The lesson, for investigative purposes, is that cold cases with unidentified suspects do not stay cold forever. They stay cold until an event occurs that provides the identification. In Gerhartsreiter’s case, the identification came twenty-three years after the killing and three years after his victim’s bones were confirmed as Jonathan Sohus. The event that provided it was a kidnapping he committed out of an unwillingness to accept the terms of a custody settlement he had agreed to.
He exposed himself. The bones in the San Marino backyard had waited twenty-eight years. They outlasted the aliases.
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## Postscript: A Name No One Should Have Used
The actual Rockefeller family has, for obvious reasons, been largely silent on the Clark Rockefeller case — there is relatively little to say about someone who stole your name and used it for thirteen years without your knowledge or permission. They denied any connection when asked. They had no connection.
But the name did something real in the world under his use of it. It opened doors, smoothed social introductions, generated the benefit of the doubt in rooms where skepticism might otherwise have been the response. It worked, not because Gerhartsreiter was especially compelling as a Rockefeller, but because the name itself did enough work that no one needed to look more closely.
This is worth noting because it says something about how social capital operates — not as a personal quality that individuals accumulate through their own actions, but as a kind of borrowed light that attaches to names and places and affiliations and can be worn by anyone willing to claim it in the right environment. The Clark Rockefeller identity was not a clever piece of individual performance art. It was a calculated attachment to accumulated social capital that Gerhartsreiter had no right to and that, once attached, did the social work he needed done.
The Rockefeller family’s social capital survived the misuse. The people around whom that identity operated paid a different kind of price — in time, in trust, in the specific costs that intimate deception always extracts from the people it is practiced on.
A name is a word. But some words, in some environments, do more work than others. He knew exactly which words those were, and he used them until he couldn’t anymore.