For twenty-three years after the Sohus disappearances, investigators in California had an unsolved missing persons case, then an unidentified murder victim, then an identified murder victim — Jonathan Sohus — and a primary person of interest they could not name. Christopher Chichester was a name. It was not an identity. You cannot prosecute a name.
The 2008 kidnapping was a different kind of crime, in a different jurisdiction, committed by a man who had been living as Clark Rockefeller for thirteen years. The fingerprint match that identified Gerhartsreiter after his Baltimore arrest was not motivated by the California case — it was standard procedure following an arrest. The federal database check, the immigration records request, the comparison against available prints on file: these are routine investigative steps following a custody arrest.
The California connection emerged from the results of those routine steps, not from an investigation targeting the Sohus case. When the print matched the Chichester license application, and when the LA County Sheriff’s office made that connection, the cold case suddenly had what it had been missing: a real name, a confirmed identity, a person who could be charged.
This sequence — a new crime, committed years later, that generates evidence connecting a suspect to an old crime — is not unique to this case. It appears regularly in cold case work. A person who has evaded identification for decades commits a new offense, comes into contact with law enforcement, and the databases that have accumulated in the intervening years produce a connection that was impossible to make when the original crime occurred.