For twenty years, German immigrant Christian Gerhartsreiter posed as a Rockefeller. He became friends with the novelist and essayist Walter Kirn, who ended up writing a memoir about their friendship and how it all fell apart: Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery and a Masqueradepublished in 2014.
I hadn’t heard of the story until I saw this interview with Kirn:
When he talks about Gerhartsreiter, he says something very revealing. It is an experience that many have in an encounter with evil. When the psychopathic mask falls, when you glimpse the reality behind the carefully crafted PR image, it can change your worldview. Kirn moved from what we might call a “common psychological worldview” to a more objective one, more in line with reality in all its complexity, and with hints of “supernatural.”
I’ve transcribed the relevant segment in full (but I recommend watching the interview if you have the time: Kirn is a fascinating guy and recently wrote a column the day he spent talking to UAP whistleblower David Grusch):
Kirn: It’s the biggest story ever. It’s the story of my real-life friendship with this con man who pretended to be a Rockefeller and who I thought was a real Rockefeller. At first he was based in New York City and he turns out to be a serial killer, basically, maybe not a serial killer, but he killed two people in cold blood. He cut one of them down, buried it in his yard. He is certainly what they used to call the emotion killer, a kind of Nietzschean person who decided to kill to show his strength and moral superiority… or amoral superiority
Interviewer: “I’m the main character, and I’m going to prove it.”
Kirn: exactly Anyway, I think I know where you’re going with this. This guy called Christian Gerhartsreiter, but pretending to be Clark Rockefeller, was as close to a demonic being as I’ve ever come across. And as I examined him, once he came out, once he was caught for these murders and then tried, and I went back forensically through our relationship and through his life, studying him, trying to figure out who he was, why he believed . him, how he lured people, how he got the scam, I probably couldn’t have made a better thesis than “this guy is possessed”, you know, possessed maybe by emptiness, maybe not by an affirmative spirit of evil, but by an absolute emptiness of good.
So when you spend time studying a character like that, the notion that there is beings that he can possess human, evil, etc. forces becomes much more believable. The psychological model of evil is broken. You find out… You know, when I was giving readings from this book, people would say to me, “What do you think happened to him as a child that made him become this cold-blooded killer who could cut people, bury – him? him on the ground, and then throw a party on the mound? Which he did. And I said, ‘When he was a kid, nothing happened to him.’ You know what he used to do as a kid? He used to blow pepper in other people’s eyes kids for fun.He used to go around the town he lived in and turn off the traffic lights so people would get lost trying to find the next town. He was always like that. He was born that way.
Interviewer: I mean it’s amazing… What I think really separates this book from… true crime is the way you struggle with how easily you’ve been duped and how that kind of relationship between the demonic and the delusional (Kirn: Yes.) is so powerful. Even when you know it, it’s not like you feel the spirals developing in your eyes and you feel a little overpowered, but it can be really insidious and just draw you in. You don’t even realize what’s happening until it’s maybe too late.
Kirn: well i mean Silence of the lambs I never thought it was a documentary until I met this guy. I remember after he was convicted of murder and I went to see him in the men’s lockup in downtown LA, I knew him as Clark Rockefeller, now he had been tried for murder, found guilty, we knew that everything he did was a fraud, and he gets on the other side of that plastic window and I see him for the first time knowing who he really is, having last seen him literally as a club room in New York or Boston …
Interviewer: This is a great movie scene, like the big moment.
Kirn: Right, he comes over and he’s wearing his prison gown or orange jumpsuit or whatever, and he sits on the other side of this plastic window and we both take these heavy phones, and the meeting is scheduled for so the phones are on for exactly 30 minutes, and when he picks up his and I pick up mine, there’s still no connection, so we’re just looking at each other through this glass. And he’s a mousey-looking guy, let’s put it that way, abysmal eyes, with an unfriendly look, and the moment the phone turns on he says, “Hi, Walter. How are you chillidrain?” And I was just, oh, you know, is he imitating evil or has he been watching movies? Could it be any scarier?
And I think in that moment and in the moments that I spent interacting with them afterward, I moved to a whole new thesis about human evil, which is that it is a affirmative thing. It’s not just the lack of kindness. There are people who… beings that they really want to scare, they want to control, they’ve reversed all ethical and moral principles so that they’ve taken that kind of power, and calling it demonic is probably not inaccurate.
And finally, talking to Dave Grusch about NHIs [non-human intelligences]it really affirmed to me that at least in many cases they seem to be alike psychic beingsghosts, interdimensional entities rather than tall, thin, large-eyed, insect-like creatures. It was a strange thought.
Interviewer: I mean, we have an elite who won’t take themselves seriously and who won’t talk publicly about anything satanic, anything demonic. It does not exist. And then look at what happens in the countryside, what happens to the common people; i mean, people can’t get enough of this content, whether they’re baffled by it, or horrified by the presence of evil in America. life is indeed a resonant theme. And it’s just the gulf between those in charge and those who are governed on this issue, it seems so great.
Kirn: So another fun story about Clark Rockefeller. One of the friends of one of his victims had grown up to become an officer in Space Command, the Army Space Command, before there was a Space Force. And I took him to dinner. He testified at the trial about his friend who had been killed. The friend was a JPL, jet propulsion laboratory, Explorer Scout, and the friend had died, and this guy had gone on and lived as Star Trek life, becoming an officer, maybe he was a colonel in the Army space program.
And I said, “So what do you think of Clark Rockefeller? What do you think of this murderer?” The boy had had a couple of drinks and said, “Everything that needs to be explained can be explained in one Star Trek episode somewhere. And this guy looks like the ‘Jack the Ripper’ character in one Star Trek episode which is some sort of energy formation that travels around the universe and coalesces into various evil characters throughout the story and then, after committing their murder, disperses again only to incarnate somewhere else.” And this was a scientist, a military man, and his best explanation for the nature of this killer was that it was a disembodied demonic entity that had taken physical form. So even among elite thinkers, people with power, there is a notion that we are dealing with something other than psychological dysfunction.
Interviewer: Yes, this is interesting. I mean these kind of thematic things come up Twin Peaks, too, of course. (Kirn: Right!) The Air Force guy who is kind of the heroes and has the secret information. Yeah, I don’t think these things are going away anytime soon. So how do you keep a smile on your face?
Kirn: Well, you keep a smile on your face by aligning yourself with the other powers. I remember when The Exorcist it was a great movie and i was a kid. I was afraid to watch it, and there were all these stories of people passing out and being possessed and so on. I talked to a priest who lived in our little town and he said, “Well, you know, you just have to pray, you just have to be a good person, you have nothing to fear from these forces.” And I think that’s still true today. Evil exists in the world, we’ve seen it everywhere this week, we’re seeing it on our phones, we’re seeing a kind of evil played out in the Middle East that’s medieval at best, and how we do keep a smile on our face? Well, clinging to the better angels.
In a strange way, if you know that evil exists, it gives you a reason to really seek the protection of the good and the best and hold on to the highest principles you can find. I don’t think that just living a completely secular life, a completely scientific and, I don’t know, rationalist, positivist life, is an option for us. I mean it might be for some people, but the idea that we are in some kind of terrible social psychology experiment in which some people act out and others are more functional seems no longer to describe the situation. I think the dark and light battle is starting to become very easy to pick up and requires you to line up.
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