The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (43 page)

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.”

Most of the jurors were quite young—maybe only four over thirty—and seemed extremely impressionable. As I watched them, I thought, “They can be conned
.
” They took their duties very seriously, though, following the judge’s instruction not to discuss the case among themselves until they had heard all the evidence. At the end of the twelve-day trial, however, when they retired to an upstairs room to deliberate, they exploded.

“I felt like I was in a John Grisham novel! You couldn’t believe that the guy had done what he’d done. That the wife [Sandra Boss] had fallen for it. The [limo] driver, poor guy. He was just trying to make a living and thought he’d found a cash cow. The detectives . . . Are these people real? It was like they were cast for their parts! . . . Our mouths were open as we heard all of the stories,” one juror said later.

Everybody on the jury was perfectly sure that Clark Rockefeller was a fraud, and there was no doubt that he had kidnapped his daughter. But once again he had brilliantly positioned himself, in perhaps the only way out of his present situation, by putting the jury in a quandary.

“He’s crazy!” more than one of them said more than once. “There’s no way anybody in their right mind would do something like this!”

The group included a lawyer, a fireman, a social worker, several college students (including two nineteen-year-old freshmen), and a young woman on her way to medical school, and over five days of deliberation they debated the notion of insanity. Yes, Clark Rockefeller was definitely crazy, but was he crazy to the point of insanity, of not knowing right from wrong? They went around and around.

One of them tried to put herself in the shoes of the con man. “Okay, suppose I’m Clark Rockefeller, and I have this little girl, and I felt what had happened to me in the divorce was unfair,” she told herself. “And I love this little girl, and I’ve been having her in my life for so long, and I get to have her. I get to do whatever it takes to get her. I can do this. I can take this divorce money. I can find a house. I can manage to get ahold of her, and we can go live happily ever after in Baltimore. Cool. Because I want it, it’s okay.”

She knew that he showed all the signs of the classic narcissist, who lives by the creed that what’s important to him or her is the most important thing. “The world revolves around what I need and what I want. And so I make a plan and carry it out,” she said, putting herself in the mind of the defendant. “Yeah, it’s illegal. But illegal schmillegal—I get to do what I want.

“This isn’t something that someone in a psychotic state can really do,” she continued. “They can fantasize about it, but they can’t really do it. He was a planner. I think he was really smart! Certainly this was an elaborate plan.”

The next day, the jury reached an agreement: what Clark Rockefeller had done wasn’t the work of a delusional nutcase; it was the carefully orchestrated plan of a self-centered narcissist who had gotten what he wanted for so long that he thought he was entitled to get his $800,000 divorce settlement from Sandra Boss and take his daughter too. He wasn’t insane; he was guilty.

On June 12, the jury foreman presented the verdict to the court: guilty on the most serious charges—kidnapping of a minor and assault and battery by means of a dangerous weapon—which Rockefeller received standing, wild-eyed and blinking, but saying nothing. His attorneys succeeded in having one of the charges dropped: providing a false name to the police, arguing that he had used the name Rockefeller for so long that there was no better identification to give. The defense argued for a light sentence: less than two years, which Rockefeller’s lawyer deemed fair for a “mentally disturbed individual” who “loved his daughter too much and made huge mistakes in trying to express that love.” The prosecution argued for the maximum sentence, up to fifteen years, and read a statement from Sandra Boss to the court, which included the following: “While Reigh was gone, I faced a mother’s worst nightmare—the possibility of losing a child without a trace. The emerging horrors about her abductor’s nefarious past only heightened my concerns that she might come to harm.”

Later that day, Judge Frank Gaziano brought the proceedings to an end: “The defendant displayed no regard for the rule of law. He thought he would be able to outmaneuver Sandra Boss by taking her money and then at the right time taking his daughter. The defendant committed this crime with complete disregard for the anguish this would cause Ms. Boss.” The judge sentenced Rockefeller accordingly: four to five years for kidnapping and two to three years for assault with the SUV, to be served concurrently.

Massachusetts Department of Corrections offender No. W94579 began serving his sentence at the minimum-security state prison housed in a turn-of-the-century mental hospital in Gardner, Massachusetts, on June 14, 2008. He was given a cell on the third floor—basically a bed, toilet, and sink—which he grandly inflated to friends: “I have my own two-room suite!”

He spent his time reading, writing, and preparing his appeal. He asked a friend to send copies of his favorite periodicals—
Sailing World
,
Cruising World
,
Sail
,
Latitudes & Attitudes
—and said, “I don’t know who to trust (except you). Right now, I worry that someone might cheat me.”

Although he confided contritely to one friend about his youth in Germany, stressing that his father’s bullying had driven him to flee to America, he clung to his Clark Rockefeller persona in public, showing up one year after his trial in a tweed jacket for a court hearing, where his petition to reduce his sentence was denied. Regarding the disappearance of John and Linda Sohus, Rockefeller’s defense attorney Jeffrey Denner said, “Mr. Rockefeller has absolutely no involvement in that case whatsoever.”