Witness: Murder Victim Found Suspect "Creepy"

The murder trial of Christian Gerhartsreiter continued on Monday with the testimony of a friend of the alleged victim.

Gerhartsreiter – a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller – was convicted of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter during a supervised visit in Back Bay in 2009. He was sentenced to 4 to 5 years in prison for both the kidnapping and for  assaulting a social worker overseeing his supervised visit. A Massachusetts court upheld the verdict in September. The California murder case is unrelated. 

Gerhartsreiter, 52, is accused of killing his San Marino landlady's son, John Sohus. Gerhartsreiter rented a guest house on the property while the his landlady, Ruth "Didi" Sohus, her son and his wife, Linda, lived in the main house.

Witness Susan Coffman, a close friend of the couple, testified she asked about the living arrangements during a 1983 visit, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

Coffman said she asked why John and Linda didn't live in the guest house.

Coffman went on to say "(Linda) said, 'Oh, there's a renter that lives there' and 'we don't talk to him because he's kind of creepy," the Daily News reported.

The witness went on to report Linda told Coffman in February of 1985 that she and her husband were heading to New York, where John was seeing about a job. She and Linda had plans to go to Phoenix together after the couple returned, the Daily News article said.

Only they didn't return and one of Linda's sisters filed a missing person report on April 8 of that year when a kennel operator called and said Linda had not picked up her cats, according to an article in the Boston Globe.

After the couple disappeared, Coffman testified on Monday, she received a postcard from Paris, signed "John + Linda" and saying they'd missed New York.

A sheriff's criminalist said she found no DNA on the postcards linking them to Gerhartsreiter the Daily News wrote.