Christopher Wilder | Biography

In the 1980s, the 39-year-old serial killer, Christopher Wilder, preyed on teenaged girls. To entice his victims, the successful, Australian-born contractor posed as a photographer in southern Florida, flattering teens and offering to turn them into models. At least eight girls were murdered; approximately a dozen were raped. As his crimes became harder to hide, Wilder set off on a murderous cross-country rampage that culminated in his shooting death by police.

Born on March 13, 1945, in Sidney, the son of an American naval officer and his Australian wife, Wilder had a troubled youth. Sickly, convulsive, and even once given last rites, the boy became a sexually violent teenager put on probation for participation in a gang rape. His twenties charted a further descent into psychopathy. At 23, his marriage lasted only days before his bride left him alleging sexual abuse. He moved to the United States, and in 1971 pleaded guilty to soliciting women to pose for nude photos. In 1976, he was acquitted on a technicality of forcing a female high school student into sodomizing him. Meanwhile, he became a successful electrical contractor in southern Florida.

On a return trip to Australia in 1982, Wilder was charged with kidnapping and indecent assault upon two 15-year old girls. His family posted $350,000 bail, and he was allowed to return to the United States, pending trial. There he began approaching attractive young women in shopping malls and in businesses.

As his court date neared in 1984, Wilder became more frenetic. Two women last seen in his company, 20-year-old Rosario Gonzales and 23-year-old Elizabeth Kenyon, vanished, their bodies never found. Learning that he was being sought for questioning, Wilder fled. Thus began his rampage: a murder in Northern California; a rape and electrical torture in Bainbridge, Georgia; stabbing deaths in Beaumont, Texas and Manhattan, Kansas; and another modeling-solicitation killing in Grand Junction, Colorado, all over a ten-day period in March.

Wilder next abducted, raped, and compelled 16-year old Tina Marie Risico to help him procure new victims as he drove east. One victim survived her ordeal of rape and torture in Rochester, New York. Another was shot to death in a gravel pit near the city of Victor. Against all odds, Wilder bought a plane ticket to Los Angeles for Risico, whose ordeal ended after eight days.

For Wilder, the end came violently and quickly in Colebrook, New Hampshire, on April 13, after two police officers recognized him from FBI descriptions. Attempting to flee, he was shot fatally in the heart. But thereafter, the victim count climbed: two pre-teen girls identified him in police mug shots as the man who had abducted and sodomized them. Investigators ultimately linked him to as many as ten more unsolved deaths and disappearances in Australia in the 1960s and in the United States during the 1980s, all of them teenaged girls.