The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  Just then Jean’s stomach growled. “We skipped lunch, and I guess we’re sort of hungry,” she interjected before the film began.

  The Kellns invited the entire family for dinner in a restaurant. They all declined, except for Christian, who directed Elmer and Jean to a typical Bavarian place, with music playing, where they sat in a wooden booth and, over wurst and beer, talked of America.

  “I want to take your picture!” Jean exclaimed once their drinks arrived.

  “Wait,” Christian said. He turned his head this way and that in an effort to find the perfect pose. “Now,” he instructed, his hand pressed insouciantly to his temple. The camera clicked, capturing the young German with his eyes blazing, staring straight into the lens as if he were getting his head shot taken at Twentieth Century Fox.

  After dinner they returned to the Gerhartsreiter home, where Christian led the Kellns to a spare bedroom and said good night.

  “I feel so uncomfortable!” Jean whispered urgently to her husband. She couldn’t put her finger on why. The house was perfectly pleasant, as were Christian’s mother, father, and brother. And, of course, Christian couldn’t have been nicer or more accommodating to them. But he completely ignored his parents.

  “Go to sleep, Jean,” Elmer said.

  “I don’t know if I can.” Unable to shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right with this unusual young man and his family, she lay awake all night. “I felt he was living in a fantasy world of which his parents were not a part,” she recalled.

  Elmer, looking back on the experience, said he was more puzzled than anything else on their one night in Christian Gerhartsreiter’s home. “He did mention that he wanted to get to the United States,” he recalled. “You can tell when a hillbilly is happy in his log cabin and when he wants to live in New York. In his mind, he had to be something someday. You could pick that up in everything he’d say and do. He wanted notoriety, I guess, fame. And there’s no question that he felt he had to divorce himself from the German culture ’cause he wasn’t going to get anywhere if he remained a German.”

  The next morning the Kellns were eager to leave, but Christian insisted they stay for coffee and rolls. After exchanging contact information with their young host, the couple said goodbye and drove off, thinking they’d never see him again.

  Not long after that, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter pulled out a piece of paper and placed it on his desk: the application for a tourist visa that would allow him to come to America. On the line asking who would be sponsoring him during his brief visit, he wrote, “Elmer and Jean Kelln.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Strangers on a Train

  The court was a circus, a never-ending parade of seemingly good, honest, trusting people who, to varying degrees, had been duped by the defendant. Once so friendly and charming, the man known as Clark Rockefeller respectfully acknowledged the people who would decide his fate, the judge and jury, by standing when they entered and exited. But as for the witnesses—especially those testifying against him—he didn’t even look their way.

  One afternoon early in the proceedings, as an immigration official gave sketchy accounts of how the defendant had come to America as a young man, I got a tap on the shoulder and a whisper in the ear.

  “Are you free for a drink this evening?” asked a man who later requested that I not reveal his identity.

  He told me to meet him at a bar near the courthouse after the proceedings ended for the day. I was nursing a drink when he entered carrying a thick brown envelope. He handed it to me and said simply, “Maybe this will help answer your questions.” Then he breezed back out the door.

  I opened the envelope and gasped. It was filled with more than a hundred documents—immigration papers, court records, police reports—spelling out in intricate detail the life of the silent, stoic defendant, from his birth certificate to the warrant that had been issued for his arrest the previous summer.

  I started reading from the beginning: there was a document from his German high school showing that he had graduated; a letter from the company in Bergen where his father, Simon Gerhartsreiter, was employed as a designer, stating that his salary was “1,900 US-Dollar a month”; an Affidavit of Support from Simon, stating that he would support Christian in America with $250 a month “plus health insurance,” because, as he wrote, “I wish my son to attend school in the US for one year.”

  One year, I thought. Then back to Bergen? Back to the little white house and the self-contained little town? It was immediately clear that time limits were not part of the young immigrant’s plans. One of the next pages in the sheaf of papers had been written in neat block letters by the defendant himself. It was a request to change his nonimmigrant status. His tourist visa was to expire on April 15, 1979, six months after he had arrived in the United States, and he was applying to extend that stay for another four years. “My educational objective is . . . College degree in Business Administration,” he wrote.

  Where the applicant was asked how he would support himself during his time in America, he wrote, “I am presently attending highschool as a senior. I am now receiving $250 per month. My father will pay all college costs for the following four years of study.” At the bottom of the form was Simon’s compliant signature.

  I flipped through the papers, trying to figure out where the immigrant had established residence after arriving in the land of opportunity. But there was only a short typed-out time line:October 16, 1978: Gerhartsreiter arrives Boston via Lufthansa.

  October 21, 1978: Enrolled Berlin, CT High School.

  December 31, 1979: Granted an extension of stay due to being a student.

  Then I came across a police report. “The investigator spoke with Thomas Glavin, principal of Berlin High School,” it read, and listed a succession of statements from Glavin: “That Gerhartsreiter arrived at his school in 1978. That Gerhartsreiter’s school records from previous school were in German. That Gerhartsreiter’s records show no information relative to his parents. That Gerhartsreiter never graduated from the school.”

  In the same summer of 1978, when Christian Gerhartsreiter met Elmer and Jean Kelln, he also encountered another American, a young man named Peter Roccapriore, who had just graduated from high school in Meriden, Connecticut. Peter was backpacking through Europe for three months, traveling from country to country on a Eurail pass. One day on a train in Germany, he met the friendly, well-dressed, exceedingly polite and erudite Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

  As a film fanatic whose favorite director was Alfred Hitchcock, Gerhartsreiter must have relished the Hitchcockian undertones of his encounter. It brought to mind the Master of Suspense’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train, in which the mysterious Bruno Antony invades the life of a tennis star, cajoling him first into joining him for a drink and eventually into joining him in murder.

  Gerhartsreiter was apparently always on the lookout for people who could help smooth his escape from Bergen, and when he found Peter Roccapriore, he introduced himself. As Bruno Antony had done with his target, Gerhartsreiter ingratiated himself immediately, complimenting, entertaining, treating the young American to lunch in a nice restaurant, and then taking him on a sightseeing expedition through the area. He knew everything about Bavaria, and for good reason: he told Peter Roccapriore that he had grown up in the area amid considerable privilege. His father was an “industrialist,” holding a position in the highest levels of the Mercedes-Benz auto company. The American was so thoroughly impressed that when it was time to say goodbye, he couldn’t possibly refuse his new friend’s cordial request to exchange contact information.

  “Hey, if you’re ever in Meriden, Connecticut, look me up,” Peter Roccapriore supposedly said in parting. “You can stay with us.”

  A scant few weeks later, Christian took Peter up on the offer. According to friends of the Gerhartsreiter family in Bergen, Christian told his parents that he had gotten a job as a disc jockey in New York City, and they agreed to send him $250 per month un
til he got settled. His elderly aunt, who lived with the family, agreed to send money as well, so he would be receiving even more than $250 on a monthly basis. Once he had obtained a six-month tourist visa (Using the names of Jean and Elmer Kelln as his sponsors), he packed up his belongings and flew from Munich to Boston, where he arrived in the fall of 1978. He was seventeen years old.

  When he landed in Boston, he called his mother: the airline had lost his luggage, he claimed. Could she please send extra money for clothing and other essentials? Of course, she said. The next day he traveled to Meriden, Connecticut, a city of about fifty-eight thousand people halfway between New Haven and Hartford. It had no particular significance for Gerhartsreiter, except for the fact that one of the three people he knew in America lived there. He called the number of Peter Roccapriore, the student he had met on the train, explaining to his mother the invitation he had so kindly received from her son that summer. “I’m here at the bus station, can you please come and get me?” he asked. Peter was apparently away that day. But his mother rushed right over. If her son had met a nice young man who had shown him some kindness in Germany, how could she not return the favor? She gave him a room in her home and she and her family welcomed the slightly built blond teenager. Peter took him over to Platt High School in Meriden, and helped him get enrolled in the senior class. The outgoing immigrant had already graduated from high school in Germany, but he didn’t tell anyone that.

  Christian stayed with the Roccapriore family for only a few weeks—according to the documents I read, they were under the impression that he was going to return to Germany immediately thereafter. But a few weeks was enough time for Gerhartsreiter to lay the groundwork for his American odyssey.

  “Exchange student seeking room and board,” read a tiny classified ad in the local newspaper of Berlin, Connecticut. This was misleading, because the young German was only visiting on a tourist visa. But no matter. The ad caught the eye of Gwen Savio, a librarian at Berlin High School. She and her family had hosted foreign exchange students in the past—most recently a French boy named Dominique—and had enjoyed pleasant and meaningful experiences. She called the number listed in the ad, and soon Christian Gerhartsreiter had his thumb in the air once again, trying to hitch a ride from Meriden to Berlin. No one stopped, however, so he walked the four or five miles to his new home, a town of fifteen thousand with an appropriately Germanic name.

  He got there late in the afternoon, lugging his meager possessions and looking like a mess after his trek. Edward Savio, the oldest of the family’s four children, who was then fifteen and is now a screenwriter in California, remembered Gerhartsreiter’s arrival well. He appeared to be trying very hard to resemble his idea of what an American teenager would look like, Edward said, with white-framed sunglasses, formfitting jeans, and a tight button-down shirt. His long hair was “windblown and spiky.” But what struck Edward Savio most was the young man’s curiosity. His head moved from side to side, he seemed to want to take everything in. And of course the family was curious about him: who he was, where he had come from, and how he had landed in Berlin, Connecticut, of all places.

  “My name’s Christian Gerhartsreiter,” he said with a light German accent, again the epitome of the friendly, outgoing, accommodating immigrant, eager to please and happy to have a home in the strange new country. The Savios didn’t have a spare room, but he said he would be happy to sleep on a couch in the living room.

  Gerhartsreiter became the fifth child living in the house. Edward had twin brothers, age ten, and a sister, eight, whom everyone called Snooks. Their father, Jim, was a computer engineer. “On my birth certificate, under my father’s occupation, it says ‘Computer Operator,’ which back then was like saying he worked on the space shuttle,” said Savio. The house was full of early computers and video games, which must have delighted Gerhartsreiter, enamored as he was of all things technological.

  Upon moving in with the Savio family, Gerhartsreiter transferred his records from Platt High School to Berlin High, one of the best public schools in Connecticut in terms of academics. He said he was a senior, and since his school records were in German, nobody seems to have bothered to verify that claim.

  As for his background, according to Edward Savio, “He said his father was an industrialist, and he implied that his father had something to do with Mercedes. He tried to make it sound like he was from a family that had money.”

  Christian went to school with Edward, a sophomore, but he got his real education in front of the television set in the Savios’ living room. His favorite show was Gilligan’s Island, and he took to mimicking the behavior of Thurston Howell III, the millionaire castaway played by Jim Backus. When speaking, he would stretch out the syllables in each word, attempting to affect an English or Ivy League–type accent. “Ehhhd,” he would say to Savio at the dinner table, “paaahhss the breaaahhd, please.” Savio recalled, “The accent was like a cross between Thurston Howell III and John Wayne.”

  Savio tried to help his houseguest adjust to his new school, but he wasn’t particularly successful. “The reaction to Chris from most of the guys was, ‘What’s up with him?’ Some of the girls were interested, though. He always gravitated toward the females.” One even picked him up in her car to drive him to the senior prom. Gerhartsreiter wore a black suit with brown socks; Savio tried to tell him that brown doesn’t go with black, but he refused to change his socks, saying, “It’s not a problem.”

  In those early days, Gerhartsreiter was the caterpillar dreaming of becoming the butterfly, Edward Savio told Dateline—he had little of the polish he would later acquire. But despite his awkwardness and his tendency toward faux pas, he was tremendously outgoing, and he tried to get to know as many people as possible in his effort to learn about America.

  “I was working at Berlin High School, in the guidance office,” said a local woman who came to know him, who is also of German descent. “Mia McMahon, the gal in the library’s media center, knew that I was German and that he was German. Mia figured he was lonely and thought maybe he would like to speak German and just be with a German person.”

  She sighed at the thought of the lonely immigrant boy, adrift in America. “Being a mother, I felt sorry for him!” she continued. “Not that he felt sorry for himself. He was very confident.”

  “There was a big German community in the nearby town of New Britain, and my mother is very much into her German heritage,” the German woman’s son told me. “She spoke German to me from the time I was five, and she’s a schuhplattler folk dancer—the German dance where you slap your shoes. She wanted to keep the German culture alive in our family.”

  And what better way than to bring a real German into their home? “We invited him for a few holidays—Easter, Thanksgiving,” said the woman. He was very sweet, but very lost. He didn’t fit in anywhere.” In an attempt to ingratiate himself, he embellished his life story. “He kept telling us about his father being a great importer of fine wood from South Africa. And his mother was some kind of professional, I can’t remember what.”

  “He was smart, obviously, but he had this odd side to him,” the son said. That side of Gerhartsreiter was on display when the family took him to their lake house in New Hampshire.

  “None of our children really bonded with him,” the mother said. “He had no interest in sports, but he loved music, especially classical music. He’d bring a Scottish bagpipe every time we came to the lake, and he loved to play it. And when he would come up for the weekend, he would wear nothing but a bathing suit and cowboy boots, which my boys thought was ridiculous.

  “My husband was an attorney, very involved in stocks and bonds,” she continued. “He and Christian had lengthy conversations, and Christian was knowledgeable—he knew stocks and bonds and banks.” In these areas, Christian knew how to make a connection.

  Back in Berlin, Gerhartsreiter parlayed his love of classical music into a part-time job. He had been blowing smoke when he told people back in Bergen that he
was going to America to work as a radio disc jockey, but that’s exactly what he wound up doing.

  “I had just gotten an educational FM station at Berlin High School,” said Jeff Wayne, who as the town’s media director supervised Berlin’s libraries and schools, ensuring that they had top-of-the-line audiovisual equipment. Around the time Christian Gerhartsreiter was at Berlin High, a Hartford radio station donated to the town of Berlin a vast collection of classical music albums, Wayne told me: “The really high-end stuff—Chopin, Mozart. An unbelievable collection of music, cabinets full of it—probably a thousand albums. We couldn’t have just anybody spinning these records. They had to know something about classical music. But high school students weren’t interested in classical music.”

  Except for one.

  “One day the librarian Mia McMahon showed up with Christian, a long-haired, European-looking lad with a German accent,” Jeff Wayne continued. “ ‘He’s an expert in classical music,’ she said, ‘and he’s interested in your radio program.’

  “I jumped at the opportunity,” Wayne told me. Impressed by Gerhartsreiter’s knowledge, he put him on the air immediately. “Pretty soon we had a lot of people listening to it, and they couldn’t believe that there was a high school student doing it. He’d announce the music, give a little commentary about it, and go right into it—very professional. Not quite NPR, but for somebody his age? If you were an aficionado of classical music, it would knock your socks off.”

  I tried to imagine Gerhartsreiter at the controls, purring into a microphone in what was left of his German accent: “And now, Charles Gounod’s haunting ‘Funeral March of a Marionette,’ from back in 1872.”

  Looking back on it, Wayne said, Gerhartsreiter was perhaps too professional, too smart. “I didn’t see him blend in or really have friends. He came across as more mature than the average high school student. I have doubts that he was really high school age. He seemed older, more sophisticated.”