The insanity defense did not fail because jurors were unsympathetic to mental illness. It failed because the evidence of deliberate, sustained, sophisticated planning — over decades, across multiple jurisdictions, through multiple carefully constructed personas — was not consistent with a person who did not know what he was doing.
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## The Victims Who Are Often Overlooked
In the coverage of the Gerhartsreiter case, the focus has often been on him: on the audacity of the deception, on the personas and their details, on the question of how long and how thoroughly he fooled people who should have known better. This is understandable as a narrative matter. The story of a con man with a Rockefeller name has an inherent dramatic appeal that shapes how it gets told.
But the victims of the case are not Clark Rockefeller’s dinner guests or his acquaintances in the Boston art world. They are specific, named people who were harmed in specific ways.
Jonathan Sohus was twenty-seven years old when he died in 1985. He was a computer programmer, the son of a woman who had tried to provide a stable environment for a young tenant, living with his new wife in a comfortable house in a quiet suburb. The manner of his death — established by the forensic evidence presented at the murder trial — involved severe violence and deliberate concealment. His remains spent nine years buried in the backyard of the house where he had lived before pool excavation brought them to light. His mother, Ruth “Didi” Sohus, did not live to see his killer convicted — he was murdered in 1985, his bones were found in 1994, and the murder conviction did not come until 2013, twenty-eight years after the killing.