A dissection of deceit

She dissected their troubled marriage with the dispassion one would expect from a top-flight management consultant. In the process, she portrayed her ex as a controlling, occasionally charming mate who never ran out of stories to explain his bizarre life.

From the time they tied the knot, she says, he became a controlling figure who isolated her from her friends, lied about his career, and demanded that they get out of New York, never mind that her career could not be moved to rural New Hampshire.

They were on the verge of divorce when she discovered she was pregnant. Overnight, a fairly straightforward decision to leave an unhappy marriage got a lot more complicated. Not that the choice was ever easy.

"I felt that the burden for leaving a marriage was very high," she said. "I was uncomfortable leaving for my own unhappiness, and there was another person involved," meaning their unborn child.

The marriage was saved, temporarily. But by late 2007, after years of trying to make it work, she had had enough. A temporarily ugly custody battle ended abruptly after Boss filed an affidavit stating that she did not believe her husband, the man now known as Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, was really Clark Rockefeller. Thus exposed, she testified, he agreed to go quietly in exchange for a big pile of cash.

So began the custody arrangement that ended so bizarrely.

Boss's testimony, which continues today, seemed to undercut Rockefeller's claims of having only a tenuous grip on reality. She said he had a normal memory, no hallucinations, no sign of any delusions. In other words, he was never mentally ill, until he became a defendant mounting an insanity defense.

Watching this smart, self-assured woman on the stand, it was impossible not to wonder how she got taken for so long. Unfortunately, her testimony didn't yield many clues on that point. Rockefeller's lawyers are certain to make more of the issue, which should be fascinating.

But ultimately, such a question pales beside the sheer pain of a mother whose child has vanished. This is how she described her feelings after getting the call that her daughter had been kidnapped: "terror, horror, consternation . . . I was freaked." She went on to say: "I was completely traumatized. There's no way to describe it."

Rockefeller's trial is barely underway, but the prosecution has clearly had a couple of good days. As a legal argument, post-dated insanity is always hard to swallow. And the efficiency with which Rockefeller/Gerhartsreiter conducted his daily life undercuts the image of someone struggling with psychosis.

The notion he had no idea what he was doing or that it was wrong took a serious hit yesterday. His former wife described a man who was always in control, to the point that she couldn't take it anymore.

Another witness testified that Rockefeller had been pondering the kidnapping for some time. A portfolio manager named Mason Peltz described meeting Rockefeller at a dinner party around Christmas 2007. Rockefeller said he had lost custody of a daughter "born out of wedlock" whose mother had moved her to England. He spoke of going to England and bringing her back, which Peltz assumed meant that he planned to kidnap the girl. Quite the husband and father, huh?

Amid all the insanity surrounding this case, snippets of normality tend to stand out.

One such moment came toward the end of Boss's testimony. In a routine moment on the stand, she was asked to identify a picture of her daughter. She looked down at the picture and beamed, like any proud mother. It was as if "the defendant" wasn't even in the room.

Adrian Walker is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at walker@globe.com.