The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (42 page)

Julie Gochar had shown investigators her client’s beat-Up catamaran the previous morning. Through a window of the boat, they could see a file labeled “Chip Smith,” presumably the plans for the new identity he was setting up. So they knew they had their man. To lure him out of Ploy Street alone, the FBI had the manager of the marina call Smith on his cell phone and say that his boat was taking on water.

“I’ll be there,” came the reply.

As more than a dozen police officers and federal agents with assault rifles stealthily surrounded Smith’s house, his neighbors watched with curiosity but little surprise. According to the
Baltimre Sun
, one of them, Lauren Gritzer, a twenty-six-year-old researcher at Johns Hopkins medical school, had already heard from the new arrival through his Realtor—he demanded that she remove a barbecue grill that was blocking his view of her building. “He said he was going to call the fire department and that I was going to get fined,” Gritzer told the
Sun
. “I was like, ‘Whatever.’” There were shades of the imperiousness he displayed in Cornish. She added that Smith’s house was always dark. “There were no lights, not even at night.”

After Smith received the phone call from the marina manager, Noreen Gleason said, “It took him fifteen to twenty minutes to get ready, and at that time we could actually see the little girl, Reigh, walking around. The agents were telling me, ‘We can see her, Noreen.’ I said, ‘Does she look okay?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, she looks fine.’”

The fugitive emerged from the house and headed toward the marina.

“Hey, Clark!” an FBI agent yelled.

He turned around.

“Where are you going, Clark?” the agent asked.

“I’m going to get a turkey sandwich,” he said. It would be the last lie he told before a group of agents wrestled him to the ground, while others stormed the house and got the girl.

Later that day, Clark Rockefeller sat in an interview room in the FBI’s Baltimore office. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn for his two consecutive supervised visits with Snooks in Boston the previous weekend: a sky blue Lacoste polo shirt with khaki trousers, no socks. Now the clothing was dirty, and his upper arms were pale beneath his short sleeves, in contrast to his sunburned forearms. He wore heavy, black-framed glasses. He was unshaven, and his left hand was handcuffed to the wall. But as always, he assumed the position of being absolutely in control.

FBI agent Tammy Harty and Detective Ray Mosher had been selected to interview the suspect. They had been involved in the investigation from the beginning, Harty as a member of Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team and Mosher as the lead detective for the Boston police. They had been in Washington, D.C., where they were preparing to go on the television show
America’s Most Wanted
to talk about the case, when they got the call saying that the kidnapper had been captured.

“Are you willing to speak with us, Mr. Rockefeller?” Harty asked after having read him his Miranda rights.

“Yeah, within a limited extent,” he said, adding, “Call me Clark.”

“You’ve kind of given us a run for our money this week,” Harty told him. “You’ve put some of the best of us to the test.”

“I could say thank you, but . . .” he said.

Harty said that she and Mosher wanted to get to know him a bit, so he told them something about himself. He said that he had made extra money writing term papers for college students; that he had amnesia about his childhood, but he believed it had been spent in New York City; that one of his few early memories was of going “to Mount Rushmore as a child in a Ford Woody Wagon, a Country Squire”; that he had audited classes at various Ivy League colleges without actually enrolling or having to pay tuition; that he had been given the name Rockefeller by his “godfather,” the late Harry Copeland.

He was still in full spin mode, and it appeared that he fully felt that he would extricate himself from this situation as easily as he had from so many others. He not only steadfastly clung to his identity as far as the name Rockefeller went, he confided in the investigators the power that the Rockefeller name gave him, saying the name worked “like a charm” on everyone who heard it. “It was easy to get into the clubs by just saying you are a Rockefeller,” he said at one point. “It would enhance a club if a Rockefeller was on the board.”

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?

H
e 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 “literally 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.