Christopher Wilder

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 13th of April 1984, a man stopped at Vic's Getty service station in Colebrook, New Hampshire, and asked for directions to Canada. He was Christopher Wilder, an Australian-American whom the press would call the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer. In the six weeks before that stop, he had abducted at least twelve young women and girls. He killed eight of them. Most had been lured by a simple offer to take their photograph.

  Wilder was not a stranger to the authorities when that spree began. Police on two continents had known his name for years. Doctors had assessed him. Courts had heard accusations against him. So how did a man with that history stay free long enough to cross the United States? What did the few people who survived him manage to do? And why do investigators still connect his name to unsolved cases from long before 1984?

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• 2. Sydney Years

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  Christopher Bernard Wilder was born on the 13th of March 1945 in Sydney, New South Wales, the eldest of four sons. His father, Coley Chapman Wilder, was an American naval officer. His mother, June, born June Decker, was Australian. Stories about his childhood are disputed. Wilder reportedly nearly died at birth and nearly drowned in a swimming pool at the age of two. Journalist Duncan McNab says the near-drowning was invented by Wilder himself.

  On the 4th of January 1963, when Wilder was 17, he raped a 13-year-old girl in a quarry at Freshwater. Two other men were present, and both denied taking part in the assault. Wilder was sentenced to probation. Years later he claimed he had also been given electroshock therapy, and some have suggested it made his violent sexual tendencies worse. McNab says there is no evidence that any such treatment took place.

  In 1968, Wilder married a woman named Christine. She left him after he was taken in for questioning over a series of sexual assaults at Manly Beach. After the divorce she told law enforcement that he had tried to seduce both her mother and her sister. She had found pictures of young women in their underwear in a briefcase in his car. She also said that Wilder had twice tried to kill her.

  In November 1969, Wilder used nude photographs to extort sex from a student nurse. She complained to police, but the charges were dropped when she refused to testify in court. Later that same year, Wilder emigrated to the United States.

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• 3. Boynton Beach

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  The house Wilder settled into in Boynton Beach, Florida, stood on the waterfront, twenty-five miles south of wealthy Palm Beach. He did well in real estate. He traveled often to Hawaii and The Bahamas. He also took up photography, and he turned one bedroom of his home into a darkroom.

  Between 1971 and 1975, Wilder faced a string of charges connected to sexual assault. In one case, he lured a young woman into his truck by saying he wanted to photograph her for a modeling contract. That pretense would become the heart of his method. He was convicted more than once, yet he never went to jail for any of these offenses.

  In 1977, a psychologist examined him and called him a "mentally disordered sex offender." The psychologist wrote that he was "not safe except in a structured environment and should be in a resident program." The report described a need to dominate women and turn them into slaves for his pleasure. It also noted his interest in white slavery.

  In 1982, Wilder was visiting his parents in Australia when he was charged over two 15-year-old girls. He had lured them away from Manly Beach and forced them to pose nude. His parents posted bail, and he returned to Florida to wait for trial. Then, in 1983, two girls aged 10 and 12 picked his mugshot out of a set of photographs. They said he was the man who had abducted and assaulted them in Boynton Beach. Court delays kept the Australian case from being heard, and the first hearing was set for April 1984, after Wilder was dead.

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• 4. Miami to Kansas

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  On the 26th of February 1984-21-year-old Rosario Teresa "Chary" Gonzalez worked at the Miami Grand Prix as a spokesmodel, handing out aspirin samples for a pharmaceutical company. Witnesses said she left the track between noon and 1:00 p.m. with a Caucasian man in his thirties. Her blue 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass was later found parked near Dupont Plaza. Wilder was a race car driver who often visited the track. He was at that race too, driving a Porsche 911 in the IMSA GTU class.

  On the 5th of March 1984, Elizabeth "Beth" Ann Kenyon, 23, vanished. A Miss Florida finalist, she was a former University of Miami cheerleader. She had also taught special needs students and coached cheerleading at Coral Gables Senior High School. Wilder had once dated her and proposed, but she turned him down because of their age difference. She is believed to have been last seen with him at a gas station near Miami. Six days later her car turned up abandoned at Miami Airport. Gonzalez had competed in the Miss Florida contest alongside Kenyon. The remains of neither woman have ever been found.

  Because Wilder knew both women, investigators named him a suspect in their disappearances. From then on, he went after women he did not know, many of them in shopping malls. Over the following weeks his crimes would stretch across 16 states and more than 6000 miles, from Florida west to California and then north and east to New Hampshire.

  On the 18th of March, Wilder led 21-year-old Theresa Anne "Terry" Ferguson away from the Merritt Square Mall in Merritt Island, Florida. He killed her and left her body at Canaveral Groves, where it was found on the 23rd of March.

  Two days after Ferguson was taken, 19-year-old Linda Grober, a Florida State University student, declined his offer to photograph her for a modeling agency at the Governor's Square Mall in Tallahassee. He assaulted her in the parking lot, bound her hands and put her in his trunk. He drove her to the Glen Oaks Motel in Bainbridge, Georgia, and tortured her there. Grober fought back and escaped into the bathroom, where she locked the door and pounded on the walls. Wilder fled in his car, taking all of her belongings.

  On the 21st of March, in Beaumont, Texas, Wilder asked Terry Diane Walden to pose as a model. She was 23, a wife and mother, and a nursing student at Lamar University. She refused. Two days later she ran into him again, and he kidnapped her. Her body was found in a canal on the 26th of March.

  Wilder drove off in Walden's rust-colored 1981 Mercury Cougar. On the 25th of March, at the Penn Square Mall in Oklahoma City, he abducted 21-year-old Suzanne Wendy Logan. He took her 180 miles north to Newton, Kansas, and checked into room 30 of the Interstate 35 Inn. The next morning, after breakfast, he drove 90 miles northeast to Milford Reservoir near Junction City. There he killed her and left her body under a cedar tree.

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• 5. West and Back East

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  Four days after Logan's death, Wilder took 18-year-old Sheryl Lynn Bonaventura captive in Grand Junction, Colorado. Staff at a diner in Silverton remembered the pair telling them they were headed for Las Vegas, with a stop in Durango. On the 30th of March they were seen at the Four Corners Monument. Wilder then checked into the Page Boy Motel in Page, Arizona. Around the 31st of March he killed Bonaventura near Kanab Creek in Utah. Her body was not found until the 3rd of May.

  On the 1st of April, 17-year-old Michelle Lynn Korfman disappeared from a Seventeen magazine cover model competition at the Meadows Mall in Las Vegas. She was an aspiring model. Someone photographed Wilder stalking her at the event. Her body lay near a roadside rest stop in Southern California until the 11th of May. Dental X-rays were needed to identify it, and that did not happen until mid-June.

  On the 4th of April, near Torrance, California, Wilder photographed 16-year-old Tina Marie Risico and then abducted her. He drove her to El Centro and assaulted her there. Wilder apparently thought she could help him lure other victims, so he kept her alive. She traveled with him back east through Prescott, Arizona, Joplin, Missouri, and Chicago, Illinois. Risico survived. During the second week of April, the FBI added Wilder to its ten most wanted fugitives list.

  On the 10th of April, Wilder and Risico reached Merrillville, Indiana. At the Southlake Mall he abducted 16-year-old Dawnette Sue Wilt. Risico drove toward New York while Wilder raped Wilt repeatedly. Near Penn Yan, New York, he took Wilt into the woods and tried to suffocate her. He then stabbed her twice and left her.

  Wilt did not die. She tied a pair of jeans around herself and flagged down help. A truck driver named Charlie Laursen took her to Soldiers and Sailors Hospital in Penn Yan. Wilder had doubled back to make sure she was dead, and he panicked when he found she was gone. After surgery Wilt recovered. She told local police that Wilder was heading for Canada.

  At the Eastview Mall in Victor, New York, Wilder forced 33-year-old Beth Elaine Dodge into his car. He had Risico follow in Dodge's Pontiac Firebird. After a short drive, he shot Dodge and dumped her body in a gravel pit. He and Risico then took the Firebird to Logan Airport in Boston, where he bought her a ticket to Los Angeles. Wilder headed north alone. In Beverly, Massachusetts, he tried to abduct a woman at gunpoint, and failed.

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• 6. Colebrook

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  Two New Hampshire state troopers, Leo Jellison and Wayne Fortier, approached Wilder at the station. He retreated to his car and armed himself with a Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver. Jellison grabbed him from behind, and two shots went off in the struggle. The first bullet struck Wilder, exited through his back and hit Jellison. The second struck Wilder in the chest. Wilder died. Jellison was seriously wounded, but he recovered and returned to full duty.

  Among Wilder's possessions, investigators found a copy of John Fowles's novel The Collector. In that book, a man keeps a woman in his cellar against her will until she dies.

  Wilder was cremated in Florida. His personal estate was worth more than US$7 million. In June 1986, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled that the after-tax balance should be divided among the families of his victims. That same year, a made-for-television movie called Easy Prey dramatized his crimes.

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• 7. Sydney Cold Cases

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  On the 11th of January 1965, two 15-year-old girls, Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock, were killed at Wanda Beach near Sydney. Their families reported them missing, and the next day both were found partially buried in the sand. Sharrock's skull had been shattered by a blow to the back of the head, and she had fourteen knife wounds. Schmidt had been stabbed six times, and her throat was badly cut. Both girls had been raped. Wilder is one of three suspects, partly because he resembled a suspect sketch. He had also been convicted of a gang rape on a Sydney beach two years earlier. The case is the oldest now under review by the New South Wales unsolved homicide unit.

  On the 29th of January 1966, a butcher arriving for work at 5:45 a.m. at the Piccadilly Centre in Wollongong found the body of Wilhelmina Kruger at the foot of a basement staircase. She was a 56-year-old cleaning lady. She had been attacked three stories up, possibly around 4:30 a.m., and dragged down the escalators and stairs. Before the murder she had felt that someone was stalking her, and her husband had driven her to work. The crime remains unsolved and is regarded as one of the most notorious in the state's history.

  A month later, on the 16th of February 1966, Anna Toskayoa Dowlingkoa disappeared after leaving the Taxi Club in Kings Cross at midnight. She was 27, a store employee and prostitute from Bondi. On the 26th of February, a truck driver stopped to fix a tire on Old Illawarra Road in Menai and found her body. Drag marks showed that it had been moved three to four days or so earlier. Police quickly linked what they called a "Jack the Ripper-like murder" to Kruger's death. They suspected the Wanda Beach killer, based on circumstantial evidence and similar methods.

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• 8. Florida and New York Files

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  On the 10th of November 1979, a teenage girl was found shot twice in a field in Caledonia, New York. She stayed a Jane Doe until 2015, when she was identified as 16-year-old Tammy Jo Alexander, who had vanished from Brooksville, Florida, in 1979. She was wearing an Auto Sports Products jacket, a brand Wilder was known to use. The .38 caliber bullet that killed her is the type commonly fired from .357 revolvers like the one found with Wilder. There is no evidence that anyone ever tested whether it matched his gun. Authorities also name Wilder as a potential suspect in the death of the Ellery Jane Doe, found on the 6th of December 1983.

  Shari Lynne Ball, 20, an aspiring model, went missing from Boca Raton, Florida, on the 27th of June 1983. Two days later she called a friend from a truck stop in Ashland, Virginia. A hunter found her badly decomposed body in Shelby, New York, on the 29th of October 1983. It was not identified until 2014. She lay thirty-eight miles from where Alexander was found. A New York State Police cold case investigator said her murder was consistent with "Wilder's method of operations."

  In Fort Myers, Florida, 17-year-old Mary Opitz was last seen on the 16th of January 1981, walking toward the parking lot of the Edison Mall. On the 11th of February, 18-year-old Mary Elizabeth Hare vanished from the same lot. Her body was found that June in a remote field in Lehigh Acres, and Opitz has never been found. Tina Marie Beebe, 17, had told her sister on the 20th of January 1981 that a man had offered her modeling work before she disappeared in Fort Myers. Her skeletal remains were found in a nylon bag on the 29th of May 1982 near Loxahatchee, close to property owned by Wilder. The Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office identified her in July 2013.

  On the 19th of December 1982, a real estate agent inspecting land near Loxahatchee found the remains of a 37-year-old woman, Leona Jean Keller. She had been shot once in the head. She was known as the "Palm Beach County Jane Doe" until DNA testing identified her in 2025.

  Tammy Lynn Leppert, 18, was last seen around 11:30 a.m. on the 6th of July 1983 in Cocoa Beach, Florida, arguing with a male companion. Her family filed a $1 million lawsuit against Wilder before his death and dropped it afterward. Her mother, modeling agent Linda Curtis, said Wilder met Tammy on the set of the 1983 comedy Spring Break. She later said she never believed he was involved, and police could not link him to the case. Two other Florida women, Lori Jane Kearsey and Melody Marie Gay, died in early 1984 in ways that resembled his crimes. He has since been ruled out as their killer.

  Colleen Emily Orsborn, 15, left her Daytona Beach home on the 15th of March 1984, two days after Wilder's birthday. Wilder is the primary suspect in her disappearance. He was staying at a motel in Daytona Beach that day. A classmate said a man resembling him had offered her $100 to pose for pictures. No evidence has connected them directly. Her body was found on the 6th of April 1984 near a lake in Orange County, but it was first ruled not to be hers. DNA testing finally identified her in February 2011-27 years after she vanished.

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