I had heard this story mentioned before in other contexts, but hadn't heard this spin on it. Sorta Tiki related, maybe.
MYSTERY OF THE MISSING ROCKEFELLER
**After the disappearance of 23-year-old Michael Rockefeller in Irian Jaya in 1961 his body was never found – despite an intensive search. In this extract from his new book, Australian private investigator Frank Monte goes on a terrifying voyage into crocodile-infested estuaries to solve the case. **
The man sitting in front of me was somewhere around 50. He introduced himself as Albert Gross. Would I be willing, he wanted to know, to do some investigations into the disappearance of somebody in New Guinea?
The disappearance had taken place 18 years earlier. What he wanted was to trace witnesses to the disappearance, or people in the area at the time.
He said he wanted me to fly to New Guinea and do face-to-face interviews. There was, he said, a lot of money behind him. He could make arrangements to pay me what my business earned for the time I was away. "If you learn what has happened to the person who has disappeared, there'll be substantial rewards."
He saw me hesitating, leaned closer and whispered: "Fifty thousand."
He snapped open an attache case and put the down payment of $US4000 in crisp bills on my desk. Then he had me sign a contract. As I was doing so, Gross dropped his little bombshell.
"The person who has disappeared is Michael Rockefeller, heir to one of the biggest fortunes in the world. He went missing in 1961. My client is Mrs Rockefeller, first wife of the recently deceased Nelson."
Just as it is now, New Guinea in 1979 was split into two countries. Papua New Guinea, the eastern side of the island, had been administered by Australia since the end of World War II.
The area in which Rockefeller had disappeared was in the other half; in the south of Irian Jaya, to be precise. It was a long way away from civilisation. At the time of his disappearance, the Dutch controlled the territory. The native and headhunter people, the Asmats, who lived in the muddy delta where Rockefeller had gone missing, had no political aspirations. They just wanted to be left alone to hunt heads.
By the time Gross made his visit to my office in 1979, Irian Jaya was under the control of the Indonesian military. Much of the region was wetlands – impenetrable swamps and jungle populated by headhunters and cannibals. The area where Rockefeller had gone missing was in the south and was as much under the control of crocodiles as of the military.
Soon I learned that Michael's mother, Mary, who had divorced Nelson Rockefeller in 1961, had been actively prevented from finding her son by her former husband. He had feared it would impede his political career. Upon Nelson's death, Mary had immediately set out to learn as much as she could about Michael's disappearance. Gross had come to see me within days of Nelson's passing. Now Mary was finally free to find out what had really happened to her son.
In November 1961, 23-year-old Michael was in the treacherous region where the Asmat people lived, the wetlands off the Casuarina Coast, West Papua. He was collecting artefacts to display in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and had indicated to other anthropologists and friends that he was also hopeful of setting up a museum for the West Papuans themselves.
It was Rockefeller's second visit that year. Earlier, he'd been part of a Harvard Peabody Museum anthropological expedition to film native tribes untouched by westerners.
Rockefeller and a friend linked up with two Dutch anthropologists, Adri Gerbrands and Rene Wassing, who had already spent some time there. Wassing was assigned by the Dutch administration to keep an eye on the billionaire's kid and make sure he didn't come to harm in Dutch territory, but was little more than a yes man, quietly going along with whatever Rockefeller wanted to do.
Rockefeller had to leave the Asmat region in July, but he determined to return as soon as possible with Wassing. By late September 1961, he was flying back to New Guinea, apparently to buy shields, canoes and heads for his museum. He linked up again with Wassing and made his way back to the Asmat. This was headhunter territory. Rockefeller was starting to feel that here was the place where he could make his mark in history. He tried to make contact with a tribe from a nearby place called Otsjanep, who were the most recalcitrant of all the Asmats. They hunted heads, they sucked brains, they butchered women and children. And they weren't stupid.
Their favourite pastimes had been outlawed by the Dutch police and frowned on by the missionaries, but they knew well enough how to conceal the fact that they were still practising centuries-old customs. It was here among these people that Rockefeller spent his last weeks, in the jungle buying skulls and carvings.
The official story of Rockefeller's last days goes like this. On Saturday, November 18, Rockefeller and Wassing were in the town of Agats on the coast preparing to sail south. Despite advice to take the rivers, Rockefeller was determined to take the quicker sea route. His vessel, a catamaran, was really two canoes with a central bamboo platform and an outboard motor.
Two Asmat guides accompanied Rockefeller and Wassing. At the Agats pier, police inspector Henri Watrim saw how low in the water the boat was sitting and ordered Rockefeller to lighten its load. Rockefeller did as he was told – until Watrim had gone on his way. Then he reloaded and the laden catamaran sailed south-east into the open sea.
The party put in at the village of Per a while later so that Rockefeller could inspect a canoe that he was going to purchase. They left at 2pm and hit a squall. The boat was swamped, the outboard engine died. The guides abandoned the boat and Rockefeller and Wassing stayed. It took the guides five hours to get to shore. According to Wassing, the catamaran capsized and he and Rockefeller drifted around, clinging to the hulls until dawn. Around 8am, Rockefeller decided he should try to make the shore alone.
At 4pm on Sunday, November 19, a Dutch Neptune patrol plane spied Wassing on the upturned cat about 60km to sea off the Cook Bay area. Wassing was dropped supplies and finally rescued at 9am on Monday, November 20. There was no sign of Michael Rockefeller.
When Nelson Rockefeller learned of the disaster, he chartered a seaplane that would take him, Michael's twin sister Mary Strawbridge, their staff and dozens of international journalists to the island of Biak off the north coast of Irian Jaya. The Dutch sent its air force and navy to search for Michael and its administrators and police joined in too. The US sent an aircraft carrier and Australia a Catalina seaplane and two helicopters.
Most of the search was concentrated on the coastline, where it was expected that he might have been washed up. The search was finally called off. The consensus was that there was no hope for Michael. He had drowned or been eaten by sharks.
Frank Monte puts ads in various newspapers around the world, offering a $10,000 reward for any information regarding Michael Rockefeller's disappearance. After hundreds of false leads, his search takes him to Amsterdam and Father Peters, a priest who was at a mission in the region where Rockefeller disappeared and claims to know what really happened.
I hoped that this was the end of my journey, but I didn't dare presume.
The seminary where the priest was living was a large stone building rising impressively out of the flat surrounds. Father Peters was elderly, probably about 70, a small but sprightly Mickey Rooney.
He told me about his years as a missionary. Dutch New Guinea was by far the most inhospitable region to which he had ever been sent. The Asmats were barbaric, warlike; the various tribes were constantly fighting among themselves. Their belief system was such that tribes would kill and eat the brain of their enemy, believing that this gave them great power. They were nomadic, following the sago crop upon which they lived.
After we had finished our meal, the priest began to tell me the true story of what had happened to Michael Rockefeller nearly 20 years before.
Rockefeller and Wassing had been trading with the Asmat people of the village of Fos on the Eilanden River. He had landed upriver on the evening of November 18. Rockefeller had done a deal with the son of one of the tribal elders to buy a relic of great tribal significance, a sort of totem pole adorned with skulls.
The priest explained to me that the Asmats believed that spirits lived alongside the living, and that killing another person entailed an obligation to look after the spirit's physical remains – the skull. Trading this pole was a huge no-no. Selling it would get the spirits angry and bring doom to the tribe.
What Father Peters told me was that Rockefeller had taken this sacred skull pole in the middle of the night and was on his way with it to the catamaran when other warriors came upon him. Rockefeller was dragged out of his boat. The pole went overboard, the engine was flooded as Wassing tried to get away, and the guides ran off to save their own skins. This account meant that the other, official, story was a complete fabrication.
After his capture, Rockefeller was taken alive back to the village of Fos, where he was kept hidden while the tribe determined his fate. The size of the search was so great that the people feared retribution if the white man was found in their custody. They felt the safest avenue was to kill him.
Father Peters didn't say whether the killers had also eaten Rockefeller. He did tell me, though, that he and his two fellow missionaries had not dared tell the authorities for fear of the genocidal retribution that would have followed. It was only on account of his concern for Mary Rockefeller that Father Peters had now consented to tell me what had happened. He still felt some guilt about the affair, believing that he should have been able to intervene to save Rockefeller's life.
I had a first-hand account from a reliable witness of the fate of Michael Rockefeller. I had done my job – or so I thought.
Gross thanked me for my efforts and assured me that the balance of my fee, now up around $70,000, would be sent immediately. He then came straight back at me. How would one go about locating Michael's remains? I told him the skull might still exist, but the rest of him may have been turned into knives and arrows. And anyway that part of the world was controlled by the Indonesians and they simply didn't let people in there.
"You can leave that part to me," said Gross. "Are you seriously contemplating bringing the skull of Michael Rockefeller out of there?" I asked. "It's crocodile-infested, headhunter land."
"Not personally, no. But my client will pay generously for whoever will. Would you like the job?"
Then I did something very, very stupid. I said: "Yes."
Monte travels to Jakarta, where Gross has arranged for $US50,000 in cash to be delivered to his hotel room. Carrying the money in a brown paper bag, Monte is instructed to deliver it to a general in the Indonesian army, who arranges for a boat and crew to take him into head-hunter territory. Reluctantly, the general agrees that Monte can take his own bodyguard, ex-SS-man Dieter Stein.
In October 1979, as rain pelted down into muddy brown water, I found myself waiting at Biak, a small island to the north of Irian Jaya, with my bodyguard, Dieter Stein.
I was expecting something like a small frigate to cruise elegantly into port. But what docked was a rusty looking patrol boat with the cabin space of a prawn trawler. I was alarmed. The personnel totalled around 25. About four were the boat's crew. The rest were commandos, cut-throat Indonesian soldiers. The captain was obviously the general's man and was more refined and courteous than the sergeant or the grunts.
Before I even stepped on the boat I was getting bad vibes. These commandos were all big men, bigger than me. They looked like thugs. I'd been around many criminals and I knew the look of the killer who'd cut your throat and go back to his dinner with an increased appetite.
I didn't learn until later that their mission in helping me had an underlying purpose: to prove how inept the Dutch had been and how savage and inhumane the natives were.
Monte and his crew of cut-throats hire Peter, a local guide who can speak the Asmat dialects. Finally, they enter the waterways that had drawn Rockefeller further and further inland in his search for rare artefacts.
We had sent a party ashore and were awaiting their return when there was the unmistakable sound of rapid gunfire from the village. I was worried, but nobody else on board seemed to have the slightest concern.
When the shore party returned, Peter gave me some information which I thought needed to be followed up. I asked him if he could go back the next day. All Peter would say was: "Too late, too late." Then it dawned on me exactly why it was too late. The gunfire wasn't the boys shooting a few wild boars: they were killing the villagers. The Indonesians were using this trip to conduct a little tribal murdering.
I was appalled. The boat journey into hell continued for around two weeks. I'd lost many kilos in weight. It was a nightmare of mosquitoes, headhunters, foul drinking water and now cold-blooded murder. One day, as we anchored, I slipped on some oil and fell off the boat. Usually the river was dead still, but an unexpected swell threw me off balance and into the water where crocodiles and sharks lurked. I couldn't get back on board fast enough.
I'd expected we'd sail up to a beach, shake hands with a few elders, hand over some gold and beads, and bring home a skeleton in a casket draped in the US flag. Never in my wildest thoughts had I imagined it would be like this: not to be able to shower or brush my teeth or even sleep.
Finally, we were getting closer to the tribe. It began to rain endlessly.
Everything was damp and mist settled like low-lying cloud. The crew had grown quieter, even more threatening. Conversation seemed pointless, as if each kilometre up the river made us somehow more primitive, as if we were journeying into the dark heart of our own soul.
We had now gone as far as we could in the patrol boat. From here on it would be in rubber dinghies and on foot. We went as far as we could in the dinghies then had to carry them and the outboards through the swamp.
Most of the time you were wading through knee-high water, then every now and again you would suddenly fall into a hole and find yourself up to your neck in mud. There were plenty of crocs around. Snakes were everywhere – up trees, on land, in the water – wherever you stepped.
The place had an evil aura about it. It was dank, dark and dangerous. At night we stuck cottonwool in our ears to stop bugs crawling in.
After just a few hours of these conditions your clothes were soaked through with a mixture of your own perspiration and the foul waters you'd been wading through. The chafing, the discomfort, as you trudged through mud was terrible.
I had been keeping the anxiety at bay pretty well up to this point, but when I saw dark shapes in the distant trees my stomach knotted up. The shapes in the trees were rotting corpses. I didn't know if this was an Asmat burial ground or what, but it spooked me. Nothing was normal, nothing was what it seemed. I started praying, something I hadn't done in years.
The second day of our trek took the surrealism of the scene to new heights.
Suddenly, we emerged into a small clearing to find two tribes confronting one another, ready for battle. The warriors wore nothing but penis gourds. Some had their hair decorated with long bird plumes, most carried spears and shields.
The two tribes quickly turned their attention away from each other towards us. There were many more of them than us but we were heavily armed. I don't know who fired first. Dieter and I were in the middle of the squad when the fighting started. There was gunfire, then spears and arrows were coming our way. One of the commandos went down, struck by a spear as his fellow soldiers raked the natives with automatic fire. After a couple of minutes the locals just ran off into the jungle.
It's hard to come to terms with the silence of spears. The Asmats use a plant poison on them so that, if you're struck, even if it's not a deep wound, you can still die. It's the same with their arrows.
With the air thick with the smell of guts and cordite, we checked the damage. Eight natives dead, one commando speared badly. We were much faster going back than we had been on the way from the boat, but the injured soldier died of his wound not long after we arrived back.
After a few more days, we finally stumbled on something solid. Peter came across a tribe that was an enemy of the tribe we were seeking. Our quarry was just a couple of days away.
We continued up a tributary of the river in our inflatable dinghies until Peter made contact with the tribe and we travelled to within a short distance of the village of Fos, where Michael Rockefeller had made his fatal error. I decided that Dieter and I would go into the village alone. We were now armed with Kalashnikovs, but I was under no illusion as to what would happen if the natives all decided to attack us.
Fos consisted of bamboo and vine huts built on stilts. Peter led me to the chief and a witchdoctor. He had said what we wanted when he first made contact, but the witchdoctor didn't seem too cordial. Through the guide, he kept asking me: "What will you do with the man if you find him?" They always speak about the dead in the present tense.
I told the witchdoctor that I would take the man back to his family. The witchdoctor clearly didn't want to hand back any of Rockefeller's remains, but the chief was more pragmatic. He wanted to know if we would trade our outboard motors. I offered one in return for the skull of Michael Rockefeller. Then the witchdoctor got going again. He thought we were associated with the Indonesians and wanted no part of us. Peter explained that we weren't like the others at all.
Finally, the chief told us that it was his predecessor, now dead, who had killed Rockefeller. This chief had a totem pole, a special relic with the bones of all the important ancestors of the village on it. Rockefeller had wanted to buy it, but the chief would not sell. Rockefeller, according to this chief, simply took it, just pulled it out of the ground in the middle of the night, and ran for the boat. Rockefeller was dragged off the boat, there was a struggle and some of the relics were damaged. Then Wassing managed to start the boat and took off. Rockefeller was kept alive and hidden while the Asmats decided what to do with him. It was when the ships and planes started to search the area that they decided it was safer to kill him.
The story coincided with what Father Peters had told me. It was also possible that they had attempted to con Rockefeller by selling him the relic even though they had no intention of parting with it. Perhaps he caught them unawares by actually removing the pole, meaning to take what he thought was rightfully his. The exact trigger for Rockefeller's death could stay a mystery as far as I was concerned, as long as they gave me the skull. That's what I'd been paid to get.
In fact, they gave me three skulls. The chief explained that these were the skulls of the only white men the tribe had ever killed. Which one was Rockefeller's he wasn't sure.
It was too late to make the transaction that day. I spent the night in the long hut waiting to lose my head. I woke up the next day to find it still attached.
Finally, when they had been given the motor and shown that it worked, the Asmats handed me the skulls. They looked like any other skulls, though brightly painted. They stank, even though they had long been stripped of any flesh. To transport the skulls, I wrapped them in leaves and put them in a gym bag.
It took us nearly two days to get back to the boat. I should have felt some sense of satisfaction. But all I felt was exhaustion.
Carrying the skulls in his hand luggage, Monte flies to the US, but he's worried about customs finding them. He gets lucky when the woman at the immigration booth is too distracted by some long-haired musicians to pay much attention to the well-dressed businessman with the holdall. Gross has the skulls picked up at Monte's hotel and Monte is invited to dinner with Mary Rockefeller, who wants to thank him personally.
A big limousine arrived and drove me to Fifth Avenue. Mrs Rockefeller had her apartments on the top floor. As soon as I walked in the door, I felt years of wealth pressing down on me like a heavy fur coat. Led by a man I guessed was the butler, I walked along the corridor past busts of blank-eyed Romans on tall pedestals. He showed me into a drawing room. Gross was waiting in his tuxedo, like Bing Crosby waiting for Grace Kelly in High Society. He greeted me, formally thanked me and sat me at a table. Across the polished ebony, he slid over some papers for me to sign. I read them quickly. It seemed the main thing was that I was not to talk about the assignment for 10 years. That was fine by me. I signed with a fountain pen he supplied me. I calculated that the pen alone was worth a house in one of Sydney's humbler suburbs.
I asked him if they had identified a skull as Michael's. Gross confirmed that they had, but cautioned me to say nothing about the skulls themselves to Mrs Rockefeller. Instead, I was to talk about the body as if it had been one whole unit.
Gross said we should dine and led me to a dining room where the clan had assembled. Mary Rockefeller introduced herself. She was in her early 70s, but looked younger. She was quiet and genteel.
Mary Rockefeller asked what had been the most difficult part about the trip and I told her of the tension, the weather, the natives and the mosquitoes. She asked me to stay for a private chat after dinner.
At this stage, of course, I was still waiting for my money. I knew it would be impolite to bring it up in conversation and I knew these people were supposed to be far too wealthy and refined to renege on a debt of $67,000.
Mary Rockefeller wanted to know exactly what I had learned of the last moments of her son. I told her that a fight ensued in which he had defended himself, ultimately in vain, against a number of warriors. I did not mention that he may have been held captive and then killed only because of the rescue operation.
She handed me an envelope. Inside was a cheque for the full amount.
And I'd earned every cent of it.
*Edited extract from The Spying Game, by Frank Monte with Dave Warner, published in July by Pan Macmillan Australia, rrp $30.
*
