The most striking moment of the 2013 murder trial, according to jurors’ own accounts, was not a dramatic witness testimony or a legal argument. It was two book bags.
Both bags were found buried with Jonathan Sohus’s remains in the San Marino backyard. One carried the logo of the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. The other carried the logo of the University of Southern California.
The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee connection pointed to the period before Gerhartsreiter moved to California — the Wisconsin period, where he had been briefly enrolled or associated with the university environment in the early 1980s. The University of Southern California bag connected to Los Angeles, the region where he landed as Christopher Chichester.
Separately, each bag was a physical object. Together, they placed in the grave someone who had passed through Wisconsin and California — a path that matched Gerhartsreiter’s documented history and that did not match any established history of Jonathan Sohus.
Physical evidence in murder cases is often most powerful for what it suggests rather than what it proves directly. The book bags did not prove that Gerhartsreiter had committed the murder. They proved that someone associated with both Wisconsin and Southern California had been involved in the burial. When that finding was placed alongside the fingerprint match, the documented flight from San Marino, the appearance in Connecticut with the victim’s truck, the false account of the Sohuses going to Europe, and the subsequent thirty years of identity evasion — the inference available to the jury was the inference they drew.