This is not consistent with an impulsive act. Building a residence in another city under a false name requires legal and financial transactions that take time. They require making decisions about where to go before you have gone anywhere. They require the kind of forward planning that presupposes both the intention to commit an act and the awareness that the act will require escape and concealment.
He did not bring his daughter to a hotel or to a friend’s house or to a location he chose after the kidnapping. He brought her to a property he had prepared.
The defense, in arguing delusional disorder, suggested that these preparations were consistent with his general pattern of constructing alternate identities — that the Baltimore identity was simply one more instance of his ongoing inability to distinguish his fantasies from reality, rather than evidence of criminal planning. The jury found the prosecution’s interpretation more consistent with the evidence.
—
## The Six Days in Baltimore
The period between July 27, when Reigh was taken, and August 2, when Gerhartsreiter was arrested, was approximately six days.
During those six days, an FBI investigation was unfolding. His photograph was distributed. The Rockefeller name was generating enormous press coverage — a famous name, a kidnapped child, a Boston Brahmin social milieu, a custody dispute with a Harvard-educated McKinsey partner. The story had every element that drives national media attention.
In Baltimore, he was living as Chip Smith. He had a townhouse. He had his daughter. He was maintaining, apparently, some version of the fiction that they could simply inhabit the life he had prepared and that the events of July 27 in Boston need not catch up with them.