Walter Mitty-like "Ghost" Clark Rockefeller Vanishes with Seven-Year Old Daughter

by Christina 123 | July 31, 2008 at 02:27 pm

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The events unfolding over the "tycoon" father who abducted his own daughter on a custody visit to New York have become stranger and stranger. FBI believe the girl may be disguised as a boy, that the ostentatious plan to sail a catamaran to the Carribean with daughter, Reigh Storrow Boss, was an elaborate web of deceit by "Rockefeller", designed to deceive his friends, and baffled police now say they have "no idea" who "Clark Rockefeller" is.

It is feared that "Clark Rockefeller" is an imposter who has built up a false identity, invoking the film about Walter Mitty, as a fantasist, who lives in a fantasy world.

Problem is, this guy is real... or is he?

Police believe the pair may be in Delaware after various sightings recently.

A high-ranking Boston police official told ABC News: “Nobody knows who this guy is. He is a ghost.”

Police confirmed that his bank records show a recent withdrawal of a large amount of cash to buy gold coins, which would be impossible to trace and easy to convert back into cash abroad.

Mr Rockefeller is known to have used several aliases and to have cultivated an aura of secrecy, suggesting to friends that he was working for the Pentagon, either as a mathematician or physicist. He met Ms Boss, a brilliant graduate of Stanford and Har-vard Business School, in the early 1990s when she began working on Wall Street for Merrill Lynch. They are believed to have married in 1995, but a certificate cannot be traced.

The couple had at least three homes – a $775,000 historic “cottage” in Cornish, New Hampshire, a $2.3 million town house in Boston and a mansion on the exclusive Nantucket Island.

Friends said that although he never explicitly claimed to be part of the oil dynasty, he did not deny being a member of the family.

Some friends recalled him saying that his parents had died in a car crash when he was a child, others that he was schooled at home before attending Yale, which has no record of him. He also talked passionately about South Africa, leading some to assume that he had lived there.