A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

Firebird would soon draw attention no matter where Chris Wilder was headed.

    Three thousand miles away from New York State and Boston, Toni Lee took a cab from LAX airport to Hermosa Beach. She was virtually home, but she didn’t call her mother, her boyfriend, or the police. Instead, she wandered into a shop that featured sexy lingerie and began picking out underwear. She had worn the same undergarments for more than a week, but that wasn’t why she was there. She was so emotionally traumatized that it was almost as if she was still under Wilder’s control.
    At some point during her bizarre shopping spree, Toni Lee walked up to the clerk at the counter and blurted out, “I’ve been kidnapped!”
    Before the clerk could stop her, Toni Lee left. She went home but that didn’t feel right either. She made her way to the Torrance Police Department, and smiled at the officers on duty there in a foggy way. They thought at first that the girl might be intoxicated, but then they looked beyond the almost-shaved head and recognized a face they had seen on “Missing” posters.
    She had to be Toni Lee Simms, who by this time, they all believed, was dead. And here she was, walking right into headquarters alive and well—but definitely emotionally disturbed.
    They questioned her carefully about where she had been. And she looked at them with eyes full of shock and fear and said simply, “I’ve been with a madman . . .”
    Indeed, she had. Toni Lee was taken to a hospital. Her physical wounds quickly became apparent. Her breasts bore peculiar dark bruises that doctors said had come from multiple electric shocks. She had lost weight and looked exhausted. Worst of all were her psychic wounds. A psychiatrist questioned Toni Lee gently, drawing out just the top layer of the horror she had seen.
    “She has been terrorized far beyond ordinary threats to her life,” he said later. “Wilder communicated with her very little.”
    He had instinctively or by design programmed Toni Lee according to the Stockholm Syndrome parameters, telling her that she must obey every single one of his commands if she wanted to live. Toni Lee had not known
who
her kidnapper was, but she learned his identity from the police. Knowing that she had been with a man who had killed almost a dozen young women only exaggerated her fear. At the psychiatrist’s request, Toni Lee was put into a quiet room where the only sound was the hum of the air-conditioner and the soft footsteps of nurses. Policemen stood guard outside her door so that no one could get to her.
    As she felt safer, Toni was able to tell the Torrance detectives a few more details of her abduction. She related her intense fear when Wilder had shoved the pistol in her mouth and said quietly, “Your modeling days are over.” She had expected to die then—and every day since then. She could not really believe that he had allowed her to leave him. That he had allowed her to live.
    Toni Lee Simms admitted that it was she who had lured the girl in Gary, Indiana, to Chris’s car. She had had no choice. She hated what he did to the girl named Carrie—but she had been helpless to stop him. She was happy to find that Carrie was
alive,
and not dead in the woods near Penn Yan, New York, as Chris had told her.
    “You were in a different car from Chris—after he stole the gold Pontiac,” a detective asked. “You could have driven away from him after he kidnapped Mrs. Dodge—”
    Toni Lee shook her head. “No. He was a race car driver. He told me. He told me that he could catch up with me, that I couldn’t go fast enough to get away from him—and then he was going to kill me.”
    Toni Lee said she hadn’t seen what happened to the woman in the lilac suit because she and Chris had been out of her sight at the time.
    The psychiatrist who was overseeing the teenager’s treatment explained brainwashing to the detectives. She had been reduced to a creature so afraid for her very life that she would have done
anything
to stay alive.

    How long could it go on? How could one man evade police officers and FBI agents all across America who were determined to stop him from his killing spree? Although he didn’t appear to be disguising himself and although he had only changed cars three times in his eight-week murdering spree, Chris Wilder seemed to be as elusive as the ground fog that clung to the rural highways of the Northeast in the very early morning.
    On that Friday—the very day that Toni