Ex-Wife Of ‘Rockefeller’: No Reason To Doubt Past

The ex-wife of the man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller testified Monday at his kidnapping trial that she had no reason to doubt his accounts of his past, even after they had dated for a year and he proposed.

Sandra Boss said she saw an angrier side of Rockefeller, whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, only after they were married.

Gerhartsreiter is charged with taking the couple’s 7-year-old daughter during a supervised visit in Boston last July after losing custody of the girl to Boss. Father and daughter were later found in Baltimore, and the girl was unharmed.

Boss said she and her future husband met in New York in 1993 through a friend of her sister’s at a “Clue” board game-themed party; he came dressed as Professor Plum, she as Miss Scarlet. She said she always knew him as Rockefeller, was flattered by his attention and found him attractive, charming and intelligent.

“He was very enthusiastic about getting to know me and getting romantically involved,” she said. She said he told her he was doing debt-negotiation work for small countries, which appealed to her own idealism.

She says they started dating when she was in Boston attending Harvard Business School and he was living in New York. He proposed in the spring of 1994 during a getaway to Maine.

After they were married in 1995, he became more controlling and critical of her friends. Eventually it became a “stressful” relationship, she said.

Prosecutors say Gerhartsreiter is a German-born con man who has changed identities repeatedly since moving to the United States in 1978.

His defense lawyers say he is mentally ill and is not criminally responsible for his actions.

Earlier Monday, a livery driver who acted as the getaway driver when Rockefeller snatched his daughter said he was an unwitting accomplice.

Darryl Hopkins said Gerhartsreiter offered him $3,000 to help him “get rid of” a friend. The “friend” was a social worker overseeing a supervised visit between Gerhartsreiter and his daughter.

Hopkins admitted he followed Gerhartsreiter’s instructions to drive away, even though the social worker was holding onto the car door. The social worker fell and suffered bruises and a mild concussion.