The third connection — which was separately confirmed — was to the stockbroker license application filed in Connecticut under the Christopher Crowe name. The Boston Globe reported this match, which placed Gerhartsreiter in the Crowe identity in Greenwich during the period when he was driving Jonathan Sohus’s truck and had come to police attention in connection with the Sohus disappearances.
The Los Angeles Police Department confirmed a match between Gerhartsreiter’s prints and prints on a document submitted in California under the Christopher Chichester name — the alias used during the San Marino guesthouse period, the period of the Sohus disappearances, the period from which Jonathan Sohus’s bones were eventually recovered.
These were not all the same fingerprint connection. They were a chain: Baltimore to immigration file to Boston to Greenwich to San Marino. Each link connected Gerhartsreiter to a different chapter of his own history, collapsing thirty years of aliases into a single confirmed identity.
The announcement was made two weeks after the arrest, on August 15, 2008. His brother Alexander, shown a photograph, confirmed what the prints had established: “It seems you found my brother.”
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## The Long Wait: 1985 to 2013
From the disappearance of Jonathan and Linda Sohus in 1985 to the murder conviction in April 2013, twenty-eight years passed. This is an extraordinary span for a case to remain unresolved, and understanding why it took so long illuminates both the practical difficulties of cold-case prosecution and the particular advantages that Gerhartsreiter’s method gave him against conventional investigative timelines.
The early investigation in San Marino was hampered by the postcard from France. The Sohuses were said to have gone abroad. When people do not file missing-persons reports for individuals they believe to be traveling voluntarily, investigations do not begin. The delay in recognizing that a crime might have occurred gave the primary suspect — who had already left the state — weeks or months in which to establish himself elsewhere.