The Man in the Rockefeller Suit (3 page)

After paying cash for their lunch, Clark said goodbye to Roxane at the curb. Almost as soon as he left, she began receiving e-mails and text messages from him. He called it text flirting. She proceeded to share some examples over the phone:

“Problem: I cannot get you out of my head. What to do? Argh!”

“Just gazed at Saturn for the last ten minutes. Viewing excellent tonight in Brookline. Wish you could see this. Wish I could see you.”

“In a submarine. Crowded. Strange. Thought of you a minute ago.”

“Sipping strange tropical drink in Nantucket now. Would love to see you. This coming week perhaps go to Central Park and kiss. Sound good?”

But then he complained that he wouldn’t be able to make it to Manhattan, because he couldn’t find suitable accommodations in any of his private clubs, and he said he would
never
consider a hotel. “Have overnight sitter, but all clubs totally booked for tomorrow . . . annoying.”

After reading me a few more messages, Roxane said she never saw the mysterious man after their one lunch together. Then she suddenly shouted, “And now he’s kidnapped his daughter!”

That night I turned on the television to discover that almost every channel was talking about Roxane’s suitor, but in even more sensational terms.

“International manhunt under way for a Rockefeller!” one news anchor exclaimed.

“Authorities search over land and sea for a man and his seven-year-old daughter,” reported another.

Clark Rockefeller was suddenly the most wanted man in America. He’d soon become emblematic of a time when people would believe just about anything if it was wrapped in a famous name. As his story unfolded, it seemed, like its main character, almost too astonishing to believe.

Part One

CHAPTER 1

Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter: Bergen, Germany

T
he public’s first glimpse of the “real” Clark Rockefeller was on May 28, 2009, at the Suffolk County Superior Court in downtown Boston. Hordes of spectators and press were eager to finally get a good look at the mystery man who had simultaneously fascinated and horrified Bostonians for nearly a year. It was beyond imagination that here, in one of the best-educated cities in America, a smooth-talking German immigrant could successfully pose not merely as a member of the aristocracy but as a
Rockefeller
.

The defendant was hustled in by a group of guards. Seated among his high-priced team of attorneys, he was still completely in character as a Boston Brahmin and gentleman of the world. He entered the courtroom, to paraphrase Carly Simon, as if he were stepping onto a yacht—or into one of the many private clubs to which he had belonged. It was as if his life of wealth and privilege were only being temporarily disturbed by this unfortunate proceeding.

“Hear ye, hear ye!” the bailiff boomed, announcing that court was in session. Then he instructed everyone to rise as the judge, a handsome, no-nonsense Italian American named Frank M. Gaziano, entered the courtroom. From the moment he spoke, in a commanding voice, it was clear that this judge was going to do everything by the book. The defendant stood, buttoning his sports coat. He was wearing perfectly broken-in chinos and Top-Siders with no socks, just as he had been on the day he kidnapped his daughter, but instead of a polo shirt he wore a white button-down, a red-striped rep tie, and a navy blue blazer with brass buttons. He stared straight ahead, sphinxlike, as the prosecutor, David Deakin, began leveling all manner of charges against him.

Clean-cut and straight-talking, Deakin brought to mind Atticus Finch, the saintly country lawyer in
To Kill a Mockingbird
, as portrayed by Gregory Peck in the film version of the classic novel.

“The rules don’t apply to Christian Gerhartsreiter,” Deakin began.

At this, Rockefeller showed absolutely no emotion.

“That is what the evidence is going to show you he believed.”

Deakin addressed the members of the jury, who had been chosen mainly because they had somehow managed to remain unaware of the barrage of media coverage about the incredible case of Clark Rockefeller. For a master con man, duping this group of mostly young, impressionable-looking Bostonians would be the ultimate victory.

However, Rockefeller did not deign to testify; instead, he let his lawyers tell his story
exactly
the way he wanted it told. He sat silently as the prosecution witnesses recounted how he had tricked them, his only shows of emotion an occasional blink or a clench of his jaw.

I had been investigating Clark Rockefeller since the previous summer and was convinced that the trial would answer my lingering questions about his fabricated life. Here, in this courtroom, the people Rockefeller had taken for a ride in his once indecipherable puzzle of a life were set to testify against him—most importantly his ex-wife, the ultra-successful management consultant Sandra Boss. I imagined that it would be like a cafeteria line of information: the witnesses would dish it out and all I’d have to do would be to write it down.

How wrong I would turn out to be.

As the case dragged on for more than two weeks, and as I listened to the parade of people whose trust the defendant had betrayed, I realized that I was as gullible as any of them. I had allowed myself to believe, just as they had, that I actually
knew
the man. In fact I knew only a small piece of the story; despite having spent a year doing research, I had seen only the tail of a whale. The body remained submerged and hidden from view.

“To understand this evidence you are going to have to go back to 1978,” David Deakin had told the jury at the outset of the trial, “because it was in that year that seventeen-year-old Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, born in Siegsdorf, Germany . . . came to the United States on a tourist visa.”

He was right. To even come close to drawing a portrait of a phantom, one had to go back to the beginning, to the obscure corner of Germany where the young man supposedly met the first victims of his lifelong con.

O
ne day in the courtroom, as the prosecutor was trying to untangle the jumbled threads of Clark Rockefeller’s past, he read a brief letter that the defendant had written to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Milwaukee a few years after his arrival in America. It was dated May 26, 1981:

Dear Sirs: With this letter, I would like to inform you that, as of tomorrow, my address is going to be changed. My new address is:

Christian K. Gerhartsreiter
c/o Dr. Elmer Kelln
[Address withheld]
Loma Linda, California 92354

The name was a clue, the first step in what would become a very long and unforgettable journey.

“Hello,” a woman answered at the Kellns’ Loma Linda, California, home. She stopped me as soon as I said the name Clark Rockefeller.

“Elmer!” she yelled, and her husband came on the line. “It’s quite a story,” Elmer said, suggesting that I come out to California for a visit.

Elmer and Jean Kelln are still in the same modest home, on a typically pleasant Southern California street, where they lived when they first met the man now known as Clark Rockefeller. Jean, a large, bubbly, hospitable woman, opened the door. “I made a chicken salad,” she said, leading me into a sunny living room with an upright piano in the corner. “I hope you’ll stay for lunch.” Elmer joined us in the kitchen. A short, compactly built man who looked a bit like the actor Mickey Rooney, he had recently retired from his dentistry practice and had become a faculty member at Loma Linda university’s dental school.

It soon became clear that although more than thirty years had passed, both of them were still smarting at the way they remembered every detail of their experiences with the future Clark Rockefeller. As Elmer told me their story, his wife got up from the table and returned with a batch of photographs.

“He was
always
posing,” she said of the man I had watched sitting mute and stone-faced for weeks on end in the Boston courtroom. She showed me a picture of a teenager with long brown hair, wearing a white schoolboy sweater over a blue shirt and giving the camera a wry smile. Then she flipped through a dozen others. One of the most intriguing photos didn’t have anyone in it. It showed a little cluster of buildings with what looked like a totem pole in the middle of them. It was Christian Gerhartsreiter’s hometown of Bergen, Germany. After hearing Elmer and Jean Kelln’s remarkable tale, I decided it would be the next stop on my journey to find out who Clark Rockefeller really was.

Bergen is a speck of a town—a village, really—home to five thousand people, each of whom seems to know everyone else. I drove from Munich, less than fifty miles away, with a German journalist I had enlisted as my interpreter and guide.

On first impression Bergen looks like something out of a fairy tale, a picturesque hamlet nestled in a verdant valley of the Bavarian Alps. The focal points of the town center are a church and a beer garden (God and beer being the two pillars of Bavarian life), and towering over both of them is the totem pole from Jean Kelln’s photo; it’s actually a maypole, I later learned, a common sight in Bavarian villages.

It wasn’t difficult to find the house where Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter had grown up, at 19 Bahnhof (Train Station) Street—it was almost the first one off the highway. But as soon as we parked in front of the row of shops across the street from the house, I could literally hear the sound of doors locking and shutters being drawn. In the coffee shop directly across the street from the Gerhartsreiter home, a woman said that Irmengard Gerhartsreiter lived in the house and her son Alexander lived in an apartment in the back. Irmengard’s husband, Simon, had died many years ago. The woman knew this, she added, because Irmengard’s parents had once run a business where the coffee shop now stands.

The childhood home of Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter is a white two-story house with a starburst over the door and intricate designs around the windows, accentuated by navy blue shutters and a profusion of red geraniums exploding from window boxes. I knocked on the door repeatedly, but there was no answer and no audible movement inside the house. Peering through a window, I could see a tidy kitchen and other obviously inhabited but impeccably neat rooms.

My interpreter and I tried calling Alexander Gerhartsreiter at work. He had been the one to confirm for the American press that the man calling himself Clark Rockefeller was indeed his older brother, after a reporter from the
Boston Herald
knocked on his door and showed him a picture of the accused parental kidnapper. However, he was apparently done talking. “You don’t have to go any further—the answer is no,” he told us before slamming down the phone.

The Gerhartsreiters’ next-door neighbor was more receptive. The door swung open almost immediately, and Helga Hallweger extended her hand in greeting. We explained the purpose of our visit, and she invited us in.

A short, pleasant woman, Hallweger said she knew the Gerhartsreiters well, having lived next door to them for decades. We sat at the kitchen table of her clean, simple house, and she told us about the family. Simon and Irmengard Gerhartsreiter were both natives of Bergen—they had grown up across the street from each other, in fact. While Simon was very outgoing, Irmengard was quiet and kept to herself. They were married in the town church and settled into the modest house that Simon’s father, a carpenter, built by hand.

On February 21, 1961, they had their first child, Christian. There isn’t a hospital in Bergen, so he was born in the nearby town of Siegsdorf. “Parents: Simon Gerhartsreiter, Catholic, and Irmengard Gerhartsreiter, maiden name Huber, Catholic, both residents of Bergen,” read his birth certificate, which I had seen in his police dossier in Boston.

Simon was “a lovely guy,” according to Helga Hallweger. He was an artist and housepainter, adept at creating the elaborately filigreed trompe-l’oeil detailing often found around the windows and doors of Bavarian homes, including the Gerhartsreiters’. “He cracked jokes, told stories,” Hallweger said. “And he was
so
grateful that we bought one of his paintings.” He painted mostly landscapes of Bergen and the surrounding coutryside, and Hallweger went to fetch the one that she and her husband had bought. It was a lovely depiction of the Bavarian Alps in winter—Simon clearly had some talent. Not only that, my hostess added, he was admired in Bergen for being a leader, a member of every possible club and cause.

“Irmengard was more reclusive,” Hallweger said. The two women would always chat when they were outside tending their gardens, but “she never came into the house.” I thought it odd that Hallweger was speaking in the past tense when referring to someone who was still alive and who still lived next door, but I soon realized why. Since October 8, 2008—the day the true identity of Clark Rockefeller was revealed—Irmengard Gerhartsreiter had seemingly turned into a different woman.

“Irmengard went to stay with a friend in the country for a couple of days, hoping the press would go away,” Hallweger said. “When she came back, I rang the bell and gave her a flowerpot. She said, ‘Thank you for your bravery,’ and then she shut the door and she never spoke to me again.”

I asked if she had seen her since, and Hallweger told me, “Yes, and I said, ‘Good morning, Irmengard.’ She didn’t say anything, just went straight back into the house.” Irmengard Gerhartsreiter had yet to recover, it seemed, from the onslaught of reporters and photographers who had shown up on her doorstep, one of whom had even followed her inside her home. A photo taken by a press photographer at the time of her son’s arrest tells the story best. It shows the Gerhartsreiter house with an immaculately kept yard. By the time of my visit, the lawn was overgrown and abandoned-looking. Speaking about Irmengard, Helga couldn’t bring herself to say the words that I would later hear from other Bergen residents—disturbed, in need of treatment—but the implication was clear.

An artist father and an introverted mother in a small town where everyone knew about everyone else’s affairs—the crucible in which Christian Gerhartsreiter had been formed was coming into sharper focus.