Behind Closed Doors: The Phony Rockefeller

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Speaker 6 I was just like, oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows somewhere.

Speaker 8 A young couple vanishes. Then, nearly a decade later, a discovery in their own backyard turns the mystery into a murder.

Speaker 7 They find a bag, and inside the bag is a human's hole.

Speaker 11 Detectives had a suspect.

Speaker 8 Then he disappeared too.

Speaker 12 His trail had just stopped.

Speaker 8 Until this.

Speaker 13 Please, please bring Snooks back.

Speaker 10 He'd kidnapped his own daughter after claiming to be a Rockefeller, Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 15 I had a private investigator try to find out who I was married to, and they couldn't find out.

Speaker 8 Now, a second chance for investigators to prove that this mysterious con man was also a killer.

Speaker 1 But was the case as clear-cut as it seemed?

Speaker 16 There was no motive. There was no reason he would have done this.

Speaker 8 Hear from the detectives who helped crack this puzzling case and from his ex-wife.

Speaker 15 I thought he was very intelligent, funny, very charming.

Speaker 8 For decades, he got away with a web of lies. Would he also get away with murder?

Speaker 19 I can fairly certainly say that I've never hurt anyone.

Speaker 8 Tonight, the mystery of the man with so many faces. I'm Lester Holt, and this is Dateline behind closed doors.
Here's Mike Taibbi.

Speaker 4 It was a brutal crime, buried over the years by dirt and lies.

Speaker 23 But there he was, finally, in a Los Angeles County courtroom to stand trial for it all.

Speaker 24 He came here with nothing, and then he ended up as a fake Rockefeller.

Speaker 26 The world first came to know him as a phony Rockefeller who made headlines for duping a string of bright, if gullible women.

Speaker 15 They couldn't tell me who I was married to.

Speaker 29 As followers of his story came to know, he used his audacious talent for lying to live the good life.

Speaker 31 But was he more than just a clever con man?

Speaker 28 Was he something darker, something evil?

Speaker 33 Adds up, circumstantially, to a picture of a guy who's probably committed a pretty brutal homicide.

Speaker 31 Those inside the investigation reveal how they assembled a case for murder from shards of evidence scattered over 28 years and thousands of miles.

Speaker 24 There really isn't a smoking gun.

Speaker 38 Would the pieces come together to form the portrait of a killer?

Speaker 23 If you were looking for a setting for a mystery, San Marino in the early 1980s wasn't the place.

Speaker 4 And a house on Lorain Road, since rebuilt, hardly the ideal stage.

Speaker 42 That's where quiet John Sowas lived.

Speaker 41 He was probably reasonably shy and reserved.

Speaker 23 Patrick Rayerman was John's childhood friend.

Speaker 43 He remembers John as a bit of a mama's boy and, as he was, a bit of a nerd.

Speaker 11 John and I both shared a love of star trek and we would compete with each other trying to out trivia the other individual compare theories about warp speed travel you guys are middle school kids and you're talking about warp speed phasers and well without advanced mathematics but yes

Speaker 36 Eventually, John's enthusiasm for science fiction morphed into a passion for another galaxy that was suddenly accessible in the 80s, computers.

Speaker 36 The nerd became the prototype for today's tech geek, a digital explorer living happily at home with his mom well into his 20s.

Speaker 37 And then he discovered love.

Speaker 47 Did you sense a connection between the two of them?

Speaker 11 I certainly had the sense that they were soulmates.

Speaker 37 Her name was Linda.

Speaker 23 Like John, she loved science fiction and fantasy.

Speaker 42 Linda's pal Sue Kaufman says Linda and John seemed to complement each other as opposites often do.

Speaker 49 He was shy, she outgoing.

Speaker 3 He was short, she at six feet towered over him.

Speaker 6 Between the two of them, I was like, this is the oddest coupling I've ever seen in my life.

Speaker 35 A quirky couple who just clicked, laughingly choosing Halloween as their wedding day in 1983.

Speaker 26 With money tight, they started their life together living in the house on Lorain Road.

Speaker 22 Sue remembers Linda complaining about John's mom, Dee Dee, who liked her cocktails, early and often on many days.

Speaker 6 His mom is a drunk and a smoker, and I really don't like being around her in the smoke and everything. And she's, you know, she's a poor old lady, but she says, I just try and avoid her like crazy.

Speaker 49 But Linda and John couldn't avoid Dee Dee because the guest house on the property, where they might have set up house, had a tenant.

Speaker 6 She goes, we can't live there because that's where the renter is. And I'm like, oh, renter's paying money.
You guys can't. The renter gets the better place.

Speaker 22 With the renter in no hurry to leave and the newlyweds stuck in the main house, John and Linda focused on their careers.

Speaker 25 They proudly made their first major purchase, a new truck.

Speaker 6 They were so happy when they showed up at my house. I don't even remember if they called first or if they actually just drove up one day and said, look, we're in a car.

Speaker 4 With a new ride and a bit of money, they planned a first road trip with Sue to a big sci-fi convention in Phoenix.

Speaker 4 But in early 1985, weeks before the event, Linda called Sue with a puzzling announcement.

Speaker 6 First thing was, you know, we're going to New York.

Speaker 14 And I'm going, what are you going to New York for? Well,

Speaker 6 John looks like he has an interview with a government job or something.

Speaker 32 She says we're going to be back in two weeks.

Speaker 6 Yeah, we're going to be back in a couple of weeks in time for us to get our stuff together and get this trip on the way.

Speaker 36 Except they didn't make it back in time.

Speaker 25 And when the weeks rolled on with no word from her friend, Sue naturally began to worry.

Speaker 29 She called John's mother, Dee Dee.

Speaker 6 She's like, I don't know, they're in Paris. And I'm thinking Paris, California.

Speaker 14 And she goes, I don't know, Paris, France.

Speaker 6 I mean, she's just... three or four sheets to the wind.
And I'm just kind of like,

Speaker 2 right.

Speaker 50 And something else made no sense at all.

Speaker 22 It seemed Linda had abandoned her beloved cats at a pet hotel.

Speaker 6 Her cats were her absolute loves of her life. She would not have left her cats of her own free will.

Speaker 31 Linda's family was alarmed too and filed a missing persons report.

Speaker 55 But when San Marino police followed up by visiting John's mother Didi, she told them the same strange story.

Speaker 7 Didi said that they weren't missing. They were on a job interview that was secret.

Speaker 29 Detectives Tim Miley and Dolores Scott with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Sheriff's Department.

Speaker 52 Kind of weird on its own that Dee Dee Sois had said, my son and his wife are on this secret job interview.

Speaker 47 Right.

Speaker 24 That means she truly believed that he was off on a secret mission job, and that's what she had been told.

Speaker 3 It was so odd.

Speaker 45 Was the young couple missing or not?

Speaker 29 An officer knocked on the door to the guest house where Dee Dee's tenant lived.

Speaker 24 So he went back there to get some more information as to what he might have known about Linda and John. In fact, he came to the door naked.

Speaker 41 But naked.

Speaker 24 Butt naked.

Speaker 4 The tenant in his birthday suit said his name was Christopher Chichester, but had nothing to say about John and Linda.

Speaker 59 There was nowhere to go with the missing persons case, not then.

Speaker 34 But something was about to change around the question that hung in the air, that wasn't going away.

Speaker 40 Where exactly were John and Linda?

Speaker 8 And who or what was really behind the missing couple's secret mission?

Speaker 60 That's what everyone wanted to know.

Speaker 8 When we come back, that mysterious tenant living like a peasant with a royal pedigree.

Speaker 61 He said he was here by himself and was descendant of some royalty in England.

Speaker 8 When behind closed doors continues.

Speaker 23 No one seemed more worried about the whereabouts of the missing John and Linda Soas than their good friend, Sue Kaufman.

Speaker 6 Something's not right. Something's afoot here.

Speaker 39 John's mom, Dee Dee, had told Sue a crazy story about the couple, that it was some kind of top-secret job that had taken them away to France.

Speaker 42 Hard to believe, until postcards from the couple started arriving from Paris.

Speaker 29 Sue got one of them.

Speaker 6 I just saw that it said John and Linda at the bottom. I went,

Speaker 14 answers.

Speaker 17 Maybe she had been wrong to worry.

Speaker 37 Maybe John's mother had been right all all along.

Speaker 53 Maybe John and Linda were off on some secret mission.

Speaker 6 So I just thought, she's off somewhere weird for whatever reason. I kind of played with the idea of witness protection.

Speaker 26 The postcard suggested that John and Linda were gone voluntarily.

Speaker 55 No foul play.

Speaker 23 But then John's mother suddenly changed her tune.

Speaker 7 In July of 1985, Dee Dee calls the police, and now she's distraught.

Speaker 39 Distraught because her guest house tenant had moved out without a word.

Speaker 27 And as she now explained, explained, he was the one telling her secrets behind closed doors.

Speaker 39 It turned out it was Chris Chichester, the very same man who'd greeted police in the nude and had nothing to say, who'd been feeding her information all along about the couple's overseas mission.

Speaker 47 Is she concerned that the guest house tenant who disappeared might have been involved in whatever happened to her son?

Speaker 7 She doesn't know. She's just concerned that the only person that she was contacting them through

Speaker 7 was missing now too. She was concerned because she had no way to contact her son.

Speaker 37 The guest house tenant, the source about a secret government mission?

Speaker 62 Chichester's friends around San Marino back then might have thought it was just another of his fantastical stories.

Speaker 64 This was a good one when he was.

Speaker 50 Lisa Gallegos and Dana Farrar knew Chichester as an eccentric and amusing character.

Speaker 24 He was funny and he was charming.

Speaker 65 He was very interesting to talk to on many subjects.

Speaker 24 He was very bright.

Speaker 65 He knew about a lot of things.

Speaker 15 He was witty.

Speaker 65 You know, it was a lot of fun to hang out with him.

Speaker 23 A film student at USC, he told Dana, often walking around campus with a script or two under his arm.

Speaker 65 We'd go to all of the films together, we'd talk about film.

Speaker 47 One of the movies the two of you saw together was Double Indemnity, a guy plotting a murder.

Speaker 66 This is the best movie, Dana.

Speaker 65 You know, we have to go see Double Indemnity.

Speaker 22 He was a minor British royal, a baronet, said the business card he handed out around San Marino. What did you think a 13th baronet was?

Speaker 65 Well, that was the funny part. I had no idea.

Speaker 21 But she didn't question it, and neither did Corey Woods.

Speaker 61 He said he was here by himself, didn't really have a family, was from England, and was a descendant of some royalty in England.

Speaker 4 Corey and her family were thoroughly impressed by the young aristocrat, who, after services at the Episcopal church they attended together, would dazzle them with his stories.

Speaker 61 He bought a castle in England and he wanted to ship it over here brick by brick so we could have, you know, an authentic English, you know, chapel.

Speaker 23 The charming young Britt had also become the town's resident raconteur, sometimes hosting parties at Lorain Road.

Speaker 26 Oddly, though he lived in the guest house, Dana noticed that he seemed to have the run of the entire property.

Speaker 65 I just said to him, well, why do you keep going in your landlord's house, Chris?

Speaker 24 Because it just seems so off.

Speaker 65 And he said, I remember this so well, he said, oh, they are away. They will not mind.

Speaker 37 And of course, they, John and Linda, were away, with only drunken Dee Dee isolated in the main house.

Speaker 69 And after Chichester, the tenant, left, she was an old woman racked by loneliness and lost hope, fading fast.

Speaker 11 You want to talk about taking what wind was in her sails out of those sails and leaving her in the doldrums. It certainly did.

Speaker 41 She died a few years later, by many accounts, a broken woman.

Speaker 31 In San Marino, meanwhile, life went on.

Speaker 23 The Lorain Road property found buyers, and in May 1994, almost a decade after John and Linda disappeared, the new owners decided to install a pool.

Speaker 4 They cleared the old backyard and started digging until the work suddenly stopped and police were summoned to the scene.

Speaker 12 And they said that they had discovered a body. Well, initially, of course, we thought, no,

Speaker 12 it doesn't happen at San Marino.

Speaker 23 Tricia Guff was a San Marino detective when the human skeleton was found.

Speaker 12 And we said, hey, there was a missing person at that address. So there was a lot of information coming together on that first day.

Speaker 53 It was a man's skeleton.

Speaker 21 And that old missing persons report suggested who that man was.

Speaker 12 I didn't need the DNA. I didn't need the dental records.
I knew that was John.

Speaker 70 John Sowas' friend Sue Kaufman heard the details of how the body had been dressed, jeans and a plaid shirt, and the truth she dreaded hit home.

Speaker 6 And I said, that's exactly what John wore, like almost all the time. That was his way that he liked to dress.

Speaker 45 The remains told more of the story.

Speaker 4 Blows to to the head, six stab wounds in the back.

Speaker 41 Not just murder, but a brutal murder.

Speaker 62 A missing person's case that had gone permanently cold was transformed in that moment through a very active, super-heated homicide investigation.

Speaker 22 There were two other people who'd lived at Lorain Road then and were unaccounted for.

Speaker 47 John's wife Linda, still missing, and the tenant in the guest house.

Speaker 17 Exactly, where were they? And was it possible one of them was a killer?

Speaker 10 Coming up, detectives get to work on that guest house to see if it had any clues to give up.

Speaker 14 It did.

Speaker 7 They found four pretty large blood spots.

Speaker 8 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 29 Bags of bones, a buried human skeleton.

Speaker 62 Not what you'd expect to find in a suburban backyard, especially in a place like sleepy San Marino, California.

Speaker 33 It was a big story, huge story.

Speaker 52 Frank Girardo was the editor of the Pasadena Star News.

Speaker 33 This is May 1994. The cable news networks are taking off.
There's a 24-hour news cycle and a body buried in a backyard is newsworthy.

Speaker 26 There was no question it was murder.

Speaker 34 And if John had been killed and buried in his own backyard, were Linda's remains in a shallow grave of their own?

Speaker 27 The police looked but found no signs in the yard and found nothing.

Speaker 33 And the thing is that after all that, they had one body and nothing else.

Speaker 39 Two key questions remained unanswered.

Speaker 37 Where was Linda and where was the other person who lived on the Lorain Road property then, the guesthouse tenant, Christopher Chichester?

Speaker 33 So early on, the police decided that they needed to find Linda and they needed to find Chris.

Speaker 33 There was only a couple of options for how John's body got back there and and how it got buried and those two options were unaccounted for. Chris and Linda.

Speaker 47 Either one of them might have might have done it or certainly would know something about who did it.

Speaker 33 Well it was imperative that they find him.

Speaker 39 In any homicide investigation the spouse is a natural suspect, often the first suspect considered.

Speaker 29 And Linda was a large woman who could conceivably have overpowered her husband.

Speaker 37 But as police started interviewing anyone around town who knew any of the occupants of the Lorain Road property, tips about the guest house tenant, Christopher Chichester, piled up quickly.

Speaker 35 Tips suggesting that he was the one police should be looking at.

Speaker 34 Even those once friendly with him now recalled him in unsavory terms as a manipulator, Dana Farrar said, always out for the next free lunch.

Speaker 65 He would show up at my apartment, hmm, that smells good, you know. And I think after a while, I just kind of kicked him out.
I was like, bye.

Speaker 58 More weird stories, how the 20-something Chichester sometimes hit on younger girls.

Speaker 29 Corey Woods said he asked her out when she was only 12.

Speaker 61 And my mom said a very definitive no.

Speaker 61 And then after that, you know, it got a little weird and he started asking other inappropriate girls to say.

Speaker 17 Not age-appropriate.

Speaker 61 Not age-appropriate.

Speaker 27 Some dusty old stories, remains buried nearly a decade, not a great start for a murder investigation.

Speaker 37 But that guest house was still standing, and detectives got to work seeing if it had any clues to give up about the man who once lived there.

Speaker 7 They did a luminol in the guesthouse, and they found four pretty large blood spots.

Speaker 9 They couldn't tell if it was human or animal blood, but detectives thought the spots could be evidence of violence from years earlier.

Speaker 32 And they also learned something else that they guessed was important.

Speaker 7 A detective at San Marino had made a connection that the tenant in the guesthouse had the victim's victim's truck.

Speaker 23 The truck had been John and Linda's prized possession, and before they went missing in 1985, they'd planned that first big road trip in it.

Speaker 27 But years later, after they'd vanished, it was traced to Connecticut and to the guesthouse tenant.

Speaker 24 I mean, why would he take the missing person's couple truck, and the truck would end up in Connecticut?

Speaker 37 And what's more, records showed he'd changed his name from the Baronet Christopher Chichester to Christopher Crowe working on Wall Street.

Speaker 22 And a deeper check found he'd had a long pick-a-name habit.

Speaker 38 That he was no royal, not even a Brit, but a German national now racing through new identities, like someone bent on covering his tracks.

Speaker 7 And that's when he disappears.

Speaker 47 He's just in the wind again. Right.

Speaker 27 And with that, the murder investigation stalled.

Speaker 18 The years went by, and in San Marino they might have forgotten all about poor dead John Soas and his missing wife, and about the oddball tenant for the Lorain Road guesthouse.

Speaker 11 Authorities search over land and sea for a man and his seven-year-old daughter.

Speaker 62 A family drama playing out on a leafy Boston Street in the summer of 2008.

Speaker 26 A custody battle that became a national story because of the name at its center.

Speaker 68 The man who insists his name is Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 29 One of America's famous names, of course.

Speaker 58 But it was the face that got everyone's attention back in California.

Speaker 7 Tricia Guff, retired as a detective by then, gasped when she saw the photo.

Speaker 12 When I saw it in the newspaper, I knew that was him.

Speaker 3 Could it be?

Speaker 27 Could the fugitive with the famous name at the center of a con man tale on the east coast be the same man wanted on the west coast for a darker, near-forgotten crime?

Speaker 69 Was there now a way to awaken the long-dormant case of the murder on Lorain Road?

Speaker 8 Coming up, a Rockefeller accused of murder.

Speaker 6 Oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something.

Speaker 4 When behind closed doors continues.

Speaker 9 The news out of Boston was crazy. A head scratcher that screamed front page.

Speaker 64 A bitter divorce, a bizarre kidnapping, a famous last name.

Speaker 42 It all seemed worlds away from that decades-old cold case in California, the unsolved murder of a quiet computer geek named John Soas, who'd gone missing with his wife Linda.

Speaker 35 But to some, the unfolding story in Boston was a link at last to that brutal, nearly forgotten murder.

Speaker 33 The women from the party recognized him, and so did all of his neighbors in San Marino.

Speaker 20 Frank Girardo was all over the story.

Speaker 33 What the FBI's wanted poster did was set off the sparks of recognition people knew that Clark was Chris.

Speaker 35 Clark Rockefeller, yes, he said, one of those Rockefellers, appeared to be the latest and boldest reinvention yet of that guesthouse tenant who'd slipped under the radar so many years ago.

Speaker 55 It was an audacious lie, now unraveling nightly on the 6 o'clock news.

Speaker 47 The storyline was that this Clark Rockefeller had been divorced after nearly 12 years of marriage to a big money business consultant named Sandra Boss, and that in a bitter custody battle after his quiet life of privilege had dissolved, he'd kidnapped their little daughter, nicknamed Snooks, and gone on the lamb.

Speaker 50 For the love of his daughter, the narrative went, he'd risk everything.

Speaker 38 The sympathetic mother pleaded on national television for her daughter's return.

Speaker 13 I ask you now, please, please bring Snooks back.

Speaker 70 She wasn't much help for the FBI because like the public, she said, she had no idea who her husband really was.

Speaker 70 The con man had been passing himself off as a Rockefeller in high society circles for well over a decade.

Speaker 68 And then they said, Clark Rockefeller put his picture up there and I almost fell off the elliptic machine.

Speaker 20 Socialite Roxanne West remembered meeting Clark Rockefeller at a posh Manhattan art gallery.

Speaker 68 He was so mild-mannered and very polite and a gentleman.

Speaker 25 Rockefeller, her new gentleman friend, liked to send weird and provocative text messages.

Speaker 18 One sent, he claimed, while he was giving a private tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Speaker 20 Then this one.

Speaker 52 In In a submarine, crowded, strange, thought of you just a minute ago.

Speaker 68 The texts were so wild and so far-fetched, it would just giggle and go, where does he come up with this stuff?

Speaker 3 There was something odd about him, but his name?

Speaker 68 One of my friends could have sworn he was definitely a Rockefeller because of his bone structure.

Speaker 26 It was a convincing cover that had lasted years.

Speaker 22 But by the time he was caught, six days into his flight with Snooks, the fraud was exposed and his real name, Christian Carl Gerhardtstrider, in every front-page top-of-the-newscast story.

Speaker 18 In California, investigators immediately reopened the John Sowas homicide case and the lead started pouring in.

Speaker 7 We got a lot of phone calls and a lot of people who did not

Speaker 7 come forward in 94 came forward in 2008. So there were some new pieces of information that we got as a result of the publicity.

Speaker 37 For Sue Kaufman, best friend of the still missing Linda Soas, it was reason to hope after all these years.

Speaker 6 Oh my God, this is really an answer. It may not be definitive, but this guy knows something.

Speaker 39 If he did, he certainly wasn't telling the police.

Speaker 22 But he did have plenty to say to NBC's Natalie Morales in his only televised interview.

Speaker 12 Are you a mystery man?

Speaker 16 I'd like to be known as a good man.

Speaker 19 If anything, I'd like to be known as a quiet man living a quiet life.

Speaker 22 He admitted using a string of fake names, Chris Chichester, one of them.

Speaker 15 You assumed different identities?

Speaker 19 Yes, but for specific purposes, much like a writer would take a pen name.

Speaker 20 But what about the murder of John Sohas?

Speaker 39 Did he have anything to say about that?

Speaker 61 Did you kill John and Linda Sohas?

Speaker 19 My entire life I have always been a pacifist. I'm a Quaker.

Speaker 19 and I believe in nonviolence.

Speaker 19 And I can fairly certainly say that I've never hurt anyone.

Speaker 7 When I saw that, I thought that was the closest thing to a confession I had ever seen or heard. What do you say? Did you kill John Alenda Souas? I think you say no, no, but you don't say,

Speaker 7 I'm a Quaker.

Speaker 50 Even as Clark Rockefeller's kidnapping case played out in Boston, the California investigators were quietly at work building the case for murder.

Speaker 7 So we basically had to do CPR in this case and just get it up and running.

Speaker 50 To resuscitate the case, they went back to find those folks who'd known the suspect when he was calling himself the 13th Baronet, Christopher Chichester.

Speaker 22 To the Episcopal Church, where he'd worked his charms after Sunday services, one man remembered Chichester asking to borrow a chainsaw.

Speaker 22 And now, Dana Farrar told detectives something that seemed like key evidence.

Speaker 27 During one of Chichester's backyard trivial pursuit parties, she'd noticed that a part of the lawn looked like it had been freshly dug up.

Speaker 65 I said to him,

Speaker 65 you know, what's with your yard?

Speaker 24 What happened to your yard?

Speaker 65 And he just said, well, I'm having plumbing problems.

Speaker 20 Detectives were astounded at the implications.

Speaker 7 At that point, he's taking ownership of the grave, because that's exactly where John's body was found.

Speaker 38 And the detectives poring over the evidence from the Boston kidnapping case found this.

Speaker 23 Reason to believe their prime suspect had totally rebooted his identity after San Marino.

Speaker 7 In Boston, we found some documents and some computer hard drives. His life begins roughly in 1988.

Speaker 41 What did that tell you?

Speaker 7 Well, I would say it's

Speaker 7 some evidence of a consciousness of guilt, of trying to erase a part of one's life.

Speaker 39 But detectives couldn't erase the nagging questions about Linda, the victim's wife.

Speaker 29 Was she still alive?

Speaker 48 And remember those postcards from Paris?

Speaker 39 She had apparently sent them all after the couple had disappeared.

Speaker 47 I think they also couldn't eliminate the wife, who's also missing and whose remains or body have themselves not been found.

Speaker 7 Yes, that obviously is something that we had to look at.

Speaker 7 However, the more we dug into Linda Solis, we just couldn't find anything sinister or any plausible reason why she would do this or that she had the means to disappear and start a new life.

Speaker 48 Was the case trial ready?

Speaker 22 The answer was at hand, with Christian Gerhardt Strider extradited from Boston to California, now officially a defendant in a case of murder.

Speaker 60 Coming up, the woman he wooed and fooled as Clark Rockefeller takes the stand.

Speaker 10 How he tricked even a Harvard MBA.

Speaker 15 I liked him. I thought he was very intelligent, funny, quirky, very charming.

Speaker 8 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 67 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 67 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

Speaker 67 Set in my home state of Maine and the greater New England area, it's my goal to dig through the archives to bring the stories of the people at the heart of these cases to light.

Speaker 67 Listen to Dark Down East, wherever you get your podcasts.

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Speaker 23 The state of California knew it was a high-stakes gamble to try and prove at trial that the con man calling himself Clark Rockefeller was also a murderer whose real name was Christian Carl Gerhardtsreider.

Speaker 4 After all, the case rested heavily on pieces of circumstantial evidence 28 years old.

Speaker 7 We're concerned. It was going to take a smart jury to put those together, and we didn't have a smoking gun.

Speaker 39 Gerhard Schrider pleaded not guilty and hired a pair of prominent Boston attorneys to defend him, Jeffrey Denner and Brad Bailey.

Speaker 16 There was no motive. There was no reason he would have done this.

Speaker 72 We are on the record of the matter of the people versus Gerhardt Schrider. All counsel were present.

Speaker 34 Still, when the trial opened, prosecutor Habib Balian confidently offered a series of friends and neighbors with odd tales from around the time John and Linda Soas disappeared.

Speaker 27 Jurors heard about the bloodstains found years later inside the guesthouse.

Speaker 23 And then testimony from a neighbor suggesting the tenant had been trying to destroy possible evidence.

Speaker 66 I called him and said, Chris, what are you burning in the fireplace?

Speaker 1 What was his response?

Speaker 24 I'm burning carpet.

Speaker 42 One church friend said the defendant had tried to sell her a rug with a strange spot.

Speaker 68 Well, I thought it looked a little like blood.

Speaker 76 Whose chainsaw chainsaw was it? Who's mine?

Speaker 18 They heard that story about the borrowed chainsaw.

Speaker 14 Now what could that mean?

Speaker 76 For approximately how long to the best of your estimation was it that he had this chainsaw?

Speaker 77 Several months.

Speaker 22 I did.

Speaker 35 And Dana Farrar took the stand to describe that backyard party the defendant hosted just yards from a patch of freshly turned soil.

Speaker 65 It looked like someone had dug up part of the lawn and there was dirt, kind of, you know, crumbled dirt on top, like someone had just been digging there. I said, what's going on with your yard, Chris?

Speaker 24 It's all dug up.

Speaker 76 What did he say?

Speaker 65 He said he had been having plumbing problems.

Speaker 76 There is no plumbing to the left of that red line.

Speaker 57 He has a party that hosts a party feet away from where he'd buried a victim?

Speaker 14 Yes.

Speaker 7 I can't explain it,

Speaker 7 but he did.

Speaker 23 But perhaps the strongest piece of circumstantial evidence tying the defendant to the murder was this.

Speaker 34 John Sowis's skull had been found wrapped in two plastic university book bags, one from USC, the other from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee.

Speaker 7 In doing a background on

Speaker 7 Gerrit Schreider, he had attended both those universities.

Speaker 42 A physical connection, finally, between the con man's real life and those bones in the ground.

Speaker 20 More evidence?

Speaker 37 After his San Marino days, after the murder witnesses said, the con man was no longer the expansive raconteur eager to work the room, but was instead living like a fugitive.

Speaker 78 He told me that he was from Pasadena, California,

Speaker 78 that his father was an anesthesiologist, and his mother was a child

Speaker 78 actress.

Speaker 36 In the late 80s, Mohoko Minabe lived with the defendant, then calling himself Christopher Crowe, an unusual guy, Minabe testified, who became paranoid and obsessed with privacy after a detective called to ask about the truck traced to his latest phony name, John and Linda Soas' truck.

Speaker 78 After the call, it was markedly different.

Speaker 76 And how was it markedly different?

Speaker 78 The furtiveness, the cutting off of all social ties.

Speaker 39 The defendant told Minabe it wasn't a detective who called, but someone out to get him and his family.

Speaker 27 She said he suggested they marry and go into hiding.

Speaker 78 He grew a beard and a mustache.

Speaker 14 Okay, what else?

Speaker 78 And he started to wear contacts. I helped color his hair.

Speaker 37 And while he was still living with Minabe, he picked a new phony name out of thin air, and it was a beauty.

Speaker 4 At first, it was just to get a table in a packed restaurant.

Speaker 33 And they say, who can we make the reservation for?

Speaker 14 And he says, Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 31 Minabi dumped him, but he never dumped the Rockefeller name.

Speaker 46 It would help win him his biggest catch ever, his gold-plated wife, Sandra Boss, and keep his secret safe for years.

Speaker 76 Who did he introduce himself as to you?

Speaker 78 Clark Rockefeller.

Speaker 76 Did you ever doubt what he was telling you?

Speaker 15 In hindsight, I wish I had, but no. I assumed that what he was telling me was true.

Speaker 31 Sandra Boss had spent the years since that public kidnapping case, shunning the limelight, doing everything she could to get as far from her ex-husband as possible.

Speaker 29 She even moved overseas to London with their daughter.

Speaker 38 But now, as a witness for the prosecution, she would have to divulge details of their life together.

Speaker 4 Details the prosecution hoped would show how she'd been used as a cover, unwittingly helping a killer hide in plain sight.

Speaker 15 I liked him. I thought he was very intelligent, funny, quirky,

Speaker 15 very charming.

Speaker 20 The Stanford graduate told how back when she was getting her MBA at Harvard, they clicked while play acting at a clue-themed party.

Speaker 15 We're supposed to come as a character, and I was Miss Scarlett.

Speaker 76 Okay. Was the defendant in character?

Speaker 1 Yes.

Speaker 15 Who was he? He was Professor Plum.

Speaker 45 What did he tell you about himself?

Speaker 15 He said that he was raised in New York and that he grew up in a townhouse on the east side, Sutton Place. He went to Yale beginning at 14 for math.

Speaker 76 Did he claim to you association with the well-known Rockefeller family?

Speaker 41 Yes. How so?

Speaker 15 Constantly. This Rockefeller doesn't like me because I, you know, got angry at him when he was a child at a party.

Speaker 15 they married in 1995 or did they according to boss she later learned that Rockefeller had figured out how to tie the knot without leaving a paper trail we went through a wedding ceremony in the Quaker meeting house in Nantucket he claimed at the time that he had filed all of the paperwork so that it was recognized

Speaker 15 as a legal marriage, except that he hadn't done so so it wasn't. I'd never been married before.
I didn't really know how these things worked, so idiotically didn't think about it.

Speaker 3 The prosecution suggested that with his marriage to boss, the con man had hit a double jackpot.

Speaker 27 She earned north of a million a year, giving her house husband and stay-at-home dad control of the lavish family budget.

Speaker 1 Is that your signature? Yep.

Speaker 15 He said it was more convenient for him to pay the bills if he had checks that were signed.

Speaker 20 And with no bank accounts of his own, he could live the life of a Rockefeller in Boston's insular Beacon Hill where few were likely to ask awkward or incriminating questions.

Speaker 15 He was very clear right from the start that he had a high need for privacy because of his famous family.

Speaker 22 Boss recalled that he stopped traveling by plane once ID was required.

Speaker 35 And perhaps most telling for the prosecution, she testified that her husband vowed to never go to two places, California, where John Sowas was murdered, and Connecticut, where police had once looked for him in connection with the Psoas' truck.

Speaker 15 I do not enter the state of Connecticut. I will not touch my feet on its soil.
It was very specific about Connecticut.

Speaker 76 What about California?

Speaker 15 California, he also said that he hated and would not visit.

Speaker 23 But deep into their marriage, his life of carefully crafted invisibility began coming apart, melting away with lie after lies, as Frank Girardo, who's written a book about the the case.

Speaker 33 He told her that his mother was really a child actress by the name of Ann Carter.

Speaker 7 And she said, wait a minute.

Speaker 33 When we first met, you told me your mom's name was Mary.

Speaker 33 Now you're telling me your mom's name is Ann Carter.

Speaker 42 Did you just put your finger on his fatal flaw that in the end, he just couldn't not lie?

Speaker 16 He couldn't help himself.

Speaker 33 This man, Clark Rockefeller, couldn't keep his lies straight.

Speaker 36 By then, Sandra Boss told the court her marriage was in serious trouble, headed toward divorce.

Speaker 4 But the private investigators she hired were stymied over a basic question.

Speaker 15 They couldn't tell me who I was married to.

Speaker 14 Eventually, she and the world found out who Clark Rockefeller really was.

Speaker 25 And prosecutors believed they'd made the case that he was more than just a con man, he was a murderer.

Speaker 76 Christian Carl Gerhardt's right.

Speaker 76 He's guilty of murder.

Speaker 39 But the defense was ready to attack each item of damning but circumstantial evidence and to point the jury to the figure hovering over the case.

Speaker 32 the more likely suspect, the defense would argue, the victim's missing wife, Linda.

Speaker 60 Coming up.

Speaker 8 Remember those postcards signed by Linda and sent from Paris?

Speaker 77 That supports the theory that Linda was alive after the death of John Solas.

Speaker 4 And if she was alive, was she the killer? When behind closed doors continues.

Speaker 70 A six-man, six-woman jury was all that stood between Christian Gerhard Strider, aka Clark Rockefeller, and freedom.

Speaker 26 He was nearing the end of his prison sentence for kidnapping his daughter in Boston.

Speaker 20 And now, reasonable doubt in what the defense called an old, cold, and still untold murder case seemed within reach.

Speaker 77 That's not spin.

Speaker 77 That's not smoke.

Speaker 20 His defense team conceded right off their client was a fraud and an oddball.

Speaker 77 This man

Speaker 77 used different names since coming to the United States in 1978.

Speaker 39 But attorney Brad Bailey said none of that made him a murderer.

Speaker 77 This had nothing to do with covering up a 28-year-old homicide and everything

Speaker 77 to do with perpetuating this gaspiesque recreation.

Speaker 43 In court, they attacked the forensic evidence as weak and mostly non-existent and got the prosecution's own experts to admit that.

Speaker 18 Not a single fingerprint or speck of DNA to tie the defendant to the victim, the bloodstains, or even those university book bags.

Speaker 78 That is correct.

Speaker 65 I did not detect a DNA profile.

Speaker 38 The defense also challenged the neighbor who testified that she saw blood on a carpet the defendant had tried to sell her.

Speaker 4 Had she really?

Speaker 9 And you don't know that that was blood, do you?

Speaker 78 Not absolutely.

Speaker 39 Another challenge, this one to Detective Tim Miley.

Speaker 23 What about that chainsaw the defendant supposedly borrowed once upon a time?

Speaker 16 Is there any allegation in this case that this chainsaw was used in connection with the murder or disposal of the body of John Silvas?

Speaker 7 No.

Speaker 72 So your answer is no, there's no proof of that?

Speaker 7 There's no proof of that.

Speaker 36 And in the absence of proof, the defense offered an alternative theory of the crime, another suspect, their stepping stone toward reasonable doubt, the still-missing Linda.

Speaker 77 We're going to ask you to envision whether John Solas's missing wife might have had just as much capacity to sneak up behind her husband and strike those blows.

Speaker 34 The defense pointed out that she was bigger and stronger than both her husband and the man in the defendant's chair.

Speaker 43 What's more, the theory went, she, the wife, might well have had a motive.

Speaker 18 while even the prosecution declined to suggest any reason why the defendant wanted John Soas dead.

Speaker 16 It made a lot more sense in terms of motive, in terms of reason to kill, that Linda had been the one to have done it.

Speaker 3 Wasn't there trouble in paradise?

Speaker 42 The defense pressed the couple's friend, Sue Kaufman.

Speaker 37 Linda, desperate to move out of her mother-in-law's house.

Speaker 77 You knew that Linda was frustrated about the living situation, and those are words that you have used, correct?

Speaker 6 Yes, she was frustrated.

Speaker 77 She shared that frustration with you, didn't she?

Speaker 6 Yes, she did.

Speaker 42 Kaufman seethed inside, appalled at what was being suggested.

Speaker 6 I'm like, dude, you're so far off base that I can't even answer your questions with anger. So I'm just going to answer your questions.

Speaker 43 But it wasn't just a motive, the defense said.

Speaker 52 Wasn't it also clear that Linda had survived whatever had happened to John, since she was the one handwriting expert said, had sent postcards to friends weeks later from Paris?

Speaker 77 Linda Sohos is the writer of the two postcards that you examined.

Speaker 12 Yes.

Speaker 77 That supports the theory that Linda was alive after the death of John Sohos.

Speaker 26 As for the testimony of Sandra Boss, tales that seemed to suggest their client was the most clever con man alive.

Speaker 27 Well, why would so nimble a schemer commit such a crude murder, burying his victim's remains in plastic book bags from universities he'd attended?

Speaker 16 That person would also be one of the stupidest murderers in the history of Southern California if he's this master con, master manipulator, master mind that that they make him out to be.

Speaker 16 He's going to kill somebody, bury him 10 feet from where he lives, essentially leaving a plaque saying, hey guys, it's me that killed him.

Speaker 35 Enough doubt, the defense thought, if not for acquittal, then to at least hang the case.

Speaker 51 But prosecutors were ready.

Speaker 22 They'd examined and eliminated the Linda Diddit theory, and just before trial, they thought they'd solve the mystery of those postcards he'd supposedly sent from Paris.

Speaker 35 The con man, they would show, had someone in Europe mail them for him.

Speaker 27 He'd done it before, a college girlfriend producing a postcard he'd supposedly sent to her from London.

Speaker 45 England is great.

Speaker 7 We know that he was attending an English class at University of Southern California.

Speaker 37 He wasn't in London.

Speaker 14 He was not in London.

Speaker 7 So that explains away the postcards.

Speaker 27 The evidence was in, and though much of it was damning, it was almost all circumstantial.

Speaker 32 The defendant, his lawyer said, was confident on verdict day.

Speaker 77 He went into the courtroom feeling upbeat, hopeful, and optimistic.

Speaker 27 It was a miscalculation, to say the least.

Speaker 29 The jurors took only a few hours to decide.

Speaker 77 We, the jury, in the above entitled Action, find a defendant, Christian Gerhardt's writer, guilty of the crime of murder in the first degree of John's.

Speaker 22 A guilty verdict reached quickly, jurors said, and with little debate.

Speaker 30 To Sue Kaufman, it meant most, if not all, of the answers about what had happened to her lost friends, John and Linda.

Speaker 6 In my heart, I know he's responsible for whatever happened to make those two gone.

Speaker 7 Are you convinced that Linda is dead as well? Yes.

Speaker 41 To the end, he'd insisted his lawyers privately call him Clark, as in Clark Rockefeller, and they did.

Speaker 22 But the man who'd invented that name and so many others, who'd spent his adult life convincing others to believe his lies and to like him and reward him for those lies, failed on all counts with the jury of his peers.

Speaker 16 Unfortunately, there was an interaction here of somebody that they instinctively hated, didn't understand.

Speaker 59 They didn't like him at all.

Speaker 41 And they hated him.

Speaker 16 And they were laughing at him openly.

Speaker 4 Not a fitting end for a Rockefeller, perhaps, but for a liar who was also a killer, maybe just right.

Speaker 8 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thanks for joining us.

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