In 2010, snow heaped on cars and bare trees along Pinckney Street in Boston. My dad stood outside with his shovel, boots and a bag of sidewalk salt, fulfilling the civil duty of sidewalk shoveling, expected of all Beacon Hill residents. His shovel scraped against uneven bricks, and the wind blew flurries from the roofs above. He had just begun salting the sidewalk when a man approached from three doors up and introduced himself as Clark Rockefeller.

 Strange, my dad thought. He had crossed paths with plenty of well-known people, but in an attempt to cut the strings attached to them, they tended not to lead with their last name. Rockefeller, however, seemed adamant in presenting himself as a member of the United States’ most powerful families. He was charismatic and self-assured, but my dad noted that his thin sweater, sneakers and need to borrow sidewalk salt showed he wasn’t accustomed to New England winters.

 Rockefeller got along well with the neighbors and spent lots of time with his 5-year-old daughter, Reigh, whom he called Snooks. On weekday mornings, they would walk to the school bus stop together. Rockefeller insisted that Reigh take the last name of his wife, Sandra Boss, who was almost always working. My dad remembers rarely seeing Boss around the neighborhood or with their daughter.

 Other than looking up his Wikipedia page after their first meeting, my dad didn’t give Rockefeller much thought. But one morning, my dad noticed him at the Starbucks on the corner of Charles and Beacon Street with his usual crowd of businessmen, looking visibly distraught. Turns out, Rockefeller had been served divorce papers, and Boss planned to cut him off financially and take custody of their daughter. As the divorce unfolded, Boss’s father began digging into Rockefeller’s background, and what he found didn’t add up.

“Psychopaths are the world’s best actors. They blend into society through careful observation and imitation.”

 Eventually, the court granted Sandra full custody of Reigh, an interesting arrangement since Rockefeller appeared to be her primary caregiver. He was allowed only limited, supervised visits. During one of these visits in 2008, Rockefeller snatched Reigh, ran from the court-ordered supervisor and took off in a black SUV. The dramatic domestic kidnapping sent Amber Alerts to every phone in Massachusetts. My dad remembers his shock when he recognized his former neighbor as the kidnapper on his cell phone.

 While investigating the incident, Massachusetts authorities discovered that Rockefeller was not who he claimed to be. For days, no one, including the FBI, could figure out his true identity. They frantically searched for the kidnapped child and lifted a fingerprint left on Rockefeller’s wine glass. The print identified Clark Rockefeller not as a Rockefeller but as Christopher Chichester, a man who had lived in the carriage house of a John Sohus decades earlier in San Marino, California. Sohus had gone missing in the 1980s. The case went cold until his remains were discovered years later in the backyard of the California home. The unidentified man in the guest house, who had disappeared with him, became the prime suspect.

 Six days later, the FBI found Reigh and arrested Chichester in Baltimore, Maryland. Investigators began unraveling a trail of aliases: Christopher Chichester in California, Christopher Crowe in New York and Clark Rockefeller in Boston. It turns out his real name was Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, a German who had come to the U.S. on a tourist visa as a teenager. This man was not a Rockefeller, and for 30 years, he had been living under false identities. Investigators connected him to the California murder, and Gerhartsreiter was convicted and sentenced to 27 years to life in prison.

 Psychopaths are the world’s best actors. They blend into society through careful observation and imitation. Gerhartsreiter imitated his way across America and right into the Beacon Hill community. I often think of true crime as distant fiction, but my dad’s story reminds me that predators don’t only exist in headlines or Netflix series. Sometimes, they live just three doors down.