A Rage to Kill (23 page)

Apparently Wilder had used his “model agency” and “fashion photographer” ruses for a long time. Some girls who had been approached by the man with the beard saw his photograph in the newspapers and on television and came forward. The investigators learned that he had used a number of aliases, but he had always seemed to have business cards that made him seem reputable. Sometimes, he had actually taken photos of young women without making a remark or gesture that was out of the ordinary. One woman said she had gone with him to an empty house someplace in Boca West. “He said it was a ‘photo test’ for a BMW ad,” she said with a shiver. “But he never called me back.”

Back in Florida, the Kenyons, the Orsborns, and the Gonzalez family hoped against hope that their daughters were still alive, perhaps held captive somewhere. In a sense, their endless waiting was worse than the grief the families felt who
knew
that their daughters were dead. Their dreams were haunted with visions of torture, horrific captivity and their own helplessness.

Searches of Chris Wilder’s home and business produced no clues at all that might indicate any of the missing girls had ever been in either spot. Wilder had had a boat—he could have dumped their bodies far out in the ocean where no one would ever find them, and this was plausible since he seemed to have a fetish about putting his victims in water after he was finished with them.

The fact remained: while Wilder was living in his own house, he had managed to hide the missing girls completely; now that he was on the run, he dropped dead bodies off with alarming regularity. What was there about his being in Florida that had made it easier for him to hide his activities?

A map in the investigator’s command center showed Chris Wilder’s slashing course across America. On March 25, the marker moved north from Beaumont, Texas, to Oklahoma City. He had spent the previous night at a motel there. And then, that Sunday afternoon, he was seen at the Pen Square Mall, although no one thought much of it until Monday.

Suzanne Wendy Logan, twenty, was a new bride on that spring day in 1984. Suzanne had a great smile and thick, taffy-colored hair with blonde highlights. Her ambition was to be a model, and she had painstakingly put together a portfolio with various photographs of herself. She went to the Pen Square Mall on March 25 and met Chris Wilder there.

Wilder’s luck in finding women who fit perfectly into his victim profile was uncanny. With shorter and shorter spates between his killing days, he was somehow able to spot his victim, cut her away from those who might have saved her, and destroy her at his leisure. How did he
know
that Suzanne dreamed of being a model? Did he have some magic power that drew his targets to him?

In truth, it was more likely that Chris Wilder had simply become completely conversant with the longings of vulnerable, naive girls. He knew how to look like a professional photographer, and he had used that guise to dupe Suzanne. When she turned up missing, there were witnesses who recalled seeing her there in the mall Sunday afternoon, talking with a bearded man with a camera around his neck.

They found poor Suzanne two days later and more than three hundred miles away. Continuing north, with his helpless victim in tow, Wilder had driven up I-135 to Newton, Kansas, away from the warm days and into wind-driven snowstorms. He had found a motel with thick walls where he beat and tortured Suzanne Logan, who wasn’t as lucky as Jill Lennox had been. The next day, a fisherman found her bound body on the shores of Milford Lake, although it would take time to positively identify her.

Chris Wilder’s rage was building; he inflicted pain that was beyond the imagination of someone who felt empathy for other people. Suzanne’s beautiful hair had been cut short and her pubic hair shaved. She had been “teased” with a sharp knife, bitten, and stabbed through the left breast.

Because Wilder was still using his ex-partner’s credit cards, he left a trail that was easy to follow. The investigators were frustrated because they knew where he had
been,
but they had no way of predicting where he would go next. He had abducted seven women since the end of January, and only one had escaped.

Chris Wilder turned west again after he abandoned Suzanne Logan’s body. Still driving the Cougar that he’d stolen from Terry Walden, he roared across Colorado on Route 70. Apparently, he was confident enough that the police and FBI didn’t know where he was that he didn’t even bother taking the back roads, and he made good time on the freeways. On the night of March 28, he stopped in Rifle, Colorado, not far from the state’s western border. Once again, Wilder was in Bundy territory. He had sailed right through Glenwood Springs where Ted Bundy escaped from jail on New Year’s Eve, 1977. But even Ted Bundy had never killed so many women in such a short window of time.

Chris Wilder was nearly a thousand miles west of the lake where he had thrown Suzanne Logan away, and he was ready to troll for a victim again on March 29. He was audacious enough to ask for a particular type when he showed up at the Mesa Mall that Thursday. With his camera and other photographer’s gear, Wilder was observed in the mall as he asked if anyone knew of a “cowgirl-type” model; he needed one, he said, for a specific photography job commission.

Sheryl Bonaventura, eighteen, was exactly what he had in mind. Although she had never heard of a man named Chris Wilder, she dressed for the part, unaware. When she arrived at the mall, she wore a white sweatshirt with a Cherokee logo, blue jeans, cowboy boots and a lot of chunky gold jewelry. Sheryl didn’t plan to shop long; she was going to meet a girlfriend soon so the two could head to Aspen for skiing, and all she needed were a few toiletry items.

With her thick ash-blonde hair, her slender figure and her perfect features, Sheryl Bonaventura looked like a model. And although she looked sophisticated, she was only eighteen and a sitting duck for a man like Chris Wilder. Somewhere in that Mesa Mall, Sheryl met Wilder, believed his story offering her a modeling job with a big Denver agency, and walked away with him.

Sheryl’s friend waited and waited for her, but she never arrived at their prearranged meeting spot. Somehow, Wilder had managed to convince her that it was all right to leave her friend stranded. There is evidence that Sheryl did go with Wilder willingly; the pair were seen in Silverton, a little mining town on the way to Durango. That was a hundred miles south of the mall where she was last seen. They stopped at a restaurant there where Sheryl was known—her grandfather once worked there. She talked with the owner who remembered how excited she was about becoming a model. A man with blue eyes and a neatly-clipped beard had stood right beside her, smiling, as she bubbled over with enthusiasm. The couple bought a sack of doughnuts before they moved on.

There was no possibility that Sheryl Bonaventura was being held against her will—not at that point. Her last name meant “Good Luck” and “Happy Adventures,” and she believed she was on a wonderful trip.

And it may have been, but only for a very short while. For some reason, Wilder did not harm Sheryl for several days. The couple were spotted at several locations in Colorado and Arizona. They seemed to be an especially close pair; the man with the beard never left the pretty blonde’s side. In retrospect, Sheryl’s sometimes “odd” behavior may have been her futile attempts to signal for help—with darting eyes and exaggerated expressions when the man beside her looked away for a moment.

The couple were seventy miles south of Durango the day after they were seen at the restaurant. They seemed like any tourist couple as they visited the Four Corners Monument where Utah, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado’s borders touched.

The night of March 30, they checked into a motel in Page, Arizona, as a married couple. The desk clerk didn’t notice anything untoward, but then motel clerks have learned not to look too closely at “married” couples. Shortly after dawn, someone noticed Chris Wilder as he whisked the blonde woman out of his room and rushed her to his car.

From that point on, there were no more sightings of the woman in western garb and the man twice her age. Nor were there any calls from Sheryl. Back in Grand Junction, her family was frantically worried. On their own, they gathered friends and relatives to search for her. Their desperate search party fanned out from Grand Junction to Durango and down toward Las Vegas. They hoped that Sheryl had left on some kind of romantic adventure, and that she wasn’t in terrible danger.

But the FBI’s revisiting of the trail Wilder left with his credit cards didn’t make things sound promising. Wilder had registered a woman thought to be Sheryl Bonaventura as his wife in Durango, and again in Page. However, the next night when he stopped in Las Vegas, he didn’t list a wife. If Sheryl was still with him, he might have had her wait in the car and then sneaked her into the motel room.

Although Sheryl’s family kept up their search for her, she had vanished somewhere along the trail from her hometown to Las Vegas. Hunting for the beautiful teenager was an impossible task; no one could check all the thousands of square miles with lakes, rivers, mountains, and endless barren prairie lands. Sheryl could be anywhere. As much as her family hoped that she was somewhere safe having a heedless adventure, they knew in their hearts that she was dead.

Chris Wilder’s terrible killing spree continued unabated; he was clever enough to move on before local authorities even realized he had entered their jurisdictions. By the time the pathetic bodies were found, he was somewhere else, searching for his next victim.

Seventeen-year-old Michele Korfman was as guileless a target as anyone could be. She was very pretty and very young as she parked the new car her father had given her at the Meadows Shopping Mall in Las Vegas. It was April Fool’s Day, an ironic date in retrospect for a beauty contest. Michele and many other young women were excited about the competition. Some, like Michele, came to the mall alone, but a lot of them had their mothers chaperoning.

The man who approached at least four of the girls who waited to compete seemed innocuous enough. Later, when they were asked to describe him, there wasn’t much they could remember: “middle-aged . . . not much hair—but a short beard.” “He had a soft voice, and nice blue eyes.”

The man asked all of the girls basically the same thing. He was a fashion photographer and he was looking for models. He had a portfolio of photographs he had taken of beautiful women, and he showed it to the pretty teenagers. He had a very expensive camera in a leather case. He promised the potential models a good fee up front and, more important, the chance to be seen by top modeling agencies.

Even so, three of the girls shook their heads; they didn’t want to leave the mall and go with him to his studio. He didn’t seem angry or disappointed at their reluctance. Rather, he had returned to his seat on a bench near the stage, watching the contest with interest. One of the mothers in attendance was taking pictures as her daughter strode confidently across the stage, and without realizing it, she captured the “professional photographer’s” image in several frames. He may have been unconcerned; he was probably unaware that she had taken his picture.

When the beauty contest at the Meadows Mall was over, the man lingered. Several people saw Michele Korfman talking to him, and then the two of them headed slowly toward an exit. Nobody took a picture of that; it didn’t seem important.

Michele looked a lot like Cindy Crawford. Like Terry Ferguson who had been seen leaving a mall on Merritt Island, Florida, two weeks before, Michele had long thick hair and she usually posed for pictures with an unsmiling, sexy look on her face. Like Terry and the other girls who had been led away from bustling shopping malls, Michele had perfect features. She
would
have made a wonderful model.

And then Michele Korfman, the darling of her daddy’s eye, a girl with everything to live for, was gone. And another family was left to search and to live with agonizing doubt. All authorities really knew—or
believed
—was that Michele had not left of her own volition. Her prized car, in perfect condition, was found a few days later in the parking lot behind Caesar’s Palace.

Chris Wilder left Las Vegas and Michele was with him at least part of the way. By the fourth of April, Wilder was alone again, and still driving the stolen Cougar. Since he had just made the FBI’s Ten-Most-Wanted list and lawmen all over America were looking for him, he had had incredible luck. His mugshots were on the wall of every post office in the country. That did not mean, however, that young women intent on shopping in a mall or in attracting enough attention to get a modeling contract would see it, or remember it if they did see it. By this time, Chris Wilder must have felt invincible.

The FBI attempted to warn as many potential victims as possible by releasing the eight-minute videotape he had made for the dating bureau. His image flashed across television screens in every state, the image of an almost shy man with a slight speech impediment, a man who was lonely for female companionship and had resorted to this awkward method of matchmaking.

And apparently, he was
still
lonely. That sounds like a bad joke and an odd thing to say about a ruthless killer who had systematically destroyed eight young women and left another physically and psychologically maimed, but it is perhaps the only way to explain the way he related to his next captive. The tenth victim may have lived because she didn’t argue with him or threaten him. Her very helplessness may have saved her life.

On April 4, Toni Lee Simms*, sixteen, was headed to apply for a job at a delicatessen in Torrance, one of the many cities whose boundaries blend into one another south of Los Angeles. Toni Lee wasn’t looking forward to the job and it paid only minimum wage—but she and her mom were more or less alone in the world. As young as she was, she was a survivor who wanted to pull her own weight, someone who was used to a side of life that wasn’t always comfortable or safe. When she encountered Chris Wilder, she was easy game.