He was sentenced to four to five years in state prison on the kidnapping conviction, with a concurrent two to three years on the assault charge.
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## The Cold Case That the Kidnapping Reopened
The extensive publicity generated by the kidnapping case — the Clark Rockefeller name, the fingerprint matching, the confirmed connection to Christopher Chichester in San Marino — did something investigators in California had not been able to do on their own.
It put a face and a confirmed identity on the person of interest in the 1985 disappearances of Jonathan and Linda Sohus.
For more than twenty years, the San Marino case had sat at the edge of solvability. Jonathan Sohus had vanished. Linda Sohus had vanished. The tenant who lived in the guesthouse — Christopher Chichester — had vanished. The postcard from France had quieted early alarm. Nobody had a confirmed identity for Chichester beyond the name he used.
The bones found in 1994 changed the material situation without immediately resolving it.
New owners of the Sohus property at 1920 Lorain Road in San Marino had contractors excavate the backyard to install a swimming pool. During the excavation, in May 1994, workers found bones buried in the yard. The remains were those of a person who had been killed violently — struck in the head at least twice with a blunt rounded object, stabbed six times, and cut into three parts.
The identification of those remains as Jonathan Sohus proved difficult. He had been adopted, which meant that DNA comparison with biological relatives could not produce a direct match. The work of identifying the bones as his proceeded through other means, including the location, physical evidence, and accumulated circumstantial connections between the site and the missing man. A DNA confirmation of the identification came only in 2010, years after the 2008 kidnapping had put Gerhartsreiter’s true identity on the public record.