life: one opulent, marked by financial success, fast cars and attractive women; the other sinister, tainted by arrests, investigations and suspicions.
That is the assessment of court records and those who came to know the 39-year-old Wilder.
“As far as I knew he was a real photographer,” said a woman who met Wilder through car racing and once went to his home for a photo session. She asked not to be identified.
“I’m flabbergasted by this whole thing,” she said. ”He must have been flipped out to be doing all these things and hiding so much. He seemed like a normal, nice guy.”
The startling chain of events has had a greater impact on Wilder’s family in Australia. His mother and American-born father have gone into seclusion while a 41-year-old brother Stephen has been in the United States aiding the FBI.
“The family has been completely broken up,” said Valerie Wilder, a sister-in-law. “Life has not been easy. We are trying to live one day at a time.”
She said Christopher Wilder first came to the United States when he was one year old. He spent much of the next several years on the road, as his father, who was in the U.S. Navy, was transferred about the nation. The Wilders did not permanently return to Australia until 1959. Christopher Wilder, the second oldest of four brothers, moved back to the United States when he was 25.
“Chris was always a perfect gentleman in the way he treated me,” his shaken sister-in-law said. “My kids adored him.”
But detectives said their investigations suggest Wilder’s gentle and friendly demeanor shrouded a darker side.
“I felt he was a Jekyll and Hyde character from the beginning,” said attorney and investigator Ken Whittaker, Sr., former special agent in charge of the FBI’s Miami office.
Early last month, Whittaker and his son repeatedly questioned Wilder and began to suspect him in the disappearances of two Miami models. They had been hired by one of the models’ family to find her.
A week later, Wilder checked his three dogs into a kennel and embarked on an odyssey that took him from Florida to California and then back across the nation to the tiny town of Colebrook, N.H., five minutes from the Canadian border.
FBI agents suspect the macabre trek included stop-offs in at least nine cities where women were abducted or murdered.
Wilder’s neighbors on Mission Hill Road in Boynton Beach told of occasional parties, several female visitors and a racing Porsche parked atop a trailer. Lately, the car and property have been the focus of police detectives and newspaper reporters.
“It’s become a historical monument,” resident Ken Bankowski said of the Porsche.
Though investigators said the cross-country rampage of rape and killing has stopped with Wilder’s death, many mysteries surrounding the man remain unanswered.
Joseph Corless, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Miami, said the bureau will continue to investigate Wilder’s past for possible links to other unsolved disappearances.
“We are not eliminating anything,” said Detective Neighbors.
Some of Wilder’s movements in recent years have already been documented.
Wilder was captured on film at the 1983 Miss Florida pageant in Fort Lauderdale. Pageant officials said last week that a review of videotape taken during an Oct. 1, 1982, media day at the beach shows Wilder among about a dozen photographers. The tape was turned over to the FBI.
Elizabeth Kenyon, 23, a part-time teacher and model who disappeared March 5 from Miami, was a finalist in that pageant and possibly met Wilder there. She is still missing and authorities said Wilder is a suspect in her disappearance.
“He was at the pageant and he represented himself as a photographer for Pix magazine from Australia,” said Grant Gravitt, one of the pageant’s producers.
Blaine Davis, media coordinator for the pageant, said Wilder presented a media identification card but it apparently was not checked with the Australian magazine for authenticity.
“Normally, with a magazine from Australia, I wouldn’t check,” Davis said. “He did present some credentials that were acceptable at the time.”
In Australia, Pix officials said there is no record of the magazine ever employing Wilder or purchasing photographs from him.
More recently, in what the FBI termed a “close call,” a 20-year-old Fort Lauderdale model was forced to turn down an invitation Feb. 23 to pose for Wilder when she couldn’t arrange transportation to his Boynton Beach home.
The young woman, who talked on condition that her name not be used, said a photographer told her Wilder had seen photos of her, was “dying to meet her” and wanted to take her photograph for a beer advertisement