A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

was still using his partner’s name and credit card.
    The next day was Friday, and Wilder backtracked a short distance to Beaumont, Texas. There, the bluebells that dot the landscape were beginning to respond to Spring. Terry Diane Walden was 24, married, and the mother of a four-year-old daughter, but she found time to study nursing, too. Terry was a beautiful blonde, and she often drew admiring stares. In fact, a man had approached her the day before in the parking lot of her college and told her she should be a model. She laughed when she told her husband about it, dismissing the stranger’s offer of a posing job as half peculiar and half compliment.
    Terry had almost forgotten about that encounter by Friday morning in the rush of activity that was her life. She took her little girl to day-care in the three-year-old Cougar that the Waldens had recently purchased. Terry was headed off to study with a friend so they could quiz each other on all the minute medical details they suspected would be on the next test. And she had to pick up a few things at a Beaumont shopping mall. She planned to be home in plenty of time to pick up her daughter from day-care.
    Chris Wilder had a reason to retrace his journey and go back to Beaumont. He couldn’t get the blonde woman he had seen out of his mind. No one will ever know if Terry had agreed to meet him in the mall to discuss his offer of a high-paying modeling gig, or if he somehow knew where she would be.
    Terry Walden’s husband was the first to realize something was terribly wrong that Friday evening. His daughter’s day-care called to say that his wife hadn’t come to pick the child up. Only then did the worried young husband remember her telling him about the man who owned a modeling agency. The local police and the FBI took Terry’s disappearance seriously from the very beginning, and they organized grid searches of the area around the mall.
    Law enforcement authorities knew that Wilder had left Florida and Georgia in the white Chrysler, and they were concerned when a teenaged girl reported that she had seen such a car along a little-traveled dirt road that afternoon. Something ephemeral had made her watch the car as it drove by slowly. “There was a man with a beard driving,” she recalled. “And there was a woman in the passenger seat. I didn’t see her well because she was kind of leaning her head against the window.”
    The white car had turned off through some rice fields, something that was also unusual. “I saw it again later,” the young witness said. “It was coming back along that rice-field road. But I couldn’t see the woman that time.”
    Although a massive search for Terry Walden began in that area, the searchers didn’t find her for three days. Her body, bound tightly with rope, bobbed face-down in a canal near the road where the girl had seen the white Chrysler. An autopsy revealed that Terry had been stabbed three times in the breasts, thrusts so powerful that the blade had gone completely through her body. She might have lived—if only she had gotten medical help soon enough; she had succumbed to exsanguination—bleeding to death. It was impossible to tell if she had been raped; any trace of seminal fluid would have dissipated in the waters of the canal.
    Terry Walden had probably died on the afternoon she was abducted, but it was possible she was still alive, if unconscious, when the witness saw her leaning against the passenger window of the Chrysler.
    The Waldens’ 1981 Cougar was missing, but there was no way of knowing if Terry’s killer was driving it. The white Chrysler hadn’t been sighted again, either.
    Every cop in the South knew now that Chris Wilder was a virtual killing machine, and he was hurtling across their territory, so slick in his approach to his victims that he was able to take them away from safety without so much as a scuffle or a soft cry for help. Back in South Florida, detectives and special agents were learning more about him.
    Apparently Wilder had used his “model agency” and “fashion photographer” ruses for a long time. Some girls who had been approached by the man with the beard saw his photograph in the newspapers and on television and came forward. The investigators learned that he had used a number of aliases, but he had always seemed to have business cards that made him seem reputable. Sometimes, he had actually taken photos of young women without making a remark or gesture that was out of