A Rage to Kill (25 page)

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 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 Lee Simms walked into the Torrance Police Department, the man who had released her was prowling once more. A nineteen-year- old girl in Wenham, Massachusetts, well north of Boston on state highway 1A, was sitting in her stalled car beside the road. The starter ground ineffectively until the battery gave out, and she was relieved when a friendly-looking man in a gold Pontiac slowed down and asked if she needed help. She accepted the ride he offered, as he said he’d take her on up into town to a service station.

She knew the area well and began to give him directions to the closest garage. But it didn’t take long for her to realize he wasn’t turning where she told him. In fact, he was heading
away
from town. She glanced at the man, and felt the skin at the back of her neck tighten. She’d seen the papers and the television news bulletins asking people in the Boston area to be on the lookout for a killer. Now, to her dread, she realized that she was sitting beside Christopher Wilder.

They came to a stop sign. As Wilder slowed down, the girl pushed the door handle and tumbled out. She hit the ground running and never looked back until she was on the front porch of a nearby house. The Pontiac had picked up speed and was disappearing down the road. Frightened that he might only be turning around, she pounded frantically on the door, and was vastly relieved when it opened. She had escaped from horrors she could never have imagined.

The police knew where he was. In a sense, Wilder had boxed himself into the northeast corner of the U.S. He didn’t have the wide prairies of Colorado and Texas to hide himself in now. Like all serial and spree killers who play their killing games too long, he was making mistakes, grabbing victims without planning his escape, leaving a trail. Like any
addict,
he was taking too many chances to get the substance that he lived for. Addicted to murder, he had lost control.

Sometime that Friday morning, Chris Wilder crossed over into New Hampshire, and he made good time as he headed north and then veered slightly west to Colebrook. There, he was only eight miles from the Canadian border. He may have figured that he would find shelter there; Canada often hesitates to return prisoners to the U.S. if they are going to face execution. He may only have been blindly running, putting miles between himself and the dead and kidnapped women he’d left behind. He probably didn’t know that Carrie McDonald was still alive; she had feigned death perfectly when he walked out of the woods in Penn Yan. He had to know that Beth Dodge was dead. He knew he’d be identified by the young woman in Wenham. The world was closing in on Chris Wilder when he pulled into a gas station in Colebrook.

It was 1:30
P.M.
on Friday, April 13, 1984. Chris Wilder, the master at putting on a friendly mask, got out of the gold Firebird and walked around as casually as any ordinary tourist might. He pumped his gas and then strolled into the cashier to pay. There, he asked how to get to the Canadian border.

In a moment of synchronicity, two New Hampshire state troopers were paying their tab for lunch in a little restaurant just down the street. Colebrook only had 1,200 people and the only strangers in town were people headed for the border, and there weren’t that many of those. The troopers, Leo “Chuck” Jellison and Wayne Fortier, got into their unmarked station wagon and headed down the main street of Colebrook. Their trained eyes spotted the gold Pontiac Firebird sitting at the gas pumps. It had Massachusetts plates while the bulletin had listed a New York plate—but that didn’t mean anything. If Wilder could shoot a woman and steal her car, he could easily have stolen license plates.

Jellison and Fortier pulled into a business parking lot just next to the gas station, their eyes never leaving the Pontiac. They saw the man walking casually from the cashier’s booth. He looked right. Age. Height. He did, however, seem awfully laid back for a man who had to know that he was one of America’s Ten Most Wanted felons.

Chuck Jellison, thirty-three, eased his huge frame out of the station wagon and Fortier moved their vehicle onto the gas station apron.

“Hold on a minute,” Jellison said easily, “Wanted to ask you something—”

The man turned to look at him for an instant and Jellison saw the blue eyes, the familiar face. And then he sprinted for the Pontiac, with Jellison right behind him. Fortier leapt out 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.