After several minutes, the car stopped, the trunk lid opened and Jill rolled toward the lip of the compartment.They were out in the country somewhere, but she didn’t get to look long; he tied her hands and feet, and slipped a gag in her mouth. As the car started up again, Jill tried frantically to think of some way to call for help, but she was totally helpless.
Although Jill Lennox didn’t know where they were when the car finally stopped, they were across the Florida-Georgia state line, about seventy miles northeast of Tallahassee in Bainbridge, Georgia. When the trunk lid opened, it was dark outside and all she could see was the blurred shape of her abductor.
Chris Wilder was far from finished with Jill. He forced her to crawl and wiggle into a sleeping bag and he zipped it completely around her head and threw her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Still gagged, she couldn’t make enough noise for anyone to hear her.
He tossed her roughly onto a bed in the motel room. Desperately hoping for a chance to escape, Jill Lennox underwent a terrible ordeal of sexual sadism. She was raped and subjected to every variation of abuse that the man who held her could think of. When he was satiated sexually, she realized dully that he wasn’t done with her.
Wilder cut the cord of the bedside lamp, and peeled back the insulation from the bare wires. Then he plugged the cord back in the wall, and holding it where he would not be shocked, he held the bare wires to her feet. The shocks were terribly painful, but not enough to kill Jill. He demanded that she dance and do aerobics in time with the shocks. It took him over two hours to get bored with his electric torture.
Now, he wanted to see if Super-Glue really worked, and he drizzled a bead of the glue on the lids of her eyes and forced them closed, using a hair dryer to make it dry faster. The glue worked only too well, and Jill could barely open her eyes, but she did have a narrow slice of vision. She realized that he didn’t know that.
Confident that his captive was helpless and blind, Chris Wilder allowed himself to concentrate on some television show that had grabbed his interest, pausing only occasionally to zap Jill with the power cord.
Suddenly, Jill tugged the cord from the wall, and tripping over it, she used the slight vision she had to head for the door. He whirled and cracked her over the head with the hair dryer. She felt her head split and bleed, but she managed to get into the bathroom and lock the door behind her.
Now, Jill freed herself of the gag and screamed until she was hoarse, pounded on the walls and the floor. When she stopped yelling for a minute to listen, she could hear him scurrying around the motel room, the click of his suitcase, and then a door slamming. Not trusting that he was gone, she waited for another half hour before opening the bathroom door.
Jill opened the door a crack and peered out. The room looked empty. Terrified that he was waiting to surprise her, she came out further and looked around the room through the slits of her glued eyes. If she could just get her clothes on and get out, maybe she could make it to the motel office.
She stepped all the way out of the bathroom and grabbed a sheet and wrapped it around her naked body. It was only when she reached the motel manager’s office that Jill believed that she might be going to live after all.
One call to police brought an instant response. Jill Lennox didn’t know her kidnapper’s real name, but she had memorized his face, determined to be able to identify him if she ever had the chance. Every cop in Florida was looking for Chris Wilder, and one of his mugshots was included in the “lay-down” of eight photos shown to Jill.
“That’s him, absolutely,” she said immediately, pointing to the picture of Christopher Bernard Wilder.
Five young women had been abducted in less than four weeks. And all but Jill were still missing. Jill had been abducted and taken across state lines against her will, a federal crime. Now the FBI entered the case. Chris Wilder was infinitely dangerous to beautiful young women and every law officer who read the case follow-ups believed that he wasn’t going to stop unless he was captured.
A federal warrant was issued for Wilder’s arrest.
Jill Lennox’s statement made it clear Wilder was a sadistic sociopath, a man who derived pleasure from his victims’ pain. He was not abducting women solely to rape them. His cruel games only began with his sexual release.
Although little hope had been held out for the women who had vanished, the extent of the Ferguson’s tragedy became known the next day. Terry wasn’t missing any longer. A crew from an electric company had come across her body in an isolated creek in Polk County, more than a hundred miles from where she had disappeared. Terry had been savagely beaten and strangled. Authorities followed Wilder’s trail to the mall where Terry vanished, to the bogged-down car in the sandy lover’s lane, and then to where her body floated. Sickened, they concluded that she had probably been in the trunk of his car while it was being towed.
There was even more urgency to their search now. Wilder had obviously zig-zagged around Florida for weeks, but, with Jill, he had crossed into Georgia. There was no telling where he might be by now. He wasn’t a serial killer—not unless he was in the final stages of his “addiction.” He was taking victims in too narrow a time frame. He wasn’t a mass murderer; he clearly wasn’t psychotic. Wilder was too well organized. Crazy as his behavior seemed, he knew what he was doing and he was quite capable of seducing his victims with a charming story and a winning smile and then his escapes were well-planned.
They concluded that Chris Wilder fell into that rarest of multiple murderers: the spree killer. He was off on a spree of murder, and there was no telling when he would stop.
Now that he was headline news all over Florida and the southeast, people who had known Wilder shook their heads in amazement. Friends at the race track told FBI Special Agents that the man they had known and raced with was “a really nice guy, a little shy . . . very kind . . .”
One of the most shocked of Chris Wilder’s acquaintances was a homicide detective in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. Tom Neighbors read a BOLO (Be on the Lookout For) that had come into his office and was stunned. He knew Chris well—or, rather, he thought he did. A racing fan, he enjoyed following Chris’s competition. He liked the guy, and found him friendly and generous. He had invited Chris over to his home many times—the last being on March 8. They had both been excited about an upcoming race.
Try as he might, Tom Neighbors had trouble picturing Chris Wilder as a roving rapist/killer. But then he remembered something. He himself had worked a case of sexual assault in 1983 where two barely pubescent girls had been pulled into a Chevy El Camino pickup in Boynton Beach. The driver had taken them to a lonely road and molested them—and then, surprisingly, he had driven them back to where he abducted them—and let them go.
The case had never been solved, even though it happened very close to the police station, and, Neighbors now realized, close to Chris Wilder’s office. An artist’s sketch done from the girls’ description showed a man with a thick head of hair, which Chris hadn’t had for a long time. But Neighbors wondered if Chris might have been wearing one of the toupees he occasionally affected.
The Palm Beach County detective arranged for the 1983 victims to look at a laydown of mugshots, and like Jill Lennox, they picked Chris Wilder at once.
His personable mask off at last, Chris Wilder was on the run. He didn’t linger long in Georgia, but headed the Chrysler west.
It was March 22, 1984. Cutting south and then heading due west from Bainbridge, Georgia, Chris Wilder traversed the southern borders of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, as he hastily put miles between himself and the Florida authorities. He may not have known yet that the FBI was after him too, but he must have realized it was only a matter of time and he had much to do before anyone caught up with him. The sun was warm and the wind fierce off the Gulf of Mexico as Wilder pulled off U.S. Highway 10 and turned his road-dirty white car into a motel in tiny Winnie, Texas. He was still using his partner’s name and credit card.
&
nbsp; The next day was Friday, and Wilder backtracked a short distance to Beaumont, Texas. There, the bluebells that dot the landscape were beginning to respond to Spring. Terry Diane Walden was 24, married, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter, but she found time to study nursing, too. Terry was a beautiful blonde, and she often drew admiring stares. In fact, a man had approached her the day before in the parking lot of her college and told her she should be a model. She laughed when she told her husband about it, dismissing the stranger’s offer of a posing job as half peculiar and half compliment.
Terry had almost forgotten about that encounter by Friday morning in the rush of activity that was her life. She took her little girl to day-care in the three-year-old Cougar that the Waldens had recently purchased. Terry was headed off to study with a friend so they could quiz each other on all the minute medical details they suspected would be on the next test. And she had to pick up a few things at a Beaumont shopping mall. She planned to be home in plenty of time to pick up her daughter from day-care.
Chris Wilder had a reason to retrace his journey and go back to Beaumont. He couldn’t get the blonde woman he had seen out of his mind. No one will ever know if Terry had agreed to meet him in the mall to discuss his offer of a high-paying modeling gig, or if he somehow knew where she would be.
Terry Walden’s husband was the first to realize something was terribly wrong that Friday evening. His daughter’s day-care called to say that his wife hadn’t come to pick the child up. Only then did the worried young husband remember her telling him about the man who owned a modeling agency. The local police and the FBI took Terry’s disappearance seriously from the very beginning, and they organized grid searches of the area around the mall.
Law enforcement authorities knew that Wilder had left Florida and Georgia in the white Chrysler, and they were concerned when a teenaged girl reported that she had seen such a car along a little-traveled dirt road that afternoon. Something ephemeral had made her watch the car as it drove by slowly. “There was a man with a beard driving,” she recalled. “And there was a woman in the passenger seat. I didn’t see her well because she was kind of leaning her head against the window.”
The white car had turned off through some rice fields, something that was also unusual. “I saw it again later,” the young witness said. “It was coming back along that rice-field road. But I couldn’t see the woman that time.”
Although a massive search for Terry Walden began in that area, the searchers didn’t find her for three days. Her body, bound tightly with rope, bobbed face-down in a canal near the road where the girl had seen the white Chrysler. An autopsy revealed that Terry had been stabbed three times in the breasts, thrusts so powerful that the blade had gone completely through her body. She might have lived—if only she had gotten medical help soon enough; she had succumbed to exsanguination—bleeding to death. It was impossible to tell if she had been raped; any trace of seminal fluid would have dissipated in the waters of the canal.
Terry Walden had probably died on the afternoon she was abducted, but it was possible she was still alive, if unconscious, when the witness saw her leaning against the passenger window of the Chrysler.
The Waldens’ 1981 Cougar was missing, but there was no way of knowing if Terry’s killer was driving it. The white Chrysler hadn’t been sighted again, either.
Every cop in the South knew now that Chris Wilder was a virtual killing machine, and he was hurtling across their territory, so slick in his approach to his victims that he was able to take them away from safety without so much as a scuffle or a soft cry for help. Back in South Florida, detectives and special agents were learning more about him.
Apparently Wilder had used his “model agency” and “fashion photographer” ruses for a long time. Some girls who had been approached by the man with the beard saw his photograph in the newspapers and on television and came forward. The investigators learned that he had used a number of aliases, but he had always seemed to have business cards that made him seem reputable. Sometimes, he had actually taken photos of young women without making a remark or gesture that was out of the ordinary. One woman said she had gone with him to an empty house someplace in Boca West. “He said it was a ‘photo test’ for a BMW ad,” she said with a shiver. “But he never called me back.”
Back in Florida, the Kenyons, the Orsborns, and the Gonzalez family hoped against hope that their daughters were still alive, perhaps held captive somewhere. In a sense, their endless waiting was worse than the grief the families felt who knew that their daughters were dead. Their dreams were haunted with visions of torture, horrific captivity and their own helplessness.
Searches of Chris Wilder’s home and business produced no clues at all that might indicate any of the missing girls had ever been in either spot. Wilder had had a boat—he could have dumped their bodies far out in the ocean where no one would ever find them, and this was plausible since he seemed to have a fetish about putting his victims in water after he was finished with them.
The fact remained: while Wilder was living in his own house, he had managed to hide the missing girls completely; now that he was on the run, he dropped dead bodies off with alarming regularity. What was there about his being in Florida that had made it easier for him to hide his activities?
A map in the investigator’s command center showed Chris Wilder’s slashing course across America. On March 25, the marker moved north from Beaumont, Texas, to Oklahoma City. He had spent the previous night at a motel there. And then, that Sunday afternoon, he was seen at the Pen Square Mall, although no one thought much of it until Monday.
Suzanne Wendy Logan, twenty, was a new bride on that spring day in 1984. Suzanne had a great smile and thick, taffy-colored hair with blonde highlights. Her ambition was to be a model, and she had painstakingly put together a portfolio with various photographs of herself. She went to the Pen Square Mall on March 25 and met Chris Wilder there.
Wilder’s luck in finding women who fit perfectly into his victim profile was uncanny. With shorter and shorter spates between his killing days, he was somehow able to spot his victim, cut her away from those who might have saved her, and destroy her at his leisure. How did he know that Suzanne dreamed of being a model? Did he have some magic power that drew his targets to him?
In truth, it was more likely that Chris Wilder had simply become completely conversant with the longings of vulnerable, naive girls. He knew how to look like a professional photographer, and he had used that guise to dupe Suzanne. When she turned up missing, there were witnesses who recalled seeing her there in the mall Sunday afternoon, talking with a bearded man with a camera around his neck.
They found poor Suzanne two days later and more than three hundred miles away. Continuing north, with his helpless victim in tow, Wilder had driven up I-135 to Newton, Kansas, away from the warm days and into wind-driven snowstorms. He had found a motel with thick walls where he beat and tortured Suzanne Logan, who wasn’t as lucky as Jill Lennox had been. The next day, a fisherman found her bound body on the shores of Milford Lake, although it would take time to positively identify her.
Chris Wilder’s rage was building; he inflicted pain that was beyond the imagination of someone who felt empathy for other people. Suzanne’s beautiful hair had been cut short and her pubic hair shaved. She had been “teased” with a sharp knife, bitten, and stabbed through the left breast.
Because Wilder was still using his ex-partner’s credit cards, he left a trail that was easy to follow. The investigators were frustrated because they knew where he had been, but they had no way of predicting where he would go next. He had abducted seven women since the end of January, and only one had escaped.
Chris Wilder turned west again after he abandoned Suzanne Logan’s body. Still driving the Cougar that he’d stolen from Terry Walden, he roared across Colorado on Route 70. Apparently, he was confident enough that the police and FBI didn’t know where he was that he didn’t even bother taking the back roads, and he made
good time on the freeways. On the night of March 28, he stopped in Rifle, Colorado, not far from the state’s western border. Once again, Wilder was in Bundy territory. He had sailed right through Glenwood Springs where Ted Bundy escaped from jail on New Year’s Eve, 1977. But even Ted Bundy had never killed so many women in such a short window of time.
Chris Wilder was nearly a thousand miles west of the lake where he had thrown Suzanne Logan away, and he was ready to troll for a victim again on March 29. He was audacious enough to ask for a particular type when he showed up at the Mesa Mall that Thursday. With his camera and other photographer’s gear, Wilder was observed in the mall as he asked if anyone knew of a “cowgirl-type” model; he needed one, he said, for a specific photography job commission.
Sheryl Bonaventura, eighteen, was exactly what he had in mind. Although she had never heard of a man named Chris Wilder, she dressed for the part, unaware. When she arrived at the mall, she wore a white sweatshirt with a Cherokee logo, blue jeans, cowboy boots and a lot of chunky gold jewelry. Sheryl didn’t plan to shop long; she was going to meet a girlfriend soon so the two could head to Aspen for skiing, and all she needed were a few toiletry items.
With her thick ash-blonde hair, her slender figure and her perfect features, Sheryl Bonaventura looked like a model. And although she looked sophisticated, she was only eighteen and a sitting duck for a man like Chris Wilder. Somewhere in that Mesa Mall, Sheryl met Wilder, believed his story offering her a modeling job with a big Denver agency, and walked away with him.
Sheryl’s friend waited and waited for her, but she never arrived at their prearranged meeting spot. Somehow, Wilder had managed to convince her that it was all right to leave her friend stranded. There is evidence that Sheryl did go with Wilder willingly; the pair were seen in Silverton, a little mining town on the way to Durango. That was a hundred miles south of the mall where she was last seen. They stopped at a restaurant there where Sheryl was known—her grandfather once worked there. She talked with the owner who remembered how excited she was about becoming a model. A man with blue eyes and a neatly-clipped beard had stood right beside her, smiling, as she bubbled over with enthusiasm. The couple bought a sack of doughnuts before they moved on.