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Crime & Safety

Rockefeller Ex-Wife Testifies

The former wife of accused murderer Christian Gerhartsreiter testified that he spoke "constantly" of being part of the Rockefeller family.

The ex-wife of a man accused of murdering a San Marino resident and burying the victim's remains in his own backyard 28 years ago testified Tuesday that her former spouse described himself as a member of the Rockefeller family and that he became more secretive during their relationship.

Sandra Boss told the Los Angeles Superior Court jury hearing the case against Christian Gerhartsreiter that she knew the 52-year-old defendant only as Clark Rockefeller, saying that he spoke "constantly" of the Rockefeller family, with whom he told her he had a "difficult relationship."

"I didn't have any reason to think he was not the person he said he was ... He was very clear right from the start that he had a very high need for privacy because of his famous family," Boss testified.

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Gerhartsreiter's ex-wife is expected to be the prosecution's last witness in its case-in-chief against the 52-year-old defendant, who is charged in the February 1985 slaying of John Sohus. The 27-year-old man's remains were found in May 1994 when a hole was being dug for a swimming pool at the back of the property at 1920 Lorain Road, where Gerhartsreiter had lived in a guesthouse for a time.

Describing a 12-year marriage in which things became "more difficult" the more she became committed to the relationship, Gerhartsreiter's former wife said there were "many things" he did to promote secrecy and privacy, including ensuring that he got mail at post office boxes rather than at home, always wearing a hat and asking that she put him on her credit cards so his name would not appear on the bills.

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Boss -- who works in London for a management consulting company -- said she never knew during the couple's marriage that Gerhartsreiter was German or had a German passport.

"Did you ever know him ... to be anyone other than Clark Rockefeller?" Deputy District Attorney Habib Balian asked the woman.

"No," she said, responding that she learned during divorce proceedings in August 2007 that he wasn't Clark Rockefeller after discovering that the former child actress -- whom he said was his mother and had been killed in a car crash with his father -- was still alive and hiring a private investigator who "couldn't tell me who I was married to."

She said Gerhartsreiter had, at one point, told her a different name for his mother, and then mentioned around 2003 or 2004 that his mother had been a child actress.

"I said, 'That's not what you told me,"' she related of her conversation with her then-husband.

Gerhartsreiter never told her that he had lived in California or been involved in the film industry, she said, noting that he said he hated the state of Connecticut because his parents died there and that he also hated California.

She said he told her that he had started a company focused on space travel and recalled that he had mentioned the name Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter as a "funny" name as the two spoke around 2003 or 2004.

Boss -- who has a daughter with Gerhartsreiter -- said that the two went through a ceremony to marry at a Quaker meeting house but that she later learned he hadn't filed the appropriate paperwork. She said the divorce decree dissolving their marriage was granted in December 2007.

Boss is expected to resume her testimony Wednesday when she is expected to be questioned by the defense.

In other testimony, Christopher Mark Bishop testified that he lied to police when a detective asked him two decades ago about whether he had been given a pickup truck from Gerhartsreiter that was linked to Sohus and his wife, Linda.

"I lied. I said I knew nothing about a truck. At that point, I was pretty panicked," said Bishop, who is now an Episcopal priest.

Bishop testified that he told Gerhartsreiter -- whom he knew as a filmmaker-turned-bond-trader named Christopher Crowe -- that a detective showed up at his house in connection with a missing person investigation, and then asked Gerhartsreiter on his own who he was.

"He said, "I've got to go," Bishop said, noting that he never spoke again with Gerhartsreiter after that telephone call.

In describing what he called "not my finer hour," the prosecution witness said he bought a "cheaper, beat-up model of the same truck" and put the license plates on the newer truck Gerhartsreiter had given him after learning that he would not be able to get the title from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for the newer vehicle without paying off a lien of about $6,000 on it. He said he eventually removed the license plates and abandoned it at a train station between Greenwich, Conn., and New York City so it could not be traced back to him.

Bishop said he told detectives about the truck when they came to question him two decades later, explaining that he had "matured a little bit in my life" and thought it was his duty to "come clean" after learning that there may have been a murder.

Gerhartsreiter's former fiancee, Mihoko Manabe, told the jury last week that he encouraged her to go into hiding with him, proposed to her and changed his appearance by growing a mustache and beard and wearing contact lenses instead of glasses after a Greenwich, Conn., police detective tried to reach him some time in 1988 at her home in New York City.

Manabe -- who was with Gerhartsreiter until 1994 -- said the man she knew as Christopher Crowe told her the person who had phoned identifying himself as a detective "wasn't really from the police" and described his parents as being in "great danger."

Last week, Greenwich police Detective Daniel Allen testified that he tried to contact Gerhartsreiter after receiving a teletype from the San Marino Police Department to ascertain information about the truck connected to the missing couple.   During his opening statement, the prosecutor told jurors that John Sohus and his wife, Linda, are dead and accused Gerhartsreiter of faking their disappearance to cover his tracks.

Gerhartsreiter is not charged in connection with Linda's disappearance, but the prosecutor contended the German national arranged for postcards to be sent from Paris to the couple's family and friends to give the appearance that they were traveling abroad.

One of Gerhartsreiter's attorneys, Brad Bailey, has suggested that the postcards prove Linda was alive and that she, rather than his client, might be her husband's killer.

The defense lawyer acknowledged that his client had "undisputably, undeniably" used different names, but said he was hardly "the first person in this city to try and reinvent himself."

--Terri Vermullen Keith, City News Service

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