A Rage to Kill (22 page)

When a man walked up to her and held out a business card, Jill was a little startled—but not afraid. He explained that he was a professional photographer and that he could not help noticing that she had the kind of beauty that modeling agencies were looking for. Jill smiled but shook her head when he offered her a job. He had a commission for a “shoot” and he needed a young blonde who looked like a coed. “That’s you,” he grinned. “You’re perfect. I have things set up back at my studio.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think I’m interested.”

When he couldn’t convince her to take the job, the bearded man shook his head good-naturedly. “O.K.,” he said, holding his hands up in a gesture of defeat. “I took some shots of you as you were walking—” He offered to send them to her if he could use them, too.

“But my release forms are back in my car. It’s parked right outside the entrance, there.”

It seemed safe enough. Broad daylight in the parking lot of a busy shopping mall. Jill walked with the man toward his car, a car that wasn’t quite as close as he’d described. He talked amiably as they strolled toward it, lifted the trunk lid, and rummaged around inside.

And then he half-turned and his arm shot out as rapidly as a snake striking. His closed fist hit the softness of her belly, knocking the wind out of Jill Lennox. An instant later, she felt a blow to her head that left her dizzy. Before she could gather her wits to run or fight, the man lifted her off her feet and tossed her into the trunk, slamming the lid down hard and plunging her into complete darkness. She was tossed around as the car hurtled out of the mall lot.

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.

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.