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Look host, you are now listening to True Murder, The most Shocking Killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. Gasey Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zupansky.
Good Evening, This is your host Dan Zupanski for the program True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them. John Sohus, a twenty somethingter resident year resident of San Marino, California, was allegedly murdered in nineteen eighty five by conman Christian Karl gerhartswriter, who had become infamous under his most known alias, Clark Rockefeller. Rockefeller the prime suspect and So's murder may
have been the last person to see him alive. Nine years after his death, SOAS's bones were dug up in the backyard of the home he once shared with his wife, Linda, whose whereabouts remained unknown. Rockefeller's two thousand and eight arrest for abducting his own daughter put him squarely in the crosshairs of the decades only decades old sous homicide case. Upon Rockefeller's arrest, girardou began placing together the convoluted tale in a series of articles for the Pasadena Star News.
His research resulted in Name Dropper, which reveals inside information about the case. Girardo says is the most fantastic he's scene in his twenty five years as an investigative reporter. The book that we are featuring this evening is Name Dropper, Investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery with my special guest, journalist and author Frank C. Girardo. Welcome to the program, and
thank you for agreeing to this interview. Frank Girardo, Thanks a lot, Dan, I really appreciate it's thanks to be able to come on and talk about this story because it is pretty compelling.
It it stretches over many decades and across the United States and involves some pretty quirky characters.
Now, I think it's important to the story and lots of times I often ask why somebody felt it, why they were compelled to write this story, and I guess in answering this question, you will answer that question. But let's give our audience your background because I think obviously your background is very important to how you came to this story and how influence unt you you were in basically being part of the story, we'll say, and we'll explain that, and you'll be able to explain that to
our alredience a little bit later. So tell us about your background as a journalist, where you were, and just tell us about your background before we get into this incredible story.
Yes, I'd be happy to I'm a longtime newspaper reporter. All in Los Angeles. I worked at the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, which folded in eighty nine. I moved around a little bit and I ended up at the Pasadena Star News. I've most of my career, I've been a police reporter, which means working at night and making a
lot of cop calls. In nineteen ninety four, police in the small town of San Marino dug up a body and I just happened to be on scene at the time, talking to neighbors and people that lived there, and a guy said to me, I know who that is. That's John Sellis, And I bet the guy that used to live here, and that stuck with me. That was in
May ninety four. Later that year, I was in the coroner's office doing a story on the O. J. Simpson case, and I happened to have the opportunity to see the remains of John Solis and actually hold the parts of his skull in my hand. It was very unique experience, obviously, and it happened to me again after in two thousand and three when I was writing a book on a
completely different topic. And so when Clark Rockefeller was in the news for kidnapping his daughter in Boston, they all came flooding back, and it gave me a I had a unique perspective because I had been covering this case since ninety four, this homicide case, and b once my old sources said, hey, you know this guy, Clark Rockefeller that they're looking for, he looks a lot like the guy they want for that murder in San Marino way back when I put all the pieces together and started
writing stories about it, and I think some of those stories had an influence on how the police ultimately approached the case and how it was prosecuted. There's a lot of twists and turns, and you know a lot of them are in the book Name Dropper, which is on you can only get on the internet at Rockefeller Mystery dot Com. And I detailed them all there.
Right now, you had the opportunity you said this was you know, this really struck you at the time. And then in retrospect, once you had seen that Rockefeller had been charged in Boston for abducting his daughter, again you made some connections. But what you said, you had a skull in your hand. For our audience, how was at least according to the coroner, how was John SaaS killed?
Well, so the coroner believed, even back in nineteen ninety for that this person, John Sois, had been bludgeoned to death. His skull had been broken into several pieces, and in ninety four almost there were seven pieces that they had
were in a paper bag. By two thousand and three they had taken the seven pieces and sort of reconstructed them, and you could actually look at the skull and with a you know, an expert describing what happened, see how where the blows were delivered and how they affected this skull initially in cracking it and then splitting it open and causing you know, great injury to John Sois that ultimately proved fatal.
Speculate did the coroner speculate it all to the weapon used?
Well, you know, there's you know, they said it was a blunt object there. You know, at one time it was described as a rounded blunt object like a baseball bat. At other times it's been described as a two by four. Unfortunately, there was something else played into determining how exactly John died by looking at the skull, and that is when the body was dug up. It was during a swimming pool excavation. That was nine years after it was buried.
And you know when they did. When they dig a swimming pool, they use these bobcats and they're like a big tractor, you know, and so the the tractor broke the skull into more little pieces, which so putting it together, they needed an expert that could say, okay, look, these injuries occurred when this person was alive, and these injuries to the skull occurred from the bobcat. So one of the things that this case has is some really interesting forensic science. Yeah.
Absolutely, yeah, So I wanted to get to that because that's again, it's all very big part of the huge puzzle here. So you gotta again, this is really is a mystery. Now tell us about go back to of course, the main character in this story that Clark Rockefeller. He's gone through various aliases and then he wound up with Clark Rockefeller. We can talk about that as well, but tell us about the German immigrant exchange student Christian Carl Gerhardt writer Gerharts writer.
Christian Karl Gerharts Rider Christian Karl Gerhartz Rider is a German national. He grew up in a tiny town in Bavaria, which, if you know Germany, it's the southern part of Germany. And his little town was on a road that connected Munich in Germany and Salzburg and Austria. He met an American couple in the late seventies and came to the United States using their name, and he posed as an exchange student. He wound up in Berlin, Connecticut, which you
know sounds very German, doesn't. They attended high school there as Christian Gerhart's writer or Chris, and moved across the country, first stopping in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he attended the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, and this will play a role later in the story. And he left, he got married, got a green card, left Wisconsin and came to California and
reinvented himself. No longer as Christopher Chris Gerhart's writer. He was now Christopher Chichester, the thirteenth Baronet of Chichester, whatever that means. If bamboozled a lot of people though, because he was now posing as you know, the scion of British Royalty. And sam Marino is a rather upper crust community in eastern Los Angeles County. Not a place where there's high crime. It's a place where, you know, the titans of industry live, be it the publishing industry, the
movie industry. You think Beverly Hills, but a lot of them live in San Marino too, and there's a lot of money there. So and here comes this guy posing as royalty. Well, it doesn't matter what your background is or what your business is. He's learned quickly that people liked royalty and liked to glom Onto Royalty because they've they felt that it gave some sort of a legitimacy to whatever their pursuits were. So he made a lot
of friends. But really he was living in the guest house, more like the garage or the shed behind a you know, a dumpy house in the poorer section of town, but pretending to be something else. And the house that he lived in was occupied by an older woman who d d sois. He was a heavy drinker, a heavy smoker. She'd been a party girl all of her life, and in her final days she was living in this house, running out the back house to Chris. She had a son about Chris's age. She was twenty eight. His name
was John. John got married and him and his wife, Linda, moved into the house with Dedie. So now we have four people living on this property, Chris, John, and Dedie and Linda. And what happened is Linda and John, we're kind of unhappy living with Dedi being that she was a drinker and a smoker and a heavy alcoholic and all these sort of bad things. And Linda wanted to move out. And I think that they had some intention possibly to move into this guest house, but of course
there's a renter there. He's paying rent, and it wasn't gonna be that easy. In nineteen eighty five, Linda disappeared. Just prior to their disappearance, Linda told several of their friends that John had gotten the job in Connecticut working for the government in some sort of top secret, hush hush job, and that Linda would said that she was going to be going there also because they needed her to do some artwork. She was an artist. The couple disappeared,
and after several weeks, her family became concerned. Linda's family became very concerned, and they called the police, and the police came over and they visited with Dedi, and Dedi said, don't worry about my son and his wife. They're on a secret mission and I have a source who's in contact with them. He's talking to them every day and relaying messages to me. And she didn't say who her secret source was, but she implied that the secret source was Chris living in the guest house.
Well how did she sorry, how did she imply that?
Well, you know how like you say I have a secret source, and then your eyes kind of like turn your head turned nods to the back house. It was that, it was It was yeah, it wasn't really subtle, because police did pick up on that, and in fact, on a subsequent visit when they came out to talk about the missing couple, an officer actually went to the back house and he knocked on the door and the door opens and Chris comes out wearing exactly nothing. He's completely naked,
you know. The officer being you know, a macho sort of you know police officer back in nineteen eighty five, said hey, what's wrong with you? Chris is well, sir, I'm the nudist, and the officer, you know, averted his eye and said, put your damn clothes on and left without ever checking the house, the grounds or anything. He was put off by this naked, quick thinking mercer suspect and left. Yeah. So several more weeks go by, and then Chris disappears, and when he leaves, he's driving the
missing couple's pickup truck. DD calls the police again. She says that she now wants to add on to the missing person's report, which she does, and nineteen eighty five comes and goes. DD sells the house, moves out, Chris is gone, and she never hears from her son or daughter in law again. However, friends of Linda's, just prior to Chris's disappearance received some postcards. All of them came
from Paris, France. All of them had a really cryptic message on it said something like, sorry miss New York, but this can be lived with. And each of these post guards will have a picture of the Iceland Power or Versailles or you know the Palais Justice, which are famous uh Parisian landmarks. And s her friends bought it. Huh okay, I guess she's in Paris. You know, no
big deal, they bought it. Yeahs. So you know there's a lot of there was a sort of a lot of these red herrings that were tossed out by this murder suspect. But he was brazen too. Before leaving, he had a trivial pursuit game in the backyard with several young ladies who asked him, Hey, why is the backyard all dug up Chris, to which he replied, well, they're doing plumbing. Plumbing goes nowhere near where this dig was, and it turns out later, of course, that's where John's
body was actually buried. So he's a pretty brazen guy. He leaves Sam Marino. He's driving a missing couple's pickup Trump and he he ends up in back Connecticut, only this time it's in Greenwich. He's kind of grown accustomed to the high life mere. He moves into the back house of a rather stately Greenwich mansion.
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And now he's passing himself off as Christopher Crowe, movie producer, Christopher Crowe who's had involvement in the return of the Alfred Hitchcock series to television, Christopher Crowe, who attended UFC Film School and is an expert in film noir. And people again buy into this. Remember now, it's nineteen eighty eight, so there's not a lot of ways to check people's stories. And one of the things that Chris has picked up along the way is that props really help him tell
the tale. So he's got some posters from Alfred Hitchcock and a couple of movie posters and they have Chris Crow on it. Well, there's no reason to believe he's not Chris Crow, and people believe it. Well, so that's assuming.
So sorry, is he assuming someone's real identity?
Yeah? Yeah, Well Chris Crowe was an actual h movie producer who worked on uh, you know, Alfred Hitchcock and uh was the brother of Cameron Crowe. And yeah, he assumed a real guy's identity, but nobody knew who he was or who Christopher Chichester was or any of that, and he still played up the royal heritage in Grantwich. He said he was a mout batton. Uh that would be Prince Philip's uh relatives, and he frequently intimated to people that he had an aunt, Elizabeth, who lived in Windsor.
I think we all know who that is. Let me buy into this anyway, He's living there for a few years and he gets he starts getting jobs. He gets worked. He's working uh as a bond trader, first for SNOPS, famous junk bond king of the mid to late eighties.
Uh.
Well, he he's exposed as a fraud at s n Thhops and he moves on to Neco's Securities, which is, you know, midtown Manhattan Japanese security firm. And as you remember in the mid eighties, the Japanese were buying up securities in real estates like Nobody's business. So this is
a pretty big, pretty powerful company. And he leaves there and gets a job at Kidder Peabody and was you know, going to be on the Kidder Peabody eurobond desk selling eurobonds and making three hundred thousand dollars a year in commission. There's just one. Right before he moves to New York City, he decides to get rid of the truck and he sells it to young man who's the son of the
episcopal Bishop of Greenwich. When the young man goes to register the car, it tips off authorities in California that it's missing. Couple's truck has turned up and Nissan has a lean on it because they didn't been paid for three years. So they come out and talk to the bishop's son and he says, I bought it from a guy, Christopher Crowe. Well, British police track Christopher Crowe first to Eco Securities, then to a Kidd Peabody, but he's a step ahead and he vanishes. Nobody ever follows up on
and kind of goes away. But he's hooked up with girl. He's engaging in counter surveillance. He's actively doing things that people in nineteen eighty eight didn't do. His routine, that'd be shredding trash, being very careful of, you know, identity, sort of questions. He maintained post office boxes in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. He was really wildly and crafty guy, and in nineteen eighty nine. Him and this girlfriend are after dinner and he calls down to a restaurant trying to
get a reservation. The restaurant brushes him off, and he's disturbed by that, so he calls again and he says, my name is Clark Rockefeller. I would like dinner tonight at your establishment and there will be two of us. Wow, mister Rockefeller, we would love to have you come and
eat here. And of course, instantly he realized the power of a name change, especially one that was American royalty would have and as a you know, wanted in connection with a missing person's case, he becomes Clark Rockefeller.
And.
You know, woo's Now he's wooing the upper echelon of Manhattan, Boston and East Coast society.
Now he's a I mean, obviously he's an effective con man because if you're in Los Angeles area talking to everybody's in film, every waitress is in film, everyone's in film, and he's and he's talking to people about film, and and then he's an impostor as well. So he's a brilliant con man. He says, he trades bonds. This guy is an amazing guy, But how does he really pull
off Rockefeller. If there's anything that can illustrate how much how he can do this, How could he pass himself off as one of the wealthiest, most powerful families in the world.
Well, anybody that has run into his family will tell you that he kind of looks like a Rockefeller. That's the first thing. So that kind of helps. But that's not really it's so simple it'll blow your mind. He had the girlfriend get an additional credit card and put the name Clark Rockefeller on it. That was all it took. He's got a credit card with the name of Clark Rockefeller. Yeah, he didn't have any other idea, didn't have a driver's license,
didn't have anything, probably have a library card. But people believed it. And you know, his personality was such that with quick and people thought, well, you know it's the that's the way these wealthy people are, and they're quirky like that. So it actually added to his weirdness, added to the perception that people had that, well he might just be a Rockefeller. And of course he does have a credit card that says that. Now there's one other thing you have to consider here. Yeah, here we are,
we're talking on the internet. Really basically, and this is gonna be shared on the Internet. But in nineteen eighty eight, when he becomes Clark Rockefeller eighty eight eighty nine, there was no Internet. There was no way to check on people. There was no way to you know, there was no Wikipedia, no Google, no hardly even really an Internet to speak of that would verify facts like this in a lot
of ways. Because of that, he's really America's last great imposter, you know people just as you know, it wasn't common practice back then to google or wikipedia people when you met him, So he was able to you know, pull it off. I think because of that, because of the fact he had this credit card and he bore some you know, passing resemblance to you know, a member of the Rockefeller family. And of course some people would query
him on it. He would say, well, you know, it's from a different branch of the family, and a poorer branch. He was really good at a couple of things. This is, you know, his friends say, his friends say, he was really good at, you know, bringing him into the Cohn providing some props that made it seem plausible, and you know, and then stringing them along with what turned out to be lies, And most of these lies were big lies, and their vibes that are so big and so enormous
that they're so big they can't be a lie. They have to be the truth. You know how that works, you know, the big lie, the sort of Hilarian idea that you know, if you tell a masterfully big lie, nobody's gonna call you on it. And he became a master at doing that.
Now, how does this this really depends on his you know, his ally for years, his wife, who's he's really fond. But how does that all sort of unravel with her? What about his personality or what about the relationship? How does it get to a point where they're thinking about divorce?
Well, it's it turns out that you know, he told one lie too many. So I told you about the girlfriend that got him the credit card. Well, in ninety four he dumped her and he met his wife, Sandy Boss, very well educated Stanford grad, Harvard Business School grad, with a bright future ahead of her in management consultancy. She wants to work for the McKinsey company, making a million two a year, and so okay, so the question here is, okay,
how do you fool somebody like that. Well, you know, I mean so many, so many people were buying into the story. Why not. I mean she was a young girl. She had no re again, no reason not to believe him, and he, you know, promised her the world showed her all the fine things of life. They you know what, they had a pretty good life for a long time.
He told her, uh that he his father was a man named George Rockefeller and his mother was ah a woman named Mary and act the two were killed in a car accident when he was uh a teenager, and that uh he after their death as a stool. As a teenager, he attended Yale uh and he was the old Yale's only commuter. S So fast forward several years. That was in the m you know, mid to late nineties that he's telling her this in the early two thousands. Uh,
they've moved from New York to Cornish, New Hampshire. And he says to his wife, Uh, well, you know, my mother was child actress Anne Carter, and Sandy says, well, wait a minute, you told me your mother was named Mary and that she died in a car accident. Well, well, uh, uh you know she my mother's name was Ann Carter. Clearly, you're mo wrong, You're mistaken. I told you my mother's name was Ann Carter, and I told you that my
mother and Carter died in a an accident. Well, you know, Sandy had heard more than one lie from him, and this was one lie too many. She decided to do a little bit of research and decided that maybe this man wasn't really what he said he was. She arranged to get so, she arranged to get them out of Cornish and into Boston. Cause at this point they had a daughter, and for all intents and purposes, Clark was
controlling this little girl. So Sandy arranged to get them, get them out of Colorination into Boston, get the little girl into a school to where teachers could see, you know, that maybe she was in an unhealthy relationship with her dad. They saw that. Sandy arranged for a divorce and presented Clark,
you know, with the divorce documents. And initially he had custody of the little girl, and she said to him, isn't it She said to him, though, I'll tell you what, Clark, tell me who you are, and you can keep custody of a little ray and we'll settle it. That way, and he said, no, certainly, I've told you everything there is to know about me. If that's what you're going to ask, I can't accept those terms. I will, however,
accept eight hundred thousand dollars in cash. So their divorce settlement is eight hundred thousand dollars in gold, and Sandy took a full custody of their little girl Ray and arranged for Clark to have supervised visitation. So this brings us Now we've gone through this Manton history. From coming here in the United States in late seventy eight, we are now all the way up to two thousand and six.
And in the middle of this, they've dug up that body in San Marino, and the police are actively looking for Christian Gerhardt's writer at least in nineteen ninety four, but by two thousand and seven, when they get divorced in two thousand and eight, when he has his first visitation with Ray, you know, nobody's thinking about John Soas or missing Linda Soas, or anything that happened in San
Marino all those years ago. And then national news story a man named Clark Rockefeller has kidnapped his little girl Ray, and they've disappeared from the radar screen and nobody knows who the hell this guy is. Well, that brings the FBI in and there's a massive man hunt on the East coast for a Rockefeller and they, you know, they stumble on to him and hanging out in a pad
and Baltimore and they arrest him. They get Ray back, they do some fingerprint analysis that you know, links him back to Christian Gerhart's rider, the Exchange student, And of course everybody knows that Christian Gerhart's rider was one of Christopher Chichester, and Christopher Chichester is a murder suspect in San Marino, So La County is now actively calling Clark Rockefeller a person of interest in their decades as homicide.
Now, at what point you say, you so, that's when you had that big moment yourself of enlightenment and then tell us about that moment and was it shortly after this well.
Episode that you know, thank you? So, you know, they flashed his picture on the screen several times and a man cloud me who knew Clark when he was Chris, and he said, do you remember came out in front of the Sola's house back in the nineties and I told you about this guy Chris Well, I think Clark Rockefellers him. Okay, so I kind of, you know, I kind of tapped that in my head and then got a phone clop from Baltimore, uh, saying, uh, I can't
even remember who it was. It may have been a cop, it may have been another reporter, uh calling and saying, hey, this guy give arrested in Baltimore is wanted in connection with H a cold case from San Marino. Well, that was all I needed to tell me. I knew exactly what the cold case was. It wasn't one a cold case in San Marina. And uh, you know, and I went with it. And you know, Brooke some pretty nice stories early on in H the whole coverage of the of the you know, aftermath of that kidnapping.
So you were you were very established at Pasadena Star News. So you went to your editor and said listen or you probably had did you have free reign? Will tell us about sort of about that exchange. How you did you make a pitch to them? What did you say I did?
I didn't think I said hey the I I I basically I said, hey, this this guy that they this Rockefeller du that they caught back in Baltimore. Yuh, he's he's wanted in connection with this, uh this old Sam Mario case. We got to go with it, and I mean that was it. We just went with it. At you know, I didn't at that point, I was pretty well established and and they have even been an assistant city editor. Uh right, you know I I uh at
that I don't remember. But anyway, you know, whatever, it had enough of a good reputation in the newsroom that if I thought something was solid, uh you know, the bosses would say done with it. And they did and we did. What was we've done with it?
And what and at what point did you sort of uh start uh introducing or at least printing stuff that was sort of inference and inference and equals this whether you're making some assumptions.
Or right right right away? Yeah, well, I mean so in journalism, uh you know, even newspaper journalism today is largely dependent on getting stuff out on the Internet and Twitter and Facebook, and at that time, uh, we were heavily into the blogs. So you know, if there was not there were no seconds to waste. I mean I knew, I knew first of all, I knew there was only
one cold case pharmacide in San Marino. Second of all, I already had the tip off from the guy that knew Chris, who said Clark Rockefeller was Chris.
Uh?
It it it was. It wasn't a stretch to just go with the story. And we did. I think we had it up on the y. I had it up on the internet within twenty minutes of you know, putting all the pieces together. And that would have been uh, the Monday after his arrest. So within twenty four hours of his arrest.
Now what did police find?
Uh?
In terms of as the story evolved, what would what did he say to police? What was his statement of police about his guilt or innocence? How was how was he respond what was his demeanor Clark Rockefeller? You know? Did he get a lawyer immediately?
He didn't. He did not l you know, a lawyer up immediately. The FBI quizzed him at length for about three hours. They knew who he was, and fourteen minutes into their interrogation, he you know, decide they give him They read him his miranda rights and uh, he asked for an attorney and they but they continue the interrogation anyway, and he never ever admitted to having anything to do with uh the disappearance of John and linusau So the death of John Soas. And you know, after several hours
they cut it off. Uh La County detectives flew flew out there in hopes of talking to him, you know, see if they could interrogate him. And by that time he was lawyered up. And what I'm talking his lawyer, Stephen Rose, a fairly well known Boston criminal attorney, hooked him up with the Today Show and the Boston Globe, and that's when things got weird because you know, he
set some ground rules for those interviews. You know, don't ask him about California, don't ask him about the murder case, don't ask him, you know, all these questions that could implicate him in something else. And in his interview would yeah, love course, I mean, any good reporters gonna ask him. Natalie Morales first of all asked him what about Germany, and he, you know, denied knowing anything about Germany. He said he grew up in the United States picking strawberries.
And then she said, well, what about this dead couple? And he says, I'm a Quaker. I would never potentionionally harm anybody. I don't know that I've ever heard anybody. He didn't say no, I didn't kill him. He threw it off on I can't remember harming anybody. The wife was played for the jury, and it played a large role in convicting him.
Yeah, that's what's fantastic about the narcissistic psychopathic killer. They get to talk too much.
Yeah, well, he likes you know, he likes to talk. He doesn't really I don't think he. I mean, I believe through sources that he's never admitted to having any involvement in this, and but he loves to talk about stuff. And before he was you know, when he was Clark Rockefeller, before anybody knew that he was Gerhart's ryder, he would talk and talk and talk and talk. And two of the things that he told his wife are sort of instructive.
One was that he would never go to Connecticut. Of course that's where they were looking for him in connection. Remember he had the missing couple's cars. And two he would never go to California. And you know those are things that uh, you know again played uh a large
role later on in convicting him. Because what happened was as we went through this whole story, even in writing it for the book name Dropper, you can see that there is just scads and scads of circumstantial evidence, and all that circumstantial evidence, you know, really only points in one direction and points to you know, unfortunately, Chris Gerhart's writer as being the killer of the of the you know, this really gentle and nice young man, John Sellis who
never harmed anybody, probably never even had never even got angry in his life. This is a kid that loved science fiction and the Star Trek and you know, was into hobbits and dungeons and dragons, and you know really was kind of a you know, just a sciencey, geeky kid. And his wife wasn't really much different. You know, she she was an artist. She painted unicorns and rainbows, and you know, I mean, these are people that are these are the kind of people that when you see in
there feel you take it faced owe. You know, they are who they are, right And unfortunately for both of them, you know, they ran into the buzz style that is Christian Gerard's rider, and you know, one didn't come out alive and the other one, you know, will never probably know what happened to her.
Now, given his character and some people you know, displaying devil's advocate a little bit given to his character and his pensant for you know, maybe being a fraud basically and maybe sponging or weaseling or chiseling or cheating or but you know, what's the what when the prosecutor said this is the mo for this case, because again, even in this circumstances, would be nice to have some kind of credible or valid or you know, reasonable motive, what
was the What did the prosecution say the motive was for this murder?
Then, well, there was never a motive offer to the jury. I can tell you what the motive is. It's a detail in my book. In fact, it's the only place where you'll really get down to the motive is in the book name Dropper and what it is. It all comes down to the old lady's will. And the old lady had about three hundred dollars, had an estate that
was worth about three hundred thousand dollars. And the old lady's estate was left to her son and Chris, a grifter, hooked up with a couple of other grifters, and he basically set them up as sort of theminders of deity after John died, and they were able to convince Dede to write John out of her will, even though she didn't know where he was, write them into the will. And the intent was that this couple, these grifters would split the remains of d D's estate with Chris, and
they gave him forty thousand dollars up front. He actually came back to collect the balance after d D died and they told him to take a hike. But it's but essentially the murder was d D's estate, that was his. That's what drove him.
Well, he was a killer. Why wouldn't he kill these people and take the money?
Well, you know, I I I think it was it was a little bit easier to get there. His idea was he'd get this forty thousand dollars up front, which he did get right as a finder's fee with them, so he, you know, he got what he was gonna get out of it. Yeah, and and it probably you know, imagine his intent was the guilt them into giving him his half after she died. The thing is though, is that you know, you know, they're saying, you can't con a con. I mean, these people, these people were mooching
off of her. They had a cellar house, they had her moving, They owned a trailer park. They had her move into, you know, a dingy, run down single ride in a crappy trailer park in one of the worst towns in all of Los Angeles County. And you know, charged her with an exorbitant amontiframe charged her to take care of her you know asthma emphasima her booze her cigarettes. And you know, they cadged her out of everything that
she had. And so of course when he comes back, they've conned him out of you know, four and fifty grand. But at least he got you know, I mean in his mind, he's probably thinking, well, at least I got forty grand out of it. Yeah.
Yeah, pretty sad. And yet you really depicted in the book too. It's it is a a land of grifters and mooches and and uh you know, burned out memories and uh yeah, it's a it's it's a different place than people might think, you know, among the affluent is still again some other element.
That right, very right, yeah, and you know, and not and see the thing is is I think that we often ascribe superpowers to the to the people who are wealthier than us, and in some ways that's how a guy works the name Rockefeller, right. I mean, I know some really smart, Ivy league educated people who you know, looked at a Rockefeller and oh, you know, maybe some
of that glow is going to shine on me. Well, you know, you can think of that too in terms of you know, a town like San Marino, which has a lot of wealthy people there, none of them have superpowers, and a lot of them are susceptible, especially the elderly, as this woman was at. You know, at the end of her life. She's elderly, and you know they're subject to predators. And these grifters, the weather Bees, they're about dead now, that own this trailer park. You know, they
were predators. I often imagine there's a society of these grifters and predators somewhere and that's where Clark, Chris whatever you want to call him, met the weather Bees, and you know, they were able to tell their true stories to one another so that they could make their cons you know, mesh into one and everybody would be you know, get some fallout from it. I don't know if that's the case or not, but so I guess I envision it the society of Grits.
Yeah, it's amazing. The defense at trial, I don't know. Obviously not so effectively. But what was their idea?
What was there?
What did they put forth as a possible suspect?
Well, they you know, I mean, all right, Linda's missing, she's not declared dead. She wrote postcards. Why isn't it possible that she killed her husband and buried him in the backyard. She was a six foot tall, two hundred pound amazon. John was a little guy. The dead man was a little guy, and Chris was a little guy too, So you know, I mean she worked at a bookstore called Dangerous Visions. She was into dungeons and dragons. Those are you know, dark topics, right.
And.
You can imagine that taking that storyline, you could work it into something that might be a little more sinister than you know, the rainbows and unicorns that Linda was actually painting. So there's that element of that was part of their story. And it's actually, you know, it's an effective defense if you think about it, right, we look at the circumstances of the case, who lived there, you know, who had a motive an opportunity. There's other there's other
parts of this storyline. Again, they're in the book the name Dropper, and they didn't come out and trial where you know, Linda talks to a friend and says, I'm headed to New York. John's already departed. There's another part in the story where you know, she's crying in the front seat of a pickup truck, all alone with Chris, and you know, the implication is that John's dead, and you know she's running off in the pickup truck with Chris.
So there's there is this And in fact, the same Marino homicide detective who you know had the case in ninety four postulated on dateline that you know, it was quite possible that Linda kills her husband. So some of this played into the defense. They didn't call this homicide detective as a witness, they didn't call the man who saw her sitting in a truck crying, but they considered it.
And when when they gave their summation, Jeff Dinner the lead attorney in the case, and he gave his summation, he said, look, this is a case that it has a lot of reasonable doubt in it, and you could you could aptly surmise that Linda killed him and doubt that Chris ever did it. Jury didn't buy it. It took him five hours to convict.
And what do you think was the who do you think was the most compelling witness at the trial that maybe turned this case or was the most important witness in terms of credibility with the jury.
Well, actually the most important witness was the evidence, and the most important piece of evidence was if you remember, Chris attended the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, and when they dug up the body, it was cut into three parts and John's head was in a book bag from the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. That's a powerful piece
of evidence. It's something that you know that you can't It's not like it's not it's the only testimony is given from a mute, inanimate plastic bag that has a logo of the University of Wisconson at Milwaukee that was only used during the years that Chris Gerhardt's rider was a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. That's first,
that's huge. I mean, the only thing that you can have if you're remotely closely compelling Platt is that he's driving around in the in the missing couple's car three years after they disappeared. And that's another powerful piece of the circumstantial case. There's lots of other little pieces that are the glue that holds it together. The name changes, the avoidance of the police, the you know, the evidence of a consciousness of guilt by not visible Connecticut or
not going to California. But the fact of the matter is that when you look down in that hole and you see that head in a book bag from a school that your suspect attended, you've got a pretty good shot at making a condition. And that's what happened. And that's what the jury, you know, in their deliberation, and after it was all done, said this book back, look back, how'd that book back there? Yeah?
And then and they know, you know, you say, putting all the circumstantial levidence, They really put all everything forward. And he really, you know, put his foot in his mouth because basically the numerous lies, the blatant lies, really did not help put the whole overall picture that anything that he had said, anything he had done was was possible because he was these incredible, huge frauds impersonation and then lies right back, like you say, using stuff that
he had said about not being from Germany. I mean, it's it the jury, I think, to make a that's a pretty quick decision.
Five hours, Really, five hours is an amazingly quick decision, especially in a case that's so old and so cold. Yeah, and you know, it was so much of the story that was left untold. That's that's a rhyme from one of the defense attorneys. But it's apt because you know, it's a very very old case, and you know these old cases that one, you know, twenty eight years in
the making. Yeah, you run into a lot of elderly witnesses whose memories are not that great and yeah, and you and you also run into a lot of unreliable witnesses. You know, the guy that the episcopal minister's son who bought the truck, for example, was an incredibly unreliable witness.
I mean, there was so much wrong with what he was saying that you know, it could have gone really bad for the DA except for the fact that they just had, you know, these mute stacks of evidence that only pointed in one direction.
Yeah, well for audience, what what was wrong with I mean it was his name was bishop and he or or parton me the yeah.
The bishop Chris. Well, I'm sorry, go ahead, I apologize.
No, no, but but the thing is that he had for he had done some things too that made police like he had he had done some things on behalf of his friend as well that didn't help his own effort as well. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about that it was.
That's I mean, I think to me that was It's pretty telling that, you know, he buys this truck, he gets, you know, he gets contacted by the police and rather than say you know, rather rather than just say yeah, I got it from this guy to know any of this stuff, he gets involved in this elaborate deception. First of all, he takes the plates off the nice Nissan truck and puts him on a crappy niece on truck
that he gives to his brother. Then, when he realizes that, you know, he's never gonna get the title straightened out on this Nissan truck that he got from Chris, he takes it down to a train station somewhere between Greenwich and New York and just leaves it there. It disappears, and he never sells anything to the police about he, you know, what happened to the truck or why, or what he did with it for many, many, many years.
And in ninety four when they dug up John's body and they linked Chris to this homicide as a person of interest, and the guy never came forward. He never talked to anybody, He never came forward, He never talked to the police, never discussed his role in hiding that truck until well after two thousand and eight, when Chris
was finally in custody. And you know, I think that you know that the totality of that, you know, I'm sure now he's coming to court and tell him the truth, but I think the totality of some of his testimony, uh, it would have been hard to overcome if there wasn't all this other you know, if there wasn't all this this other circumstantial evidence in the case.
Well, he also but he also called he also called his friend well yeah, yeah, yeah, and said and said listen, then warned him, you know, hey, these guys are the cops that have been asking some questions. So it didn't surprise me that much that he was almost a monkey wrench in in in at trial, like still helping his friend.
He was a monkey wrench. Yeah, I mean he you know, he did call him and you know, very explicitly asked him, who are you? You know, in very explicitly you know, said the police are looking for you, which really, you know, tipped off kind of the whole Yeah, uh, the whole game, and kept Croc at that time still cross one step ahead of law enforcement. And you know, and it's these little breaks another thing that going on in the book,
as you know, these little breaks that he gets. Some of them are like that where you have a friend calling others are just completely random. You know, in eighty five, when this couple went missing, and it wasn't too long after they went missing that the knightstalkers started killing people
in those same neighborhoods. So police, you know, weren't gonna weren't focusing on a missing couple maybe in the way they would have had they not been trying to figure out, you know, why this crazed predator was out raping women and killing their husbands. And it it degenerated in ninety
four when they dug up John. And it was only two weeks later that Oh Jay was suspected of killing his wife and her friend, and the attention of the media, which had been looking at these bones and talking about this case and focused on this missing guy, shifted to OJ.
And it was all O Jay all the time for eighteen months and Son California sure and and and the police in ninety four, the homicide detectives that were working the case didn't didn't follow through on all the groundwork that they have back in eighty eight, Like they didn't go back and talk to people in Greenwich. They didn't, you know, they didn't talk to uh, Chris Bishop, the the minister's son, They didn't talk to Dan l and the Greenwich police lieutenant. They didn't. They didn't do any
of that. What they did was they w they went to Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show and gave him essentially the blue book, the case book, and said, here, put put on a show, uh and see if we don't
catch this guy. Well, you know, ninety four people were watching OJ and focused on OJ, and nobody gave a crack up about you know, a poor dead king in the backyard of a house in San Marino, and not even the police apparently, because they never did complete reports, they never actually worked the case as well as they could have back in ninety four. And it's you know, and it's a shame too because you can think about all the lives that have been affected by h Chris Clark, Chris Clark, the flashing.
There, yeah, yeah, and a pause over those.
Years, and uh, you know, it's just it's a shame. A homicide investigations have changed mightily since the night, you know, the mid nineties, but uh, you know, it's a it's certainly an untold part.
Of the story for those maybe keeping track, and and uh, I think we skipped over this sort of explanation as well. Why would Linda john SAWA's wife, and since he certainly wasn't any kind of secret, secret mission or assignment that he was under, why would they tell d D or anyone? Why would they tell anyone they were doing some sort of secret job? Why would.
I think the implication is that Chris convinced first John and then Linda that there was a secret government job waiting for them in Connecticut, uh, and it would be doing top secret work, and that he was a secret agent Chris was a secret agent, and I think he convinced us that that's what he was. He throughout his life, especially after leaving San Marino. Government work top secret agents played into a lot of his stories, and it's almost a thread in his you know, his con like the
like the high level con game. When he was a Rockefeller, he told people in New Hampshire that he owned this top secret government plant that specialized in manufacturing jet propulsion engines, and that he was such top secret work that he was a potential target of Chinese secret agents who were
going to kidnap. When he was fleeing the Greenwich Police in eighty eight, he told his girlfriend that his parents were involved with secret agents in Pakistan and that these people were out to kill them, and that because they were involved in this secret government work and they had
to flee. So he he did it convincingly. He did it more than once, so there's no reason to believe that he didn't do it with you know, John and Linda, and then you know, more brutally with this poor alcoholic uh deity, Uh say, yeah, government government works, the top secret government work. He you know, I guess he's quirky and we'd a lot. So if that's the and you know, you remember back of forty five minutes ago, I mentioned
the big lie. There's one of the big lies, and people just buy it because it's too unbelievable.
Yeah. Well, he had a lot of practice, so he got better and better. But he just he was almost flawless and until I guess a fatal mistake. Don't mess with your wife.
Yeah, you know that's the thing, right, except he what but you know what the thing is, that's true. That that why that changed everything for him with his wife. But but he wasn't that perfect. He wasn't that flawless. You know, the bag, the bag, the truck, the you know, the fact that he left the trail of bruck Frumbs in Connecticut that led to the old girlfriend, who, by the way, knew that he was married to, say Andy Boss.
And if somebody in ninety four had just gone and talked to people in Greenwich who were just gone and talked to people in New York just done the basic amount, you know, dumb shoe detective room, they would have put the case down back then.
Yeah, so he was more like, yeah, there's a lot of missed opportunities by uh by police early on.
Right, and and you know, and the thing about the story is, I'm sure your listeners are like going, what the heck, there's so much stuff going on. The thing about name dropper, which by the way, is only available at Rockefellowmistry dot com, UH, is that you know, I traced the story from through Chriss to Clark, and he's
he's the central character. And I know we're going through all these massinations and all these different locales and people, but at the end of the day, it's this one guy, a German who came here and killed a kid, a twenty eight year old kid. But he killed a kid, an innocent kid, and got away with it for a hell a long time until he was convicted. That's the story.
Do you think he's likely to have killed Linda as well?
Well, I know the police believe that. And there's no reason not to believe that. She hasn't been heard from since nineteen eighty five. She's never applied for a job, she's never applied for credit, she's never phoned home. Uh, other than these postcards that you know appeared in her friend's mailboxes shortly after her disappearance, She's had no contact with anyone, so you know, that leads one to believe
that she's dead. In databases, the the kind of databases that UH are kept on people as far as identity goes, are so thorough and so up to date, and it contained so many records and billions of hers. The fact that they're not one of those databases has ever encountered on Linda Sellis or anyone remotely using her identity since then, leads one to believe that she's done.
Yeah, just it's a mystery where the body might be.
Yeah, right, Well, you know, there's a lot of theories about that. We have a big forest here in Los Angeles just behind the city, the north of the city. There's a lot of bodies buried up there. And if you go pretty if you go fifty miles east out of La you hit the desert and there's a lot of bodies dumped out there. So there's two theories right there.
The third theory is, and the one that I think is probably the most plausible, by the way, is that she's buried in that backyard and that they'll never find her.
They they didn't see that as a possibility and further excavate that or have any way of you know, they have the corpse smelling.
I know, they believe, they believe there was a possibility they used you know, corpse smelling detective canines. But that yard has so significantly changed since John was dug up in ninety They didn't use corpse dogs in ninety four, and the yard has changed so significantly since then, that with this swimming pool and cement and you know, massive amounts of landscaping that I don't even think sonar could
could find her remains. And I mean, I just think it's another example of him just getting lucky.
So you think it just wasn't as thorough because it really was by accident that they found his body. And then, like you say, that was in the excavation of building a swim or the making of a swimming pool, and you just.
Fact, what they did was they drew some they so they dug up his body, and they drew some conclusions, you know, and the first conclusion was, Okay, he's here, she must be close by. So they looked close by, right, but they didn't look at you know, he didn't I don't believe that they looked at the other end of the pool, the shallow end of the pool, for example, or you know, as it gets to that deep end.
I don't believe they looked at any of that. I don't think they dug any of that up, because don't forget, this is a homeowner. He's getting a pool built in, and if the cops come in and start tearing the hell out of his house, you know, he's not gonna be too happy because guess what, he's gonna have to pay to put it back together. And there's some element
of that in this. In ninety four, after they found the body, they went into that guest house where Chris lived, and they loomin all the hell out of the place, and they found lots of blood. In ninety four, you couldn't get DNA out of, you know, non visible blood that was spotted with love and all. In two thousand and eight, they were capable of doing that, but they weren't gonna rip up the guy's floor and go through
all this stuff to get it. The fact of the matter is is that, you know, as sometimes prosecution is like playing cards. You know you're gonna the hand you got a dead John, sois is a winning hand and yeah, and you know, for them, and it's just sad that again, you know, these poor people, these are good, good people, really, John and Linda, and it's just really sad. What you know that they ran into this guy.
Yeah, absolutely, Well at least someone caught up with them, and we have this fine story about that entire event. So I want to thank you very much Frank Girardo for coming on the program and talking about Name Dropper investigating the Clark Rockefeller Mystery. It's a very very very engaging story and I want to thank you very much for this interview.
Well, thanks a lot for having me on and I really appreciate you you doing this this it's it's great to be able to talk to your listeners about this really fascinating case.
Yes it is. And for people that want to get a hold of you that have been moved by the program, you can be contacted through Facebook. You're always looking for friends on Facebook and you have again, could you repeat that website for us?
Sure, it's actually Rockefeller Mystery dot com. And if that's hard to remember, you can think of the old TV show Rockford Files rockdfellerfiles dot com and there you can buy the book Name dropper great.
I want to wish you all the best, and I hope to hear from you again soon because I know that there may be something else going on with this, but hopefully we can hear from you again, and because they had a great time here speaking with you tonight. So thank you very much and thanks for having me Dan, I really appreciate it.
I enjoyed the show.
Thank you very much.
Good night, thank good night.