Sometime during the summer of 1998, a Montana-based journalist named Walter Kirn received an odd request: His friends Harry and Mary Piper, wealthy and religious, had rescued an injured dog and found her a home.
His new owner was named Clark Rockefeller, and as badly as he wanted this dog, he had no way to come get her: He lived in New York City, was unwilling to fly commercial, and his private plane was indisposed. His wife, Sandy, was traveling on business, and he wouldn’t make the cross-country drive alone. He didn’t want to hire a stranger to transport the dog.
Intrigued, Kirn offered to talk to Rockefeller about options.
As he writes in his new book, “Blood Will Out: A True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade” (Liveright), he was a journalist — “and I had a hunch I was going to meet a character.”
When they first spoke by phone, Rockefeller never said he was a member of the famed Rockefeller clan, though he did everything to imply it. He’d come across the Pipers’ dog, Shelby, a Gordon setter, on a site devoted to the breed. They were favorites of the British royals, he said.
Rockefeller mentioned he lived close to Central Park, which meant Shelby would have lots of exercise and could embark on “squirrel hunts.” In the apartment below his was one of the city’s top animal acupuncturists, and he’d hear his other neighbor, Tony Bennett, rehearsing all the time.
He said that he was a freelance banker who worked for countries, not companies, and that a cabal of world leaders had secretly agreed to allow for the communist invasion of Taiwan. Also, the royal family murdered Princess Diana.
At the end of this incredible monologue, Kirn offered to transport Shelby himself. It was an opportunity to befriend a Rockefeller. Kirn’s new wife, Maggie, came along.
When they deplaned at La Guardia, Kirn was surprised by Rockefeller’s appearance. Far from the robust, well-appointed scion he’d expected, Rockefeller was a short man with thinning, badly dyed blond hair. He was wearing cheap black plastic eyeglasses and khakis with no socks.
His appearance puzzled Kirn, who then quickly doubted himself: Wasn’t this how old-moneyed WASPs presented themselves? Didn’t they wear their unlabeled clothes until they had holes and fraying hems? Didn’t they carry themselves with a cultivated air of disregard, unlike the strivers and the nouveau-riche?
He said nothing and was rewarded when Rockefeller invited the Kirns to dinner the next night. They met Clark and wife Sandy at the Sky Club, at the top of the MetLife building, and when Clark pointed out “the family’s place” — Rockefeller Center — Kirn was impressed. Sandy’s expression, however, was a mixture of exhaustion and contempt.
Clark rolled on, regaling the table with a litany of quirks that sounded endemic to the super-rich: He’d never had a Coca-Cola or a hamburger, or had a meal in a restaurant that wasn’t private. He was a child prodigy who had enrolled at Yale at 14, despite suffering through a form of muteness till he was 10.
He was obsessed with dogs and the sitcom “Frasier,” and was about to do a cameo — as a caller to the titular shrink’s radio show. He’d be a musical buff with a form of doggy Tourette’s, and when he called in, he’d sing, “The hills are alive with the bark of doggies, woof, woof, woof, woof, woof . . .”
Clark never shut up, and when he finally paid Kirn for his cross-country delivery, he slipped him a sealed envelope. Mindful of what he assumed was WASP etiquette, Kirn didn’t open the envelope until he was alone. Inside was a check for $500 — not the $5,000 he had been led to expect.
Kirn thought it polite to say nothing.
Over the next 10 years, Kirn and Rockefeller maintained a long-distance friendship, kept up mainly through phone calls and e-mails. But as the summer of 2002 approached, Rockefeller kept asking Kirn to come visit him at his estate in rural New Hampshire — New York City had proved too much for his delicate constitution, Rockefeller said, and he had had a breakdown in 2000. He had moved there with Sandy and their young daughter, whom Rockefeller had nicknamed “Snooks.”
Also, Rockefeller mentioned that he had befriended the reclusive author J.D. Salinger, and wouldn’t Kirn like to meet him?
Curious, Kirn finally agreed to a visit that summer, and as he approached Rockefeller’s home, he wasn’t sure he had the right address. Here was a ramshackle structure surrounded by scraps of wood. Windows were blown out, and siding had peeled away from the exterior. It was filthy, with mouse droppings strewn below and spiderwebs spun above. Outside the house sat an abandoned police car. Kirn asked what it was doing there.
“Oh, that,” Rockefeller said. “A security measure.”
Much later, Kirn would come to realize what the phrase “oh, that” signified. It gave Rockefeller just enough time to fabricate an answer.
Kirn arrived after an hours-long ride up from Boston, where he had had a business meeting. He had gotten lost along the way and when he arrived was exhausted and famished. Rockefeller paid that no mind. He dragged Kirn all over the grounds, for hours, rambling on about his houseguests — Britney Spears, Helmut Kohl — his byzantine work in cosmology and his efforts to evade the Chinese government, which viewed his contribution to NASA a national threat.
Finally, Rockefeller led Kirn inside the house, which was as Spartan and shabby as the exterior. In the main room was a tattered old sofa. They sat, and Kirn mentioned he was having issues with the IRS.
Rockefeller took out a pen and paper and scrawled out a number.
“Call George,” he said. George was President George W. Bush, and Rockefeller claimed it was his private line. Kirn, impressed and humbled, knew he would never use it.
Still, there came no offer of food, and that night, Kirn found himself driving into town, scrounging for a processed dinner. When he returned, an unashamed Rockefeller showed Kirn to his quarters: A bare room containing an uncomfortable mattress, threadbare blankets and no temperature controls — it veered from too hot to too cold, and Kirn could barely sleep.
Yet he stayed the whole weekend, seduced by the promise of a meeting with Salinger, by the super-secret work Rockefeller was doing for the US government, by this man who had the president’s private phone number. Even though Rockefeller ignored him nearly all the next day, leaving Kirn to entertain himself in a remote house that had no TV, no books, no food, no other company — he stayed.
Finally, that evening, Rockefeller invited Kirn to dinner in town. They had a feast, Rockefeller gorging himself and insisting on dessert, and when the check came, as usual, he claimed to have forgotten his wallet. It was just another cost of being friends with a Rockefeller.
The next day, Kirn’s last in New Hampshire, Rockefeller insisted on taking him to the museum at Dartmouth. “My aunt built the place,” he said. But the experience was awful — Rockefeller rushing Kirn around, droning on and on about the art he loved most without so much as pausing in front of it, never asking Kirn a question about himself, what he thought, was he having any fun.
Kirn had an epiphany. The energy it took for him to endure this “chirping, pedantic, benumbing little p- - -k” could mean only one thing: “I must hate myself at some level.”
It wasn’t until six years later, in July 2008, that Kirn began to learn the truth about Clark Rockefeller. First, came the news reports: Rockefeller, in the midst of divorcing Sandy, had kidnapped Snooks. He was the subject of a nationwide manhunt.
Kirn couldn’t believe it. He called his mother.
“You’re watching all this?” he asked. “You’ve heard?”
“It sounds like your friend was a phony, Walt.”
“It’s a big family,” Kirn replied. “He’s from the black-sheep side or something.”
“That’s just silly.”
On Aug. 3, 2008, Rockefeller was apprehended in Baltimore. Using the alias Chip Smith, he was living with Snooks, 7, in a $450,000 apartment. The FBI identified Rockefeller as a fraud: His real name was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, and according to the passport in his apartment, he was a 52-year-old German.
“The kidnapping,” Kirn writes, “exposed Clark Rockefeller as a fraud, the most prodigious serial impostor in recent memory.”
He was also wanted in connection with the murder of John Sohus, whose bones had been found in 1994. In the ’80s, Gerhartsreiter — going by Christopher Chichester at the time — lived in a guesthouse on Sohus’ LA property, and Sohus’ wife, Linda, had gone missing, too. Her remains have never been found.
The murder trial got under way in March 2013, and Kirn was there for all of it. He believed his old friend “Clark” was guilty, but was still grappling with how it was he — an experienced journalist, a professional cynic — had been so badly duped. He kept looking over at Gerhartsreiter in the hopes of making eye contact. He thought Gerhartsreiter would be relieved to see a familiar face.
He was shocked when Gerhartsreiter finally looked his way. He turned up his nose at Kirn, pursed his lips, and made clear his contempt. He never looked Kirn’s way again.
“What a perfect mark I’d been,” Kirn writes. “Rationalizing, justifying, imagining. I’d worked as hard at being conned by him as he had at conning me.”
On April 10, 2013, Gerhartsreiter was found guilty of first-degree murder. Sohus had been stabbed multiple times, his body cut into three pieces, then wrapped in bags and buried in the back yard.
Gerhartsreiter was sentenced to 27 years to life and showed no emotion as he was led away.
For Kirn, though, the story wasn’t over. While he knew Gerhartsreiter was a psychopath, he still sought to understand: How had he been fooled? How was Gerhartsreiter able to con so many people for so very long?
Not long after the trial, Kirn visited Gerhartsreiter in jail — a place the convict described as “a minor inconvenience,” a place from which he’d soon be sprung once his conviction was overturned. Kirn was uninterested; he was there for himself, to learn how he’d been the victim of such a long con.
“What is it you look for?” Kirn asked. “What’s the key to manipulating people?”
Gerhartsreiter found the question laughably simplistic.
“That’s too easy,” he said. “Vanity, vanity, vanity.”