He abandoned the Crowe identity when he learned that California investigators were looking for Christopher Chichester. He established the Rockefeller identity in time to meet Sandra Boss at her Clue-themed party in the summer of 1993. The period between — the late 1980s and early 1990s — is a gap in the public documentation.
During this period, he presumably continued to live, to support himself in some way, and to develop the Rockefeller persona that he would deploy from 1993 onward. The specific locations, the specific activities, the specific means of support during this period are not clearly established in the public record reviewed for this article.
This gap is itself informative: it suggests that the alias transitions were not instantaneous, that there were periods of preparation and construction between the deployment of one identity and the next, and that Gerhartsreiter was capable of maintaining a relatively low profile during these transitional periods.
The question of how he supported himself financially across the entire thirty-year period is similarly underdocumented. He did not hold verifiable employment for most of his American life. He engaged in some art trading. Sandra Boss’s income supported the Boston household. How he subsisted during the California, Connecticut, and early New York periods — before he had a spouse’s income to draw on — is a matter the public record does not fully clarify.
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## Lessons the Case Offers: Practical and Structural
Cases like Gerhartsreiter’s are sometimes described as sui generis — unique, one-of-a-kind, a story so extraordinary that it offers no general lessons. This is not quite right.