Boston's amazing summer media mystery: Who is Clark Rockefeller?

Where to begin?

The Boston Globe has been leading the coverage of this strange and incredible story and has assembled links to numerous timelines, photos and articles at this link. If what has been reported to date is true, this is a tale of lies, deceit, identity theft, love under false pretenses, lots of money, con jobs, interstate and international flight - and quite possibly murder.

Here's a bit of an introduction first, before you click through to the Boston Globe:

Just before 5:00PM on July 27, 2008, an "AMBER Alert" was issued throughout Massachusetts. Seven year-old Reigh Storrow "Snooks" Mills Boss (Rockefeller) had been abducted in Boston near Boston Commons. Her captor was assumed to be her father, Clark Rockefeller, who was recently divorced from the girl's mother, Sandra Boss, losing custody of "Snooks" as a result. Apparently supervised visits were allowed as part of the settlement and the abduction occurred during one of these supervised visits.

I was watching television that evening and noticed the AMBER ALERT banner scrolling across the bottom of the screen during the evening news. "A Rockefeller? Surely he's got something up his sleeve!" - and sure enough, by the next morning there was talk of the possibility of the father captor and daughter abductee escaping by yacht to the Caribbean.

Fortunately, it didn't take the police long to find the father and daughter. They had not escaped by yacht, but rather to a former industrial space in Baltimore that had been converted to luxury apartments. Acting on a tip, the authorities lured Rockefeller out of the apartment by having someone phone him from the marina where his boat was stored with a phony story about his boat taking on water and nearly sinking. Rockefeller was arrested on the spot, moments after he stepped out of his apartment.

At court proceedings in Baltimore he agreed to be extradited back to Massachusetts for trial.

Here's where the story gets weird:

As a result of being "booked" in Baltimore, his finger print was taken. It was compared against a national database of both known and unknown fingerprint sources and there was a hit - his prints matched those found at the scene of a long since unsolved crime. Could Clarke Rockefeller really have kidnapped and killed a young couple in California nearly 15 years ago? He's not saying - even after detectives from the Los Angeles Police Department flew in to interrogate him this week.

Even weirder:

A family in Connecticut has stepped forward and says that from the photos they have seen of Rockefeller he is almost certainly an exchange student from Germany that lived with this family for a semester or two in the late-1970s or early-1980s under a different name.

The story continues with more strange fun and surprises ahead. I could write for hours more and not cover everything about it, but you're in good hands with the Boston Globe as far as this story goes.

Read on.

[The Boston Globe]