A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

had been abducted and taken across state lines against her will, a federal crime. Now the FBI entered the case. Chris Wilder was infinitely dangerous to beautiful young women and every law officer who read the case follow-ups believed that he wasn’t going to stop unless he was captured.
    A federal warrant was issued for Wilder’s arrest.
    Jill Lennox’s statement made it clear Wilder was a sadistic sociopath, a man who derived pleasure from his victims’ pain. He was not abducting women solely to rape them. His cruel games only
began
with his sexual release.
    Although little hope had been held out for the women who had vanished, the extent of the Ferguson’s tragedy became known the next day. Terry wasn’t missing any longer. A crew from an electric company had come across her body in an isolated creek in Polk County, more than a hundred miles from where she had disappeared. Terry had been savagely beaten and strangled. Authorities followed Wilder’s trail to the mall where Terry vanished, to the bogged-down car in the sandy lover’s lane, and then to where her body floated. Sickened, they concluded that she had probably been in the trunk of his car while it was being towed.
    There was even more urgency to their search now. Wilder had obviously zig-zagged around Florida for weeks, but, with Jill, he had crossed into Georgia. There was no telling where he might be by now. He wasn’t a serial killer—not unless he was in the final stages of his “addiction.” He was taking victims in too narrow a time frame. He wasn’t a mass murderer; he clearly wasn’t psychotic. Wilder was too well organized. Crazy as his behavior seemed, he knew what he was doing and he was quite capable of seducing his victims with a charming story and a winning smile and then his escapes were well-planned.
    They concluded that Chris Wilder fell into that rarest of multiple murderers: the spree killer. He was off on a spree of murder, and there was no telling when he would stop.

    Now that he was headline news all over Florida and the southeast, people who had known Wilder shook their heads in amazement. Friends at the race track told FBI Special Agents that the man they had known and raced with was “a really nice guy, a little shy . . . very kind . . .”
    One of the most shocked of Chris Wilder’s acquaintances was a homicide detective in the Palm Beach County Sheriff’s Department. Tom Neighbors read a BOLO (Be on the Lookout For) that had come into his office and was stunned. He knew Chris well—or, rather, he thought he did. A racing fan, he enjoyed following Chris’s competition. He liked the guy, and found him friendly and generous. He had invited Chris over to his home many times—the last being on March 8. They had both been excited about an upcoming race.
    Try as he might, Tom Neighbors had trouble picturing Chris Wilder as a roving rapist/killer. But then he remembered something. He himself had worked a case of sexual assault in 1983 where two barely pubescent girls had been pulled into a Chevy El Camino pickup in Boynton Beach. The driver had taken them to a lonely road and molested them—and then, surprisingly, he had driven them
back
to where he abducted them—and let them go.
    The case had never been solved, even though it happened very close to the police station, and, Neighbors now realized, close to Chris Wilder’s office. An artist’s sketch done from the girls’ description showed a man with a thick head of hair, which Chris hadn’t had for a long time. But Neighbors wondered if Chris might have been wearing one of the toupees he occasionally affected.
    The Palm Beach County detective arranged for the 1983 victims to look at a laydown of mugshots, and like Jill Lennox, they picked Chris Wilder at once.
    His personable mask off at last, Chris Wilder was on the run. He didn’t linger long in Georgia, but headed the Chrysler west.
    It was March 22, 1984. Cutting south and then heading due west from Bainbridge, Georgia, Chris Wilder traversed the southern borders of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, as he hastily put miles between himself and the Florida authorities. He may not have known yet that the FBI was after him too, but he must have realized it was only a matter of time and he had much to do before anyone caught up with him. The sun was warm and the wind fierce off the Gulf of Mexico as Wilder pulled off U.S. Highway 10 and turned his road-dirty white car into a motel in tiny Winnie, Texas. He