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Con Man Connected to 1985 LA Area Disappearence
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A house at 1920 Lorain Road in San Marino, just south of Pasadena, where the previous owners of the property, Jonathan and Linda Sohus, vanished without a trace in 1985. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)
It's a very strange story that spans nearly 30 years. A German man who lived in a guest house of a San Marino, CA couple that disappeared (and are presumed dead) in 1985 disappeared himself during the case, only to recently turn up as the kidnapping suspect of his daughter on the East Coast this summer. That German man was Christopher Chichester and was a "person of interest" in the San Marino case before he disappeared. Just recently, his prints came up when he, under the name Clark Rockefeller, was arrested in Baltimore for kidnapping his daughter in Boston.
LA County Sheriff's have positively identified him as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
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Piecing together his story is a journey through false IDs and scams. He was originally Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German exchange student living off wealthy families in Connecticut in the early 1980s, then next heard of as a runaway teen husband in Wisconsin (got his green card off that one) and later as a Wall St. bond trader named Christopher Crowe. Then he was involved in the San Marino case as Christopher Chichester and finally as Clark Rockefeller in the recent Boston kidnapping case.
As this story gets wider and wider coverage throughout the media, more people scammed by Gerhartsreiter are likely to come out.
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