The Podcast Uncovering The New Victims Of Serial Killer Christopher Wilder

In 1984, Terry Ferguson was approached in a busy Florida mall by a charming photographer with an Australian accent. He promised her stardom; instead, she became a victim of Christopher Wilder, the notorious "Beauty Queen Killer." While Wilder’s confirmed body count sits around 11, new evidence suggests a much darker reality: a trail of over 30 victims stretching from Australia to America. Today, we explore Wilder’s predatory tactics, his transition from serial to spree killer, and his potential connection to Australia’s infamous, unsolved Wanda Beach murders. LINKS Listen to the Catching Evil podcast here https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/catching-evil/id1861357789. If any of the contents in this episode have caused distress, know that there is help available via Lifeline on 13 11 14 or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636. GET IN TOUCH Follow us on Instagram and TikTok @truecrimeconversations https://www.instagram.com/truecrimeconversations/?hl=en Want us to cover a case on the podcast? Email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or send us a voice note. https://help.mamamia.com.au/en-US/send-a-podcast-voice-note-467960 Make sure to leave us a rating and review on Apple & Spotify to let us know how you're liking the episodes. Get 25% off Nala with your Mamamia subscription. Click here https://www.mamamia.com.au/nala-discount-code/?utm_source=shownotes&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=discounts to get your code ends April 1st. CREDITS Guest: Mark Llewellyn & Andy Byrne https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0533976/Host: Gemma Bath https://www.linkedin.com/in/gemmabath/?originalSubdomain=au Senior Producer: Tahli Blackman https://www.linkedin.com/in/tahli-blackman-205a891b7/?originalSubdomain=au Group Executive Producer: Ilaria Brophy Audio Engineer: Jacob Round Mamamia acknowledges the traditional owners of the land on which we have recorded this podcast. Become a Mamamia subscriber: https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe https://www.mamamia.com.au/subscribe See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  It's Sunday, March 18th, 1984, in Florida. And Terry Ferguson is at the local shopping centre on the hunt for a new outfit. Her boyfriend has been away on a trip and she wants something nice to wear to welcome him back. She was hoping her girlfriends might come with her, but they're all busy. She doesn't mind, she's happy to browse by herself. At 2.30pm that afternoon, a man approaches her. He looks nice enough, well dressed, in his late 30s, handsome, charming. He has an Australian accent and a camera around his neck. He tells 21-year-old Terry he's a photographer. He even has a business card. "I can make you a star," he says.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  He tells her he'd like to do a quick shoot with her at a nearby beach for a local surfing store. Little does she know, she has happened across a serial killer. A man who will become known as the Beauty Queen Killer. A man who has killed multiple young women. A man who is about to kill her. I'm Gemma Bath and you're listening to True Crime Conversations, a podcast exploring the world's most notorious crimes by speaking to the people who know the most about them. For the past few decades, the confirmed victims of Christopher Wilder was believed to be between 9 and 11.

• 1:21Speaker 00

  Our guests today believe that number is more likely to be 30 or more. In the months before his death, Wilder turned from a serial killer into a spree killer, murdering women every few days between February and April 1984, before he was finally stopped. All his victims were women. Most were aged in their late teens, early 20s. All of them beautiful, with aspirations to model. Wilder grew up in Australia. This was his first hunting ground before he took his horror to America. He didn't creep around in the bushes and kidnap women unawares. He didn't have to.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  He walked up to them in broad daylight, surrounded by people. He charmed them, lured them. Many of the victims of this depraved killer have largely been forgotten because there were simply so many of them. That was why award-winning journalist and author Andy Byrne and former Channel 7 TV executive Mark Llewellyn wanted to revisit this case in a podcast called Catching Evil. They've followed Wilder's footsteps, found new victims, spoken to families that have shared their story for the first time. Because they think there is much more to this case. And they believe Wilder is the perpetrator behind one of our most famous unsolved murder

• 2:46Speaker 00

  cases, the infamous Wander Beach killings. Andy and Mark, join us now.

• 2:54Speaker 00

  Mark, Andy, thank you for joining us on True Crime Conversations.

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:58Speaker 00

  You've both had huge careers, TV, newspapers, books. That's putting it very lightly. How do you know each other? And how did you end up doing a podcast investigation together?

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Andy and I met when I was working at Channel 9, actually doing A Current Affair. And Andy came and took a job for A Current Affair with me. And we kind of like knew that we had the same sort of likes. We like journalism, we like a laugh, we like investigation and, you know, we like to talk about stories. And so from that grew a friendship, a kind of fractured friendship at times, but a pretty good friendship, to be honest. From that grew a friendship. And then we've always been in touch, wherever our careers have taken us. And we ended up doing a crime series at Channel 7. And in that series were some things that led to this podcast. Now, that's more Andy's territory because they're very particular and very personal

• 3:55Speaker 01

  to him. But it's been an interesting journey, but one that we've done together, which is, which is good.

• 4:01Speaker 00

  Well, this is a case, you in particular, Andy, have been chasing and covering for, what, eight years, nearly a decade of your life?

• 4:09Speaker 02

  That's right. Not full time, I should say, but certainly for the last eighteen months, the pair of us have been pretty much, you know, eighty percent of the time we've spent, we've spent on this.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:18Speaker 02

  But to fill in the gap of Mark's story, so when we were researching the new crime show, I was looking for the stories that we could cover, big stories. And Wilder was on a list, but I wasn't really taken with it until I discovered one day that he'd grown up in the same suburb where I was living with my family. Now, years apart, of course, not at the same time. But I was fascinated how, you know, a suburb that's twenty minutes from the centre of Sydney, family, picket fences, playgrounds, full of cul-de-sacs, so kids play out in the street.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  You know, I lived on a cul-de-sac, so did Wilder, in a beautiful house that his father built, overlooking the Lane Cove River. How could a situation like that, he wasn't from a broken home or anything like that, his parents were still together, how could, how could a monster be produced out of, out of something like that? And that's what kind of got me interested.

• 5:15Speaker 00

  Well, you've written a whole book on this before you've even started the podcast. That was many years ago. And now, obviously, you've been spending eighteen months in this podcast. So you obviously had still a lot of unanswered questions from that time.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely, yeah. Well, as I say, it began with a fascination with Wilder and what produced him. But in doing the book, researching the book, and a documentary that Mark and I, Mark commissioned and I produced, met so many families.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:43Speaker 02

  And survivors, that the story turned for me, and I realised that the real story here that had never been told is the story of those families, and of the victims, and of the survivors. They'd never been heard. Their voice had been forgotten. You know, at the time, it was all about the manhunt for Wilder. It was all about him. Oh yeah, a girl died and her body was dumped two days later, but he's now believed to be in California.

• 6:08Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:08Speaker 02

  No one ever had gone back and talked to those families and and found out about those girls, those young girls. And it annoyed me.

• 6:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  That at the time, there were newspaper reports almost suggesting that, oh, these were silly naive girls.

• 6:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  Why did they do that? And it's just so wrong. So.

• 6:27Speaker 00

  Do you think it's also because there were so many victims, it's a case of like, oh, there's too many to cover. We'll cover Wilder.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 6:37Speaker 00

  So that's why they kind of forgot about it.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. They were yesterday's headlines by tomorrow.

• 6:41Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  But what they don't recognize, and this is universal to a lot of these crimes, it's not just Wilder. And that's part of what we're discovering on this journey. But what they don't recognize is that, you know, this this girl that's been taken, their sister, their daughter, their their girlfriend, their wife. You know, it's just wreaks generational havoc on these families. And they have no answers and nobody's listening to them and nobody's listening to to what they want to say, which includes, why aren't the police helping me? Why are they so useless? And in some cases, you know, why are they not listening to the actual information that we're able to help them with? You know, there's like a a culture of silence, but that culture of silence then goes into years and decades.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Where they want to be able to celebrate and remember a woman who was lively and full of opportunity. And it's just nothing, you know, and people ask us the question, wow, do you feel intrusive going into their lives? It's the exact opposite. We're the first people in forever. Who've actually gone and asked questions about the most significant person in their life. And that's really important to be able to open up and talk about somebody and celebrate them.

• 7:56Speaker 00

  It really shocked me, not be not like on your skills, but that these people hadn't. Shared their stories before. They hadn't been asked about their stories because there are so many families. In your podcast that you have spoken to for the first time.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:09Speaker 00

  And this is a really notorious serial killer.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  It shocked me that they hadn't been given the opportunity before.

• 8:17Speaker 00

  Like, that's wild.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is wild. And the problem with that is that, well, in terms of the investigation, when Wilder died in a really bizarre shootout on the New Hampshire-Canadian border, the police basically said, and the FBI basically said, well, that's it. You know, so no further investigation, it kind of just stopped. And the reality is that Wilder wasn't just killing at Wanda Beach once and waiting another 20 years to have a bit of a crag. He was doing it consistently for those 20 years. And there are throughout the states and probably in New South Wales, we found, that's another episode to come, another part of New South Wales where we think it took maybe six, seven girls.

• 8:58Speaker 00

  Wow, okay.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's no investigation, it just stopped dead. And, and that's another frustration for the families of the victims and for the families of victims that to this day, we don't know were Wilder's victims. You know, there's one case that we investigated where the mother died not knowing that her daughter was taken by Wilder due to an horrendous mistake. And that daughter was a Jane Doe for 27 years. 27 years unrecognized, sitting in a morgue.

• 9:28Speaker 02

  Because of another mistake by the pathologist.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, but the thing is that when they did recognize that it was her daughter, she's now dead, her sisters were able to give her a burial, were able to mourn her, were able to remember her. And so there's this sense of, much overused word, closure, but it's very important, it doesn't end the pain, but it does help resolve a lot of, a lot of the issues surrounding it. And that's why, you know, it's important to, to follow a case like this.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  Okay, you asked the question about you're surprised that families hadn't spoken before. I'll give you two examples. There's an episode that, that's come out this week that we've put out, and it's two brothers, and they've spent between them 50 years in the US Navy. These are big, strong guys, you know? And when their sister was taken by Wilder, their parents didn't want to hear her name in the house. They were so, you know, so upset by the whole thing. And so these, these two brothers agreed, or one of the brothers agreed to see me. And then on the day that we arrived to do the interview, they're at Pensacola in, you know, um, in Florida. He said to me, oh, my brother's gonna be here, my elder brother, John.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  We've never had a discussion between us in forty years about our sister.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 10:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  It was the first time, that interview, that they'd ever spoken in the same room as each other about their sister. And it was the hairs on the back of your neck astounding, you know? And they're both weeping. And these are two men who've seen combat and stuff. It's, it's incredible.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  That is so sad.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  It is. It is. And afterwards, they, you can see, it's like a weight's been lifted off their shoulders. It really is.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  Therapy's there for a reason. Talking about people and remembering them and, and going through all of that. Yeah, that's so sad. I wanna rewind a bit for people, for listeners that don't know the story, don't know Wilder. One thing that really got to me when I was kind of looking at your promo and how you've kind of attacked this story, so to speak. You kind of describe Wilder as more cunning than Ted Bundy.

• 11:42Speaker 00

  And if Bundy makes you shiver, wait until you hear about this guy. Why do you say that? Ted Bundy, many people will know that name. I would hazard a guess that not as many know the name Wilder.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  That's the answer, really, isn't it?

• 11:53Speaker 00

  Is that the answer?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was able to get away with it for longer, we think, than Ted Bundy. Being more successful, we think the numbers will be up there, perhaps even more than Ted Bundy. We're still to sort that one out.

• 12:03Speaker 00

  How many? How many victims do you think?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Look, it's hard because there, there are clusters of victims all, all over the place. And there's a guy on death row in California who's been on death row there in San Quentin for four decades and more. He was a former friend, or I say former, he was a friend of Wilder's that in his racing team. And he says that Wilder confessed to him that he'd murdered eleven women at that stage. Now, that conversation took part before the rampage and before an awful lot of other suspected killings that Wilder had done. And if you think that all the experts tell us, and they all agree that Wilder is the prime suspect, he's the Wanda Beach killer.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  A killer doesn't then wait twenty years to go on the rampage.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:54Speaker 02

  He's committing crime and he's in the perfect place in southern Florida. Because to get rid of a body in southern Florida, you just go out to a bit of a swampy area, you put it near water, and the crocs and the wild pigs and everything will pick it clean in a couple of days.

• 13:08Speaker 00

  Which is what he did.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Which is what he did. If you put those eleven with the ones that we know about, and now we're hearing and being told that he is a suspect in, was it mark six, seven?

• 13:20Speaker 01

  Six, seven victims on the New South Wales north coast.

• 13:24Speaker 00

  So we're getting up to like fifty.

• 13:26Speaker 02

  No, I don't think, well, who knows how high it would go, but certainly thirty, I think, is the ballpark figure.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  And look, when he died, Mark's right, the FBI, look, they did do some checks, but they were kind of financial routine checks, you know, where had he been, where had he, where had he spent and bought petrol? Because like a lot of serial killers, as you probably know, most serial killers are white, middle-class guys.

• 13:53Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Who like to drive cars.

• 13:55Speaker 01

  We had to rule each other out when we did this.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  We did.

• 13:58Speaker 01

  You know, I'm still not sure about Andy, to be honest.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  Investigate each other and then we'll do this.

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  So he drove enormous distances and he was a racing car driver, for goodness sake. You know, so it's really hard, and I get it, you know, we're talking about a time when there were no computers around. And police departments, particularly in America, didn't really communicate with each other terribly well. So if you're Wilder, who lives in one area of Florida, but then he drives three states away at the weekend and murders a girl. And then drives back. The the dots are never going to be connected. They would be today.

• 14:34Speaker 00

  So that's where that cunning, smart, all that kind of comes in.

• 14:38Speaker 01

  You know, it's it's it's like when you constantly revise your homework and you become better and better and better. Well, he just became the supreme serial killer. He knew how to, he was so good at it. And and that's why, to get back to your original question, um, we think that, you know, probably surpasses Bundy in terms of the craft.

• 14:56Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  But here's another thing, and I'll let you in on something we're about to reveal in one of our upcoming episodes. We also think that he might have been following Bundy around because we've spotted a pattern of him taking women where Bundy had taken women.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  Oh.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  So so we think that he might have been sort of playing a bit of a game with himself or marking himself off against Bundy himself. So um, that's one of the reasons why we're going to the States.

• 15:21Speaker 00

  He just, everything you learn about this guy, he just gets more and more twisted.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:25Speaker 00

  More more sick, more, yeah.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  Well, what we what we are now discovering too, and and this occurred to Mark the other day when we were going over the material, is his victims are getting younger and younger.

• 15:37Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  And he was stalking them for quite some time beforehand. He was, and it's typical predatory pedophile behaviour, if you like. He was ingratiating himself into families and and and into the lives of people.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So he would get access to young girls.

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  You know, whether it's pretending to be a photographer at a beauty contest that gave him access. Whether it was befriending the local homicide detective. Why would he, why would a serial killer do that? Well, I think the I think the answer's obvious, isn't it? You know, why would, why would he um, follow and watch and stalk um, two, two, two sisters? Um, whose mother ran a business close to him. So he could get the information so that then he could be ringing them up and pretending to be from their school.

• 16:28Speaker 01

  He rang them up and put on a fake female voice. So he he just faked the female voice of a teacher. And, you know, he's been watching these girls because his offices are virtually next door to, you know, their mum's beauty salon. It's just like, the guy is constantly thinking of new ways to entice and abduct people. I mean, what goes on in a mind like that?

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Well, can you take us back to the kind of the start, a bit more about his origin story for listeners that don't know much about him? You said he grew up in this, you know, picture perfect Sydney suburb.

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  Because he was Australian American.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was, he's the son of an American war hero, um, who, who was in the Navy, uh, in the war.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  At Pearl Harbour?

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, at Pearl Harbour, in the Battle of Medway. He met Wilder's mum on shore leave. She was the daughter of a Sydney tram conductor.

• 17:20Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  Uh, Wilder came along a year later, born here in Australia. War ends, um, the father Coley is still in the Navy for the next fifteen years or so. So Wilder then moves to America with his, with his mum, and, and they, they followed the dad around to naval bases all over America in the Philippines. And that's part of the trauma that the experts talk about, that, you know, he never settled, he never made friends, it was constantly moving schools, you know, all, all that kind of background. And then at fifteen, it wasn't a happy marriage, his parents, and at fifteen, when his dad retired from the Navy, Wilder's mum gave him an ultimatum, that she was going back to Australia and taking, um, Wilder

• 18:04Speaker 02

  and his brother at that stage, um, and he could follow her or he could, or he could stay in America. He followed her, they built the house in Rydell. Wilder was fifteen at that age.

• 18:13Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 18:14Speaker 02

  He'd already started to commit offences, um, weird stuff, you know, peeping toms, stealing women's underwear from, from the local clotheslines, and that kind of thing.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Because he lived that kind of bi, what a bi-coastal life, you know, in America, born in Australia, came back to Australia, um, he had this capacity to change his accent. So in Australia, at the time of, say, the Wander Beach murders, Elvis was huge. And his dad was from Alabama, like Elvis. And so Wilder was able to. Speaking this Elvis-like Alabama accent.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  The drawl.

• 18:50Speaker 01

  And the drawl and the the girls he had loved, he has a huge attraction to the girls. He goes to America, he does the opposite and often he'll put on an Australian twang. You know, sort of, so he's exotic. So he was this shapeshifter, this chameleon. And that relates back to your question, you know, the backstory, he traveled between these two countries. The the the follow up is that years later, when ridiculously he's given bail by a Sydney court. He's able to return to America, um but that has triggered something in his mind, which leads to the rampage. But he was able to play between these two countries. It probably makes him, you know, I mean, unique amongst serial killers that he operates in two countries.

• 19:35Speaker 00

  I've heard you say that his mum taught him sex and his dad taught him torture.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Uh.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  That's a pretty hectic sentence.

• 19:44Speaker 02

  It it is.

• 19:45Speaker 00

  Can you tell, can you tell me what that means?

• 19:46Speaker 02

  And to be fair, we weren't the first ones to say that, that we were, we were interviewing the FBI's top profiler. Who studied Wilder. And when he discovered that um Wilder, Wilder had told some of this detail to his sex therapist, Ginger Bush.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  What a name.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  What a name.

• 20:07Speaker 01

  It is, it is. People, people have written in. I mean, it is an extraordinary name to have for a therapist and, you know, people have written in about it. But it is what it is. And she was the therapist that he told all his reality to. She believed they were fantasies. He was basically fessing up to everything and she just thought he had these wild, violent sexual fantasies.

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Including that he liked to watch his mother undress. So he used to peep on her and do that. His father, of course, um in the navy, his, his trade, his background was electrician. And he had seen his father build one of these devices. Now, whether it was ever used on Wilder, I've no idea. The mother and father did arrange for him after that rape that we mentioned before, his first rape. They sent him for electric shock treatment, which was barbaric, to be honest.

• 20:56Speaker 00

  Hmm. It's not treatment, it's torture.

• 20:59Speaker 02

  It's torture. And particularly this, this type and how it was done, it was, it was real torture. Um. So there was a um a hatred there apparently that that festered in Wilder for A, his mother.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Allowing him to to undergo that.

• 21:15Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  But also, his father was a was a heavy drinker. And when he when he was drunk, he was violent and he used to thrash the boys. Um. He was also a strict disciplinarian. And there are real um similarities in the way that he insisted that the boys called him sir and said yes sir and no sir.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  And he did the same with the victims, with the girls. He made them do that. And if they didn't respond like that, he used the electric shock treatment on them.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the the suggestion is that, first of all, he may have learned how to do that from his father. Um. To construct the the electric shock equipment that he later used on his victims. And then that was exacerbated by the electric shock therapy he went through, courtesy of his parents sending him there. But the the theory from Dr Eric Hickey, who was the preeminent FBI investigator into serial killers, an expert, was that the strange violent behaviour of his father certainly influenced him becoming a psychopathic serial killer. But the sexual element, he he he believes, including the the spraying of his mother's favourite perfume before he did anything to the victims in the room. He used to do that methodically.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  And his obsession with women's underwear strongly points to some obsessive sexual behaviour. And his theory uh is that the mother was complicit in his early life. So so we don't know for sure, but it's it's.

• 22:41Speaker 00

  Makes sense.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  It makes sense.

• 22:43Speaker 00

  Does any of this explain, though, why he has such a hatred for women, for girls? Because they were his only victims, young women.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  One of the theories is this, um. In in people who've had significant childhood trauma, and he's certainly, you know, if you were rated out of ten, he's an eleven on that scale.

• 23:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  So for people who have significant childhood trauma, that part of the brain that sort of regulates empathy, atrophies, it just disappears, it can't be got back.

• 23:15Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 23:16Speaker 01

  And they find that in a lot of serial rapists. Again, this is from Dr Eric Hickey and others that we interviewed. So at that point, you know, you don't actually sympathize with the people you're you're torturing or brutalizing or killing. These are just part of a grand scheme and the scheme is one of power and control. So it might be that he doesn't actually hate women. He loves killing. If you get what I mean, there's this small distinction here. It might be that he does hate women, you know, but either way, whatever it is in our brains that stops us from going around the streets and killing people, he didn't have. Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 02

  I think as well, it's all about dominance with him.

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  It wasn't always the sex. He didn't rape a number of his victims, but he was so violent with them. There was a rage inside him. Where did that come from? Yes, he certainly blamed his mother, because he said this to his therapist, he blamed his mother for not protecting him from the father. And that's a, that's a big, big, big part of it. But certainly that, that dominance that he had to have, you know, we've talked about his obsessions and he'd spray his mother's perfume on the bed sheets. His other obsession, there was a couple of them, but the one that sticks out is his obsession with the collector.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  The book.

• 24:36Speaker 02

  The book where a guy abducts a young girl and keeps her in a, in a, in a secret basement, you know, and he tries to, he thinks that she will eventually come to love him. It's really, really weird and twisted and it's surprising. Dr. Hickey told us how many serial killers become obsessed with this book.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Oh. Yeah. Get rid of it. Yeah. Don't give it to your kids. Yeah, no, get rid of it.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Scary.

• 25:05Speaker 00

  You're listening to True Crime Conversations with me, Gemma Bath. I'm speaking with hosts of the Catching Evil podcast, Mark Llewellyn and Andy Byrne. Up next, we take a closer look at the Wander Beach murders. Were they Christopher Wilder's first kills?

• 25:24Speaker 00

  You know the drill. You pick the couch, pay the deposit, then wait 12 weeks praying it matches the living room. Let's skip that. Mamamia is giving one lucky subscriber a $5,000 voucher for B2C furniture to spend on pieces that are in stock and ready to ship right now. High-end style, zero weight. To enter, head to mamamia.com.au/subscribe. You'll unlock all our subscriber-only podcasts, articles, and our fitness app, Move. Already subscribed? You're already in the running. Offer ends October 31st. T's and C's apply. You keep bringing up the Wanda Beach murders, so let's go there. The Wanda Beach murders, 1965, if I'm right.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 26:06Speaker 00

  Two young girls, 15. They were found buried and very brutally murdered in Wanda Beach, which is a very remote stretch of beach down in Cronulla in Sydney.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  That has remained unsolved for many, many years. It's one of our most notorious kind of unsolved murders here in Australia. But you think that was Wilder's first kill?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Oh yeah, 100%. Again, you mentioned how brutal and uncontrolled it was. That's actually signifies that it probably was the first kill. Again, from some of the other experts we've spoken to, the first kill is often disorganized. It's chaotic. They don't really know what they're doing. And as one of them says, killing ain't that easy, you know? People don't die on the first stab. And, and so, but what it does, that frenzy, that release of everything they've been fantasizing about, leaves them with a sort of impression that they can't ever get rid of. They want to recreate that feeling forever and ever and ever. And that's probably what happened with Wilder. But in the course of the investigation, I'll throw over to Andy on this.

• 27:08Speaker 01

  But one of the things we've discovered, courtesy of this podcast and a lot of leads coming in, are some really interesting stuff. So, including coming up, a woman who was 15 at the time, worked, was in Rye, used to go to a department store where Wilder worked. And he approached her about two weeks before the Wanda Beach killings and asked her on multiple occasions, was persistent, not once, not twice, but more than that, persistent to this 15-year-old. I want you to take time off work. Let's go to Wanda Beach together. I can come and pick you up. I really want to do that. And she refused. She was a shy fifteen year old. She's

• 27:49Speaker 01

  not told her story publicly before. It places him in right, talking about Wanda Beach two weeks before these two girls are taken. But more than that, afterwards, she came into the possession of a diary he kept at the time, remember, he's still a young bloke at this time, that had dozens and dozens of names and phone numbers of local girls in the area. And she gave it to the police at the time, gave them the information. It's lost and they didn't investigate. So, you know, there we are.

• 28:20Speaker 00

  Which I feel like comes up a lot in Wanda Beach. They had DNA, it got lost. They had a witness. They didn't follow that.

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:28Speaker 02

  Well, that's right. I mean, perhaps I can summarize the important elements, I think, that we've discovered and are there that point directly to Wilder as being the killer. Two victims. Now, that's very, very rare for a serious crime like this. I mean, how does one person manage two teenage girls? You know, they're not five year olds. They're fifteen year old girls. So two of them, that's extremely rare. It was a beach that Wilder went to a lot. He was a surfer. The description of the killer that Marianne's seven year old brother gave to detectives, which was checked and rechecked, and they're absolutely

• 29:11Speaker 02

  convinced that it was accurate, and this is what he saw, fits Wilder to a T.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Then you had the incident Mark's talking about, this new witness who's come forward. Now, she was fifteen at the time. She was shopping with her friend, again, two girls together, in a shopping mall, approached. That's what Wilder did for the next twenty years. He wanted her to go to Wanda Beach over about three different weekends. When the murders happened, literally two weeks later. He never went back to work.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:44Speaker 02

  And the women who, where did he work in that department store? He worked in the women's fashion department.

• 29:50Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  So.

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Sorry, sorry, your face.

• 29:53Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 29:54Speaker 00

  I feel like I've made that face a lot because it just gets grosser.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:57Speaker 00

  Everything you say.

• 29:59Speaker 02

  And the women who worked there said, oh, we've seen him talk to you a few times. Were you a friend? And she said, no, no, no, he was pestering me. And they said, oh, he's left this book behind. And Mark's right, innit? There were fifty pages of women's names and telephone numbers. Now, where did he get that? Well, I would say, we were talking before about he ingratiated himself into situations where he could get information. He was working in the fashion department, I think, because what I should have had explained is that one of the last names in the book was a friend of this girl who'd been trying to pester to go to Wanda Beach. When she told her friend, did you know him? Your name's in his book. She was horrified.

• 30:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  So where did he get the details from? I think he got it from the store. He was working there in the department. I think he was watching women and when he took a like to one or whatever, he would, he would get her details.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:53Speaker 00

  It sounds like there are enough clues there that the police could have caught him then and saved thirty plus lives.

• 31:00Speaker 02

  Well, it gets worse, doesn't it? Because four years later, and don't forget, as I say before, no computers or anything. So this was the biggest investigation in the state's history. You had, I think it's something like ten thousand witness statements. Now, these aren't on a computer that you can program and it'll, it'll find all the connections. These were all on little flashcards, sixty thousand of them apparently in total.

• 31:24Speaker 00

  Imagine the amount of boxes.

• 31:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. But who's gonna be able to cross-reference? You, you just wouldn't be able to do it.

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Oh, they're still cocked up. They're still serious.

• 31:32Speaker 00

  I'll tell you why they're cocked up. Andy's making excuses.

• 31:35Speaker 02

  No, they, they're cocked up because Wanda got married. Three years after Wanda Beach, he gets married.

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  Which is another detail that is wild to me. How did she even survive that?

• 31:43Speaker 01

  I didn't know that. When Andy took me out, I'll explain then you take it in. It takes me on this drive in his battered old Mini to, um. Um, the chapel, the church where one of the victims had had her memorial service was um.

• 31:58Speaker 00

  A Wanda Beach victim, yeah.

• 31:59Speaker 01

  Christine, and we drive up there, I'm going, well, why, you know, and we've got the mics on, we're recording for the podcast. And then he tells me that at the time when they had the service, and it was the biggest news in Sydney, and there were hundreds of mourners outside the church, you know, Wilder lived a suburb away, if that, a few hundred metres. Now, then he says, now, look at the church, and he drives me down the road, and maybe fifteen, twenty seconds later, look at that building, and there's a block of flats. See that top flat that overlooks that chapel? That's where Wilder brought his first wife to live in. Now, if you think that serial killers often keep trophies, there's a good argument he said that that was his trophy, that he got

• 32:43Speaker 01

  a real thrill out of living just where one of the victims was mourned after the murder of that victim. Now, Andy did the drive with me that day, I didn't know, and I was absolutely shocked.

• 32:56Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  But it's a level of detail that makes sense, you know, as you add it up, these details make sense. To throw it back to Andy, um, not long after, because he tries to kill his wife three times, there's an incident where she goes to the police with her mother and her sister, and tells them that she believes that her husband is the Wanda Beach killer.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  It's remarkable. Um, he did try to kill his wife three times. Um, he stalked her on a beach with her sister, two girls together, on a beach.

• 33:27Speaker 00

  Same M O.

• 33:27Speaker 02

  Same M O.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:29Speaker 02

  Um, after he tries to kill her the third time, and then is arrested in their front room for raping an eighteen-year-old nurse that he'd brought back to the house, and he admitted it in front of his wife, she left him. A few days later, as Mark says, she goes to the police station, she says, look, I think that, um, think he could be connected to Wanda Beach. The police took eight months to go and knock on his door to look for him, to take a statement. In that time, he'd fled to America.

• 33:58Speaker 00

  Which is a detail I don't understand, because couldn't they just extradite him back? If they think he's the killer?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  If you're so sort of like slack to take eight months to go and, you know, knock on the door of the person who's possibly responsible for the biggest unsolved crime in the States or in the city's history at that time, well, you can imagine that level of incompetence can then travel a little bit further. And rather than do what you just said, which is the obvious damn thing.

• 34:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Come back here, old son. Just go, oh, well, case closed, which is effectively, well, we're not going to look into it much further.

• 34:34Speaker 02

  Well, they wrote on the murder book, nothing further can be done at this stage. Inquiry suspended.

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, the poor old Americans are now got a serial killer living in their midst.

• 34:42Speaker 02

  I'm not making excuses for them at all. He had two passports.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  So he could have been coming in and out of the country on his American passport. And again, no computers. How would they have, you know?

• 34:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  How would they have put it? And that could have been happening. But, you know, 20 years later, he gets arrested. He's locked up in Manly Police Station.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Hmm. Because he's back in Australia.

• 35:04Speaker 02

  Because he's back in Australia. And why is he back in, well, why is he in Manly Police Station? Because he lured two girls off a beach and assaulted them in his motel room. But he's arrested. He's there. They've got, they know about the wife from 20 years before.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  But did they do a search? Did they do a check? Did they know who the guy they had in the cells was the Wander Beach Killer? Now, I don't believe that they did, because Wilder applied for bail.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  And they let him out.

• 35:33Speaker 02

  The police officer in the court, the prosecutor, he opposed bail, but he opposed bail on the grounds of he could be a flight risk. These are serious charges, because he was being charged with sexually assaulting these two girls, which is a serious charge. But the magistrate gave him bail. I don't believe that if the police prosecutor had said to the magistrate, we're also investigating Mr. Wilder for far more serious charges, that he'd have been given bail. He wouldn't have been. So I don't think the police had made the connections at that stage. And what makes it even more difficult for me to fathom is that when Wilder died...

• 36:14Speaker 02

  Not long after, you know, we're talking about twelve months later. When he died, there was a huge press conference here in Sydney because it was it was the biggest story in the world at the time. Biggest crime story. And the the chief of detectives here in Sydney at the press conference, when asked the question, why didn't you, why did you not question Wilder about Wander Beach when you had him in the police station, in the cells, in custody? And his answer still blows my mind today. He said, oh, we were intending to interview Mr. Wilder at the conclusion of his trial.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so we'll just hang around, wait for the trial.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  The biggest unsolved case in the state's history. And they were waiting for a very serious, but not quite the same case to enter. You know, why did they wait?

• 37:05Speaker 00

  To connect the dots for listeners, he gets bail.

• 37:08Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 37:08Speaker 00

  He goes back to America.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:09Speaker 00

  He's awaiting trial. And then he goes on this, he basically turns from a serial killer into a

• 37:14Speaker 02

  Spree killer.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  A spree killer. And kills multiple women in in very close succession.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  But it's even worse, Gemma. It's even worse. Because you're talking about being a spree killer when he goes on the rampage.

• 37:26Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 37:27Speaker 02

  We're going to America in a few days. Because we're going to be talking to families of girls who were murdered. When he gets back to America, but before he goes on the spree.

• 37:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  So he murders in that period, gets away with it.

• 37:41Speaker 00

  Because that's what you're saying, you're saying there there is this twenty year gap where they say Wilder didn't kill anyone. But you're saying there are multiple victims there that just haven't been linked to Wilder in a more formal sense.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  And and in in part because families weren't listened to, you know, evidence wasn't looked at. People weren't heard, you know, it's all the, it's just the tragedy of a system that fails the victims.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  But also because.

• 38:12Speaker 02

  There was a, there was a body, but it couldn't be identified.

• 38:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  They were a Jane Doe.

• 38:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  So there was no way to link that to Wilder. Now with DNA, every now and again, they get a match. The Jane, and they do an identification. And in a couple of cases, we found out they were Florida girls. Who the last contact with them, they said to their parents, oh, we've met this guy. He's a fashion photographer. He's taking us to New York.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Because he's, he's gonna, he's gonna get us a job, you know, as a model.

• 38:43Speaker 00

  Why this fashion photographer thing?

• 38:46Speaker 02

  It works.

• 38:46Speaker 00

  That was his schtick, it worked. He used it for thirty years.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, he'd go up to very beautiful young women. I mean, there's one of the, I think the first episode we did, this amazing woman called Frances Ferguson. His daughter, Teresa, was taken, she was the dead spit for Jennifer Beal in Flashdance, which terribly was one of his favorite films, even another one of his obsessions. So he spots her in a mall and he takes her. And then we asked, Andy asked the question about why would she go? I mean, surely that conversation about being a beauty queen would have.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  I don't forget, she was the daughter of the police captain.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, she was the daughter of the police captain and would have told her, you know, be careful. Don't, don't, you know, don't talk to strangers. And Frances said, look, she was naive. She was a young girl who had issues about, you know, whether she was attractive enough, or good enough, all those issues that many young teenage girls have. And a, and a man who does not look threatening. So remember, he operated in broad daylight. He comes up to you in a mall. He doesn't, he's not sneaking around and coming up to you, you know, in the dead of night. He's, he's there, he's wearing a Rolex watch. You know, his hair's neatly clipped, he's got a nice suit on and he's got a portfolio of photos and often Pentax camera with no film in it hanging around his neck. And he says, you know, come out to the car, I'll show you the portfolios. And that's the last trip they ever make.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  So he's got this honed to perfection. But, you know, in the conversations that we've had with people on the road, I mean, we met people who had near misses. Um, one woman went to a mall.

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Same day and she she she decided not to go with him. So what does he do? It doesn't deter him. He chooses the next girl. So with every rejection, there was always some acceptance. Just just to go back to the manly one, um, you know, how did he get bail? But we went to Curl Curl recently, blazing hot, summer's day. You know, waves pounding to meet a man who was the desk sergeant the day that Wilder was brought in. He's the guy that has to process him. And he is the only guy that's really been face to face, only policeman that's been face to face. And he said he saw something in him. He said, you know, I've seen, his exact words, I've seen psychos. I've seen psychopaths and he was exactly that.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Now, as he's processing him, Wilder, who does not want to be kept in Australia because he fears he's going to be exposed, is really petrified about that and being incarcerated, starts to look around as if he's going to escape. And then does something even more extraordinary. He takes off his gold Rolex watch and attempts to bribe the sergeant. Um, all of this is new information. He hasn't spoken in forty years.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  That'll get me bail, he said.

• 41:32Speaker 01

  That'll get me bail as he pushed the watch over to him. The sergeant, Rob, goes and says to him, he says, I see something in you. You've done, again, a direct quote, worse shit than this. And Wilder, he said his expression, while he was calm, you could see the rage in his eyes. And Wilder hated authority figures, male authority figures. Wilder just sort of like the eyes just flashed, then he then he goes, I think you've done murder.

• 41:59Speaker 00

  It's a very bold thing to say to someone in a.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  To Wilder and Wilder just sort of like, he said the change in his look and his attitude. His face went red at the accusation, probably the first time he's been directly accused. Now, consequently, the the cop wasn't bribed. He didn't give him bail. He didn't recommend bail. Wilder got bail because the court and his lawyer, you know, one was, you know, the court was stupid and the lawyer was good. He he gets away, but that that encounter um reveals again Wilder's sort of like pathology and, you know. He went on to do it again and again and again.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  That that police sergeant is the only policeman anywhere. And if you think that in America, it's still to this day, the biggest manhunt in American history. Because Wilder went from Florida all the way across to California, all the way across the country then, up to almost the Canadian border. It's the biggest manhunt ever. But the manly desk sergeant is the only policeman who ever confronted him and accused him of murder.

• 43:06Speaker 00

  After the break, the women who are yet to be named as victims of Christopher Wilder.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  I want to tell, go back to Terry, Theresa, tell her story a bit because I think, you know, I want people to understand what this man did to these women. So let's tell Terry's story a bit. It's 1984. He approaches her in a mall. She she goes with him. What does he do? What does he do to her?

• 43:37Speaker 02

  He drives to the Cannaveral, remember, we've all seen the rocket launches. He takes her to Cannaveral Groves, which is about a 20 minute drive away from the mall.

• 43:45Speaker 00

  And he has her in the boot?

• 43:47Speaker 02

  He has her in the, he has her in the boot.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  And what we, what we know now is that very, very close, I mean, within a stone's throw of where he takes her, another body had been found only a few months earlier that's now been connected to Wilder. Another girl who disappeared off the same beach because he went back to the same places time and time again.

• 44:08Speaker 02

  But he goes there and he gets bogged down in soft sand and he's, he's, he's struggling then, what does he do? He rings a local tow truck company and the guy says to him, I'm not going to be out there for, you know, a good hour or whatever. When he, when he arrives, of course, Wilder's problem is that he's got a girl tied up in, in, in, in the boot, you know? Now, when Terry is, Terry's body is eventually found, they realized that he'd attacked her and bashed her with a tire iron from the car. I mean, it was, it was brutal. He didn't sexually assault her, he just bashed her.

• 44:48Speaker 00

  Bashed her.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Now, had he done that before the tow truck driver arrived because he couldn't take the chance that she would, you know, somehow raise the alarm, trust up in, in, we don't know that, but it was just a brutal, brutal attack on her.

• 45:04Speaker 00

  That's a relatively quick death compared to what he did to some of his other victims.

• 45:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, so there's there's similarities that we drove out to where he took her. We drove out to where he got bogged. And what's some of the similarities with the poor girls that he took is that they'd be trussed up and in the boot as she was in the boot of the car. Um, he would often, um, because he got a thrill out of it, you know, have them in the boot while it was in a garage station, put in a couple of bucks worth of petrol, just so that he could see people walking past and inside is a girl sort of like, you know, breathing and struggling for her life. But he would warn them. He would tell some of the victims who were in the boot, uh, that he had put a tape recorder next to them and that if he, they said anything, he would hear it and if he heard it, he would do awful things to them before killing them.

• 45:52Speaker 01

  So he left them with this absolute terror while he was getting excited by the prospect that they were in the boot and others were walking past it.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  And they were just tied up. He'd he'd put tape across their eyes as well and their mouth.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:04Speaker 00

  He superglued some, didn't he?

• 46:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:06Speaker 02

  He didn't do that with Terry, but he did for for some of the, um.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  But but Andy's right with Terry probably had other plans. Um, but those plans were thought of thwarted when he got bogged. I asked Andy at the scene, actually, um, what do you think happened? And the most likely scenario that, you know, I think you told me at the time is that he he he knew that he couldn't run the risk of having his, um, kidnap exposed. So he had to kill her before the tow truck driver came out. And the tow truck driver does come out and this guy is cool as a cucumber, thanks him, you know, um, gives him a tip, lets him go on his way and off he goes to to commit new murders. Um, uh, before that is, um, leaving Terry's body in another spot where where, um, you

• 46:53Speaker 01

  know, notorious for alligators and all sorts of wildlife in Florida and the heat and the.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, what what what he did, um, what he liked to do, terrible way of phrasing it, but he liked to. Prop his victims up against a tree or a boulder or something.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Near water?

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Near water and leave them there to die on their own.

• 47:17Speaker 00

  While they were still alive?

• 47:18Speaker 02

  While they were still alive, while they would bleed out.

• 47:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  He shot some of them, but he always stabbed them as well and it was generally the, you know, they would bleed out and die on their own.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  What a horrifying man.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 47:32Speaker 00

  Like, because the other detail we haven't touched on yet is he had a torture dungeon. He created a torture dungeon in his house, which he took multiple women to.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  That's, that's really, really fascinating. I interviewed the detective, I mentioned earlier that he'd befriended the local homicide cop.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:50Speaker 02

  And that's this guy, that's Tom Neighbors, who had had no, very experienced police officer, got no radar feelings from Wilder at all, had no idea. His wife was Wilder's seamstress and he was always popping in with his racing suits to get them monogrammed.

• 48:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  And Tom had come home for his lunch and there'd be Wilder sitting chatting to his wife.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  Hi, Tom.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Hi, Tom. He never got any, any kind of feelings from it. When, of course, the manhunt begins, looking for Wilder, Tom becomes one of the main assets of the FBI because he knows him. And his wife, because she monogrammed all his team shirts, could tell them who was in his team and who his friends and acquaintances are. So he becomes a... When they then did the search of Wilder's house, Tom took part in the search. And as a joke, he says to one of the FBI guys, "I wonder if this is like Scooby Doo and if you knock on the wall, you'll find a secret compartment." And he goes, and on the second knock, woof!

• 48:47Speaker 01

  There's a secret compartment.

• 48:49Speaker 02

  The false wall in the bedroom opens.

• 48:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:51Speaker 02

  And there's a dungeon with all kinds of torture devices and whips and manacles and chains and that kind of thing. Now, the weird thing is... But they then, as they dig further into Wilder's life, they find out that he's been hiring models from modeling agencies, young girls, you like them, you know, eight, no, no older than eighteen, nineteen. And they were coming out and he was photographing them in that room as if they were part of a white slavery kind of, kind of route.

• 49:21Speaker 00

  What on earth?

• 49:23Speaker 02

  And these girls were doing it because he was paying good money.

• 49:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:26Speaker 00

  And he wasn't killing them.

• 49:27Speaker 02

  He wasn't, he wasn't killing those girls. I think he was selling those photographs.

• 49:32Speaker 00

  Right.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  But, no, tho- those girls were doing it because they were getting paid handsomely. But, here's the thing, when the FBI forensics went through there, they found all kinds of blood stains. They found blood in those, in that room. But, Wilder was meticulous and before he left and went on the run, he went through that house and he used a chemical, which, when it's mixed with human blood, it affects it so that the police then can't work out whether it was human blood or animal blood. So.

• 50:05Speaker 00

  Back to that cunning serial killer vibe.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  And we know with two of the girls, the last two girls he killed before he went on the run, who were both models, um, you know, Rosario Gonzalez and Beth Kenyon.

• 50:17Speaker 00

  Which was a former girlfriend.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  A former girlfriend. Well, in Beth's case, when he took her, the day he took her, he took her back to that house and we think that's where he attacked and he killed her. Because later, the FBI spoke to his, some of his workmen, because he had a construction company, and they'd had to go in the day after she had, she had gone missing and there was a, a, a, a hole in a plate glass window at the height that she would have been, as if her head had been thrown against it. And when the workman went to go into the, um, the pool's side area bathroom, if you like, changing room, he said, no, no, no, no, no.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  Use someone in the house.

• 50:58Speaker 02

  You can't, you go anywhere else, but you can't go in there. Then when they interviewed the cleaner, she says, oh, it was all very strange. The, um, the shower curtain was missing from that room and then suddenly there's a new one there. So the theory is that he killed her, he wrapped her in the shower curtain. And, um, when the workman had, had corrected all the, you know, all the, all the damage and all the glass and everything, he then disposed of her.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, the workman, he got to clean up the crime scene.

• 51:24Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, again, that's.

• 51:27Speaker 00

  Cause their bodies, Rosario and Beth have never been found.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Never been found, no.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  So when does he go on the run in all of this? Because we've talked about kind of the police not really doing their bit. He goes on this rampage. He manages to kill a lot of women before he's even a wanted man.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, well.

• 51:49Speaker 00

  How do they eventually catch up?

• 51:51Speaker 01

  Well, they don't catch up for a very long time. Um, because partly because as Andy said, you know, that the commuter, computer and digital communications are nothing like they are today. Now you can trace a credit card in like a nanosecond.

• 52:03Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  But, but there are a few things in his favor. One was the, the initial reluctance of the police to believe the victims' families and Rosario and Beth, that this guy needed to be watched, needed to be surveilled, and needed to be brought in. He'd breached probation, all sorts of, all sorts of issues that they did not address. So he's off, he takes Linda Grober and she escapes. So that, that brings the FBI in.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  A victim survivor.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Um, and then he grows from Georgia and then he's just off. But the other thing that is against them is that he's a racing car driver. So they don't, they don't reckon that he's going to travel that far at first. And he's hundreds of miles before they even know where he was last at. So he's in a racing car and then, right, he's a racing car driver, driving like a racing car driver. And then he just keeps swapping cars. So he kills one, um, victim, Mindy's, um, mum.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 52:55Speaker 01

  Um, Terry, um, in Texas for her car. He swaps the car and previously he'd swapped the plates on the car he was using. So he keeps going further and further and further, right across to California. And they have no idea, they're just always one or two steps behind. Meantime, while this is going on and he's driving long distances and, you know, he's becoming known and his faces are. He's still calmly going to shopping malls or beaches or whatever. You know, picking up girls, using the same patter. Then he'll take them to a motel room, he'll do this sick stuff to them and kill them and move on. And he kept doing it for days and days and days and days.

• 53:34Speaker 00

  Well, I guess if you've gotten away with it for this long.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're good at it.

• 53:36Speaker 02

  Well, that's right. But you, you know, to go back to the, the start and you say, well, before he went on the, on the, on the run, um, what was happening? With those two girls, with Rosario and Beth, in Beth's case, her family brought in a private investigator. And the private investigator in forty eight hours solved the case.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:56Speaker 02

  Private investigator.

• 53:57Speaker 00

  Ken, right?

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, Ken Winnicott, great bloke.

• 53:59Speaker 00

  Great bloke.

• 54:00Speaker 02

  Dad was, ran the FBI in Miami for twenty odd years for J Edgar Hoover, so he was well connected. He identified Wilder, had a witness who identified Wilder with her. And then did something which is, is, is not, he shouldn't have done, but there are reasons why he did it. He then confronts Wilder over the phone. So that's something, he's interfering in a police investigation, yada, yada. But the police had done nothing.

• 54:29Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  And this is a problem that will become apparent in every single case where it happens. There was this attitude at the time, you had the old, oh, someone's going to be missing for forty eight hours before. But these were young girls and the attitude was almost, oh, these are pretty young girls, they've run off with a, with a boyfriend or.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, or they've had an argument with their mum or whatever. Nobody, nobody was listening to them, they were just young girls, you know, so. And when the parents come in, oh, what would you know, you know, they're, they've run away, you're ignoring the reality.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  There was a ten day window there.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 55:02Speaker 02

  With, when Whitaker went to the police, never get it, separate police departments again, so for, for, for both cases. And where he was pleading with them and the two families were pleading with them, pick this guy up, pick him up. And they had every reason to pick him up because he was on probation. He'd committed a sexual assault five years previously. And he, as part of his sentence, not that it was much of a sentence, he never got sent to jail. But his sentence was that for five years, he had to go and see sex therapist Ginger Bush twice a week.

• 55:33Speaker 00

  There are so many instances where this guy could have been stopped.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was fantastic for him because he was relaying to her, as Mark says, all his fantasies.

• 55:42Speaker 00

  He was probably really enjoying that.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  But it was reality, he was enjoying that.

• 55:46Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 55:46Speaker 02

  Just unbelievable.

• 55:48Speaker 00

  He kind of dies by accident, doesn't he?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  At the hands of a cop.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  Look, I've to and froed on this. I've now come round to the conclusion that he probably was trying to kill himself. He had a pathological fear of being locked up. He'd spent a few weeks in a kind of juvenile detention centre, and something happened to him in there. I've no idea what. He never explained to anybody.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Left him with a terror.

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Left him with a terror of being locked up.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:17Speaker 02

  Fast forward, when he was arrested in Manly for those two girls and was at his committal hearing, and he got the bail, why was he so keen on getting that bail? And we believe, I'm absolutely convinced, that in the court that day was one young reporter, and that was Michael Robotham, who's the international, you know, crime writer today. He was a young cub reporter. And Wilder saw him, and their eyes locked. Wilder knew that when it came to his actual trial, it would get a lot of coverage. And what was the big secret? The big secret was that somebody would go, hang on, that's the guy, an old detective who

• 56:58Speaker 02

  was originally on the case or something, would point at Wanderbeach. So he couldn't afford to come back, because if he was convicted of anything, there's no way he would have been allowed back in America with a criminal record. So he was never, ever going to return.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  But just going back to his death on the border there, and Andy's right, there's a sort of dispute as to whether he died accidentally, a bullet that he was aiming at the cop hit him, or whether he was trying to kill himself and hit the cop. But it ends with his death.

• 57:29Speaker 02

  Well, getting to his death, so his death, what happens is, so we're in this small town in New Hampshire, he's only, you know, a fifteen minute drive away from the border, and then freedom, when you've got fifteen hundred FBI agents working full time on trying to find him, hundreds of police officers across six states looking for him. They can't find him. Two state troopers in an unmarked car pull up at traffic lights, and there's a petrol station, a service station there. And they see this guy, and then they see the car, and they think, that, didn't we get an all points bulletin about that a bit earlier? Wilder sees them and makes a run for his car. He's just coming out from paying for his gas. He makes a run for the car.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  The driver, the police officer, the state trooper jumps out and runs after him. And Wilder runs round his car and then throws himself on the seats. And he's trying to get something from under the seat. And in a split second, the state trooper goes, he's reaching for a gun.

• 58:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 58:30Speaker 02

  So he jumps on top of him, across the seat, the front seats of the car and gets him in a bear hug. Wilder gets the gun, turns it round and shoots. Shoots through himself and the bullet goes into the state trooper. And the state trooper then pulls away and stands up. And his colleague comes round. And it's several seconds later, and then there's a second shot. Wilder shoots himself a second time after the state trooper's left him. So.

• 59:02Speaker 00

  So it looks like he killed himself.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Yeah. Whether the first shot was to, but I, I, I, I think that either way, he wasn't going to be taken alive.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  Have you spoken to the families about whether they would have preferred he lived and see justice? Or are they happy he's dead?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  You know, Mark, Mark's the best at explaining this, but quite a few of them, remarkably, including Linda and including Mindy, whose mum was murdered when she was four years of age. They forgive him.

• 59:31Speaker 00

  What?

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, there is that.

• 59:34Speaker 00

  They're better people than me.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  I'm gonna put a caveat, I'm gonna put a caveat on, uh, they don't excuse him. I think the issue there is, um, Linda, Linda and the, a lot of the, the women that were spoken to are, who either avoided it somewhat fortuitously because their radar was on. Or, um, you know, and, or escaped, as in Linda's case. Um, they, they recognized in Wilder, um, probably more presciently than the police, that there was a screw loose, there was something in his background that had turned him into this killer. All of which, if you look at his background, is true. You know, things happened in his childhood that irrevocably, you know, turned him into a serial killer. Not excuse, just an explanation.

• 1:00:19Speaker 01

  And they had that, that sense that there was something wrong and they. You know, and so it's a it's they see in one sense, if I could put it this way, it's probably the wrong expression. They see the bigger picture.

• 1:00:30Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  And in terms of of his death, look, I think it's a bit mixed in amongst the people. Some, you know, felt, thank God, he's off the streets, he deserved it. And all of that is understandable. Others think they were cheated.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  You know, they want to know, what was my mum's last words? What did she say to you? You know.

• 1:00:55Speaker 00

  Knowing the kind of guy he is, I don't think we would have gotten any answers though.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Sorry, I mean, that's the bit, sorry, that's the bit that probably chokes me up the most. You know, getting that last sense of who who your mum was.

• 1:01:08Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, he, um, a lot of these, a lot of the families of girls who, whose daughters and wives or whatever, haven't been found.

• 1:01:22Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  I mean, that's the real key to this, you know, that's why you would have wanted Wilder to have been taken alive and questioned. Um, because we may have found out some answers there, um, and we never will. No, I don't think.

• 1:01:35Speaker 00

  That's why you're doing this, right? Mark, you've gotten really emotional talking about these women.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  We live.

• 1:01:40Speaker 00

  But that's why you're doing it, to tell these women's stories.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  We are doing it. We do. We do have a passion for it. We we're kind of robust blokes. We've seen a lot and we've experienced a lot in our lives. And, you know, we're fairly resilient characters and, you know, I think about it, I think Andy does too. There are moments when we listen back to our stories months after. And like, you know, there's bits we will look away because we don't want to sort of show that, you know, it's affecting us.

• 1:02:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  But why? Because, you know, these are decent people. We go into people's homes and we meet people who are lovely, like the two brothers that are on this week's episode, who hadn't spoken for forty years. We turn up with three hours late because the plane was delayed by thunderstorms. We bring them Budweiser, which they hate, you know.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  They laugh, they have dinner for us, they open a very nice bottle of wine and they sit down and, you know, we're like best friends. And then we're talking about the loss of, you know, the person they love most.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Speaker 01

  So, oh, fuck it, I don't know why this is doing this to me, but. The point here is that we need to honour that.

• 1:02:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, and honour their stories.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Speaker 00

  Well, you're very much doing that. And I can see that you're very much still deep in this investigation. So I'm guessing there's more, more women's stories to come.

• 1:02:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that, that's true. And it's, it's, um, you know, it's really important. We, we, we made a vow, a vow at the beginning that we'd let people tell their stories. We'd let them speak, you know? We wouldn't initiate it in the, in the construction of the stories in a way that sort of was disrespectful. And, and we kind of, you know, in answer to the question about whether it's right to go into these lives, it's a hundred percent right because it's what they want. You know, it's the recognition, so long as it's done with some honesty and sort of, um, in a way that brings clarity, you know, we will continue to pursue on their behalf.

• 1:03:34Speaker 02

  And the last thing I'd say, the other thing that's become apparent to us, and it's, it shocks me,

• 1:03:41Speaker 02

  is that we've, we, um, we've discovered just how poor and the lack of services

• 1:03:51Speaker 02

  for women who've gone through an experience like this or been the victims of violent crime. We decided pretty early on from after hearing some of these families that we wanted to support some of these organisations, particularly the non-for-profit ones, you know? We found it really, really hard to find any. So many of them are having their funding cut at the moment and they're moving to online only. You know, they're not actually providing face to face. You think in a country the size of America, the wealth of America, these things would be all over the place. They're not. One we found, and it's, she's the subject of next week's episode, I think, isn't she, Mark?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 02

  Was a, was a girl who.

• 1:04:32Speaker 01

  Kristin, Christine.

• 1:04:34Speaker 02

  Christine. When she was 11 years of age with her 10-year-old sister, they were abducted at gunpoint by Wilder in the main street in Boynton Beach.

• 1:04:43Speaker 00

  He just doesn't stop.

• 1:04:44Speaker 02

  Eleven, twenty miles away and raped. Eleven. Eleven. Yeah.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  But she's, look, um, well, her interview is amazing. She is perhaps one of the most courageous women we've spoken to. And there's a whole like new area that that comes in here because there was information that was denied to her for thirty years that would have placed Wilder in the frame much earlier. But the thing about her is that she's resolved, oh, this is the expression she uses, the very last expression where we end the interview. She says, you know, I want to make it so that other women don't go through the pain and the trauma that I've gone through. And so she's set up a nonprofit to do that and provide information, support, counselling, therapy, her own experience to other women to access.

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  But the expression that she uses is that she wants to turn pain into purpose.

• 1:05:46Speaker 00

  Thank you to Mark and to Andy for joining us on this episode. You can find a link to their podcast Catching Evil in our show notes. If you want to see visuals from this episode, head over to our Instagram page at True Crime Conversations. And for in-depth case explainers, follow us on TikTok under the same name. True Crime Conversations is hosted by me, Gemma Bath. Our senior producer is Thali Blackman. The group executive producer is Alaria Brophy. And there's been audio design by Jacob Brown. Thanks so much for listening. I'll be back next week with another True Crime Conversation.