Walter Kern

When a Rockefeller appeared in my life and wanted to be my friend, it was, well, look at me now. You know, this isn't a story that makes me look that great. I'm Walter Kern. I was a friend of Clark Rockefeller's or the guy who called himself Clark Rockefeller. An Amber Alert has been issued for a girl abducted in Boston. One day I turn on the news, there's Clark Rockefeller's picture.

He wrote me a letter from his jail cell that I got just recently in which he claimed that his entire career in America was based on a novel he read when he was 10 about somebody who came up in society through fraudulence. I think that might have been the great Gatsby.

We only saw the Clark that comes out on stage, but there was a lot of offstage time when he was dressing the set, making the props, adjusting the costume. I think he loved that.

A few days later, the Rockefeller family came out and said, he's not one of us.

standing unframed against the walls are what must have been 50, $60 million worth of Mark Rothko's, Jackson Pollock's abstract expressionist masterpieces.

You wouldn't guess that the man is fake, the art is fake, the name is fake, everything, you know.

I remember sitting there thinking, this is a sad marriage. They don't love each other. It didn't seem like a happy place.

He called me up around Christmas time and he said, I just lost my daughter in a divorce, Walt. I don't think I'm ever going to be able to see her again. My wife's taking her to England.

Drip, drip, drip. The details came out as to who he really was.

The postcards were such an ingenious move. You know what I mean? Your common murderer doesn't try to cover a crime that way.

To me, one of the most convincing pieces of evidence was the stories they told about going off on a secret mission. Going off on a secret mission was a Clark idea. Now, obviously, that was to prepare people not to look for them, to prepare people for their absence.

Sitting in that courtroom, waves of anger would come over me. Every minute I was sitting there, I was going, please, jury, find him guilty. He did it. He did it.

I deferred to the old time court reporters who were there around me. And I said, so what do you think is gonna happen? And they said, oh, he's gonna get off. Why do you say that? Oh, the evidence is so circumstantial. One of the victims is missing. She might still be out there. Maybe she did it. They can't establish a motive.

These people had me convinced that, you know, this was gonna be Clark's greatest magic trick.

That emptiness is evil. It's that lack of feeling, using everybody as a tool, everybody as a way to get your will, is as close to a definition of evil, as monstrousness as I can come to. You really think he's a monster? I think he's a monster.

I'd never been to a murder trial before. You know, imagine me. One of my best friends is the defendant at the first murder trial I get to go to.

I'm a journalist and a novelist, so you'd think that I was the kind of guy who would see through someone like him. The fact was I never did.

But now, witness after witness was coming up and giving evidence about what was really going on, and that the person I knew was actually hiding from a murder the whole time, and that a lot of what I thought were his eccentricities, his concerns about privacy, his concerns about security, all of these things suddenly took on a whole new meaning.

I don't think it was murder he was interested in. It was getting away with murder. You know, he was a fan of Hitchcock and film noir. He was steeped in the literature and the cinema of murder. The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create. And a lot of these movies he saw have a plot in which somebody who thinks they're very smart commits the perfect crime.

and it makes fools of everybody else because they get to go forth with a secret that no one else will know.