March 13, 1945 - Christopher Wilder

Christopher Bernard Wilder (March 13, 1945 – April 13, 1984), also known as the Beauty Queen Killer and the Snapshot Killer, was an Australian-American serial killer who abducted at least twelve young women and girls, killing eight of them during a six-week, cross-country crime spree in the United States in early 1984. Having committed numerous rapes and sexual assaults in Australia and the United States dating back to 1963, Wilder had developed his methods for victimizing attractive young women, most of whom he enticed by promising to take their photographs.

In February 1984, Wilder progressed to murder, beginning in Florida, then traveling more than 6,000 miles (9,700 km) west to California then north and east to New Hampshire, while committing murders, abductions, attempted abductions, and transportation of victims in 16 different states. After subduing his victims, he tortured and raped them before shooting, stabbing, or strangling them to death. He electrocuted two or more of his victims using a makeshift electrical cord.

After being named a suspect in the disappearances of his first two victims, both of whom were women he knew and whose bodies were never found, Wilder began to target random women, many of whom were abducted from shopping malls. During a struggle with police in New Hampshire on April 13, 1984, he accidentally killed himself, with one bullet from his gun passing through his body and seriously injuring the officer trying to disarm him. Since his death, Wilder has been suspected of the rapes, murders, and disappearances of many other women, including the 1965 Wanda Beach Murders in his native city of Sydney, as well as the suspected murder of missing 18-year-old beauty queen Tammy Lynn Leppert.

Content sourced from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher Wilder under CC BY-SA 4.0.