A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

from Florida to Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona—back to Indiana and Ohio, and now he was somewhere south of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. Only God knew how many women he had killed and thrown away on his sojourn of sadism, but the FBI and task forces around the country agreed that they had names for nine to twelve victims that matched his M.O.
    What shocked them the most, perhaps, was Carrie McDonald’s statement that Wilder had a girl with him, not another victim but an accomplice! She told them how the girl she knew as Toni Lee came into the mall in Gary, Indiana, where Carrie was applying for work. “She lied to me—to get me to go out by the car where he was waiting.”
    She described Toni Lee as being about her own age—sixteen—and said she was pretty but a little plump. When she had followed Toni Lee outside the mall, she’d been led to a Cougar, and a man with a beard. He had pulled a gun that she identified as a .357 Magnum as he bound her hands and feet. When they stopped at night, Carrie said she, too, had been subjected to electric shock torture, along with other horrible abuses.
    Carrie didn’t know why he hadn’t killed her, and she had been determined to find a way to escape. But she was bound and gagged during the days as they traveled, hog-tied in the back seat and hidden beneath a rack of clothing Wilder had strung up there.
    But it was hopeless. At night, she was hustled into various motel rooms, and the days were long stretches of bondage. “When we went through Niagara Falls,” Carrie remembered, “he and the girl got out to look at the falls, and they left me there in the parked car . . .”
    Chris Wilder had been so confident; he had somehow managed to control Toni Lee Simms so completely that she was on an invisible tether. And Carrie had been controlled with a gag and tightly-wound layers of duct tape. But then something happened. They woke in their motel room on the morning of April 12, and Wilder turned on the television. Toni Lee gasped. Her mother was on the screen, sitting there on “Good Morning America,” and begging for news of her missing daughter.
    Maybe that was the first time Wilder realized that he was big news, and big news meant the roads would be lousy with cops. Carrie told the FBI agents that he panicked, and hurried them into the car. He drove to the narrow and isolated road where the tractor mechanic had found her.
    She had known that he meant to kill her, even though she couldn’t see what he was doing. She was blindfolded, bound and gagged, as she followed his directions to “walk here . . . keep walking.” She sensed that they were in an open field, that they had broken out of the woods she’d seen before she was blindfolded. And then he forced her roughly to the damp ground. He clamped one hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut with the other, but she had tossed her head back and forth in her frantic efforts to breathe and stopped him from suffocating her.
    Then it felt as if he had hit her hard in the chest and twice on the back. Blinded, she didn’t realize she had been stabbed until she felt something warm and wet, her own blood. She had willed herself to lie perfectly still and she took breaths so shallow that she longed for oxygen. But she wanted him to think that she was dead. She had heard him standing over her, breathing heavily, and then, finally, the sound of his footsteps going away.
    At last, she rubbed the blindfold along the ground to strip it off her eyes. Her own blood made it possible for her to slide her wrists out of their bonds, and she had been able to untie her ankles. But even without the blindfold, she was disoriented. She had staggered first into the woods, and then she had found the road—and the man who saved her.
    Although Carrie was in critical condition, doctors believed that she would live. Courageously, she had told the investigators everything she knew about the man named Chris and the girl named Toni Lee. Toni was wearing blue jeans, she said, and had short hair and a round face.
    It was anybody’s guess where Chris Wilder and his captive—whom they now knew as Toni Lee Simms—had gone. They wondered if Toni Lee
was
still a captive or if she had joined forces with Wilder. Carrie said she had not hurt her, but she hadn’t helped her either. If Toni Lee continued to assist Wilder in snaring victims, detectives feared