A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

teenage girl in West Palm Beach. He had, however, denied any connection to the charges to his friends—insisting that he had only been questioned about the girl, and that police had admitted it was a case of “mistaken identity.” Wilder had violated that probation almost immediately when he flew to Australia. There he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted two teenage girls. He had been arrested the next day, but Australian authorities released him on $376,000 bail that his parents had posted. He then left Australia, after promising his parents he would return for his trial, which was scheduled for April 1984.
    With all the charges and trials pending, Chris Wilder had managed to maintain his equilibrium. He continued to race his Porsche, date a number of women, and act as the good and generous friend that everyone in Boynton Beach and Boca Raton knew. But now, the world was clearly closing in on Chris Wilder. He was apparently
anything
but the perfect gentleman and the considerate and understanding #8220;buddy” that Beth thought he was. He had demonstrated that he was a sexual predator. It was Ken Whittaker, Jr. who saw the link that might connect Beth’s disappearance with Rosario Gonzalez. When he learned that Wilder drove a race car, he recalled that Rosario had vanished during the Miami Grand Prix.
    Armed with this information, Miami Homicide Detective George Morin checked Wilder’s name against the roster of competitors on the weekend of February 25–26. He found that Chris Wilder had driven his black Porsche 310HP sports car on Saturday, the twenty-fifth. He had placed seventeenth out of the large field of drivers and had won $400.
    More ominous was the statement of a photographer who had been at the Grand Prix that weekend. He told detectives that Chris Wilder had presented himself as a photographer as well as a contractor and race car driver, and had had an expensive camera around his neck on Sunday, February 26. The two had walked past the pharmaceutical company’s tent, and Wilder had stared openly at the girls who were handing out free samples. The witness could place Chris Wilder within ten feet of Rosario Gonzalez shortly before she disappeared.
    Neither Beth Kenyon’s parents nor the investigators doubted now that Wilder had taken her away. Dolores and Bill Kenyon went to Boynton Beach with the investigative team on Monday, March 12. Beth had been missing for a week, and Rosario for fifteen days. It took everything her parents had not to knock on Wilder’s door and demand that he let them in, but they waited at the Boynton Beach Police Department as they were asked to do.
    The investigators, in plain clothes, went to Wilder’s construction offices and asked to speak to him. And then they waited. Several hours later, a Cadillac Eldorado drove up and Wilder got out. They confronted him and asked to talk with him, and he nodded amiably and invited them into his office.
    Smiling at them, he fixed his clear blue eyes on their faces as he said he couldn’t have been with Beth in the gas station the day she vanished. “I was always working,” he explained. He called in an employee who gave him a somewhat halting alibi, “Chris is always down in Boca in the morning—then back here in the afternoon,” the man said. “He’s
always
here in the afternoon.”
    Boca Raton
—the posh seaside resort town, whose name flows so easily off the tongue. Few realize that it actually means “the mouth of the rat.” There
was
a tremendous amount of construction going on there. Any contractor worth his salt could make good money.
    The man who gave Wilder his alibi had blurted out something about “a girl’s car found at the airport,” and then acted as if he’d wanted to take it back. “That’s what you told me, wasn’t it, Chris?”
    Darting a cool glance at his talkative employee, Wilder had said quickly, “Yes, her mother told me that.”
    He gave the detectives permission to accompany him to his home—as long as he was back at work by five. But first, they checked with Dolores Kenyon. She was adamant that she had
never
told Wilder about Beth’s car being found at the airport. That was information that the police had chosen to keep quiet so that they could weed out the compulsive confessors from the real person who had abducted her.
    And yet Chris Wilder had known exactly where Beth’s convertible was.
    At this point, Ken Whittaker, Jr., and his associates pulled out of the intense probe,