By Don Harney

5 August 2008

I had first heard about the kidnapping last Sunday night. It was all over the news. It aroused my interest because it happened outside the Public Garden in Boston, a very safe place where my wife and I often bring our own daughter for walks and for rides on the Swan Boats.

As more details came out, the story became more and more interesting. It was revealed that the abductor was the girls' father and his last name was Rockefeller. A bell went off in the back of my mind.... And then a cropped image of his face flashed onto the screen.

"I know that face...." I thought.

Then the entire uncropped image of Rockefeller with his daughter on his shoulders flashed onto the screen and I felt a cold chill through my body.

"I know that picture .... " I began to mutter, "That is my picture. How the fuck did my picture get there???"

My wife had probably thought I had lost my mind (not very uncommon).

I was a bit confused and really spooked. I ran down to my basement and dug through my old newspapers and there it was on the front page of an April 2007 Beacon Hill Times newspaper.

I thought back to the day that I had made that picture. It was Palm Sunday and it also happened to be April Fools' Day. I had been wandering the streets looking for feature photos to submit to the local papers I had been freelancing for and I had stumbled across a little church in the very affluent Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.

That was when I saw them exit the Church. He was very well dressed and distinguished looking and she was a perfectly beautiful little girl cherubically perched on his shoulders clutching her palms from the Mass. They were so perfect looking that it was almost like they were caricatures of the Beacon Hill elite. My desire to make a portrait of them was so intense that I felt as though I was channeling Diane Arbus.

I approached the two, smiled and introduced myself and told them that I wanted to take their picture for the local paper. He paused for a moment and then obliged. I made five or six exposures of them and then pulled out my reporters notebook and requested their names. When he told me his name was Clark Rockefeller, I may have chuckled under my breath. There was something about him that was just not ordinary, or maybe not real...

One thing that I did sense at that time was how he seemed to adore the beautiful little girl on his shoulders. He gave me her name and was adamant that I include her nickname 'Snooks' in the caption. I obliged of course.

That picture was one of 333 images I made that morning, but somehow it stuck out in my mind enough to go home and mention to my wife, "I shot a Rockefeller in Beacon Hill this morning."

The picture ran on the front of the weekly rag that week and that was that.... until last Sunday July 27, 2008. I first saw it on News 7, then Fox 25 News. Then the front page of the Boston Herald, the front page of the New York Post. It was in the Globe, the Metro. BBC was even running it on their website. That picture, which I own all the rights to, was running everywhere and I was not getting paid and not even getting a photo credit.

After doing some research, I realized that the Boston Police had released the picture during the Amber Alert. It seemed to be the only decent picture of the two of them together. Clark Rockefeller turned out not to be a Rockefeller after all. Authorities are still trying to figure out who he is and what his real name is.

I was very relieved to hear on Sunday that the authorities had apprehended this mysterious man, where he was hiding out in Baltimore. But moreso, I hope that picture I made on April 1, 2007 played a small role in bringing that beautiful little girl back safe.

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