DAN’S PAPERS
Page 44 April 18, 2014
danspapers.com
Noisy (Continued from page 35) This boat was owned by a local woman, Kali Moore. The Coast Guard circled the boat and looked it over. But they never went aboard. Told what had happened by cell phone from someone in an adjacent boat, she said she was really glad she wasn’t on board at the time. In any case, Rockefeller was soon arrested and charged with kidnapping and assault. At trial it turned out he had been using a variety of names other than Clark Rockefeller, that his real name was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and he was the 48-year-old son of a Bavarian house painter. Really weird things happened after this. A book called Who Is Clark Rockefeller came out. It was turned into a Lifetime cable-channel movie dans 4 17 Eric 14 logo3:Layout 1 4/14/2014 4:28 and PM Page 1 starring McCormack as Clark Sherry
Clark Rockefeller, while serving a five-year sentence in prison for his misdeeds, was charged with a 1985 cold-case murder. Stringfield as Sandra Boss. (A reviewer for The New York Times wrote “…as a mystery and a police procedural, Who Is Clark Rockefeller? attains glossy mediocrity, but every few minutes Mr. McCormack shows up and says something like, ‘You were very tedious about money when I married you, and you’re still tedious,’ and it feels like Will & Grace all over again.”) The marriage between Boss and “Rockefeller”
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was declared invalid not because he was not who he said he was, but because it took place as a Quaker ceremony and papers were never properly filed. Sandra Boss moved with her daughter to London and became CEO of McKinsey, and is there today. And then, after all this, Clark Rockefeller, while serving a fiveyear sentence in a Massachusetts prison for his misdeeds, was charged by California authorities with a cold-case 1985 murder they believed he committed while pretending to be a man of royal lineage named Chris Chichester. He was convicted and is now serving a 27-years-to-life sentence. (He allegedly cut his victim into three pieces and buried him in plastic bags in the yard behind the house he was renting. He drove off in his victim’s pickup, which investigators later discovered. There was the victim’s blood in his house, it was reported. The body was discovered nine years later, when the homeowner was excavating for a swimming pool. A book bag from a college the accused attended was found with body remains inside.) Now a new book has come out called Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, which is a memoir by a prominent novelist named Walter Kirn (he wrote Up in the Air.) Kirn met Clark Rockefeller when Rockefeller called Kirn at his ranch in Montana to say he was interested in adopting a dog that Kirn had put up for adoption. Kirn’s wife was a supporter of the local humane society. Rockefeller sounded so interesting over the phone—this was when he was working on Wall Street—that Kirn decided to drive the dog from Montana to New York to bring it to him. “He told me he didn’t drive and his wife was abroad in his private plane, shopping,” Kirn told Terry Gross on NPR in March. So Kirn did that, and became Rockefeller’s friend, fascinated with knowing a Rockefeller, right through to his murder trial, when he sat in the courtroom watching, hoping to catch Gerhartsreiter’s eye. All fascinating stuff. There have been other attempts at being a Rockefeller out here. A woman named Adela Holzer, who had successfully produced several Broadway shows, including Hair, told people in East Hampton she was secretly married to David Rockefeller, as she attempted to arrange bogus investments from the local summer citizenry. She pleaded guilty to defrauding people of $400,000. And in 1984 there was a woman passing herself off as the daughter of Governor Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia; she was arrested after allegedly charging thousands of dollars on expensive hotel suites, bodyguards and a new car. What is it about pretending to be a Rockefeller? A Robert S. Feldman (not a Rockefeller), who is Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Massachusetts, told this to ABC News: “They may be treated far better than they normally would be, may be unhappy with their own lives, or simply like duping other people. Obviously there’s also a potential gain—they can get access to people, to parties, to events that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to go to….” Keep your heads down, you Rockefellers.