Killer’s creepy MO exposed in shopping centre abduction
He tried to convince her she could be a model, but the pretty teen wasn’t falling for the charming stranger’s well-practised lines. Unfortunately for her, the Aussie-born serial killer had planned ahead and there was no way he was leaving without her.
Book extract
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He was charming and convincing in his guise as a professional photographer looking for the next pretty young thing to become a top model.
But Christopher Wilder hid killer instincts behind his winning smile, with the Aussie surfer-turned-American racing driver responsible for the murders of multiple women in a deadly roadtrip across the US.
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It was a killing spree that may well have begun with the Wanda Beach murders in Sydney, where he grew up.
But not all his victims fell for his well-practised lines.
In this edited extract from The Pretty Girl Killer, the abduction of Linda Grober — who would eventually make a courageous escape from Wilder — reveals his sickening MO and what happened when women didn’t take the bait.
TUESDAY 20 MARCH 1984, GOVERNOR’S SQUARE, TALLAHASSEE, FLORIDA
Linda Grober was smiling, bouncing along to the song Down Under by Australian band Men at Work blasting from one of the stores. The Governor’s Square shopping mall was only a few minutes from the university campus and the apartment she shared with her girlfriends, and it was a trip she had done a hundred times. The nineteen-year-old, slim and lithesome with a stunning face, big blue eyes and deeply bronzed limbs, was a creature of habit and had a favourite spot where she liked to park, seven spaces from the main entrance. She got out of the car and headed for the basement section of Maas Brothers, where she was hoping to get a present for Eddie, for their five-and-a-half-year anniversary. A photo album, to fill with snapshots of all their best moments. Her sorority sisters had teased her about that this morning, laughed at her for still celebrating the half-year anniversaries, but Eddie was such a romantic. ‘I love that about him,’ she thought. She couldn’t believe how quickly the years had gone; she’d been with Eddie since she was fourteen years old, but she was still besotted with him. Her first and only one.
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She heard the steel-tipped heels of his cowboy boots against the polished marble tiles as she was reaching up for a greeting card.
‘Excuse me, I’m a fashion photographer looking for a fresh new face for an assignment I’m doing for a major magazine,’ he said quietly, a hint of a lisp. ‘I think you’re just the one I’m looking for.’
He paused and smiled for a moment, not too close, not threatening her space. He was wearing a hand-tailored dark pinstriped suit with a maroon tie, and his moustache and beard were neatly clipped. The large diamond ring on the pinkie finger of his left hand, the gold watch on his wrist and the Pentax camera hanging casually from his shoulder completed the look: confident, professional, successful and respectable.
‘I think you definitely have what it takes to make a really good model,’ he added, nodding slightly to emphasise the point. ‘It’s a really fantastic opportunity and it wouldn’t take very long at all. I can see that you have so much potential.
‘We could do the test shoot nearby,’ he added, producing a business card he’d stolen from an exhibition by a local photographer and holding it out to show her. ‘As you can see, my studio isn’t far away. It wouldn’t take very long, and I will pay you very well for your time,’ he added.
‘That’s very kind, but I’m really not interested in modelling,’ she replied. ‘My boyfriend wouldn’t like it if I did. Anyway, I’m a surfer and I don’t shave my legs.’
He didn’t push it, just gave her a few more compliments and left her alone.
The second approach came a short while later, as she walked between stores, her blonde curls falling over her face. He looked sheepish, embarrassed to be troubling her again.
‘I was thinking, if you’d reconsider I could drive you to the park up the road and photograph you there,’ he said. ‘You have the perfect figure and face for what the magazine is looking for. It will be the easiest $25 you ever make, and I could give you four hours’ work every week for $25 an hour.’
She was midway through repeating how she really wasn’t interested when a thought struck her, and she mentioned she had two very beautiful roommates who might model for him if he was interested. She called them from a nearby payphone. He waited patiently as she left a quick message and then walked back over, apologising that her friends weren’t home. She wished him luck and said goodbye. He smiled, shrugged his shoulders as if to say, ‘Oh well, you can’t win them all’ and walked off with a slight wave. Then he waited. He was good at waiting and, later, as she headed back to her car he began to follow.
Linda was rummaging in her handbag for her car keys when she noticed him again, just behind her in the car park. She freaked out, just a little. She’d laughed to herself when he first approached her — she was such a midget, as if she could be a catwalk star. It had been a bit creepy, but he’d been super polite and well dressed, and they were in the middle of a store with sales staff and customers. She hadn’t been that perturbed, not really, not even when he’d come up to her again outside the store. He was just a balding, everyday guy with a voice that was very soft and quiet, gentle almost. But now he was back and she felt a pang of panic.
‘Hi there, again,’ he said as if bumping into an old friend. ‘What a lucky coincidence, I’m parked right next to you.’
He’d watched her arrive earlier and eased the nondescript Chrysler sedan he was driving into the empty parking space next to hers before approaching her in the mall. It was a big old clunker, eleven years old, but he’d deliberately chosen it because it blended in so well and didn’t attract attention like his beloved Porsche Carrera, or his black racing Porsche that he’d driven in the recent Miami Grand Prix.
The man was chattering away, but Linda hadn’t been listening, her mind had been whirring. Should she try and make a run for it? She tuned in again.
‘Of course, I only do fashion work,’ he said, his head tipped on one side, smiling, disarming.
It reassured her a little.
‘I’ve got some magazine covers that I’ve done, in the car. Why don’t you check them out?’ he said, opening the boot of the car and pulling out a briefcase.
He saw her hesitate and glance around. There was no-one. He opened the lid, like a door-to-door salesman, and told her to have a look inside. She gingerly moved forward and peered in. It was tidy, papers neatly stacked. She noticed a passport with ‘Australia’ stamped on the front in gold lettering, then she was doubled over, in agony.
He’d driven his clenched fist into the pit of her stomach. He hadn’t had much room to swing but he was muscular, and it was a sucker punch. She was gasping and wheezing, desperately trying to suck air back into her lungs when the second blow came. This time he hit her in the face, on her cheek under her left eye. As she began to crumple to the floor, he reached out and grabbed her by the arms to stop her hitting the ground, then pushed her into the back of the car.
There was a moment of dizzy confusion as Linda started to wake up. She was lying on her back, spread-eagled across the back seat of a moving car. It smelt like dog. She felt an overwhelming wave of nausea and started to pull herself up, groaning. The car braked abruptly and she was thrown against the front seats. She tried to get up, but she felt disorientated, and then the rear door was flung open and he was looming over her.
She started burbling, a hundred miles an hour. ‘Please let me go, please don’t hurt me, if it’s money you want, my dad is wealthy, I’ll write you a cheque now for a million dollars … I’ll do whatever you need me to do, just don’t hurt me.’
‘Shut up, and don’t talk again,’ he barked at her.
His voice was harsh, not at all like it had been back at the mall. He stuffed a cloth gag into her mouth, tore off a length of duct tape and then placed the ends roughly on either side of her mouth, using both hands to press down hard, so her head was forced backwards into the blue seat cushion. She wanted to struggle but it was futile; he was far too powerful and there was very little room to manoeuvre. Linda remembered a movie she’d watched with Eddie, about a girl who had been kidnapped and sold into prostitution, and she started panicking, wriggling maniacally, kicking out with her feet in a stomping motion. She tried to scream, but the tape meant she could only muster a muffled whimper. He smacked her hard across the cheek several times and snapped, ‘Keep doing that and I will really hurt you, I might even kill you, I’ve done it before.’
The tone in his voice was enough. She stopped thrashing, her whole body going limp.
‘Now you’re going to cooperate while I tie you up, do you understand me?’ he asked.
She nodded once to show him she understood. She didn’t know where she was, or how long she had been unconscious, or what this crazy, strange man was going to do. He’d shown no interest when she’d mentioned money. She knew that wasn’t good.
‘Keep it together,’ Linda told herself. ‘Keep cool, engage with him, don’t fight.’
He used pre-cut lengths of white rope to tie her arms behind her back at the elbows and wrists, then tied her ankles to her wrists tightly with more rope, forcing her back to arch. Even though she was skinny and very flexible, it was an unnatural position and she knew it would become very painful, very quickly. Then he ripped off two more pieces of duct tape and put them over her eyes. The sudden blindness terrified her most of all. Picking her up like she was little more than a toothpick, he pulled her out of the back seat and threw her down into the boot, slamming the lid shut.
She felt the car do a quick U-turn, the tyres spinning in the loose soil. The rain that had been threatening all day finally began to fall, heavy drops that made a steady thumping sound against the boot.
He parked in a quiet spot not far from the shopping mall. He’d remembered the phone message the girl had left her flatmates and knew that as soon as she was reported missing, the cops would check it out. He needed to move her car. The rain had eased and after he cut the engine he heard the girl thumping inside the boot. He got out of the car calmly and, after looking around to make sure there was no-one watching, lifted the lid.
Linda had been distraught in the blackness of the trunk, horrified at the thought he would park somewhere and abandon her to die, but with the duct tape still over her eyes, the silence as he opened the boot was even more petrifying. She froze, desperately trying to show her submission, that she got it, she’d learned her lesson, she’d keep quiet.
He punched her in the side of the face, then used his thumb and forefinger to pinch her nostrils together and close off her air supply. With the duct tape across the mouth, she couldn’t breathe.
‘This is your fault,’ he whispered in her ear, his hot, stale breath washing over her.
She panicked, started thrashing around, but he kept hold of her and she realised this was it, this was how she was going to die. She thought briefly about the pathologist, who would examine her body and see the tatty knickers she’d thrown on that morning.
‘That was your last warning,’ he bellowed in her ear this time, taking away his hand, as she snorted in air and choked down saliva.
He tightened her bindings even more. ‘I’m leaving a tape recorder on the back seat of the car. If I find you’ve made a single sound, I’ll know about it, and it won’t be good for you.’
Linda felt a whoosh of air against her cheek as he closed the boot. She took a few ratcheting-up breaths and felt a spreading warm sensation between her legs. She’d wet herself. The music suddenly kicked back in, but not as loudly this time. She’d listened to him singing along to Here Comes the Rain Again time and time again while they had been driving, but now a new Eurythmics song was playing. The lyrics to Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), filled the stifling, tepid air as she lay, quiet, still, tears pooling in her eyes behind the tape.
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Linda heard him come back, get into the car and start driving.
Every time he checked on her, he was like a programmed robot: methodically repeating the procedure of re-applying the duct tape on her eyes and mouth, then testing all the knots on her bindings twice before closing the boot.
She wondered how many other girls there had been.
• This is an edited extract from The Pretty Girl Killer by Andrew Byrne, RRP 34.99, out Tuesday 6 August.