**The book bags.** The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and University of Southern California bags buried with the remains pointed to someone who had been associated with both institutions, following a path that matched Gerhartsreiter’s documented history.
Assembled together, this evidence told a coherent story. No single element was definitive. As a chain, the elements supported a finding that only one person — the person who had lived at the property, had the victim’s truck three years later, had provided false accounts of the victim’s whereabouts, and had personal connections to both universities represented in the buried book bags — was the responsible party.
The jury deliberated for approximately one day and found him guilty.
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## The Defense Argument at Trial: Reasonable Doubt and Circumstantial Evidence
Gerhartsreiter’s trial defense in the 2013 California proceedings made several arguments. The most fundamental was that the prosecution’s evidence, though circumstantial, failed to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.
Every piece of evidence the prosecution offered, the defense argued, was susceptible to an alternative explanation. His presence on the property was not evidence of murder — he was a tenant, not a killer. His disappearance at the same time as the Sohuses could reflect other causes — he might have left for reasons unrelated to them. The truck in Greenwich could be explained by prior arrangements, a sale, a gift. The book bags could have been placed in the yard by someone else, at a different time.
The defense was not obligated to offer an account of what actually happened to Jonathan Sohus. The burden of proof in a criminal trial rests entirely with the prosecution. The defense’s task was to identify the gaps — the places where the prosecution’s reconstruction was inference rather than fact — and argue that those gaps were too significant to support a finding of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.