The Thirteenth Baronet

From 1982 to 1985, Christo­pher Mount­bat­ten Chich­ester rent­ed a guest house from Ruth Sohus on Lor­raine Road in San Mari­no. I lived only a cou­ple blocks away and Chich­ester vis­it­ed my neigh­bor across the street many times, but I can only recall meet­ing him once. He sat in the chair at the bar­ber shop, get­ting his hair cut, while I wait­ed my turn. He was in his twen­ties, short and slight, and he spoke with an aris­to­crat­ic accent. I didn’t pay much atten­tion to him because I didn’t real­ize what a big deal he was.

He was British, a descen­dant of Sir Frances Chich­ester, the first per­son to sail around the world alone, and he was a nephew of Lord Mount­bat­ten, one of the Three Supreme Allied Com­man­ders in
World War II. Chichester’s busi­ness card pro­claimed his roy­al her­itage: “Christo­pher Chich­ester, XIII Bt (13th baronet), San Mari­no, CA.” It sport­ed his fam­i­ly crest, an egret with wings spread and an eel in its mouth, over the mot­to, “Firm en Foi” (firm in faith). He was a San Mari­no Rotar­i­an and a mem­ber of the City Club; he hob­nobbed with civic lead­ers; and he pro­duced a tele­vi­sion pro­gram on a pub­lic access chan­nel enti­tled, “Inside San Mari­no.” He attend­ed USC, work­ing on his M.F.A. in Film Stud­ies, and he was well-con­nect­ed in the enter­tain­ment indus­try. He pro­duced the movie, The Pris­on­er, and he secured pass­es for his friends to par­ties host­ed by Stephen Spiel­berg and George Lucas.

While Chich­ester lived in Ruth Sohus’s guest house, her son, John, and his wife, Lin­da, moved into the main house with her and befriend­ed Chich­ester. Sud­den­ly in 1985, they left San Mari­no. Chich­ester told Ruth they had gone to France to work on a clas­si­fied gov­ern­ment project. About a month after they left town, one of Chichester’s rel­a­tives died, and he had to return to Lon­don to take care of the estate.

Months passed, and Ruth heard noth­ing from her son, so she filed a miss­ing person’s report. The police couldn’t locate John or Lin­da. They want­ed to talk to Chich­ester, but sur­pris­ing­ly they couldn’t find any record of any­one with that name and back­ground. Strange­ly, fin­ger­prints lift­ed from the guest house matched some­one named Chris­t­ian Ger­hart­sre­it­er, a Ger­man immi­grant, but they couldn’t find this man either.

Time passed with no word about the miss­ing per­sons. Ruth Sohus died in 1988 and her house was sold. That year some­one named Christo­pher Crowe tried to sell a Toy­ota pick­up in Con­necti­cut. The buy­er became sus­pi­cious because the name on the title was John Sohus. He called the police. They set up a sting, but Crowe didn’t show up.
In 1994, nine years after Chich­ester left San Mari­no, my wife and I were dri­ving down Lor­raine Road on the way to our house when we came upon scores of police cars in front of the old Sohus house. A police­man stopped us. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Active crime scene. You’ll have to leave the area, sir.”

We were stunned. San Marino’s idea of a crime is park­ing your car on the street overnight in front of your own house. I’d nev­er heard the words “active crime scene” used in the same sen­tence with “San Marino.”

The sor­did details ripped through the rumor mill faster than we could get home. When the own­ers of the Sohus house start­ed to dig a pool in the back yard, a back­hoe unearthed three plas­tic bags filled with human bones. Foren­sic analy­sis revealed that some­one blud­geoned a man’s skull with a blunt object, cut his body into three seg­ments, and buried the parts in plas­tic bags. The police sus­pect­ed the bones belonged to John Sohus, but they couldn’t estab­lish a DNA match to a rel­a­tive because he was adopted.

The case gar­nered nation­al press cov­er­age, cul­mi­nat­ing in an episode on the tele­vi­sion pro­gram, Unsolved Mys­ter­ies, ask­ing peo­ple to call in tips about the mys­te­ri­ous Ger­hart­sre­it­er. No one called.

The next year, in 1995, Clark Rock­e­feller mar­ried San­dra Boss in Boston. They were an impres­sive cou­ple. He descend­ed from the Per­cy Rock­e­feller branch of the fam­i­ly. A Yale grad­u­ate, he con­sult­ed with third world coun­tries about debt financ­ing. She was a grad­u­ate of Stan­ford and Har­vard Busi­ness School and the youngest woman ever elect­ed a direc­tor at McK­in­sey and Com­pa­ny. Clark’s mon­ey was tied up in fam­i­ly trusts and all his work was pro bono, so the cou­ple lived on her sev­en fig­ure salary.

Their daugh­ter, Reigh (Clark called her Snooks), was born in 2001. Clark loved Snooks dear­ly, but mar­i­tal strife threat­ened their spe­cial bond when San­dra filed for divorce in 2006. After a bit­ter bat­tle, the court gave her cus­tody of Snooks and restrict­ed Clark to three eight-hour super­vised vis­its per year.  His friends say the sep­a­ra­tion ripped him apart. For two years he endured the restric­tions, but in 2008 he snapped and kid­napped Snooks.

After a nation­wide man­hunt, the police found Clark in Bal­ti­more, liv­ing as Chip Smith with his daugh­ter, Muffy. In the run-up to Clark’s tri­al for kid­nap­ping, the FBI matched his fin­ger­prints to Ger­hart­sre­it­er, and San Mari­no res­i­dents iden­ti­fied the man splashed all over the nation­al press as our Christo­pher Chichester.

The court in Boston sen­tenced him to five years for kid­nap­ping and then flew him to LA to stand tri­al for Sohus’s mur­der. The case against him rest­ed entire­ly on cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence: traces of blood in the guest house; a Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin logo on one of the bags con­tain­ing the bones; a USC emblem on anoth­er bag; and Gerhartsreiter’s attempt to sell Sohus’s truck, using the alias Christo­pher Crowe. The jury found him guilty, and the judge gave him 27 years to life. Today, he sits in Iron­wood State Prison in Blythe, California.

To date, no one has seen or heard from Lin­da Sohus, and the police have found no trace of her.

As with Anna Ander­son, who claimed to be a Russ­ian princess and was the sub­ject of my blog post The Grand Duchess of Char­lottesville, the truth about Ger­hart­sre­it­er is almost more aston­ish­ing than the fraud. He came from a back­woods vil­lage in the Bavar­i­an Alps. His father was a house painter; his moth­er a seam­stress. When he was sev­en­teen, he lied on an appli­ca­tion for a U.S. tourist visa, say­ing a fam­i­ly invit­ed him to stay with them. He land­ed in Con­necti­cut in 1978 and con­vinced a host fam­i­ly he was a high school for­eign exchange stu­dent. They said he learned to speak flaw­less Eng­lish with an aris­to­crat­ic accent by watch­ing episodes of Gilligan’s Island on tele­vi­sion and mim­ic­k­ing the speech pat­terns of Thurston How­ell III, the ascot-wear­ing mil­lion­aire. He nev­er grad­u­at­ed from high school, but some­how gained admis­sion to the Uni­ver­si­ty of Wis­con­sin, where he attend­ed two quar­ters of col­lege. On the verge of depor­ta­tion in 1981, he mar­ried a woman he did not know in order to get a green card, and prompt­ly left her for Cal­i­for­nia. At the age of 20, he sur­faced in San Mari­no as Christo­pher Chich­ester and showed up in film stud­ies class­es at USC. Fac­ul­ty mem­bers and stu­dents assumed he was a stu­dent, but he nev­er enrolled.

Every­thing he said about him­self in San Mari­no was a lie, and using that plat­form, he launched a three-decades-long career of stu­pen­dous frauds. He con­vinced titans of busi­ness and shrewd sophis­ti­cates that he was British roy­al­ty, a movie pro­duc­er, a bond trad­er, a Rock­e­feller, and an expert in third world debt. And this only skims the sur­face. The biog­ra­phy, The Man in the Rock­e­feller Suit, by Mark Seal, is the defin­i­tive study. It’s a fas­ci­nat­ing read, and I high­ly rec­om­mend it.

Dur­ing the Boston tri­al, psy­chi­atric experts opined that Ger­hart­sre­it­er suf­fered from nar­cis­sis­tic per­son­al­i­ty dis­or­der. It seems obvi­ous they were right. He exploit­ed every­one around him and loved no one.

Except for Snooks. His friends say he was com­plete­ly devot­ed to her and she loved him, too. “I love you too much, Dad­dy,” they heard her say often.

Which brings us to the great irony of this sto­ry. An over­whelm­ing love for some­one oth­er than him­self brought down this relent­less­ly self­ish con-man. He risked every­thing for Snooks, and as a result, all his frauds and crimes came out in the open. Every­one knows who he is, includ­ing Snooks, who is now fif­teen. It seems unlike­ly that the lit­tle girl, who loved too much the man he was not, could pos­si­bly love at all the man he real­ly is. All the pun­ish­ment the jus­tice sys­tem has met­ed out to him must be a mere incon­ve­nience com­pared to that one irre­deemable heartbreak.