BOSTON, May 19 (UPI) -- A former German exchange student who posed as a member of the Rockefeller family has lost a bid to cut his prison term for kidnapping his daughter in Boston.
Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, 49, was sentenced to four to five years in a Massachusetts prison. A state appeals court, in its decision Monday, rejected his lawyer's argument that the sentence exceeds the 24 months usually given for parental kidnapping.
Gerhartsreiter was using the name Clark Rockefeller when he met and married Sandra Boss, a successful business executive. After their divorce, he kidnapped their 2-year-old daughter, assaulting a social worker supervising his visit with her, and took her to Baltimore, where he was discovered a week later.
Investigators say Gerhartsreiter came to the United States as a teenage exchange student and had been living under a number of assumed identities. Police in California say he is a "person of interest" in the disappearance of a couple who vanished in 1985 while Gerhartsreiter, then using the name Christopher Chichester, was living in their guesthouse in San Marino.
