The Man in the Rockefeller Suit

by Mark Seal

  Chip Smith, a.k.a. Clark Rockefeller, was suddenly the most wanted man in America.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Manhunt

  To those he had left behind in Boston, Cornish, and New York, Rockefeller was merely off on another of his adventures, this time on the high seas. He told one friend he was sailing to Peru; he informed another that he was traveling by boat to Alaska. To others he said he was headed to the Turks and Caicos, Bermuda, or the Bahamas. His unwitting friends became part of his elaborate escape plan, creating a vast network of possible trails to throw off anyone who might come looking for him.

  July 29, 2008, MSNBC News Services:

  Boston—Police on Tuesday were investigating the disappearance of a father and daughter amid concerns the dad, involved in a custody dispute, may try to flee the country on a 72-foot yacht, possibly to Bermuda.

  July 30, 2008, CBS News:

  Police in Delaware are looking into a claim that a state worker saw Clark Rockefeller and his daughter, Reigh Boss, at a car dealership in Smyrna on Tuesday. A state worker reported the sighting to police. She claims she saw a well-dressed man—believed to be Rockefeller—and a little blond girl wearing a flowered dress in the corner of a car lot. The woman said they had red suitcases with them. When the woman turned her car around to snap a picture of the pair, they were gone.

  August 1, 2008, the Sunday Times of London:

  The mysterious Clark Rockefeller and his abducted daughter have been spotted in a Caribbean island, having arrived by yacht on Thursday, the FBI has been told. Mr. Rockefeller, 48, had been on the rUn since snatching Reigh Boss, 7, during a contact visit in Boston, Massachusetts, last Sunday. The manhunt turned to the Turks and Caicos Islands yesterday. [The Turks and Caicos police would later confirm two sightings of Clark Rockefeller and his daughter, Reigh, after two store clerks at a NAPA Auto Parts and a 7-Eleven convenience store reported seeing the pair. Police showed workers pictures and the clerks identified them. They said the child was a girl, but had her hair cut short to look like a boy. At one store, the man used a Visa credit card bearing the name David M. Gibson.]

  August 2, 2008, the Daily Telegraph, London:

  Apparent sightings of the pair were reported across America and abroad. For the past six days, people who thought they knew him—including his former wife, who had custody of their daughter—have been trying to work out not just where he is, but who he is. Not many Americans reach the age of 48 without a driving license, a social security number, a job or a single penny paid in tax.

  Throughout his life in America, the immigrant had depended on the kindness—and often the gullibility—of women, from his first wife, Amy Jersild, to his landlady Didi Sohus, to the widows of San Marino, to Sandra Boss. Now, however, a string of women were hot on his trail, led by Noreen Gleason, of the FBI, which took command of the case once it became clear that Reigh Boss had most likely been taken across state lines.

  Twenty-four hours after the kidnapping, Gleason was on the phone with a representative of the Rockefeller family, assuming that the fugitive she and her fellow agents were seeking was indeed a member of the famous family. “There was no reason for me not to assume that he was a Rockefeller,” she said. “But this really didn’t fit the profile of how a Rockefeller would conduct himself.”

  “We’ve never heard of him,” the Rockefeller representative told Gleason.

  Months later, when I spoke to her in her Boston office, Gleason was still marveling over how Rockefeller’s many bogus destinations tripped up a squadron of FBI agents. “We would start going down one avenue, one lead, and we would get to the end of it and there would be nothing there,” she said. She mentioned his supposed destination of Peru as an example: “He had contacted the Peruvian government, so when we looked into all the things that we normally trace and track, there were bread crumbs that indicated that he did go down this lane. And then we would get to the end of it and we would know: he didn’t do this! So we would go all the way back out and get another lead, go down that same avenue of intense vetting and investigation, and find another dry hole. And it’s not like we started off down that avenue and stopped after only going five feet. We’d go the five feet and there would be something else that made us keep going, a little piece of cheese. He had talked to somebody, somebody would actually confirm it: ‘Oh, yeah, Clark told me he was going to do this. He showed me a map!’”

  Even where he spent the night before the kidnapping seemed to be, upon reflection, a ploy. Most assumed that Rockefeller had spent the night in a room at the Algonquin Club, where he met his daughter and the social worker on the morning of July 27. But he had actually stayed in the home of a woman with whom he was having a love affair. “I had just returned from Dubai, and was jetlagged and hung over, but I did manage to wrest up enough energy to have dinner with him that night,” the woman said, adding that Rockefeller had seduced her over the course of a year with his good manners, compliments, proficient Latin, and the attentiveness he showed her children. He was too cheap to stay at the Algonquin, she added, so he frequently stayed with her, most recently leaving empty boxes of gold on her dining room table and saying urgently of his daughter, “I have to get her back!” They had dinner at The Palm steakhouse on the night before the kidnapping, then returned to her house. “The next morning he was gone,” the woman remembered. Some time over the course of that evening, he stopped by the house of yet another friend, where he drank a glass of water. When the police arrived a few days later, the friend hadn’t washed the glass Rockefeller had used, and the police were able to lift a fingerprint from it.

  While the prints were being analyzed, the authorities released pictures of the kidnapper and his daughter to the media in hopes that someone might recognize him. On July 31, Sandra Boss recorded an impassioned video plea to her former husband, which was aired on television stations across America. She wore a simple green top, and her hair was a mess.

  “Clark,” she said in a weak and cracking monotone, “although things have changed, you will always be Reigh’s father and I will always be Reigh’s mother. We both love her dearly and have only her best interests and well-being in our hearts. I ask you now, please, please, bring Snooks back. There has to be a better way for us to solve our differences than this way.”

  Then she addressed her daughter: “Reigh, honey, I love and miss you so much. Remember, you’re always a princess.”

  The video, coupled with a Wanted poster showing Clark Rockefeller’s picture, brought calls from all over the country. In Berlin, Connecticut, Steve Savio (Ed’s brother) told the Associated Press that he was “100 percent certain” that the man police were seeking was Christian Gerhartsreiter, a foreign exchange student his family had hosted thirty years earlier. In Milwaukee, Amy Jersild’s husband confirmed to a Pasadena Star-News reporter that his wife had been married to the alleged kidnapper, “but said it only lasted a day.” The Boston Herald contacted Amy’s sister, Beth, who told the newspaper, “It wasn’t like they dated. To me, it seems like it was kind of on the quick side.”

  In San Marino, California, the Swedish hairdresser Jann Eldnor told reporters that the fugitive was Christopher Chichester, a British aristocrat who lived in San Marino in the 1980s, claimed to have been related to Lord Mountbatten, and disappeared without a trace. “When I see the picture, right away I knew it was the guy,” said Jann. “The hair, the head—I worked on that head for years.” In Greenwich, Connecticut, veterans of the financial industry recognized the mystery man as Christopher C. Crowe, a TV producer who had worked for at least three investment firms in the late 1980s before suddenly vanishing. And scores of people in New York, Cornish, and Boston knew him as Clark Rockefeller, a distinguished if somewhat eccentric member of America’s most famous family.

  The accounts of all the people who had known the fugitive in the past, however, were of limited usefulness to the authorities. What they really needed was a verifiable sighting of Clark Rockefeller—or whoever he was—since his
dramatic flight from Boston.

  “We had no idea that he was [still] in Baltimore,” the real estate agent Julie Gochar said. She had more or less tried to forget her peculiar client Chip Smith, who had bought the carriage house at 618 Ploy Street. She figured he had taken off on the yacht he was always talking about or had gone to visit his sisters in Wisconsin. Then she got a call from one of her associates at Obsidian Realty, Cindy Neuberger, who had been watching a report about the Rockefeller kidnapping on the Today show.

  “I think that’s Chip on TV!” Neuberger said on a voicemail message she left for Gochar. By the time Gochar checked her messages, there were several more from Neuberger. “She said, ‘Urgent! Urgent! Call me! I’m freaking out!’” Gochar remembered.

  Gochar kept her cool and checked out the Today segment online. There was definitely a resemblance between the wanted man on the screen and the persnickety ship’s captain who had driven her batty, but she wasn’t entirely sure they were the same person. “I don’t know if that’s him,” she told Neuberger. Gochar was uncertain, she explained to me, because Chip Smith “was in a hat and glasses the whole time.”

  But Neuberger was insistent: it was Chip Smith. “We’ve got to do something,” she said.

  Beth Grinspoon, the Obsidian Realty employee who had helped Smith move his belongings from Boston to Baltimore, agreed with Neuberger. She had also seen Today, and she told Gochar that Smith had met her at the Annabel Lee Tavern just a couple of days earlier to pay her money he owed her for the move. “So he actually came out of hiding to give Beth money, which doesn’t make sense to me,” said Gochar. “I mean, why? I guess because he really planned on not getting caught and wanted to pay off his debts to people here—he didn’t want to make a bad name for himself and didn’t think anyone was going to find him.”

  She was right about his belief that he had succeeded in creating yet another new life. He would later tell an interviewer that the time spent with his daughter in Baltimore represented “six days of intense fun,” adding, “I wanted to change my life altogether. I could really no longer afford to live in Boston. I always loved Baltimore. I wanted to have a boat that I could sail. In Boston, that’s almost an impossibility. In Baltimore, that’s very possible.”

  “Were you going into hiding?” he was asked.

  “That’s perhaps an extreme way of saying it,” he replied. “I just wanted to live an obscure life.”

  Yet, he lamented, those peaceful days “ended rather abruptly.”

  Although her fellow Realtors were insisting that Clark Rockefeller was their own Chip Smith, and they had to advise the FBI, Julie Gochar still wasn’t sure. She later admitted that she was “stressing” about calling the authorities.

  “Beth said, ‘We’ve got to call!’ And I said, ‘Beth, I’ve got a baby! You know, if the guy’s out there, I don’t want it to be on the news that we tipped them off that he’s in Baltimore! And they don’t catch him! I don’t feel right about putting my family in jeopardy.’”

  But that night, while watching yet another television report about the case, Gochar became convinced that the man who had kidnapped his daughter was her client, Chip Smith, when one reporter mentioned that the suspect had a patch of white hair on the back of his head, a trait she had noticed on Chip. That did it for her: she knew she’d been had. She knew the supposed highfalutin ship’s captain was a fraud who had chosen what he considered a nowhere place where “Us podunk, laypeople live,” and chosen “a small, local agency like ours” on which to pull his final scam. All the bullshit—the posing, the never-ending neediness, the temper tantrums, the lies—put Julie Gochar on high boil.

  “He was hiding out in Baltimore the whole time?!” she later exclaimed. “Excuse my French, but I almost shit the bed when I heard that. I mean, he’s actually here? We thought he was in Turks and Caicos.”

  She and her husband placed an anonymous call to the FBI’s national tip line, but with the flood of calls they had been receiving, he got no response. Then Grinspoon called the bureau’s Baltimore branch. “I know where Clark Rockefeller is,” she began. At six o’clock the next morning, Gochar was in the FBI office. “I told them everything,” she said, from minute details about the house on Ploy Street to the location of her client’s broken-down catamaran. Gochar put the agents in touch with her brother, who allowed them to stake out the marina from his house. “I gave the agents the local cell phone number that [Chip Smith] had been using, and I think they pinged that,” she said, meaning they used the number to pinpoint the wanted man’s whereabouts. Grinspoon and Neuberger cooperated with the FBI as well.

  A string of different women had been instrumental in the fugitive’s rise in America. Now three women in Baltimore were going to be the key to his downfall.

  Surveillance of the house at 618 Ploy Street began at 1 a.m. on Saturday, August 3. It was a brown-brick two-story home, sparsely furnished, strewn with boxes yet to be unpacked. Through the large oval windows the agents could see an open case of sherry and a small painting leaning against a wall. Chip Smith and his daughter were thought to be inside, but in nearly twelve hours of watching the place, the surveillance team hadn’t detected any motion. Noreen Gleason, directing the manhunt from Boston, took this to be a bad sign. She knew that Rockefeller was an insomniac who often worked on his computer throughout the night. “We’d gone down so many avenues, we were afraid maybe he had been there and left,” she said.

  Their first priority was getting the child out safely. “We wanted her to remain inside the house, but we wanted him to come out,” said Gleason. “That’s where the ruse came in.”

  Julie Gochar had shown investigators her client’s beat-Up catamaran the previous morning. Through a window of the boat, they could see a file labeled “Chip Smith,” presumably the plans for the new identity he was setting up. So they knew they had their man. To lure him out of Ploy Street alone, the FBI had the manager of the marina call Smith on his cell phone and say that his boat was taking on water.

  “I’ll be there,” came the reply.

  As more than a dozen police officers and federal agents with assault rifles stealthily surrounded Smith’s house, his neighbors watched with curiosity but little surprise. According to the Baltimre Sun, one of them, Lauren Gritzer, a twenty-six-year-old researcher at Johns Hopkins medical school, had already heard from the new arrival through his Realtor—he demanded that she remove a barbecue grill that was blocking his view of her building. “He said he was going to call the fire department and that I was going to get fined,” Gritzer told the Sun. “I was like, ‘Whatever.’” There were shades of the imperiousness he displayed in Cornish. She added that Smith’s house was always dark. “There were no lights, not even at night.”

  After Smith received the phone call from the marina manager, Noreen Gleason said, “It took him fifteen to twenty minutes to get ready, and at that time we could actually see the little girl, Reigh, walking around. The agents were telling me, ‘We can see her, Noreen.’ I said, ‘Does she look okay?’ and they said, ‘Yeah, she looks fine.’”

  The fugitive emerged from the house and headed toward the marina.

  “Hey, Clark!” an FBI agent yelled.

  He turned around.

  “Where are you going, Clark?” the agent asked.

  “I’m going to get a turkey sandwich,” he said. It would be the last lie he told before a group of agents wrestled him to the ground, while others stormed the house and got the girl.

  Later that day, Clark Rockefeller sat in an interview room in the FBI’s Baltimore office. He was dressed in the same clothes he had worn for his two consecutive supervised visits with Snooks in Boston the previous weekend: a sky blue Lacoste polo shirt with khaki trousers, no socks. Now the clothing was dirty, and his upper arms were pale beneath his short sleeves, in contrast to his sunburned forearms. He wore heavy, black-framed glasses. He was unshaven, and his left hand was handcuffed to the wall. But as always, he assumed the position of being absolutely
in control.

  FBI agent Tammy Harty and Detective Ray Mosher had been selected to interview the suspect. They had been involved in the investigation from the beginning, Harty as a member of Child Abduction Rapid Deployment Team and Mosher as the lead detective for the Boston police. They had been in Washington, D.C., where they were preparing to go on the television show America’s Most Wanted to talk about the case, when they got the call saying that the kidnapper had been captured.

  “Are you willing to speak with us, Mr. Rockefeller?” Harty asked after having read him his Miranda rights.

  “Yeah, within a limited extent,” he said, adding, “Call me Clark.”

  “You’ve kind of given us a run for our money this week,” Harty told him. “You’ve put some of the best of us to the test.”

  “I could say thank you, but . . .” he said.

  Harty said that she and Mosher wanted to get to know him a bit, so he told them something about himself. He said that he had made extra money writing term papers for college students; that he had amnesia about his childhood, but he believed it had been spent in New York City; that one of his few early memories was of going “to Mount Rushmore as a child in a Ford Woody Wagon, a Country Squire”; that he had audited classes at various Ivy League colleges without actually enrolling or having to pay tuition; that he had been given the name Rockefeller by his “godfather,” the late Harry Copeland.

  He was still in full spin mode, and it appeared that he fully felt that he would extricate himself from this situation as easily as he had from so many others. He not only steadfastly clung to his identity as far as the name Rockefeller went, he confided in the investigators the power that the Rockefeller name gave him, saying the name worked “like a charm” on everyone who heard it. “It was easy to get into the clubs by just saying you are a Rockefeller,” he said at one point. “It would enhance a club if a Rockefeller was on the board.”