A Rage To Kill And Other True Cases

of the police vehicle with his gun drawn. Almost in slow motion, the troopers saw that the wanted man now held a .357 magnum in his own hand.
    Chuck Jellison literally leapt on Wilder through the driver’s door of the Pontiac; it was akin to being hit by the offensive tackle of a pro football team. For a frozen few moments, the two men were nothing but a tangle of struggling arms and legs. And then there was a tremendous “BOOM!!!”.
    Fortier kept his gun pointed at the gold car, watching in shock as his partner almost fell back toward him in an awkward stumbling gait. “I’m hurt—” Jellison said, and Fortier could see blood. Fortier covered him as he limped back to their station wagon to call for help.
    There was no movement from Wilder’s car, but Fortier was taking no chances. He waited, his gun leveled, afraid for his partner, but knowing he couldn’t drop his gun and go check on him. Time inched by, and suddenly there was another shot. The man everyone had hunted for weeks sat dead in the driver’s seat, his heart literally blown apart by the .357 magnum bullet.
    Chuck Jellison had been critically injured by a bullet that had been slowed down—but not stopped—as it passed through Wilder’s body front to back and
then
penetrated the trooper’s chest as he grasped the fugitive from behind in a bear hug. The slug missed Jellison’s liver by an inch. Had it hit him in the liver, he probably would have bled to death before help arrived.
    And help was arriving rapidly. The Colebrook Police first, and then state troopers from both Vermont and New Hampshire.
    Jellison was rushed to the hospital for surgery, but the only doctor who would examine the body of Chris Wilder was a forensic pathologist. The second blast from his .357 was a puzzle. The first had undoubtedly been a fatal wound, and quite probably, he had done it deliberately—fired into his own chest to commit suicide. The second shot had probably been the result of a muscle spasm in the dying fugitive’s hand. But this was the wound that blew his heart to pieces.
    It was, perhaps, a fitting end to a man whose cruelty suggested that he had no heart. And the day—Friday, the 13th—was an apt date for the denouement of the most savage spree killer America has ever known.
    The news of Chris Wilder’s death was a terrible blow for the Gonzalezes and the Kenyons. He had carried within him the knowledge of where their daughters were—and if they were alive or dead. The Kenyons wept when they got the news of the shoot-out in New Hampshire. “We were hoping and praying that they wouldn’t kill him,” Bill Kenyon said. “I know he killed himself. But we don’t know how we’ll ever find Beth now.”
    And they never did. Although Sheryl Bonaventura’s body was found in Utah on May 3, where the remains of Beth Kenyon, Rosario Gonzalez and Coleen Orsborn are and what their fates were has never been known to this day, fifteen years later. Of all the terrible things Christopher Wilder did, this may be the cruelest—to leave families wondering and worrying for the rest of their lives.

The Lost Lady
    Thousands upon thousands of adults disappear in America every year. Some go because they choose to; the stresses and disappointments of life can make the concept of ��running away” seem very appealing. Some actually
do
suffer from amnesia, that much beloved plot device of the television soap opera writer, but it is an exceedingly rare psychological phenomenon in real life. Lots of people vanish because they are victims of foul play. And some human beings actually seem to evaporate into the mist that forms between midnight and dawn, gone forever without explanation.
    I have never researched a police case as unearthly as the story of Marcia Moore. Marcia was an altogether beautiful woman, a psychic of international reputation, an heiress to a large fortune, and a well-published author. And at the age of fifty-one, she had found the kind of perfect love that all women long for in their secret hearts.
    Years before I ever wrote about Marcia Moore, she was familiar to me. I first saw her image in the seventies when so many of us were caught up in the yoga craze, hard on the heels of the study of reincarnation and astrology. The lithe, gorgeous woman who demonstrated
yoga positions in Jess Stearn’s books was Marcia. She seemed to all of us in that bemused decade to be the very essence of perfection. My friends and I would have been shocked to know