Tuesday, May. 26, 2009

Clark Rockefeller

Even though 48-year-old German national Christian Gerhartsreiter has lived in the U.S. since the 1970s — without having filed a single tax return and going by a number of aliases — his lawyers are still trying to get the false identity charge against him dropped. It's an uphill battle: the man otherwise known as Clark Rockefeller has been passing himself off as a member of the industrialist dynasty for years. And really, that's the least of his worries. After abducting his then 7-year-old daughter Reigh Boss from a Boston street in the summer of 2008, Rockefeller now faces charges of assault and kidnapping as well.

Rockefeller's lawyers are claiming mental distress caused him to snatch his daughter that day, injuring a social worker in the process; a rough divorce in 2007 had left him limited to just three supervised visits with his child a year. But investigators say that Rockefeller, who was caught in Baltimore after a week on the run, is a person of interest in the 1980s disappearance of a California couple. His trial is set to begin May 26.