August 8, 2008 Conn. woman: Rockefeller was exchange student, capable of crimes Play video

(NECN: Berlin, Conn.) - Back in 1981, Gwen Savio says she responded to an ad from a German exchange student looking for a place to live. Today, she thinks that student, who called himself Christian Gerhart Reiter, is being held in Boston under the name Clark Rockefeller.

In an interview with Brad Puffer of NECN, she describes Rieter as a man who made a good first impression ("very nice, very polite"), but says her opinion changed the longer he stayed. "He wasn't nasty, but he want pleasant to where you could say you enjoyed his company," Savio said.

But Savio said, she never had reason to question Reiter's story, "Being naive, I believed what he said," she explained, "(that he was) from Germany and they had a home in Bavaria, and and that at home they didn't speak to peasants."

Savio says Reiter made regular calls to South Africa where he said his mother lived, and that he reimbursed her for those calls.

But when she saw stories about Clark Rockefeller, there was an imperfect connection in her mind. "I did not recognize him (at first). His face is very full, and when Chris was here his face was slender. I just said he looked familiar," she said. "But then when they showed those other (older) pictures, I could definitely see it was Chris."

Savio says Reiter talked with her son Edward a number of times after moving out of the house, and called her occasionally, but rarely spoke to Savio's daughter, who thought the German man was "a crumb."

She also noted that she had once been contacted by Greenwich police about Reiter - she recalls that it was something about a fundraising scam, and told Puffer about a call she received from Reiter, saying that he had voted in the 1988 presidential election, even though he wasn't a citizen.

When asked whether the current stories she's hearing from California and Boston fit the man she knew as Reiter, she answered, "I kind of think that he was capable of something like that."

"He looks different, but from the brazenness, the way he with which he abducted that child, and the things that he did, I would say that is sort of like his, behavior, kind of modus operandi," she said. "His face certainly looks different, but then again 24 years or something, that's quite a difference - maybe 26 years - he left us in 1981."