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Archives > Volume 7 Issue 35 - June 3, 2009 Kidnapping trial exposes weird world of Clark Rockefeller...A man who calls himself Clark Rockefeller believed he was communicating telepathically with his daughter and she was telling him she needed to be rescued, a defense attorney told jurors Thursday to begin his kidnapping trial. Fox News story here 
Attorney Jeffrey Denner set up an insanity defense by telling the jury during opening statements that the defendant, whose real name is Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, suffered from two mental illnesses and didn't know it was wrong to snatch his 7-year-old daughter off the streets of Boston during a supervised visit last July.
Gerhartsreiter was "pushed over the edge" when he lost custody of his daughter in 2007, Denner said. "He believed that on a moral level ... he had to do this to save his daughter," Denner said. Gerhartsreiter is accused of shoving a social worker to the ground during the supervised visit, then hustling his daughter into a waiting car and fleeing. They were both found in Baltimore six days later, the girl unharmed. For more background see vol6_iss50, vol6_iss51, and vol6_iss52. Prosecutors opened the trial by portraying Gerhartsreiter as a con man who thinks the rules do not apply to him. They allege that he spent months meticulously planning the kidnapping. Prosecutor David Deakin described how Gerhartsreiter romanced he ex-wife and "dazzled" her with "his personality, his charisma, his likability," but remained vague about his past. He told her he worked restructuring debt for developing nations and explained his lack of money by saying he didn't have the heart to charge for his services, Deakin said. He also claimed his parents had died in a car crash when he was a teenager and said he had attended a program for gifted children at Yale University when he was 14. Authorities say Gerhartsreiter is a German man who has used multiple aliases since moving to the U.S. in 1978. During testimony on Monday, the man who was recruited to drive the getaway car when Rockefeller allegedly kidnapped his daughter said Rockefeller practiced kidnapping the little girl by hurling duffle bags into the back of a livery vehicle the day before he snatched her off a Boston street. ABC News story here Darryl Hopkins, the wheelman on that July day when Reigh was thrown into a waiting black suburban by her father, said Rockefeller paid him $3,000 to "get rid of" the "cling-on" following the dad-daughter visit. The person Rockefeller claimed was a "cling-on," or unwanted friend, was a social worker appointed by the court to supervise Rockefeller's visit with his 7-year-old daughter. Hopkins said Rockefeller tossed his daughter into the car, banging her head on the door, and shoved the social worker to the ground. "Snooks was crying. She was saying, 'I really whacked my head, Daddy.' Clark was saying: Go! Go! Go!'" Hopkins testified. A year after her daughter's disappearance and subsequent return, Sandra Boss, ex-wife of the accused kidnapper, spoke for the first time in a Boston courtroom Monday about the man she would only refer to as "the defendant." CBS News story here Boss described him as "very intelligent, very polite, could talk about anything ... also, really very charming." She said she never doubted his stories - including being related to the famous Rockefeller family. But Boss said shortly after they married he became extremely controlling. "Defendant was unhappy with the limited amount I earned at my job," Boss said, putting "a lot of pressure on me about it." The couple had a daughter in 2001, but after years of a strained marriage Boss filed for divorce in 2007 - and began to unravel her then-husband's secret. "The defendant was not the person he said he was." She said she asked for full custody of Reigh at that time. In response, Rockefeller in a letter denied the allegation that he was not who he said he was: "You have known me as Rockefeller for 15 years ... Others have known me for longer," he wrote. "How could I pull a fake identity for so long." For more details of Sandra Boss' testimony see CNN News story here. Video link to her testimony here MSNBC News story here. Michigan girl missing... Eight full days into the search for 5-year-old Nevaeh Buchanan and Monroe, Michigan authorities are no closer to finding the little girl. NBC 24 Toledo news story here 
Tensions are building between the family and authorities. Some family members claim they are not being kept up to speed on the investigation into Nevaeh's disappearance.
Searchers say they are frustrated by a lack of cooperation with the Monroe County Sheriff's Department. Authorities say they are not revealing everything they know for fear it may tip the wrong person off. James Easter, is no longer a "person of interest" in the case, according to Monroe County officials. Easter was arrested over the weekend after allegedly burning items on his property just after being questioned by police about Nevaeh's disappearance. George Kennedy and Roy Lee Smith do remain "persons of interest" in the girl's disappearance. They are both in jail on unrelated parole violations. An all day search was scheduled for Tuesday in Monroe. In other news... 
A woman accused of staging an abduction hoax that began near Philadelphia and ended at Florida's Walt Disney World was returned to Pennsylvania in police custody on Friday and was held on $1 million bail. CBS News story here A drained-looking Bonnie Sweeten appeared in an Orlando, Florida courtroom for a brief hearing Friday morning before detectives from Bucks County, Pennsylvania escorted her to the airport for the flight home. On Friday night she was taken to a court in the Philadelphia suburb of Richboro for an arraignment on misdemeanor identity theft and false-reporting charges. A judge, in setting the bail, said he thought she was a flight risk. Sweeten can be released if she posts 10 percent of the bail amount, or $100,000. A video of ABC's Good Morning America interview with Sweeten's nine year daughter, Julia, can be seen at ABC News story here Julia said the trip seemed "normal" and was "fun." For more on this story see vol7_iss34.
Your kids may get a bang out of Bing - and that's not a good thing, Internet safety experts warned on Monday. Fox News story here Bing, Microsoft's new search engine (www.bing.com), went live in the U.S. this weekend, aiming to challenge and possibly unseat industry titan Google. But bloggers and Internet safety experts quickly discovered that one of Bing's "features" is that it takes only a few clicks for anyone - of any age - to view explicit pornographic videos without even leaving the search engine. In its bid to beat Google, Microsoft has unveiled a slate of convenient features for Bing, including an "autoplay" tool that lets users preview videos simply by hovering a mouse over them. That asset may become a liability, because users can get a taste of porn videos on Bing instead of having to go to a smutty Web site - an innovation other search engines have yet to offer.
The risk of suicide increases directly with the number of times a child or adolescent moves, a new study has found. ABC News story here The study looked at population registries of more than 120,000 children born in Denmark between 1978 and 1995 and found that a total of 4,160 children between the ages of 11 and 17 had attempted suicide. Interestingly, they found that the rates of suicidal behavior increased with the number of times they had changed addresses. According to the study, those who moved more than three times had more than twice the risk for suicide and those who moved more than 10 times had a four-fold risk. The Danish authors of the study, which appeared in the journal Archives of General Psychiatry, state in their conclusions that their findings "raise a few critical questions for parents who move frequently, such as whether they have to move and, if so, how to minimize the adverse influence on adolescent children. "While considering moving, it is important to consider children and their interests. It is always good to involve children, as much as possible, in the process of moving, motivating their participation in all decisions, plans and practical work," they wrote. The abstract and full study are available online at http://archpsyc.ama-assn.org/current.dtl See more at eGuide/teen suicide Meanwhile, from the same issue, a persistent decline in the rate of Americans, especially children, newly diagnosed with depression followed the first federal warning on risks connected with antidepressant drugs, a study suggests. MSNBC story here In 2003, the Food and Drug Administration first warned about the risk of suicidal thoughts and behavior in young people taking the drugs. That action may have helped reverse a five-year trend of rising rates of diagnosis for depression, the researchers found. The findings, published Monday in the Archives of General Psychiatry, are based on an analysis of eight years of data from nearly 100 managed care plans and more than 55 million patients. For more on depression see eGuide/depression.
Authorities in central Florida say they have charged more than three dozen suspects with possession of child pornography, including one man with over 10,000 images. Fox News story here The Polk County Sheriff's Office says 35 suspects were arrested Thursday, and they are still looking for six others. The investigation began more than a year ago. Forty-five people were charged in all. Sheriff Grady Judd called it the largest child pornography sting in the department's history. Judd says the suspects include a father and son who are both registered sex offenders and were each charged with ten counts of possession of child pornography. Others were found with thousands of images and videos. Authorities say some of the images involve children as young as toddlers.
Former sex crimes prosecutor Wendy Murphy says the new drugs charges against Melissa Huckaby could be related to the pornography business-and that the accused child killer is exactly the type of weak woman child pornographers seek to exploit. thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories here 
A New York middle school teacher has been arrested after authorities said she had sexual trysts with a 14-year-old student in a Queens classroom after school. Fox News story here Social studies teacher Melissa Weber was awaiting arraignment late Thursday on rape, sexual abuse and child endangerment charges. Prosecutors don't know whether she has a lawyer, and no telephone number can be found for her home. Prosecutors say Weber had sex with the boy seven times at M.S./I.S. 8 this month and last. Prosecutors say the teen's mother heard about the liaison Wednesday and found hundreds of contacts with the 27-year-old teacher in her son's cell phone.
Searching for child pornography on the Internet and following links to make such images appear on a computer screen constitutes knowing possession or control of that material, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has ruled. law.com story here The decision comes in the case of Anthony Diodoro, a Delaware County man who argued that although he admitted to searching the Internet for pornographic images of underage girls, the presence of the images in his Web browser's cache file did not support his conviction of possession of child pornography. The opinion in Commonwealth v. Diodoro follows a pair of decisions in which the Superior Court initially threw out Diodoro's conviction on the strength of the defendant's argument that he had not intentionally downloaded any of the images. Vic Walczak, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Pennsylvania, said that the decision may have an impact in a high-profile case in which the ACLU has opposed the criminal prosecution of teenagers under the anti-child pornography law for "sexting" - the term given to the phenomenon of teenagers taking nude or semi-nude photographs of themselves with mobile phone cameras and sharing them via picture messaging services. *for access to member only sites like the New York Times, use the ID "JohnDoeID" and the password "whatever". On sites asking for an email address, feel free to use "info@childprotectionprogram.org" |
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