The full shape of what he had done across thirty years was not yet clear on August 15, 2008. It would take three more years, two more trials, and a murder conviction to see the whole picture.
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## The Kidnapping Trial: Boston, 2009
Gerhartsreiter faced trial in Boston in June 2009 on charges arising from the kidnapping: parental kidnapping, assault and battery, and assault with a dangerous weapon — the latter charge relating to the SUV that dragged the social worker when it pulled away.
His defense attorneys offered an insanity defense. They argued that he suffered from a delusional disorder that made him not criminally responsible for his actions — that his entire system of alternate identities and invented histories was not fraud but illness, that the man who had lived as Clark Rockefeller was not a calculating deceiver but a person genuinely unable to distinguish his fantasies from reality.
Sandra Boss testified for the prosecution. Her account of the marriage — the controlling behavior, the financial dependence she subsidized, the lies she had come to see clearly only when hiring the private investigator — was central to the case. Under cross-examination, defense attorneys pressed her on whether she considered him delusional. She was consistent: she said he told lies, that he was “completely clear on what he was doing,” and that “the defendant was lying to me.”
This distinction — between calculated deception and genuine delusion — was the core of the trial’s central conflict. The jury’s verdict resolved it.
They rejected the insanity defense. On June 12, 2009, the jury convicted Gerhartsreiter of parental kidnapping and assault and battery with a dangerous weapon. They acquitted him on a second assault count and on the charge of giving a false name to police.