The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  Was it a slip on Rockefeller’s part? Perhaps. But he went no further. The investigators weren’t going to get him to confess anything, especially about how he came to assume the famous name. Harty and Mosher quickly got the sense that he used the big name in part to compensate for his small stature; he kept talking about how short he was. “Nobody notices a short man,” he said at one point.

  “How tall are you?” Harty asked.

  He wouldn’t say, but at one point when he mentioned his height, he stood up from his chair and quickly sat down again, so that they could see for themselves, Harty said.

  Besides his name, the prisoner said, the key to making himself larger than life was his extraordinary art collection. He said an “opportunistic” friend had given it to him, and the art fooled everyone, including his wife. (Later, his attorney would say that the art was fake, “derivatives, basically worthless.”)

  He also admitted that his daughter had been his undoing. “Reigh was like a little me,” he said. “They have a way of getting to your heart. My goal was to be reunited with Reigh.”

  They offered him something to eat. He insisted on turkey on white bread, because, he explained, he ate only white foods. As the interview stretched on, he turned increasingly evasive, then demanding, dictating what he wanted his daughter to have for dinner. His interviewers began to lose their patience as he tried to defocus from the interview.

  “You just wanted to jump across the table and wrap your hands around his neck, because he just irritated the hell out of you,” said Harty. “He had those beady little eyes.”

  The vast majority of parental kidnappings, Harty was aware, aren’t about the child, but about the spouse—one parent using the child to get revenge on the other. That scenario made perfect sense in the case of Clark Rockefeller and Sandra Boss. “Because he went eight or nine months without visiting [Snooks],” Harty observed, adding that Rockefeller hadn’t even called or e-mailed his daughter. “Nothing. Zero.”

  So when he kept repeating, “I just want to be a good father,” Harty cut him off.

  “Knock off the bullshit,” she snapped. “This isn’t about you.”

  They had told him earlier that they needed to know his true identity because someday his little girl would want to know about her heritage. Tell us who you are for the sake of your daughter, they had pleaded. Now they tried a tougher approach. “Everything you have told us is bullshit,” Harty said flatly. She stood up and wrote on a piece of paper in big block letters, THIS IS ALL ABOUT REIGH. He still wouldn’t divulge his identity.

  Harty kept hammering away. “You need to start telling us the truth and stop playing games,” she said. “You have been lying over and over again throughout the course of this interview, and if you think you can pull one over on us when we have fifty FBI agents out there determining who you are . . . We are going to figure it out. We are damned good at what we do.”

  She recalled, “He just sat there and blinked at me again and said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ I said, ‘Don’t be sorry, tell me who you are!’”

  Still nothing. Harty looked over at Mosher. “Ray, what is the first thing you think when somebody does what Clark has done?” she asked. “Hiding your identity. Not telling your child who you are. Not telling your wife who you are. using multiple aliases.”

  “I would think he’s got something to hide,” said Mosher.

  “What are you trying to hide, Clark?” asked Harty.

  He said nothing.

  “Did you steal something from somebody?”

  No response.

  “Did you rape somebody? Are you a serial jaywalker? Are you a serial murderer?”

  Harty later said she had hoped that he would “bite” on the murder line “and tell me about the California thing at that point. But there was just no way. I think he was still hoping that he could continue with the charade he had been playing, because it had worked so well for him for so long.”

  He may have believed he could escape this unfortunate situation just as he had escaped so many others, by sticking to his mantra: the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it—even if you are lying to the FBI and the police.

  Finally, near the end of the four-hour interview, he admitted, “Clark Rockefeller does not exist.”

  “Really?” asked Harty. “Then who am I talking to?”

  “And I went down the whole list of aliases,” she remembered. “I said, ‘Who is Christopher Crowe?’”

  “He doesn’t exist,” said Rockefeller.

  “Who is Christopher Chichester?”

  “Doesn’t exist.”

  “Who is Christopher Mountbatten?”

  “Doesn’t exist.”

  “So who am I talking to?”

  “I don’t know,” he insisted. “I don’t know my name.”

  A few days later, however, investigators would; the results of the FBI’s fingerprint analysis confirmed that he was, as they had suspected, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter. It was under that name that he would stand trial in Boston almost ten months later.

  CHAPTER 21

  One Last Con?

  He never ceased being Clark Rockefeller.

  When he emerged from the Baltimore holding cell to be escorted back to Boston to face charges that included kidnapping of a minor and assault and battery with a deadly weapon (the SUV he used in his escape), he was outgoing, erudite, eager to meet and greet. Boston police sergeant Ray Mosher drew the duty of escorting him home, and when a handcuffed Rockefeller walked outside with his guards, reporters surrounded them, screaming, “Mr. Rockefeller! Mr. Rockefeller!” The prisoner seemed eager to speak to them, but Mosher stopped him and guided him toward the car that would take him to the airport for an AirTran flight to Boston.

  Shackled on the plane, he spoke nonstop with Sergeant Mosher, most notably about a startling murder conspiracy he said he had uncovered while going through the books in an office where he had worked in New York City. It was called Operation Hat Trick, he whispered, and it involved the deaths of three major politicians—U.S. senators John Tower and H. John Heinz III and Republican political strategist Lee Atwater—all of whom had died over an eight-day period in 1991. “Can you give me your word that you’ll look into it?” he asked Mosher.

  Perhaps he believed that by giving the sergeant a bigger case to investigate he could divert his attention from the one at hand. It didn’t work. Mosher asked a flight attendant if she had a newspaper, and when she brought him that day’s Boston Globe, he handed it to his prisoner.

  FINGERPRINTS DEEPEN A MYSTERY: AUTHORITIES LOOK AT POSSIBLE LINK BETWEEN KIDNAP SUSPECT, CALIF. SLAYING, read the August 5, 2008, front-page headline, alongside a scruffy mug shot of Rockefeller. The story referred to the possible murder of missing persons John and Linda Sohus, although their names had not been released at that point. Rockefeller read the paper carefully, solemnly, then handed it back to Mosher.

  “Well, what did it say?” asked the sergeant.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” said Rockefeller, uncharacteristically quiet for the first time on the trip. “You’ll have to read it yourself.”

  From the moment he landed in Boston, however, he couldn’t seem to stop talking. The lawyer he chose to represent him, whose fees would be paid from what he had left of his divorce settlement, was the veteran Boston criminal attorney Stephen Hrones. As the media storm grew, both in the United States and abroad, Hrones actually encouraged him to keep talking. “Fight fire with fire,” Hrones later said. “We had to get out and tell his side of the story, emphasize the loving-father aspect. That was his strength. I pressed that at every point: how can you kidnap your own child?”

  There was a larger question, however, which Sandra Boss had asked after she learned that her daughter was safe and her ex-husband was in custody: Who is he? “He is a mystery man, a cipher,” said Suffolk County assistant district attorney David Deakin during Rockefeller’s bail hearing, adding that he was a spinner of stories “literal
ly so numerous and varied that they are proving to be difficult to keep track of, even with a database.”

  Rockefeller declined to meet with California authorities, who had revived their investigation of the Sohus murder case following his arrest. But he was the old charmer again when he and his attorney went on NBC’s top-rated morning show Today in his first attempt to present his side of the story. The show’s crew, led by correspondent Natalie Morales, set up a studio in the Nashua Street Jail. When Rockefeller walked in wearing his jailhouse scrubs, he acted as if he were entering one of his private clubs, shaking every crew member’s hand, working the room. Sitting down for the interview with Morales, he crossed his legs, cocked back his head aristocratically, and confided to her, “Normally, I would enjoy this moment.”

  His memory was sketchy when it came to his past, but he did recall some scenes from his childhood. “I remember clearly going to Mount Rushmore in the back of a Woody Wagon,” he said grandly. “Being an aficionado of station wagons, I believe it was a ’68 Ford with the flip-Up headlights. I have a clear memory of picking strawberries in Oregon.”

  “Did you kill John and Linda Sohus?” Morales asked at one point.

  “My entire life I’ve been a pacifist,” Rockefeller replied. “I am a Quaker, and I believe in nonviolence. I can fairly certainly say that I have never hurt anyone physically.” Asked what he would say to his daughter if she happened to be watching, he said, “She should wish that we be reunited.” Eyes welling up and voice trembling, he added, “That there’s hope for the two of us.” Then Morales asked him if he believed he would see Snooks again. He straightened and replied, “Natalie, I cannot predict the future. . . . I only hope so, and I wish for it.” At the end of the first segment of the two-part interview, he recited a portion of “Address to a Haggis” by Robert Burns in a Scottish brogue.

  In a subsequent installment of the Today show, investigative criminal profiler Pat Brown, interviewed by Morales, marveled at Rockefeller’s television performance. “Most people have not heard a man talking this much, to expose himself this way, who is what I would call a psychopath,” she said. “He’s a pathological liar. He’s spinning his tale. He wants to be the center of attention.” She described him as an individual without “empathy for other people,” whose only concern was himself, who could be dangerous to anyone who stood in his way, even his own child, whom he had used “as a pawn to get back at his wife.” Rockefeller’s show of conviviality, introducing himself to everyone in the studio, was evidence of a con man “selling himself,” casing the room to see “who [his] marks are.”

  Rockefeller’s next and last interview, with three reporters from the Boston Globe, gave credence to the profiler’s analysis. The Globe’s resulting front-page story, with the headline I’M NOT QUITE SURE WHAT I’M SUPPOSED TO REMEMBER. I DON’T LOSE MUCH THOUGHT OVER IT, began:He burst into the room smiling, with the cheerful demeanor of a host welcoming guests to a party. “Clark Rockefeller,” he said, fixing his gaze on a visitor and extending a hand. His nails were manicured. He wore tasseled loafers with his jail-issued scrubs. He turned to another visitor and another, bowing slightly to each. “Clark Rockefeller, Clark Rockefeller,” he said in a Brahmin accent. “Nice to see you. How are you, everyone?” . . .

  Peppering his speech with verbal filigrees such as “quite so” and “rather,” he rambled on about the “five or six or seven” languages that he speaks, the historical novel about the roots of Israeli statehood he is writing, and his work as a researcher of “anything from physics to social sciences.” He painted himself as a devoted father.

  Two months later, when Stephen Hrones visited his client in the Nashua Street Jail after a court appearance on his behalf, Rockefeller told him that he had decided to switch attorneys. He said his friends didn’t agree with Hrones’s fight-fire-with-fire, get-your-story-out approach. He had already hired a new legal team, led by Boston criminal attorney Jeffrey Denner, who had come up with a defense radically different from the “loving father” one Stephen Hrones was preparing.

  Rockefeller would plead insanity.

  “This case isn’t about what happened, but why it happened,” Jeffrey Denner said in his opening statement, on May 28, 2009, in a courtroom packed with media and spectators. A lanky, well-regarded attorney with wiry hair and a deep baritone voice, Denner, along with his young associate, Timothy Bradl, would make whatever blistering attacks the prosecutor levied against his client seem even worse, by admitting that Rockefeller had indeed kidnapped his daughter and enumerating the various personas Rockefeller had invented during his thirty-year reign of deceit in America.

  However, Denner submitted, his client wasn’t a calculating con artist but a mentally ill individual who couldn’t tell right from wrong. He exemplified a certain “narcissistic personality disorder and delusional disorder, grandiose type,” which had intensified over the years, guise by guise, lie by lie, until the pitiable defendant was living in a “magical, insane world.”

  “Along with every identity change there is also an incredible biographical change,” the attorney informed the court, with these changes steadily increasing in “grandeur” and culminating in his pitch-perfect performance as a Rockefeller, with “billions of dollars’ worth of art, keys to Rockefeller Center, and so many other things that are so blatantly, blatantly ridiculous to anyone other than [a person] in the throes of this kind of mental illness.”

  The kidnapping of his daughter wasn’t a calculated, elaborately planned operation, Denner insisted. It was the result of a “psychotic break,” triggered by the loss of that daughter four days before Christmas in 2007, “that pushed him over the edge.

  “He believed that he was telepathically communicating with his child. He believed that she was secretly signaling him, basically saying that she needed to be saved . . . that she wasn’t being cared for, that [she was] in danger.” Walled off from his memories and separated from the one person he cared about above all else, Denner said, Rockefeller, in his deluded state, felt he had no choice but to “rescue his daughter.”

  The defense would introduce expert witnesses, a psychiatrist and a psychologist, who had carefully examined the defendant and could confirm that he was insane. “You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or, respectfully, a psychiatrist to know that something is very wrong with him,” Denner told the court. “This is not a man playing with a full deck.”

  Denner concluded, “If in fact after hearing all the evidence in this case you do believe that the defendant at the time of the offense was suffering from a mental illness or defect that substantially affected his ability to appreciate the criminality or the wrongfulness of what he was doing, then the judge will instruct you that he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity.”

  I looked over at the defendant, sitting in his blazer and khaki pants, and he did indeed look crazy, mumbling to himself at times, his complexion so pale it was ghostly. It was as if, after a lifetime of lies, he had finally run out of stories to tell. For someone who usually talked nonstop, in court he would not say a word on his own behalf. Through his attorney, however, he was now telling perhaps his greatest story yet. I kept thinking of what the criminal profiler Pat Brown had said on the Today show: he enters a room and introduces himself to everyone, seemingly out of friendliness but actually in order to case the room and see who his marks are. In this case, the potential dupes were the members of the jury and the alternates—seven men and nine women.

  The expert witnesses paid for by Rockefeller and his defense team tried to paint the picture of a psycho. “His father called him ‘human refuse,’” testified Dr. Keith Ablow. The celebrity psychologist said he had spent twelve to sixteen days examining Rockefeller, who told him that his father insisted that he switch his studies in Germany from music, which he loved, to “the vocational track.” Ablow continued, “He openly questioned whether Mr. Rockefeller might be a homosexual in front of him.” Ablow also said the father questioned whether or not he was
truly his biological son, verbally attacking him so viciously that the boy had no choice but to escape and reinvent himself in America.

  The second expert witness for the defense, forensic psychologist Catherine Howe, said, “What’s fascinating about Mr. Rockefeller is that not only does he meet five or more [of the criteria for delusional-disorder, grandiose-type insanity], he meets all of the criteria.”

  At that point, prosecutor David Deakin held up The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which had been referred to over and over by the defense. “And there’s no diagnosis for liar?” he asked.

  “There’s nothing in there under that word, no,” said Howe.

  The psychiatrist for the prosecution, Dr. James Chu, testified that in his interviews with Rockefeller, it had become apparent that the defendant was faking mental illness. Rockefeller had told him that 70 percent of the time he found himself in places where he would have no idea how he had gotten there, which would have rendered it impossible for him to function. He gave “untruthful,” “exaggerated” answers to questions but “clearly understood the wrongfulness of his conduct.”

  For two weeks, a dizzying parade of witnesses and psychological experts passed through the courtroom, analyzing the mental state of the defendant, making him once again the center of attention, the star of his own world. David Deakin invariably asked witness after witness, “Any sign the defendant might be hallucinating?”

  “No” was the usual answer.

  “Any signs that he was delusional?”

  “No.”

  In his closing arguments, Deakin told the court, “This is not a case about madness. It’s a case about manipulation. . . . Don’t let him get away with that. Don’t let this insanity defense be the culminating manipulation of a lifetime of lies designed to try to get what he wanted. Don’t shy away from the facts. See the truth before you.”