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In the mid ’90s, Stanford graduate Sandra Boss was getting her MBA at Harvard when her sister introduced her to a man named Clark Rockefeller, descendant of the famous business family. He wore custom-made designer clothing, collected expensive art, and had an upscale New York apartment. Boss was charmed, and the two married shortly thereafter.
Boss and Rockefeller spent the next 11 years together. They enjoyed a stable life, thanks in large part to Boss’s job as a consultant and personal wealth. The two had a daughter, Reigh Storrow Mills Rockefeller, lovingly referred to as “Snooks,” in 2001. Rockefeller was a stay-at-home dad, and didn’t hesitate to spend Boss’s money to keep up his appearances. His stories, too, became inconsistent. And Boss was often baffled when Rockefeller would suddenly insist, seemingly out of the blue, that they needed to move. Again.
Boss served Rockefeller with divorce papers in 2007. Since her husband was jobless and a complete mystery, Boss was awarded full custody. In 2008, Clark Rockefeller was enjoying one of the three court-approved visitations with his daughter as his ex-wife waited in a Boston hotel room nearby. While walking through Boston Common, Rockefeller disappeared with his daughter.
As investigators attempted to track down Rockefeller, they found more questions than answers. He didn’t have a Social Security card, a driver’s license, or even a credit card in his own name. When his picture was shown on the news asking for leads, callers gave at least four different identities to go with the man shown on-screen. Investigators were flummoxed.
Then, a friend came forward with what would become crucial evidence: Rockefeller had had a glass of wine at his house the night before, and the glass had not been washed. Police lifted prints off the glass and got a match to one Christian Karl Gerhartstreiter, a German immigrant who had come to the United States almost 30 years earlier.
Gerhartstreiter grew up in a middle-class family in a small town in Germany. He moved to the US as a teenager, where he stayed with a Connecticut family while claiming to be an exchange student at a local high school. He later got married and divorced, landing a green card, and moved to Los Angeles under the name of Christopher Chichester. He made himself at home in an upper-class neighborhood, weaving a tale of royal English ancestry and proclaiming himself a TV producer. He lived in the back house of a woman named Didi Sohus. Her son and daughter-in-law, John and Linda Sohus, lived on the property, as well. The two went missing in 1985, and Christopher Chichester disappeared shortly afterwards.
The skeletal remains of the couple were discovered in the backyard of the house in 1994, but by that time, Christopher Chichester had become Christopher Crowe. Crowe worked at (and was fired from) a number of high-level jobs on Wall Street, with no degree, no experience, and no Social Security number. As people began to catch wind of his act, and investigators tracked Sohus’s missing truck back to him, he disappeared again, later turning up in Sandra Boss’s life as Clark Rockefeller.
After a five-day manhunt for him and his kidnapped daughter, Clark Rockefeller had become Chip Smith. But his newest alias didn’t last long; the owner of the carriage house he rented called investigators, and Snooks was safely returned to her mother while Christian/Christopher/Clark/Chip was finally taken into custody.
Gerhartstreiter was convicted of kidnapping his daughter as well as the murder of John Sohus (Linda’s body has never been found). He is serving a sentence of 27 years to life in prison.
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