FBI: Fingerprints ID 'Rockefeller' mystery man

updated 4:59 p.m. ET Aug. 15, 2008

BOSTON - The FBI said officials identified the kidnapping suspect who called himself Clark Rockefeller as a German man who came to the United States as a youth and later took on several aliases.

The FBI told reporters the agency pulled fingerprints from immigration documents from the early 1980s of Christian Gerhartsreiter. The prints matched those taken from Gerhartsreiter around the time of his Aug 2. arrest in Baltimore.

Earlier this week, authorities in California identified Rockefeller as Gerhartsreiter, though they did not provide forensic evidence.

Gerhartsreiter is accused of kidnapping his daughter off a Boston street. And authorities want to question him about the disappearance of a California couple.

Gerhartsreiter went by the name Christopher Chichester when he was a guest at the San Marino home of the couple now presumed dead. He has long been suspected in their disappearances, police have said.

The alleged aliases appeared to reflect a twisted life of multiple identities that unraveled last week. Authorities said Gerhartsreiter was many things besides the suspect in the California disappearances:

• As Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, he lived with families in Connecticut until he wore their hospitality thin.
• A teen husband who left his wife in Wisconsin a day after they wed.
• A Wall Street bond salesman named Christopher Crowe, who talked a good game but rarely closed a deal.
• A stay-at-home dad who lived in a $2 million brownstone in Boston's tony Beacon Hill neighborhood until his wealthy wife divorced him when she grew suspicious of his background.

Gerhartsreiter's Boston attorney, Stephen Hrones, said in an earlier interviews that his client doesn't have a full memory of this past. But Hrones said Gerhartsreiter had acknowledged using the name Christopher Chichester while living in California, and that he remembered the Sohuses.

Hrones said Gerhartsreiter told him that he barely knew the couple and that they left while he was still in California.

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