'Rockefeller' remembers couple who vanished

'You found my brother'
The strongest word on his true identity came Friday, when a man in Germany told reporters Rockefeller was his brother, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, the son of an artist and homemaker in Upper Bavaria who felt like he was better than his modest upbringing.

"It seems you found my brother," Alexander Gerhartsreiter said upon being handed a photograph of Rockefeller by a Boston Herald reporter who visited his home. "It is really a shock."

He said his older brother was born Feb. 21, 1961, in Siegsdorf, Germany, and was raised until 1978 in the same house where his family still lives today. Gerhartsreiter said his brother moved to Connecticut as a student and never returned, initially keeping in contact but out of touch since he called his parents in 1985 — the year the couple in California and their tenant Chichester disappeared.

Hrones said Rockefeller speaks German but does not remember living in the country or having a German brother. He said Rockefeller remembers only "tidbits" of his childhood — including going to Mount Rushmore in a station wagon and having a Scottish nanny.

Gerhartsreiter said his brother had told his family he had taken the name Christopher Chichester because his given name was too difficult for Americans.

"I think Germany was too small for him," Gerhartsreiter told a Boston Globe reporter who also visited him at his home Friday. "He wanted to live in the big country and maybe get famous. Now that I see all this, he's really famous."

Hrones said Rockefeller's memories begin around 1993. In 1995, he married Sandra Boss, a senior partner in the London office of the management consulting firm McKinsey & Co. She has not responded to requests for comment left with her employer.

At least two families in Connecticut said Rockefeller is certainly the same young man who came to live with them when he was a teenager.

'Better than the rest of us'
Steve Savio, 39, of Berlin, Conn., said his family met him after answering an advertisement in a newspaper from a visiting German teen looking for a place to live.

"I recall him thinking he's better than the rest of us," Savio said. "I recall him telling stories about having servants growing up and like that."

Savio said he last saw the man he knew as Christian Reiter in 1981 but said he kept in contact with his mother, telling her he was using the name Christopher Crowe to open a production company. Savio said the FBI interviewed his mother in 1988 after a man identifying himself as Christopher Crowe tried to sell a pickup truck in Connecticut belonging to the missing Californians, Jonathan and Linda Sohus. He apparently fled before authorities could track him down.

Crowe is also the name on the stockbroker license application with fingerprints linked to Rockefeller, according to the Globe. A former colleague at Nikko Securities International, Richard Barnett, told the newspaper, "The man knew very little about corporate bonds."

Records reviewed by The Associated Press show that after Gerhartsreiter left Connecticut, he went to Wisconsin, where he married 22-year-old Amy Jersild on Feb. 20, 1981, at the Dane County courthouse in Madison. He was 19 at the time — and the marriage enabled him to get a green card.

He left the next day, according to divorce records Jersild filed 11 years later. On them, she listed his address as "unknown."

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