He was a race car driver, late 30s, soft-spoken and a wealthy construction company owner in Boynton Beach, Florida. He was good looking, super charming. It would seem having beautiful models on his arm would complete the picture.
But he didn't let them live long enough to do that.
Christopher Wilder, posing as a fashion photographer promising modeling careers, lured at least 12 women and teenagers from shopping malls across the country starting in February 1984. He raped, tortured and killed most of them in an 8,000-mile, seven-week crime spree that reached from Florida to California to New England.
Hulu started streaming a docu-series about his crimes this month called "The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 days of Terror."
The Australian-born Wilder owned Sawtel Construction, drove a Porsche racing car and, when he died, was worth $1 million — three times that in today's dollars.
What happened?Boynton Beach's Christopher Wilder suspected in many Florida slayings
His business partner, L.K. "Zeke" Kimbrell, whose name and credit cards Wilder used on his nationwide journey to check into out-of-the-way motels, said Wilder didn't do the sweaty work of their construction company. He brought in the business clients with his charm — surprising clients' secretaries with flowers and doting on their dogs.
But this charmer had a deeply dark side.
Wilder tortured his victims for hours — he beat their faces, bit their breasts, shocked them with electrical wires and sealed their eyes shut with Super Glue. He raped the young women and girls then killed most, by strangling, stabbing or shooting them.
Three survived.
Wilder held Tina Risico much longer than most of his victims — for nine days — and used her to help lure others. In a moment of mercy, he paid for her flight from Boston back to Los Angeles and gave her $100 in cash. She breaks her silence after 40 years inn the documentary from ABC News Studios, Ample Entertainment and 101 Studios, according to a release.
Risico was only 16 when Wilder kidnapped her from a California mall on April 4, 1984. While they were together, Wilder killed one of his victims by shooting her at point-blank range and stabbed another, leaving her for dead. Risico says people didn't believe she was innocent and she was forced to make difficult choices to survive with Wilder.
Even before the killing and torture spree, Wilder had a stunning history of sexual violence in Australia and in Palm Beach County.
He was ordered to see a therapist three times and he went regularly. His sex therapist in 1984 told legendary Miami Herald crime reporter Edna Buchanan that Wilder was a "deeply disturbed walking time bomb."
Wilder said he went to Boynton Beach in 1969, seeking warm beaches and a booming construction business.
His trip happened to coincide with Australian authorities' plans to question him about the rape of two 15-year-old girls on a Sydney beach. Wilder's wife had tipped them after she found a briefcase in the trunk of his car that contained half-nude pictures of young girls — wearing his wife's bikini bottoms. (Their marriage lasted about a week.)
Wilder already had been convicted as a juvenile for his part in a gang rape seven years earlier. He got a year's probation after pleading guilty to a lesser charge of carnal knowledge.
Before he left the country, he corroborated a 19-year-old nursing trainee's story of forced sex. After she let him take nude photos of her, he told her he'd send them to the hospital where she worked if she didn't have sex with him. The teen reported it to police on the condition that she not be forced to testify.
Once he got to Palm Beach County, Wilder showed success in business, but he couldn't suppress his dark side.
He was arrested in Pompano Beach in 1971 on charges of disturbing the peace, asking girls to pose nude at a beach. He was fined $25.
In 1977, Wilder offered to drive a 16-year-old Boca Raton girl to a job interview. Instead he took her to a secluded field and raped her in the front seat of his car, police said. He was acquitted because the jurors said they thought the stick shift made the rape impossible.
He got five years probation for the 1980 abduction of a girl from the Palm Beach Mall with the promise of a modeling career. He spiked her pizza with LSD then raped her.
Detectives said Wilder often showed remorse, many times weeping when he talked to them.
And after the final crime spree in 1984, two Boynton Beach girls — ages 10 and 12 — would tell deputies they recognized Wilder as the man who had abducted them in June 1983 from the parking lot of the Boynton Beach Civic Center, driven to the outskirts of West Palm Beach where he sexually abused them and then returned them to the parking lot.
The Chevrolet El Camino driven by the rapist matched the description of one owned by Wilder.
The seven-week, cross-country trek of horror started after Wilder drove his Porsche in the Miami Grand Prix on Feb. 25. He placed 17th and won $400, but that wasn't why he was at the event.
Wilder sported his Pentax 35mm camera and racing credentials two days later when he spotted Rosario Gonzalez, 20, handing out sample packets of aspirin. She aspired to be a model after participating in the Miss Florida pageant and was a bride-to-be. The night before she was on the phone with her fiance until 2 a.m. Her body was never found.
Then Elizabeth "Beth" Kenyon, 23, a former University of Miami cheerleader and teacher, vanished. Kenyon was in her first year teaching emotionally disabled children at Coral Gables High School. She and Wilder had dated a few times without incident, but she considered him more like a brother.
Kenyon was last seen at a Miami-Dade County gas station with a man who looked like Wilder. While there, Kenyon talked about going to the airport to pose for pictures. Her parents found her car at Miami International, neatly backed into a parking spot. A lousy driver, Kenyon was incapable of parking a car that way, they said.
The Kenyons, who owned a chain of craft shops, hired a team of private detectives who investigated both disappearances. One of them found out about Wilder's past sexual violence and put him on the radar of police.
Detectives questioned Wilder at Sawtel about Kenyon's disappearance. His business partner vouched for him.
"He said he had nothing to do with the disappearances, but that it was going to be pinned on him anyway," Kimbrell told the Herald.
After telling Kimbrell he was going to leave, Wilder headed north.
In Daytona Beach on March 15, Wilder checked into a Howard Johnson's motel. The same day, Colleen Orsborn, 15, skipped school. She wanted to see The Fixx play on the beach. But she disappeared, never to be found.
Three days later, Theresa Ferguson, 21, of Satellite Beach vanished from Merritt Square Mall near Cape Canaveral. A quality care supervisor at a T-shirt factory, Ferguson loved to shop. Her father, a police captain, expected her home that evening for a scheduled date. He never saw her again.
Wilder's car later got stuck in the sand in Cocoa Beach and e had to call a tow truck. Police believe Ferguson was hogtied in the trunk at the time. Ferguson's body was found four days later in a swamp. She had been beaten and strangled.
Wilder's next known victim would live to tell her tale. He stopped in Florida's state capital on March 20 and picked up Linda Grober, 19, at Governor's Square Mall. She attended Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Wilder promised $25 an hour for modeling photos. He had the paperwork to sign in the car. As she approached, he hit her in the head, zipped her into a sleeping bag and threw her in the trunk.
He took Grober to a motel in Bainbridge, Georgia, about 20 miles away. He beat her, raped her, tortured her with a frayed electric cord and Super Glued her eyes shut. But Grober managed to lock herself in the bathroom, pounding on the walls and screaming. Wilder fled.
Grober told The Palm Beach Post in 2004 that she had turned her trauma into something positive.
"I thought that could have been it for me. I wouldn't get to save the seals. I wouldn't get to work with Jacques Cousteau," she said after returning to FSU and becoming a marine biologist.
Wilder made his way across the South to Texas where he meet Terry Walden, 24, on March 21. She was a mother of two and a nursing student at Lamar University in Beaumont. She told her husband that a bearded Australian had wanted to take her picture. That day, she had declined.
Days later, her body was found stabbed to a death in a canal.
Former Palm Beach County Sheriff Bob Neumann remembered taking part in the manhunt, which was run from the FBI's West Palm Beach Office.
"We were always just hours behind him," said Neumann. Wilder was tracked through his business partner's stolen credit card. "We got to a motel in Oklahoma, and he had checked out two hours earlier."
More:Former Palm Beach County Sheriff, FBI agent Bob Neumann dies at 81
Housewife Suzanne Wendy Logan, 21, was abducted March 25 from an Oklahoma City shopping center. Her body was found the next day by fishermen under a cedar tree in Milford Lake, Kansas.
Her husband said she would have been attracted to the idea of modeling.
Sheryl Lynn Bonaventura, 18, on March 29 planned a trip to Aspen, Colorado, from Grand Junction with her best friend. Bonaventura told her mother she was headed to the mall first. She and Wilder were later seen having a meal at a diner. They told the staff they were headed to Las Vegas.
They stayed at a hotel in Page, Arizona, on March 31. Her body was found a month later in southern Utah. She had been shot and stabbed to death.
Michelle Korfman, 17, disappeared on April 1 from a Las Vegas fashion show sponsored by Seventeen magazine. Her father was a casino executive there. Witnesses later said a man who looked like Wilder appeared to be stalking her. A photo showed Wilder watching the pageant.
Korfman's body was found six weeks later at a California rest stop.
Tina Risico traveled to the Del Amo Fashion Center in Torrance, California, on April 4 to fill out a job application when she encountered Wilder. He promised to pay her $100 for a billboard shoot.
After he raped and tortured her, she said she became compliant.
“There’s something inside of me that I knew how to play along,” she told UPI in an interview a few months later.
On April 8, Christopher Wilder realized a dream: He was on the FBI's Top 10 Most Wanted list.
At the Southlake Mall in Merrillville, Illnois, two days later, Wilder forced Risico to lure a 16-year-old to the car where Wilder forced her inside at gunpoint. Risico drove while Wilder raped the girl in the backseat.
They stopped for photos at Niagara Falls before Wilder left the teen, strangled and stabbed, for dead. Wilder decided to check back after 20 minutes, but she was gone.
Wilder and Risico then traveled to Eastview Mall in Victor, New York, looking for another car. They spotted Elizabeth Dodge's gold Pontiac Firebird TransAm. Risico was forced to lure Dodge to the car where Wilder stole her keys and pushed her inside. They went to a gravel pit where Wilder shot her to death in the back.
Before heading to the Canadian border, Wilder drove Risico 400 miles to Logan International Airport in Boston. He bought her a one-way ticket to Los Angeles and gave her $100 for a taxi.
"All you gotta do, kid," he told her, "is write a book."
Wilder finally landed in Colebrook, New Hampshire, eight miles from Canada. He needed some gas. When he pulled into the station, two state troopers recognized him. One got into a struggle with Wilder in the car and Wilder pulled out his .357 Magnum. Two shots rang out, and Wilder was dead. The medical examiner said it was a suicide.
Many women came forward during and after the killing rampage to say Wilder had victimized them, too. He is suspected in about a dozen deaths and disappearances, including that of Sheri Lynne Ball of Fort Myers, Florida, an aspiring model who vanished in 1983.
An extraordinarily horrific killer, Wilder left scientists to ponder how anyone could commit so many extreme crimes.
In the summer after Wilder's rampage, a man contacted Robert Christie, the pathologist who conducted Wilder's autopsy, asking for his brain. Christie knew it might provide clues to Wilder's behavior. That's why he had preserved it.
After all, doctors in 1966 had found a tumor in the brain of University of Texas sniper Charles Whitman.
Christie drove to Wellesley College to hand over the brain to an unidentified man who took it to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.
Around the 20th anniversary of Wilder's death, the medical center in 2004 confirmed to The Post that they still had it.
"There was no pathology," a hospital spokesman said.
Holly Baltz is Investigations Editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Network. You can reach her at [email protected].
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