Friend: Defendant Tried To Sell Bloodstained Rug

ALHAMBRA, California (AP) — A German-born man who masqueraded as a Rockefeller and is now accused of murder was confronted in court Monday by witnesses who said he tried to sell them an Oriental rug with a blood spot.

Christian Gerhartsreiter, who is charged with murdering a man from whom he had rented a cottage in 1985, smiled slightly at witnesses Robert and Bettie Brown, an elderly couple who once welcomed him into their home for religious study classes and became his close friends.

Gerhartsreiter is charged with killing John Sohus, whose bones were found in 1994 in the backyard of his former home in San Marino, a wealthy suburb of Los Angeles, nearly 10 years after Sohus and his wife vanished.

Gerhartsreiter left town soon after they went missing. He is charged only with killing 27-year-old John Sohus. No sign of Linda Sohus has been found.

Robert Brown testified at a preliminary hearing about a day in 1985 when the man they knew as Chris Chichester showed up at their door with various belongings he wanted to sell because he was going on a trip.

Brown said he called his wife to look at a small Oriental rug.

“She looked at it, and said, ‘Chris, this has blood on it.’ He fairly quickly rolled it back up and left with it,” Brown said, adding that his wife suggested a place he could take it to be cleaned.

Brown said Chichester, who was then pretending to be an instructor at the University of Southern California’s film school, showed up on another occasion asking how to dispose of photo processing chemicals.

Chichester had told the Browns that he was descended from English peerage and was related to a famed British sailor, Sir Francis Chichester. He had also given them tea, saying it came from his family’s Indonesian tea plantation.

About a week after the rug incident, Brown said Chichester disappeared, which was not surprising.

“He was something of a phantom. He was different, unusual. He was believable up to a point. You couldn’t pin him down on details. Everything was loose and feathery,” Brown said.

Another witness filled in the blanks of Gerhartsreiter’s travels after he left San Marino. Gerhartsreiter was arrested in Boston in 2008.

Christopher Bishop, an Episcopal priest from Greenwich, Connecticut, testified that he met the man he knew as Christopher Crowe in 1985 when he appeared at the church where Bishop’s father was the priest.

The younger Bishop said he was a film student at Columbia University at the time and his father told him there was a new parishioner who was also involved in film.

Crowe told Bishop that he was the brother of well-known film director Cameron Crowe and had been to film school in California. He said he was in Connecticut to produce the new “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” series, Bishop said.

“Did you believe it?” asked prosecutor Habib Balian.

“Yes,” the witness said. “I gave him a screenplay I had written and he had critiqued it. He certainly was conversant in film.”

In 1988, Crowe gave Bishop a truck, saying he had used it in a movie and didn’t need it anymore. Bishop said he later found out there was a lien on the truck and it had fraudulent license plates. He dumped the truck at a train station, thinking he could get in trouble for it.

“I thought that was going to be the end of the story,” Bishop said. “But one day I was sitting at my parents’ house and a Greenwich detective came to the door.”

The detective asked about Crowe, saying he was involved in a missing person investigation.

Bishop said he later asked Crowe who he really was.

“What was the defendant’s response?” Balian asked.

“Gotta go, bye,” Bishop said.

The truck was later found to be registered to John and Linda Sohus and had disappeared at the time Gerhardsreiter left the house, authorities said.

On the East Coast, Gerhartsreiter had claimed to be Clark Rockefeller, a member of the famous family, and married a woman with whom he had a daughter. She divorced him when she found out he had duped her.

Last year, Gerhartsreiter was convicted of kidnapping his daughter in Boston during a custody dispute. He is serving a four- to five-year prison sentence for that crime.

He would be eligible for parole this year if he was not facing the California charge, which could bring him 26 years to life in prison if he’s convicted.

The preliminary hearing will determine whether Gerhartsreiter is bound over for trial on the murder charge.