A Rage to Kill

by Ann Rule

  Beth Kenyon didn’t know Rosario Gonzalez, although she may have read about her disappearance in the paper or seen the story on the evening news. Beth’s school was in Coral Gables, just south of Miami. On Monday, March 5, only a week after Rosario Gonzalez’s disappearance, Beth didn’t come home to the apartment she shared with a roommate on Ives Dairy Road.

  Her roommate assumed that Beth had gone to her parents’ home in Pompano Beach, about thirty miles up the Florida coast, so she was not really worried—not until someone at the high school where Beth taught called the next morning to ask why she hadn’t come to work. Beth’s roommate called Bill and Dolores Kenyon, and learned that they had not seen Beth nor did they know of any plans she might have had that would have kept her away from her apartment all night. Frightened, they notified the Metro Dade County police.

  Three days passed with no word from Beth Kenyon. On Thursday, March 11, Beth’s Chrysler convertible, the car she had driven away from the high school in Coral Cables, was found parked at the Miami International Airport. But Beth’s name wasn’t listed on any flights going out of Miami during the previous three days.

  The Kenyons hired Ken Whittaker, Jr., a private investigator and the son of a retired FBI agent, to search for Beth, even though the Miami Dade County police were doing everything they could to find her. It was a daunting task for everyone; there was nothing in Beth Kenyon’s past that might explain her sudden disappearance. As a beautiful woman, she certainly had had a number of boyfriends but, as far as her parents knew, she had never had an acrimonious breakup. She had no enemies. Like Rosario Gonzalez eight days before, Beth Kenyon had seemingly stepped into another dimension.

  Beth’s photograph became familiar to people who lived in southern Florida. One man who learned she was missing worked at the service station in Coral Gables where she usually bought her gas. He remembered the last time he had seen her—on Monday, March 8, shortly before his shift ended at three o’clock. She had been driving her convertible, but she was talking with a man who drove a Cadillac Eldorado.

  The attendant recalled their conversation to investigators, “She was asking, ‘Am I dressed all right?’ and ‘Who will be taking my picture?’ When I went to clean her windshield, she told me, ‘Don’t worry about that—I’m late for the airport.’ ”

  The man in the Cadillac had paid for her gas, and she had followed his car out of the gas station.

  This was the last reported sighting of Beth Kenyon. Who was the man with Beth on Monday afternoon?

  Beth Kenyon’s mother went through the photo albums her daughter had kept updated so meticulously. Dolores Kenyon slipped all of the pictures of men out of their transparent envelopes. It was a difficult task because she had to look at photo after photo of her daughter smiling into the camera, and it heightened the terrible sense of loss and anxiety she had fought for days. She knew some of Beth’s boyfriends, some of her platonic friends, but a few of the photographs were of men she didn’t recognize.

  Dolores Kenyon gathered up the pictures and took them to the gas station where Beth had last been seen. The attendant thumbed through the photos, and paused as he stared at a picture of Beth with a balding man at the Florida Derby Horse Race.

  “That’s him. The man in the Eldorado.”

  Dolores looked at the picture. It was Chris Wilder. She shook her head slightly in disbelief. Chris Wilder was the most polite man she’d ever met. She remembered the flowers, the lovely French dinner, how deferential he was to all women. She recalled how he had confessed his love to Beth, and then been so understanding when Beth gently refused his unexpected proposal. It was difficult to picture him as an abductor.

  Investigator Whittaker and his dad called the number after Chris Wilder’s name in Beth’s address book. He answered, and said that he did know Beth, but that he hadn’t seen her for awhile. Told that he had been placed with Beth on the previous Monday, he said that wasn’t possible. He said he’d been working in the Boynton Beach area and hadn’t been anywhere near Miami or Coral Cables. He did, however, agree to call Beth’s parents to “reassure” them. And he said he would be happy to talk to the investigators.

  Ken Whittaker, Jr. and an associate drove to Wilder’s home on the canal in Boynton Beach. No one answered their knocks and all the window blinds were tightly drawn. They left and visited the offices of his construction company, restaurants where he was known, and, finally, the Boynton Beach Police Department. There they found someone who was not disbelieving when they suggested that Christopher Wilder might be connected to Beth Kenyon’s disappearance. The local police department knew that Wilder had a criminal record, which included three charges of sexual assault and abduction, and that he had left Australia under a cloud, after his last visit.

  Even while he was dating Beth Kenyon, Chris had been on probation after he pleaded guilty in 1980 to charges of attempted sexual battery brought by a teenage girl in West Palm Beach. He had, however, denied any connection to the charges to his friends—insisting that he had only been questioned about the girl, and that police had admitted it was a case of “mistaken identity.” Wilder had violated that probation almost immediately when he flew to Australia. There he had kidnapped and sexually assaulted two teenage girls. He had been arrested the next day, but Australian authorities released him on $376,000 bail that his parents had posted. He then left Australia, after promising his parents he would return for his trial, which was scheduled for April 1984.

  With all the charges and trials pending, Chris Wilder had managed to maintain his equilibrium. He continued to race his Porsche, date a number of women, and act as the good and generous friend that everyone in Boynton Beach and Boca Raton knew. But now, the world was clearly closing in on Chris Wilder. He was apparently anything but the perfect gentleman and the considerate and understanding #8220;buddy” that Beth thought he was. He had demonstrated that he was a sexual predator. It was Ken Whittaker, Jr. who saw the link that might connect Beth’s disappearance with Rosario Gonzalez. When he learned that Wilder drove a race car, he recalled that Rosario had vanished during the Miami Grand Prix.

  Armed with this information, Miami Homicide Detective George Morin checked Wilder’s name against the roster of competitors on the weekend of February 25–26. He found that Chris Wilder had driven his black Porsche 310HP sports car on Saturday, the twenty-fifth. He had placed seventeenth out of the large field of drivers and had won $400.

  More ominous was the statement of a photographer who had been at the Grand Prix that weekend. He told detectives that Chris Wilder had presented himself as a photographer as well as a contractor and race car driver, and had had an expensive camera around his neck on Sunday, February 26. The two had walked past the pharmaceutical company’s tent, and Wilder had stared openly at the girls who were handing out free samples. The witness could place Chris Wilder within ten feet of Rosario Gonzalez shortly before she disappeared.

  Neither Beth Kenyon’s parents nor the investigators doubted now that Wilder had taken her away. Dolores and Bill Kenyon went to Boynton Beach with the investigative team on Monday, March 12. Beth had been missing for a week, and Rosario for fifteen days. It took everything her parents had not to knock on Wilder’s door and demand that he let them in, but they waited at the Boynton Beach Police Department as they were asked to do.

  The investigators, in plain clothes, went to Wilder’s construction offices and asked to speak to him. And then they waited. Several hours later, a Cadillac Eldorado drove up and Wilder got out. They confronted him and asked to talk with him, and he nodded amiably and invited them into his office.

  Smiling at them, he fixed his clear blue eyes on their faces as he said he couldn’t have been with Beth in the gas station the day she vanished. “I was always working,” he explained. He called in an employee who gave him a somewhat halting alibi, “Chris is always down in Boca in the morning—then back here in the afternoon,” the man said. “He’s always here in the afternoon.”

  Boca Raton�
��the posh seaside resort town, whose name flows so easily off the tongue. Few realize that it actually means “the mouth of the rat.” There was a tremendous amount of construction going on there. Any contractor worth his salt could make good money.

  The man who gave Wilder his alibi had blurted out something about “a girl’s car found at the airport,” and then acted as if he’d wanted to take it back. “That’s what you told me, wasn’t it, Chris?”

  Darting a cool glance at his talkative employee, Wilder had said quickly, “Yes, her mother told me that.”

  He gave the detectives permission to accompany him to his home—as long as he was back at work by five. But first, they checked with Dolores Kenyon. She was adamant that she had never told Wilder about Beth’s car being found at the airport. That was information that the police had chosen to keep quiet so that they could weed out the compulsive confessors from the real person who had abducted her.

  And yet Chris Wilder had known exactly where Beth’s convertible was.

  At this point, Ken Whittaker, Jr., and his associates pulled out of the intense probe, allowing the Metro detectives to carry on a full-scale investigation of Christopher Wilder. The Kenyons still hoped against hope that Beth was alive somewhere; nothing mattered except that she be found as soon as possible.

  Up until this point, the investigation into Beth Kenyon’s disappearance had been conducted mostly by private detectives; when adults go missing, it is a rule of thumb that police departments wait from twenty-four to forty-eight hours before they get actively involved, simply because the vast majority of those missing come home. But eight days later, there was no physical evidence that Beth had been harmed. No blood. No signs of any struggle. No bullet fragments. No torn clothing. Nothing.

  It is difficult to obtain a search warrant without probable cause and a list of what detectives hope to retrieve by going into a car or a house or a boat, “tossing it,” and searching for evidence of a crime. The Metro police didn’t have that probable cause—at least, they felt they did not. Wilder’s background file showed a pattern of his skipping away from prosecution. They wanted to be sure they had him so solidly that there was no way he could slip out of the net they were weaving.

  Theirs was, perhaps, a tragic reluctance to move forward. Chris Wilder had been seeing a woman counselor about his sexual obsessions, a condition of his probation on the rape charges in 1980. Although professional ethics forbade her saying anything to anyone, his therapist suspected he might be dangerous. He seemed to her to be a “walking time bomb.”

  She knew that he was obsessed with sex, fantasizing about holding women captive. His ideal relationship with a female would be that he was dominant and his “partner” submissive. As a boy he had wanted to become a white slaver. A decade or more earlier, he had read John Fowles’ The Collector, a novel where a man kidnaps a woman and keeps her in a sealed room, trapped like some exotic butterfly, totally in his possession.

  Now, Chris Wilder failed to show up for his appointment with his therapist on Thursday, March 15. He headed instead to the ocean and checked into a Daytona Beach motel. He wandered the sandy strip, stopping to talk with young women he met there. None of them would recall that he said anything obscene or suggestive. They remembered only that he had distinctive blue eyes and a soft voice.

  A fifteen-year-old girl named Colleen Orsborn disappeared in Daytona Beach on that Thursday, gone as quickly and certainly as Beth and Rosario were. No one can say if Chris Wilder was responsible for her vanishing; she would never be found.

  Wilder had less than a month before he was scheduled to go on trial in Australia. Florida police were focusing on him, and, on Friday, the Miami Herald broke the story about a race car driver who was a suspect in the disappearance of both Beth Kenyon and Rosario Gonzalez. They did everything but print his name and a photograph.

  It spooked him. He had slipped out of control a few days before, and now he saw surveillance teams everywhere he looked—even though they were only in his imagination. He told acquaintances that the police were parking vehicles close to his house and business so that they could watch his every move.

  The Miami detectives had taken a calculated risk that a man with as much property and as many ties to Boynton Beach and Boca Raton would not bolt and run. In every contact with him, Christopher Wilder had been as cool as ice cream; he never got angry and he never got flustered.

  But now, driven by his obsession and his paranoia, he blinked. Quietly, Wilder withdrew savings from his bank account, using some of the money to purchase a 1973 Chrysler New Yorker with low mileage. He took his three big dogs to a kennel and left them.

  And then he left South Florida far behind. He may have had nothing left to lose, but Chris Wilder intended to make a large and horrible statement.

  Each serial killer and his evil brother, the spree killer, has a plan in mind, and a preferred victim type. While their obsessions are insane, they themselves are not. These murderers know exactly what they are looking for in a victim, and they are always prepared with a ruse, a device, a plan that they can activate when they spot a potential victim. Chris Wilder was fixated on beautiful young model types, the tall slender girls who were caught somewhere between the innocence of a teenager and the sophistication of a woman in her twenties.

  Despite his bizarre compulsion, Wilder was a very intelligent man and he knew exactly where to go to find girls like that: amateur model shows in the malls of America . . .

  Would-be models and starlets are made vulnerable by their ambition. Chris Wilder would take advantage of that. He was immaculately dressed with a neatly trimmed beard as he blended in with the crowds surrounding the temporary stages in the malls. Long-legged coeds and high school girls strolled and strutted, some smoothly and some with the awkward coltishness of adolescence. Wilder was well prepared with fake business cards that identified him as the representative of a model agency. With an impressive camera on a strap around his neck, he watched the amateur models and smiled at them encouragingly.

  St. Patrick’s Day found Wilder a hundred miles north of Boynton Beach at a shopping mall on Merritt Island. Teresa Ferguson was twenty-one, the stepdaughter of a police captain in Indian Harbor. Terry hoped to become a model and she was certainly lovely enough. She had huge brown eyes, a full mouth and clouds of dark hair. She sometimes affected a sultry, pouting expression when she gazed at a camera, but she was really a sweet-natured girl.

  Terry Ferguson took her time shopping in the mall that Saturday afternoon. At some point, she was approached by a man with sandy hair and a neat beard. Shoppers in the mall would recall seeing her talking earnestly to a man with a camera. She didn’t seem at all alarmed; she was smiling and nodding.

  In a seemingly unconnected incident, a man whose car was stuck in the sand near West Cocoa Beach had to call a tow truck that day. Merritt Island is a long, narrow, off-shore spit of sand, and it wasn’t unusual for people to get stuck. It was sometime between three and three-thirty when the call for a tow came in. The truck driver responded, to find a man about forty, balding, with a short beard. His 1973 Chrysler was trapped along a local road known as a lover’s lane. In his frustration at finding himself in the soft loam, he had revved his engine until the rear wheels of the car were deeply embedded. He said his trunk was locked and he didn’t have a key, but that he didn’t have anything in there that would help him dig out, anyway.

  The Chrysler came out of the sand easily enough, he paid the tow truck driver, and drove to a Cocoa Beach motel, where he didn’t check in with his real name—Chris Wilder; he signed the name of his business partner.

  Like Rosario Gonzalez and Beth Kenyon, Terry Ferguson failed to return home, and her parents reported her as missing.

  On March 20, three days later and 250 miles away in Tallahassee, a nineteen-year-old Florida State University student named Jill Lennox* was shopping at the Governor’s Square Mall. Slim and blonde, Jill looked like a model. It had been six years since Ted Bundy entered th
e Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State and had left two coeds dead and two others gravely injured. Six years since he had sprinted across campus to attack another woman on the same night. The fear that had gripped Tallahassee then had long since dissipated. Jill Lennox had been only thirteen then, and if she’d ever heard of Ted Bundy, she knew he was safely locked up on Death Row in the Florida State Prison in Starke.

  When a man walked up to her and held out a business card, Jill was a little startled—but not afraid. He explained that he was a professional photographer and that he could not help noticing that she had the kind of beauty that modeling agencies were looking for. Jill smiled but shook her head when he offered her a job. He had a commission for a “shoot” and he needed a young blonde who looked like a coed. “That’s you,” he grinned. “You’re perfect. I have things set up back at my studio.”

  “No,” she said. “I don’t think I’m interested.”

  When he couldn’t convince her to take the job, the bearded man shook his head good-naturedly. “O.K.,” he said, holding his hands up in a gesture of defeat. “I took some shots of you as you were walking—” He offered to send them to her if he could use them, too.

  “But my release forms are back in my car. It’s parked right outside the entrance, there.”

  It seemed safe enough. Broad daylight in the parking lot of a busy shopping mall. Jill walked with the man toward his car, a car that wasn’t quite as close as he’d described. He talked amiably as they strolled toward it, lifted the trunk lid, and rummaged around inside.

  And then he half-turned and his arm shot out as rapidly as a snake striking. His closed fist hit the softness of her belly, knocking the wind out of Jill Lennox. An instant later, she felt a blow to her head that left her dizzy. Before she could gather her wits to run or fight, the man lifted her off her feet and tossed her into the trunk, slamming the lid down hard and plunging her into complete darkness. She was tossed around as the car hurtled out of the mall lot.