Christopher Wilder

Christopher Bernard Wilder (March 13, 1945 – April 13, 1984), also known as The Beauty Queen Killer, was a serial killer from Australia who abducted and raped at least twelve women, killing at least eight of them, during a six-week cross-country crime spree in the United States of America in early 1984. His series of murders began in Florida on February 26, 1984, and continued across the country through Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nevada, California and New York before he was killed during a struggle with police in New Hampshire on April 13, 1984.

He is also believed to have raped two girls, aged 10 and 12, in Florida in 1983. Since his death, Wilder has also been considered the prime suspect in the unsolved 1965 murder of two teenage girls in Sydney, Australia, where he had lived from his birth until 1965.

Wilder was born on March 13, 1945, in Sydney, Australia, the son of an American naval officer and an Australian national. He nearly died at birth, but recovered, and almost drowned in a swimming pool at the age of two. In 1962 or 1963, he pleaded guilty to a gang-rape at a beach in Sydney and was sentenced to probation, during which time he also received electroshock therapy. There is evidence that this treatment exacerbated his violent sexual tendencies. A copy of the novel The Collector by John Fowles, in which a man keeps a woman in his cellar against her will until she dies, was found among his possessions after his death.