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The four faces of Rockefeller
Ellen Widdup, Evening Standard13 Aug 2008
Police are piecing together the many names and faces of the man accused of kidnapping his sevenyearold daughter during a supervised visit.
Clark Rockefeller, who claimed to be an oil dynasty heir, snatched Reigh in Boston, Massachusetts, after her mother, London-based Sandra Boss, agreed to the terms of a custody ruling.
After he was arrested and charged with her kidnapping, his extraordinary web of lies started to unravel. Now he is being linked to murder, fraud and fake identities across America.
Detectives, who found he had no birth certificate, driving licence or social security number, now believe he was born Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter in Bavaria, West Germany, in 1961.
Family members have confirmed this, claiming Gerhartsreiter stayed in touch with his parents until the Eighties when he abruptly severed contact.
Investigations have revealed Gerhartsreiter left Germany aged 17 to get an education abroad and a year later enrolled at high school in Connecticut under the name Chris Gerharts Reiter.
His brother Alexander said: "He wanted to live in the big country and get famous. Now he really is famous."
In 1981, Gerhartsreiter married US citizen Amy Jersild, 22, in Wisconsin but, according to divorce papers, left her the following day.
Miss Jersild's sister Beth Litza said he married her just to get a green card.
Shortly after he turned up in San Marino, California, under the alias Christopher Chichester - a British royal moving his castle to America brick by brick. He joined the Episcopal Church, the Rotary Club and the Chamber of Commerce to entrench himself in the local community and rented the guesthouse of John and Linda Sohus.
In 1985 the couple disappeared. Their neighbours remember Chichester borrowing a chainsaw and digging up the garden but he vanished before officers could question him. Ten years later workmen digging a swimming pool found three bags full of human remains but the bodies were never identified.
Gerhartsreiter had moved on to the East Coast, taking the name Christopher Crowe, head of the Battenberg-Crowe-von-Wettin family, and a job as a sales representative. He was fired for using the social security number of serial killer David Berkowitz to get a Wall Street broker's licence.
Gerhartsreiter then moved to New York, took the name Rockefeller, and married Ms Boss in a Quaker ceremony on Nantucket in 1995 - where a marriage licence is not required.
He is thought to have used other aliases during his married life - including Clark Mill Rockefeller, James Frederick and Michael Brown.
When police in Baltimore arrested him over his daughter's abduction he was using the name Chip Smith.
Reader views (1)
Guess if your born nuts you end up nuts even if you have all the riches of the world.
- Derek Andrews, Liverpool, 13/08/2008 23:53
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