'Rockefeller' charms faded after wedding, ex-wife says

"He could talk about anything," Sandra Boss testified yesterday of the man she knew as Clark Rockefeller, whom she met at his East Side apartment in Manhattan in the summer of 1993 and married on Nantucket two years later. "He was one of the most intelligent people I had ever known."

But Boss, an urbane, 42-year-old executive at McKinsey & Co., said her husband turned out to be very different from the man who wooed her. He was controlling and demanded that he accompany her when she walked to and from work. He never brought in any income, she said. He missed their daughter's birth, arriving at the hospital 18 hours after the delivery. And he named the baby Reigh without consulting her.

Speaking publicly at length for the first time as she testified about the man accused of kidnapping their 7-year-old daughter for six days last summer, Boss appeared to bolster the state's case that her former husband, who authorities say is a Bavarian-born con man named Christian Karl Gerharstreiter, is not mentally ill but a smooth-talking louse. It was the third day of testimony in the kidnapping case.

The prosecution witness also indirectly addressed the question that has remained unanswered since the notorious abduction on a Back Bay street: How could an intelligent and capable woman, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School, fall for the fraudulent Brahmin?

In Boss's account, it was easy.

"I liked him," said Boss, who advises governments and companies facing business challenges. "I thought he shared a lot of my values about changing the world."

When Boss began divorce proceedings in 2007, she hired a private investigator to "find out who my soon-to-be ex-husband was," she said, because "I had a doubt."

When Rockefeller failed to provide a satisfactory answer, she obtained full custody of Reigh after agreeing to give him $800,000, two cars, her engagement ring, and a dress he had bought for her.

Boss, who wore a conservative black suit and carried a shiny black purse, was composed and confident on the stand. She spoke in a firm voice and averted her eyes from her former husband until Assistant District Attorney David A. Deakin asked, at the start of his direct examination, whether she had been married to him.

"Yes, I was," she said, her voice softening. She repeatedly referred to him as "the defendant" during her testimony.

Deakin never asked Boss whether she was enticed by the Rockefeller name, a matter likely to be probed by her former husband's lawyers today when she returns to the stand to be cross-examined. The defendant's lawyers say their client suffers from grandiose delusions and narcissistic personality disorder and was legally insane when he abducted his daughter.

Nonetheless, Boss said she had no reason, at least initially, to doubt that the defendant was the man he professed to be: a scion of the storied American family and one who assisted small countries in reducing crippling debt.

He told her that he grew up in Manhattan a block from the East River in a Sutton Place townhouse, the son of George Percy Rockefeller and Mary Roberts, she said.

As a boy of 2 or 3, she recalled him saying, he fell down the stairs and hit his head, an accident that left him mute, she said. He got a private tutor and was so precocious that he enrolled in a Yale program for gifted teenagers at 14. Four years later, he told her, his parents were killed in a car crash.

"He told me that he had quite a lot of money but that, sadly, it was encumbered by a lawsuit" because his father, a former Navy employee, was accused of having embezzled funds, she said.

Rockefeller's childhood stories were reinforced, Boss said, by a four-member family who lived near Sutton Place and apparently said they were relatives. The matriarch identified herself as Rockefeller's maternal aunt. Boss provided few particulars about the family during her testimony, and it was not immediately clear who they were.

Boss and Rockefeller married in October 1995 and lived in Manhattan while she worked at McKinsey. But the marriage was troubled almost from the start, she said, because he controlled many aspects of her life.

In late 1998, he prevailed on her to move to Nantucket, which meant she had to fly to New York on Mondays, stay at a hotel during the week, and fly back on weekends. About a year later, he persuaded her to buy a house in Cornish, N.H. She continued to commute to New York.

By 2000, she said, she decided she wanted a separation but then got pregnant. She said she was reared in the Episcopal Church in Seattle, and "was raised to believe you're supposed to work on your marriage." She stayed with Rockefeller.

After Reigh was born, she said, the couple argued about how to raise her. Rockefeller did not want to send the girl to a preschool in Cornish, and Boss was concerned that the little girl was not spending enough time with other children. The family ultimately moved to a townhouse on Beacon Hill, but Boss found the marriage intolerable.

It was then, as the marriage was breaking up, that Boss hired the private investigator to try to determine her husband's true identity. On the basis of his findings, she sought full custody of Reigh.

"The point of it was that the defendant was not the person he said he was, and that was a cause for great concern," she said.

Boss and Reigh moved to London, where McKinsey had an office, on Dec. 23, 2007. They returned to Boston last summer for the first supervised visit between Reigh and her father, under the terms of the custody agreement, and he abducted the girl on July 27 and fled to Baltimore.

Boss was "hysterical" and "devastated" when Reigh disappeared, she said. When authorities found the girl unharmed six days later, Boss said, Boss danced gleefully and rushed to Baltimore to be reunited with her.

"I gave her a big hug," she said with a broad smile.

Saltzman can be reached at jsaltzman@globe.com.