Sadistic Killers: Profiles of Pathological Predators (25 page)

The fugitive

First, he went to his business partner in tears, admitted that he was petrified of spending time in prison and said that he was planning to disappear for a while. Manipulative to the last, he stole the man’s credit cards.

Next, Wilder put a torture kit into the boot of his car, and prepared to start an extensive sadistic kidnapping and murder spree. Having decided that he wouldn’t let the police take him alive, the 39-year-old had nothing to lose.

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The third murder

That same day – on the afternoon of Sunday 18 March 1984

– he approached Theresa Ferguson in a Florida shopping mall.

Theresa was pretty enough to be a model so wasn’t surprised when the photographer with the expensive camera introduced himself and told her a little about his work.

The 21-year-old went into the Ladies and changed into the new clothes she’d just bought before tossing her old clothes into her vehicle. Thereafter, Wilder may have persuaded her to get into his car to look at his portfolio, or may simply have hit and abducted her.

Shortly afterwards he got stuck on a dirt track road and had to be helped out by a vehicle breakdown service. Police later speculated that Theresa may have been trussed up and gagged in the boot.

Wilder kept the young woman captive for a few hours and beat her viciously with a tyre iron before strangling her. Five days later her body was found floating in a Polk County creek approximately 70 miles from the abduction site.

A torture victim escapes

Two days after abducting Theresa, Christopher Wilder was ready to terrorise another victim. On 20 March 1984, he was prowling a Tallahassee shopping mall when he espied a pretty blonde 19-year-old Florida State University student called Linda Grober and began to follow her. He approached her in the car park where he introduced himself as a photographer and suggested that she’d be ideal for fashion work, saying that they could go to a nearby park and he’d pay her $25 to pose for photographs.

She politely declined, whereupon he punched her viciously in the stomach, completely winding her. He then punched her in the face, one of the signs of a woman-hater. As she fell to the ground, he grabbed her and pushed her into his car.

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He drove with the unconscious woman beside him until she began to revive, then he put her in the boot and strangled her until she passed out again. The sadist drove on to a motel in nearby Bainbridge, Georgia where he paid in cash, something he would do whenever possible. The hotelier had no reason to be suspicious of him as he looked calm and collected and was exceptionally well dressed in a suit and tie.

Wilder zipped Linda into a sleeping bag and carried her into his room. When she regained consciousness, he forced her to fellate him. He also tied her to the bed where he beat her, and, taking man’s inhumanity to man to new depths, superglued her eyelids shut. The sadist also raped her repeatedly, watching
Dallas
on the television as he did so and telling the traumatised young woman that he liked the programme’s lead male character JR because he had so much power over women.

Eventually Wilder began to tire, but he revived his flagging libido by carrying out his favourite sexual fantasy – electrical shock torture. He used a special 15-foot cord which he’d brought with him that had a plug and a switch attached. As Linda screamed inside her gag, he administered electric shocks to her naked flesh for the next two hours.

Later, he dozed off and she managed to crawl to the bathroom and lock herself in. Pounding on the walls, she screamed loudly and repeatedly called for help.

Waking swiftly and realising that other residents could arrive at any moment, Wilder grabbed his clothes, fled naked from the motel and drove off to find another girl. Linda subsequently spent a week in hospital recovering from her injuries then was taken out of the country as police feared Wilder might attempt to track her down and kill her rather than leave a living witness.

She later returned to America and excelled in her studies, earning a PhD. She now works as a marine biologist, though she admitted in a recent interview that the memories of the pain that the sadist inflicted will never leave her, and she echoes 210

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the sentiments of most of us when she says ‘I still can’t believe that one human being could do this to another.’ But someone had done terrible things to the pre-teen and teenage Wilder and now he was taking the maximum revenge…

The fourth murder

The day after Linda’s escape, he approached a beautiful 24-year-old nursing student called Terry Diane Walden and asked her to do a photo shoot for him. The young mother declined politely but remained perturbed by the encounter. Back home, she told her husband about the pushy photographer.

By sheer chance, she visited the same shopping mall as Wilder on 23 March. He’d already approached numerous girls with his offers of fashion assignments and had been turned down. By now, he was trying less hard to persuade women that he wanted them for work, telling one, ‘Try me – you might even like me.’

They clearly didn’t, and by the time he saw Terry, his head was full of revenge fantasies. He approached her and reminded her of who he was, trying to get her to take his business card. Again she declined but this time he followed her out to her car.

Terry doubtless felt safe – after all, it was a sunlit afternoon in a busy car park. But Wilder was desperate to control
someone
, to make his rage go away. Despite the risk of capture, he knocked her out with a blow to the head and bundled her into the boot of her own car then drove quickly to an unknown location where he tied her up with nylon rope and venetian blind cord, and put duct tape over her mouth to stifle her screams.

The sadist now tortured his victim with an eight-inch knife, stabbing her 43 times in the breasts and enjoying her muffled terror and frenzied writhing. Eventually his slicing blade punctured her lungs and heart and fractured two of her ribs. It’s likely that he ejaculated spontaneously during this cruelty (sadists often do) as Terry wasn’t sexually assaulted. She eventually bled to death. Afterwards, he dumped her body in a 211

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nearby canal before fleeing in her car: by frequently changing vehicles he knew that it was harder for the authorities to trace him. Three days later her corpse was seen floating in the water by a passerby.

The fth murder

Wilder took a day off to recover, then on 25 March he struck again. This time he approached Suzanne Logan at a shopping mall in Reno. Suzanne – a happily married woman from Oklahoma City – had studied modelling and fashion design so may have agreed to look at the plausible photographer’s portfolio.

True to form, Wilder hit her about the face and tied her up in the boot, before driving off in his stolen vehicle. He drove to a Kansas inn and smuggled her into his room, where he cut the 20-year-old’s blonde tresses into a humiliating crop. This act also helped to depersonalise her, to make her less human in his eyes – and that made it easier for him to torture her without guilt.

He subsequently raped her, shaved her pubic hair and bit both of her breasts. But his rage remained and he turned her onto her stomach and began to torment her with the tip of his knife, inflicting six cruel puncture marks.

The victim’s ordeal only ended the following lunchtime when he stabbed her fatally above her left breast. Afterwards he drove her half-naked body to the riverbank and dumped it under a tree, where it was found within the hour.

The sixth murder

Increasingly rootless and lost, Christopher Wilder drove to Denver and stayed there overnight, before driving on to Rifle, with the FBI in hot pursuit. They had put him on their Ten Most Wanted list and had distributed posters to various 212

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shopping malls warning women that the photographer might approach.

By 29 March, he’d doubled back to Grand Junction in Colorado and had breakfast there. At midday he approached a young woman and gave her his business card, introducing himself as a fashion photographer and suggesting he could find work for her. The woman declined politely and he walked away.

A couple of hours later he approached 18-year-old Sheryl Lynn Bonaventura, probably attacking her as she went to her car in the mall’s car park. He drove her 100 miles then took her to a roadside café for a meal. The waitress noticed that Sheryl was very nervous and that she insisted on giving the waitress a lot of information, including her name. It may be that Wilder had his gun trained on her and she felt too frightened to escape.

(Victims who attempt to escape in a public setting are more likely to survive than are those who let themselves be taken to a remote location. The kidnapper may not shoot with witnesses around – and, even if he does, the victim has a greater chance of being successfully treated at the scene.)

No one knows the exact sequence of events which followed, but Sheryl was kept alive for the next two days then brutally murdered. Her nude body was found five weeks later by the foot of a tree at a beauty spot in Utah. She had been tortured with a knife and shot once in the chest.

The seventh murder

Wilder was immediately ready to strike again. On 1 April he approached teenager after teenager at a beauty contest held in a Las Vegas shopping mall. Eight of them turned down his offer of a photo shoot, but the ninth, 17-year-old schoolgirl Michelle Korfman, left the shopping mall with him, planning to look at his portfolio in the car park. Other girls had arranged 213

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to meet him at a hotel for fashion photography work but he stood them up.

He kidnapped Michelle and drove to a downtown motel where he beat, raped and tortured her with his electric shock equipment. Her body was found the following month and taken to the Los Angeles County Morgue, where it was finally identified on 15 June. The FBI later recovered a photo (taken by another photographer) in which Wilder notices Michelle as she walks on stage. He is staring predatorily at her, and the Bureau described his expression as that of a homicidal maniac.

Meanwhile, Wilder’s rage seemed to be growing rather than abating, and on 3 April a motel employee had to stop him from smashing up a drinks dispenser which wouldn’t give him the soda he’d paid for. Perhaps recognising that he’d make further mistakes if drunk, he continued to avoid alcohol.

A torture victim lives

The next day he found himself another teenage victim, approaching 16-year-old Tina Marie Risico in a fashion store and offering her fashion photographic work. He took some photos of her on a nearby beach – it’s clear that he had a fetish about girls on beaches, as he’d raped his first known victim on the sand when she was 17 and had later sexually assaulted two other girls on a beach.

After the photo shoot, Wilder tied her up and drove her more than 200 miles to a California inn, but he left within hours and drove on to an Arizona motel. There, he spreadeagled Tina on the bed and raped and tortured her with his knife until he fell asleep.

The following day he continued to torture the 16-year-old, giving her electric shocks all over her body and sexually humiliating her. He also cut off most of her hair, telling her that he wanted all his victims to look like the short-haired actress in his favourite film,
Flashdance
. As the days passed, 214

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self-styled psychics told the police that Tina was dead, which was a comparatively safe bet as she was known to have been kidnapped by Wilder who had murdered all of his previous victims. But Tina was still alive.

For, in his own limited way, Christopher Wilder had bonded with the teenager who’d been on welfare most of her life and had often gone hungry. And he realised that he could use her to help him abduct another girl.

Attempted murder

So it was that on 10 April, Tina approached a 16-year-old schoolgirl called Dawnette Sue Wilt and offered her a shop job.

She introduced Christopher Wilder as the shop manager, and he suggested that Dawnette sign some forms he had in the car.

Once there, he trained his gun on her and bound her wrists and ankles. He also sexually assaulted the girl in the back seat whilst Tina drove.

That night, the trio stayed at a room near Toledo, Ohio, and Wilder gave Dawnette electric shock treatment and raped her repeatedly, gagging her with duct tape so that the other residents couldn’t hear her screams.

The following morning, he hog-tied and gagged Dawnette, and put her in the boot of his car, then he and Tina drove to a motel near Rochester. Again, he tortured Dawnette with his electroshock machine and raped her throughout the night whilst Tina sat in shocked silence, threatened with death.

The next day, he saw Tina’s mother on television begging for her daughter’s safe return. Vowing that the police would never take him alive, Wilder forced his two victims into his vehicle and took off at speed.

He decided to kill Dawnette, driving the bound and sedated girl to a dirt road where he attempted to suffocate her by pinching her nostrils together. She managed to pull free, so he produced his knife. She begged him to shoot her rather than stab her 215

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to death – but stabbing is a more sadistic act so the merciless Wilder stabbed her twice with all of his strength. Believing that she was dead, he drove off with Tina – but Dawnette managed to free herself from her bloodsoaked bonds and stagger to the roadside, where a shocked driver took her to the nearest hospital. (Though badly hurt and deeply traumatised, the 16-year-old eventually made a complete recovery.) Meanwhile, Wilder wondered aloud if he’d actually succeeded in killing Dawnette. He turned the car round and returned to the scene of the stabbing, planning to shoot her. But, to his horror, she had gone.