Joe Cafasso may have attempted to rub elbows with the rich and famous in much the same way as Gerhartsreiter, but at least his aliases were in keeping with his italian heritage.
Gerhartsreiter, by contrast, pretended to be a distant relative of the Rockefeller family. He married under that pretense, and divorced when his wife began to suspect that his story was not true.
Love is blind, so they say. And Cafasso knows that to be true, as he's infamous for proposing marriage to unsuspecting spinsters while he lays designs on their nest eggs.
Gerhartsreiter had been a 'stay-at-home dad', living in his wife's $2 million brownstone. Not a bad job if you can get it!
But that is just the tip of the iceberg; because after he left Germany, and had gone to school just long enough to get some level of English proficiency, he found his way to the US and found ways to take advantage of people.
He is wanted for questioning in the 1985 disappearance of a California couple, Sohus. He was apparently staying in their guest house under another alias, Christopher Chichester. As it turns out, Chichester was one of many aliases Gerhartsreiter used in his 30-year odyssey.Steve Savio, 39, said his mother answered a classified ad in the Journal-Register newspaper from a teen calling himself a German exchange student. He recalled Gerhartsreiter, who slept on their couch before moving into their basement, as a high-maintenance house guest.
“He was mad at us because we made him do his own laundry,” Savio said. “He was expecting to be served.”
In 1979, Gerhartsreiter moved in with the Savios family (in Connecticut) and attended Berlin High School as a foreign exchange student. The family said they knew the "snotty" student as Christian Gerhart Reiter. Gerhartsreiter moved to Wisconsin, where he married 22-year-old Amy Jersild on Feb. 20, 1981.This was a telling little tidbit:He disappeared the next day, with his new green card in hand.
Chichester soon after left the Savios' house and moved in with a librarian, who asked not to be named.Aren't they all."He was a con artist," she said. "He thought he was better than everyone else. But he was not self-assured. He was an insecure young man."
Gerhatsreiter resurfaced in California around 1985 - this time as Christopher Chichester, a name he seemed to have borrowed from a high school science teacher. Friends and neighbors in California remember a man who tried to cozy up to the high-society crowd in San Marino but never quite fit in.
"I have a feeling he was looking for somebody to victimize so he could just take the money and run," said Carole Iliff, 69, who said Chichester tried to con her late husband out of $1,200.
Chichester rented the guest house of Jonathan and Linda Sohus in San Marino, Calif. The couple mysteriously vanished that year. Jonathan Sohus' remains were found nine years later buried in his back yard.
When cops came to question Chichester he was nowhere to be found. Gerhartsreiter's lawyer said his client recalls being in California but doesn't remember living with the couple and denies any involvement in their disappearance.
In the late 1980s, at some point, he adopted yet another identity - Christopher Crow - and worked for banks, including Credit Suisse, according to a co-worker who worked with him who wanted to remain anonymous. "This guy clearly is a wacko," the former co-worker told The News.
Gerhartsreiter, 47, then pulled off his biggest con of all, marrying executive Sandra Boss in Nantucket in 1995.
They spent some time in New York, moved into a $2 million townhouse in Boston and had Reigh in 2001. The couple divorced in 2007 and Boss, 41, gained full custody of "Snooks."
Another "Catch me if you can" fellow, only he claims to have amnesia or some such rot.There are numerous parallels here to our Joseph Anthony Cafasso, the original two-bit conman, aka the Carteret Con Artist, including Gerhartsreiter's owning a boat at the marina. He just had it there so he could talk it up, apparently - he never took it out. And the story the FBI used in order to draw him out of the sparsely furnished apartment he was staying in with his kidnapped daughter - was that his boat was taking on water.
Unfortunately, Cafasso, who said he had a Clipper Ship at Bannister's Wharf, didn't even have a rowboat there.
What is absolutely fantastic is the french connection. (There seems to be a consistent theme here!) Cafasso claimed to have a home in France, Scott Covington claims to be jewish and french (what a joke!), and Jonathan and Lynda Sohus supposedly sent a postcard from France after they disappeared.
joe cafasso