartment in a good building right across the hall from an art dealer who should really think about a different career because when my dude invited her over one afternoon to see his priceless collection of modern art she fell for his room full of fakes like a credulous toddler.

Like, really? You don't get training on how to spot a fake anyway. Clark told everybody he worked for a nonprofit that helped poor countries manage their debt and he cultivated a whole list of weird traits that I guess just convinced everybody he was one of those old money eccentrics. He wouldn't eat in restaurants. only expensive private clubs because he didn't trust the kitchens.

He only ate one kind of cookie. It was a Peppridge Farm Nantucket, if you're curious. Oh, my God. He was a Trekkie. He loved purebred dogs. And any time he went out to eat with anybody, he'd hand them the bill because he was always taught to never carry cash. How delightful, that classic Rockefeller quirkiness. Sure, I'll pick up the tab.

What the fuck were these people even doing? They're doing this wrong. What is the point of having a rich friend if they don't cover the half-priced apps at the bees? Well, the thing is, he was making friends with rich people, you know? They were all rich people. I guess, you know, they didn't care, but it's wild to me. But you've got to trade off. I know, I know.

They thought they were going to, they thought they were landing a big one. I know it. Oh, yeah. And he was good at acting like he didn't want to broadcast his family pedigree while still managing to bring it up constantly. But he was so good at creating the whole rich family mythos about himself that people just fell all over themselves to believe it. One guy who prided himself on being able to recognize old money by bone structure alone told his friend, he's got the Rockefeller jaw. You can spot it a mile away.

Yeah, good job, man. Maybe get a new hobby. Something other than phrenology for rich people. Like, what the hell even is that? And he was as fancy pants as ever, once telling a friend, that he was writing a book called American Standard to, quote, educate the middle class on how to dress and how to act. Good God, could you make me want to punch you anymore? I really don't think he could. I think he may have just reached maximum punchability with that one. It might not get any worse.

Most of these quotes, by the way, are from Mark Seals' book, The Man in the Rockefeller suit, which is terrific. I'm writing a book on how to get the shit kicked out of you if you go above 75th Street. The pores, you know, they just don't know how to appreciate a good ascot. Like, dude, what the action? Oh, is anybody actually that out of touch with reality? I think they probably are, like really, really rich people. A thousand percent, yes. The middle class need help.

Go get fucked. It's literally that scene in arrested development. Like, it's a banana, Michael. How much could it cost? $10? Yeah. That's pretty accurate now. Well, yeah, close.

And in 1994, he threw that clue-themed dinner party and met McKenzie and company senior executive Sandra Boss, and within a year they were married. Good for Mr. Crocofeller. Sandy made damn good money, and she let him take control of their finances,

too, and didn't ask too many questions he didn't have answers to. But right around the time Sandy and Clark were saying their vows at the Quaker Meeting House, on Nantucket, something unexpected was happening in California. D.D. Soes' old house in San Marino had new owners now, and they were putting in a swimming pool. And one afternoon, as workers were digging up the yard, neighbors heard one of them yell, Holy shit! The contractor had dug up a lot of weird stuff over the years, a whole car once

and another time the skeleton of a horse. But this latest find had him running for a phone to call the police. It was a fiberglass container full of decaying plastic bags and inside the bags bones and a human skull with hair still attached. The investigators quickly realized that there was an old missing person's case

attached to the address where the bones had been found, the case of John and Linda Soas, missing now for almost a decade. And of course, it didn't take long for them to dig up the old reports on former guest house tenant Christopher Cheechester, who had popped up in Connecticut as Christopher Crowe, then disappeared. The investigators assumed that the body they'd found, a male skeleton,

about five feet six inches tall, must be John Soas, but there was no sign of Linda. The skull showed evidence of brutal blunt force trauma, three major hits, probably with a baseball bat or something similar. And that wasn't all. The medical examiner also found evidence of stab wounds to the body. The killer had tied plastic bags around the hands and feet, then wrapped the body and cling wrap with another plastic bag over the head. DNA testing would later confirm that it was the body of John Soas. They had a suspect, obviously, Christopher Cheechester slash Crow, but they had no idea where the guy was.

They tried to follow the few flimsy leads they had, but the guy was a phantom. He was no one and nowhere. So despite the discovery of John Soas' body, the case went cold once again. And in New York, then in New Hampshire, then Boston, Clark Rockefeller and Sandra Boss built a life together. Had a daughter.

If Christian Gerhard Stryder was a master at anything, it was at ingratiating himself with the right people. And by the right people, I mean people who could offer him something he wanted. Membership in a private club, a spot on the board in an opera house or museum. Money. Status. Many people practically welcomed him as an adopted member of the family. Nobody ever would have suspected they were hanging out talking about art or film theory with a murderer. Charm will get you far when it comes to friends and acquaintances,

but in a marriage, it has limits. And about a decade into their marriage, Clark's charm started wearing pretty damn thin on Sandy. He wasn't making money of his own, but he was spending plenty of hers. And she started to notice some, let's call him inconsistencies in some of the stories he told her about his life before he met her? After Snooks was born and their parenting styles started to clash, Sandy saw more and more of Clark's angry side. According to her, he became emotionally abusive, moody, sexually coercive, even violent sometimes. She later told the court that he used, quote, techniques including sleep deprivation, I'm master kind of behavior. He never hit me in the face, she said, but he'd scream and scream at me. And he cut me off from my friends and

family. Later, she said, she realized he was cheating on her. She finally hired a private investigator to look into his background, and the guy told her, this dude is not who he says he is. That's all I could find out, though. There's no paper trail at all. Sandy had had it. She filed for divorce, and of course, y'all already know what came next. He kidnapped his daughter on a sunny afternoon in July. The cops got his fingerprints off a wine glass, and suddenly there was a manhunt in progress for conman Christian Garl Gerhard Stryder, fake Rockefeller. Clark had left a whole bunch of fake clues to throw off the investigators before he ran off

with Snooks. He told one friend he was going to Turks and Caicos. He told other friends he was headed to Peru or Alaska or the Bahamas. The investigators had to follow every one of those fake leads. But the FBI don't mess around, and it didn't take them long to track Gerhardt Strider down. He had a new name, Chip Smith, a new fake occupation, C, captain, and a brand new house in Baltimore bought with $450,000 cash. Worryed about Snook's safety, agents set up surveillance on the place and quickly saw that both dad and daughter were fine. They came up with a strategy.

Chip Smith had bought a boat, a catamaran, and had it docked nearby. So the FBI had the owner of the marina called Chip and claimed that the boat was taking on water. Sure enough, that got him out of the house. And as soon as he was out the front door, they finally put the habeas gravis on the con man slash possible killer. Snooks went home to her mom, and the investigators began the complicated process of unraveling Christian Gerhardt Strider's real-life story.

The dipshit himself was no help. He just sat there and spewed bullshit about how he didn't really remember his childhood, but he thought he'd grown up in New York, mostly, and just blah, blah, bullshit, blah. the custodial abduction charge plus assault for pushing the social worker was no problem they got him charged convicted and sentenced to seven years on that one despite his hilarious attempt at an insanity defense in which he claimed that snooks had been communicating with him telepathically and asking him to rescue her from her mom wow man i'll give you points for creativity but now there was the matter of those bones in california a key piece of evidence there was the plastic bag of bags the bones were found in, one from the University of Wisconsin, one from the University of Southern California. Experts were able to date both bags to the time when Christian was at each of those universities. They also did a luminal test and found a tremendous amount of blood in that guest house. And that, coupled with a ton of witness testimony about Christian digging in his

front yard in the days after the soist disappearance, for example, was enough for prosecutors. And in 2011, they charged him with the murder of John Soas. He went to trial two years later, and the jury didn't buy his theory that Linda was the real killer. They convicted him a first-degree murder, and the judge sentenced him to 27 years in prison. He'll be old when he gets out, if he ever does. At his sentencing, you could just see him vibrating with rage. I still firmly believe that the victim's wife killed the victim, he said to the judge. I did not commit the crime of which I stand accused.

Yeah, I think you did, Shugs. I think you did. I think you wanted to keep on stealing Didy Soas money. And I think you probably had a plan to get her house away from her too. And I think John and Linda were an obstacle and you killed him. I think it's very likely, in fact, that he disposed of Linda's body somewhere different than John's with this exact defense in mind. Like if he ever fell under suspicion, he could just say Linda killed John and ran off. The thing is, Linda didn't have any money. She didn't have a passport. She had no way of disappearing like that. She didn't have the skill set for that. So the only real mystery left in this story is where Christian put her body. Well, that and how everybody fell for his bullshit. Everybody's always talking in this story

about what a master manipulator this guy is. And I mean, you know, sure, he's manipulative. But to be honest, what a good con artist needs more than anything isn't skill. It's just lack of fear and a lack of conscience. That inherent scumbaggery that lets them lie to people and use them without feeling guilty or worrying about getting caught. He doesn't have to be a master at anything. And let me tell you, I don't believe he was. This man copied his accent from Gilligan's Island. For God's sake, he claimed to be the 13th baronet of Chichester. There was no fucking 13th baronet. Okay, the 11th one was still alive at the time. And he could have looked that up in 10 minutes at any library and he didn't bother. This loser was getting people to drive him around and

developing T-Rex arms when it came to pay for dinner. He was the New York elite skis. gumbag unemployed boyfriend who just happened to own a lot of Lacost. And like everyone's high school best friend, they refused to dump him because for some reason he made them feel all warm and fuzzy. Yeah. He was always changing little details about his story from one person to the next, which is dead stupid and it'll get you caught in a heartbeat if people talk to each other. So no, I don't believe this dork is a master anything except possibly a masturbator. Okay. He's just a sociopath. I think people want to say he's a genius because it makes us feel better about the fact that we fall for this shit and sorry if that sounds harsh but damn you

know if nothing else let us be a cautionary tale if something or somebody seems too good to be true they probably are and if you're ever tempted to be dazzled by somebody because of the stories they tell or the last name they give you you might want to take a minute and look closer so that was a wild one right campers you know we'll have another one for you next week But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the true crime campfire. And as always, we want to send a grateful shout out to a few of our lovely patrons. Thank you so much to Kalina, Tina, Jessica, Heather, Alexia, Julia, Liz, Adrian, and E.B. We appreciate y'all to the moon and back.

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