Brownie skills save teen left for dead by Aussie serial killer Christopher Wilder
He was an Aussie serial killer on a murderous road-trip across the US. She was a 16-year-old girl abducted from a mall. Against all odds, her bravery and Brownie skills saved her life — and set in train the killer’s final reckoning. WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT
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WARNING: DISTURBING CONTENT
No one will ever know for certain how many people Christopher Wilder killed.
The charming, Sydney-born predator is firmly in the frame for at least eight murders, but has been linked to other deaths and disappearances, including being named as a suspect in the Wanda Beach killings of teenagers Marianne Schmidt and Christine Sharrock in 1965.
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For decades Wilder hunted for victims, first in Australia and then in America, prowling beaches and shopping malls with camera in hand and spinning a tale of modelling contracts to lure pretty young hopefuls into his car.
Wilder’s crimes included abduction, rape, torture and murder and earned him a place on the FBI’s ten most wanted list.
But while so many fell victim to his sickening depravity, there were also incredible tales of bravery and resilience by young women determined to survive as he embarked on a final road trip of terror, crisscrossing the US in 1984.
They included Linda Grober, who despite having her eyes superglued shut and being electrocuted, managed to break free of Wilder and lock herself into a motel bathroom until he fled.
There was Tina Risico, just 16, who would do whatever it took to survive her eight-day ordeal with Wilder — and was remarkably released by him and allowed to fly home as detectives closed in.
And then there was teenager Dawnette Wilt, also 16, who was bound, repeatedly stabbed and left for dead in a forest, but used her Brownie skills to survive. Her escape put in train the events that would ensure Wilder’s final reckoning — but not before one more murder.
This edited extract from The Snapshot Killer by Duncan McNab tells her remarkable story after being abducted from a mall in Merrillville, Indiana, held captive with Tina and repeatedly assaulted.
It was April 12, 1984 in New York State and Wilder had just watched Good Morning America coverage of the manhunt for him and Tina.
DAWNETTE said Wilder became ‘agitated’ after the news broadcasts and told her that if she wasn’t cooperative he would send her to South America where he had friends, and she would get more shock treatment. He said he was a ‘three-time loser’ — with those three words Dawnette knew that Wilder had nothing to lose and was going to kill her. She told investigators she asked him to ‘be shot rather than knifed to death but he refused’. He then left the two girls on the bed, and took a shower and shaved.
They left the motel around 8am and breakfasted at McDonald’s, after which Wilder forced Dawnette to swallow sleeping pills, showing no interest when she pleaded that it might affect her (claimed) unborn child. Wilder, as she probably suspected, had other plans for her and they didn’t include her being around long enough to give birth. Risico recalled they passed through a toll booth then joined the I90, heading east. Not long after the toll gates, they left the Interstate and drove toward the town of Penn Yan in the Finger Lakes district of Yates County.
Welker Road, in the town of Barrington about twelve kilometres south of Penn Yan, runs to the right off (Route) 14A. It’s all farmland with the occasional house, not unlike the crop-duster scene from Hitchcock’s North by Northwest. On the northern side of Welker Road is a small forest area that rises conspicuously from the surrounding crops. Wilder saw the forest, and directed Risico to turn into Welker Road. When they were adjacent to the forest, he told her to stop.
He took the car keys, collected his briefcase from under the seat, then dragged Dawnette Wilt, still drugged and blinded by duct tape and with her hands tied with venetian-blind cord, from the back seat and manhandled her into the forest. Tina thought she had been sitting in the car nearly half an hour before Wilder returned, minus Dawnette. So remote was the location that only two cars had passed while she waited. Tina did not see any marks or bloodstains on Wilder but he was ‘shaky’ and didn’t comment on Dawnette’s fate, and she was too scared to ask. A few moments after they drove off, Wilder told her to stop because he wanted to drive. Tina told the FBI that Wilder then drove in roughly a square that took ten to fifteen minutes and brought them back to the forest where they’d parked earlier. He stopped the car, took the key and told her to sit there while he went back into the forest. He returned a few minutes later, very shaken, and told her that Wilt was gone. They drove off very fast, heading north along the 14A toward Penn Yan, and Wilder told her they needed to get another car.
Dawnette Wilt had once been a Brownie, and her training with them helped her survive Wilder’s attack in the forest. She told the FBI that once out of sight of the road, he sexually assaulted her again, then tried to smother her but she fought back with such vigour that he took his long knife from the briefcase and stabbed her three times, once to the back of the neck and twice to the chest. She collapsed, bleeding heavily, and as Wilder walked away leaving her to die, the brave young woman yelled, ‘I hate you, I hope you die!’ Wilder snarled, ‘Shut up, bitch,’ and kept walking.
With Wilder gone, Dawnette managed to pull the duct tape from her eyes, untie her hands and then assess her wounds and her surrounds. For the first few minutes she was confused, then her clear thinking and Brownie training kicked in. Her wounds, though deep, were not fatal or as brutal as those Wilder inflicted on some of his earlier victims. While leaving Dawnette for dead, he had neglected to make sure she was. It was a mistake that would be a key component of the end of his homicidal road trip.
Dawnette used some of her clothing to make a tourniquet she wrapped around her chest wounds to slow the bleeding. Then she tried to find her way out of the forest, eventually seeing glimpses of sunlight and open spaces through the trees. She moved as quickly as her injuries permitted, thinking that at any moment Wilder would return, which was precisely what he did. The first piece of good fortune over those past few days came when she stumbled out of the forest onto the road just as Charles Laursen drove by in his flatbed truck. Laursen was a mechanic at the local Ford dealer and had been sent out to repair a tractor, but was having trouble locating the farm, and instead located Dawnette.
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Laursen told the Finger Lakes Times of 16 April 1984: ‘I could see the knife wounds in her chest. There was blood all over. She said, “Please take me to the hospital.”’ On the way to Penn Yan’s Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hospital she told Laursen she had been abducted from a mall in Indiana and wanted to call her mother. Laursen told the paper he ‘couldn’t cover the seven miles quickly enough’ as Dawnette repeatedly asked how long it would take. ‘I told her, “Calm down, we’ll get there soon.”’ He drove her straight to the hospital’s emergency entry.
Dawnette’s arrival at the small-town hospital caused a profound and thankfully rapid reaction.
Mid-morning (Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronald) Spike (who was on a training course in Batavia) received an urgent call from his office in Penn Yan, telling him a young girl had been stabbed and left to die, but had been rescued by Laursen and was now in hospital. He said later, ‘I just had this feeling, hunch, call it what it is, I’d done criminal work for several years and I said to myself, I’ll bet you that’s Christopher Wilder. And so … we headed back and … it took us probably … forty-five minutes to get back here. But lo and behold, that hunch turned out to be true.’
Spike and his partner drove at speeds of around 100mph (160km/h) with lights and sirens blaring. What would trouble him later was the probability that he passed Wilder and Risico travelling in the opposite direction. When they arrived back in Penn Yan they were told that Dawnette was in surgery and would survive. She later told one of the deputies the man responsible for her injuries was called Chris.
Spike directed some of his deputies to the crime scene in the forest, where they found blood stains and one of Dawnette’s shoes — but there was another gruesome surprise.
Beth Dodge was a thirty-three-year-old mother from nearby Phelps, who taught Sunday school at the Uniting Church of Phelps and was a systems analyst for Mobil Chemicals.
Neighbour Mike Harris said: ‘She was a very independent woman who kept the house up by herself after she and her husband separated a year and a half ago. Her job meant a lot to her.’ When she and her husband parted, Beth bought herself a present, a gold Pontiac Firebird, with a firebird painted on the bonnet. It was a desirable car and hard to miss, even in a shopping centre car park. Mike Harris said, ‘She loved her car.’
On the morning of 12 April, Beth left her ranch house in Mary Street, Victor, and headed to work in the Pontiac, via the preschool where she dropped her four-year-old daughter. Late morning, she left the office and drove to the Eastview Mall for an early lunch, something she did regularly. What no one knew was that Wilder and the still-captive Tina Risico were also headed to the mall, a place that Wilder had probably scoped out the night before.
What happened next was swift, brutal and a contraction of Wilder’s usual methods. After Wilt’s escape he needed a new car, and as a fancier of fine vehicles, Beth’s Pontiac took his eye. It was the best choice in a car park full of more mundane options. Risico told the FBI that Wilder spotted a ‘glittery gold’ car and followed it into the car park. When Beth parked, Wilder, who was still driving, pulled the Cougar in behind her and stopped. He instructed Tina to get out and walk around to the driver’s side of the Cougar and get in. While she was walking around, he got out and walked up to Beth just as she was getting out of her car. Wilder was swift, pulling out his revolver and forcing her at gunpoint into the back seat of the Firebird, ordering her to lie down, out of sight. Risico couldn’t hear their conversation but observed that Beth didn’t resist. What also disturbed Tina was that a man she thought was around thirty years old and working on a green car saw the attack but didn’t attempt to intervene.
Wilder instructed Risico to follow him, then got into the driver’s seat of the Firebird and drove off. Tina knew she didn’t have a chance to escape. They drove around for about half an hour, then Wilder found a two-lane road in woodland, drove in, then pulled to the side and stopped. Tina followed, and saw Wilder pull the woman from the passenger side of the car and walk her to a ‘mound’ of dirt and gravel. He stepped behind, the mound blocking Tina’s view as she remained in the Cougar, too frightened to try to escape. About two minutes later she heard a sharp, loud sound she assumed to be a gunshot. Wilder walked back and ordered Tina, still in the Cougar, to follow. She said he was speaking quickly and seemed ‘hyper’, and wanted to get moving quickly.
Terrified of what would happen if she commented or tried to escape, Tina complied with Wilder’s orders. She knew this was the only way she could survive. They drove for about fifteen minutes back to Victor and parked near a gas station and McGhan’s pub, a popular lunch spot, and together they unloaded luggage from the Cougar and put it into the Firebird. Wilder let the air out of the front tyre of the Cougar, then they were back on the road, travelling east on the I90 in their new car.
What Wilder didn’t know was that he had been seen acting suspiciously in the woods, and an anonymous call was made to the State Police, who investigated and found Beth. She was lying face down, and forensics later deduced she had been forced to kneel and then executed by a shot in the back with a .357 jacketed round, so powerful and so close that it pierced her heart and exited through her breast. The bullet was found by forensic police and described as ‘in good shape and … suitable for comparison’.
Back in Penn Yan, Sheriff Spike was certain that Wilder was responsible not only for the abduction and assault of Dawnette Wilt but also the murder of Beth Dodge. He contacted the State Police and persuaded them that Wilder was who they should be looking for, and that he was likely to be driving Beth’s car on the I90 heading east toward Boston. Shortly after, the State Police found Terry Walden’s Cougar parked near McGhan’s pub in Victor, confirming that Spike’s deduction was on the money.
Spike then put together an album of photographs of ten men who looked similar to Wilder and the one of Wilder that the FBI had used in their media campaign. Around this time the first wave of FBI agents arrived from the Buffalo office and wanted to show Dawnette their photo of Wilder to confirm he was the culprit. Spike had a different idea. He needed the identification to stand up in court and wanted ten minutes to finish putting together his album so Dawnette’s identification couldn’t be successfully challenged by Wilder’s lawyers when he was caught and tried. Spike said, ‘I had an attempted murder in my town, and the only live Wilder victim — the FBI had a warrant from Georgia.’
Spike prevailed, and he took the album to the hospital where Dawnette was recovering under armed guard in case Wilder returned to remove one of the few eyewitnesses to his crimes. When asked to try to remember the man who had attacked her, according to Spike, ‘She immediately identified him [Wilder] with all the pictures. And some of the pictures were very similar looking individuals. I found people that had a moustache and a beard and then had similar facial features. But she picked him right out. And so we knew positively that’s who we were looking for.’
Spike had a serious crime committed on his turf, and a living and very competent witness in Dawnette. He participated in the interview that followed, but he reckoned,
It wasn’t all me. We were a team doing this whole thing. I just happened to be the Chief Deputy at the time. But we were all involved and she was a very good witness. She really was. She did go into detail about some of these things that I’m sure she wouldn’t want me to … [talk] about. But nevertheless, it was all brutal, sexual … acts and very controlling acts. She never felt that she ever had a chance to get away from him. But there were times she thought that Tina could have, but didn’t … her mind had been manipulated to the point where she … didn’t dare to try to depart. You know, … that was the impression that she had. I just felt for … a sixteen-year-old girl, she’d been through a lot. She really had been. And then … she saved her own life by making her clothes into a tourniquet. She was amazing.
Next morning, the nation’s media packed into the small and peaceful town of Penn Yan for a press conference by the FBI and Sheriff Spike. The Sheriff said, ‘I remember holding his picture up saying Christopher Wilder is who we want, and it kind of went nationwide. I was there, the head of the FBI out of Buffalo was there and the captain of the State Police was there at the news conference. After that, I travelled up to the State Police headquarters … where we’re trying to figure out what investigation we needed to do next or lead to follow or where to go.’
The nationwide manhunt for Christopher Wilder, the biggest in US history, was about to get a major breakthrough, and finally some good news.
• The Snapshot Killer: The shocking true story of predator and serial killer Christopher Wilder — from Sydney’s beaches to America’s Most Wanted by Duncan McNab is published by Hachette Australia, RRP $32.99. Available Tuesday March 26.
