Police searching for a wealthy father who has abducted his daughter were trying yesterday to untangle his mysterious past as they investigated sightings of the two across America.

Clark Rockefeller snatched Reigh Boss, 7, who lived with her mother in London and was known as Snooks, during a supervised access visit in Boston, Massachusetts, on Sunday. He had not seen his daughter since his divorce in December His former wife, Sandra Boss, moved to London with Reigh this year. The wealthy socialite is a senior partner with McKinsey & Co, a leading management consulting firm.

Ms Boss, 41, is reported have become concerned at Mr Rockefeller’s secrecy surrounding his past and convinced a US judge to issue an order limiting his access rights to Reigh when their marriage ended after 12 years.

Mr Rockefeller was initially thought to have fled on board a 72ft catamaran that he told friends he had recently bought with $300,000 of gold bars. However, a spotter plane could find no trace of the yacht yesterday and police now believe that Mr Rockefeller told friends of his plan to sail around the world with Reigh in an attempt to throw them off the trail.

Mr Rockefeller, 48, was last seen in New York with Reigh on Sunday night. Boston police said yesterday that they were investigating dozens of sightings, including reports from a woman who believed that she saw them in Smyrna, Delaware.

Detectives released pictures of two dresses that Mr Rockefeller had recently bought in Boston in case he had attempted to disguise his daughter.

Police sources said that he had managed to become a member of high society despite having at least half a dozen aliases and no steady job or valid social security number. Newspaper headlines described him as “Crock Feller”, “Off-His-Rockefeller” and “Rockefooler”.

The couple married in 1995 and bought an historic 15-room “cottage” worth $775,000 in Cornish, New Hampshire, a $2.3 million townhouse in Beacon Hill, Boston, and a home on the exclusive Nantucket Island.

Police said that Mr Rockefeller had told his wife that he was a member of the oil dynasty.He had also claimed to be a mathematician who attended Yale and taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard. None of the institutions has any record of him.

The New York Post reported that before his marriage Mr Rockefeller lived in Manhattan and held parties for leading artists. He was considered a knowledgeable collector with an apartment full of 20th-century masterpieces, including works by Jackson Pollock and Piet Mondrian.

A police source told the New York Daily News: “He’s not a Rockefeller. It’s not clear where he gets his money. That’s part of the investigation.”

A friend said: “I don’t think anyone in his life knew – including Sandra – what was real and what wasn’t. People would get interested and look into it, but they’d never get far.”

Peter Burling, a New Hampshire state senator and neighbour of the Rockefellers, said: “He was one of the most difficult, pathological personalities I’ve ever known. Everybody was immediately led to assume that he was one of the Rockefeller family, that there was lots of money, lots of power.”

Friends described him as a devoted father and main carer for Reigh while his wife was away on business. But another Cornish resident, Don McLeay, said that Reigh “never had a normal life” and was not allowed to play with other children because her father feared she would “catch something”.

Ms Boss, a former aide to Michael Bloomberg, the Mayor of New York, was in Boston last night helping police to build up a picture of her former husband’s past.

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