DEL.ICIO.USReady-made Rockefeller linked to missing couple?
The New York Times
Sunday, August 24, 2008
In the understated town of Cornish, N.H., where it is considered bad form to exhibit your wealth, the man calling himself Clark Rockefeller was driven around in an armored black Cadillac with bulletproof windows. He affected silk ascots and bragged that when it came to acquiring property, he could outbid anyone. He said that Helmut Kohl and Britney Spears were coming to dinner.
If it seemed odd for a Rockefeller to violate such unwritten class rules, some wrote it off as the eccentricity of an heir to a legendary fortune.
AP Photo/NBC News, Lauren Kapp
NBC correspondent Natalie Morales is shown during a jailhouse interview with Clark Rockefeller
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“What Clark figured out,” said Peter Burling, a New Hampshire state senator and Cornish resident, “was the truth that novelists sometimes find and write about. That the power of a name can blind you to the behaviors that would otherwise make you say, ‘This is nuts.’”
But Rockefeller was not only not one of the Rockefellers. He was not any sort of Rockefeller at all.
That became joltingly clear three weeks ago when, the authorities say, he kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter on a Boston street and fled with her to Baltimore. The subsequent swirl of attention began the unmasking of Clark Rockefeller, exposing a long-running charade. He is now wanted for questioning in the 23-year-old disappearance and presumed death of a couple in California.
Under the name Christopher Chichester, he is considered a “person of interest” in the 1985 case. As Chichester, he rented a guest house in San Marino, Calif., from the missing couple, John and Linda Sohus, but left town not long after their disappearance.
“He’s somebody we want to talk to,” said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which had made little progress in the case since 1994, when bones believed to be those of John Sohus were found in the yard. Linda Sohus has never been found.
“Everything that is available is going to be re-examined, reanalyzed using the most advanced technology available today,” Whitmore said. “Every new lead will be followed.”
The man with the eccentric accent, the tantalizing hints of family fortune and the impressive conversational knowledge of everything from physics to art to the stock market is actually Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who grew up in Germany, came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and never left, not even contacting his family back home for the last 20 years.
“Gerhartsreiter is at the center of the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career,” Daniel F. Conley, the Suffolk County district attorney in Boston, said on Aug. 15 in announcing that authorities had confirmed his identity by matching a fingerprint on a wine glass with a decades-old print on an immigration document.
The portrait that emerges from the recollections of those who knew Gerhartsreiter, or one of his aliases, is of a man with an extraordinary talent for concocting personas and stories to go with them. Even the way he met his former wife, Sandra Boss, had elements of charade.
It happened, according to his lawyer, Stephen B. Hrones, at a party he gave in 1993 in his Manhattan apartment. The theme of the party was the mystery board game Clue. Rockefeller was dressed as Professor Plum, Boss as Miss Scarlet.
Among the autobiographical details he reportedly told various people at various times: His parents had been kidnapped in South America and he needed to pay ransom; he and his friends were “Star Trek” groupies who conversed in Klingon; a private chef made four-course meals for his dogs; and he became mute as a child for 10 years because he was distraught at the death of his parents in a car crash. (In truth, his mother is still alive and his father died of natural causes a few years ago.)
He even told people that he had the key to Rockefeller Center.
“I’m thinking, ‘There can’t be one key to Rockefeller Center,’” recalled Maggie McGuane, a writer who lives in Montana and met Rockefeller when he adopted a dog from the animal shelter where she volunteered.
As authorities continue to unravel the 27 years that Gerhartsreiter lived under assumed names, many mysteries remain. When and how did his wife of 13 years, a partner at the management consultants McKinsey & Co. — whose money apparently paid for a Boston town house and properties in Cornish — learn that he was a fake? What traits of background and character drove him to concoct his aristocratic aliases, which convinced some who met him, even as others were dubious?
Peggy Stone, an owner of an art gallery on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, said that the man she knew as Rockefeller owned a collection of “textbook examples” of Modernist paintings by the likes of Mondrian and Rothko that, to her trained eye, were “absolutely genuine and fabulous” and “along the lines of what the Rockefeller family collected.”
“Basically we never questioned what he was,” said Stone, who, with her husband, Lawrence Steigrad, owns Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts, specialists in old masters. “The most amazing thing to me was that I grew up in a German-speaking household, and he sounded to me like he was from New England. I just did not detect anything.”
Last month, freshly divorced and denied custody of his daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, Rockefeller, during his first supervised visit, shoved a social worker out of the way and jumped in a waiting car with Reigh, the authorities say.
An international manhunt ensued and, on Aug. 2, Rockefeller, 48, was found in Baltimore, where he had leased a carriage house and called himself Chip Smith. The authorities caught him by telephoning to say that his 26-foot catamaran, in a city marina, was taking on water.
Reigh, who is nicknamed Snooks, was unharmed and returned to her mother, who has declined all requests for interviews. Gerhartsreiter has been charged in Boston with felony custodial kidnapping, assault and battery, and battery with a dangerous weapon.
His lawyer, Hrones, says his client’s decision to take his daughter did not constitute kidnapping, and that the divorce and custody order are not valid because the couple, wed in a Quaker ceremony on Nantucket, never took out a marriage license, so were never legally married.
In an interview that will be telecast on the “Today” show on Monday and Tuesday, Gerhartsreiter maintains that Boss knew “early on that I had virtually not much in common with the Rockefeller family,” according to a transcript. He adds that she, too, “wanted to keep the appearance of it going.”
People who know Boss said she never used the name Rockefeller in any professional or personal documents. Boss released a statement Friday that, given her ex-husband’s “history of deceitful behavior,” his statements “should be viewed with extreme skepticism.”
In the television interview, Gerhartsreiter claims to have grown up in New York City and cites memories of visiting Mount Rushmore and picking strawberries in Oregon in the ’60s.
Hrones says his client has only vague memories of being in California as an adult, at the time the Sohuses disappeared.
“He liked to tell stories,” said Hrones, contending that because Gerhartsreiter is under 5-foot-5, he concocted “tall tales” to build himself up. “The stories were so wild, people knew they weren’t true,” Hrones said.
In Cornish these days, people are retelling their Clark Rockefeller stories, trying to figure how some were taken in and others were not. And they are speculating about what drove the man.
For someone who was hiding from his past — a past that California authorities say may include a connection to two deaths — he paradoxically sought the spotlight. Why else, suggested Peter Burling, would he pick the name Rockefeller — and, decades earlier, claim to be a Mountbatten. Even the name Chichester belonged to an adventurer: Sir Francis Chichester, who sailed around the world alone.
“He must have been a superb student of the kind of American fascination with names and powerful families,” Burling said.
Even after his marriage broke up last year, he was still at it. A few months ago, after having been out of contact for years with Stone and Steigrad, he showed up at their gallery, Stone said. “He said he was looking for a town house in the East 60s,” she said. “He talked about buying a boat.”
A few weeks later, in May, he attended a gallery party. “He was the life of the party that night, he really was,” Stone said. “He was just running around introducing himself to everyone and putting people together, and I thought, this is fabulous.”
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