FBI officially identifies Rockefeller as Gerhartsreiter

August 15, 2008 06:19 PM Email| Comments (1)| Text size – +

By Maria Cramer and Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

Goodbye, Clark Rockefeller. Hello, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.

FBI officials in Boston said today that they have confirmed that the true identity of Clark Rockefeller is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a native of Germany who came to the United States as a student three decades ago.

Gerhartsreiter was born in 1961 in the former West Germany, and he has also used the aliases Christopher C. Crowe, Chris Chichester, Charles Smith, and Chip Smith, the FBI said.

Fingerprints from the man who called himself Rockefeller were matched by the FBI's crime lab to a fingerprint on Gerhartsreiter's immigration file in the early 1980s, Warren Bamford, special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office, said at a news conference.

Suffolk District Attorney Daniel F. Conley lauded investigators for working around the clock to identify the man who, he said, was "at the center of the longest con I've ever seen in my professional career."

He said that prosecutors would amend the complaint to reflect Gerhartsreiter's real name and would consider adding new charges. He noted that there is a charge for giving a false name to a police officer and said that was a charge that police or a grand jury could add.

Attorney Stephen Hrones, Gerhartsreiter's lawyer, said prosecutors didn't need to know his real name.

"So they want to find out his real identity? Fine. But they're supposed to be prosecuting a case instead of spending thousands of hours determining who he is," Hrones said.

Gerhartsreiter's brother told the Globe in an interview in a small town in Germany last week that Rockefeller was his long-lost brother who had gone to America. And the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department had declared that Rockefeller, Gerhartsreiter, and Chichester, who is wanted for questioning in the 1985 disappearance of a San Marino, Calif., couple, were one and the same man.

Conley said prosecutors needed more than "a photo and a fading memory" before they could identify Gerhartsreiter and that FBI experts had "brought science to bear where mere suspicion had prevailed."

Gerhartsreiter is being held without bail at the Nashua Street jail. He allegedly kidnapped his daughter -- violating a probate court custody order -- from a Boston street on July 27 and was arrested six days later in Baltimore, where he was living under an assumed name. The child has been reunited with her mother.

Gerhartsreiter's story took a sinister turn after his arrest when authorities in California revealed that they believed he was Chichester and wanted to question him in the disappearance and presumed slaying of John and Linda Sohus.

Bones believed to be those of John Sohus were recovered from the yard of their house in 1994 by pool excavators. The body of Linda Sohus has never been found. Chichester was a tenant in a guesthouse behind the Sohus home in 1985, but police never were able to question him.

Law enforcement officials declined comment on the Los Angeles County investigation.

"We're cooperating with them and we'll deal with that as those issues arise," said Conley.

Hrones, who convened his own news conference after law enforcement officials spoke, said Gerhartsreiter is still remembering "bits and pieces" of his past, "but he doesn't recall ever living in Germany. That is one thing he just has no memory of."

Hrones also said Gerhartsreiter would be victorious in the case against him.

"We're going to beat the charges on their own merits," he said.

He said Gerhartsreiter had been described as a wonderful father and that the child custody order was invalid, both because Gerhartsreiter and the child's mother had never been officially married and because the Massachusetts court no longer had jurisdiction once the mother had left the country for six months.

"He had people wrongly chasing after him when he had every right to the child," said Hrones.

He also charged law enforcement officials with making a big deal of the case because "they wanted all the publicity."

"Somehow because he's a 'mystery man' he deserves different treatment from someone else," he said.