The seven-year-old daughter of a High Society family was snatched from a Boston street on Sunday in a brazen daylight abduction apparently staged by her father Clark Rockefeller. An international manhunt is underway but police concede that the man’s past, his relationships and his true identity remain a mystery.

Mr J. Clark Rockefeller, 48, whose aliases include James Frederick, Clark Mill Rockefeller and Michael Brown was last seen at New York City’s Grand Central Terminal several hours after he allegedly kidnapped his own daughter.

It was reported yesterday that although police have found details of his birth they could not find a valid social security number or any evidence of a job.

“Investigators have learned that Clark Rockefeller is a very elusive and secretive man,” said Elaine Driscoll, a Boston Police spokeswoman.

What is known, however, is that Mr Rockefeller divorced his wife Sandra Boss in 2007 after a 12-year marriage. Soon after the split Ms Boss took their daughter Reigh Storrow Boss with her to London where she works in the City as a partner at the management consultants McKinsey & Co.

Reigh was making her first supervised visit to see her father in the United States for several months when she was taken from a male social worker who was overseeing the trip. She is now missing.

Police believe that she may be with her father on his private 78ft catamaran heading for the Caribbean or South America.

Friends of the secretive Mr Rockefeller told officers that he had bragged of purchasing the boat with $300,000 worth of gold bullion, but now there are doubts whether the vessel exists at all.

The man's family history is also a mystery, former neighbours and friends say they were led to believe that he was part of the wealthy Rockefeller dynasty, but the Rockefeller Archive Centre strenuously denies it.

Peter Burling, a New Hampshire state senator and former neighbour of Mr Rockefeller, claimed that he never directly pronounced himself to be a Rockefeller, but the impression he left was unmistakable.

"Everybody was immediately led to assume that he was one of the Rockefeller family, that there was lots of money, lots of power,” he told the Boston Globe.

"Once I got a clear vision of this person, he was truly one of the most difficult, pathological personalities I've ever known."

During their marriage the Rockefellers had a house in Cornish, New Hampshire, near Mr Burling, as well as a host of writers and artists believed to include the reclusive author J. D. Salinger.

The family split their time between a nineteenth century cottage in Cornish, worth $775,000, and a $2.3 million brownstone house in the exclusive Beacon Hill area of Boston. Senator John Kerry was among their salubrious neighbours.

In Boston, Mr Rockefeller was a director at Algonquin Club, a century-old private members club in the Back Bay area. He resigned his membership three months ago.

Bostonians have described Mr Rockefeller as a familiar figure around town often riding his Segway and dressed in a Yale baseball cap, polo-shirt, khaki trousers and deck shoes with no socks.

An employee at the Boston Athenæum, a private member’s library frequented by Mr Rockefeller, told the Boston Herald: “He was perfectly nice, but strange. He would just tell you things and you would go, ‘Hmmm . . .’ He just tells you weird things.”

Other neighbours were less charitable describing him as as “phony”, “odd” and “as weird as the day is long”.

As well as Cornish and Beacon Hills, Mr Rockerfeller is reported to have an estate on Nantucket, an island off Massachusetts.

He is said to have a collection of abstract paintings including works by Mondrian and Rothko on top of his property portfolio.

It is unclear where the money to invest came from, however, as there is very little sign of a steady job and it would appear that he is not a member of the Rockefeller family. He told friends that he worked as a physicist for an aerospace company and devised financial investment tools, but there is no record of his career.

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