A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

the ordinary. One woman said she had gone with him to an empty house someplace in Boca West. “He said it was a ‘photo test’ for a BMW ad,” she said with a shiver. “But he never called me back.”
    Back in Florida, the Kenyons, the Orsborns, and the Gonzalez family hoped against hope that their daughters were still alive, perhaps held captive somewhere. In a sense, their endless waiting was worse than the grief the families felt who
knew
that their daughters were dead. Their dreams were haunted with visions of torture, horrific captivity and their own helplessness.
    Searches of Chris Wilder’s home and business produced no clues at all that might indicate any of the missing girls had ever been in either spot. Wilder had had a boat—he could have dumped their bodies far out in the ocean where no one would ever find them, and this was plausible since he seemed to have a fetish about putting his victims in water after he was finished with them.
    The fact remained: while Wilder was living in his own house, he had managed to hide the missing girls completely; now that he was on the run, he dropped dead bodies off with alarming regularity. What was there about his being in Florida that had made it easier for him to hide his activities?
    A map in the investigator’s command center showed Chris Wilder’s slashing course across America. On March 25, the marker moved north from Beaumont, Texas, to Oklahoma City. He had spent the previous night at a motel there. And then, that Sunday afternoon, he was seen at the Pen Square Mall, although no one thought much of it until Monday.
    Suzanne Wendy Logan, twenty, was a new bride on that spring day in 1984. Suzanne had a great smile and thick, taffy-colored hair with blonde highlights. Her ambition was to be a model, and she had painstakingly put together a portfolio with various photographs of herself. She went to the Pen Square Mall on March 25 and met Chris Wilder there.
    Wilder’s luck in finding women who fit perfectly into his victim profile was uncanny. With shorter and shorter spates between his killing days, he was somehow able to spot his victim, cut her away from those who might have saved her, and destroy her at his leisure. How did he
know
that Suzanne dreamed of being a model? Did he have some magic power that drew his targets to him?
    In truth, it was more likely that Chris Wilder had simply become completely conversant with the longings of vulnerable, naive girls. He knew how to look like a professional photographer, and he had used that guise to dupe Suzanne. When she turned up missing, there were witnesses who recalled seeing her there in the mall Sunday afternoon, talking with a bearded man with a camera around his neck.
    They found poor Suzanne two days later and more than three hundred miles away. Continuing north, with his helpless victim in tow, Wilder had driven up I-135 to Newton, Kansas, away from the warm days and into wind-driven snowstorms. He had found a motel with thick walls where he beat and tortured Suzanne Logan, who wasn’t as lucky as Jill Lennox had been. The next day, a fisherman found her bound body on the shores of Milford Lake, although it would take time to positively identify her.
    Chris Wilder’s rage was building; he inflicted pain that was beyond the imagination of someone who felt empathy for other people. Suzanne’s beautiful hair had been cut short and her pubic hair shaved. She had been “teased” with a sharp knife, bitten, and stabbed through the left breast.
    Because Wilder was still using his ex-partner’s credit cards, he left a trail that was easy to follow. The investigators were frustrated because they knew where he had
been,
but they had no way of predicting where he would go next. He had abducted seven women since the end of January, and only one had escaped.

    Chris Wilder turned west again after he abandoned Suzanne Logan’s body. Still driving the Cougar that he’d stolen from Terry Walden, he roared across Colorado on Route 70. Apparently, he was confident enough that the police and FBI didn’t know where he was that he didn’t even bother taking the back roads, and he made good time on the freeways. On the night of March 28, he stopped in Rifle, Colorado, not far from the state’s western border. Once again, Wilder was in Bundy territory. He had sailed right through Glenwood Springs where Ted Bundy escaped from jail on New Year’s Eve, 1977. But even Ted Bundy had never killed so many women in