He arrived as a German teenager. He would not leave the country as himself again.
The Connecticut period established a template that would repeat across thirty years: he moved into the lives of people with money and social standing, leveraged their goodwill and their assumption of good faith, built a persona that fit the environment he was in, and left when the persona became untenable or dangerous.
He was resourceful. He was observant. He understood, quickly and with apparent precision, what his hosts expected to hear and what claims would go unchallenged in any given social context. He would test a persona against a room — measure the response — and adjust.
He was, by his brother Alexander’s later account and by the testimony of those who knew him in various iterations, also charming. Intelligent enough to sustain conversations that others found impressive. Curious enough to accumulate knowledge in areas — art, physics, finance, history — that he could deploy when a claimed expertise needed surface-level support. He was a skilled listener, which let him identify what people wanted to believe and present himself accordingly.
What he was not, and apparently never pretended to be in any private reckoning with himself, was honest.
—
## The Green Card and the First Exit
His first legal foothold in the United States came through a transaction that was itself a fraud, though not the kind that carried criminal consequences at the time.
In Madison, Wisconsin, on February 20, 1981, Gerhartsreiter married a twenty-two-year-old woman named Amy Jersild Duhnke — reportedly to obtain the immigration status that the marriage would provide. He was nineteen. He left the day after the wedding. She filed for divorce in 1992, after he had long since vanished from her life.