A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

there would be more deaths.
    The investigators had assumed that Chris Wilder would continue moving north and east, although they knew that assumptions made about a sexual renegade are seldom predictable. Going over the thick stack of followup reports they had gathered from anyone and everyone who had ever known Wilder, they found something interesting. An old girlfriend of his in Florida had told detectives that Wilder had once visited her home in New Hampshire with her. He was getting closer to the small New England state. He hadn’t made it over the border to Mexico, so they figured he might be trying for Canada.
    But then Carrie McDonald had said that Wilder had threatened to send her to Mexico City, not once but several times. He might just as easily backtrack and head toward the Southwest again.

    Beth Dodge was thirty-three, a wife, mother, and Sunday School teacher. She did not fit Chris Wilder’s profile in any way, save that she was female. She was sweetly pretty, but she was no winsome long-legged teenager with hopes of becoming a model. Beth had a lunch date to keep with a friend in the Eastview Mall near Victor, N.Y., which was a small town just off I-90 about forty-five miles northwest of Penn Yan.
    Doctors were still monitoring Carrie as they had been for the three hours she had been in the Emergency Room when Beth got into her gold 1982 Pontiac Firebird. It was a flashy car for a Sunday School teacher but she loved it and kept it spotless. Beth wore a lilac-colored suit in keeping with the pleasant spring day.

    Chris Wilder sat behind the wheel of the road-worn Cougar in the Eastview Mall. He watched carefully as cars approached and parked. When he saw the gold Firebird, he nodded, half to himself. That was the one he wanted.
    Wilder and Toni Lee waited for more than an hour, and he never took his eyes off the Pontiac. When a slender woman in a pale lavender suit came walking back toward it, he motioned to Toni to get out of the car. She knew what to do.
    Listening to the story that Toni Lee told about needing some help, Beth Dodge believed her and walked with her to the car where Wilder waited. He ordered her into his car at gunpoint, took her keys from her hand, and tossed them to Toni Lee. “Get in the Pontiac and follow me,” he instructed.
    The two-car caravan ended up at a gravel pit. He made Beth get out of his car and walk into the gravel pit area. There was no one else around to hear the boom of his gun as he shot the young housewife in the back. Chris Wilder left the battered Cougar at the gravel yard, and he and Toni Lee drove off in the gold Firebird.
    Toni Lee had lost hope that she would ever escape; she tried simply to live through each day. Had anyone seen her, she might have looked normal enough, but a closer look would have let them see a vague, glassy look in her eyes. Torrance, California, was a whole country’s worth of freeways away; she didn’t believe she could ever go back there to her mother, her boyfriend or her life. That was another world.
    Shortly after nine that night, Toni Lee was shocked and stunned when Chris Wilder turned the gold car into the airport access road in Boston, and followed the signs to Logan Airport. She wondered if he was going to shoot her there—in front of everyone. Instead, he pulled out a thick chunk of bills and handed it to her, telling her to buy a ticket to Los Angeles. She sat, disbelieving, for a few moments—and then she crawled out of the car. The door swung wide and slammed as he pulled rapidly away.
    No one in the crowded airport looked twice at the disheveled teenager in blue jeans, although her hair was cropped so close to her head that she looked like a Marine recruit or a refugee from a concentration camp. No one saw that her expression was strangely blank. She bought the ticket home, and boarded the “red eye” flight. Toni Lee had no idea why her captor had let her go, but her mind was in a fuzzy, odd place where she could not put one thought together with the next one to make sense out of anything.

    Beth Dodge’s body was found a few hours after she died, and so was the Cougar that had once belonged to Terry Walden and her husband. There was no question that Chris Wilder was still in a killing mode. The ugly bullet wound in Beth’s back marked her murderer as a heartless coward. It took only a short time for investigators to send out a nationwide alert for her missing car. Surely, a car as visible as a stolen gold