He moved to California.
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## San Marino: A Guesthouse and a Family
The move to San Marino placed him in a very different environment from Connecticut — Southern California rather than New England, warmth rather than reserve, a community defined more by property values and proximity to Los Angeles than by the old northeastern social structures he had been navigating.
But the essential dynamic was the same: he was someone without a clear position, moving into an environment that had one, and presenting himself in ways that made acceptance easier than scrutiny.
The Sohus property at 1920 Lorain Road was a residential house with a separate guesthouse — the kind of arrangement common in Southern California, where property owners often rented the secondary structure to a tenant to offset costs. Ruth “Didi” Sohus was a widow. Her son Jonathan was nearby. Jonathan had recently married Linda. The household was in some sense complete, and the tenant in the guesthouse was peripheral to it in the way tenants typically are — present in the physical space without being fully integrated into the family dynamics.
Gerhartsreiter — presenting himself as Christopher Chichester, with his claimed baronetcy and English connections — was a distinctive tenant. He was educated-seeming, personable, and interested in the arts and culture in ways that his landlady apparently found engaging. He was also, by the accounts available, observant: paying attention to the household, to the family’s routines, to the relationships between the people around him.
What he observed, and what he may have understood about his own position, is not accessible from the public record. What is documented is that by early 1985, both Jonathan and Linda Sohus had vanished, and so had Christopher Chichester. And that before leaving, he told people who asked that the Sohuses had gone to Europe.