Hat tip to Neatorama for the link to these stories in the Boston Globe.
Many-layered identity is emergingThis story is incredibly twisted and strange.
Father in kidnap case thought to be German immigrant and veteran con man
Authorities were developing evidence yesterday that Clark Rockefeller's true identity is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a native of the small Bavarian village of Siegsdorf, Germany, who has spent the last three decades in the United States as a high-society con man, marrying at least two women, working on Wall Street, and perhaps committing violent crime.
Investigators have matched Rockefeller's fingerprints to a thumbprint included on immigration records submitted by Gerhartsreiter in the late 1970s when he was entering the United States as an exchange student, a law enforcement official said yesterday, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Those prints have also been matched to a stockbroker license application filed under the name Christopher Crowe, believed to be an alias used by Christopher Chichester, who has long been a suspect in the 1985 disappearance and presumed slayings of a San Marino, Calif., couple who rented him a guesthouse.
"I think we're getting close, but I wouldn't want to come out and say definitively who this person is," said Noreen Gleason, an assistant special agent in charge of the FBI's Boston office.
Said Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the Boston office: "We're probably not going to confirm this person's identity until we have a birth certificate in our hands."
Another day in the pursuit of Clark Rockefeller's identity brought another set of revelations, most notably that he had a brief but remarkably unproductive career under the name Christopher Crowe, a bond salesman on Wall Street in the late 1980s who spun extravagant tales but rarely closed deals.
One former colleague at Nikko Securities International, Richard Barnett, said bluntly: "The man knew very little about corporate bonds."
Authorities were able to sketch a trail yesterday that began with Gerhartsreiter arriving in Connecticut as a German exchange student, moving to Wisconsin to marry a young woman in 1981, heading to California in the mid-1980s as Chichester, before returning East to work on Wall Street as Crowe, and eventually marrying Sandra L. Boss on Nantucket in 1995 as Clark Rockefeller.
But on July 27, police say, Rockefeller, newly divorced from Boss, kidnapped their 7-year-old daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Boss, off a street in Boston. Authorities said yesterday that he had left a fingerprint behind on a wine goblet, a print that matched the stockbroker application filed by Christopher Crowe.
