A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

camera, Chris Wilder spoke in a soft voice that had the slightest trace of a lisp, but no Australian accent at all. “I want to date,” he said. “I want to meet and enjoy the company of a number of women. I want to meet someone special.”
    His words sounded like every ad ever placed by a “swinging” playboy in a lovelorn column. “I have quite a few playthings at home,” he bragged. “I like sports cars. [But] bar hopping is not—and never has been—one of my greater joys . . . I would like a family one day.”
    Perhaps. “Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, I was heavy into surfing,” Wilder continued. “That was my sole game in life. Arriving here and finding no surf, I went from one extreme to the other. I was completely non-work oriented prior to coming here.”
    Apparently, he wanted to come across as a good, solid, marrying kind of guy—but also as an exciting man. He sounded too perfect. Why—at almost forty—was a man with so many sterling qualities still single? Why did he have to pay somebody to find him a date?
    In truth, Wilder had met many women already; he just hadn’t met any who wanted to be involved in a serious relationship with him. He took out Vicki Smith, who was also a race-car driver. They certainly had a lot in common and they went dancing once a week. “He was so polite and gallant,” Vicki remembered. “He never let me open my car door.”
    But politeness and gallantry weren’t enough for Vicki. And their dancing dates became sporadic when Wilder met a woman he found completely perfect for him. Her name was Beth Kenyon and she was twenty-one in 1982 when she met Wilder at the Miss Florida beauty pageant. Wilder introduced himself as a professional photographer. He had an expensive camera around his neck and was taking pictures of many of the contestants. Beth liked his easy manner and his smile.
    Beth was tall, slender, and classically beautiful. She had been a cheerleader through high school and college, and she was a finalist in the Orange Bowl princess beauty contest. When she graduated from the University of Miami, she became a teacher of special education classes at a high school in Coral Gables. She coached the cheerleading squad and the girls were thrilled to have her.
    Beth Kenyon and Christopher Wilder were never a couple, not in the way he visualized it. For one thing, he was sixteen years older than she was, and she had a number of men in her own age bracket whom she dated. Beth’s family was wealthy, and she was scarcely impressed with Wilder’s construction business, his house, cars and boat. She never considered him anything but a buddy. And she talked about him that way to her mother, Dolores Kenyon. Chris was someone she occasionally had dinner with, a good friend who was always available to her.
    Dolores Kenyon met Chris Wilder sometime after Beth did, when he invited Beth and her family out for dinner in an expensive French restaurant. “He was very polite,” she recalled. “He brought flowers for the women, and he stood when we entered the room.”
    Later, when Dolores would have a tragic reason to try to dig deeper beneath Wilder’s courtly facade she recalled, “There was nothing menacing about him at all. Actually, Beth found him a little boring . . .”
    Shortly after this “family dinner,” both Beth and her parents were stunned by what happened the next time Chris Wilder saw Beth. “He asked Beth to marry him!” her mother said. “Beth was shocked. She had never given him any encouragement. She told me she explained her feelings to him, and afterward she thought that everything was fine—they were just going to be friends. She said he took her refusal very well.”
    Beth Kenyon got over her surprise at Chris Wilder’s unexpected proposal, and decided that they had simply been miscommunicating, but that they had worked it out. Chris had taken her explanation that she just didn’t view him as more than a very good friend without any sign that he was hurt or angry. Had Beth known that he was devastated, she would have been even more shocked. He didn’t betray his feelings by so much as the flicker of an eye or a flush of embarrassment.
    Beth continued to see Chris and to trust him as a friend. She was serenely oblivious to the fact that he was totally obsessed with her. He had buried his secret fixations for most of his life, and by the age of thirty-nine, he was expert at hiding them.
    Chris Wilder had arranged to race