SUV, yacht part of kidnap plot, police say
Clark Rockefeller's plan was elaborate and brazen, police said, involving the daylight abduction of his 7-year-old daughter in a black SUV festooned with Red Sox stickers, then an escape to Bermuda aboard a recently purchased 72-foot yacht named "Serenity."
Yesterday, the FBI, US Coast Guard, and Boston and New York police continued to search for Reigh Storrow Boss, a 4-foot-tall, blond child who wears glasses and speaks with a British accent, as her mother waited for word at the Four Seasons Hotel in Boston, where she was staying.
The alleged kidnapping, which happened Sunday afternoon near Boston Public Garden, followed a bitter divorce between Reigh's parents, Sandra Boss, a 41-year-old senior partner at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, and Rockefeller, a 48-year-old Beacon Hill man with at least four aliases and no known relationship to the wealthy American family.
Boston officials released more details about Rockefeller's alleged plan yesterday, one day after Massachusetts State Police issued an Amber alert for the child. The girl's mother had told investigators that she feared Rockefeller might harm her daughter, according to David Procopio, a State Police spokesman.
"We are concerned for her safety," said Boston Police Superintendent Bruce Holloway.
Police said Rockefeller and his daughter were last seen around Grand Central Station in New York at 7:30 p.m. Sunday, seven hours after Rockefeller had met his child and a male social worker outside the Algonquin Club on Commonwealth Avenue, where Rockefeller is listed as a director.
The visit was the first scheduled one since Rockefeller and his wife had divorced in December, police said. The child and Boss had come for the visit from London, where they live, police said.
The social worker, who was hired out of an independent agency, was there to supervise the visit, which is not unusual in divorce cases, according to a Probate Court official.
As the three walked down Marlborough Street, a man driving a black sport utility vehicle drove up beside them and stopped. Rockefeller shoved the social worker, grabbed his daughter, and jumped in the car. As the car sped off, the social worker tried to grab onto the vehicle and was dragged for several feet before the SUV disappeared down Berkeley Street. Rockefeller then planned to go to Long Island where he had docked his yacht, police said.
Police said they have not been able to find the yacht. The Coast Guard has been searching for it and alerting local marinas.
Two law enforcement sources with direct knowledge of the case said acquaintances of Rockefeller described him as "a bit of a con man." He has no known police record or history of violence, according to the sources. Police are looking into his aliases: Michael Brown, JP Clark Rockefeller, James Frederick, and Clark Mill Rockefeller.
The motive for the kidnapping has not been described, but the sources said Rockefeller had recently lost joint custody of Reigh and was allowed only supervised visits with the child, whose name had been changed from Reigh Storrow Rockefeller during the divorce proceeding.
The kidnapping shocked those who know the child and her parents, who owned several pieces of property, including the 200-year-old Trinity Church in Cornish, N.H., before they divorced last year. Boss, a graduate of Harvard Business School, is chairwoman of the board of trustees for the Mount, the Lenox mansion of novelist Edith Wharton, who wrote of New York high society in her novels "The Age of Innocence" and "The House of Mirth."
Boss could not be reached for comment yesterday, and her relatives declined to speak. Neighbors around the Beacon Hill brownstone where Rockefeller had been living most recently said they did not know him.
Reigh, whose nickname is Snooks, visited the Mount with her mother and would play near the pond, where she asked endless questions about the animal life in the water, recalled Stephanie Copeland, former CEO and president of the Mount.
"I had the great good fortune of meeting Snooks and I was quite taken with her," Copeland said. "When a child has a mind like hers where she's just curious about everything, it's wonderful for an adult to be around a child like that."
John Hammond, chairman of the Board of Selectmen in Cornish, a rural town of about 1,800, described Rockefeller as a "nice enough fellow" and said he was a physicist.
But Rockefeller, Hammond said, was also very private and refused to release seemingly mundane details about himself, such as his birth date or where he had lived before.
"I found him fairly evasive," Hammond said. "I never could seem to get solid answers from him."
Rockefeller, who lived in the town until about two to three years ago, was civic-minded, Hammond said. He tried to help the town get a backhoe, and in 2004 offered to pay $110,000 for a new police station if the town sold him Trinity Church for $1. The deal went through, but the property is apparently back up for sale because of the couple's divorce, Hammond said.
Hammond described Boss as reserved, but nice. Their child, he said, was unusually bright and made a strong impression on him.
"You can tell when kids are sharp, very bright," he said. "She could sit down and carry on a conversation with you that would be something you'd expected from someone quite a bit older."
Asked if Rockefeller was the kind of man who could kidnap his own child, Hammond said, "when people are under duress, nothing comes off the table."
"I guess you would call it a crime of passion, wouldn't you?"
Globe correspondent Jeannie M. Nuss and Globe librarian Lisa Tuite contributed to this report.
Maria Cramer can be reached at mcramer@globe.com. 