A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

twenties.
    Despite his bizarre compulsion, Wilder was a very intelligent man and he knew exactly where to go to find girls like that: amateur model shows in the malls of America . . .
    Would-be models and starlets are made vulnerable by their ambition. Chris Wilder would take advantage of that. He was immaculately dressed with a neatly trimmed beard as he blended in with the crowds surrounding the temporary stages in the malls. Long-legged coeds and high school girls strolled and strutted, some smoothly and some with the awkward coltishness of adolescence. Wilder was well prepared with fake business cards that identified him as the representative of a model agency. With an impressive camera on a strap around his neck, he watched the amateur models and smiled at them encouragingly.
    St. Patrick’s Day found Wilder a hundred miles north of Boynton Beach at a shopping mall on Merritt Island. Teresa Ferguson was twenty-one, the stepdaughter of a police captain in Indian Harbor. Terry hoped to become a model and she was certainly lovely enough. She had huge brown eyes, a full mouth and clouds of dark hair. She sometimes affected a sultry, pouting expression when she gazed at a camera, but she was really a sweet-natured girl.
    Terry Ferguson took her time shopping in the mall that Saturday afternoon. At some point, she was approached by a man with sandy hair and a neat beard. Shoppers in the mall would recall seeing her talking earnestly to a man with a camera. She didn’t seem at all alarmed; she was smiling and nodding.
    In a seemingly unconnected incident, a man whose car was stuck in the sand near West Cocoa Beach had to call a tow truck that day. Merritt Island is a long, narrow, off-shore spit of sand, and it wasn’t unusual for people to get stuck. It was sometime between three and three-thirty when the call for a tow came in. The truck driver responded, to find a man about forty, balding, with a short beard. His 1973 Chrysler was trapped along a local road known as a lover’s lane. In his frustration at finding himself in the soft loam, he had revved his engine until the rear wheels of the car were deeply embedded. He said his trunk was locked and he didn’t have a key, but that he didn’t have anything in there that would help him dig out, anyway.
    The Chrysler came out of the sand easily enough, he paid the tow truck driver, and drove to a Cocoa Beach motel, where he didn’t check in with his real name—Chris Wilder; he signed the name of his business partner.
    Like Rosario Gonzalez and Beth Kenyon, Terry Ferguson failed to return home, and her parents reported her as missing.
    On March 20, three days later and 250 miles away in Tallahassee, a nineteen-year-old Florida State University student named Jill Lennox* was shopping at the Governor’s Square Mall. Slim and blonde, Jill
looked
like a model. It had been six years since Ted Bundy entered the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State and had left two coeds dead and two others gravely injured. Six years since he had sprinted across campus to attack another woman on the same night. The fear that had gripped Tallahassee then had long since dissipated. Jill Lennox had been only thirteen then, and if she’d ever heard of Ted Bundy, she knew he was safely locked up on Death Row in the Florida State Prison in Starke.
    When a man walked up to her and held out a business card, Jill was a little startled—but not afraid. He explained that he was a professional photographer and that he could not help noticing that she had the kind of beauty that modeling agencies were looking for. Jill smiled but shook her head when he offered her a job. He had a commission for a “shoot” and he needed a young blonde who looked like a coed. “That’s you,” he grinned. “You’re perfect. I have things set up back at my studio.”
    “No,” she said. “I don’t think I’m interested.”
    When he couldn’t convince her to take the job, the bearded man shook his head good-naturedly. “O.K.,” he said, holding his hands up in a gesture of defeat. “I took some shots of you as you were walking—” He offered to send them to her if he could use them, too.
    “But my release forms are back in my car. It’s parked right outside the entrance, there.”
    It seemed safe enough. Broad daylight in the parking lot of a busy shopping mall. Jill walked with the man toward his car, a car that wasn’t quite as close as he’d described. He talked amiably as they strolled