June 2011 - PopHistory.org

Rockefeller imposter and convicted felon born

Year: 1961

Month Day: February 21

On February 21, 1961, Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a con man who went by the alias Clark Rockefeller and passed himself off as an American blueblood, is born in Germany. Gerhartsreiter gained the public spotlight in 2008, when he kidnapped his young daughter and became the target of an international manhunt. The attention the case sparked helped lead to Gerhartsreiter’s conviction in 2013 for the murder of a California man in the 1980s.

Gerhartsreiter, the son of a landscape painter and seamstress, was raised in Bergen, Germany, and came to America as a teenager on a tourist visa in 1978. By the early 1980s, he was living in San Marino, California, where he went by the name Christopher Mountbatten Chichester and claimed to be a movie producer, among other occupations, as well as a relative of Lord Mountbatten, the British statesman. He rented a small guesthouse from Didi Sohus, whose son and daughter-in-law, John and Linda Sohus, lived with her. In 1985, John and Linda Sohus disappeared. Soon after, Gerhartsreiter moved to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he presented himself as a wealthy individual named Christopher Crowe and used a fake social security number to land jobs with several firms on Wall Street.

By the early 1990s, he was passing himself off as Clark Rockefeller, a member of one of America’s most famous families, who made their fortune in the oil business. Living in New York City as Clark Rockefeller, Gerhartsreiter owned an impressive (but later believed to be fake) art collection, dined at private clubs, wore silk ascots and told people that he worked helping Third World countries manage their debt. He was described as intelligent and eccentric by those who knew him. In 1995, he married Sandra Boss, a Harvard-educated executive at a management consulting firm. After moving to Boston, the couple purchased a multi-million-dollar town house there, as well as an estate in Cornish, New Hampshire. When their daughter Reigh was born in 2001, Gerhartsreiter stayed home to raise her while Boss supported the family. After filing for divorce in 2007, Boss (who later stated she was unaware her husband was a fraud during their marriage) paid Gerhartsreiter an $800,000 settlement and gained custody of Reigh.

On July 27, 2008, during a court-supervised visit in Boston, Gerhartsreiter abducted his 7-year-old daughter and took her to Baltimore, Maryland, where he had already found a home and established a new identity as Chip Smith, a yacht captain. Following a highly publicized manhunt, Gerhartsreiter was captured by police on August 2 outside his Baltimore residence. His daughter was unharmed.

In June 2009, Gerhartsreiter was convicted of kidnapping his daughter and sentenced to a maximum of five years in prison. The spotlight on Gerhartsreiter brought renewed attention to the unsolved murder of John Sohus, whose dismembered remains were found buried in the backyard of his former house in San Marino in 1994. Sohus’ wife has never been found. In March 2011, Gerhartsreiter was charged in connection with John Sohus’ death. During the serial impostor’s trial, prosecutors presented an array of circumstantial evidence linking him to the crime, including the fact that two unearthed bags of Sohus’ remains had logos from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and the University of Southern California, schools Gerhartsreiter once attended. On April 10, 2013, a jury convicted Gerhartsreiter of first-degree murder, and he later was sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.

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Best-selling crime novelist Patricia Cornwell is born

Year: 1956

Month Day: June 09

On June 9, 1956, one of the world’s top-selling crime novelists, Patricia Cornwell, best known for her forensic pathologist character Dr. Kay Scarpetta, is born in Miami, Florida.

Cornwell, whose maiden name is Daniels, had a difficult childhood: When she was 5, her father, a lawyer, left the family. Afterward, Cornwell moved with her mother and two brothers to Montreat, North Carolina. There, her mother was hospitalized for mental illness, forcing Cornwell and her brothers to spend time in foster care. Cornwell graduated from Davidson College in 1979, married her college professor and became a reporter for the Charlotte Observer, eventually covering the police beat. She went on to work for six years as a technical writer and computer analyst in the chief medical examiner’s office in Richmond, Virginia.

After multiple rejections from publishers, Cornwell’s first novel, “Postmortem,” was released in 1990. The book features Dr. Kay Scarpetta, the brainy, murder-solving medical examiner. “Postmortem” was a hit, and Cornwell has since penned 18 other top sellers starring Scarpetta. Known for meticulous research and grisly detail in her writing, Cornwell attends autopsies and interviews forensic scientists and law-enforcement professionals to keep up with the latest procedures and technology. She’s also learned to pilot helicopters, shoot guns and scuba dive because her characters do. Her books have been credited with helping to inspire such TV shows as “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” and “Cold Case.”

In addition to the Scarpetta series, Cornwell has written novels featuring journalist-turned-cop Andy Brazil and state police investigator Win Garano, along with several cookbooks and a children’s book. In 2002, the blockbuster author published “Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper—Case Closed,” based on her own intensive investigation into the notorious, never-captured 19th century London serial killer, who she believes was the British artist Walter Sickert.

Cornwell’s personal life has occasionally read like the pages of a crime thriller. In 1992, the writer, then divorced, had a brief affair with married FBI agent Margo Bennett. Four years later, Bennett’s estranged husband Eugene, an ex-FBI agent who blamed the affair for the breakup of his marriage, launched an (ultimately unsuccessful) plot to murder his wife.

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Britain’s Prince William weds Kate Middleton

Year: 2011

Month Day: April 29

On April 29, 2011, Great Britain’s Prince William marries his longtime girlfriend Catherine Elizabeth “Kate” Middleton at Westminster Abbey in London. Some 1,900 guests attended the ceremony, while another 1 million spectators lined the streets of London and an estimated 2 billion people around the world watched on television.

The 29-year-old bride and 28-year-old groom, second in line (behind his father) to the throne, met in 2001 as students at the University of St. Andrews in Fife, Scotland. Middleton, the eldest of three children, was raised in the English village of Bucklebury. Her parents, former flight attendants, became millionaires running a successful party-supply business. Middleton majored in art history at St. Andrews and went on to do a stint as an accessories buyer for a British clothing chain. Prince William, the elder of two sons born to Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales, embarked on a military career after college, eventually becoming a helicopter search-and-rescue pilot with the Royal Air Force (RAF). His parent’s lavish 1981 wedding was a media sensation witnessed by a global television estimated as high as 750 million; however, in December 1992, it was announced the couple was separating. The couple, who publicly admitted to infidelities during their marriage, officially divorced in 1996. Diana died in a car crash in Paris the following year.

After dating for eight years, William and Kate became engaged in October 2010 while vacationing in Kenya, Africa. Their engagement was publicly announced the following month, on November 16, ending years of media speculation about whether they ever would tie the knot—and immediately kicking off a new wave of speculation about the wedding details, including the guest list and the bride’s dress.

At their Friday morning marriage ceremony on April 29, the bride wore a gown designed by Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen, a British fashion house, while the groom donned the scarlet tunic of an Irish Guards officer. Middleton’s younger sister, Pippa, served as maid of honor, while William’s brother, Prince Harry, was best man. The nuptials were presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury, with world leaders and celebrities including Elton John and David and Victoria Beckham in attendance. After the ceremony, the newlyweds kissed twice on a Buckingham Palace balcony before hundreds of thousands of cheering fans. Overhead, RAF planes made a ceremonial flyby. An afternoon reception at the palace presided over by Queen Elizabeth for some 650 guests followed, and that evening, Prince Charles hosted a dinner dance at the palace for 300 people.

The couple, who once married became the duke and duchess of Cambridge, honeymooned in the Seychelles, before returning to Wales, where William resumed his duties as a helicopter pilot.

On July 22, 2013, the duchess gave birth to the couple’s first child, George, who is third in line to the throne. She gave birth to Princess Charlotte on May 2, 2015 and to Prince Louis on April 23, 2018.

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Baby Jessica rescued from a well as the world watches

Year: 1987

Month Day: October 16

On October 16, 1987, in an event that had viewers around the world glued to their televisions, 18-month-old Jessica McClure is rescued after being trapped for 58 hours in an abandoned water well in Midland, Texas.

The drama unfolded on the morning of October 14, 1987, when McClure fell through the 8-inch-wide opening of an abandoned well while playing with other children in the backyard of her aunt’s home day-care center. After dropping about 22 feet into the well, the little girl became stuck. Over the next two-and-a-half days, crews of rescue workers, mining experts and local volunteers labored around the clock to drill a shaft parallel to the one in which McClure was trapped. They then tunneled horizontally through dense rock to connect the two shafts. A microphone was lowered into the well to keep tabs on the toddler, who could be heard crying, humming and singing throughout the ordeal.

On the night of October 16, a bandaged and dirt-covered but alert Baby Jessica, as she became widely known, was safely pulled out of the well by paramedics. By that time, scores of journalists had descended on Midland, a West Texas oil city, and the rescue was carried out on live television before a massive audience.

After her rescue, McClure was hospitalized for more than a month and lost a toe to gangrene. She and her family were flooded with gifts and cards from well-wishers, and received a visit from Vice President George H.W. Bush and a phone call from President Ronald Reagan. Once out of the hospital, McClure went on to lead a normal life, spent largely out of the public spotlight. She graduated from high school in 2004, married two years later and became a mother. In 2011, at age 25, she gained access to a trust fund—reportedly worth at least $800,000—that was established following her rescue and made up of donations from people around the world.

Life proved more challenging for others involved in the Baby Jessica saga. McClure’s parents divorced several years after her accident, rescue workers in Midland feuded over a potential Hollywood movie deal and in 1995, a paramedic who played a key role in helping to save McClure died by suicide, possibly as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder.

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Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and best-selling author, is born

Year: 1928

Month Day: September 30

On September 29, 1928, Eliezer “Elie” Wiesel, the human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize-winning author of more than 50 books, including “Night,” an internationally acclaimed memoir based on his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, is born in Sighet, Transylvania (present-day Romania).

In May 1944, the Nazis deported 15-year-old Wiesel and his family to Auschwitz, a concentration camp in Poland. Wiesel’s mother and the youngest of his three sisters died at Auschwitz, while he and his father later were moved to another camp, Buchenwald, located in Germany. Wiesel’s father perished at Buchenwald just months before it was liberated by Allied troops in April 1945.

Following the war, Wiesel spent time in a French orphanage, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris and went on to work as a journalist in France. In the early 1950s, he broke a self-imposed vow not to speak about the atrocities he witnessed at the concentration camps and penned the first version of “Night” in Yiddish, under the title “Un di Velt Hot Geshvign” (“And the World Remained Silent”). At the encouragement of Nobel laureate and prominent French writer Francois Mauriac, Wiesel reworked the manuscript in French. However, even with Mauriac’s help in trying to land a book deal, the manuscript was rejected by multiple publishers, who believed few people at the time were interested in reading about the Holocaust. The book was eventually released in 1958 as “La Nuit”; an English translation, “Night,” followed in 1960. Although initial sales were sluggish, “Night” was generally well reviewed and over the decades gained an audience, eventually becoming a classic of Holocaust literature that has sold millions of copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages. In 2006, TV talk show host Oprah Winfrey selected “Night” for her famed on-air book club, and traveled with Wiesel to Auschwitz for an episode of her show.

Since the publication of “Night,” Wiesel has written dozens of works of fiction and non-fiction, lectured widely and crusaded against injustice and intolerance around the world. A professor at Boston University since the 1970s, he was instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and has received numerous awards, including the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize. Wiesel died on July 2, 2016. He was 87 years old.

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Army major kills 13 people in Fort Hood shooting spree

Year: 2009

Month Day: November 05

On November 5, 2009, 13 people are killed and more than 30 others are wounded, nearly all of them unarmed soldiers, when a U.S. Army officer goes on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in central Texas. The deadly assault, carried out by Major Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, was the worst mass shooting at a U.S. military installation.

Early in the afternoon of November 5, 39-year-old Hasan, armed with a semi-automatic pistol, shouted “Allahu Akbar” (Arabic for “God is great”) and then opened fire at a crowd inside a Fort Hood processing center where soldiers who were about to be deployed overseas or were returning from deployment received medical screenings. The massacre, which left 12 service members and one Department of Defense employee dead, lasted approximately 10 minutes before Hasan was shot by civilian police and taken into custody.

The Virginia-born Hasan, the son of Palestinian immigrants who ran a Roanoke restaurant and convenience store, graduated from Virginia Tech University and completed his psychiatry training at the Uniformed Services University of Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland, in 2003. He went on to work at Walter Reed Medical Center in Washington, D.C., treating soldiers returning from war with post-traumatic stress disorder. In May 2009, he was promoted to the rank of major in the Army, and that July, was transferred to Fort Hood. Located near the city of Killeen, Fort Hood, which includes 340 square miles of facilities and homes, is the largest active-duty U.S. military post. At the time of the shootings, more than 50,000 military personnel lived and worked there, along with thousands more family members and civilian personnel.

In the aftermath of the massacre, reviews by the Pentagon and a U.S. Senate panel found Hasan’s superiors had continued to promote him despite the fact that concerns had been raised over his behavior, which suggested he had become a radical and potentially violent Islamic extremist. Among other things, Hasan stated publicly that America’s war on terrorism was really a war against Islam.

In 2013, Hasan, who was left paralyzed from the waist down as a result of shots fired at him by police attempting to stop his rampage, was tried in military court, where he acted as his own attorney. During his opening statement, he admitted he was the shooter. (Hasan had previously told a judge that in an effort to protect Muslims and Taliban leaders in Afghanistan, he had gunned down the soldiers at Fort Hood who were being deployed to that nation.) For the rest of the trial, Hasan called no witnesses, presented scant evidence and made no closing argument. On August 23, 2013, a jury found Hasan guilty of 45 counts of premeditated murder and attempted premeditated murder, and he later was sentenced to death for his crimes.

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Michael Skakel convicted of 1975 murder in Greenwich

Year: 2002

Month Day: June 07

On June 7, 2002, 41-year-old Michael Skakel is convicted in the 1975 murder of his former Greenwich, Connecticut, neighbor, 15-year-old neighbor Martha Moxley. Skakel, a nephew of Ethel Kennedy, the wife of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy, was later sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

On October 30, 1975, Moxley was bludgeoned to death with a golf club outside her family’s home in Greenwich, one of America’s most affluent communities. The golf club was later determined to have come from a set belonging to the Skakel family, who lived across the street from the Moxleys. Investigators initially focused on one of Michael Skakel’s older brothers, the last person Moxley reportedly was seen alive with, as well as the Skakels’ live-in tutor as possible suspects, but no arrests were made due to lack of evidence, and the case stalled.

In the early 1990s, Connecticut authorities relaunched the investigation, and public interest in the case also was reignited by several new books, including Dominick Dunne’s “A Season in Purgatory” (1993), a fictionalized account of the crime, and former Los Angeles police detective Mark Fuhrman’s “A Murder in Greenwich” (1998), in which he claimed that Michael Skakel killed Moxley in a jealous rage because she was romantically interested in his older brother. In 2000, based in part on statements made by former classmates of Skakel’s who claimed he admitted to them in the 1970s to killing Moxley, he was charged with her murder.

Skakel, who came from a family of seven children, had a wealthy, privileged upbringing; however, his mother died from cancer in 1973 and he had a troubled relationship with his father. In the late 1970s, Skakel, who began drinking heavily as a teen, was sent to the Elan School, a private boarding school in Poland, Maine, for troubled youth. At Skakel’s 2002 trial, the prosecution presented testimony from several of his former Elan classmates who stated that in the 1970s Skakel had confessed to killing Moxley. One ex-classmate, a drug addict who died shortly before the 2002 trial started, claimed at a previous court hearing that Skakel told him, “I am going to get away with murder because I am a Kennedy.”

At trial, prosecutors, who had no eyewitnesses and no physical evidence directly linking Skakel to the murder, played a 1997 taped conversation between Skakel and the ghostwriter of an autobiography Skakel hoped to sell. Skakel said on tape that on the night of the murder he climbed into a tree in the Moxleys’ yard, while drunk and high on marijuana, and masturbated as he tried to look into Martha Moxley’s bedroom window. He said that when Moxley’s mother came to his house the next morning looking for her daughter, he felt panicked and wondered if someone had seen him the night before. Although Skakel never admitted on the tape to killing Moxley, prosecutors said his words put him at the scene of the crime and were an attempt to cover up the slaying.

After three days of deliberations, jurors found Skakel guilty of murder, and in August 2002, he was sentenced to 20 years to life behind bars. Skakel’s cousin, Robert Kennedy Jr., an attorney, later worked to get Skakel a new trial; however, in 2010, the request was denied by the Connecticut Supreme Court.

In October 2013, in yet another twist to the case, a Connecticut judge ordered a new trial for Skakel, ruling that his first trial lawyer didn’t represent him effectively. The following month, Skakel was released from prison on a $1.2 million bond.

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