The postcard from France arrived after their disappearance — something that satisfied at least some of the immediate concern but that did not, over time, account for why the Sohuses never returned, never wrote again, never reached out to their family, never came back for their belongings or their mother.
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## The 1988 Stop: A Truck Too Far
For three years after the Sohus disappearances, Gerhartsreiter operated in Connecticut under the Christopher Crowe identity without apparent major disruption. He was working in some capacity in financial services — the stockbroker license application filed under the Crowe name is part of the documentary record — and building the social connections in Greenwich that that world required.
The 1988 encounter with police was, in retrospect, the moment at which his situation nearly collapsed several years earlier than it ultimately did.
He was attempting to sell a pickup truck in Greenwich. The truck, it turned out, belonged to Jonathan Sohus — whose disappearance was still an unresolved missing-persons matter in California. How the truck came to be in Connecticut in the possession of a man calling himself Christopher Crowe is not established in the public record. The truck was there. He was attempting to sell it.
When the situation developed in a way that suggested police were going to ask detailed questions, he left before they could. He did not flee in a dramatic sense — he simply was not there when the next interview was scheduled. And then he was not in Greenwich at all, because the information that police were looking for Christopher Chichester in connection with the Sohus case was apparently enough to persuade him that the Crowe identity in Greenwich was no longer viable.