by Mark Seal
On some evenings in the Savio house, Gerhartsreiter would join Edward in his bedroom, where there was a writing table, a stereo system, and an upright piano, on which Edward composed songs for high school musicals. Just as Christian had always been determined to leave his hometown of Bergen, Germany, Edward was intent on leaving Berlin for new horizons. His dream was to move to Los Angeles and become a screenwriter and director. “I wanted to make movies,” Savio told me. “I knew this when I was in sixth grade. Chris and I would have conversations about it.”
“How could you grow up like this?” Gerhartsreiter would ask Savio. “I certainly wouldn’t want to be here.”
“I love growing up here,” Savio would reply. “I don’t want to live here, but this is a great place to be from. My goal is to go to school and get out to California.”
“But New York—that’s the city,” insisted Gerhartsreiter.
“Yeah, New York is a world-class city,” Savio agreed, “but California is where they make the movies. That’s where all the action is.” He said he planned to attend film school at USC or UCLA, then blaze a trail through Hollywood. As always, Gerhartsreiter paid close attention, absorbing every word.
Even as he tried to befriend Edward, Gerhartsreiter began acting increasingly haughty toward his host family. With his position as a classical music DJ, his weekends in the country with the German family, and his observations of Thurston Howell on TV, he began thinking of himself as being more than he actually was, and more important than those who hosted him in their home. “My fah-ther,” he would say in a faux-aristocratic accent, “wouldn’t let me speak to peasants.”
“We would never eat like this,” he would complain at the dinner table. “We would have servants bring the food.” When he grew tired of Gwen Savio’s everyday Italian American fare, he would say, “Oh, this is what we’re having, again?”
“I’d never marry an Italian,” he said once. “They’re just too emotional.”
“Well, thank God for that!” Mrs. Savio shot back. “Lucky for Italian girls.”
Time and again, Gerhartsreiter said, “I would never live like this,” meaning in a modest house in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
“But Chris, you are! You are living like this,” Edward reminded him.
The German teen’s transformation extended to his name. “He was Christian Gerhartsreiter when he arrived in our house,” explained Savio. “Then it was Chris Gerhart. Then it was Christopher Kenneth Gerhart.” He must have liked the sound of that—very American. And how easy it was to take a new name! As with so much in America, all you had to do was assume it, grab it, and no questions would be asked.
Still, Chris Gerhart behaved much like Christian Gerhartsreiter, commandeering the Savios’ living room, where he watched television day and night from the couch on which he slept.
“Quiet, please!” he would say in the morning as his hosts were preparing for the day and he was still trying to sleep, having been up until all hours watching TV. He needed his rest, and when he awoke he expected his laundry to be done and his meal prepared.
A couple of months into his stay at the Savios’, he was reclining on the couch, watching TV, perhaps Gilligan—maybe laughing at the way Lovey sucked up to Thurston, or practicing the way Thurston said his lines. He was so engrossed that either he didn’t hear a knocking on the door or he heard it and ignored it. Whatever the case, he didn’t get off the couch to open the door for Snooks as she stood outside for hours in the cold.
Gwen Savio returned home to find her young daughter shivering on the doorstep. “You’re going to have to find somewhere else to live,” she told Gerhartsreiter.
“My mom is very polite, even when she is angry, but she was pissed off,” Savio recalled. “She told me the story, and I said, ‘Yeah, that’s unacceptable. But what are you going to do? It’s wintertime. Are you going to kick him out on the street?’”
“I need him to leave,” she said.
Gwen called around, and Mia McMahon, the school librarian who had made many of Gerhartsreiter’s early introductions, offered to let him stay at her house. Christian unceremoniously left the Savio residence.
“I’m ready for something better anyway,” he said as he left.
I attempted to reach Mia McMahon, but she declined to speak with me, preferring to keep her memories to herself. However, I found a brief synopsis of an interview she had given to the police years after the young man left her home:She related: that Chris Gerhartsreiter appeared at her residence back in 78/79, after staying with the Savio family. That Chris indicated to her then that he was from Germany but had left the country to avoid being drafted into the army. That his father was an engineer, with his mother being a South African citizen. That Chris made several lengthy calls to Germany and South Africa during the time he stayed at her residence. That Chris and her departed on bad terms, due to Chris’s attitude about paying for overseas telephone calls.
Having left (or been kicked out of) three different homes in less than a year, he was finished with Connecticut altogether. He didn’t bother waiting until the school year ended, for he was off to bigger and better things: college. He’d been accepted as a foreign student at the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point, an extension of the school’s main campus in Madison and thus easier to get into.
I studied the application forms that Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the name he still went by for official purposes, had filled out. It wasn’t clear how he managed to get into the college—he was intelligent and well educated, having spent much of his time reading and studying in the Berlin public library, but he never got a diploma from Berlin High School. Regardless, there was an admission certificate that read, “University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point. The student named herein has been accepted for a full course of study.”
Where the F1 immigration form asked the applicant to identify “the person most closely related to me who lives in the United States,” Gerhartsreiter gave the name and address of the Berlin woman of German descent with the lake house. “We had one phone call from him,” she told me when I asked if she had ever heard from him after he left Connecticut. “He said his mother had just gone through a cancer operation and needed a place to recoup, and could he use the cottage.” He was referring to the family’s lake house. “He was trying to tell us that he was attending university. He kept talking about stocks and bonds. I just remember it was October and after that he never called again.”
Chris Gerhart listed his major field of study as political science and stated that he intended to stay at Stevens Point for the full four years required to obtain his bachelor’s degree. By August 1979 he had moved to Wisconsin and was living in a dormitory called Baldwin Hall, which housed many of the university’s international students. They were encouraged to participate in social activities aimed at fostering their language and cultural skills—a perfect environment for Gerhartsreiter, who, despite all he had learned, was still working at becoming American.
I contacted the university administrators whose names appeared in the paperwork in my file. No one seemed able to provide any information about the young man. “We wanted to help but have no records in the foreign student office (where I once worked) and have no memory of this guy,” Gerhartsreiter’s college adviser e-mailed me. Finally, I found his first roommate, Chris Newberg, who had an indelible memory of the freshman, who arrived in the dormitory with new black luggage, a set of golf clubs, and an aristocratic air. “Supposedly his mother or father was an ambassador who had come from back east,” said Newberg. “He said he was from Boston, Massachusetts.
“I had a wall where I put my posters and I had a big American flag that was tattered on the end,” Newberg continued. “I thought it looked cool, that it represented what our country had been through with battles.” But Christopher thought it looked tawdry. “I’m sorry but you’re going to have to burn that. It’s in disarray,” he told his roommate in his formal English accent.
He buttres
sed his image as the son of a Boston ruling class family by regularly practicing his golf and by what he ate and drank: Irish coffee, exclusively, and Boston cream pie, not on occasion but every single day. “We all thought his dad was in the FBI or the witness protection program because he was so secretive about his family,” recalled another fellow student, Richie Riddle. He was so secretive that he insisted that his name and biographical details be blacked out from the book that listed Baldwin Dormitory’s students—and their emergency contact information—at the dorm’s front desk. One night, at a party in the girls’ wing of the dormitory, Christopher so adamantly refused to leave when the party ended at midnight that the girls had to call the resident assistant to force him out. “Do you know who I am?” Christopher snarled. “I don’t have to take orders from you.”
“That was the last time we saw him,” said Richie Riddle.
In fact, he spent only one three-month semester at Stevens Point. In January 1980, he transferred to the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, where, he wrote in his application papers, his education objective was “a B.A. degree in Communications.”
Filed about the same time as his University of Wisconsin transfer application was a flurry of other documents—Application for Change of Nonimmigrant Status, Application by Nonimmigrant Student (F-1) for Extension of Stay. They were all approved with remarkable swiftness, signed by a succession of Johns and Cynthias and Joes, busy bureaucrats who most likely never met the enigmatic young German and accepted what he had written on paper as the truth.
By then Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter—a.k.a. Chris Kenneth Gerhart—was in search of the ultimate document, one that could keep him in America forever: a marriage certificate.
CHAPTER 3
Becoming American
I knew him as Chris Gerhart,” said Todd Lassa, who was a student at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee when Gerhartsreiter arrived in January 1981. “I was twenty-two and taking film classes. We both were. One of the classes I had with Chris was a class in film noir. He told me he’d spent the previous semester at the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. He befriended me.”
Lassa, a writer for Motor Trend magazine, recalled, “He had a German accent when I met him. It wasn’t anything he was trying to hide. He was living in a suburb of Milwaukee, Elm Grove. I went there once. He invited me into the house, an upper-middle-class house, which is the way I saw him. I can’t remember if he said it was his parents’ house or his aunt’s. But there was nobody else there. It would have been a very strange house to rent. It cost quite a lot. Maybe he was house-sitting.
“He and I and another classmate went out for beers a few times, so it was surprising when he asked me to be the best man for his wedding in a civil service in Madison,” said Lassa. “This is after I knew him three or four weeks. But I said, ‘Sure, I’ll do it.’”
The lucky bride’s name was Amy Janine Jersild.
Chris Gerhart had met Amy through her younger sister, Elaine, who must have seemed a miraculous gift to him. She was the twenty-two-year-old daughter of a hardworking middle-class couple, Arthur Jersild and Bertha M. Geiger Jersild, of Elkhart, Indiana. He had met Elaine through a church group. She was not a beauty, but she was very spirited and vivacious. More important, she was an American citizen and thus had the power to obtain for Gerhart what he wanted most at this juncture of his life: a green card, which grants permanent resident status to an alien who marries an American.
Chris broached the subject of marriage with her, saying that he wanted to stay in America to avoid begin drafted into the German army, where he would surely be put on the front lines, directly in the line of fire in the cold war against the Russians. Elaine sympathized—the cute, friendly, and diminutive Chris Gerhart would seemingly have no chance on the front lines of any war—but she had no intention of helping him. Though Elaine wasn’t game, she said that maybe her older sister, Amy, might be.
I called Elaine Jersild to get an explanation of what happened next. She responded immediately, sunny, cheerful, but as soon as I mentioned Chris Gerhart, her tone turned cold.
“Honestly, hon, I must say no comment,” she snapped, adding, “I thought this was over, but I guess it’s not.”
Amy Jersild, however, could not refuse to comment. She was subpoenaed for the trial in Boston, where all the reporters and spectators in the courtroom eagerly anticipated her entrance. Finally, we would hear evidence from someone who had actually known the strange young man in his early, unstoppable years in America.
When Amy Jersild Duhnke walked in, the media pack looked at one another as if to say, That’s her? She was fifty, weathered and gray, with a long white braid snaking down the back of her drab business suit. The toll of spending several decades in the food service industry—most recently as a cook in a Milwaukee restaurant called the Twisted Fork— was etched in the deep wrinkles of her face. It was impossible to imagine her as the first wife of the budding bon vivant.
One would expect that the sight of his first wife reemerging in his life after thirty years would elicit some reaction from the defendant. But he stared straight ahead. He registered no emotion whatsoever.
“Describe the first time you met him,” asked the prosecutor after Amy was sworn in.
“He came in with my sister to visit me expressly to ask me to marry him,” she said in a dry midwestern monotone.
I knew from the documents I’d read that when Amy met Chris, she was earning $5,800 a year as a clerk at a delicatessen called East Side Foods, which meant she had a take-home pay of a little more than $100 a week. I also knew that she was then living in a small apartment near her workplace with her boyfriend. What could have persuaded her to marry a complete stranger? Had he offered her money? In those days, a hungry immigrant would without hesitation have paid for a quickie marriage to a willing young American. Later, the prosecutor would say that Amy didn’t recall whether money was ever offered, but she did recall that she never received a dime from the immigrant.
“Who brought up the idea of you marrying him?” Amy was asked next.
“My sister, Elaine,” she said.
“And did she tell you why she wanted you to marry him?”
“I can’t remember verbatim . . . all the information. But because he wanted to stay in this country. He was a foreign exchange student.”
Over the course of an hour, she said, she listened to Chris and Elaine explain how Chris could become a resident of the United States if Amy married him. She was not asked in court whether the question of money came up. The prosecutor simply asked her, “Did you come to a decision?”
“Yes,” she said, “that I would in fact marry him.”
The prosecutor didn’t probe any further, and Amy certainly didn’t volunteer anything further about her motivation for agreeing. “It was easy,” she explained—all she had to do was learn how to pronounce and write her future husband’s name. “I just know we made an arrangement for him to pick me up to go to Dane County in Madison, which is in Wisconsin, to get married.”
Shortly after Amy said yes, Gerhart asked Todd Lassa to be his best man. The two students had spent a semester studying the great examples of film noir, which usually features conniving people doing dastardly things to one another in a very black-and-white world. Gerhart’s request—to have a near stranger as his best man at a wedding that had come out of nowhere—perhaps seemed almost normal compared with what they had been watching in class on film. Lassa readily agreed.
“It was a Saturday afternoon,” Lassa told me. “He picked me up, and we drove into an older neighborhood of Milwaukee.” They were in Chris’s 1980 Plymouth Arrow, and Chris and Todd were both wearing suits. The Jersild sisters were waiting for them at the door. Strangely, though, the sister Todd thought Chris was dating—the younger one—was not the sister he was marrying.
“They seemed in on the joke,” said Lassa, “as did Chris. He gave me a crazy explanation that he was marrying his girlfriend’s sister for tax purpos
es, that he had a book he was publishing. And secondly, he didn’t want to make a big commitment to his girlfriend. It was obvious that he was bullshitting, that he was out to get a green card.”
It was also obvious to Todd back then that Chris was accustomed to getting what he wanted. And why not? He was young, smart, handsome, and on his way. On February 20, 1981, one day before he turned twenty, Chris Gerhart stood solemnly beside Amy Jersild in the Dane County Courthouse as circuit judge Richard W. Bardwell read the simple, straightforward questions and waited for their responses.
“Do you, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, take Amy Janine Jersild to be your lawful wedded wife . . .”
Within minutes the modest ceremony was over, and there was no reception. Immediately after saying “I do,” the newlyweds went their separate ways. Chris and Todd dropped the Jersild sisters off back home and returned to college. A few weeks later, Chris picked up Amy again and drove her to the federal courthouse in Milwaukee, drilling her on the spelling and pronunciation of his real, full name—Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
On April 7, the marriage would be consummated, not in bed but on paper. “He gave me a sheet of paper with his name on it so I could memorize it, because there are quite a few letters in his name,” Amy told the prosecutor. “And I had to look at it so I would be able to write it down on the document that I was going to be signing.”
“And what would those documents accomplish?” she was asked.
“Getting his legal status to stay in the United States of America.”
“Did you have any intention to be together as husband and wife?”
“None whatsoever,” she answered defiantly, with the first hint of emotion in her tone.