Crime Beat (11 page)

“I spent my time professionally with him,” Martin said. “He was very into the business.”

Investigators don’t know how many other young aspiring models were unlucky enough to cross Wilder’s path.

Detective Neighbors said he is suspected in a 1979 rape case. A 17-year-old girl reported at the time that she had been approached on the Lake Worth beach by a man claiming to be a talent agent for a prominent modeling agency in Fort Lauderdale. After luring the girl to his car, the man took her to a secluded area west of West Palm Beach and raped her. Neighbors said the woman recently told detectives her abductor was Wilder.

Investigators suspect Wilder used several aliases, business cards and ploys to lure young women to photo sessions where he would attempt to seduce them or rape them.

“There is evidence of different names and cards he would flash,” said Neighbors. “That is part of his M.O. He had quite a line.”

William Silvernail, who operates the Blackthorn modeling school in West Palm Beach, said Wilder approached his agency in 1981 as a freelance photographer looking for work. He didn’t get any work, but Silvernail suspects Wilder may have taken a business card and then had copies made that identified him as a Blackthorn photographer.

Silvernail said his agency began getting calls from parents checking on a photographer who had approached their daughters. The name of the photographer was often different but the description was always the same: blond, balding and bearded—a description similar to Wilder.

At the Barbizon School of Modeling in Broward County, talent director Dorothy Girard said Wilder also used the name of her agency to approach young women and girls. In those cases, Mrs. Girard said Wilder was often wearing a Barbizon T-shirt.

“And, at that time, we didn’t even have Barbizon T-shirts,” she said. “When he was using our name, our students called up to check on him and we said, ‘Forget it, he is not with us.’”

Some of the girls Wilder approached apparently didn’t bother to check him out. He was arrested in 1980 for raping a 16-year-old girl after luring her from a West Palm Beach shopping mall with promises of appearing in a pizza advertisement as a Barbizon model.

According to court records, Wilder first told the girl to strike poses for him at different stores in the mall. “My eyes are the camera,” he told the girl, according to court records. “Don’t pay attention to me.”

Sheriff’s Detective Arthur Newcomb, who arrested Wilder for the rape, later said in a court deposition that Wilder was believed to have continually used the photographer-agent ruse to seduce young women.

“[Wilder] stated this was a common operation, posing as this modeling agent, and that this is something he has done often,” Newcomb said in a deposition. “He tries to get girls in order to have relations with them. I have non-crime reports that show this man has done this frequently. It is nothing he denies.”

In that case, Wilder pleaded guilty to attempted sexual battery and was placed on five years’ probation. He began receiving psychiatric counseling but never ended his life as self-styled fashion photographer.

Detectives said that in the early 1980s he built a studio in his home on Mission Hill Road. The room was complete with developing, printing and lighting equipment, backdrops and cosmetic supplies. A friend said Wilder even had fans “for blowing a model’s hair back.”

In December 1982, two months after he had bluffed his way into the Miss Florida Pageant, Wilder was arrested in Australia and charged with the abduction and indecent assault on two teen-agers he had lured from the beach with a promise of modeling jobs. Wilder had first taken the girls to a zoo where he took their pictures as they posed on a rock sculpture.

Police said there was no film in the camera he was using. On April 4, he failed to show for a court hearing on the case in Australia.

According to records in Australia and with Interpol, Wilder showed the girls a card identifying himself as a photographer for Tide International, a talent agency located on Worth Avenue in Palm Beach.

Detective Neighbors said Wilder was associated with Tide as a freelance photographer in the early ’80s. According to the detective, models were referred to Wilder’s home studio for photo sessions.

“He used [Tide] as a source for models,” said Neighbors. “He would call and say I need a model and they would send one over. He legitimately hired them. What he did with the pictures, I don’t know.”

Neighbors said the sheriff’s office has received no complaints from any Tide models that posed for Wilder. He said several that were interviewed said Wilder had acted very professionally and they expressed shock that he was suspected in several abductions or murders.

Tom Davis, owner of Tide, said Wilder was not associated with the business. While Davis acknowledged that he had met Wilder through Grand Prix racing, he said Wilder was not one of about 40 freelance photographers associated with Tide.

“We never sent him models, no way on that,” said Davis.

Though Neighbors said Wilder may have had arrangements with other agencies throughout the area in the early ’80s, he said Wilder removed the studio and photographic equipment from his home after his arrest in Australia. The self-styled fashion photographer then began dropping off his film at a local Kmart store to be developed.

Sun-Sentinel
staff writers Ott Cefkin and Patricia Sullivan, along with correspondent Nick Yardley in Australia, contributed to this report.

WILDER VICTIMS STILL MISSING 1 YEAR LATER

February 23, 1985

Haydee Gonzalez will think about the wedding that was planned for her daughter last June and she will cry.

Delores Kenyon will talk about the bedroom, filled with her daughter’s unused belongings, and she, too, has to cry.

It has been 12 months now since Rosario Gonzalez disappeared and nearly as long since Beth Kenyon has been gone, but to each of the missing young women’s families, the pain and the questions have not been diminished by time.

Though it has been a year since Christopher Wilder began a cross-country odyssey of kidnap, rape and murder that authorities believe started with the disappearances of the two South Florida women and ended in his own death 8,000 miles later, he keeps a grim hold on many.

The families of Gonzalez and Kenyon still don’t know the fate of their daughters. Neither do Wilder’s many investigators. And they don’t know how many other unknown victims he may have claimed, either.

With the suspected murderer gone, the families, FBI agents and police officers continue to follow clues and search for the missing women, all the while piecing together bits of the Wilder puzzle.

“It has been a year and we still cry,” said Delores Kenyon, of Pompano Beach. Delores and William Kenyon’s daughter, Beth, 23, was last seen March 6 with Wilder at a Coral Gables gas station.

“You can’t help but cry,” she said this week. “I don’t think my heart could be broken any worse. We’ve gone through a year of this, and we are still at that gas station. We don’t know what happened to her after that.”

“Whatever has happened we will accept as God’s way. But we need to know what happened,” said Haydee Gonzalez, of Miami. Rosario Gonzalez, 20, daughter of Haydee and Blas Gonzalez, disappeared from the Miami Grand Prix a year ago this weekend.

In the last year, the two families have hired private detectives, consulted psychics, distributed thousands of “missing” posters, placed newspaper ads from here to El Salvador and traveled as far as Mexico and Canada in hopes of finding their daughters—whether it would be to find them alive or not.

The Gonzalezes and two relatives were arrested for trespassing on Mother’s Day last May when they searched the outside of Wilder’s Boynton Beach home for clues. Mrs. Gonzalez said it was the frustration of not knowing; she had to do something. The charges were later dropped.

The families have found no trace of the two women. Of the 13 women Wilder is believed to have abducted, six were murdered, four escaped their abductor and three are still missing. The missing are Kenyon, Gonzalez and Colleen Orsborne, 15, who disappeared from Daytona Beach on March 15.

Wilder was killed April 13 while struggling for a gun with a state trooper in Colebrook, N.H.

Not knowing what happened to the missing women is the thing that hurts their families most; it hurts more than knowing.

“They have found their daughters and buried them,” Delores Kenyon said of some of the other families from which Wilder took a daughter. “We don’t even know what happened to ours.”

“The not knowing is the worst thing about this,” said Haydee Gonzalez.

That’s why the Gonzalez family had gone as far as Mexico City looking for Rosario; why each weekend they take a drive out to a different spot of western Dade County to look for her in the Everglades areas; and why they will be at the Miami Grand Prix this weekend distributing 10,000 flyers with her photograph on them.

And that’s why the Kenyons call the FBI week in and week out to see what is happening on their daughter’s case; why they have spent thousands of dollars on three different private detective agencies; and why they have followed even a psychic’s advice and searched underbrush as far away as Alabama for their daughter.

And that’s also why the FBI and police, even close to a year after Wilder’s death, follow any plausible lead or clue in an effort to locate the missing women.

“It is a continuing process,” said Miami Police Detective Harvey Wasserman. “Leads still come in. We still follow them. But so far nothing has worked out.”

“We follow up on any kind of lead that comes in,” said FBI spokesman Joe Del Campo. “We won’t stop until all logical investigation has been completed and all leads are followed out.”

As late as last week, Miami police got a call that Rosario Gonzalez had been seen in Washington, D.C. The tip didn’t check out.

And for the FBI, following the leads has recently led agents to the death row of a California prison to talk to a man who once knew Wilder and is now awaiting execution for murder, a source with knowledge of the investigation said.

The source said the prisoner claimed he could help investigators find the missing women, but information he provided did not check out. Del Campo acknowledged that agents went to California recently, but would not confirm that they spoke to a prison inmate.

While continuing a search for the missing women, the FBI is also pursuing another branch of investigation. Agents are following Wilder back in time along a trail of credit-card, telephone and other traceable records.

Del Campo said agents intend to trace Wilder’s trail backward for years and will compare each stop to any unsolved crimes in that area that involve the abduction, rape or murder of young, attractive women.

“It is very much an ongoing investigation. We are piecing together the Wilder puzzle,” Del Campo said. “In the case of Mr. Wilder, there could be victims from years in the past that we don’t know about yet. We will leave no stone unturned.”

Wilder had a record of arrests for sexual offenses dating back to the 1970s in Palm Beach County and his native Australia. So far, investigators have learned that Wilder crossed the country in the year before the murderous spree that made him the most wanted fugitive in America. Agents said they have attributed a 1983 kidnapping and rape of a young woman in San Mateo, Calif., to Wilder.

“It is difficult to track,” Del Campo said. “We are trying to put it all together. It is going to take time.”

Time is something the families of Rosario Gonzalez and Beth Kenyon have had to pass in agonizing pain since their daughters were reported missing last year.

Gonzalez was last seen Feb. 26, 1984, distributing samples of an aspirin product at the Miami Grand Prix. Investigators have placed the aspiring model at the race that day speaking at one point to a man fitting Wilder’s description.

Wilder, an electrical contractor with an affinity for car racing and photography, had raced his black Porsche in a preliminary Grand Prix race a day earlier and had returned to the race grounds Feb. 26 with his camera, the device investigators say he used often to lure women to their deaths.

The missing woman’s family hopes the 10,000 flyers they will distribute this weekend will bring out new information on her disappearance. The flyers offer a $50,000 reward for information leading to her whereabouts.

“The FBI has not proven it was Wilder who took her,” Mrs. Gonzalez said. “There were people from all over the country at the Grand Prix. There were yachts from all over. Maybe some of these people will be back this year and will see her picture and remember something that will help us.”

In her heart, Gonzalez believes that her daughter, who had planned to get married last June, can be found alive.

“I feel she is still alive,” she said. “I have no idea where, but it could be she was kidnapped and taken away somewhere.”

The Gonzalezes and Kenyons share a unique, though tragic, bond. Family members often call each other to console one another and share information on their similar searches. When the Kenyons were pursuing a tip that their daughter might be in El Salvador, members of the Gonzalez family came to Pompano Beach from Miami to translate telephone calls.

“We share what we know and stay in contact, usually every few weeks,” said Selva Menendez, a cousin of the Gonzalez family who often acts as a translator for Haydee and Blas Gonzalez, who speak little English. “We believe if we find one of the girls, the other will be nearby.”

The trail of Beth Kenyon, also an aspiring model like many of Wilder’s victims, ended at the gas station near the Coral Gables elementary school where she taught. Her car was found at Miami International Airport. Her family has never stopped looking for her.

“If somebody calls up and says our daughter is on the moon, we will send somebody to the moon to look for her,” said Mrs. Kenyon.

But the family’s search has come up painfully short of information on what happened to Beth. The posters mailed to churches and sheriffs’ offices and supermarkets across Florida have resulted in no plausible leads. A six-day search for a cabin in North Alabama where a psychic said the woman might be also proved fruitless. Dead ends—just as with leads to Canada and South America.