Christopher Bernard Wilder was born in Sydney on March 13, 1945, to an American father and an Australian mother. He was convicted of a gang rape in Sydney in 1963 and given probation with electroshock therapy, and moved to Florida in 1969, where he built a successful electrical contracting business, raced sports cars at Sebring and Daytona, and lived in a large house in Boynton Beach.
He was arrested repeatedly through the 1970s and early 1980s for sexual assaults on young women, mostly by luring them with photography sessions, and in 1980 was charged with abducting two teenagers in New South Wales while visiting family. His parents put up bail and he returned to Florida, and the Australian case was still pending in 1984. The American press called him the Beauty Queen Killer, after the modelling work he offered.
On February 26, 1984, he abducted Rosario Gonzalez, a twenty-year-old model handing out samples at the Miami Grand Prix. From there he moved almost continuously for six weeks, across Florida, Georgia, Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada, California, and back east through the midwest. He approached young women at shopping centres with a portfolio and a promise, and eight are known to have died. He forced one of them, a sixteen-year-old, to travel with him for a week as an accomplice before releasing her at an airport with a plane ticket home. He was placed on the FBI's Ten Most Wanted list on April 5.
Those named in the record are Rosario Gonzalez; Elisabeth A. Kenyon, twenty-three; Terry Ferguson, twenty-one; Terry Walden, twenty-four; Suzanne Logan, twenty-one; Sheryl Bonaventura, eighteen; Michelle Korfman, seventeen; and Beth Dodge, thirty-three.
On April 13, 1984, two New Hampshire state troopers stopped him at a filling station in Colebrook, near the Canadian border. In the struggle over his own .357 revolver the gun went off twice, killing him. Whether he shot himself deliberately has never been settled; one round passed through him and wounded a trooper.