Police investigate Clark Rockefeller's possible aliases

Chichester, Dana Farrar recalled, acted like just another one of the old-money scions who inhabited the area. But Farrar, then a USC student, suspected there was more -- or perhaps less -- to his story.

"He pretended to be wealthy, but I noticed he used to show up hungry," she said. "His sports jackets smelled like they needed a visit to the dry cleaner. He drove an old brown Datsun or Toyota. It was hardly the car of a wealthy young man."

Soon after, he left San Marino, telling Farrar's aunt he was off to Paris. Jonathan and Linda Sohus, the couple who lived in the main house on that property, seemed to have vanished as well.

Nine years later, bags of human skeletal remains were unearthed there.

Authorities have never been able to figure out whose bones were buried on the property or what happened to the Sohuses or to Chichester.

But in the last week, police on both coasts have begun to ask whether an ex-husband who is accused of absconding from Boston with his young daughter and was captured by the FBI in Baltimore may be the man who called himself Chichester.

"That's him," said Farrar in an interview, referring to the photos of the man in custody in Boston. "I know those beady eyes. I don't need fingerprints to know it is him."

Forlornly peering out from behind horn-rimmed glasses as he was escorted to a police car last weekend in Maryland, Clark Rockefeller didn't look like an international man of mystery.

But Rockefeller, who sits in a jail cell in Boston on charges of kidnapping his daughter, is being investigated by law enforcement agencies on two coasts, the FBI and German authorities.

They all want to know if he is connected to a San Marino couple who vanished more that two decades ago.

But police also wonder who Rockefeller really is.

Could he be Chichester, the charming South African with the odd accent who in the early 1980s lived in the guesthouse behind the Sohuses' home on Lorain Road?

Could he be Christian Gerharts Reiter, an effete German exchange student who landed in Connecticut in 1979?