Longtime criminal defense attorney adds “author” to his resume

Like many lawyers, Stephen Hrones of Concord describes himself as a “frustrated novelist.”

“I worked in the legal field and always had a desire to do something outside of the legal world,” he says.

Now he is no longer frustrated.

With the publication of “Hypnosis on Trial: Anatomy of a Murder Case,” the 82-year-old Hrones has fulfilled his long-held dream.

Although a work of fiction, the book is more than loosely based on one of Hrones’ most significant court victories.

Hrones represented a 23-year-old Brighton man who was the first to be charged in the death of 24-year-old Susan Marcia Rose. Rose’s body was found the day before Halloween 1979 in a renovated home in Back Bay.

Two witnesses linked the man to the murder, and one said the man confessed.

As the title of the book suggests, one of these witnesses had her memories of the night of the murder resurfaced through the now discredited practice of hypnosis.

After hypnosis, the witness claimed to remember Hrones’ client returning to an apartment where a party was taking place with blood on his hands. But even though science was considered more credible than it is today, Hrones was able to overcome it.

“I had a very good expert and that helped a lot,” says Hrones.

Meanwhile, the other witness to whom the man had allegedly confessed had already had a long criminal record.

“So I could do a lot with him,” says Hrones.

Hrones used the actual trial transcripts to shape the book, taking some liberties to increase the entertainment value.

For one thing, the lawyer in the book is called Red Czek – a play on one of Hrones’ nicknames, the “Mad Czech” – and unlike Hrones himself, who specializes in criminal law and police misconduct cases, the protagonist is a corporate lawyer was persuaded to go to the new training area by the defendant’s mother.

However, his grizzled Boston homicide detective Gus Grazzi is not modeled on any detective from his past, says Hrones.

Hrones says he tried to track down his real former client to make him aware of the book, but he hit a dead end as every phone number he was given turned out to be out of date.

However, decades after the client’s acquittal, Hrones unexpectedly received confirmation that he had helped the jury reach a fair result.

In August 2023, nearly 44 years after the crime, a 68-year-old ex-convict named John Michael Irmer walked into an FBI field office in Portland, Oregon, and told agents he wanted to confess to several murders, including Rose’s. DNA tests would later confirm this confession.

Convicted along with another man of robbing and murdering a San Francisco drug dealer in 1983, Irmer told the FBI he was surprised that Boston police did not wait for him when he was released from prison in 2012 because his DNA has since been taken. He was in prison and entered into a nationwide database of unsolved cases.

Instead, he lived freely in Oregon for more than a decade before admitting to the crime.

Hrones said he was pleased to have confirmed the jury’s verdict was correct.

“As a criminal defense attorney, you never know whether your client is guilty or innocent,” he says.

As for his own legal career, Hrones says he is “pretty much retired, but still at it to some extent.”

Perhaps his most notorious client was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the con artist who insisted that his name was “Clark Rockefeller” in the pretrial phase of his trial for the kidnapping of his seven-year-old daughter during a supervised visit with a social worker in Boston’s Back Bay.

Sixteen years later, Hrones still doesn’t know what he can say about the case. But he says his most vivid memory is “just the incredible amount of publicity that the case received.”

When he stood trial for kidnapping, it was clear that Gerhartsreiter was the same man – then using the pseudonym Christopher Chichester – who was one of the main suspects in the 1985 disappearance of John and Linda in San Marino, California Sohus, from whom he had rented a guest house.

As his kidnapping trial was underway in Boston in the spring of 2009, news reports from Los Angeles County indicated that a grand jury was considering whether Gerhartsreiter was charged in connection with the death of John Sohus, whose remains were found by workers in 1994 Murder should be charged over digging a backyard pool for the new homeowners. However, current Supreme Court Justice Frank M. Gaziano blocked the jury in Boston from receiving that information.

Gerhartsreiter would be convicted of both crimes and is currently serving a 26-year-to-life sentence for the murder of John Sohus in California. He will be eligible for parole in December 2029.