Kidnap Dad? 'He's a Con, He's a Fraud'

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PerryPeabody

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 2:37 pm

Thursday, August 7, 2008
Trouble mounts for dad accused of kidnapping
By THOMAS WATKINS The Associated Press
SAN MARINO, Calif.–

He calls himself Clark Rockefeller, and police say for years he's been dining out on the illustrious name, pretending to be an heir to the oil tycoon.

But investigators want to know whether the man dubbed "Crockefeller" and "Rockephony" by the tabloids is more than an impostor. They want to know if he's linked to an unsolved killing.

The bespectacled 48-year-old has been jailed since being accused of abducting his daughter from Boston's high-society Back Bay neighborhood. Authorities are now trying to determine whether he's connected to a bag of human bones and a married couple who vanished nearly a quarter-century ago from this wealthy Los Angeles suburb.

On Wednesday, two homicide detectives from Los Angeles were in Boston to question Rockefeller about Jonathan and Linda Sohus, who disappeared without a trace in 1985.

After his arrest last weekend in Baltimore in the alleged kidnapping, it soon became clear the suspect was not a real Rockefeller. Descendants of the oil tycoon said he was not related. And the man's true identity remains a mystery because he claims he can't remember anything about his past.

But police soon realized Rockefeller's fingerprints matched those on an old license application submitted by Christopher Chichester – a man who lived in a guesthouse on the Sohus' property and was a target of the initial investigation.

The development was the latest in an intriguing case that has frustrated investigators since Jonathan Sohus' mother filed a missing persons report 23 years ago.

Police explored various possibilities, including that Chichester had been in love with Linda Sohus and murdered her husband in a fit of jealousy.

But then Chichester disappeared, too, and Sohus' mother died in 1988 without any answers.
. . . .

The badly damaged remains were believed to be those of Jonathan Sohus but were never positively identified, Hadsell said.

Jonathan Sohus was adopted, so there was no obvious way of comparing the bones' DNA to that of family members, half-brother Chris Sohus said.

No sign of Linda Sohus was ever found. The case eventually faded from the public eye, but investigators have searched for Chichester for years.

In 1994, homicide detectives circulated a news release that described Chichester as a con man who "surfaces in affluent neighborhoods and mingles in social circles before making friends with wealthy, influential people."

They never found him and never interviewed him, Hadsell said.
. . . .

Authorities came close to Chichester in the late 1980s when he was pulled over in Greenwich, Conn., driving Sohus' truck. But by the time the Department of Motor Vehicles had confirmed it was Sohus' truck, Chichester and the vehicle had vanished.
"We were very diligent in trying to track down as many leads as we could, but they were adults, and there were no signs of foul play," Hadsell said of the initial investigation. "Adults can go ahead and disappear."

When the Los Angeles detectives came to the Boston jail where Rockefeller is being held without bail, Rockefeller refused to meet with them.

"He's not accepting any communications. He's not granting any interviews," said Peter Van Delft, a spokesman for the Suffolk County Sheriff's Department.

Rockefeller's attorney, Stephen Hrones, said he advised his client not to speak to the Los Angeles investigators. He said Rockefeller "denies absolutely" any connection between him and the California case.
. . . .
The possible link to Boston, where Rockefeller allegedly orchestrated a complex kidnapping scheme to take his daughter during a supervised custody visit, was the talk of San Marino, a placid town of gated cul-de-sacs, well-manicured lawns and tree-lined boulevards.

Neighbors on Wednesday remembered Chichester as a smooth talker who was well-dressed and seemed well-educated. He did all the right things to ingratiate himself with his upscale neighbors, including volunteering at the local library, said Ray Cornwall, a neighbor who has lived in the community since the 1970s.

Chichester arrived with a British accent, but some were suspicious of him because of his fantastical claims to fame and fortune, Cornwall said. He told people he was related to a famous British sailor who had navigated the globe and was also related to the Mountbatten family, a wealthy and influential British line.

"He's a prototype con man. He's really good at it," said Cornwall, whose daughter dated Chichester briefly in the mid-1980s. "It's going to be hard to prove anything, because he's not left any permanent trail. It's all smoke and mirrors."
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gwen

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:04 pm

Very devious man and quite the con!

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gwen

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 3:54 pm

Case of Clark Rockefeller, Accused of Kidnapping Daughter, Suggests Man of Many Faces
Thursday, August 07, 2008

A wealthy, educated member of the elite Rockefeller family. A German exchange student in Connecticut. A man renting a carriage house in Los Angeles County who mysteriously vanished along with the newlywed owners of the property in what became a cold homicide case.

Police on both coasts suspect these personas could be among at least a dozen faces of the man who now calls himself Clark Rockefeller.

The 48-year-old balding father with big, round glasses and piercing eyes sits in a Boston-area jail on charges he kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter Reigh and allegedly planned to start a new life in Baltimore as Charles "Chip" Lewis.

Police could have a real-life "Talented Mr. Ripley" on their hands — mystery man, multiple identities, a taste for high society — if their theories of his web of lies and false identities prove true.

"We're already familiar with multiple aliases. If there's one thing we're certain about this suspect, it's that his true name is not Clark Rockefeller," Jake Wark, press secretary for the Suffolk District Attorney in Massachusetts, told FOXNews.com.

But for now, the prosecutor in the kidnapping case isn't saying much, either about Rockefeller's possible link to the San Marino, Calif., murder investigation — which popped up after a fingerprint match to an out-of-state license application — or about many other elements of the baffling case.

"I can only say that the investigation remains very active and is growing more focused by the day, but I'm not going to discuss specific leads or avenues of the investigation," Wark said.

He would say that, by his count, Rockefeller has "at least a dozen" different aliases.

"It's a long list," Wark said.

Rockefeller and his attorney have been mum on who he is, who he has claimed to be and where he comes from. Rockefeller refuses to speak to detectives from Los Angeles and Boston or to the media, and defense lawyer Stephen Hrones says his client won't start spilling the beans any time soon.

"I don't know anything about it (the possible L.A. murder link) except for what I read in the papers, and they're not going to talk to my client," Hrones told FOX News on Wednesday. "I'd be a fool to let him talk." Hrones said his client has told him he is, in fact, named Clark Rockefeller — and Hrones has no reason to believe otherwise.

The latest potential alias is that of an "odd" German exchange student named Christian Gerhart Reiter who stayed with two families in Berlin, Conn., nearly 30 years ago.

Authorities have contacted the families to determine whether Rockefeller and Reiter are one and the same, according to the Boston Herald.

Reiter lived with the family of Edward Savio before moving to California, Savio told the Herald. The FBI later would get in touch with the Savios when they were investigating the disappearance of the newlywed couple John and Linda Sohus of San Marino, Calif.

Of interest to federal agents was an attempt made in Connecticut to sell a vehicle — a pickup truck — belonging to John Sohus, the newspaper reported.

"He made my mom really nervous," Edward Savio, 45, told the Herald. "He said he was from Bavaria. We were a modest, middle-class family and he would say things like, 'I would never live like this.' He knew where the line was and he flirted with it."

An 82-year-old librarian, who also took in Reiter, has not-so-fond memories of the exchange student.

"He really was an odd kid," she told the Herald on condition of anonymity. "We did not really end up on a happy note. ... He had some fantastic stories about his parents. It turned out he was from a poor, working-class background."

Click here for more on this story from the Boston Herald.

In California, a man who called himself Christopher Chichester, a tenant of the Sohus couple, ingratiated himself to the town's elite — joining the local rotary club and speaking with a slightly British accent, by many accounts.

The remains of a man believed to be John Sohus were unearthed on the property about 10 years after the 1994 disappearance of the couple and their guest, when the new residents were digging a space for a swimming pool. Sohus' adopted sister Ellen Sohus said a complete skeleton was found.

"My brother was bludgeoned, dismembered and buried in the backyard in three separate bags," she told MyFOXBoston.com. "There was a huge blood stain on the concrete floor of the guest house in my brother's home. My brother's car turned up on the East Coast when Chichester tried to sell (it)."

The disappearance of Jonathan Sohus and his new bride didn't cause any alarm at first, because someone sent a postcard to their family from Europe claiming they were on a "secret mission." Chichester, meanwhile, vanished almost without a trace after.

Click here for more on this story from The Los Angeles Times.

The Rockefeller link turned up after his fingerprints matched those with a license application for a Christopher Chichester. Los Angeles police sent two investigators to Boston to try to question Rockefeller in jail, but they have been tight-lipped about their side of the probe.

Calls to Los Angeles County sheriff's office and to the Suffolk County Jail in the Boston area were not returned.

In Boston, Rockefeller married Harvard Business School graduate Sandra Boss. Reigh is their daughter.

The couple lived in a tony brownstone and had a lavish lifestyle, buying a yacht and a summer mansion in New Hampshire and hob-knobbing with the area's rich and influential. That is, until their 2007 divorce — brought on in part, court records show, by the fact that Rockefeller refused to reveal his true identity.

After Rockefeller, a former director of the exclusive Algonquin Club, allegedly ran off with Reigh to Baltimore, he used the name Charles "Chip" Lewis to buy an apartment, police said.

Hrones says Rockefeller raised the little girl often without much help from her constantly working mother, and the lawyer denies that his client kidnapped her, since she was his daughter, too.

Meanwhile, detectives continue to be confounded by their mystery man. But, they say, they're getting close.

"We're extremely confident that we will determine who he is," Wark, the prosecutor, said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,399624,00.html

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PerryPeabody

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 5:34 pm

I guess this is how you hide in plain sight for 25 years--be pretentious, annoying, don't drive, don't fill out forms, and change your name constantly--oh, and either sand off your fingertips or wear rubber gloves at all times.

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gwen

Posted: Thu Aug 07, 2008 7:25 pm

PerryPeabody wrote:

Sure worked for this freak!

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PerryPeabody

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:26 am

Rockefeller revelation: ’It seems you found my brother’
bostonherald.com By Jessica Van Sack
Friday, August 8, 2008 - Updated 6m ago

BERGEN, GERMANY - The man who claimed to be Clark Rockefeller and captivated a nation with his ever-changing identities is Christian Gerhartsreiter, the son of an artist who hails from this quaint Bavarian town, his shocked family told the Herald today.

“It seems you found my brother,” a wide-eyed Alexander Gerhartsreiter said upon being handed a photograph of the man known to America as an alleged child abductor and a “person of interest” in a decades-old California murder. “It is really a shock.”

Until a Herald reporter knocked on their door today, Christian’s fate had been a mystery to the family for decades.

“This is quite heavy,” Alexander said.

Christian Gerhartsreiter was born on Feb. 21, 1961 in a Siegsdorf, Germany, hospital. He was raised until about 1978 in the same house his mother and brother still live in today, the house his paternal grandfather built with his own hands.

“He’s my brother, but I really didn’t know him,” Alex said in an interview on his porch. “I have only a few memories. He left when I was 5 or 6.”

Christian Gerhartsreiter had an air of superiority, his brother said. He would spell his name differently than the rest of the family. “He wrote it always with a hyphen,” Alex said. And Christian left, never to return to what he viewed as a provincial life in Bavaria.

Prior to halting communication with his family in 1986, Christian did admit to his family that he had changed his name to Christopher Chichester, Alex said.

“He told us it was not possible for Americans to use his name,” Alex said.

Appearing tearful at times, Alex spent an hour sifting through pictures and American newspaper articles to learn about his only sibling’s life as a nation-crossing chameleon.

Rockefeller’s true identity had long stymied American investigators. He has no Social Security number, birth record or driver’s license.

Local police and prosecutors are said to be assisting Los Angeles-area detectives in trying to pinpoint if Rockefeller is the man known as Christopher Chichester, sought for questioning since 1985 in the disappearance of San Marino, Calif., newlyweds John and Linda Sohus. A dismembered skeleton was found on the Sohus property in 1994.

“The investigation remains very active and grows more focused by the day,” said Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley, whose office is holding Rockefeller without bail in the July 27 kidnapping of his daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Storrow Mills Boss, from the Back Bay.

“I don’t know if I’m awake or even breathing right now,” Alex said as he read newspaper clippings detailing his brother’s recent turmoil.

The brothers could hardly be more different: Alex, 34, is a computer programmer who has always preferred his native Alps to any exotic travels. He bears the burden of his brother’s disappearance, taking care of his mother and paying the bills. He lives modestly with no desire for fame – now more than ever.

“We’re different,” Alex said. “He wants always to be in a big world.”

Alex struggled today with whether to tell his German-speaking 78-year-old mother, Irmengard, the truth about the son she still talks often about. He said their father, Simon, a landscape painter, died five years ago without ever knowing what became of the son he loved.
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PerryPeabody

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:32 am

Silence keeps cops scrambling for clues in Clark Rockefeller case
By Peter Gelzinis
Friday, August 8, 2008 - Updated 1h ago
Boston Herald Columnist

What are we calling him today: Cristian Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester, Charles “Chip” Smith, Christopher Crowe, Clark Rockefeller - or Arnold Stang?

By this time next week, Cristian, Christopher, Chip, Clark Whatshisname will most likely have charmed his fellow guests at the Nashua Street Jail as skillfully as he once wormed his way into the hearts of those Back Bay blowhards at the Algonquin Club.

Pretty soon he’ll be conducting jailhouse tutorials on how to tie the legal system in knots by keeping your mouth shut.

“By virtue of the conversation we’re having right now,” said Tom Nolan, assistant professor of criminology at Boston University and a former Boston police lieutenant, “this guy is still playing us. It’s actually more of a Rip Van Winkle tale in some respects. Here you have someone who surfaces some 20 years after the Internet.

“Law enforcement is forced to concede the obvious: Before 1993, he’s invisible, someone who simply doesn’t exist in any of the conventional ways we used to use to track people. And after ’93, we still have no clear idea of who this person really is.”

And the geek who’s become Suffolk county’s latest celebrity inmate has continued to shroud himself in a curious fog. He calmly shunned the California cops who traveled cross-country to talk to him about the disappearance of a newlywed couple some 23 years ago. But then, what else was he going to do? Invite them into his cell for a cup of coffee?

Jailhouse sources describe a strange, enigmatic little man who tends to bury his nose in a book and keep largely to himself. Even with something as ominous as a possible double homicide hanging over his head, Clark Whatshisname seems absolutely indifferent.

Perhaps that’s because he’s already planned for the eventuality of jail as meticulously as he planned to spirit his daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Storrow Mills Boss, away from his ex-wife. People who babble in jail usually know they’re screwed and are angling to deal their way into a better situation.

“This is someone who’s already come to terms with the fact that if he has to do a year, possibly a year and a half on the (custodial) kidnapping charge,” Tom Nolan said, “he’ll do it. Chances are, with nothing on his record, and a couple of extraneous (assault) charges that won’t stand up, he probably wouldn’t do any jail time, and he knows that, too.”

Even though an international gathering of law enforcement personnel has come to the conclusion that Cristian Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester and Clark Rockefeller are one and the same person, there is still a long way to go before they can definitively tie this cipher to the disappearance and possible murders of John and Linda Sohus of San Marino, Calif.

Indeed, the mounting tide of circumstantial evidence seems tantalizing, but at the moment it’s just that - circumstantial. To hang a double murder rap around the narrow shoulders of this geeky shadow, cops would have no choice but to piece together a case the way they did some 25 years ago, long before our every move was electronically recorded. And that could take forever.

Which brings us to the mystery man’s most potent inoculation against serious jail time - his ex-wife Sandra Boss, the international consultant who is paid roughly $1.4 million a year for her peerless business sense, but for whom it took a dozen years and the birth of a child before she figured that the man she was married to was a stranger.

Right now, the only way Clark/Christopher/Cristian spends any serious time in jail is if his ex comes back from London to enlighten us about their bizarre life together. Sandra Boss once bought her ex-husband’s silence, along with custody of their daughter, for a million bucks. I’m guessing the faker knows she will never testify about how she was snookered by the man who stole their beloved Snooks.
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PerryPeabody

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 9:42 am

Many-layered identity is emerging
Father in kidnap case thought to be German immigrant and veteran con man
August 8, 2008
BostonGlobe reporters Michael Levenson, John R. Ellement, Maria Cramer, Eric Moskowitz, Shelley Murphy, and Maria Sacchetti reported and wrote this story.

Authorities were developing evidence yesterday that Clark Rockefeller's true identity is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a native of the small Bavarian village of Siegsdorf, Germany, who has spent the last three decades in the United States as a high-society con man, marrying at least two women, working on Wall Street, and perhaps committing violent crime.

Investigators have matched Rockefeller's fingerprints to a thumbprint included on immigration records submitted by Gerhartsreiter in the late 1970s when he was entering the United States as an exchange student, a law enforcement official said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Those prints have also been matched to a stockbroker license application filed under the name Christopher Crowe, believed to be an alias used by Christopher Chichester, who has long been a suspect in the 1985 disappearance and presumed slayings of a San Marino, Calif., couple who rented him a guesthouse.

"I think we're getting close, but I wouldn't want to come out and say definitively who this person is," said Noreen Gleason, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office.

Said Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the Boston office: "We're probably not going to confirm this person's identity until we have a birth certificate in our hands."

Another day in the pursuit of Clark Rockefeller's identity brought another set of revelations, most notably that he had a brief but remarkably unproductive career under the name Christopher Crowe, a bond salesman on Wall Street in the late 1980s who spun extravagant tales but rarely closed deals.

One former colleague at Nikko Securities International, Richard Barnett, said bluntly: "The man knew very little about corporate bonds."

Authorities were able to sketch a trail yesterday that began with Gerhartsreiter arriving in Connecticut as a German exchange student, moving to Wisconsin to marry a young woman in 1981, heading to California in the mid-1980s as Chichester, before returning East to work on Wall Street as Crowe, and eventually marrying Sandra L. Boss on Nantucket in 1995 as Clark Rockefeller.

But on July 27, police say, Rockefeller, newly divorced from Boss, kidnapped their 7-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, off a street in Boston. Authorities said yesterday that he had left a fingerprint behind on a wine goblet, a print that matched the stockbroker application filed by Christopher Crowe.

Rockefeller was captured last weekend in Baltimore after an international manhunt. He now sits in the Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street, and law enforcement officials believe they finally are on the brink of identifying him.

It has been no easy task. While his earliest years in Germany remain obscure, Gerhartsreiter's Wisconsin marriage records show he is the son of Simon and Irmengard and was born in 1961. Other government records list his birthplace as the mountain resort town of Siegsdorf, Germany, near the Austrian border.

Authorities do not know precisely how or when Gerhartsreiter came to the United States, but he apparently arrived in the late 1970s and lived for a time with the Roccapriore family in Meriden, Conn. Peter Roccapriore, 49, recalled a slightly-built, blond teenager who was surprised by the shortness of the American school day.

"He went to school with us," Roccapriore said yesterday. "He was like, 'Guys, you aren't even going to school that much. We usually go back for another two or three hours in our country.' "

Roccapriore wasn't certain how long the German student stayed or what may have been his reason for leaving, but he thinks the time limit for the exchange program had expired.

In August 1980, Gwen Savio, a retired librarian in Berlin, answered a newspaper ad for a German student seeking room and board and agreed to take in Gerhartsreiter, who walked several miles to her house.

Savio told the Globe yesterday that the teen, who enrolled at Berlin High School, refused to eat her family's Italian cooking and once locked her daughter out of the house in the winter.

"I didn't get a creepy feeling; I just thought that he was a spoiled brat," said Savio, who said she was interviewed by the FBI this week. "He wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it."

In January 1981, Savio kicked Gerhartsreiter out of her house, after he declared "that we were peasants and his father had told him not to talk to peasants." She believes he moved in with another family in Berlin.

On Feb. 20, 1981, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, 19, moved almost 1,000 miles west to Elm Grove, Wis., where he married a US citizen, Amy Jersild, 22, in a civil ceremony at the Dane County courthouse in Madison, records show. After that point, he obtained a green card, granting him legal residency in the United States.

Gerhartsreiter lived in a tiny brick cottage with flowing drapes, china, candles, and a fancy rug, recalled Beth Litza, Amy's older sister, in an interview yesterday.

"He had a kind of a rich-person, kind of distance thing going on," Litza said. As quickly as Gerhartsreiter appeared in Amy's life, he disappeared, she said, but she could not remember when and how they divorced.

Amy Jersild Duhnke, who is remarried and still living in Wisconsin, could not be reached yesterday.

In about 1983, Christopher Chichester showed up in San Marino, where he rented a converted garage, joined an Episcopal church, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and said he was the descendent of royalty. Residents recall being initially intrigued and later put off by Chichester's pretensions.

In 1985, Chichester's landlords, a young couple named John and Linda Sohus, were reported missing. Authorities wanted to question Chichester, but he had left the city and could not be located.

About the same time, a man named Christopher Chichester Crowe began mingling with members at the exclusive Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, Conn. Using contacts from the club, he was hired as a sales representative at S.N. Phelps and Co., a brokerage firm in Greenwich, said two former employees. They said they remember Crowe as a strange young man who said he had graduated from the University of Southern California and had worked as a producer for the television show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

"He's a chameleon; he can fit in," said one of the employees, speaking on condition he not be named. "He can be funny at times, witty, laughs at your jokes . . . He walked into the yacht club, pretending like he owned the place."

One of the employees said he saw Crowe's apartment, a converted garage on a large estate in Greenwich that was beautiful, but empty, except for a cot and some magazines. "He might have been a little embarrassed about it," the employee said. "He claimed he'd ordered some furniture that hadn't arrived yet."

The employees say Crowe quit for reasons they cannot recall. In 1987, he was hired as vice president of the corporate bond department at Nikko Securities International in Manhattan, after professing to be former head of the apparently bogus Battenberg-Crowe-von-Wettin Family Foundation, with a collection of Rolls-Royce automobiles and Italian sports cars. He told tales of owning castles in Europe, and his hiring was covered in the trade publication The Bond Buyer, which quoted Crowe's market analysis in July 1987: "Customers like industrials. They've been oversaturated with banks and finance."

But colleagues recalled yesterday that Crowe was not what he professed to be. He drove a beat-up 1965 Chevy, grew angry easily with others in the office, and made very few sales. He was terminated sometime around 1989, they said.

"He was a sales manager and never made a sale, so eventually he was fired," said Barnett. "He just didn't do anything."

Another former colleague recalled Crowe telling a customer who accidentally sat at his desk, "If anybody touches my stuff, I'll bring my German Luger."

"It started to become very apparent that whatever he said was a story; it was made up," another former colleague said. "At most places, but especially Wall Street, your word is your bond. And whenever you get someone like this, you're sitting on a liability, and so it was that, more than anything, that prompted the firm to decide that we'd be better of without him."

Just before he was fired, in 1988, Crowe attracted the attention of police in Greenwich, Conn., when he tried to sell a truck belonging to John Sohus, according to a 1995 episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries." The potential buyer, a minister's son, alerted police after Crowe lacked the proper paperwork, the show said.

Crowe's next job, sometime around 1989, was at Kidder Peabody in Manhattan, the former Nikko employees said. But he quit abruptly, telling colleagues his parents had been kidnapped abroad, those former colleagues said.

The next day, Connecticut state troopers showed up Crowe's office, asking about Sohus's truck, but Crowe was gone. Connecticut State Police declined to comment.

Where he went next is not clear, but during his marriage to Sandra Boss, they lived in New Hampshire, as well as in a $2 million townhouse on Beacon Hill.

About a year before he married Boss, in May 1994, workers digging a pool for the new owners of the Sohus home in San Marino discovered human remains wrapped in three plastic bags and buried in the backyard. Police presumed but never definitively identified them as those of John Sohus. DNA tests are currently being conducted on those remains. Neither Linda Sohus nor her remains have been located.

San Marino Police Lieutenant Steve Johnson said investigators plan to conduct a search next week of the property where the Sohuses were living when they disappeared in an effort to determine whether any additional human remains are buried on the property. Equipment that can X-ray through concrete will be used, he said.

"They'll survey the whole property," Johnson said.
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gwen

Posted: Fri Aug 08, 2008 10:41 pm

German: 'Rockefeller' is my long-lost brother

BOSTON, Massachusetts (AP) -- A German man has identified the mysterious "Clark Rockefeller" as a long-lost brother who left home as a teen and severed contact with his family 20 years ago.

Alexander Gerhartsreiter said his brother, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, is the man calling himself a Rockefeller, who is in custody on charges that he kidnapped his own daughter.

The real Rockefeller family says he's not a descendant, and authorities call the man a con artist who traversed the country using different stories and aliases to live a privileged life.

"It seems you found my brother," Alexander Gerhartsreiter said upon being handed a photograph of Rockefeller by a Boston Herald reporter who visited his home in Germany's Upper Bavaria. "It is really a shock."

He said his older brother was born February 21, 1961, in Siegsdorf, Germany, and was raised until 1978 in the same house where his family lives today. He moved to the United States as a student in Connecticut and never returned, initially keeping in touch.

The family last heard from him when he called his parents in 1985, Alexander Gerhartsreiter said.

"I think Germany was too small for him," Gerhartsreiter told a Boston Globe reporter who also visited him at his home. "He wanted to live in the big country and maybe get famous. Now that I see all this, he's really famous."

Investigators have been working to unravel the true identity and background of the man calling himself Clark Rockefeller since he is said to have snatched his 7-year-old daughter from a Boston street during a supervised visit July 27. He was caught Saturday in Baltimore, Maryland, where he had bought a home and boat.

Prosecutors said 300 one-ounce gold coins and $12,000 in cash were found in Rockefeller's apartment following his arrest.

The girl, Reigh, is also known as Snooks. She was found in good condition in Baltimore and has been reunited with her mother, Sandra Boss.

Authorities have said they have no record of Rockefeller before 1993, and he claims to have no memory of his life before then. He had refused to talk to investigators or reporters.

In addition to the kidnapping case, Rockefeller has been named a "person of interest" in the disappearance of a California couple.

Los Angeles detectives say a man named Christopher Chichester lived on the property of Jonathan and Linda Sohus of San Marino, California, who have been missing since 1985.

Police now say Rockefeller's fingerprints matched those on an old license application submitted by Chichester. They also believe that Chichester was one of the aliases used by Christian Gerhartsreiter.

The Boston Globe, citing an unnamed source, said the fingerprint also matched one submitted on a stockbroker license application filed by Christopher Crowe, believed to be another alias of Chichester, who has not been seen since the Sohuses disappeared.

The Federal Criminal Police Office in Germany said it had no information on the man.

FBI spokesman Damon Katz in Boston said "there is a pending investigation to determine who this guy is" but refused to give any details. Paula Grenier, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston, also said agents are helping law enforcement try to determine his identity.

Steve Savio, 39, of Berlin, Connecticut, said Thursday that he is "100 percent certain" that Rockefeller is the same person who boarded with his family in 1980 under the name Christian Gerhart Reiter at age 17. His mother and brother agree.

Savio said his family met him after answering an advertisement in a local newspaper from a visiting German teen looking for a place to live.

Savio said that when Reiter first moved in, he was sweet. After several months, however, "his true colors started showing," Savio said.

"I recall him thinking he's better than the rest of us," Savio said. "I recall him telling stories about having servants growing up and like that."

Savio said he last saw Reiter in 1981 but said the man kept in contact with his mother, telling her he was using the name Christopher Crowe to open a production company.

Savio said the FBI interviewed his mother in 1988 after a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe tried to sell a pickup in Connecticut belonging to the Sohuses. He apparently fled before authorities could track him down.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/08/08/rockefeller.internat.ap/index.html

AKA Gagal_05

Joined: 24 Feb 2007
Posts: 14370

PerryPeabody

Posted: Sat Aug 09, 2008 11:28 am

I read in an AP story that after Christian Gerhartsreiter a/k/a Clark Rockefeller married Amy Jersild in WI in 1981, he left after one day. It was from that "marriage" that he got his green card to work in the US.

Quote:

Records reviewed by The Associated Press show that after Gerhartsreiter left Connecticut, he went to Wisconsin, where he married 22-year-old Amy Jersild on Feb. 20, 1981, at the Dane County courthouse in Madison. He was 19 at the time—and the marriage enabled him to get a green card.

He left the next day, according to divorce records Jersild filed 11 years later. On them, she listed his address as "unknown."

http://www.denverpost.com/nationworld/ci_10137386

Why did this woman, who married him when she was 22, wait 11 years to file for divorce if he left her after one day of marriage?

Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 9:49 am

Clark Rockefeller conned my sister
Wis. woman: Sham marriage was for green card
BostonHerald
By Jessica Fargen
Monday, August 11, 2008

A Wisconsin woman claims the man known in Boston as accused kidnapper Clark Rockefeller scammed her sister into marrying him in the 1980s so he could get a green card and then he split.

A German newspaper photo of Christian Gerhartsreiter.

“I know she was conned,” said Amy Jersild’s sister, Beth Litza, in an interview from Wisconsin. “They didn’t date. They were introduced. They decided to get married, and then he divorced her to get his green card. After the courthouse wedding, she did not see him again.”

Rockefeller’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, said his client has a shattered memory and only vague recollections of his life before 1993. Hrones said Rockefeller does not recall having a Wisconsin bride.

Jersild, who has since remarried, could not be reached. She married Christian Gerhartsreiter in 1981 in a civil cermeony in Wisconsin.

Investigators believe Gerhartsreiter, a German national who came to Berlin, Conn., as a student in the late 1970s, went on to reinvent himself many times over as a Manhattan bond trader, art collector and moviemaker, and in Boston as Clark Rockefeller, a high-society intellectual with ties to the famed New York dynasty.

Gerhartsreiter, identified by his mother and brother as the same man as the wannabe Rockefeller, allegedly kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Storrow MillsBoss, from a Back Bay street on July 27, touching off an Amber Alert and an international manhunt. Rockefeller’s ex-wife, Sandra Boss, has custody of the girl.

He is being held in a Boston jail on charges of kidnapping, assault and battery, and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, as authorities across the globe try to straighten out his past.

Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley, said once authorities establish Rockefeller’s true identity, a new complaint will be drawn up. He said the new criminal complaint against Rockefeller could include charges of furnishing a false name to police.

Federal agents this past weekend were reportedly on their way to inteview the mother and brother Gerhartsreiter left behind 30 years ago in Bergen, Germany, a small Bavarian resort town.

A spokesman for the F.B.I. could not be reached.

A spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Boston said they continue to cooperate with authorities.

California authorities also want to question Rockefeller in connection with the 1985 disappearance and presumed murder of a newlywed couple.

Rockefeller has been linked by fingerprints to Christopher Chichester, who was living in the guesthouse of John and Linda Sohus when they disappeared. Chichester vanished soon after that.

Litza, the sister of the Wisconsin woman Gerhartsreiter allegedly conned into marriage, said she hopes authorities put him under hypnosis to jog his foggy memory.

“He tells stories and takes advantage of people,” Litza said. “He screws with people’s heads.”
http://tinyurl.com/67axxf

Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Mon Aug 11, 2008 5:55 pm

This article doesn't contain anything really new except for the positive identification by investigators.

The man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller, right, stands with his attorney, Stephen Hrones, during his arraignment in Boston on Tuesday.

'Rockefeller' is German sought in Calif. case
msnbc.com

LOS ANGELES - A Boston kidnapping suspect is a German man who lived in the guesthouse of a California couple who disappeared in 1985, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said Monday.

Spokesman Steve Whitmore said investigators “positively identified” Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter as the man being held in Boston and wanted for questioning in the disappearance of Jonathan and Linda Sohus.

Gerhartsreiter had been living under the name Clark Rockefeller. Police have said he snatched his daughter from a Boston street on July 27 in an elaborately planned kidnapping in which he hired two people to drive them to New York.

He was caught Aug. 2 in Baltimore, where he had bought a home and boat.

Gerhartsreiter went by the name Christopher Chichester when he was a guest at the San Marino home of the couple now presumed dead. Chichester has long been suspected in their disappearances.

The alleged aliases appear to reflect a twisted life of multiple identities that unraveled last week. If authorities and reports are to be believed, Gerhartsreiter was many things besides the suspect in the California disappearances:

As Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, he lived with families in Connecticut until he wore their hospitality thin.
A teen husband who left his wife in Wisconsin a day after they wed.
A Wall Street bond salesman named Christopher Crowe, who talked a good game but rarely closed a deal.
A stay-at-home dad who lived in a $2 million brownstone in Boston's tony Beacon Hill neighborhood until his wealthy wife divorced him when she grew suspicious of his background.
Rockefeller has refused to speak to authorities and remains jailed in Boston without bail. His attorney, Stephen Hrones, reiterated Friday that Rockefeller can't remember anything before 1993.

"We have all these different stories from everywhere. He says he doesn't remember anything. He's my client and I believe him until I see solid evidence that he's not who he says he is," Hrones said.

Hrones said that although his client has no memory, he vehemently denies any involvement with the disappearance and presumed deaths of Jonathan and Linda Sohus of San Marino, Calif.

"There are certain things you know you didn't do," Hrones said.

Los Angeles police said Rockefeller's prints matched those on an old license application submitted by Chichester, who has long been a suspect in the disappearance of Jonathan and Linda Sohus.

Rockefeller's prints also match those on a stockbroker license application filed under the name Christopher Crowe, The Boston Globe reported Friday, citing unnamed law enforcement sources.

'You found my brother'
The strongest word on his true identity came Friday, when a man in Germany told reporters Rockefeller was his brother, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the son of an artist and homemaker in Upper Bavaria who felt like he was better than his modest upbringing.

"It seems you found my brother," Alexander Gerhartsreiter said upon being handed a photograph of Rockefeller by a Boston Herald reporter who visited his home. "It is really a shock."

He said his older brother was born Feb. 21, 1961, in Siegsdorf, Germany, and was raised until 1978 in the same house where his family still lives today. Gerhartsreiter said his brother moved to Connecticut as a student and never returned, initially keeping in contact but out of touch since he called his parents in 1985 — the year the couple in California and their tenant Chichester disappeared.

Hrones said Rockefeller speaks German but does not remember living in the country or having a German brother. He said Rockefeller remembers only "tidbits" of his childhood — including going to Mount Rushmore in a station wagon and having a Scottish nanny.

Gerhartsreiter said his brother had told his family he had taken the name Christopher Chichester because his given name was too difficult for Americans.

"I think Germany was too small for him," Gerhartsreiter told a Boston Globe reporter who also visited him at his home Friday. "He wanted to live in the big country and maybe get famous. Now that I see all this, he's really famous."

Hrones said Rockefeller's memories begin around 1993. In 1995, he married Sandra Boss, a senior partner in the London office of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. She has not responded to requests for comment left with her employer.

At least two families in Connecticut said Rockefeller is certainly the same young man who came to live with them when he was a teenager.

'Better than the rest of us'
Steve Savio, 39, of Berlin, Conn., said his family met him after answering an advertisement in a newspaper from a visiting German teen looking for a place to live.

"I recall him thinking he's better than the rest of us," Savio said. "I recall him telling stories about having servants growing up and like that."

Savio said he last saw the man he knew as Christian Reiter in 1981 but said he kept in contact with his mother, telling her he was using the name Christopher Crowe to open a production company. Savio said the FBI interviewed his mother in 1988 after a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe tried to sell a pickup truck in Connecticut belonging to the missing Californians, Jonathan and Linda Sohus. He apparently fled before authorities could track him down.

Crowe is also the name on the stockbroker license application with fingerprints linked to Rockefeller, according to the Globe. A former colleague at Nikko Securities International, Richard Barnett, told the newspaper, "The man knew very little about corporate bonds."

Records reviewed by The Associated Press show that after Gerhartsreiter left Connecticut, he went to Wisconsin, where he married 22-year-old Amy Jersild on Feb. 20, 1981, at the Dane County courthouse in Madison. He was 19 at the time — and the marriage enabled him to get a green card.

He left the next day, according to divorce records Jersild filed 11 years later. On them, she listed his address as "unknown."

'Better than the rest of us'
Steve Savio, 39, of Berlin, Conn., said his family met him after answering an advertisement in a newspaper from a visiting German teen looking for a place to live.

"I recall him thinking he's better than the rest of us," Savio said. "I recall him telling stories about having servants growing up and like that."

Savio said he last saw the man he knew as Christian Reiter in 1981 but said he kept in contact with his mother, telling her he was using the name Christopher Crowe to open a production company. Savio said the FBI interviewed his mother in 1988 after a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe tried to sell a pickup truck in Connecticut belonging to the missing Californians, Jonathan and Linda Sohus. He apparently fled before authorities could track him down.

Crowe is also the name on the stockbroker license application with fingerprints linked to Rockefeller, according to the Globe. A former colleague at Nikko Securities International, Richard Barnett, told the newspaper, "The man knew very little about corporate bonds."

Records reviewed by The Associated Press show that after Gerhartsreiter left Connecticut, he went to Wisconsin, where he married 22-year-old Amy Jersild on Feb. 20, 1981, at the Dane County courthouse in Madison. He was 19 at the time — and the marriage enabled him to get a green card.

He left the next day, according to divorce records Jersild filed 11 years later. On them, she listed his address as "unknown."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26142682/

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Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:56 am

Clark Rockefeller admits California ID
bostonherald.com
By Jessica Fargen, Laurel J. Sweet and Jessica Van Sack
Tuesday, August 12, 2008

All the world has been a stage for accused kidnapper Clark Rockefeller, who finally admitted yesterday that he used the name Christopher Chichester when he tried to break into Hollywood as a movie actor in the 1980s, his lawyer said yesterday.

“He was trying to get into the acting business,” said attorney Stephen Hrones, who said Rockefeller thought the name “Chichester” would work better in Hollywood, and used the name “Christopher Crowe” when he tried, but failed, to present himself as a Wall Street financier.

Rockefeller’s revelation came on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department homicide detectives that, after much international speculation, they have positively determined German national Christian Gerhartsreiter to be both Rockefeller, accused of kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter from Boston last month, and Chichester, a person of interest in the 1985 disappearance and presumed murders of San Marino, Calif., newlyweds John and Linda Sohus.

Hrones said that while Rockefeller acknowledges having used aliases, he believes himself to be Rockefeller, and has not accepted his identity as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

“They are confident this is the same person,” said Los Angeles Sheriff’s Lt. Paul Becker, head of cold-case murder investigations.

Yesterday’s announcement marked the first time a law enforcement agency has publicly linked the names Rockefeller, Chichester and Gerhartsreiter to the same man.

Becker said detectives in California made the determination after a week of investigation and numerous tips from people who recognized Chichester from Gerhartsreiter’s photo.

“We’ve had a large number of people come forward saying, ‘Yeah, that’s him. No doubt,’ ” Becker said. “It’s been made pretty clear that that’s him.”

But the confirmation hasn’t yet passed muster for the Boston FBI. “We’re waiting for further verification through investigative techniques or resources,” Special Agent Maureen Robinson said. “We are not able to rely on a photograph identification.”

Likewise, Jake Wark, spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel Conley, stressed, “Any identification we obtain, especially for this defendant, must be checked, double-checked, supported and verified by every means possible. This defendant’s efforts to avoid identification are simply too extensive for us to take anything at face value.”

Hrones has not allowed police or the FBI to talk to Rockefeller.

Rockefeller, whose allegedly spotty memory seems to grow sharper each day, also now admits he remembers being a tenant of the Sohuses, but maintains he doesn’t know what happened to them.

“He said, ‘I’m not a violent man. I’ve never murdered anybody.’ He wasn’t that close to them,” Hrones said. “He just said they left.”

But could Rockefeller be seasoning the mystery surrounding him with bread crumbs? Last week, he requested a book on Paris for his jail cell reading. Yesterday, Hrones said he asked for the Star Trek novel “Vulcan’s Forge.” The Sohuses reportedly fell in love over a shared interest in science fiction. And the last time anyone heard from them, it was via postcards allegedly sent from France.

Yesterday, the Herald obtained Gerhartsreiter’s birth certificate. Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was born on Feb. 21, 1961, at 11:10 a.m. in a Siegsdorf hospital. His family’s claims Rockefeller is the youth who left their tiny Bavarian village in 1978 and never returned.

Rockefeller “understands German,” Hrones conceded, but insists he’s never lived in Germany and has no relatives there.
http://tinyurl.com/68nr24

Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:02 am

Old lives coming back to Rockefeller
Suspect recalls Calif. days, names
Rockefeller does recall Sohuses
By Michael Levenson and John R. Ellement
BostonGlobe Staff / August 12, 2008

Clark Rockefeller's lawyer acknowledged for the first time yesterday that his client used the alias Christopher Chichester while living in San Marino, Calif., in the mid-1980s and that he remembers the disappearance of his landlords, who are presumed slain in a case in which Rockefeller has been declared a "person of interest."

Stephen B. Hrones emerged from an hourlong meeting with his client at the Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street and said Rockefeller recalls living in a guesthouse that he rented from John and Linda Sohus, a young married couple, and John's mother, Didi, in the early 1980s. He said Rockefeller also recalls when John and Linda Sohus went missing in 1985.

"The mother was there. He was still there, but they left," Hrones said. "He wasn't that close to them, so he just said, 'They left.' "

The comments marked a turnaround from last week, when Hrones said his client could not recall anything before 1993.

Los Angeles County authorities say that Rockefeller left San Marino in 1985 before they could question him about the Sohuses' disappearance. Nine years later, in 1994, workers digging a backyard pool for the new owners of the house discovered human remains believed to be those of John Sohus. Neither Linda Sohus nor her remains have been found.

Hrones said his client denies any involvement with the presumed slaying. He said Rockefeller, however, was using the Chichester alias in San Marino, a prosperous Los Angeles suburb.

"He was aspiring to be an actor out there . . . and he thought it a more appropriate name," Hrones said.

He also said Rockefeller used the alias Christopher Crowe during a brief career as a corporate bond salesman on Wall Street in the late 1980s. He said his client does not recall growing up in Germany with the birth name Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, which Los Angeles authorities say is Rockefeller's true identity.

Hrones said his client, who is charged with kidnapping his 7-year-old daughter in Boston July 27, maintains that "Rockefeller is his real name."

"He's used aliases," Hrones said, "but there's nothing wrong with using aliases, as long as you don't use them to defraud."

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Office said yesterday that investigators have confirmed that Gerhartsreiter is Rockefeller's true identity. Through "numerous interviews back East and here" and "other investigative tools," investigators also confirmed that Gerhartsreiter used the Chichester alias in San Marino, said Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the office.

The official confirmation buttressed the account of Alexander Gerhartsreiter, who was shown a photo of Rockefeller on Friday in Germany and identified him as his older brother, who left the Bavarian hamlet of Bergen at age 17 in 1978 to find fame and fortune in the United States.

Whitmore said the sheriff's office, which has declared Rockefeller "a person of interest" in the Sohus case, is asking anyone who knew Rockefeller between 1985 and 1988 to contact police.

Boston investigators said yesterday that they have concluded that Rockefeller is not the suspect's real name but have not determined that Gerhartsreiter is his true identity.

"To our mind, the efforts undertaken by this defendant to avoid conclusive identification are simply too extensive for us to take anything at face value," said Jake Wark, a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley. "Any identification we make must be checked, double-checked, supported, and verified by every means possible."

A law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity said yesterday that authorities are planning to take DNA samples from Gerhartsreiter's relatives in Germany in hopes of conclusively identifying the suspect.

Maureen Robinson, a spokeswoman for the FBI in Boston, declined to comment on any potential DNA tests and said the bureau is working to verify Rockefeller's identity.

Two Los Angeles County homicide detectives traveled to Boston last week to question Rockefeller about the Sohuses, but he turned them away.

Hrones offered Rockefeller's explanation of why Rockefeller turned up with John Sohus's white pickup truck in Greenwich, Conn., in 1988, three years after Sohus went missing. Hrones said that Rockefeller had bought the truck from John's mother and that she failed to send him the truck's registration after he paid for it.

According to a 1995 episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries," Rockefeller attracted the attention of police when he tried to sell the truck in Greenwich in 1988 and the potential buyer notified officers about the lack of proper registration.
http://tinyurl.com/5ox3sa

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Posts: 1085

Ber

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 9:56 am

I wonder if Sandra will seek to know his brother and mother, after all,Reigh's Bio. uncle and Grandmother in Germany.

Also, if in fact, he left the day afterh e married the wisconsin woman, why would she seek to "divorce" and not "annull" the marriage? Furthermore, if she did file either way, wouldn't that void his greencard? why wasn't he deported?

Joined: 06 Apr 2006
Posts: 1648

PerryPeabody

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:08 am

Birth certificate zeroes in on Rockefeller’s true identity
bostonherald.com
By Jessica Van Sack

BERGEN, Germany - A family’s assertion last week that the man claiming to be accused kidnapper Clark Rockefeller is their long-lost boy has been backed up by decades-old vital records obtained by the Herald this morning in the small Bavarian village near their home.

Birth Certificate

A town employee in Siegsdorf, about five kilometers from Bergen, today pulled from its stacks a meticulously kept book of birth, adoption and death records showing that Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was born on Feb. 21, 1961 at 11:10 a.m. in a town hospital.

Alexander Gerhartsreiter, 34, said last week that his brother, whom he identified as the man claiming to be Clark Rockefeller, was born on that date.

The record shows the man, who would now be 47, was born to Simon Gerhartsreiter and his wife, Irmengard (Huber) Gerhartsreiter.

The certificate reads in German: “The mother has been identified by her husband. The father is Simon, an artist, Catholic. The child was born a boy. The child has the forename Christian Karl.”

According to the record, signed by the village registrar, the couple was married on May 10, 1958 in Bergen and lived in the same house where the widowed mother still resides with her son Alex. Simon Gerhartsreiter died in Sept. 2003 after a long illness and a life hampered by a lung injury he sustained while fighting in World War II at age 16.

The record will likely provide the final documented proof for investigators who have linked fingerprints from Rockefeller to Gerhartsreiter and are trying to prove that he is a German immigrant who lived in Berlin, Conn. as an exchange student in 1978.

Rockefeller’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, said his client has a shattered memory and only vague recollections of his life before 1993, when he surfaced as a purported member of the famous New York clan.

Gerhartsreiter’s family lived in uncertainty about his fate for 20 years until a Herald reporter knocked on their door Friday morning. Rockefeller allegedly kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter, Reigh “Snooks” Storrow Mills Boss, from a Back Bay street on July 27, touching off an Amber Alert and eventually raising questions about how he apparently faked a series of identities, from filmmaker to luxury ship captain to physicist - over the last three decades throughout the nation.

He is being held without bail in a Boston jail on charges of kidnapping and assault as authorities in California have named him as a person of interest in the San Marino, Calif. disappearance and presumed murders of a newlywed couple in 1985.
http://tinyurl.com/5vouwc

Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Tue Aug 12, 2008 10:15 am

Ber wrote:

What I don't understand is why she would wait 11 years to divorce him. I don't know what the law did about green card fraud in 1981 or if the length of time between the "marriage" and divorce mitigates green card fraud in some way.

Joined: 24 Mar 2006
Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:10 am

California detectives plan to [try to] query Christian Gerhartsreiter again
BostonHerald
By Mike Underwood
Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Los Angeles County Sheriff’s homicide detectives are planning another trip to Boston to quiz Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka Clark Rockefeller, over the 1985 disappearance of a California couple, investigators said.

“We are going to make another run at talking to him in Boston at a future date,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Steve Whitmore.

The LASD has also released a new wanted poster featuring three faces of their suspect, including a previously unpublished photograph of Gerhartsreiter, taken by U.S. immigration officials in 1978.

The LASD wants to speak to Gerhartsreiter in connection with the 1985 disappearance of John and Linda Sohus, who vanished from their home in posh San Marino, Calif., while he lived with them under the name Christopher Chichester.

In 1994, the skeletal remains of an adult male murder victim were found by workers digging a swimming pool in the back yard of the Sohuses’ former home.

Whitmore said there are no plans to re-search the property as reported elsewhere.

Gerhartsreiter, known here as Clark Rockefeller, is being held on charges that he kidnapped his daughter, Reigh Mills Storrow Boss, 7, from Back Bay streets on July 27, triggering an international manhunt.

Fingerprints taken when he was arrested revealed he was Chichester, who was wanted by cops in California. Investigators have since said Rockefeller and Chichester are both Gerhartsreiter, a German national who came to Berlin, Conn., as a student in the late 1970s.

Anyone with information about Gerhartsreiter is asked to call LASD on 323-890-5500.
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Posts: 1085

PerryPeabody

Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 9:21 am

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester, Clark Rockefeller: Are they the same man?
By Chris Green
Wednesday, 13 August 2008
Independent.co.uk

It was a story that gripped both sides of the Atlantic. An elusive millionaire who kidnapped his own seven-year-old daughter in broad daylight and escaped with her to Baltimore.

When Clark Rockefeller was arrested by FBI agents, who had staked out the marina where he was staying, he was portrayed as a devious, but ultimately harmless eccentric who longed to be accepted by the high flyers of American society.

But 10 days on, the story has taken a more sinister tone. US authorities are now convinced that Rockefeller is in fact a German citizen who is wanted for questioning over the sudden disappearance of a couple in California more than 20 years ago.

In another incredible twist to the saga, the man who conned his American friends – and even his former wife of 12 years – to believe he was a member of the famous Rockefeller oil dynasty, was "positively identified" by US police on Monday as the German-born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

Investigators say that Rockefeller left his native country for the US when he was just 17, a claim which was soon reinforced by the discovery of a man living in Germany who said he was Rockefeller's long-lost brother.

Alexander Gerhartsreiter, 34, of Bergen in Bavaria, said his elder brother, Christian, left the family in the 1970s to seek his fortune in the US. He greeted a reporter carrying a photograph of Rockefeller at the door of his house in Germany with the words: "It seems you found my brother."

Mr Gerhartsreiter insists that his elder brother was born in the Bavarian municipality of Siegsdorf in 1961. As their father was an artist and their mother a housewife, he had a humble upbringing and, according to his brother, always wanted to better himself. After moving to Connecticut in 1978, he initially kept in touch with his family in Bavaria, before communications ceased in 1985.

"He's my brother, but I didn't know him," Mr Gerhartsreiter said. "I have only a few memories. He left when I was five or six. It is really a shock."

Shortly after arriving in America, it appears that Rockefeller moved to California to try his luck as an actor in Hollywood. According to his Boston lawyer, Stephen Hrones, he adopted the alias of Christopher Chichester, because "he was trying to get into the acting business and he thought it was a more appropriate name".

In 1985 – the same year he stopped contacting his German family – Rockefeller used his Chichester alias to rent a room in a guesthouse in the wealthy enclave of San Marino, near Los Angeles, where a young married couple called Jonathan and Linda Sohus were also residents.

Police files state that the couple mysteriously vanished while Chichester lived there. Not one member of the trio was ever heard of again. The case was abandoned until 1994, when skeletal remains were unearthed in the back garden of the property by its new owners, who were building a swimming pool.

At the time, police were unable to identify the remains, although they believed them to be those of Mr Sohus. Now that they are confident Chichester has finally been tracked down – living under the new alias of Clark Rockefeller – a new set of forensic tests can be carried out.

Ray Cornwall, who lived near the guesthouse, recalled that some locals were suspicious of Chichester because of several outrageous claims he made about his past, including that he was related to a famous British sailor. "It's going to be hard to prove anything because he's not left any permanent trail," Mr Cornwall said.

Similar accusations were recently levelled at Rockefeller by members of the small community of Cornish in New Hampshire, where he lived with his wife and daughter while their family was still intact. One local resident, Judith Kaufman, said that he had a "Napoleon complex" and seemed intent on becoming "the new lord of the land" by becoming as involved as possible with the running of the town. "I was suspicious from the first time I heard that he was related to the Rockefeller family," she said. "The way he wore the name on his sleeve, in a gloating kind of way, seemed unusual." Rockefeller is currently being held on kidnapping charges in Boston, where he vanished with his seven-year-old daughter, Reigh, on 27 July, sparking a nationwide manhunt, which culminated in his arrest at a Baltimore marina a week later. Reigh, who is nicknamed Snooks, had been living with her mother in London since her parents finalised their divorce. She was visiting her father under supervision during the school holidays when she was taken, but was eventually recovered unharmed and reunited with her mother.

Rockefeller has so far refused to be interviewed by Los Angeles police about his part in the 1985 disappearance case. His lawyer initially said that his client remembered only "bits and pieces" of his life prior to 1993, and nothing at all about his upbringing in Germany, although he does understand the language.

Police in the US are still unable to find any record of his existence at all before 1993, the year he began referring to himself as Clark Rockefeller, which he still insists is his real name.

He has, however, said that he used other aliases in the past, an admission which will come as no surprise to US police. Before they traced him to Baltimore, detectives investigating the kidnapping of Rockefeller's daughter were perplexed by his impressive number of alter egos, which included the names James Frederick and Michael Brown.

As a result, authorities in Boston have been reluctant to confirm that Christian Gerhartsreiter, Christopher Chichester and Clark Rockefeller are definitely the same person. "This defendant's efforts to avoid identification are simply too extensive for us to take anything at face value. One thing we are certain of – this defendant's true name is not Clark Rockefeller," said Jake Wark, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office in Massachusetts.

There can be no doubt that Rockefeller was rich – he bought a catamaran just days before his arrest, and reportedly had an impressive collection of paintings – but the source of this wealth remains a mystery. Some friends said he told them he was a mathematician or a physicist, while others believed he worked as a Wall Street financier.

In custody in Boston, Rockefeller said he does remember meeting a newly- married couple named Jonathan and Linda Sohus in California, but that he barely knew them. He apparently maintains that the couple left of their own accord and he never saw them again. According to Mr Hrones, Rockefeller said: "I'm not a violent man. I've never murdered anybody."

Many of the recent revelations are likely to be news to Rockefeller's former wife, 41-year-old Sandra Boss, who works in London as a financier for the management consultants McKinsey & Company. During the investigation into her daughter's kidnapping, it emerged that Ms Boss believed that her husband was a genuine Rockefeller, a claim which was subsequently denied by the family's archive centre.

Even the legitimacy of the couple's marriage has been called into question, after Rockefeller's lawyer hinted that his client could be forced to give back the £416,000 settlement he received when they finalised their divorce in December. They were thought to have married in Massachusetts in 1995, but no official record of the union has ever been found and it is unclear whether the couple provided a marriage licence.

"They weren't legally married," said Mr Hrones, after meeting his now world-famous client. "How can you divorce when you're not legally married?"
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Joined: 24 Mar 2006
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PerryPeabody

Posted: Wed Aug 13, 2008 10:15 am

This story doesn't add anything new but