Rockefeller prints linked to '81 immigration paper

His German identity is confirmed, officials say

Thomas Lee, deputy police superintendent, (left) and Bruce Holloway, superintendent, discussed their findings yesterday. (LISA POOLE/Associated Press)

As the man who claimed to be Clark Rockefeller insisted he had no memory of being German Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, FBI and Boston police unearthed further evidence of his real identity through a piece of paper he touched 27 years ago.

Officials announced yesterday that Rockefeller is Gerhartsreiter, a conclusion they reached after fingerprints Boston police recently lifted from a wine glass were matched to a print on an immigration document Gerhartsreiter filed in 1981. Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley said prosecutors will make sure the kidnapping charges pending against "Rockefeller" are changed so they are lodged against Gerhartsreiter instead.

Authorities in Los Angeles, who are investigating whether the man charged with kidnapping his young daughter in Boston last month may have been involved in the presumed killings of a San Marino couple, said Monday that Gerhartsreiter was Rockefeller's true identity. The Globe reported Aug. 8 that authorities were developing evidence the two are the same person. His brother in Germany also said Rockefeller and Gerhartsreiter are the same man after a reporter showed him photos.

But Boston authorities said they needed forensic evidence before they could say who Rockefeller really was.

Investigators have "developed the strongest evidence yet of who this defendant is and where he has been," Con ley said at a news conference yesterday at the FBI's Boston office. "The FBI's fingerprint technicians brought science to bear where mere suspicion had prevailed."

Gerhartsreiter's lawyer, Stephen Hrones, told reporters after the news conference that his client does not remember being a German national and that his true identity is irrelevant to the criminal case against him.

"You don't need to know his birth name in order to prosecute these offenses, not at all," he said. "We're going to beat the charges on their own merits."

In the days after Gerhartsreiter allegedly kidnapped his 7-year-old daughter, on July 27 in the Back Bay, Boston police recovered a fingerprint from an unwashed wine glass Gerhartsreiter had handled. The glass was found at the Boston home of an acquaintance of Gerhartsreiter, said Deputy Superintendent Thomas Lee.

FBI technicians then learned that the fingerprint matched those on a fingerprint card belonging to a man called Christopher Crowe, an alias authorities knew Gerhartsreiter had used.

The FBI had first learned of Gerhartsreiter's identity around 1994, when police from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department asked the agency for help locating Christopher Chichester, a man they wanted to question about the disappearance of Linda and John Sohus.

Officials learned then that Chichester was using the alias of Crowe, who they believed was Gerhartsreiter, a German immigrant who entered the country on a student visa in the late 1970s.

In 1981, Gerhartsreiter married a young woman in Wisconsin whom he later divorced. But the marriage allowed him to get permanent legal status in the country, a law enforcement official said yesterday. Gerhartsreiter remains a legal resident of the United States, said Matthew Etre, deputy special agent in charge of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations in Boston.

When Rockefeller was captured in Baltimore on Aug. 2, police took his fingerprints and found they matched the fingerprints for Crowe. FBI technicians then began analyzing documents from Gerhartsreiter's immigration file until they found one from 1981 with his fingerprint on it.

That print matched the two fingerprints from the wine glass and the fingerprint card of Christopher Crowe, investigators said.

Law enforcement officials have told the Globe that the fingerprint card was part of an application for a stockbroker license that Crowe filed in the 1980s.

Since his capture in Baltimore, Los Angeles detectives have tried to interview Gerhartsreiter, who left San Marino in 1985, soon after the Sohuses disappeared.

In 1994, human remains were found in the couple's backyard, but authorities have not been able to determine whether they belong to John Sohus. Linda Sohus was never found. Gerhartsreiter has been called a "person of interest" in the California case.

Steve Whitmore, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department, said yesterday there are no new developments in that investigation.

Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com.