Notorious 1980s Millionaire Serial Killer Raced Porsches In His Spare Time

The 12 Hours of Sebring in 1983 will go down in history as one of the strangest races ever run. A fan allegedly stole the pace car during the week leading up to the race to get groceries, alligators and hitch-hikers were reported on track by drivers, and a GTO-classed car won the race outright over the then-new faster GTPs. With 84 cars on the grid it was the largest Sebring race in history, which caused the track to run out of fuel before the end of the event. All of these fun pieces of racing lore are tainted by one macabre fact, the GTU-classed #68 Porsche was piloted by Australian-born Floridian Christopher Wilder, reports USA Today, who would soon find himself at the top of the FBI’s most-wanted list. 

Wilder, the millionaire co-owner of Sawtel Construction, raced Porsches for two seasons in some of the biggest international endurance races of the era. But before he ever sat on an IMSA grid he had already been suspected of raping at least eight teenagers and pre-teens dating back 22 years. It wasn’t until Wilder escalated his despicable acts to a seven-week cross-country kidnapping, torture, rape and murder spree that he was tracked down by authorities and killed in a shootout near the Canadian border. Wilder entered his Porsche for a second run at the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1984, where his team finished 14th overall and 5th in class, but did not himself make the grid. He had already gone on the run using his business partner’s name and credit cards to evade capture. 

Motor racing has always been an attractive side-gig for criminals, given the exhilarating and powerful nature of fast cars and death-defying action. After a reasonably successful 1983 season of partnering with Jack Rynerson in a Porsche for that year’s 12 Hours of Sebring, 500 km of Road Atlanta, and the three-hour season finale at Daytona, Wilder bought his own Porsche and started the 1984 season as an entrant in his own right. After running with a giant field at the 24 Hours of Daytona in 1984 Wilder hauled his car to Miami for the Grand Prix in late February. Later that week the first of this spree’s victims, Rosario Gonzales, a Miss Florida pageant model disappeared. Wilder, also an avid photographer, typically allegedly drew in his victims by promising to grow their modelling careers. When an ex-girlfriend of Wilder’s, Beth Kenyon, also went missing he told his business partner that police would pin her disappearance on him, and he skipped town. 

By the end of March, when he was supposed to have been in Sebring running his Porsche, Wilder had instead headed to Texas abducting victims along the way. A 15-year-old girl in went missing in Daytona Beach and was never found, the young daughter of a police captain was abducted and found days later strangled in a swamp near Cape Canaveral. A Tallahassee woman managed to lock herself in the bathroom of a motel to get away from Wilder after he had beat her, raped her, electrocuted her with a frayed lamp plug, and super glued her eyes shut. A woman in Texas told her husband that a bearded Australian man asked to take her picture and she declined, she was later stabbed to death and dumped in a canal. Wherever Wilder went — Oklahoma City, Grand Junction, Las Vegas — young women were killed. 

A truly disturbed man from his youth, Wilder was said to have enjoyed the notoriety of his crimes. One of his survivors, then-16-year-old Tina Risico of Torrance, California (above) was forced to assist Wilder abduct further victims over the course of nine days with him heading back east. Risico later said she knew she had to play along to survive. After two further victims, one shot in the back for her gold Pontiac Trans Am, Wilder dropped Risico off at Logan airport in Boston with $100 for cab fare. The last thing he said to her, “All you gotta do, kid, is write a book.” Her story recently became the subject of a three-part episodic documentary on Hulu, breaking nearly forty years of silence about her time with Wilder. 

Cops finally caught up to Wilder when he stopped for gas in Colebrook, New Hampshire. State troopers recognized him and an altercation ensued where Wilder pulled his gun on one of the officers. After two shots Wilder was dead, the local medical examiner ruled his death a suicide. 

Wilder used the same money, smooth-talking, and trustworthy appearance that had served him well in business and at the race track to assist him in committing horrifying atrocities. There’s no formula to tell us why evil men are evil, or why they might victimize young women, though Wilder was apparently addicted to the power and infamy. About a dozen deaths and dozens more sexual assaults are attributed to Wilder. There’s no telling who we might be sharing the race track with.