Many-layered identity is emerging

Father in kidnap case thought to be German immigrant and veteran con man

Nick Ut/associated pressThe house in San Marino, Calif., where John and Linda Sohus lived before they vanished in 1985. Their tenant, Christopher Chichester, eluded police. (Nick Ut/associated press)

Globe reporters Michael Levenson, John R. Ellement, Maria Cramer, Eric Moskowitz, Shelley Murphy, and Maria Sacchetti reported and wrote this story.

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.

Rockefeller was captured last weekend in Baltimore after an international manhunt. He now sits in the Suffolk County Jail on Nashua Street, and law enforcement officials believe they finally are on the brink of identifying him.

It has been no easy task. While his earliest years in Germany remain obscure, Gerhartsreiter's Wisconsin marriage records show he is the son of Simon and Irmengard and was born in 1961. Other government records list his birthplace as the mountain resort town of Siegsdorf, Germany, near the Austrian border.

Authorities do not know precisely how or when Gerhartsreiter came to the United States, but he apparently arrived in the late 1970s and lived for a time with the Roccapriore family in Meriden, Conn. Peter Roccapriore, 49, recalled a slightly-built, blond teenager who was surprised by the shortness of the American school day.

"He went to school with us," Roccapriore said yesterday. "He was like, 'Guys, you aren't even going to school that much. We usually go back for another two or three hours in our country.' "

Roccapriore wasn't certain how long the German student stayed or what may have been his reason for leaving, but he thinks the time limit for the exchange program had expired.

In August 1980, Gwen Savio, a retired librarian in Berlin, answered a newspaper ad for a German student seeking room and board and agreed to take in Gerhartsreiter, who walked several miles to her house.

Savio told the Globe yesterday that the teen, who enrolled at Berlin High School, refused to eat her family's Italian cooking and once locked her daughter out of the house in the winter.

"I didn't get a creepy feeling; I just thought that he was a spoiled brat," said Savio, who said she was interviewed by the FBI this week. "He wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it."

In January 1981, Savio kicked Gerhartsreiter out of her house, after he declared "that we were peasants and his father had told him not to talk to peasants." She believes he moved in with another family in Berlin.

On Feb. 20, 1981, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, 19, moved almost 1,000 miles west to Elm Grove, Wis., where he married a US citizen, Amy Jersild, 22, in a civil ceremony at the Dane County courthouse in Madison, records show. After that point, he obtained a green card, granting him legal residency in the United States.

Gerhartsreiter lived in a tiny brick cottage with flowing drapes, china, candles, and a fancy rug, recalled Beth Litza, Amy's older sister, in an interview yesterday.

"He had a kind of a rich-person, kind of distance thing going on," Litza said. As quickly as Gerhartsreiter appeared in Amy's life, he disappeared, she said, but she could not remember when and how they divorced.

Amy Jersild Duhnke, who is remarried and still living in Wisconsin, could not be reached yesterday.

In about 1983, Christopher Chichester showed up in San Marino, where he rented a converted garage, joined an Episcopal church, the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, and said he was the descendent of royalty. Residents recall being initially intrigued and later put off by Chichester's pretensions.

In 1985, Chichester's landlords, a young couple named John and Linda Sohus, were reported missing. Authorities wanted to question Chichester, but he had left the city and could not be located.

About the same time, a man named Christopher Chichester Crowe began mingling with members at the exclusive Indian Harbor Yacht Club in Greenwich, Conn. Using contacts from the club, he was hired as a sales representative at S.N. Phelps and Co., a brokerage firm in Greenwich, said two former employees. They said they remember Crowe as a strange young man who said he had graduated from the University of Southern California and had worked as a producer for the television show "Alfred Hitchcock Presents."

"He's a chameleon; he can fit in," said one of the employees, speaking on condition he not be named. "He can be funny at times, witty, laughs at your jokes . . . He walked into the yacht club, pretending like he owned the place."

One of the employees said he saw Crowe's apartment, a converted garage on a large estate in Greenwich that was beautiful, but empty, except for a cot and some magazines. "He might have been a little embarrassed about it," the employee said. "He claimed he'd ordered some furniture that hadn't arrived yet."

The employees say Crowe quit for reasons they cannot recall. In 1987, he was hired as vice president of the corporate bond department at Nikko Securities International in Manhattan, after professing to be former head of the apparently bogus Battenberg-Crowe-von-Wettin Family Foundation, with a collection of Rolls-Royce automobiles and Italian sports cars. He told tales of owning castles in Europe, and his hiring was covered in the trade publication The Bond Buyer, which quoted Crowe's market analysis in July 1987: "Customers like industrials. They've been oversaturated with banks and finance."

But colleagues recalled yesterday that Crowe was not what he professed to be. He drove a beat-up 1965 Chevy, grew angry easily with others in the office, and made very few sales. He was terminated sometime around 1989, they said.

"He was a sales manager and never made a sale, so eventually he was fired," said Barnett. "He just didn't do anything."

Another former colleague recalled Crowe telling a customer who accidentally sat at his desk, "If anybody touches my stuff, I'll bring my German Luger."

"It started to become very apparent that whatever he said was a story; it was made up," another former colleague said. "At most places, but especially Wall Street, your word is your bond. And whenever you get someone like this, you're sitting on a liability, and so it was that, more than anything, that prompted the firm to decide that we'd be better of without him."

Just before he was fired, in 1988, Crowe attracted the attention of police in Greenwich, Conn., when he tried to sell a truck belonging to John Sohus, according to a 1995 episode of the television show "Unsolved Mysteries." The potential buyer, a minister's son, alerted police after Crowe lacked the proper paperwork, the show said.

Crowe's next job, sometime around 1989, was at Kidder Peabody in Manhattan, the former Nikko employees said. But he quit abruptly, telling colleagues his parents had been kidnapped abroad, those former colleagues said.

The next day, Connecticut state troopers showed up Crowe's office, asking about Sohus's truck, but Crowe was gone. Connecticut State Police declined to comment.

Where he went next is not clear, but during his marriage to Sandra Boss, they lived in New Hampshire, as well as in a $2 million townhouse on Beacon Hill.

About a year before he married Boss, in May 1994, workers digging a pool for the new owners of the Sohus home in San Marino discovered human remains wrapped in three plastic bags and buried in the backyard. Police presumed but never definitively identified them as those of John Sohus. DNA tests are currently being conducted on those remains. Neither Linda Sohus nor her remains have been located.

San Marino Police Lieutenant Steve Johnson said investigators plan to conduct a search next week of the property where the Sohuses were living when they disappeared in an effort to determine whether any additional human remains are buried on the property. Equipment that can X-ray through concrete will be used, he said.

"They'll survey the whole property," Johnson said.