The Imposter

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Speaker 3 The man who called himself Clark Rockefeller has been charged with murder.

Speaker 4 You know, it hits the news that he's Christopher Chichester of San Marino.

Speaker 5 Very prominent people were fooled by him.

Speaker 4 He's Christopher Crowe of Greenwich, Connecticut.

Speaker 6 He could fool anyone. He was brilliant.
He was diabolical.

Speaker 4 He's Clark Rockefeller of New York.

Speaker 5 To him, it was a game.

Speaker 4 And everybody's going, who the hell is this guy?

Speaker 8 Because we always start this way with an interview. Could you introduce yourself saying, I am?

Speaker 9 No, no, no. Everyone knows who I am.

Speaker 8 Well, who are you? I don't think everybody does know who you are. No, no, no, no, no.
Why is that so hard for you to say your name?

Speaker 9 Because so many persons know me under different names, and I don't want to make anyone uncomfortable.

Speaker 6 When a Rockefeller appeared in my life and wanted to be my friend, it was, well, look at me now. You know, this isn't a story that makes me look that great.

Speaker 6 I'm Walter Kern. I was a friend of Clark Rockefeller's, or the guy who called himself Clark Rockefeller.
An amber alert has been issued for a girl abducted in Boston. One day I turn on the news.

Speaker 6 There's Clark Rockefeller's picture.

Speaker 3 There is still no sign of Clark Rockefeller and his seven-year-old daughter, Ray. Rockefeller abducted his daughter during a supervised visit in a...

Speaker 6 And I thought, oh boy, he finally snapped. We do not know who this man is.
He's not Clark Rockefeller. A few days later, the Rockefeller family came out and said, he's not one of us.

Speaker 6 There is no record of any Clark Rockefeller as a descendant of John D. Rockefeller.
I was like, what?

Speaker 2 The mystery man who took on that very famous last name is now in police custody.

Speaker 10 Tell me who you are.

Speaker 10 I'm sick of this bull. I've been dealing with this all week.
Tell me who you are.

Speaker 4 Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 10 No, you told me you are not Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 8 Clark Rockefeller doesn't exist.

Speaker 5 I don't think there is a real person under there. I don't think he even knows who he is.

Speaker 8 Who are you?

Speaker 10 I can't tell you.

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 5 I can't tell you.

Speaker 10 Because you've done something that somebody's looking for you for, right?

Speaker 6 Drip, drip, drip. The details came out as to who he really was.

Speaker 12 Los Angeles homicide detectives identify this man as Christian Gerhardsrider from Bergen, Germany.

Speaker 4 When he was busted for kidnapping his daughter, that blew the lid off of a 30-year con.

Speaker 4 All these other identities come to light. It turns out he's wanted for questioning in this homicide case.

Speaker 13 John Soas and his wife Linda vanished in 1985. Linda was never seen again.

Speaker 4 Years later, the bones of John Soas were discovered in the backyard of the house where John and Linda had lived with a mysterious boarder named Christopher Chichester, who later became Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 8 What should I call you?

Speaker 9 Gee, that's always a good question.

Speaker 9 I don't know, Aaron. What would you like to call me?

Speaker 6 I'd never been to a murder trial before.

Speaker 6 You know, imagine me. One of my best friends is the defendant at the first murder trial I get to go to.
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Somebody who's fooled me for years.

Speaker 6 Exactly 28 years ago, Linda's family reported Lyndon John missing.

Speaker 6 I'm a journalist and a novelist, so you'd think that I was the kind of guy who would see through someone like him. The fact was I never did.

Speaker 11 He was very secretive.

Speaker 6 But now, witness after witness was coming up and giving evidence about what was really going on and that the person I knew was actually hiding from a murder the whole time and that a lot of what I thought were his eccentricities, his concerns about privacy, his concerns about security, all of these things suddenly took on a whole new meaning.

Speaker 8 America has long been the land of opportunity. And in 1982, there were few places more inviting than San Marino, California, an opulent suburb of Los Angeles that felt like a small town.

Speaker 8 It was a sort of an Andy Hardy existence. Like a wealthy Mayberry?

Speaker 8 Well, that could be.

Speaker 8 And the perfect setting for English royalty. You knew him by what name? Christopher Chichester XIII.
The 13th. The 13th Baronet of England, yes.

Speaker 8 The 21-year-old baronet had a posh accent and old-world charm and made sure that he was properly introduced. He was at Church of Our Savior a lot.
Well, it's the oldest church in the area.

Speaker 8 And the most prestigious, the perfect place to charm his way into San Marino high society.

Speaker 4 And he was passing out hymnals, going to the free lunches, and joining the city club and meeting all the regulars.

Speaker 8 Vanity Fair reporter, 48 Hours consultant, and author of the Man in the Rockefeller suit, Mark Seale.

Speaker 4 He was handing out business cards that said 13th Baronet of Chichester and it had the crest and he would hand out a business card and kiss the ladies' hands and pretty soon he's a member of the community.

Speaker 8 So much so that he started making elaborate plans for the city, none of it setting off any alarms among the trusting folk. I remember Chris coming over and saying, I can get a chapel.

Speaker 8 We have a chapel on our property in Europe, and I'll have it sent over.

Speaker 4 And did you believe it? It's just your cathedral, no less.

Speaker 8 Right, but did you believe it? And I thought, fabulous, that will look so perfect right here.

Speaker 8 Police say that you are a con artist, a con man. No, what would you call yourself?

Speaker 9 Who did I con?

Speaker 8 If not a con artist, what would you call yourself?

Speaker 9 Steve Bodrowski is an absolute literary genius. He came up with the word confabulator.
Confabulations, harmless inventions of

Speaker 9 fun that don't really hurt anyone.

Speaker 8 So you don't believe you hurt anyone?

Speaker 9 I don't think so.

Speaker 8 It was through friends at church that Chris Chichester reportedly met wealthy divorcee Rue Soas, better known as Dee Dee. Dee Dee had a small guest house in the backyard of her San Marino home.

Speaker 8 Legally, she wasn't allowed to rent it out, but the 65-year-old had been running out of money. So when she let Chichester move in, it had to be their secret.

Speaker 8 Something that suited her new tenant just fine.

Speaker 5 No one ever knew what house he lived in.

Speaker 15 He told me he was living on the second house from the corner on Lorain and

Speaker 4 West.

Speaker 8 He told me he lived on the corner. But all the while, he lived here in this guest house where authorities believe he turned from con man to kill her.

Speaker 4 John Soas, Didi's adopted son, and Linda, his soon-to-be bride, were low on money. They moved into Dee Dee's house.
Christopher Chichester is living in the back in the guest house.

Speaker 4 John is a computer nerd, Star Trek fanatic. Linda's six feet tall, a strawberry blonde artist who loved horses and painted fanciful unicorns.

Speaker 8 While the young con man was living in their backyard, John and Linda got married and made plans to move out on their own.

Speaker 8 For more than two years, Dee Dee, John, Linda, and Chichester seemed to have coexisted without a peep. Did she ever express any concern about the tenant?

Speaker 16 Nothing.

Speaker 8 Linda's best friend, Sue Kaufman. But your memory is that she thought he was creepy.

Speaker 15 Yeah, or just kind of like, just unsavory, like she didn't want anything to do with him.

Speaker 8 Tell me about John and Linda. How well did you know them?

Speaker 9 I didn't.

Speaker 9 I mean, I knew them sort of, but not.

Speaker 8 Well, you were living in that guest house for almost two years while they were living with John's mother.

Speaker 9 Yeah, they didn't talk to me.

Speaker 8 At all?

Speaker 9 Not really, no.

Speaker 8 It was early February 1985 when something very strange happened. John and Linda Soas disappeared.

Speaker 8 At first, no one was really worried. Just days before they vanished, Linda told several people that she and John were going off on a secret government mission to New York.

Speaker 8 Did Linda tell you what government agency was hiring?

Speaker 15 She just said the government and its top secret, and I can't tell you anymore.

Speaker 8 At any point, did Linda seem worried about this trip to New York or about this job that her husband was offered?

Speaker 8 She didn't say how he got offered the job?

Speaker 15 No, that's what's, you know, in hindsight, it's like, why didn't I ask more questions? But I didn't know she was going to disappear.

Speaker 8 The real story wouldn't come out until 28 years later, when the state of California put Chris Chichester, also known as Clark Rockefeller, on trial for the murder of John Soas.

Speaker 8 The prosecutor believes he also killed John's wife, Linda.

Speaker 6 Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence will show you.

Speaker 6 that John and Linda Sovoos are dead. I don't think it was murder he was interested in.
It was getting away with murder. You know, he was a fan of Hitchcock and Film Noir.

Speaker 6 He was steeped in the literature and the cinema of murder.

Speaker 17 The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create.

Speaker 6 And a lot of these movies he saw have a plot in which somebody who thinks they're very smart commits the perfect crime.

Speaker 6 And it makes fools of everybody else because they get to go forth with a secret that no one else will know.

Speaker 9 Aaron, don't put any words in my mouth.

Speaker 8 And efforts to get to that secret are met with resistance. Judy.

Speaker 18 Judy, we gotta stop this.

Speaker 8 I mean, the police. Whenever I got a little too close, he tried to get 48 Hours producer Judy Ryback to stop me.

Speaker 9 You know, you gotta stop that, Aaron. It's too adversarial, Aaron.
Judy,

Speaker 9 let's discuss that.

Speaker 8 And even tried to walk out.

Speaker 9 Unfortunately, Aaron, we gotta stop it. It's not going the way I had hoped.

Speaker 8 But I kept him in his chair long enough to ask: did you kill John Saws?

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Speaker 9 who's christopher crow um that's a name i used to go by is that the real you

Speaker 20 i don't know I don't think so.

Speaker 8 You don't think so? Yes or no?

Speaker 4 No, it's a name I used to go by.

Speaker 8 Sometime in May 1985, four months after Linda and John Soas vanished from San Marino, Christopher Chichester did the same.

Speaker 8 About a month after that, 3,000 miles away in Greenwich, Connecticut, Christopher Crowe appeared.

Speaker 8 Once again, in church.

Speaker 4 He gravitates to the most exclusive Episcopal church there, Christ Church, and he's passing out hymnals and meeting the locals.

Speaker 8 Author Mark Seale.

Speaker 4 He was very smart to launch his lives at churches because, you know, people at churches tend to believe. He meets the minister's son.
Chris Bishop is an aspiring filmmaker, and they became friends.

Speaker 8 27 years later, at the trial, Chris Bishop took the stand to describe the man he knew as Chris Crowe.

Speaker 6 What projects was he working on when you met him? According to Chris, he was the executive producer of the new Alfred Hitchcock Present series.

Speaker 8 In the 1980s, the classic series from the 50s was remade. And sure enough, there was a Christopher Crow in the credits.
Of course, it wasn't this Chris Crowe.

Speaker 8 But no one seemed to question the 24-year-old story.

Speaker 4 He had studied up on whatever he was trying to do, enough to get away with it.

Speaker 8 Nor did anyone question him when two years later, the television producer evolved into a bond trader on Wall Street.

Speaker 4 In New York City, he met a man who worked for Nico Securities, and he was actually hired to lead an entire department of corporate bond salesmen.

Speaker 15 Didn't you have to lie to get that job?

Speaker 9 Not necessarily.

Speaker 20 He was hired

Speaker 20 simply because of his name.

Speaker 8 Richard Barnet was hired to work under Crowe, who claimed to be royalty.

Speaker 20 He said his name was Christopher Crowe Mountbatten. Mountbatten is related to the Queen.

Speaker 8 When did you start having questions about his abilities?

Speaker 20 Actually, fairly soon. He didn't understand the basic elements of what a corporate bond was all about.

Speaker 8 You took a job with a securities company as the head of a corporate bond department with absolutely no experience.

Speaker 9 And produced a huge profit.

Speaker 8 The people who worked with you said you didn't know what you were doing.

Speaker 9 Well, that's their opinion. I nonetheless produced a huge profit.

Speaker 20 Never sold a bond.

Speaker 8 Never sold a bond.

Speaker 20 Never sold a bond.

Speaker 8 How unusual is that?

Speaker 20 Impossible.

Speaker 8 It took the better part of a year, but Crowe was finally fired from NECO.

Speaker 8 Meanwhile, back in California, Dee Dee Soas died heartbroken, believing her only son John had abandoned her.

Speaker 8 Shortly afterward, Chris Crowe of Connecticut did something that would eventually put Chris Chichester of San Marino back on the radar in connection with the Soas disappearance.

Speaker 6 When he said, hey, I've got this pickup truck. It was a production

Speaker 6 vehicle on a movie that I made.

Speaker 6 I can't use it. I don't want it.
Would you like it?

Speaker 8 Crowe gave Chris Bishop a white 1985 Nissan pickup like this one. But when Bishop went to register it at the DMV, there was a problem.
The truck belonged to the long-missing John and Linda Soas.

Speaker 8 Police in San Marino wanted answers and asked the Greenwich Police for help.

Speaker 21 The San Marino Police Department was looking to find out if the new owner of this pickup truck that was connected to this missing couple had information on where they might be because their case was still open.

Speaker 8 Lieutenant Dan Allen was a detective in Greenwich back in 1988.

Speaker 8 Crow had talked his way into another job at a large brokerage house and was living with a girlfriend, Mohoko Minabe, who hoped to marry him.

Speaker 8 When Detective Allen called the number he had for Crow, it was Minabe who answered.

Speaker 22 He said that he was

Speaker 22 detective with the Greenwich Police.

Speaker 8 And that's when she said he's not here.

Speaker 9 Did you leave him a message?

Speaker 21 And she said she would.

Speaker 8 But over the next few days, with his girlfriend's help, Crowe kept dodging Allen. If you had nothing to do with the death of John Sohas, why wouldn't you talk to Detective Allen?

Speaker 9 Because Detective Allen never contacted me.

Speaker 8 He contacted Mohoko.

Speaker 9 He never gave her a reason for the contact, did he?

Speaker 8 But you knew what they were there for.

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 8 Oh, you had no idea.

Speaker 9 How would I know?

Speaker 8 But here's what Mohoko Minabe said at trial.

Speaker 22 He told me that next time he called

Speaker 22 that, you know, he wasn't there and that I didn't know where he was.

Speaker 23 He had told her I wasn't a police officer.

Speaker 21 I wasn't a detective.

Speaker 24 I was a hitman out to kill him.

Speaker 8 And she believed that? And she believed that. Now that Crow knew that the police were onto him, it was time once again to disappear, leaving Alan at a dead end.
Did you ever meet him face to face? No.

Speaker 8 Did you ever talk to him on the phone?

Speaker 4 No.

Speaker 22 Fairly soon after Detective Alan's call, we moved to another apartment. He grew a beard.
I helped color his hair. He never came out of the building at the same time.

Speaker 22 Always walked down different sides of the street.

Speaker 6 Whose idea was it to do all those?

Speaker 22 It was his idea.

Speaker 8 Crowe laid low for about three years.

Speaker 8 And in that time, a Rockefeller was born.

Speaker 4 According to Mohoko and Manabe, they went out to a restaurant and he couldn't get a reservation. And so he just said,

Speaker 4 Rockefeller. My name's Clark Rockefeller.
Suddenly a table appeared. The name worked its magic and would work its magic

Speaker 4 from that point forward.

Speaker 6 He wrote me a letter from his jail cell that I got just recently in which he claimed that his entire career in America was based on a novel he read when he was 10 10 about somebody who came up in society through fraudulence.

Speaker 6 I think that might have been the Great Gatsby.

Speaker 24 I cannot find anyone who knows anything real about Mr. Gatsby.

Speaker 8 When you were growing up,

Speaker 8 did you get most of your ideas about America from watching movies and reading books?

Speaker 4 Books.

Speaker 8 Books.

Speaker 9 I'm a big reader.

Speaker 8 You once mentioned The Great Gatsby.

Speaker 9 Yeah, that's one of them.

Speaker 8 And of course, there was television. One program in particular.

Speaker 9 Gilligan's Island's one of my favorite television shows.

Speaker 8 Why?

Speaker 9 Because it's actually a religious show, and the characters represent the seven deadly sins. Gilligan is sloth.
The skipper is anger. The professor is pride.
Marianne is envy and ginger is lust.

Speaker 9 The millionaire's wife is gluttony, and the millionaire is greed.

Speaker 8 There's a story that you modeled your accent after Thurston Howell III.

Speaker 9 Thurston Howell III.

Speaker 8 Is that true? Perhaps unconsciously. That was your idea of what a blue-blooded American would sound like?

Speaker 9 Perhaps unconsciously.

Speaker 17 This is my darling wife, Mrs. Thurston Howell III.
How do you do?

Speaker 6 We only saw the clerk that comes out on stage, but there was a lot of off-stage time when he was dressing the set making the props adjusting the costume i think he loved that

Speaker 8 sometime in 1992 his riskiest most outrageous identity was unveiled when the congregation at st. Thomas Church on New York's swanky Fifth Avenue met Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 4 He would carry around a security device that he said was connected to the Rockefeller offices because he was very paranoid paranoid about security and being kidnapped, which is pretty gutsy because that church has real Rockefellers.

Speaker 8 It was through friends at church that Clark Rockefeller met a bright young Harvard Business School student named Sandra Boss while playing a game that, coincidentally, involved fake identities and murder.

Speaker 6 Are you talking about the board game clue?

Speaker 11 The board game clue.

Speaker 6 Who did you go as?

Speaker 11 I was Miss Scarlett.

Speaker 6 Okay. Was the defendant in character?

Speaker 4 Yes. Who was he?

Speaker 11 He was Professor Plum.

Speaker 8 Boss and Rockefeller quickly became an item and later moved in together. She says she simply accepted his odd and eccentric behavior.

Speaker 11 He refused to set foot on the soil of Connecticut because it was an evil state and that was where his parents had died. So even if we had to drive between Boston and New York, he would not actually

Speaker 11 allow stops in the state of Connecticut.

Speaker 6 What about you's a restroom?

Speaker 11 That was not done. One waited.

Speaker 8 While a Rockefeller courted his soon-to-be wife in New York,

Speaker 8 back in San Marino, the mystery of John Soas's disappearance was about to take a sharp turn.

Speaker 4 The owners of Dee Dee Soas' house at 1920 Lorraine decided to put in a swimming pool. And during the excavation of the pool, the bulldozer operator struck something hard.

Speaker 4 And it turned out to be human bones.

Speaker 8 The grave site was directly behind the guest house where a young man named Chichester once lived.

Speaker 18 The body was found. It was inside of a fiberglass container.

Speaker 8 Los Angeles Sheriff's Detective Tim Miley.

Speaker 18 Inside the container, the arms, legs, and torsiles were wrapped in saran wrap. Hands were covered in bags.

Speaker 25 And the hands, feet, and head were covered in plastic bags.

Speaker 8 The remains were so decomposed that they couldn't be officially identified, and the coroner wouldn't rule it a homicide.

Speaker 24 Police could only speculate about how the body came to be buried in the backyard of the one-time Sochus residence.

Speaker 8 The TV show Unsolved Mysteries recreated the scene and even posted a picture of Christopher Chichester, calling him a person of interest.

Speaker 8 But no one called him with a tip.

Speaker 18 And when they didn't get anything back from that, then the case just went cold again.

Speaker 8 But who was then the main person of interest at the time the body was found?

Speaker 18 They were looking at both Linda Soas at the wife and Christian Gerhard Schreider.

Speaker 8 Gerhardt Schreider, who was now hiding out in plain sight as Clark Rockefeller, and telling everyone that he had just inherited what they would all come to believe was a multi-million dollar art collection.

Speaker 8 Writer Walter Kern remembers the first time he laid eyes on it.

Speaker 6 Standing unframed against the walls are what must have been $50, $60 million worth of Mark Rothko's, Jackson Pog's abstract expressionist masterpieces.

Speaker 8 That artwork was one reason that Kern never doubted Rockefeller until years later when the whole world would learn that the art was expertly forged.

Speaker 6 You wouldn't guess that the man is fake, the art is fake, the name is fake, everything, you know.

Speaker 8 Shortly after the art appeared, Sandra Boss married her Rockefeller.

Speaker 6 Who supported your family financially after you got married?

Speaker 3 I did.

Speaker 6 Who controlled the finances?

Speaker 8 Um, the defendant.

Speaker 8 Kern met the couple in 1998 when the marriage was already in trouble.

Speaker 6 I remember sitting there thinking, this is a sad marriage. They don't love each other.
It didn't seem like a happy place.

Speaker 8 But they stayed together and even had a daughter. In 2001, Ray Storow Rockefeller was born.
But five years later, Sandra Boss filed for divorce.

Speaker 8 And when things got contentious, her husband's con finally unraveled.

Speaker 11 I found out in August of 2007 that he was not Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 4 She hires a detective and he goes, we can find find absolutely nothing on this individual. We don't know who he is.
It was like he had materialized out of thin air.

Speaker 6 He called me up around Christmastime and he said, I just lost my daughter in a divorce. Well, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to see her again.
My wife's taking her to England.

Speaker 6 An amber alert has been issued for a girl abducted in Boston. Police say she may have been taken by her father.

Speaker 8 On July 27, 2008, FBI agent Tammy Hardy got a call from headquarters that a Rockefeller living in Boston had kidnapped his seven-year-old daughter during a supervised visitation.

Speaker 5 The social worker tried to prevent it when he was dragged by the vehicle and was injured during the course of the abduction.

Speaker 3 There is still no sign of Clark Rockefeller and his seven-year-old daughter, Ray.

Speaker 8 For six days, Rockefeller eluded even the FBI by changing his identity once again.

Speaker 4 He has set up an elaborate new identity in Baltimore as Chip Smith, a high-sea ship captain, who has a daughter named Muffy.

Speaker 5 It was very apparent that this was a well-thought-out abduction, that he had planned this for a long time.

Speaker 6 It all happened so fast at Marlborough and Arlington streets.

Speaker 8 But it all came to an end when a real estate agent in Baltimore saw the fake Rockefeller on the news. She realized he was the man she had just sold a house to.

Speaker 8 The FBI surrounded that house, and when they were certain the child was safe, they arrested her father without incident.

Speaker 6 The evidence will show that in his mind, the rules do not apply to him.

Speaker 8 At his kidnapping trial, the world met Christian Karl Gerhardt Schreider, a German immigrant who had come to America as a young man and created a life that was complete fiction.

Speaker 8 Gerhard Schreider was tried and convicted.

Speaker 6 We, the jury, say that the defendant is guilty of offense as charged.

Speaker 8 Although his defense team tried to argue that their client was delusional

Speaker 8 and actually believed he was a Rockefeller. But that's not the man federal agent Tammy Hardy met the night he was arrested.
Did it ever open up doors for you?

Speaker 9 Delacting and kidding everyone.

Speaker 17 He knew.

Speaker 5 I'm not a Rockefeller. I'm not Christopher Crowe.
I'm not Count Mountbatten or whoever that was.

Speaker 6 That was amazing.

Speaker 10 Works like a charm.

Speaker 10 Try it sometimes.

Speaker 4 I'm Sarah's go ahead.

Speaker 9 Now it works like a charm.

Speaker 8 Is he dangerous?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 5 Well, I have no doubt that he killed John Sohus.

Speaker 5 I have no doubt that he killed Linda.

Speaker 20 Sohus.

Speaker 8 In California, detectives Tim Miley and Dolores Scott were also convinced Gerhard Schrider killed Linda and John and were working against the clock to prove it before he could serve his time on the kidnapping charge and then disappear again.

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Speaker 8 Unmasked at last, Christian Gerhardt Schreider now has a new identity. Inmate number 2800458.

Speaker 8 Which persona did you like the most? Who did you like being the most?

Speaker 4 Clark Rockefeller?

Speaker 9 Um,

Speaker 9 no, no, no, no. Let's not get into that again.
Erin, Erin, Erin.

Speaker 8 Well, because we're talking about how you would put on these personas, that it was fun.

Speaker 9 Let's go back to the trial testimony. That's why we're here.

Speaker 8 Gerhard Schrider, aka Clark Rockefeller, was serving a four to five year sentence for kidnapping his daughter when he was suddenly on the move again, hauled from a Massachusetts prison to a California jail, where he would now face charges for the murder of John Sowas.

Speaker 8 L.A. County Sheriff Detectives Tim Miley and Dolores Scott led the cold case investigation.

Speaker 8 Did you know what you were getting into when you first started this investigation?

Speaker 25 No, we had no idea how bad it was, how difficult it was going to get.

Speaker 8 It took four years, four years of our lives, right?

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 8 Before we put it in the bottom of the data. The detectives had to determine exactly how John Psoas died.

Speaker 8 The problem was, all they had to work with was the victim's skull, and it was in pieces and had to be reconstructed by a special lab in Hawaii.

Speaker 23 This is where the facial bones would be, but we never know.

Speaker 8 That's when forensic pathologist Dr. Frank Sheridan was finally able to determine how John Psoas had died.
He had been viciously bludgeoned. How do you know that? How can you tell?

Speaker 23 Partly is based on looking at the edges of the fractures, the dark appearance.

Speaker 8 Dark edges, says Dr. Sheridan, mean the fractures occurred at the time of death and not when the body was unearthed.

Speaker 23 The decomposing scalp blood can sink down into the fracture lines. And that's one of the indicators that these fractures occurred shortly before death.

Speaker 8 How many times do you think John Sowas was hit here?

Speaker 23 In this area here, I believe at least twice. It takes a fairly fair amount of force to cause this kind of injury.

Speaker 8 But now, how to prove the killer was Gerhardt Schreider?

Speaker 8 Soas was buried just feet from the guesthouse where Gerhart Schreider once lived. And his body wrapped in plastic bookstore bags traced to colleges that Gerhardt Schreider had attended.

Speaker 8 Yet no DNA, no fingerprints belonging to the defendant were found.

Speaker 16 But you have to understand that obviously the bags and the body have been underground for nine years and dirt just decomposes everything.

Speaker 8 Right, but you've got a jury that might

Speaker 8 say

Speaker 8 reasonable doubt.

Speaker 18 All we can do is put on the the best case we can.

Speaker 8 In an LA courtroom in March of 2013, Christian Gerhardt Schrider went on trial for the murder of John Soas.

Speaker 6 We are on the record of the matter of the people versus

Speaker 6 Gerhardt Schrider.

Speaker 8 Did you kill John Soas? No.

Speaker 8 Did you kill Linda Soas?

Speaker 9 No, absolutely not. She's around somewhere.

Speaker 8 You believe she's still alive? Absolutely. Gerhard Schrider's defense is that Linda Soas is the one who killed her husband and is alive and hiding from authorities.
The proof?

Speaker 8 These postcards in Linda's handwriting that were sent to her family and friends from Europe after she disappeared.

Speaker 8 But to Walter Kern, this was classic Gerhardt Schreider.

Speaker 6 The postcards were such an ingenious move. You know what I mean? Your common murderer doesn't try to cover a crime that way.

Speaker 8 Like a scene from a Hitchcock thriller, Kern says, the defendant carefully concocted the couple's disappearance.

Speaker 6 To me, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence was the stories they told about going off on a secret mission. Going off on a secret mission was a Clark idea.

Speaker 6 Now, obviously, that was to prepare people not to look for them, to prepare people for their absence.

Speaker 8 But even after nearly three decades, Linda nor her body have been found.

Speaker 8 Isn't it possible that Linda's out there just under a different name doing what Chris did?

Speaker 16 No, everything points to her being deceased.

Speaker 8 Detective Miley says that Linda couldn't have sent the postcards. DNA taken off the stamp doesn't match Linda's, but it also doesn't match the defendant.

Speaker 18 Proves that he has the ability to have somebody send a postcard from Europe when he's not there.

Speaker 8 John Sowas's younger sister, Ellen, attended the trial every day and says there is no way that that Linda would have killed her brother.

Speaker 14 Linda and John, if you could have seen them together, it would be very hard for you to believe that she would have done anything to hurt John.

Speaker 8 Ellen says there's far more evidence that points to Gerhard Schreider.

Speaker 14 All the things that I learned about how he changed identities, trying to sell my brother's truck, covering up all of these things.

Speaker 8 Gerhardt Schreider says Dee Dee gave him the truck. You don't believe that? No.

Speaker 14 She didn't touch the bedroom that they had slept in. All of his stuff and Linda's stuff was left untouched.
She wouldn't have done that and given the truck away.

Speaker 9 This truck was in my possession for three and a half years with its license plates attached, unaltered, unchanged, in excellent condition. Why would a person

Speaker 9 who is aware of criminal liability preserve evidence. Answer that.

Speaker 21 No way. No way.

Speaker 8 That's how Lieutenant Dan Allen of the Greenwich PD answered.

Speaker 21 It wasn't out in the open as far as I could determine. No one ever saw that white pickup truck.

Speaker 8 And how did he miss someone burying the body right behind his house when, according to trial testimony, it would have taken the killer several hours.

Speaker 8 If Linda, in fact, killed her husband, wouldn't you have seen her burying the body?

Speaker 9 Well, if you believe that I'm home every single second, that I never leave my house, that I never go out at all, that I don't go away on weekends.

Speaker 8 But wouldn't you notice the ground was dug up?

Speaker 9 It was not a very well-kept property. Let's put it that way.

Speaker 6 All jurors may be dismissed at all recesses. All right, Mr.
Bailiff.

Speaker 8 As the case goes to the jury, Gerhard Schreider is feeling confident.

Speaker 9 I believe it because I know for a fact

Speaker 9 that I did did not do this. I know that for an absolute fact.

Speaker 6 Sitting in that courtroom, waves of anger would come over me. No, you're not.

Speaker 6 Every minute I was sitting there, I was going, please, jury, find him guilty. He did it.
He did it.

Speaker 8 As a packed courtroom gathered to hear the verdict in the murder trial of Christian Gerhardt Schrider, the man who once called himself Rockefeller looked confident, while the prosecutor, Habib Balian, seemed nervous.

Speaker 6 He'd caught in so many people for so many years. You always worry that, okay, this might be his one last con and he's going to escape justice.

Speaker 8 Walter Kern, who recently wrote Blood Will Out about his former friend, attended the trial for the New Yorker magazine.

Speaker 6 I deferred to the old-time court reporters who were there around me, me, and I said, so what do you think is going to happen? They said, oh, he's going to get off.

Speaker 6 Well, why do you say that? Oh, the evidence is so circumstantial. One of the victims is missing.
She might still be out there. Maybe she did it.
They can't establish a motive.

Speaker 6 These people had me convinced that, you know, this was going to be Clark's greatest magic trick.

Speaker 8 Ellen Sowas and another brother, Chris, were just as worried.

Speaker 14 I was very worried that

Speaker 14 those key pieces would be enough to create doubt.

Speaker 6 Okay, is it correct? The jury has reached a verdict.

Speaker 8 Yes.

Speaker 27 But in the end, we, the jury in the above entitled Action, finding defendant Christian Gerhart's writer guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree of John Sohus.

Speaker 27 I started to cry because

Speaker 14 we finally got

Speaker 14 justice.

Speaker 8 But it's a bittersweet victory because a painful question still remains. Where is Linda Soas? Do you believe then that Christian Gerhard Schreider also killed Linda?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 25 Yeah, I believe she probably met a similar fate to my brother.

Speaker 8 Do you think we'll ever know what happened to Linda?

Speaker 25 Not unless he decides to confess.

Speaker 8 I was curious how the jury felt about Linda and had the opportunity to ask the four person.

Speaker 8 Did you feel Linda had anything to do with it?

Speaker 16 I didn't.

Speaker 8 So did you believe at the end of the trial that if Christian Gerhard Schreider killed John, he probably killed Linda too?

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 8 Do you think we'll ever really know what happened to Linda Savos?

Speaker 28 I hope so.

Speaker 8 Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca.

Speaker 8 Was justice done in this case?

Speaker 28 Yes and no. There's no real justice in a murder case.
You'll never bring back a victim, but we're happy we solved this case.

Speaker 28 And the ingenuity of the homicide detectives and all their colleagues on the federal and local level are to be cheered for this.

Speaker 9 Your Honor, I can only say once again

Speaker 9 that I

Speaker 9 want to assert my innocence and that I firmly believe that the victim's wife killed the victim.

Speaker 6 That emptiness is evil.

Speaker 6 It's that lack of feeling, using everybody as a tool, everybody as a way to get your will,

Speaker 6 is as close to a definition of evil, of monstrousness as I can come to.

Speaker 8 You really think he's a monster?

Speaker 6 I think he's a monster. I think he's a monster.

Speaker 6 The defendant shall receive the sentence for the crime of first-degree murder as dictated under the law, which is a sentence of 25 years to life.

Speaker 6 Yep.

Speaker 8 The day I spoke with Gerhard Schreider, he had just been sentenced.

Speaker 9 I can't speak for the jury's decision. Half of them were probably

Speaker 9 too stupid to understand a reasonable doubt. The other half were probably too lazy to even think about what's been presented and just wanted to get out of here.

Speaker 9 This will be overturned. Make no mistakes about this.
So it's just a minor inconvenience until then.

Speaker 6 That's all it is.

Speaker 6 Big news!

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