The arrest prompted the most urgent question: who, underneath the layers of assumed names and fabricated backstory, was this man actually?
At the Baltimore apartment, investigators found a man who would not give them his real name, in a building where he had identified himself as Chip Smith, in a city where he had arrived from Boston after years as Clark Rockefeller, in a life that had included Christopher Crowe in Greenwich and Christopher Chichester in San Marino.
The fingerprints broke it open.
A fingerprint taken from him at arrest was run through the available databases. It matched a latent print from a Boston wine glass that had been collected during the initial search. It also matched a print from his early-1980s immigration file, which the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency provided. And it matched a print on a stockbroker license application filed years earlier under the name Christopher Crowe.
The FBI Laboratory in Quantico confirmed the identity match. On August 15, 2008 — two weeks after his arrest — authorities publicly announced that the man known as Clark Rockefeller was a German citizen named Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
His brother Alexander, shown a photograph, confirmed the identification: “It seems you found my brother.”
Two Connecticut families who had hosted him as a teenager when he first arrived from Germany recognized him from the photographs circulated during the kidnapping case.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that Gerhartsreiter’s prints matched prints on a document submitted in California under the name Christopher Chichester — connecting the arrested man in Baltimore to the guesthouse tenant who had lived on the Sohus property in San Marino before Jonathan and Linda Sohus disappeared.