by Ann Rule
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.
He came up to her outside the deli, and he didn’t look frightening at all—just an older man with a beard and friendly blue eyes. He told her that she was just the right type for an ad campaign that a company he worked for was doing. She saw his camera and a bunch of other photographic gear he had with him. He looked straight and honest and safe.
Toni Lee was a little bit chubby, and she wasn’t used to having someone tell her she could be a model. She was flattered and intrigued when the man—“Chris”—offered her a hundred-dollar bill if she would come to the beach near Santa Monica with him and pose for some ad shots. She calculated how many hours she would have to work to make that much money—even if she got the job in the deli.
It was kind of fun at first. The sun was shining and there were people around, but later she realized that the wind was getting chilly and everyone but the two of them had left the beach. She told Chris that she had to be getting home. His friendly persua
sion disappeared in an instant, and he seemed terribly angry at her.
Before she could think fast enough to run, a pistol appeared in Chris’s hand and he grabbed her by the back of the neck with one hand and forced the gun into her mouth with the other. She heard a click as he aimed the gun down her throat.
“Your modeling days are over,” he breathed.
He dragged her over to his car, pushed her into the back seat, and held her down as he tied her arms behind her and then looped the rope down to her ankles.
And then the car was racing away from the beach, away from Torrance. Toni Lee had no way of telling what time it was, but it seemed as though they had driven more than six hours when her captor finally slowed to a stop.
Michele Korfman, gone from her safe life in Las Vegas, was dead; her unclaimed, unidentified body lay in the Los Angeles County Morgue. (On June 15, when Nevada and California authorities finally connected her sad little corpse with the beautiful seventeen-year-old who had vanished from Las Vegas, she had been missing two and a half months.)
Wilder and Toni Lee were still in the Cougar, although it now bore stolen plates from New Mexico. Except for using his partner’s credit cards, this was Wilder’s sole effort to hide his identity. He headed out of Los Angeles County to El Centro, California, twelve miles from the Mexican border at Calexico. He may have planned to attempt a crossing at the border, and thought better of it. The pair, he, thirty-nine, and Toni Lee, sixteen, checked into an El Centro motel.
Long before it was light, Wilder put Toni Lee back in his car and they crossed the desert into Arizona, and then turned the Cougar north to Prescott. They stayed the night at a motel there, and then something changed; maybe Wilder knew that he’d made the Ten-Most-Wanted list; perhaps he saw the flyer with his picture in a truck stop cafe or in a gas station. There were no sightings, no motel receipts—nothing for four days.
During those four days, Toni Lee Simms was subjected to multiple sexual assaults. She didn’t fight him. She had survived with passivity for a long time, learning to watch people quietly and to evaluate what they wanted so that she could just get along. She listened to her captor as he talked of his fantasies, his obsessions, his hopes and fears. Somehow, her very helplessness soothed Wilder. All of the other captives had been dead within a day or two.
For some reason Chris Wilder didn’t kill Toni Lee Simms. He kept her with him in his headlong race back east across America. Toni Lee was caught in the grip of the Stockholm Syndrome, an intricate psychological process that virtually turns the mind inside out. A more familiar term is brainwashing. Anyone can be brainwashed; it is only a matter of how much terror, loneliness, time and repetition it will take. There are four steps: (1) the subject suffers a profound psychological shock; (2) the subject is taken away from every person and place where she felt safe; (3) the “programmer” repeats his message over and over and over, and (4) he holds out the promise of a reward—usually the captive’s life.
Toni Lee Simms had been brainwashed. She was kidnaped, terrorized, raped, and taken far from home. Amazed that she was still alive as the miles zipped by, she began to be mesmerized by Wilder’s deceptively soft voice. He had not killed her yet, and she hoped that he wouldn’t kill her if she just listened to him and did what he asked of her. After four days with Chris Wilder she began to think only as he gave her permission to think.
By the time they crossed the Indiana state line, Toni Lee was prepared to do whatever Wilder asked of her. He had convinced her that even when she was out of the car and away from him, he could still hurt her. In order to stay alive, she would have to follow his orders. In Gary, Indiana, on April 10, Wilder ordered Toni Lee to go into the West Lake Mall and bring back a girl. He gave her the script. She was to offer a likely-looking girl a good job, and then bring her to the car.
It turned out to be nowhere near as difficult as Toni Lee thought it might be. She walked around the mall, no longer even psychologically capable of escape, until she saw a girl about her own age filling out a job application on a bench outside a clothing store.
“I work here,” Toni Lee said. “You look as if you’d be fine for the job. If you’ll come outside this mall exit here and wait, I’ll call the manager and tell her.”
Chris Wilder was waiting for his next prey, Carrie McDonald*, sixteen. Now, as the Cougar sped away, Toni was no longer the prime captive; Carrie had taken her place and lay trussed up and gagged with duct tape in the back seat of the car. Her ordeal would last for three days as they drove across as many states. Even in her terror, Carrie wondered about the other girl—the girl who had led her to the cruel man who enjoyed torturing her. The girl he called Toni seemed to be in a trance. She wouldn’t help Carrie or even look at her.
The last place Wilder’s partner’s credit card had been used was in Arizona, and so law enforcement agencies were concentrating their efforts there. And yet they knew that they couldn’t be sure where he was; he had covered over six thousand miles already in a crazy, zig-zagging pattern. And then they tracked him to a motel in Wauseon, Ohio. He was moving northeast.
That, combined with the disappearance of the girl in Gary, Indiana, made them suspect that he was still abducting women. There was no way of knowing how many women might have gone missing between Arizona and Ohio.
On April 11, the credit card was used again in a motel southeast of Rochester, N.Y. No one there recalled seeing anyone with the man who had checked in. For that matter, the clerk couldn’t really describe the man, either.
On Wednesday, April 11, a tractor mechanic was driving on a meandering two-lane road in the woods near Penn Yan, N.Y. It was an easy place to get lost, and the tractor serviceman finally accepted that he was headed for a dead end. He sighed and wheeled his rig around. As he did so, he saw what looked like an apparition lurching toward him. It was a young woman who was nearly naked. Her breasts were scarlet with blood as she tried to stanch the flow with her clothing.
The mechanic blinked his eyes as if to clear the “ghost” from his sight, but the girl was still there. He jumped out of his truck and helped her into the passenger seat. She was real, and begging him to take her to a doctor.
The closest medical help was at the Soldiers and Sailors Hospital in Penn Yan, and the man floored his accelerator, afraid that the injured girl would die before he could get her there.
Carrie McDonald proved to have incredible recuperative powers, despite the stab wounds in her chest. Sheer luck had prevented the thrusts from piercing vital organs, and she was anxious to talk to the FBI agents who flocked to the Yates County District Attorney’s office.
For the first time since Jill Lennox had escaped from Chris Wilder, the investigators had a living witness who could look at a laydown of mugshots and identify him as her attacker.
It was Christopher Wilder all right. He had gone from Florida to Georgia, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Arizona—back to Indiana and Ohio, and now he was somewhere south of Lake Ontario between Buffalo and Syracuse, New York. Only God knew how many women he had killed and thrown away on his sojourn of sadism, but the FBI and task forces around the country agreed that they had names for nine to twelve victims that matched his M.O.
What shocked them the most, perhaps, was Carrie McDonald’s statement that Wilder had a girl with him, not another victim but an accomplice! She told them how the girl she knew as Toni Lee came into the mall in Gary, Indiana, where Carrie was applying for work. “She lied to me—to get me to go out by the car where he was waiting.”
She described Toni Lee as being about her own age—sixteen—and said she was pretty but a little plump. When she had followed Toni Lee outside the mall, she’d been led to a Cougar, and a man with a beard. He had pulled a gun that she identified as a .357 Magnum as he bound her hands and feet. When they stopped at night, Carrie said she, too, had been subjected to electric shock torture, along with other horrible abuses.
Carrie didn’t know why he hadn
’t killed her, and she had been determined to find a way to escape. But she was bound and gagged during the days as they traveled, hog-tied in the back seat and hidden beneath a rack of clothing Wilder had strung up there.
But it was hopeless. At night, she was hustled into various motel rooms, and the days were long stretches of bondage. “When we went through Niagara Falls,” Carrie remembered, “he and the girl got out to look at the falls, and they left me there in the parked car . . .”
Chris Wilder had been so confident; he had somehow managed to control Toni Lee Simms so completely that she was on an invisible tether. And Carrie had been controlled with a gag and tightly-wound layers of duct tape. But then something happened. They woke in their motel room on the morning of April 12, and Wilder turned on the television. Toni Lee gasped. Her mother was on the screen, sitting there on “Good Morning America,” and begging for news of her missing daughter.
Maybe that was the first time Wilder realized that he was big news, and big news meant the roads would be lousy with cops. Carrie told the FBI agents that he panicked, and hurried them into the car. He drove to the narrow and isolated road where the tractor mechanic had found her.
She had known that he meant to kill her, even though she couldn’t see what he was doing. She was blindfolded, bound and gagged, as she followed his directions to “walk here . . . keep walking.” She sensed that they were in an open field, that they had broken out of the woods she’d seen before she was blindfolded. And then he forced her roughly to the damp ground. He clamped one hand over her mouth and pinched her nose shut with the other, but she had tossed her head back and forth in her frantic efforts to breathe and stopped him from suffocating her.