John Sohus murder: fake Rockefeller found guilty of killing newlywed

A German man who impersonated a member of the Rockefeller family has been found guilty of first-degree murder in the death of a man whose bones were found buried beneath the backyard of a suburban home.

Christian Gerhartsreiter was tried 28 years after the disappearance of newlyweds John and Linda Sohus. Much of the prosecution's evidence focused on the strange behaviour of the man who adopted many names including Clark Rockefeller. He masqueraded as an heir to the oil fortune for 20 years.

The case went to the jury on Tuesday morning and the verdict was reached shortly after the panel returned the following day. Gerhartsreiter did not react to the decision.

"I don't know if you can really have closure with something like this," John Sohus's sister, Ellen Sohus, said. "What I have now are a lot of answers that I never believed I was ever going to have."

Sentencing was scheduled for 28 June. Gerhartsreiter faces 25 years to life in prison, plus two additional years because the jury also found that he had used a blunt object and a sharp instrument to kill John Sohus. It was not a death penalty case.

Authorities said Gerhartsreiter was a German immigrant who previously occupied a guest cottage at the home of Sohus's mother in San Marino. He was known as Chris Chichester and intimated he was of royal lineage. He joined the church, befriended residents and told some he was a film student.

A friend said Linda Sohus once described Gerhartsreiter as "creepy" and said she and her husband never spoke to him.

The town's residents did not connect him with the disappearance of the Sohus couple in 1985, but shortly after they vanished, so did he.

No trace of Linda Sohus has been found but her husband's bones were unearthed during excavation of a swimming pool at the San Marino property in 1994. With no clues, the mystery went cold again.

Meanwhile, across the country, a man variously known as Chris Crowe, Chip Smith and Clark Rockefeller was inventing new lives for himself.

This impostor wormed his way into high society and talked his way into important jobs. He married a wealthy woman and controlled her funds, but his identity unravelled when he kidnapped their daughter during a custody dispute. She testified that he had become increasingly paranoid when police began inquiring about him.

Once unmasked, he became the subject of magazine articles, true crime books and TV films. The resulting publicity led California authorities to revisit the Sohus disappearance. They realised the man in custody in Boston was not an heir to the Rockefeller fortune but was the man who had lived in San Marino decades ago.

Already serving time for the kidnapping of his daughter, Gerhartsreiter was close to the end of his sentence when he was charged with murder.

The defence team suggested Linda Sohus, who was not their client, killed her husband. But no motive was offered for her, or Gerhartsreiter, to have killed the young man.

Prosecutors filled in the blanks of the defendant's whereabouts during the decades of his disappearance. But some details were unlikely ever to be explained.

Gerhartsreiter chose not to testify in his own defence and much of the trial testimony came from people who knew him as Chris Chichester, the stranger in San Marino with a murky past.

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