A writer recalls his friendship with a ‘Rockefeller’
Walter Kirn dissects ‘the process of being a chump’ for a con man
What’s it like to be conned by an infamous con artist, one who pretended to be a wealthy Rockefeller but who turned out to be a murderer?
That’s the provocative question that journalist and novelist Walter Kirn asks himself
in his new memoir, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade (Liveright).
Kirn, like many others, was duped by the web of lies spun by “Clark Rockefeller,” aka German immigrant Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who is now serving a life sentence for murder.
“I wanted to open up the process of being a chump,” Kirn, 51, says by phone from Livingston, Mont., where he lives. “I wanted to step out as the sacrificial poster boy for everyone who has ever been duped by another person. It happens in love, in business, and here, it happened in this way that’s stranger than fiction.”
Kirn’s friendship with Rockefeller (Kirn calls him Clark throughout his book) began with a crippled dog, which Kirn delivered in the late ’90s from Montana to Manhattan after Rockefeller adopted “Shelby” via the Web. (Kirn’s then-wife was president of the local Humane Society.) Kirn found Rockefeller living in an apartment filled with works of art by modern masters. All of which, Kirn learned years later, were fakes.
“This book is really like going back and inspecting a magic show to see how it fooled you the first time,” he says. “You realize now it was a bunch of tricks.”
Rockefeller was such a master manipulator, Kirn says, that red flags could be ignored or dismissed, such as the fact that the Manhattan apartment was dusty and unimpressive, or that his friend never picked up the bill.
Kirn sees this man of multiple aliases (Christopher Chichester among them) as an empty vessel who created personae by appropriating images and scenes from film noir and con-man classics such as The Great Gatsby and The Talented Mr. Ripley.
“Clark has absolutely no self,” Kirn says. “He’s like a spore who blew in on a cosmic wind from Jupiter.”
After his own divorce, Kirn, a dad, was sympathetic with Rockefeller’s distress over a custody dispute with his ex-wife, Sandra
“This is the story of a writer getting his revenge on a con man. I survived to tell the tale, and he got life in prison.”
Boss. Rockefeller’s masquerade unraveled in 2008, when he kidnapped his daughter, known as “Snooks.” After his arrest, his true identity was revealed, and he was linked to the 1985 murder in California of Jonathan Sohus, whose wife also disappeared.
Kirn attended Gerhartsreiter’s murder trial last year for The New Yorker, and has no doubts of his former friend’s guilt. Even more chilling is the thought that he himself could have been a victim.
“This is the story of a writer getting his revenge on a con man,” Kirn says. “I survived to tell the tale, and he got life in prison. I’m not going to shrink from the sense of victory that gives me.”
Writing Blood Will Out, though, took a toll emotionally. The author of the novel Up in the Air (which became a hit George Clooney movie) says he’s not working on a new book at the moment.
“Writing this was very hard,” he says. “The night I finished writing it, I went to bed; I woke up clammy from a nightmare of driving in a car with Clark. He asked if we could pull over so he could go to the bathroom. And it was dark, and I knew he was going to come around and kill me.”