A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

related to his next captive. The tenth victim may have lived because she didn’t argue with him or threaten him. Her very helplessness may have saved her life.
    On April 4, Toni Lee Simms*, sixteen, was headed to apply for a job at a delicatessen in Torrance, one of the many cities whose boundaries blend into one another south of Los Angeles. Toni Lee wasn’t looking forward to the job and it paid only minimum wage—but she and her mom were more or less alone in the world. As young as she was, she was a survivor who wanted to pull her own weight, someone who was used to a side of life that wasn’t always comfortable or safe. When she encountered Chris Wilder, she was easy game.
    He came up to her outside the deli, and he didn’t look frightening at all—just an older man with a beard and friendly blue eyes. He told her that she was just the right type for an ad campaign that a company he worked for was doing. She saw his camera and a bunch of other photographic gear he had with him. He looked straight and honest and safe.
    Toni Lee was a little bit chubby, and she wasn’t used to having someone tell her she could be a model. She was flattered and intrigued when the man—“Chris”—offered her a hundred-dollar bill if she would come to the beach near Santa Monica with him and pose for some ad shots. She calculated how many hours she would have to work to make that much money—
even
if she got the job in the deli.
    It was kind of fun at first. The sun was shining and there were people around, but later she realized that the wind was getting chilly and everyone but the two of them had left the beach. She told Chris that she had to be getting home. His friendly persuasion disappeared in an instant, and he seemed terribly angry at her.
    Before she could think fast enough to run, a pistol appeared in Chris’s hand and he grabbed her by the back of the neck with one hand and forced the gun into her mouth with the other. She heard a click as he aimed the gun down her throat.
    “Your modeling days are over,” he breathed.
    He dragged her over to his car, pushed her into the back seat, and held her down as he tied her arms behind her and then looped the rope down to her ankles.
    And then the car was racing away from the beach, away from Torrance. Toni Lee had no way of telling what time it was, but it seemed as though they had driven more than six hours when her captor finally slowed to a stop.
    Michele Korfman, gone from her safe life in Las Vegas, was dead; her unclaimed, unidentified body lay in the Los Angeles County Morgue. (On June 15, when Nevada and California authorities finally connected her sad little corpse with the beautiful seventeen-year-old who had vanished from Las Vegas, she had been missing two and a half months.)
    Wilder and Toni Lee were still in the Cougar, although it now bore stolen plates from New Mexico. Except for using his partner’s credit cards, this was Wilder’s sole effort to hide his identity. He headed out of Los Angeles County to El Centro, California, twelve miles from the Mexican border at Calexico. He may have planned to attempt a crossing at the border, and thought better of it. The pair, he, thirty-nine, and Toni Lee, sixteen, checked into an El Centro motel.
    Long before it was light, Wilder put Toni Lee back in his car and they crossed the desert into Arizona, and then turned the Cougar north to Prescott. They stayed the night at a motel there, and then something changed; maybe Wilder
knew
that he’d made the Ten-Most-Wanted list; perhaps he saw the flyer with his picture in a truck stop cafe or in a gas station. There were no sightings, no motel receipts—nothing for four days.
    During those four days, Toni Lee Simms was subjected to multiple sexual assaults. She didn’t fight him. She had survived with passivity for a long time, learning to watch people quietly and to evaluate what
they
wanted so that she could just get along. She listened to her captor as he talked of his fantasies, his obsessions, his hopes and fears. Somehow, her very helplessness soothed Wilder. All of the other captives had been dead within a day or two.
    For some reason Chris Wilder didn’t kill Toni Lee Simms. He kept her with him in his headlong race back east across America. Toni Lee was caught in the grip of the Stockholm Syndrome, an intricate psychological process that virtually turns the mind inside out. A more familiar term is brainwashing. Anyone can be brainwashed; it is only a