A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

such a short window of time.
    Chris Wilder was nearly a thousand miles west of the lake where he had thrown Suzanne Logan away, and he was ready to troll for a victim again on March 29. He was audacious enough to ask for a particular type when he showed up at the Mesa Mall that Thursday. With his camera and other photographer’s gear, Wilder was observed in the mall as he asked if anyone knew of a “cowgirl-type” model; he needed one, he said, for a specific photography job commission.
    Sheryl Bonaventura, eighteen, was exactly what he had in mind. Although she had never heard of a man named Chris Wilder, she dressed for the part, unaware. When she arrived at the mall, she wore a white sweatshirt with a Cherokee logo, blue jeans, cowboy boots and a lot of chunky gold jewelry. Sheryl didn’t plan to shop long; she was going to meet a girlfriend soon so the two could head to Aspen for skiing, and all she needed were a few toiletry items.
    With her thick ash-blonde hair, her slender figure and her perfect features, Sheryl Bonaventura looked like a model. And although she looked sophisticated, she was only eighteen and a sitting duck for a man like Chris Wilder. Somewhere in that Mesa Mall, Sheryl met Wilder, believed his story offering her a modeling job with a big Denver agency, and walked away with him.
    Sheryl’s friend waited and waited for her, but she never arrived at their prearranged meeting spot. Somehow, Wilder had managed to convince her that it was all right to leave her friend stranded. There is evidence that Sheryl did go with Wilder willingly; the pair were seen in Silverton, a little mining town on the way to Durango. That was a hundred miles south of the mall where she was last seen. They stopped at a restaurant there where Sheryl was known—her grandfather once worked there. She talked with the owner who remembered how excited she was about becoming a model. A man with blue eyes and a neatly-clipped beard had stood right beside her, smiling, as she bubbled over with enthusiasm. The couple bought a sack of doughnuts before they moved on.
    There was no possibility that Sheryl Bonaventura was being held against her will—not at that point. Her last name meant “Good Luck” and “Happy Adventures,” and she believed she was on a wonderful trip.
    And it may have been, but only for a very short while. For some reason, Wilder did not harm Sheryl for several days. The couple were spotted at several locations in Colorado and Arizona. They seemed to be an especially close pair; the man with the beard never left the pretty blonde’s side. In retrospect, Sheryl’s sometimes “odd” behavior may have been her futile attempts to signal for help—with darting eyes and exaggerated expressions when the man beside her looked away for a moment.
    The couple were seventy miles south of Durango the day after they were seen at the restaurant. They seemed like any tourist couple as they visited the Four Corners Monument where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado’s borders touched.
    The night of March 30, they checked into a motel in Page, Arizona, as a married couple. The desk clerk didn’t notice anything untoward, but then motel clerks have learned not to look too closely at “married” couples. Shortly after dawn, someone noticed Chris Wilder as he whisked the blonde woman out of his room and rushed her to his car.
    From that point on, there were no more sightings of the woman in western garb and the man twice her age. Nor were there any calls from Sheryl. Back in Grand Junction, her family was frantically worried. On their own, they gathered friends and relatives to search for her. Their desperate search party fanned out from Grand Junction to Durango and down toward Las Vegas. They hoped that Sheryl had left on some kind of romantic adventure, and that she wasn’t in terrible danger.
    But the FBI’s revisiting of the trail Wilder left with his credit cards didn’t make things sound promising. Wilder had registered a woman thought to be Sheryl Bonaventura as his wife in Durango, and again in Page. However, the next night when he stopped in Las Vegas, he didn’t list a wife. If Sheryl was still with him, he might have had her wait in the car and then sneaked her into the motel room.
    Although Sheryl’s family kept up their search for her, she had vanished somewhere along the trail from her hometown to Las Vegas. Hunting for the beautiful teenager was an impossible task; no one could check all