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after the proceedings ended for the day. I was nursing a drink when he entered carrying a thick brown envelope. He handed it to me and said simply, “Maybe this will help answer your questions.” Then he breezed back out the door.
    I opened the envelope and gasped. It was filled with more than a hundred documents—immigration papers, court records, police reports—spelling out in intricate detail the life of the silent, stoic defendant, from his birth certificate to the warrant that had been issued for his arrest the previous summer.
    I started reading from the beginning: there was a document from his German high school showing that he had graduated; a letter from the company in Bergen where his father, Simon Gerhartsreiter, was employed as a designer, stating that his salary was “1,900 US-Dollar a month”; an Affidavit of Support from Simon, stating that he would support Christian in America with $250 a month “plus health insurance,” because, as he wrote, “I wish my son to attend school in the US for one year.”
    One year, I thought. Then back to Bergen? Back to the little white house and the self-contained little town? It was immediately clear that time limits were not part of the young immigrant’s plans. One of the next pages in the sheaf of papers had been written in neat block letters by the defendant himself. It was a request to change his nonimmigrant status. His tourist visa was to expire on April 15, 1979, six months after he had arrived in the United States, and he was applying to extend that stay for another four years. “My educational objective is . . . College degree in Business Administration,” he wrote.
    Where the applicant was asked how he would support himself during his time in America, he wrote, “I am presently attending highschool as a senior. I am now receiving $250 per month. My father will pay all college costs for the following four years of study.” At the bottom of the form was Simon’s compliant signature.
    I flipped through the papers, trying to figure out where the immigrant had established residence after arriving in the land of opportunity. But there was only a short typed-out time line:
    October 16, 1978: Gerhartsreiter arrives Boston via Lufthansa.
October 21, 1978: Enrolled Berlin, CT High School.
December 31, 1979: Granted an extension of stay due to being a student.
    Then I came across a police report. “The investigator spoke with Thomas Glavin, principal of Berlin High School,” it read, and listed a succession of statements from Glavin: “That Gerhartsreiter arrived at his school in 1978. That Gerhartsreiter’s school records from previous school were in German. That Gerhartsreiter’s records show no information relative to his parents. That Gerhartsreiter never graduated from the school.”
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    In the same summer of 1978, when Christian Gerhartsreiter met Elmer and Jean Kelln, he also encountered another American, a young man named Peter Roccapriore, who had just graduated from high school in Meriden, Connecticut. Peter was backpacking through Europe for three months, traveling from country to country on a Eurail pass. One day on a train in Germany, he met the friendly, well-dressed, exceedingly polite and erudite Christian Karl Gerhartsreiter.
    As a film fanatic whose favorite director was Alfred Hitchcock, Gerhartsreiter must have relished the Hitchcockian undertones of his encounter. It brought to mind the Master of Suspense’s 1951 classic Strangers on a Train , in which the mysterious Bruno Antony invades the life of a tennis star, cajoling him first into joining him for a drink and eventually into joining him in murder.
    Gerhartsreiter was apparently always on the lookout for people who could help smooth his escape from Bergen, and when he found Peter Roccapriore, he introduced himself. As Bruno Antony had done with his target, Gerhartsreiter ingratiated himself