Michael Rockefeller
In 2014, Carl Hoffman published a book that included details from the official inquest into the disappearance, in which villagers and tribal elders admitted to Rockefeller being killed and eaten after swimming to shore in 1961.
Rockefeller attended the Buckley School in New York City and graduated from the Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire, where he was a student senator and exceptional varsity wrestler.
Following his military service, Rockefeller went on an expedition for Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology to study the Dani tribe of western Dutch New Guinea.
My trips are enabling me to comprehend (if only in a superficial, rudimentary manner) the nature of this puzzle ...[3]On November 17, 1961, Rockefeller and Dutch anthropologist René Wassing were in a 40-foot (12 m) dugout canoe about 3 nautical miles (6 km; 3 mi) from shore when their double pontoon boat was swamped and overturned.
According to Wassing, Rockefeller created a float for himself out of a jerry can and the boat's gas tank, took a compass and knife, and set off for the shore between 7 and 8 a.m. on November 19.
The boat was an estimated 12 nmi (22 km; 14 mi) from the shore when Rockefeller made the attempt to swim to safety, supporting the theory that he died from exposure, exhaustion or drowning.
[1] The account repeated by a number of villagers was that Rockefeller was pulled out of the water wearing underwear, and despite a dispute about whether or not he should be killed, he was non-fatally stabbed in the abdomen and later finished off somewhere along the Jawor River.
[1] In December 1961, four locals told minister Hubertus von Peij that Rockefeller's remains and personal effects, including his head, long bones, ribs, shorts, and glasses, had been divided amongst 15 Asmats.
[1] Von Peij and missionary Cornelius van Kessel both wrote the same regional supervisor, repeating nearly identical accounts with myriad supporting details from residents of four separate villages in the vicinity.
[1] The first public report that Rockefeller was killed and dismembered, and his long bones turned into weapons and fishing equipment, was published by the Associated Press in March 1962.
[13] Under the Asmat belief system, several of the killers, named Fin, Ajim, Pep, Jane, Samut, would have had "sacred obligation to avenge the deaths of the men killed by Lepré".
[1] Author Paul Toohey, in his book Rocky Goes West, claims that Rockefeller's mother hired a private investigator in 1979 to go to New Guinea and try to solve his disappearance.
[15] In 2014, Mary Rockefeller Morgan wrote of her twin brother's disappearance: Rumors and stories of Michael's having made it to shore—of his having been found, captured, and killed by headhunting Asmat villagers—have persisted for more than forty years.
All the evidence, based on the strong offshore currents, the high seasonal tides, and the turbulent outgoing waters, as well as the calculations that Michael was approximately ten miles from shore when he began to swim, supports the prevailing theory that he drowned before he was able to reach land.In 2014, Carl Hoffman published the book Savage Harvest: A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller's Tragic Quest for Primitive Art, in which he discusses researching Rockefeller's disappearance and presumed death.
[19] There is a memorial stained glass window for Michael Rockefeller, designed by the artist Marc Chagall, installed at Union Church of Pocantico Hills.
[20] Rockefeller's twin Mary became a therapist in later life and following 9/11 led a bereavement support group for survivors who had lost their twins in the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, D.C.[21] The 1973 National Lampoon Comics compilation contained the story "New Guinea Pig", originally published in the July 1972 issue, which focused on Rockefeller's disappearance as being a ruse, so he could kill all the black people in New Guinea and his family could steal their resources.
In the travel adventure book Ring of Fire: An Indonesian Odyssey, the Blair brothers claim to have discussed Rockefeller's death with a tribesman who killed him.
Jeff Cohen's play The Man Who Ate Michael Rockefeller, based on the short story by Christopher Stokes, had its world premiere in an Off Broadway production at the West End Theatre in New York.
This theory is supported by a verbal claim of contact made by a mysterious Australian adventurer, plus a few frames of film footage showing a bearded white man among indigenous men, wearing local garb.
[29] The chorus of Jenny Lewis's song "Hollywood Lawn" off her 2019 album On the Line features the lyrics "I'm long lost like Rockefeller / drifting off to sea."
