The FBI Ten Most Wanted List is considered a representation of the “baddest of the bad.” Officially, the Top Tenners are not ranked, but for one week in April 1984 a native Australian who murdered at least eight young women over a seven week stretch was, unofficially, the most wanted man in America.
On April 13, eight days after being placed on the Ten Most Wanted List, thirty-nine-year old Christopher Wilder was killed during a struggle with New Hampshire State Troopers as they attempted to arrest him. It was a fitting end for the “homicidal maniac” as one FBI agent called him. Wilder’s death was met with relief, but at the same time it was deflating because the likelihood of determining the actual number of lives he claimed may have died with him.
Christopher Wilder
A native of Sydney, Australia, the capital of the state of New South Wales, Christopher Wilder was the eldest of four sons of an American naval officer and an Australian national. At age seventeen, he was convicted of the January 1963 gang-rape of a thirteen-year-old girl at a quarry near Freshwater, part of Sydney Beach. Because he was a youth, he received probation instead of prison.
Wilder said he was ordered to undergo electroshock therapy following the incident. His parents, Coley and June, believed the treatment aggravated his violent sexual tendencies, but biographer Duncan McNab says there is no evidence he was subjected to any electroshock procedures.
Wilder’s Troubles Begin As a Youth . . .
Wilder’s 1968 marriage to Christine Paluch ended after only one week following his being suspected of a series of sexual assaults at Manly Beach, along northern Sydney. Some sources say they had a child, but I could not find his or her name.
Following the divorce, Christine told police that Wilder had tried to entice both his mother-in-law and sister-in-law and had twice attempted to kill her after she had found a briefcase in his car containing multiple photos of nude or scantily clad young women.
In November 1969, Wilder allegedly used nude photographs to extort sex from a student nurse; the charges were dropped after she refused to testify in court.
. . . And Continue In Australia . . .
By year’s end, Wilder had immigrated to the United States, settling in Boynton Beach, Florida, sixty miles north of Miami. He became a successful building contractor, co-owing the Sawtel Electric and Construction Company. He also invested well in real estate and owned an apartment building.
Wilder’s violent tendencies toward women, however, continued as he was convicted of multiple sexual misconduct charges from 1971-75. He fancied himself a fashion photographer and in one instance, in a foreshadowing of the modus operandi used during much of his 1984 killing spree, he raped a young woman he had lured into his truck on the pretense of photographing her for a modeling job.
In 1977, a psychologist deemed Wilder a “mentally disordered sex offender” and “basically a psychotic in need of treatment” because of his “need to dominate women and turn them into slaves for his pleasure.” Despite the diagnosis, Wilder was not jailed or institutionalized for any of his crimes.
. . . And In America . . .
After returning to his homeland in December 1982, Wilder was charged with multiple sexual offenses after two fifteen-year-old girls said he forced them to pose nude after luring them from Manly Beach. His parents posted his $400,000 bond and persuaded a judge to allow their son to return to America until his trial. The multimillionaire Wilder assured the court he would come back to face the charges against him.
By the time the trial date was set for April 1984, the affluent Aussie who had achieved the American dream had no intention of returning to his home, either in Australia or in America.
. . . And Continue Back In Australia
Having recently taken up auto racing, Wilder, along with two other drivers, finished 52nd at the 24 Hours of Daytona, held on February 4.
Wilder’s Car at the 1984 24 Hours of Daytona
The Aussie had a better showing driving his black Porsche 911 at the Miami Grand Prix, held on February 26. In finishing seventeenth, he pocketed $400, though he had not placed high enough to compete in additional races.
Upon returning to the track as a spectator the following day, Wilder is believed to have found his first prey.
Wilder At The Miami Grand Prix Wilder’s Car
Twenty-three-year-old Rosario “Chary” Gonzales had worked at the Miami Gran Prix as a model distributing free aspirin samples for a pharmaceutical company. The recently engaged computer science student at Miami-Dade College was last seen leaving the track with a man between noon and 1:00 p.m. Later that afternoon, her blue 1980 Oldsmobile Cutlass was found parked near Dupont Plaza, a major downtown Miami Hotel, but a search of the vehicle failed to produce any clues to her whereabouts.
Wilder had been a credentialed photographer at the 1983 Miss Florida Beauty Contest in which Chary had participated, and she had previously modeled for him in several amateur photoshoots. He resembled the man with whom she was last seen, and he became a suspect in her disappearance eight days later when another twenty-three-year-old model associated with him was also reported missing.
Rosario “Chary” Gonzales
Beth Kenyon, a former Miss Orange Bowl Princess and another Miss Florida finalist, taught emotionally-disturbed children and coached cheerleading at the Coral Gables High School in part of metropolitan Miami. She was last seen at a Shell gas station near the school on the morning of March 5, but she did not arrive for work.
Six days later, Beth’s Chrysler convertible was found at Miami International Airport, but her name was not listed on any recent flights and she had told anyone of travel plans.
Beth Kenyon
Attendant Ricky Norman recognized Christopher Wilder as the man seen with Beth at the gas station. They had met through the Miss Florida pageant and had briefly dated, but she had recently rejected his marriage proposal and ended the relationship due to their sixteen-year age difference. She had told her parents they were still friends, but many of Wilder’s acquaintances said he was irate at being dumped.
Beth Had Ended Her Relationship With Wilder
Private investigator Ken Whittaker, Jr. called Wilder inquiring about his missing former girlfriend and Chary Gonzales. They agreed to meet the following day, March 12.
Instead, the race car driver hit the road.
The Racer Runs
A Miami Herald article published on March 16 described the man suspected in the women’s’ disappearances as a local contractor, race car driver, amateur photographer, and a native Australian. Crime reporter Edna Buchanan, without naming him, clearly accused Christopher Wilder.
Two days later, twenty-one-year-old Terry Ferguson, the daughter of a police captain, disappeared after leaving the Merritt Square Mall in Merritt Island near Cocoa Beach, two-hundred miles north of Miami. A man resembling Wilder accompanied her.
Terry Ferguson
Later that afternoon Wilder called for a tow-truck after his car became stuck in mud in rural Canaveral Groves, twenty miles northwest of Cocoa Beach. After his car was pulled out, he checked into the Holiday Inn in West Cocoa Beach.
On March 19, the following day, Wilder emptied his Tampa bank account of over $19,000. An automatic security camera photographed him acquiring the cash needed to further finance what became a cross-country killing spree.
Have Money Will Travel
In Travel Will Kill
The next day, Wilder approached nineteen-year-old Linda Grober, a Florida State student, in the Governor’s Square Mall in Tallahassee, two-hundred-seventy miles northwest of Tampa. He told her he was a photographer for a modeling agency and said he would pay her $25 an hour to pose for him. After she declined, Wilder followed her to her car, knocked her out, bound her hands behind her back with zip ties, wrapped her in a blanket, and tossed her into the trunk of his car, a 1973 Chrysler, which he had purchased on March 12, the day before he had fled.
Wilder drove his captive forty miles north to Bainbridge, Georgia, where he checked into the low-budget Glen Oaks Motel. When Linda came to, she was wrapped in a sleeping bag, tied to a bed, and had duct tape around her mouth.
Over several hours, Wilder repeatedly raped and electrocuted Linda, having tied copper wires to her feet and fashioned an electrocution device attached to an extension cord. He further tortured her by gluing her eyes shut and burning her with a blow dryer. Despite the torment, Linda was lucky.
Linda Grober
As Wilder was putting his clothes back on after raping and untying her, Linda ran to the bathroom, locked the door, and pounded on the walls, screaming for help. Wilder panicked, grabbed what he could and fled in the early morning hours of March 21, taking all of Linda’s belongings with him.
After being rescued, Linda Grober identified Christopher Wilder as her tormentor. The FBI became involved in tracking the awful Aussie because he had committed a federal crime by abducting her in Florida and transporting her to Georgia.
Linda Escapes
That afternoon, a utility repairman in Haines City, eighty-five miles west of Merritt Island, from where Terry Ferguson had disappeared three days earlier, found her body in a rural ditch. A single rope was tied to her neck and stretched down to tie her feet. An autopsy determined she had been beaten with a tire iron and strangled to death.
Terry Ferguson’s Body Is Found
Christopher Wilder was suspected in the murder of Terry Ferguson, though nothing linked him to the crime.
After fleeing Bainbridge, Georgia, in the early morning of March 21, he had driven overnight to Texas, where his killing trail picked up two days later with the murder of another woman named Terry.
Wilder Suspected
When Lamar University nursing student Terry Walden came home from school on March 21, she told her husband John of an odd encounter she had had earlier that day. The twenty-four-year-old recent mother had been approached in the college’s Beaumont, Texas, parking lot by a man saying he was a fashion photographer and asked her to pose as a model. Terry declined.
The cameraman was Christopher Wilder who stayed at the Best Western Gulf Coast Inn in Winnie, approximately thirty miles southwest of Beaumont, for the following two days before returning to his favorite hunting grounds of shopping malls on March 23. After failing to lure several women he, by chance, again encountered Terry Walden. Several shoppers say they saw Wilder speaking to her, presumably again making his “model pitch” but appearing to have again failed.
Terry was last seen walking toward her car in the mall parking lot, being followed by Wilder. As he had done with Linda Grober, he knocked her out and abducted her.
Terry Walden
Wilder fled the Beaumont mall in Terry Walden’s car, a 1981 Mercury Cougar. Hair and fibers found in his abandoned Chrysler were shown to be those of Terry Ferguson.
Through Terry Walden’s Disappearance
Wilder Is Linked To Terry Ferguson’s Murder
The following day, March 24, Wilder attempted to lure another woman at a mall in Dallas, two-hundred-eighty-miles northwest of Beaumont. The woman, an actual model, feigned interest and asked if they could meet the following day to discuss it further. Wilder agreed.
The woman reported the incident to police and FBI agents staked out the mall, but Wilder did not return. He had instead driven two-hundred miles north to Oklahoma City, checking into a Holiday Inn.
No Wilder
The following day, Wilder abducted twenty-one-year-old newlywed Suzanne “Sandy” Logan at the Penn Square Mall and drove her one-hundred-eighty-five miles north to Newton, Kansas, checking into the Interstate 35 Inn, roughly twenty miles north of Wichita.
Sandy Logan
On March 26, the following day, a fisherman found Sandy’s body beneath a cedar tree at Milford Reservoir near Junction City, Kansas, ninety miles northeast of Newton. She had been raped, stabbed, and bound with nylon cord and duct tape. An autopsy also determined her pubic hair had been forcibly shaved.
That same day, Terry Walden’s body was found in a Beaumont, Texas, canal. She had died a similar death.
Sandy Logan And Terry Walden’s Bodies Are Found
A nationwide APB (All-Points-Bulletin) was put out for Terry Walden’s stolen Mercury Cougar, but Wilder had removed the license plates and replaced them with ones he is believed to have stolen in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on March 21.
Continuing his westward route, Wilder drove five-hundred miles where he stayed at the American Family Lodge in Wheat Ridge, Colorado, a western suburb of Denver, on March 27. That day, he purchased a Colt Trooper revolver in nearby Aurora.
Two days later, Wilder checked into the Red River Lodge in Rifle, one-hundred-eighty miles to the west, using the stolen VISA credit card of his business partner, L.M. Kimbrell. Authorities knew he had the card, but the cheap motels he stayed at along his murderous route did not have instant validation of customer credit cards.
When the motel clerk called in the credit card in the early morning hours of March 29, the FBI was notified. Denver FBI Agents raided the motel, but Wilder had already checked out, perhaps out of paranoia.
Wilder Slips Away
Later that day, Sheryl Bonaventura of Grand Junction, Colorado, told her parents, Jim and Sandra, she was going to stop at a local mall before meeting a friend to take a trip to Vail, one-hundred-fifty miles to the northeast. She never arrived.
That afternoon, several shoppers at the Mesa Mall in Mesa, thirty miles northeast of Grand Junction, saw Wilder soliciting several women with his standard offer of photographing them. It appeared Sheryl, an aspiring model three days shy of her nineteenth birthday, was the latest girl he had lured into his trap as she was later seen having lunch with him at a diner in Silverton, one-hundred-thirty miles to the south. A waitress recalled Wilder saying they were going to stop in Durango, one-hundred-sixty miles to the south near the Arizona border, and then head to Las Vegas, five-hundred-thirty miles to the west. She said Sheryl was acting strangely and spoke in what she called “baby-talk.” This led some investigators to believe she had been drugged.
One day later, on March 30, Sheryl and Wilder were seen at the Four Corners National Monument, eighty-five miles southwest of Durango. The following day, chunks of hair were found by a maid in the wastebasket of the Page Boy Motel, just south of the Utah-Arizona border. They were determined be those of the missing Sheryl Bonaventura.
Sheryl Bonaventura
Wilder did in fact then head to Las Vegas, where, on April 1, he checked into the Gold Key Motel along the Strip (some sources say he stayed at the Ambassador Hotel.) He had no interest in frequenting any casinos in Sin City, instead continuing his most sadistically sinful actions by quickly finding another ideal victim at another ideal venue.
The Serial Killer Comes To Sin City
Teenage girls flooded Las Vegas’ Meadows Mall on April 1, hoping to be featured on the cover of Seventeen magazine. Among the many who were approached by a camera-draped man asking them to pose for him was seventeen-year-old Michelle Korfman of Boulder City, twenty-five miles southeast of Las Vegas. She was last seen leaving the event with the purported fashion photographer.
Michelle Korfman
A real fashion photographer at the Las Vegas pageant captured this image of Christopher Wilder, who was identified as the man who had approached the women. The legs in the foreground with whom Wilder’s eyes are fixated are those of Michelle Korfman.
Gordon McNeill, one of the FBI agents desperately tracking the serial killer, described the look on Wilder’s face as that of a “homicidal maniac.”
The “Homicidal Maniac”
Eyeing His Next Prey
After leaving Las Vegas, Wilder headed nearly three-hundred miles southwest to Lomita, California, a Los Angeles suburb about five miles from the Pacific Ocean, where he stayed at the Proud Parrot Motel on April 3. Returning to his favorite hunting grounds the following day, he soon zeroed in on his next prey.
Following school, sixteen-year-old Tina Risico of neighboring Torrance had stopped at the Del Amo Fashion Center Mall to apply for a part-time sales clerk job at the Hickory Farms store. Wilder approached her with his standard spiel, saying he was a modeling manager and that she was a natural beauty who was perfect for his latest photo shoot. Tina had heard of the modeling agency he had mentioned and knew its location but was still skeptical. Wilder secured the deal by giving her a $100 bill and the promise of many more if he cou
Tina accompanied Wilder to the parking lot and entered his car.
Tina Risico
Wilder drove by the modeling agency he had mentioned. Saying his bosses wanted outdoor photos of potential models, he then drove to a secluded wooded area where he had Tina pose for a few photographs before saying he had to change film rolls. Upon returning, instead of holding a camera, Wilder displayed a gun and ordered Tina to remove her shirt and bra.
After photographing her topless, Wilder ordered Tina back into his car and raped her. He then tied her up, knocked her out, and drove approximately two-hundred miles southeast to El Centro, where he checked into the El Dorado Motel. There, he tied Tina to the bed, taped her eyes shut, drugged her, repeatedly raped her, and electrocuted her with wires tied across her body. He also cut off her long hair to beneath shoulder length.
Tina Is The Next To Be Tortured
While staying in a Motel 6 in Prescott, Arizona, the following day, April 5, Wilder panicked upon seeing a broadcast of the FBI’s announcing his addition to its Ten Most Wanted List. He hastily again hit the road, changing course in heading back east.
Perhaps out of panic as when Linda Grober had locked herself in the bathroom and screamed for help fifteen days earlier, Wilder did not kill his latest catch. Unlike with Linda, however, he did not leave Tina Risico behind but took her with him.
Wilder Becomes A Top Tenner
Over the following five-day drive to the Midwest, Wilder continued checking into cheap morels where he raped and electrocuted Tina. He slept with her each evening after tying her hands to the bed and allowed her to bathe only once during this time.
With no specific destination in mind, it was up at dawn and drive until dark, stopping only for gas and food, primarily at McDonalds. Wilder, with his knife and gun always within reach, drove for most of the journey; he forced Tina to ride with her eyes taped-shut and covered by aviator sunglasses. At times, however, he allowed her to drive; the sixteen-year-old had recently attained her driver’s license but did not have much experience behind the wheel. She essentially learned how to drive while she was Wilder’s captive.
Tina’s Awful Odyssey . . .
On April 10, Wilder again did something out of character: he told Tina he would release her if she helped him get another girl. When she hesitated, he then said he would kill her if she did not do so.
With her life again threatened, Tina agreed to be her tormentor’s bait. She accompanied him into a mall . . . and the wanted Wilder soon found who he wanted.
. . . And Awful Task
As sixteen-year-old Tina Risico had applied for a job on April 4 at the Del Amo Fashion Center Mall in Torrance, California, sixteen-year-old Dawnette Wilt was doing the same at Merrillville Indiana’s Southlake Mall, forty miles southeast of Chicago, on April 10.
After giving Tina money to purchase perfume, Wilder instructed her to approach Dawnette and ask if she wanted to be a participant in an upcoming modeling show at the mall. When Dawnette showed interest, Wilder took it from there, going into his standard pitch of being a fashion photographer, flattering her on her appearance, and saying he wanted to photograph her. He then asked her to accompany him to his car to fill out some paperwork. She had no qualms about doing so because Tina was with them.
As they neared the car, Wilder pulled his gun on Dawnette and ordered her into the passenger’s seat as he entered the driver’s seat. He then instructed Tina to take the wheel of Dawnette’s car and to follow him.
Dawnette Wilt
Wilder drove, and Tina followed him, to the Dolton Hotel in Dolton, Illinois, approximately five miles from the shore of Lake Michigan, where Wilder left Dawnette’s car.
Now having two captives, Wilder resumed traveling east in Terry Walden’s Mercury Cougar. They stayed at motels in Wauseon, Ohio, and Syracuse, New York over the following two days. Up until this point, Wilder had registered at each motel under the name L.M. Kimbrell, his former business partner, but he now used the name C.J. Bain.
Wilder’s methods, however, remained the same, as he tied both Tina and Dawnette to the bed and made each watch as he raped and tortured the other.
Wilder Doubles His Torturing Pleasure
On April 12, after seeing a broadcast of Tina’s mom, Carol Sokolowski, pleading for her safe return, Wilder again panicked and fled with his two captives. He forced Tina to drive while he again raped Dawnette before he ordered Tina to stop in a field near Penn Yan in rural Yates County, New York, about fifty miles southwest of Rochester. Instructing Tina to stay in the car, he dragged Dawnette, drugged with sleeping pills, into a wooded area. Again, Tina complied.
In a field, Wilder began suffocating Dawnette before removing her shirt and stabbing her twice. He then returned to the car where Tina had stayed as ordered and drove a mile or so before doubling back to the field, worried he had not completed his task.
Dawnette Is Left For Dead . . .
His fears were legitimate; Dawnette had tied her jeans around herself to contain the bleeding and had flagged down a truck driver, Charlie Laursen, who took her to Penn Yann’s Soldiers and Sailors Hospital.
. . . But Survives
Wilder grew more panicked after hearing on the radio that Dawnette had been rescued and was still alive. Knowing he needed a different vehicle, he carjacked thirty-three-year-old Beth Dodge, forcing her at gunpoint into the back seat of her 1982 gold Pontiac Firebird, at the Eastview Mall in Victor, New York, thirty miles south of Penn Yan. He ordered Tina to follow him in Terry Walden’s Mercury Cougar. She again did as told.
After roughly half-an-hour, Wilder pulled into a secluded wooded area where he dragged Beth out of her car and marched her into the woods. There, he shot her twice in her head and dumped her in a gravel pit.
Beth Dodge had the awful misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. In being shot to death, however, she had dodged a figurative bullet in not being tortured as had Wilder’s other victims.
Beth Dodge
Abandoning Terry Walden’s Mercury Cougar, Wilder then ordered Tina into Beth’s Pontiac Firebird. He drove three-hundred-seventy-five miles to Boston’s Logan Airport where he performed perhaps his most inexplicable action of all.
Knowing the net was closing in and telling Tina he did not what her to be with him when the end came, he gave her $1,000 in cash, bought her a ticket to Los Angeles, and released her.
Wilder, alone, then headed north where on the following day, April 13, he unsuccessfully attempted to abduct another woman at gunpoint in Beverly, thirty miles north of Boston. He then drove over two-hundred miles further north.
Now In New England
Wilder probably believed he had disposed of Beth Dodge deep enough in the woods so that it would be some time before her body was found, but she had already been discovered by two truckers. A nationwide APB had been issued for her stolen Pontiac Firebird by the time he arrived in Colebrook, New Hampshire, where he stopped for gas at Stanton’s Getty Service Station.
Wilder had told Tina he had friends in Canada and planned to try to cross the border. Colebrook is approximately ten miles from a checkpoint.
Beth Dodge’s Pontiac Firebird
As Wilder was asking attendant Wayne DeLong about the papers needed to enter Canada, two New Hampshire state troopers, Wayne Fortier and Leo Jellison, recognized the car and the unofficial most wanted man in America. The plain-clothes officers in an unmarked car cautiously neared Wilder and asked to speak with him; he, instead, hastily reached for a Colt Python .357 Magnum from inside the car.
When Jellison grabbed Wilder from behind, a scuffle ensued in which Wilder fired two shots. The first bullet struck him in his chest, while the second pierced his heart, killing him. It could not be determined if he had intentionally or accidentally shot himself.
Perhaps fittingly, April 13, 1984, was a Friday.
The Serial Killer Is Himself Killed
The first bullet had exited Wilder’s back and entered Trooper Jellison’s chest, but the lawman recovered. Trooper Fortier was uninjured in the tussle.
New Hampshire State Troopers Wayne Fortier and Leo Jellison
A briefcase found in the car contained blood-stained tape, a knife, gun holster, $4,900 in cash, Wilder’s passport, and photographs of several young women he had photographed before beginning his killing spree.
Wilder’s Briefcase
Wilder also had the keys and hairbrush of his missing former girlfriend Beth Kenyon.
Personal Items Of Beth Kenyon
Also amongst Wilder’s possessions was a copy of John Fowles’ 1963 novel, The Collector, in which a man forcibly confines a woman in his cellar until she dies and disposes of her corpse where he believes it will never be found. He then begins looking for his next victim.
Ginger Bush, a sex therapist Wilder had been seeing prior to his rampage, believed these were the pages around which the “Model Killer” had modeled his murders.
Wilder’s Reading Material
On May 3, three weeks after Christopher Wilder’s death, Sheryl Bonaventura’s mutilated body was found in the Kanab River, near the town of Kanab, Utah. After his usual M.O. of rape and electrical torture at the Page Boy Motel in Page, Arizona, Wilder is believed to have stabbed her to death on March 31 and disposed of her body in the river just across the Utah border.
Sheryl Bonaventura’s Remains Are Found . . .
Michelle Korfman’s decomposed remains were discovered eight days later, five-and-half weeks after she disappeared from the Las Vegas model show, near the Angeles National Forest in southern California. She was bound in duct tape, and had also been beaten, raped, tortured with electrocution, and stabbed to death. An autopsy found multiple small shallow incisions in her body meant not to kill, but to inflict pain.
. . . As Are Michelle Korfman’s . . .
The remains, however, have not been found of Chary Gonzales and Beth Kenyon, Wilder’s first two presumed victims and the only ones with whom he was acquainted.
. . . But Not Those Of Chary Gonzales And Beth Kenyon
The District Attorneys of Lake County, Indiana, and Ontario County, New York, initially viewed Tina Risico as Wilder’s accomplice in the latter stages of his killing spree. Each considered charging her with multiple crimes, including aiding and abetting a fugitive.
In Indiana, Tina had approached Dawnette Wilt in the mall, introduced her to Wilder, and walked with them to the car from which Dawnette was abducted at gunpoint. In addition, when Wilder took Dawnette into the field where he attempted to murder her, Tina was left alone but had not attempted to escape or summon help.
In New York, Tina had driven Wilder to Beth Dodge’s car which he commandeered at gunpoint, and, again being left alone, she had followed Wilder to the locale where Beth was shot to death.
Furthermore, when Wilder released Tina at Boston’s Logan Airport, she flew home without telling anyone on the airplane of her ordeal.
After authorities and both DA offices consulted with multiple psychiatrists and experts in the behavior of trauma victims, however, no charges were filed against Tina Risico.
No Legal Trouble For Tina
Following her return home, many outlets reported Tina had developed Stockholm Syndrome, in which hostages are said to develop a psychological bond with their captors. She rejects the contentions, saying she believed the only way she would survive was to obey Wilder. She says she feared him, but did not want him to see her fear.
When left alone in the car, Tina said she had not attempted to escape because Wilder had told her he was a race car driver and that she, a novice driver, would be unable to outrun him.
No Admiration For Her Abductor
Whereas all of Wilder’s other confirmed victims came from a stable family background, Tina Risico had an unhinged upbringing; her dad, Joe, was absent and her mom, Carol Sokolowksi, was a drug user. Through her chaotic childhood, in which Tina says she was sexually abused by several family members from age three to seven, many psychoanalysts believe she developed a survival mechanism enabling her to live to through her torture at the hands of Christopher Wilder.
Wilder’s excitement was likely stimulated by his victims pleading for their lives. Perhaps because Tina did not cry, scream, or beg for her life like the others, he came to view her differently and developed a begrudging respect for her. In the words of Psychiatrist Dr. Roland Summit, Tina, the captive, “captivated the captor,” to the point that he decided her life was worth sparing.
Tina’s Trials And Tribulations Had Made Her Tough
Christopher Wilder’s forty-seven day cross-country killing spree encompassed roughly 8,000 miles in which he is known to have kidnapped eleven women and to have murdered eight of them.
Christopher Wilder’s Confirmed Victims
Left to Right:
Top Row: Chary Gonzales, Beth Kenyon
Middle Row: Terry Ferguson, Terry Walden, Sandy Logan
Bottom Row: Sheryl Bonaventura, Michelle Korfman, Beth Dodge
Linda Grober, Tina Risico, and Dawnette Wilt survived being abducted and tortured by Christopher Wilder. All three women ultimately made full recoveries.
The Survivors:
Linda Grober, Tina Risico, Dawnette Wilt
Recent Photos
Christopher Wilder likely claimed additional lives, both in America and Australia, where he is a suspect in three of his native country’s most infamous unsolved murders.
How Many More Women Did Wilder Kill?
On January 12, 1965, a day after they had been reported missing, the bodies of two fifteen-year-old girls, Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt, were found partially buried in the sand at Wanda Beach, near Cronulla, in Sydney, New South Wales. Christine’s skull had been shattered by a blow to the back of her head and she had been stabbed six times; Marianne had suffered fourteen stab wounds. Both girls’ underwear had been cut and each had semen stains found on their clothes, although autopsies found their hymens still intact. Biographer Duncan McNab says DNA from the crime scene was misfiled and cannot be located.
Wilder was not quite twenty-years-old at the time of the “Wanda Beach Murders” which are similar to the 1963 gang-rape at Freshwater Beach, forty-five kilometers (twenty-eight miles) to the north, for which he was convicted and received probation.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70764870/christine-mary-sharrock
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70764995/marianne-schmidt
Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt
The “Wanda Beach Murders”
Another unsolved murder from the Land Down Under occurred just over a year later, again in New South Wales.
At 5:45 a.m. on January 29, 1966, a butcher arriving for work at Wollongong’s Piccadilly Centre found the bludgeoned body of fifty-six-year-old cleaning lady Wilhelmina Kruger at the bottom of the building’s basement-level staircase. She was naked from the chest down and cigarette burns were found on her hair and clothing. It was determined she had been forcibly pulled down the escalators and stairs after being attacked three stories up, possibly around 4:30 a.m.
In the days before her murder, Wilhelmina believed she was being stalked. Although she does not fit the targeted group of the “Beauty Queen Killer,” Wilder is also a suspect in her murder as well as another occurring nineteen days later.
Wilhelmina Kruger
At midnight on February 16, twenty-seven-year-old store employee and prostitute Anna Dowlingkoa disappeared after leaving the Taxi Club in Kings Cross, eighty-four kilometers (just over fifty miles) north of Wollongong. Her partially clothed, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated body was found ten days later by a truck driver who had pulled off a road to fix a flat tire in Menai, thirty-five kilometers (just over twenty miles) southwest of Kings Cross. Drag evidence showed her body had been moved to the location roughly three or four days before being discovered. Her missing clothing was never found nor were her personal belongings.
Because she was a “working lady” and of the manner in which she was slain, investigators called the killing of Anna Dowlingkoa a “Jack the Ripper-like murder.” I could not find a picture of her.
Based on circumstantial evidence and the similarities of the killings, many Australian investigators believe the same person who murdered Christine Sharrock and Marianne Schmidt also took the lives of Wilhelmina Kruger and Anna Dowlingkoa.
Many also believe the culprit is Christopher Wilder, who came to America three years later where he is also the suspect in several murders or disappearances of girls and young women in the years before and leading up to near his 1984 crime spree.
Did The Cross-Country Killer
Also Kill Across The Globe?
A teenage girl’s body was discovered in a Caledonia, New York field, sixty miles east of Buffalo, on November 10, 1979. She had recently been shot twice in her head with a .38 caliber gun, once in the front and once in the back. The girl remained unknown until 2015 when DNA testing identified her as sixteen-year-old Tammy Alexander, who had a history of running away from home and had done so sometime in the first half of the year.
Tammy lived in Brooksville, Florida, two-hundred-forty miles northwest of Boynton Beach, were Wilder resided. He is a suspect in her murder because she was found wearing an Auto Sports Products jacket, a brand he often wore, and because he was known to have frequented New York. In addition, the .38 caliber ammunition used in her murder was also often used in .357 caliber revolvers like the one he had attempted to retrieve upon being cornered by the New Hampshire State Troopers. Ballistic tests, however, have not matched the gun in question’s compatibility to the rounds that killed Tammy.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/23492901/tammy_jo-alexander
Tammy Alexander
In 1981, two Fort Myers, Florida, women disappeared within one month of the other; one was found murdered and the other is believed to have met the same fate, though she remains missing.
Seventeen-year-old Mary Opitz was last seen on January 16 while eighteen-year-old Mary Hare vanished on February 11. The latter’s decomposed body was found four months later in a field along a remote rural road near Highway 82 in an undeveloped area of Lehigh Acres, fifteen miles east of Fort Myers. She had been repeatedly stabbed in the back.
Both women were last seen in the parking lot of the Edison Mall . . . Wilder’s favorite type of hunting ground.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/261481421/mary_elizabeth-hare
Mary Optiz Mary Hare
On January 20, 1981, four days after Marty Optiz was last seen, another seventeen-year-old girl, Tina Beebe, vanished from Fort Myers. Her disappearance, as well, had the earmarks of a Christopher Wilder abduction in that she had told her sister, Martha, that a man had offered her a modeling job.
Sixteen months later, on May 29, 1982, a green nylon bag containing skeletal remains was found in a shallow grave in Loxahatchee, one-hundred-twenty miles east of Fort Myers. Boynton Beach, where Wilder lived, is only twenty-five miles to the southeast, and he owned property near where the body was found.
The victim remained unidentified until June 2013, when dental records were matched to Tina Beebe. The cause of death could not be determined, but she is believed to have been murdered.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/187268484/tina_marie-beebe
Tina Beebe
The remains of another Jane Doe who had been shot once in the head was discovered in a wooded location near Loxahatchee on December 19, 1982, seven months after the body identified as Tina Beebe’s was found. Nearly forty years later, on December 12, 2022, DNA testing identified the victim as thirty-seven-year-old Leona Keller, a real estate agent who was last seen inspecting the land on which she was found murdered.
Wilder is also considered a suspect in her murder.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/248368263/leona_jean-keller
Leona Keller
Shari Ball, a twenty-year-old aspiring model, left her Boca Raton, Florida, home on June 27, 1983. She phoned a friend from an Ashland, Virginia, truck stop over nine-hundred miles away two days later.
Four months later, on October 29, a hunter found a badly decomposed body in Shelby, New York. In 2014, the remains were identified as Shari’s. Four play is suspected, but her cause of death could not be determined.
Shelby is in western New York, approximately forty miles from Caledonia, where Tammy Alexander’s body was found four years earlier.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/131178623/shari_lynne-ball
Shari Ball
The most publicized missing person’s case in which Christopher Wilder is deemed a suspect is that of eighteen-year-old actress and model Tammy Leppert, who disappeared from Coca Beach, Florida, on July 6, 1983. Her mother, modeling agent Linda Curtis, said she believed Wilder visited her agency several times looking for models to photograph and that he had specifically asked her if he could shoot Tammy.
Linda filed a $1 million lawsuit against Wilder before his death but dropped the suit afterward and seemed to have an about-face, saying she did not believe he was involved in Tammy’s disappearance.
Here is the link to my write-up on Tammy Leppert.
The body of twenty-three-year-old Lori Kearsey was found floating in a Davie, Florida, canal on February 18, 1984. She had been strangled to death and was thought to have been dead for two days.
For a time, Wilder was considered a suspect in Lori’s murder; she was found eight days before Chary Gonzales, his first attributed victim, disappeared from Miami, only twenty-five miles away. It is now believed, however, that Lori was murdered by her husband, said to be from a Boston crime family.
Lori Kearsey
Wilder was, but is also no longer, a suspect in a similar crime occurring less than a month later.
On March 10, the body of nineteen-year-old Melody Gay was pulled from a rural canal in Collier County, Florida, three days after she had been abducted while working the graveyard shift at an all-night store in Golden Gate.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/15833365/melody_marie-gay
Melody Gay
Wilder, however, remains the primary suspect in the disappearance of fifteen-year-old Colleen Orsborn from Daytona Beach five days later.
After missing her school bus on the morning of March 15, Colleen went to the beach. Wilder is confirmed to have stayed at and to have checked out of a Howard Johnson’s Motel in Daytona Beach that day, and a man resembling him was seen talking to several girls on the beach; one of Colleen’s classmates says the man offered her (Colleen)$100 to pose for pictures, the same amount Wilder had given Tina Risico.
A partially buried body found near an Orange County lake on April 6 was initially ruled not to be Colleen, but advanced DNA testing in February 2011 showed it was she.
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/79813730/colleen_emily-orsborn
Colleen Orsborn
Christopher Wilder’s estate was valued at over $7 million at the time of his death. In June 1986, a court-appointed arbitrator ruled the after-tax balance be divided among the families of the eight victims he is confirmed to have killed.
Victims of Christopher Wilder – Find a Grave Virtual Cemetery
That same year, a made-for-television movie, Easy Prey, starred Gerald McRaney as Christopher Wilder and Shawnee Smith as Tina Risico.
The film centers on Tina’s abduction and nine days of captivity.
A Television Movie About “The Model Killer”
SOURCES:
- The Beauty Queen Killer: Nine Days of Terror
- Chicago Tribune
- Daily Sentinel
- FBI Files
- FBI: The Untold Story
- Miami Herald
- Miami News
- Orland Sentinel
- Palm Beach Post
- Sydney Morning-Herald (Sydney, Australia)
- Tampa Tribune
Increíblemente un fructífero asesino en serie, no se le comprobaron todos estos asesinatos pero fue un sospechoso potencial. Un hombre terrible. Y las chicas muy hermosas y jóvenes.
Incredibly a prolific serial killer, not all of these murders were proven, but he was a potential suspect. A terrible man. And the girls were very beautiful and young.