Christian Gerhartsreiter

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Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter (born February 21, 1961 in Siegsdorf ) is a German impostor convicted and imprisoned in the USA for murder , who became known as Clark Rockefeller .

Life

In 1978, the then seventeen year old Christian Gerhartsreiter traveled to the United States, apparently with the plan to become an actor. He gave the immigration authorities an invitation from the married couple Elmer and Jean Kelln. He had met the Kellns, a dentist from California and his wife, on their trip to Germany in the same year. As a supposed exchange student and the son of wealthy German parents, he found acceptance with the Savio couple in Berlin (Connecticut) and attended high school there in 1979. In 1980 he contacted his parents for the first time. He informed the father Simon Gerhartsreiter, a painter by profession, and the mother Irmgard, a seamstress, of his name change (Christopher Chichester) . When the Savios put him in front of the door, he set off for Hollywood according to his original plan . He first enrolled at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and called himself Chris Gerhart .

In order to obtain a residence permit for the USA, he married Amy Jersild Duhnke in Madison (Wisconsin) in 1981 . The then 22-year-old Duhnke allowed herself to be persuaded to get married because otherwise he was allegedly threatened with forced recruitment by the Bundeswehr and a frontline deployment in the Cold War. She filed for divorce in 1992, stating that he left her the day after the wedding.

In the early eighties he lived in the garden house of the Sohus family (Ruth, called "Didi" Sohus, their adoptive son John Sohus and his wife Linda) in San Marino , a suburb of Los Angeles . Here he called himself Chris Chichester and posed as a film student. 1985 John and Linda and then Gerhartsreiter / Chichester disappeared from the property without a trace.

More aliases followed. In the late 1980s he worked as a stockbroker in New York under the name Christopher Crowe . According to his own statement, a godfather who has since died identified him as Clark Rockefeller .

In 1994 he married Sandra Boss, a wealthy Harvard graduate, who was a partner at McKinsey and earned around $ 1.4 million annually. Boss divorced him in 2007 because he refused to give her information about his true identity . Due to the divorce, he lost custody of his daughter from this marriage, which he then kidnapped. There was a charge and a prison sentence of several years. In the course of the process, various aliases of the “false Rockefeller” were uncovered.

In March 2011, the now imprisoned person was also charged with murdering John Sohus, the adopted son of his former landlord Ruth Sohus, in 1985. Sohu's body, which could only be identified by DNA analysis in 2010 , was discovered in 1994 during excavation work in the garden of the family's former residence in San Marino. Sohus and his wife Linda were previously thought to be missing. There is still no trace of Linda Sohus, who tried to portray Gerhartsreiter's defense as a possible perpetrator. The process began in March 2013; on April 10, Gerhartsreiter was found guilty of the murder of John Sohus. The defense announced a revision procedure . In August 2013, the sentence was set from 27 years to life . The appeal proceedings were concluded on October 23, 2015 with slight reductions in the sentence, and in his judgment also lists the circumstantial evidence that led to the first conviction.

Others

The film based on his life story Who is Clark Rockefeller? was filmed in 2010 with Eric McCormack in the lead role and Sherry Stringfield as Sandra Boss. In 2011, the American journalist and author Mark Seal published the book The man in the rockefeller suit - the astonishing rise and spectacular fall of a serial imposter through Gerhartsreiter (German book title: The man who was Rockefeller: The rise and fall of a Bavarian impostor ).

literature

  • Walter Kirn : Blood will out: the true story of a murder, a mystery, and a masquerade . Liveright Publishing Corporation, New York 2013

Movie

  • My friend Rockefeller , documentary by Steffi Kammerer (2014, 87 min.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michele McPhee: Fresh Details on Mystery Man Clark Rockefeller as Trial Opens. In: ABC News , May 26, 2009 (English).
  2. ↑ German "Rockefeller" for murder in court. In: Die Welt , March 10, 2013.
  3. ↑ a b c d Marc Pitzke : Man with many masks. In: Spiegel Online , March 17, 2011.
  4. ^ Mark Seal, "The Man in the Rockefeller Suit," Vanity Fair 2008 [1]
  5. ↑ Rockefeller held without bail. In: The Boston Globe , August 5, 2008.
  6. ↑ Fake Rockefeller has been imprisoned for four years. In: Spiegel Online , June 13, 2009.
  7. ↑ Elusive 'Clark Rockefeller' figure charged in 1980s slaying of San Marino man. In: Los Angeles Times , March 15, 2011 (English).
  8. ↑ http://www.zeit.de/news/2013-06/21/kriminalitaet-falscher-deutscher-rockefeller---mordstrafmass-erst-im-august-21015003 dpa-newsticker from June 21, 2013 on Die Zeit . de
  9. ↑ Rockefeller impostor convicted of cold-case murder. In: Boston Herald , April 10, 2013 (English).
  10. ^ Sentence in murder trial: "False Rockefeller" sentenced to 27 years in prison , Spiegel Online from August 15, 2013.
  11. ↑ B251546 Appeal from a judgment of the Superior Court of Los Angeles County. (PDF) In: California Courts, The Judicial Branch of California. The court of appeal of the state of California second appelate district division eight, October 23, 2015, accessed January 16, 2016 .
  12. ↑ Mark Seal: The man in the Rockefeller suit. In: mark-seal.com , (accessed December 16, 2011, English).
  13. ↑ My friend Rockefeller , documentation by Steffi Kammerer ( Memento from July 5, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  14. ↑ Incredible story of a German impostor . Die Welt , September 27, 2016 (accessed July 5, 2018)
personal data
SURNAME Gerhartsreiter, Christian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gerhartsreiter, Christian Karl; Rockefeller, Clark
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German impostor
DATE OF BIRTH February 21, 1961
PLACE OF BIRTH Siegsdorf