Throughout the years between 1994 and 2008, investigators knew they had remains of a murder victim in San Marino and a missing tenant who had disappeared at the same time. They did not know who the tenant actually was. The fingerprint match made after the 2008 kidnapping — confirming that Christopher Chichester was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter — was the connection that allowed the California case to move forward.
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## Assembling the California Case
Los Angeles County prosecutors filed a murder charge against Gerhartsreiter on March 15, 2011. He was fifty years old. He was then serving his Massachusetts kidnapping sentence, which meant extradition proceedings were required before he could be moved to California to face the new charges.
The case against him in California was, from the beginning, circumstantial. No witness had seen him kill Jonathan Sohus. No confession existed. The physical evidence — the remains, the injuries, the buried location — established that a murder had been committed, and the location established a connection between the crime and the property where Gerhartsreiter had lived. But connecting the act to the person required the kind of inferential reasoning that circumstantial cases demand: a chain of established facts that collectively support only one coherent explanation.
Prosecutors pointed to specific details that they argued tied Gerhartsreiter to the killing. He had lived in the guesthouse where the victim’s bones were later found buried. He disappeared at the same time the Sohuses disappeared, in a manner that suggested flight rather than relocation. He was found in Connecticut three years later driving Jonathan Sohus’s pickup truck — the vehicle of a man who was supposedly in France. He had told people at the time that the Sohuses had gone to Europe, providing a false account that delayed investigation and gave himself distance.