Christian Gerhartsreiter (AP)
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LOS ANGELES — A high-powered financial analyst admitted on the witness stand yesterday that she never realized that the man to whom she was married for 12 years was not a Rockefeller but a serial impostor from Germany.
“In hindsight, I wish I had,” Sandra Boss told a jury at the murder trial of Christian Gerhartsreiter, who convinced the wealthy business executive that he was an heir to the legendary family.
The former New York resident told jurors in LA Superior Court that she first met Gerhartsreiter — who claimed to be “Clark Rockefeller” — when she was invited to a party at his New York apartment on First Avenue at East 57th Street in 1993.
At the party, guests wore costumes and played the role of characters in the board game Clue, Boss testified.
“I was Miss Scarlet. He was Professor Plum,” said, Boss, who is the trial’s final witness.
Gerhartsreiter was dressed in purple slacks and sipping sherry when he met Boss and her sister.
Asked by prosecutor Habib Balian if he talked about being a Rockefeller during the years they knew one another, Boss, 46, said, “Constantly.”
“He told me he inherited when he was 18, and he had broken off connections [with his family] except for formal affairs,” she said.
She said that “Rockefeller” acted in a convincing, aristocratic manner, and she couldn’t believe that she had fallen for his lies.
“I did not have reason to think he was not the person he said he was,” Boss said.
During yesterday’s testimony, Boss looked at the defendant only when she had to identify him, but Gerhartsreiter, 52, sneaked glances at her when she was not looking at him.
“He had a high need for privacy because of family concerns,” she said.
After they married, they lived on West 55th Street in Manhattan and she bore his child, but she was not allowed to give out their home address, and all their bills were in her name.
Gerhartsreiter, who came to the United States in 1978, is charged with murdering and cutting up the body of John Sohus, a San Marino, Calif., man in whose home Gerhartsreiter was a guest in 1985.
He allegedly fled California after burying the body, and adopted a series of identities as he moved to the East Coast and eventually married Boss.
One of those identities was “Christopher Crowe,” who claimed to be a filmmaker.
Earlier yesterday, Christopher Bishop testified that in the 1980s, he met a man who called himself Crowe in Connecticut and eventually bought a truck from him.
Other witnesses have said Sohus and his wife, Linda, bought the truck just before they vanished in 1985.