The true identity of Clark Rockefeller, the bogus millionaire who made international headlines when he disappeared with his seven-year-old daughter last month, appeared to have been resolved yesterday when a Bavarian family recognised him from photographs.

“Rockefeller” may be Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter, who left Germany aged 17 in 1978. His family last heard from him more than 20 years ago after he announced that he was changing his name to Christopher Chichester because Americans could not spell Gerhartsreiter.

Federal investigators were on their way to Bergen in southeastern Germany yesterday to interview family members about the Chichester connection. Rockefeller’s fingerprints have been linked to a 1985 murder case in California where a man named Christopher Chichester has long been sought for questioning.

The trail of adopted identities came to light after Rockefeller’s divorce from Sandra Boss, a highflying American banker who obtained custody of their daughter, Reigh – known as Snooks – and moved to London last December.

Boss returned to America with her daughter last month for a court-supervised custody visit in Boston. Rockefeller is alleged to have snatched his daughter from the street and to have assaulted the social worker supervising the visit.

Father and daughter were found by police a week later in a rented apartment in Baltimore, where Rockefeller kept a catamaran at a marina.

As the hunt for the pair unfolded, it quickly emerged that Rockefeller had no connection to the oil and banking family, and that neither his ex-wife nor the US authorities had any idea of his real identity. The couple were married for 12 years.

An FBI fingerprint database linked Rockefeller to the disappearance in 1985 of the newly-weds Jonathan and Linda Sohus. A man named Chichester, living in a guesthouse behind their house, also vanished. Nine years later a new owner began renovation work and dug up bags of human bones belonging to an adult male. Police were unable to identify the remains but believe they were those of Jonathan Sohus; no trace of his wife has been found.

A photograph of Chichester taken at the time shows a marked resemblance to Rockefeller. Publicity in the case prompted several people to come forward, including Edward Savio, of Connecticut, whose parents let a room in their home to a German exchange student calling himself Christian Gerharts Reiter.

Savio said the man he knew as Reiter had placed an advertisement in a local newspaper looking for a place to stay. “That is 100% the guy in my house,” Savio said after seeing pictures of Rockefeller.

A media hunt led to a neat, two-storey chalet in the Bavarian Alps. Boston newspapers reported yesterday that Rockefeller’s real identity was confirmed by his brother, Alex, 34.

“It is really a shock. That is definitely him,” Alex Gerhartsreiter said. The German foreign ministry confirmed that officials were cooperating with US law agents to confirm the Gerhartsreiter connection.

In Boston last week Rockefeller’s lawyer, Stephen Hrones, emerged from an hour-long meeting with his client and confirmed that he spoke German. Hrones said Rockefeller recalled only “bits and pieces” of his childhood.

“He has no memory of being from Germany or of having a German brother,” Hrones told The Boston Globe. “He tells me he’s Clark Rockefeller. I believe him. I haven’t been shown any hard evidence that he’s something other than what he tells me he is.”

Hrones also said that Rockefeller remembered living in California, but knew nothing of the Sohuses. “He doesn’t remember murdering anyone there and he doesn’t remember being a tenant of the couple that was murdered,” he said.

Rockefeller faces charges of parental kidnapping and assault, but his lawyer says he will argue that the issue should be settled under British law because Snooks and her mother live in London, where Boss earns a reported £730,000 a year as a senior partner at Mckinsey & Company, the management consultancy.

Mother and daughter were reunited in Baltimore last weekend and are believed to have returned to Britain.

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