Clark Rockefeller, the kidnapper captured in Baltimore Saturday six days after he snatched his seven-year-old daughter off a Back Bay Street during a supervised visit had no driver’s license. No social security card. No work history. No educational ties. No family members to speak of. He married a woman – after falling in love with her identical twin first – in 1994 but did not file for a wedding certificate. He spread stories of owning Lear Jets, built a bizarre moat around his New Hampshire home, led neighbors to believe he was a descendent of the famed industrialist clan and swore he graduated from Yale. All lies.
In the words of one Boston Police law enforcement source, “He’s a ghost.” A broke ghost that lived off his wife’s lucrative income.
But that did not stop Harvard-educated, high-powered political consultant Sandra Boss from marrying Rockefeller. Or Clark Rock. Or Michael Brown. Or whatever Rockefeller’s real name is. She was married to the man for more than a decade, but, astonishingly, she would never know who her husband and daughter’s father really was. In fact, Rockefeller took a “substantial amount of money” to relinquish custody of his little girl and even signed off on paperwork to change her name from Reigh Rockefeller to Reigh Boss.
Sandra Boss is not the only smart woman to fall in love with an imposter. Two decades of crime reporting have shown me that women are often willing to clench their eyes shut to the possibility that the man they have fallen in love with is not who he said he was – like whistling in the dark to keep away ghosts. Recent murder trials have shown us that.
Rachel Entwistle, the beloved teacher from the South Shore who was shot dead alongside her nine-month-old daughter Lillian Rose, thought she had married a loving husband and doting dad in Neil Entwistle, who was pulling in $10,000 a month as a computer consultant for British intelligence. In fact, she created a website to keep family members abreast of the Entwistles perfect life and signed each message the same way, “Love, the happy family.” Neil Entwistle was in fact a broke, cowardly sex addict convicted of pumping a bullet into his baby’s belly and his wife’s head this summer.
Weeks later, another so-called loving husband, former WRKO radio talk show host James Keown, was convicted in the same courthouse of killing his wife Julie by spiking her Gatorade with antifreeze. As she died slowly and painfully in their Waltham home, Julie Keown was still convinced her husband was a Harvard Business School student (he forged acceptance letters) who was heartbroken over her inexplicable sickness. In emails to friends Julie wrote about her unending love for James, and even expressed fear that her illness would “mess up” his life.
Why are smart women so ready to believe obvious lies? Have we become so busy juggling successful careers that we ignore our person lives?
