On a sunny Sunday last July, Clark Rockefeller left his stately accommodations in Boston’s venerable Algonquin Club, the gentlemen’s establishment founded in 1886. Dressed in khakis and a blue Lacoste shirt, he was carrying his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, whom he called Snooks, on his shoulders, walking toward Boston Common, where they were going to ride the swan boats in the Public Garden.
“Good morning, Mr. Rockefeller,” people greeted him, for he was well known in this Beacon Hill neighborhood. He had lived here for a year and a half in a $2.7 million, four-story, ivy-covered town house on one of the best streets. But that was before his wife, Sandra, left him and dragged him through a humiliating divorce, taking not only the Boston house but also their second home, in New Hampshire. In addition, she won custody of their daughter, moving her to London with her, and restricting him to three eight-hour visits a year, in the company of a social worker, who was tagging along that morning like a third wheel.
Read about another fame-seeking impostor in “The Counterfeit Rockefeller,” by Bryan Burrough. Above, Christopher Rocancourt. Courtesy of the East Hampton Village Police Department.
Nevertheless, he was still Clark Rockefeller. At 47, he still had his name, his intelligence, an extraordinary art collection, close friends in high places, and his memberships in clubs up and down the Eastern Seaboard, where he could sleep and take his meals, having long ago decided that hotels and restaurants were for the bourgeoisie. He also had a divorce settlement of $800,000, at least $300,000 of which he had converted into Krugerrands and then into gold U.S. coins, keeping the rest in cash. And now he had his beloved daughter with him again, for a blissful day together.
As they approached Marlborough Street, a tree-lined avenue on which Edward Kennedy has a house, a black S.U.V. limousine cruised to the curb. Rockefeller had told the driver that he and Snooks had a lunch date in Newport, Rhode Island, with a senator’s son, and that he might need help getting rid of a clingy friend (the court-appointed social worker), who might try to get into the limo. Having assured Mr. Rockefeller that nobody would get into the car without his consent—the ride, after all, was costing him $3,000—the driver wasn’t surprised, as he looked in his rearview mirror, to see Rockefeller with Snooks on his shoulders and a clingy sort of guy right behind them.
Suddenly, Rockefeller pushed his pursuer away, put his daughter down, yanked the car door open, and pulled the child into the limo so fast that she hit her head on the doorframe. “Go! Go!” he shouted, and the driver stepped on the gas, dragging the social worker, who had hold of the back-door handle, several yards before he let go and fell to the pavement.
Within minutes, according to Rockefeller’s indictment, he told the driver to pull over. Then he hailed a cab, explaining to the limo driver that he wanted to take his daughter to Massachusetts General Hospital in order to make sure the bump on her head was not serious. He instructed the limo driver to wait for him in a nearby parking lot. The driver did as he was told, and waited approximately two hours, but his $3,000 customer never showed up. Meanwhile, Rockefeller had taken the taxi to the Boston Sailing Center, where one of his many female friends was waiting for him. She had agreed to drive him to New York in her white Lexus for $500. “Hurry!,” Rockefeller implored her, saying that he and Snooks had to catch a train that would get them to a boat launch on Long Island by eight p.m.
Soon after they arrived in Manhattan, they got stuck in traffic near Grand Central Terminal. In a flash, Rockefeller swept up his daughter, threw an envelope full of cash onto the front seat, and took off without even saying good-bye. Then the woman’s cell phone rang. It was a friend asking if she had seen the Amber Alert concerning Clark Rockefeller’s abduction of his daughter. That was when she realized that she had been fooled into providing the transportation for what the Boston district attorney would later charge was a custodial kidnapping. (Rockefeller has also been charged with assault and battery by means of a deadly weapon [the limo], assault and battery, and furnishing a false name to the police.)
Back in Boston, in a suite at the Four Seasons Hotel, Rockefeller’s ex-wife, Sandra Boss—a Harvard Business School graduate earning an estimated $1.4 million a year as a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the global management-consulting firm—was informed that her ex-husband had disappeared with their daughter. At the same time Boston police were entering Rockefeller’s name into national databases and finding … nothing.
“Can you please give us his driver’s-license number?” an officer asked Boss.
She said he didn’t have one.
“Do you know if Clark has a Social Security number?”
“No.”
“Is he on your tax returns?”
“No.”
His credit cards were on her accounts. His cell-phone number was under the name of a friend. To each of the investigators’ questions about her ex-husband’s identification papers, Boss responded in the negative. He didn’t have any identification at all.
Twenty-four hours after his disappearance, the curious case of Clark Rockefeller was being handled by Special Agent Noreen Gleason, a tough, blonde, 17-year veteran of the F.B.I. assigned to the Boston field office. Her first call was to the Rockefeller family, she remembers. “They said, ‘Under no circumstances is there a link We are not connected.’”
Plenty of other people had heard of him, however. For five days Gleason and a battalion of F.B.I. agents and police officers in the United States and abroad were taken for a ride. Like the limo driver and the friend Rockefeller tricked into driving him to New York, the authorities soon realized that they had been set up. Before the extraordinarily well-planned vanishing act, Rockefeller had devised an equally elaborate escape plan, telling many of his well-heeled friends his destination, which in every case was different, and in every case a lie. He told one he was sailing to Peru; he informed others he was going to Alaska, the Turks and Caicos, the Bahamas. “It was fascinating,” says Gleason. “We would start going down one avenue, one lead, and we would get to the end of it, and nothing would be there.”
Red herrings popped up all over the globe before the fugitive’s true identity was finally revealed, in part by a wineglass. The night before Rockefeller fled, he had had a glass of wine at a friend’s house. When investigators arrived there the next day, the friend still hadn’t washed the glass, so they lifted fingerprints and sent them off to the F.B.I. lab in Quantico, Virginia.
While the alleged kidnapper’s prints were being analyzed, the bureau, in hopes that someone might recognize him, released pictures to the media, and soon a lifetime of carefully constructed identities began emerging. Some people knew him as Chris Gerhart, a University of Wisconsin film student. Others said he was Christopher Chichester, a descendant of British royalty, who had charmed the residents of a wealthy Los Angeles suburb in the 1980s, only to vanish after being sought for questioning in the disappearance of a California couple and their possible murder. Still others remembered him as Christopher C. Crowe, a TV producer, who had worked for at least three Wall Street investment firms in the late 1980s before suddenly vanishing. Scores of people knew him as Clark Rockefeller, a Boston Brahmin and scion of industry whose friends included important artists, writers, producers, physicians, financiers, and members of prestigious private clubs.
“Now, we’re thinking that we’re dealing with a person who might have committed two homicides,” says Gleason. “We’ve tracked this person for a week, and we really don’t know who he is. Statistically speaking, parental kidnappings can go very bad. A lot of times people say, ‘If I can’t have her, she’s not going to have her, either.’ We’ve seen time and time again that the person who has kidnapped the child will kill himself and the child. You don’t want to get to the point where he knows he’s caught and he has possession of her, because that’s when the game is going to be over.”
When the results came back from the print lab, one thing became clear: the alleged kidnapper was not a Rockefeller. He was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a 47-year-old German immigrant who had come to America as a student in 1978, and who had disappeared into a complicated existence that the Boston district attorney would call “the longest con I’ve seen in my professional career.”
A.k.a. Christopher Gerharts Reiter
Once Rockefeller’s flight hit the headlines, reporters joined the manhunt in order to discover who the suspect was and where he had gone. The trail began in Bergen, Germany, a small resort town in the Bavarian Alps, where Gerhartsreiter grew up a misfit, and where no one had heard from him in 30 years. He was a short, skinny, fantasy-obsessed boy, whose father was a housepainter and an amateur artist, and whose mother was a seamstress. “He was like Batman … always going into different roles,” a friend of the family told the Boston Herald’s Jessica Van Sack. “Like his dad, he was an artist. And he always had crazy ideas.”
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