Rockefeller Impostor Pleads Not Guilty in Alhambra Court

A man who masqueraded as a member of the Rockefeller family appeared in court on Friday on charges of murdering his landlady's son and burying the body under his San Marino residence in the mid '80s.

Christian Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant who went by the name Clark Rockefeller entered a not guilty plea at an L.A. County courthouse in Alhambra. Gerhartsreiter, 50, was extradited to L.A. from from a Boston prison earlier this week where he was serving a prison sentence after being convicted of kidnapping his daughers, Reigh Boss.

And the mystery only gets curiouser from there, according to the SacBee:

His arrest connected him to the San Marino cold-case murder of John Sohus, whose body parts were found in 1994 beneath the lawn at a home where Gerhartsreiter had rented a guest house under his assumed identity Chris Chichester.

John Sohus and Linda Sohus disappeared in 1985. Gerhartsreiter could face a maximum sentence of 26 years to life in prison if convicted on the murder charge.

The Bavarian-born Gerhartsreiter came to the U.S. as an exchange student when he was 17. In the early 1980s, he was known as Chris Chichester, a relative of Lord Mountbatten and a would-be film producer who lived in a San Marino guest house.

He later went by Christopher Crowe, a bond salesman in Greenwich, Conn. By the early 1990s, he had turned up as Clark Rockefeller.

"Mr. Rockefeller" was profiled in the January 2009 issue of Vanity Fair.