On July 27, 2008, a seven-year-old girl named Reigh went for what should have been a supervised visit with her father on a street in Boston’s Back Bay.
Within minutes, she was gone.
The man who took her introduced himself to most of the world as Clark Rockefeller — art collector, physicist, eccentric heir to one of America’s great dynasties. He had lived under that name for more than a decade. He had married a Harvard-educated McKinsey executive. He had hosted dinner parties, traded in what he described as rare artworks, and moved through Boston’s elite social circles with the casual confidence of a man who believed he was, in some fundamental sense, above scrutiny.
What he actually was became one of the most extraordinary identity fraud stories in modern American crime. And the kidnapping of his daughter was the event that unraveled it.
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## A Name Built for a Different Country
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter was born on February 21, 1961, in Siegsdorf, a small town in Bavaria, West Germany. His parents were Simon and Irmgard Gerhartsreiter. He had a brother, Alexander.
By every account of those who knew him as a young man, Gerhartsreiter was fixated on the United States — on its wealth, its culture, and the possibilities it seemed to offer for reinvention. He absorbed American television programs and developed the English-language fluency that would later serve him in ways his family could not have anticipated.
When he was a teenager, he encountered an American on a train in Germany who invited him to come and visit his family in Connecticut. Gerhartsreiter accepted. He arrived in the United States and stayed with that family — and later others in the same state — for an extended period, working his way through the networks of well-off Connecticut households that took in foreign students and young visitors.