Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  Zalina survived. After four months of captivity, she was released and she contacted human rights activist Natalya Estemirova and described her ordeal. She could not say where she had been held, as she was blindfolded when she was taken there and on her way back. However, she claimed that the abuse was sanctioned by the Chechen president himself. One girl had managed to steal the mobile phone of a senior militiaman who had raped her. It had the number of Kadyrov’s private cell phone on it, so she called the president and begged for help. According to Zalina, Kadyrov was furious. He called the militiaman to upbraid him for allowing “one of your whores” to call him. As a result, the girl was shot.

  Other girls got pregnant. Some miscarried. Others gave birth on the base.

  Naturally, Zalina was traumatized by what she had gone through. But unburdening herself to Estemirova did no good. On the morning of July 15, 2009, Estemirova was abducted from her home in Grozny. Her body was found that evening in a wooded area a hundred miles away. She had been shot in the head and chest. Kadyrov denied any involvement and blamed exiled oligarch Boris Berezovsky, a former supporter of Vladimir Putin who claimed political asylum in the UK in 2003.

  Zalina fled to St. Petersburg where the Sunday Times tracked her down in November 2010. They made contact through a Chechen intermediary.

  “She was still frightened and emotionally scarred,” the intermediary told the paper, “but she gave exactly the same account she’d given to Estemirova in Grozny. You could see she’d been through hell.”

  Zalina tentatively agreed to tell her story on condition that her name was not revealed. But the meeting never took place, as Zalina traveled to France and Turkey for treatment for internal injuries sustained during her captivity. Then the urge to see her daughter proved too strong and she returned to Chechnya.

  A relative said that pressure been brought on Zalina’s brother to lure her back. He assured her that she would be safe and could visit the daughter she had only seen twice in five years. Then four separate sources in Chechnya told the Times that Zalina was murdered by the men who had held her. She knew too much.

  “Should anyone ever ask questions, it’s easy to pin the murder on her brother and dismiss it as an honor killing,” a relative told the Sunday Times. “But no one is even looking for her.”

  Zalina Israilova now lies in an unmarked grave.

  So-called “honor killings” are common in Chechnya, and murders by the security forces are not investigated.

  “Girls like Zalina simply vanish,” said an activist. “No one will ever face justice for what happened to her. Officially, peace may have returned to Chechnya but terrible things are happening there still.”

  Scandals have surrounded Ramzan Kadyrov since 2006, when a video was posted on the Internet showing him with two prostitutes at an orgy in a sauna. According to a member of Kadyrov’s entourage, “The people around him know that Kadyrov is a psycho who likes, for example, having sex while being observed by prisoners from his private jail, located in the village of Tsentoroi; the onlookers are forced to masturbate.”

  Kadyrov has also spoken out in favor of honor killings. Nevertheless, celebrities, including actors Jean-Claude van Damme and Hilary Swank, violinist Vanessa Mae, soccer-star Diego Maradona, and singer Seal turned out to celebrate Kadyrov’s thirty-fifth birthday in Grozny.

  Chapter 14

  Tina Marie Risico—Dealing with a Killer

  SOMETIMES A KIDNAPPING VICTIM is forced to become their captor’s unwilling accomplice. This was the case with sixteen-year-old Tina Marie Risico. On April 4, 1984, she was in a clothing store in a shopping mall in Torrance, California, when she was approached by a balding, bearded man who said he was a fashion photographer. He was doing a shoot for a billboard that would be seen for miles around and he offered her $100 to pose for a few test rolls.

  He took her to a nearby beach. But after he had fired off one roll of film, she grew uneasy and told him that she had to go home. Suddenly, he became angry.

  “Your modeling days are over,” he said, pulling a gun and sticking the barrel in her mouth.

  He bundled her into a car and drove for more than two hundred miles to El Centro, California. In a motel room, he tied her to a bed and assaulted her. After a few hours, he put her back into the car and drove to Taos, New Mexico. There he tied her to the bed spread-eagle and raped and tortured her until he fell asleep. The next day, he tortured her with electric shocks all over her body and sexually humiliated her. He cut off most of her hair, telling her that he wanted all his victims to look like a short-haired actress in his favorite film, Flashdance . There had been many other victims. The day before he had abducted Tina, Wilder had made the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted” list.

  The torture continued for several days. But Tina was lucky, though she did not know it. Her tormenter, Christopher Bernard Wilder, had killed his earlier victims. Tina was to be spared—at a price. If she was to survive, she had to help him kidnap fresh victims.

  Wilder’s career of sadistic kidnapping spanned two continents. Born in Sydney, Australia, on March 13, 1945, he was the son of an American naval officer and his Australian wife. It was a difficult birth and Wilder was immediately given the last rites. However, he pulled through. At the age of two, he fell into a swimming pool and almost drowned. A year later, he had convulsions and lapsed into a coma. But, again, he survived.

  His father’s career in the navy meant they moved frequently between Australia and America. In the U.S., he spent much of his boyhood in Alabama and New Mexico. A withdrawn child with a speech impediment, he seems to have been the victim of a pedophile; he told others that he had had sexual experiences from the age of nine. At home, though, his father was a stern disciplinarian and a religious man. Sex was totally taboo.

  At age eleven, Wilder became a peeping tom. At twelve, he grew so nervous that he bit his nails until they bled. He blushed when sex was mentioned by other boys and suffered from a nervous stomach disorder throughout his teenage years. But in his fantasy life, he was omnipotent. He masturbated over the idea of turning girls into slaves.

  When he was seventeen, he and a group of friends gang-raped a girl on a beach. He went first, and it was clear that he was the ringleader. However, he claimed that she had consented to sex with him. The others had coerced her afterwards. Nevertheless, he pleaded guilty and was put on probation with mandatory psychotherapy. As part of the course, he was given electric-shock treatment. The idea was to give him an aversion to assaulting women sexually. It failed. Instead, he turned the therapy on its head, forcibly administering it to Tina Risico and others.

  Wilder also became obsessed with the 1963 novel by John Fowles, The Collector, in which a butterfly collector keeps a woman in his basement against her will until she dies. He memorized the text and owned several copies with large sections underlined. He had studied the book and clearly wanted to put some of what it described into practice.

  On January 11, 1965, two fifteen-year-olds named Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock were seen heading toward Sydney’s Wanda Beach with a man answering Wilder’s description. The two girls’ bodies were found in a shallow grave on the beach the next day. Marks in the sand indicated that Christine had tried to flee, only to be caught and dragged back. Attempts had been made to rape both girls, and both suffered multiple stab wounds.

  In November 1969, Wilder used nude photographs to extort sex from a student nurse. She went to the police but did not press charges. Then Wilder fled to Florida. Along the way, he married, but the marriage lasted just eight days. His wife could not cope with his sadistic desires and complained of sexual abuse. She also found that the trunk of his car was full of pictures of naked women and underwear that Wilder had stolen from clotheslines. It appears that he liked dressing up in women’s clothing. In March 1971, Wilder was arrested in Pompano Beach, Florida, for soliciting women to pose nude for him. He pleaded guilty to disturbing the peace and escaped with a small fine.

  At the time, Wilder
was working as a carpenter. With a partner, he set up a building firm that won a lucrative contract to build a housing development. Soon they were employing dozens of men. Wilder became a millionaire. He lived a playboy lifestyle, took up racing driving, and slept with numerous attractive women. However, his taste was for very young women. He would behave inappropriately toward them, but was often contrite afterward. Some sixty teenagers later reluctantly admitted that they had been sexually humiliated by Wilder. Usually he forced them to show him their breasts and perform oral sex on him.

  Early in January 1976, he was carrying out some building work for a couple in Boca Raton, Florida, and got to know their sixteen-year-old daughter. He discovered that she was looking for secretarial work and said he knew of a suitable job. He would drive her there.

  She got into his pickup carrying a spare blouse. Afterward, she said, she was going to hang out with her boyfriend and wanted to change. Wilder realized that he had an excuse to get her to undress and suggested that she change her blouse before the interview as the spare one was much prettier. He pulled over.

  When the truck stopped, he slapped her and tore off her clothes, telling her that she must do whatever he wanted. Then he forced her to masturbate and fellate him. Afterward he was apologetic and asked her if she wanted him to drive her to the police station. Fearing for her life, she said no. She promised not to tell anyone what had happened and he dropped her off at her boyfriend’s.

  However, three months later, she went to the police and Wilder was arrested. When interviewed by a psychiatrist, he wept copiously and admitted that the fantasized about rape, though he knew it was wrong. The psychiatrist said that he was not safe “except in a structured environment and should be in a resident program geared to his needs.” But a second psychiatrist pronounced that he was not a danger to others.

  Wilder went to trial for the oral rape of the sixteen-year-old, but was acquitted, possibly because she had consented to change her blouse in front of him. He refused therapy and made no effort to change his ways.

  On June 21, 1980, he posed as a photographer and told a young girl from Tennessee that he was making a pizza advertisement. He had laced a pizza with drugs. When she ate it, she began to grow drowsy. He took her to his truck, where he persuaded her to take her top off, assuring the semiconscious girl that it was part of the ad. At the sight of her naked breasts, he grew aroused and viciously raped her. Impaired by the drugs, she was in no state to fight him off. However, she managed to note down his license plate number and he was arrested for rape the following day.

  By then the drugs had cleared her system and the girl admitted that she had taken her top off voluntarily, so the charge was reduced to sexual battery. He was given five years’ probation with mandatory therapy. His probation officer reported progress. But secretly, Wilder was drugging young women and a number of prepubescent children and photographing them. Later, the police found numerous disturbing photographs hidden in his studio. At this stage, Wilder still knew that what he was doing was wrong. He told a girlfriend that his compulsion to take photographs was a sickness, but he had to do it. She also recalled that he had once told her to leave his house because he was frightened that he might harm her.

  Wilder continued to indulge his compulsion to wear women’s underwear and he joined a dating agency, looking for young girls. Sometimes he would disappear for two or three days at a time and return looking shaken. He told acquaintances that he had blackouts and could not remember where he had been.

  While visiting his parents in Australia in 1982, Wilder approached two fifteen-year-old girls on a beach in New South Wales. He said he was a fashion photographer and offered them a modeling assignment. After photographing them on the beach, he forced them into his car and drove them to a deserted park where he forced them to strip naked and pose for pornographic photographs. Then he assaulted both of them; he tied them up in subservient positions and masturbated over them. But they noted the license number of his rental car. The following day, he was arrested for kidnapping and indecent assault. He was only allowed to return to the U.S. when his parents posted $350,000 bail. The trial was scheduled for May 7, 1983, then postponed until April 3, 1984, because Wilder was a no-show.

  Back in the States, Wilder was still enjoying the company of attractive women. He threw late night parties and set up a small photographic studio in his garage where women would voluntarily pose nude for him. He could have had any number of consensual girlfriends. But that was never enough for him.

  On June 15, 1983, he abducted two girls, aged ten and twelve, at gunpoint from Boynton Beach Park, Florida. He drove them out into the woods and forced them both to fellate him. Then he returned them to the park. A year later, when Wilder was on the run, the girls identified him as the perpetrator.

  On February 6, 1984, Wilder was racing at the Miami Grand Prix track when he approached twenty-year-old Rosario Gonzales, who was giving out aspirin samples. She had posed for him before, so she had no reason to be apprehensive. She left without even picking up her paycheck. She was never seen again. Her body has never been found. But then Wilder had access to a number of construction sites.

  Less than two weeks later, twenty-three-year-old former Miss Florida finalist Elizabeth Kenyon disappeared after leaving Coral Gables High School, where she worked teaching emotionally disturbed children. She had been a girlfriend of Wilder’s and had posed nude for him. He was, she told her parents, a “real gentleman”—unlike the other photographers who asked her to pose. Wilder had even asked her to marry him. She had refused because she was not ready to settle down and he was seventeen years older than her. They remained friends, though.

  The police took little interest when she was reported missing. She was an adult and there was nothing suspicious about her disappearance. So Kenyon’s parents hired a team of private detectives. They found Wilder’s name in her address book. He had been seen with her at a gas station on the afternoon she vanished, though he denied having seen her. They also linked her disappearance to the Gonzalez case, as Wilder had been at the track that day.

  On March 13, 1984, Wilder celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday by buying himself a 1973 Chrysler New Yorker sedan Gonzales had seen at the track. Three days later, the Miami Herald ran a story linking the missing girls to a racecar driver. Wilder was not named, but he got the message.

  He missed his therapy appointment on March 17. The following night, he met his business partner and said tearfully, “I’m not going to jail.” Meanwhile, he stole his partner’s credit cards, which he used while on the run. Then he put his three red setters in boarding kennels and wiped his house clean of fingerprints. Figuring he had nothing to lose, he put a homemade torture kit in the trunk of his car and drove north.

  In Indian Harbor, two hours north of Boynton Beach, Wilder approached twenty-one-year-old Terry Ferguson in a shopping mall in Satellite Beach. She was pretty enough to be a model, so she was not surprised when a man with an expensive camera approached her. She went to the restroom and changed into some clothes she had just bought, throwing her old outfit into her car. Then, it seems, she disappeared with Wilder.

  Soon after, Wilder called a tow truck. His car was stuck in the sand along a dirt road near Canaveral Groves. This was a well-known lovers’ lane, but Wilder was on his own. The police believe that Theresa was tied up and gagged in the trunk of the car when the tow truck turned up to extricate him. He held her for several hours and beat her with a tire iron before strangling her. Four days later, her dead body was found floating in a snake-infested creek in Polk County, seventy miles away. She was identified from dental records.

  On March 20, 1984, Wilder struck again when he approached nineteen-year-old Linda Grober, a student at Florida State University, in a Tallahassee shopping mall. He said he was a photographer and offered her $25 to pose for him. He seemed sincere and credible, and not at all pushy, she said. She went with him to his car, where he showed her some photographs in magazines which he said he
had taken. However, she refused to pose for him. Growing angry, he punched her in the stomach and the face, and dragged her into his car. She was unconscious when they drove off. When she began to come to, he stopped and put her in the trunk, choking her until she was unconscious again.

  With the helpless girl in the trunk, he drove across the state line to Bainbridge, Georgia, where he checked into a hotel, paying cash. The man at the desk had no reason to be suspicious of Wilder. He was calm and well-dressed. Wilder put his victim into a sleeping bag, zipped it shut, then carried her to his room. When she came to, he forced her to strip naked and fellate him. He shaved off her pubic hair and put a knife to her genitals to see how she would react. Then he tied her to the bed, beat her, and superglued her eyes shut. He raped her repeatedly while watching Dallas on TV, saying that he admired the male lead character J.R. Ewing because of the power he had over women.

  When he got tired of raping her, he got out an electrical cable and, for the next two hours, administered shocks all over her body. She could not scream because she was gagged. Eventually, he dozed off. Seizing her opportunity, she managed to crawl into the bathroom and lock herself in. Then she pounded on the walls to alert other guests. Wilder awoke, realized what was happening, grabbed his clothes, and fled. However, no one came to Linda’s rescue and she eventually had to open the bathroom door and seek help, blinded, naked, and covered in blood.

  After a week in the hospital, Linda was taken out of the country for fear that Wilder might return and kill her. When she returned, she resumed her studies and went on to become a marine biologist. Nevertheless, the memory of what Wilder did to her has never left her. More than ten years later, she told an interviewer: “I still can’t believe that one human being could do this to another.”