When the bones were found in 1994, investigators had physical evidence of a murder victim but no identity for the victim and no identity for the suspect. They knew that Christopher Chichester had lived at the property and had disappeared around the time the Sohuses did. They did not know who Christopher Chichester actually was.
Jonathan Sohus’s adoption complicated identification. DNA testing in the 1990s could establish whether remains matched biological relatives — but for an adopted person, the relevant biological relatives were not easily identified. The conventional route to positive identification was closed. The investigation proceeded through circumstantial and documentary means that ultimately confirmed the identity, but not until 2010.
The 2008 kidnapping broke the case open not because it generated new forensic evidence about the 1985 murder, but because it generated a confirmed identity for Christopher Chichester. Once investigators knew that Chichester was Gerhartsreiter, they could run his prints against the California records. Once that match was confirmed, the connection between the 2008 arrest and the 1985 Sohus property was established. Once the connection was established, a murder charge became possible.
The charge was filed March 15, 2011. The trial took place in March and April 2013. The verdict came on April 10, 2013. Twenty-eight years after a twenty-seven-year-old computer programmer disappeared from the house where his mother’s tenant was living.
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## Ruth “Didi” Sohus: The Absent Voice
One figure in the Clark Rockefeller case who appears in the public record primarily as a peripheral detail — a landlady, a mother, a name attached to a property — is Ruth “Didi” Sohus, and her absence from most accounts deserves a moment’s attention.