Crime Beat

MISSING 1 YEAR LATER
    February 23, 1985
    Haydee Gonzalez will think about the wedding that was planned for her daughter last June and she will cry.
    Delores Kenyon will talk about the bedroom, filled with her daughter’s unused belongings, and she, too, has to cry.
    It has been 12 months now since Rosario Gonzalez disappeared and nearly as long since Beth Kenyon has been gone, but to each of the missing young women’s families, the pain and the questions have not been diminished by time.
    Though it has been a year since Christopher Wilder began a cross-country odyssey of kidnap, rape and murder that authorities believe started with the disappearances of the two South Florida women and ended in his own death 8,000 miles later, he keeps a grim hold on many.
    The families of Gonzalez and Kenyon still don’t know the fate of their daughters. Neither do Wilder’s many investigators. And they don’t know how many other unknown victims he may have claimed, either.
    With the suspected murderer gone, the families, FBI agents and police officers continue to follow clues and search for the missing women, all the while piecing together bits of the Wilder puzzle.
    “It has been a year and we still cry,” said Delores Kenyon, of Pompano Beach. Delores and William Kenyon’s daughter, Beth, 23, was last seen March 6 with Wilder at a Coral Gables gas station.
    “You can’t help but cry,” she said this week. “I don’t think my heart could be broken any worse. We’ve gone through a year of this, and we are still at that gas station. We don’t know what happened to her after that.”
    “Whatever has happened we will accept as God’s way. But we need to know what happened,” said Haydee Gonzalez, of Miami. Rosario Gonzalez, 20, daughter of Haydee and Blas Gonzalez, disappeared from the Miami Grand Prix a year ago this weekend.
    In the last year, the two families have hired private detectives, consulted psychics, distributed thousands of “missing” posters, placed newspaper ads from here to El Salvador and traveled as far as Mexico and Canada in hopes of finding their daughters—whether it would be to find them alive or not.
    The Gonzalezes and two relatives were arrested for trespassing on Mother’s Day last May when they searched the outside of Wilder’s Boynton Beach home for clues. Mrs. Gonzalez said it was the frustration of not knowing; she had to do something. The charges were later dropped.
    The families have found no trace of the two women. Of the 13 women Wilder is believed to have abducted, six were murdered, four escaped their abductor and three are still missing. The missing are Kenyon, Gonzalez and Colleen Orsborne, 15, who disappeared from Daytona Beach on March 15.
    Wilder was killed April 13 while struggling for a gun with a state trooper in Colebrook, N.H.
    Not knowing what happened to the missing women is the thing that hurts their families most; it hurts more than knowing.
    “They have found their daughters and buried them,” Delores Kenyon said of some of the other families from which Wilder took a daughter. “We don’t even know what happened to ours.”
    “The not knowing is the worst thing about this,” said Haydee Gonzalez.
    That’s why the Gonzalez family had gone as far as Mexico City looking for Rosario; why each weekend they take a drive out to a different spot of western Dade County to look for her in the Everglades areas; and why they will be at the Miami Grand Prix this weekend distributing 10,000 flyers with her photograph on them.
    And that’s why the Kenyons call the FBI week in and week out to see what is happening on their daughter’s case; why they have spent thousands of dollars on three different private detective agencies; and why they have followed even a psychic’s advice and searched underbrush as far away as Alabama for their daughter.
    And that’s also why the FBI and police, even close to a year after Wilder’s death, follow any plausible lead or clue in an effort to locate the missing women.
    “It is a continuing process,” said Miami Police Detective Harvey Wasserman. “Leads still come in. We still follow them. But so far nothing has worked out.”
    “We follow up on any kind of lead that comes in,” said FBI spokesman Joe Del Campo. “We won’t stop until all logical investigation has been completed and all leads are followed out.”
    As late as last week, Miami police got a call that Rosario Gonzalez had been seen in Washington, D.C. The tip