A Rage to Kill (24 page)

He came up to her outside the deli, and he didn’t look frightening at all—just an older man with a beard and friendly blue eyes. He told her that she was just the right type for an ad campaign that a company he worked for was doing. She saw his camera and a bunch of other photographic gear he had with him. He looked straight and honest and safe.

Toni Lee was a little bit chubby, and she wasn’t used to having someone tell her she could be a model. She was flattered and intrigued when the man—“Chris”—offered her a hundred-dollar bill if she would come to the beach near Santa Monica with him and pose for some ad shots. She calculated how many hours she would have to work to make that much money—
even
if she got the job in the deli.

It was kind of fun at first. The sun was shining and there were people around, but later she realized that the wind was getting chilly and everyone but the two of them had left the beach. She told Chris that she had to be getting home. His friendly persuasion disappeared in an instant, and he seemed terribly angry at her.

Before she could think fast enough to run, a pistol appeared in Chris’s hand and he grabbed her by the back of the neck with one hand and forced the gun into her mouth with the other. She heard a click as he aimed the gun down her throat.

“Your modeling days are over,” he breathed.

He dragged her over to his car, pushed her into the back seat, and held her down as he tied her arms behind her and then looped the rope down to her ankles.

And then the car was racing away from the beach, away from Torrance. Toni Lee had no way of telling what time it was, but it seemed as though they had driven more than six hours when her captor finally slowed to a stop.

Michele Korfman, gone from her safe life in Las Vegas, was dead; her unclaimed, unidentified body lay in the Los Angeles County Morgue. (On June 15, when Nevada and California authorities finally connected her sad little corpse with the beautiful seventeen-year-old who had vanished from Las Vegas, she had been missing two and a half months.)

Wilder and Toni Lee were still in the Cougar, although it now bore stolen plates from New Mexico. Except for using his partner’s credit cards, this was Wilder’s sole effort to hide his identity. He headed out of Los Angeles County to El Centro, California, twelve miles from the Mexican border at Calexico. He may have planned to attempt a crossing at the border, and thought better of it. The pair, he, thirty-nine, and Toni Lee, sixteen, checked into an El Centro motel.

Long before it was light, Wilder put Toni Lee back in his car and they crossed the desert into Arizona, and then turned the Cougar north to Prescott. They stayed the night at a motel there, and then something changed; maybe Wilder
knew
that he’d made the Ten-Most-Wanted list; perhaps he saw the flyer with his picture in a truck stop cafe or in a gas station. There were no sightings, no motel receipts—nothing for four days.

During those four days, Toni Lee Simms was subjected to multiple sexual assaults. She didn’t fight him. She had survived with passivity for a long time, learning to watch people quietly and to evaluate what
they
wanted so that she could just get along. She listened to her captor as he talked of his fantasies, his obsessions, his hopes and fears. Somehow, her very helplessness soothed Wilder. All of the other captives had been dead within a day or two.

For some reason Chris Wilder didn’t kill Toni Lee Simms. He kept her with him in his headlong race back east across America. Toni Lee was caught in the grip of the Stockholm Syndrome, an intricate psychological process that virtually turns the mind inside out. A more familiar term is brainwashing. Anyone can be brainwashed; it is only a matter of how much terror, loneliness, time and repetition it will take. There are four steps: (1) the subject suffers a profound psychological shock; (2) the subject is taken away from every person and place where she felt safe; (3) the “programmer” repeats his message over and over and over, and (4) he holds out the promise of a reward—usually the captive’s life.

Toni Lee Simms had been brainwashed. She was kidnaped, terrorized, raped, and taken far from home. Amazed that she was still alive as the miles zipped by, she began to be mesmerized by Wilder’s deceptively soft voice. He had not killed her yet, and she hoped that he wouldn’t kill her if she just listened to him and did what he asked of her. After four days with Chris Wilder she began to think only as he gave her permission to think.

By the time they crossed the Indiana state line, Toni Lee was prepared to do whatever Wilder asked of her. He had convinced her that even when she was out of the car and away from him, he could still hurt her. In order to stay alive, she would have to follow his orders. In Gary, Indiana, on April 10, Wilder ordered Toni Lee to go into the West Lake Mall and bring back a girl. He gave her the script. She was to offer a likely-looking girl a good job, and then bring her to the car.

It turned out to be nowhere near as difficult as Toni Lee thought it might be. She walked around the mall, no longer even psychologically capable of escape, until she saw a girl about her own age filling out a job application on a bench outside a clothing store.

“I work here,” Toni Lee said. “You look as if you’d be fine for the job. If you’ll come outside this mall exit here and wait, I’ll call the manager and tell her.”

Chris Wilder was waiting for his next prey, Carrie McDonald*, sixteen. Now, as the Cougar sped away, Toni was no longer the prime captive; Carrie had taken her place and lay trussed up and gagged with duct tape in the back seat of the car. Her ordeal would last for three days as they drove across as many states. Even in her terror, Carrie wondered about the other girl—the girl who had led her to the cruel man who enjoyed torturing her. The girl he called Toni seemed to be in a trance. She wouldn’t help Carrie or even look at her.

The last place Wilder’s partner’s credit card had been used was in Arizona, and so law enforcement agencies were concentrating their efforts there. And yet they knew that they couldn’t be sure
where
he was; he had covered over six thousand miles already in a crazy, zig-zagging pattern. And then they tracked him to a motel in Wauseon, Ohio. He was moving northeast.

That, combined with the disappearance of the girl in Gary, Indiana, made them suspect that he was still abducting women. There was no way of knowing how many women might have gone missing between Arizona and Ohio.

On April 11, the credit card was used again in a motel southeast of Rochester, N.Y. No one there recalled seeing anyone with the man who had checked in. For that matter, the clerk couldn’t really describe the man, either.

On Wednesday, April 11, a tractor mechanic was driving on a meandering two-lane road in the woods near Penn Yan, N.Y. It was an easy place to get lost, and the tractor serviceman finally accepted that he was headed for a dead end. He sighed and wheeled his rig around. As he did so, he saw what looked like an apparition lurching toward him. It was a young woman who was nearly naked. Her breasts were scarlet with blood as she tried to stanch the flow with her clothing.

The mechanic blinked his eyes as if to clear the “ghost” from his sight, but the girl was still there. He jumped out of his truck and helped her into the passenger seat. She was real, and begging him to take her to a doctor.

The closest medical help was at the Soldiers and Sailors Hospital in Penn Yan, and the man floored his accelerator, afraid that the injured girl would die before he could get her there.

Carrie McDonald proved to have incredible recuperative powers, despite the stab wounds in her chest. Sheer luck had prevented the thrusts from piercing vital organs, and she was anxious to talk to the FBI agents who flocked to the Yates County District Attorney’s office.

For the first time since Jill Lennox had escaped from Chris Wilder, the investigators had a living witness who could look at a laydown of mugshots and identify him as her attacker.

It was Christopher Wilder all right. He had gone from Florida to Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona—back to Indiana and Ohio, and now he was somewhere south of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. Only God knew how many women he had killed and thrown away on his sojourn of sadism, but the FBI and task forces around the country agreed that they had names for nine to twelve victims that matched his M.O.

What shocked them the most, perhaps, was Carrie McDonald’s statement that Wilder had a girl with him, not another victim but an accomplice! She told them how the girl she knew as Toni Lee came into the mall in Gary, Indiana, where Carrie was applying for work. “She lied to me—to get me to go out by the car where he was waiting.”

She described Toni Lee as being about her own age—sixteen—and said she was pretty but a little plump. When she had followed Toni Lee outside the mall, she’d been led to a Cougar, and a man with a beard. He had pulled a gun that she identified as a .357 Magnum as he bound her hands and feet. When they stopped at night, Carrie said she, too, had been subjected to electric shock torture, along with other horrible abuses.

Carrie didn’t know why he hadn’t killed her, and she had been determined to find a way to escape. But she was bound and gagged during the days as they traveled, hog-tied in the back seat and hidden beneath a rack of clothing Wilder had strung up there.

But it was hopeless. At night, she was hustled into various motel rooms, and the days were long stretches of bondage. “When we went through Niagara Falls,” Carrie remembered, “he and the girl got out to look at the falls, and they left me there in the parked car . . .”

Chris Wilder had been so confident; he had somehow managed to control Toni Lee Simms so completely that she was on an invisible tether. And Carrie had been controlled with a gag and tightly-wound layers of duct tape. But then something happened. They woke in their motel room on the morning of April 12, and Wilder turned on the television. Toni Lee gasped. Her mother was on the screen, sitting there on “Good Morning America,” and begging for news of her missing daughter.

Maybe that was the first time Wilder realized that he was big news, and big news meant the roads would be lousy with cops. Carrie told the FBI agents that he panicked, and hurried them into the car. He drove to the narrow and isolated road where the tractor mechanic had found her.

She had known that he meant to kill her, even though she couldn’t see what he was doing. She was blindfolded, bound and gagged, as she followed his directions to “walk here . . . keep walking.” She sensed that they were in an open field, that they had broken out of the woods she’d seen before she was blindfolded. And then he forced her roughly to the damp ground. He clamped one hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut with the other, but she had tossed her head back and forth in her frantic efforts to breathe and stopped him from suffocating her.

Then it felt as if he had hit her hard in the chest and twice on the back. Blinded, she didn’t realize she had been stabbed until she felt something warm and wet, her own blood. She had willed herself to lie perfectly still and she took breaths so shallow that she longed for oxygen. But she wanted him to think that she was dead. She had heard him standing over her, breathing heavily, and then, finally, the sound of his footsteps going away.

At last, she rubbed the blindfold along the ground to strip it off her eyes. Her own blood made it possible for her to slide her wrists out of their bonds, and she had been able to untie her ankles. But even without the blindfold, she was disoriented. She had staggered first into the woods, and then she had found the road—and the man who saved her.

Although Carrie was in critical condition, doctors believed that she would live. Courageously, she had told the investigators everything she knew about the man named Chris and the girl named Toni Lee. Toni was wearing blue jeans, she said, and had short hair and a round face.

It was anybody’s guess where Chris Wilder and his captive—whom they now knew as Toni Lee Simms—had gone. They wondered if Toni Lee
was
still a captive or if she had joined forces with Wilder. Carrie said she had not hurt her, but she hadn’t helped her either. If Toni Lee continued to assist Wilder in snaring victims, detectives feared there would be more deaths.

The investigators had assumed that Chris Wilder would continue moving north and east, although they knew that assumptions made about a sexual renegade are seldom predictable. Going over the thick stack of followup reports they had gathered from anyone and everyone who had ever known Wilder, they found something interesting. An old girlfriend of his in Florida had told detectives that Wilder had once visited her home in New Hampshire with her. He was getting closer to the small New England state. He hadn’t made it over the border to Mexico, so they figured he might be trying for Canada.

But then Carrie McDonald had said that Wilder had threatened to send her to Mexico City, not once but several times. He might just as easily backtrack and head toward the Southwest again.

Beth Dodge was thirty-three, a wife, mother, and Sunday School teacher. She did not fit Chris Wilder’s profile in any way, save that she was female. She was sweetly pretty, but she was no winsome long-legged teenager with hopes of becoming a model. Beth had a lunch date to keep with a friend in the Eastview Mall near Victor, N.Y., which was a small town just off I-90 about forty-five miles northwest of Penn Yan.

Doctors were still monitoring Carrie as they had been for the three hours she had been in the Emergency Room when Beth got into her gold 1982 Pontiac Firebird. It was a flashy car for a Sunday School teacher but she loved it and kept it spotless. Beth wore a lilac-colored suit in keeping with the pleasant spring day.