Surviving a serial killer: She was attacked at age 11. Here's her story

Yahoo

31-05-2025

It started with a phone call.
The nice lady from school talked to 11-year-old Kristine Heck about stuff Kristine liked — roller skating, tennis and modeling.
"Your mom is worried about you," the caller told her. "She says you're a model and a skater. You need a friend.'
The calls kept coming to their home in Boynton Beach, Florida, and when Kristine eventually figured out that the caller was actually a man, she didn't want to be rude.
As the calls progressed, he started talking about things that made her uncomfortable — sexual things. That was when she told her parents, and they told her to stop talking to him.
The next time she encountered her creepy caller, it was in person — at gunpoint.
Within eyeshot of the Boynton Beach Library on a summer's day in June 1983, Christopher Wilder abducted Kristine and her 10-year-old sister and took them miles away near Okeeheelee Park in West Palm Beach.
They would live through the sexual assault that followed. Wilder deposited them right back where he had kidnapped them four hours earlier.
Though police began investigating that day, they would not be able to identify the girls' attacker until nearly a year later — after Wilder, a self-made millionaire and Boynton Beach resident, had kidnapped 12 women across the country, killing nine, in a nearly two-month rampage that landed him at the top of the FBI's Most Wanted list.
Beauty Queen Killer: Christopher Wilder killed 9 in nationwide spree recounted in Hulu doc
At the end of the rampage, Wilder, 39, died after two self-inflicted gunshot wounds during a confrontation with police. He was 10 minutes from the Canadian border.
For the first time, Kristine (now Conyers) is telling her story 40 years after the attack. Her trauma stretched for decades.
Though detectives in 1984 pegged Wilder — after he died — as the man who had assaulted Kristine and her sister, the pain continued.
The adults around her failed to offer support and to help her make sense of what had happened. Instead, they sent her away to a mental hospital for the majority of her middle school years, she said. She suffered another sexual assault in her early 20s. And, decades after the 1983 assault, Kristine reeled from her mother's revelation — that she had known Wilder before he targeted Kristine and her sister.
Another sad fact: During her high school years, Kristine, seeking comfort, had confided in some of her classmates that she had been the victim of a man who turned out to be a serial killer.
But they didn't believe her — because she didn't die.
Kristine and her sister were latchkey kids.
The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Network, does not identify victims of sex crimes unless they want to be, and Kristine's sister asked that her name not be used.
They both attended King's Academy. Their bus dropped them at home about 4 p.m. on school days, but they didn't have to wait long for Dad, an engineer at the phone company, Southern Bell, who would appear like clockwork, an hour or so later.
The summers, however, were different. The girls got to go to work with their mom, who owned a beauty salon within walking distance of things they loved to do.
Kristine would play tennis near the library.
Both girls were avid roller skaters — Kristine was a national contender in speed skating, and her sister, the 'graceful' one, as Kristine says, liked to perform as a figure skater. They traveled all over the county and across the country competing.
Kristine also joined the Brownies and then the Girl Scouts.
As she confronted Wilder, one of her scouting lessons came crashing back.
'That was one of my first thoughts,' she said. 'We weren't supposed to talk to strangers.'
Wilder was born in Australia in 1945, two months before Germany surrendered during World War II. He was a dual citizen with an American father and Australian mother.
Setting out for South Florida in 1969, Wilder slipped out of Australia even as authorities were eying him as the top suspect in the sexual assault and murders of two 15-year-old girls on a Sydney beach, according to "The Snapshot Killer," a 2019 book about Wilder by former Australian police detective Duncan McNab. The Wanda Beach killings in 1965, still unsolved, rocked the country.
That investigation would never catch up to Wilder as he landed in Fort Lauderdale then moved to Palm Beach County.
Wilder worked as a carpenter in the 1970s, then flourished financially from the 1980s building boom in the land of fast boats, cocaine cowboys and "Miami Vice." He was a fan of J.R. Ewing, the shifty lead character on the popular TV show "Dallas."
Eventually Wilder opened electrical and construction companies in Boynton Beach on a path to amassing a net worth later estimated at $1 million.
He would buy one of those speedboats himself and lead a Grand Prix racing team though he wasn't a great driver. (His national killing spree began with a victim he grabbed at the Miami Grand Prix.)
Wilder was living an unfettered life that intersected not only with his victims but also the people who would later track him.
Palm Beach County Sheriff's detective Tom Neighbors, who would connect Wilder the serial killer to Kristine's kidnapping and assault, was married to the woman who monogrammed Wilder's racing jackets.
Years later, Neighbors told an Australian news crew that on the day he learned about the killing spree during a police roll call, Wilder was scheduled to pick up some jackets. Neighbors called his wife, told her to get the gun, and if she saw Wilder, "Shoot him!"
Wilder was intelligent and good looking with intense blue eyes and blonde hair. He spoke with a slight lisp. Another sheriff's detective, who arrested Wilder in 1980, described him as "very well-spoken and educated."
Detective Neighbors said Wilder seemed shy and always looked down. The detective didn't perceive the killer as "any threat at all" though he later acknowledged Wilder "most likely had killed a number of women when I was talking to him." Neighbors' wife, Dana, who monogrammed Wilder's jackets, described him as a "true gentleman," saying he always overpaid.
To his friends and workers in Boynton Beach, Wilder loved to perform gags in the office but was quick to demand respect for women, one told McNab.
Wilder didn't smoke and rarely drank alcohol. He kept a fastidiously clean house, said a girlfriend who lived with him in Loxahatchee.
His geeky retort to anything was always, "Oh, love a duck."
Wilder's light-hearted facade cloaked a monster, several veteran law enforcement officers agreed. He'd been stalking and assaulting minor girls since his teens.
At 17, he was convicted of sexual assaulting a 13-year-old girl in Australia.
Police in South Florida, especially Palm Beach County, would quickly learn of Wilder's penchant for victimizing minor females. But they couldn't quite find a way to put him away.
When he was 26, Wilder was arrested in 1971 by Pompano Beach police after he tried to get young girls at the beach to pose nude. He paid a $25 fine.
Wilder once told a sheriff's detective that he knew he had a "problem," that on the weekends when he didn't have work, "something came over him and that's what made him do the things he had to do," the detective said in court documents.
When the compulsion struck, Wilder would pick up an empty camera and pose as a fashion photographer or modeling agent at shopping malls, promising jobs to lure young victims — most in their mid- to late-teens.
Five years after the Pompano Beach fine, Wilder crossed paths with a 16-year-old girl in Boca Raton when he was parked on the side of the road. He told her he knew her family and persuaded her to ride with him. In a remote area, he slapped her about the face then sexually assaulted her on the front seat of his truck, according to "The Snapshot Killer."
Wilder was found not guilty of sexual battery in 1977. According to news reports, the truck had a stick shift, and jurors didn't think a front seat rape was possible given that obstacle.
The next time Wilder was arrested, he knew authorities were coming, said former Palm Beach County Sheriff's detective Arthur Newcomb.
"He felt bad about what he had done," Newcomb added in court documents.
This was a common M.O., apologizing and looking remorseful in order to get a lighter sentence, McNab says in his book.
Newcomb arrested Wilder in 1980 after Wilder had targeted a 16-year-old girl with her friend at the Palm Beach Mall.
This time Wilder donned his camera and convinced the teens he worked for a modeling agency. He said he was going to film a pizza commercial, and he wanted to see them eat a slice. He told the 16-year-old to chew slowly, Newcomb testified.
As she became disoriented, Wilder found a way to separate the girls, took the 16-year-old to a remote parking lot and raped her, court documents say.
Though deputies recovered the slice, the lab couldn't find any drugs. Newcomb said in a 2025 interview that he later learned that Wilder had used a tiny dot of LSD.
Newcomb knew Wilder's predations were extensive in Palm Beach County, according to court documents. Lake Park police were investigating Wilder at the time in a case that was never filed. Also reported were 'suspicious incidents' in which the girls got away.
With inconclusive evidence, Wilder got a deal to plead guilty to attempted sexual battery of the girl he met at the mall. He was sentenced to five years of probation.
Newcomb said the case was out of his hands by that time, and it frustrated him.
"We had him," he said in 2025. "We should have locked him up."
Wilder would indeed violate his probation, but then a Palm Beach County circuit judge would refuse to put him behind bars.
Still preteens, Kristine and her sister couldn't fathom the danger lurking as they walked on June 15, 1983, in the early afternoon three blocks from their mother's beauty salon to a book event at the Boynton Beach Library.
On their way, they were stopped. Wilder, in his 1970s Chevrolet El Camino, asked the girls whether they knew how to get to Congress Avenue. They said, 'No,' but a woman sitting at an apartment house nearby answered the question so he drove away.
Half a block later, there he was again, parked on the same side of the street as the girls — next to the tennis courts and in view of the library. He pointed a gun at them and ordered them to "get in."
Kristine's 10-year-old sister started to stomp her feet, looking like she was going to run, according to sheriff's documents.
'I'll blast a hole in your sister's head,' he told Kristine. She quickly grabbed her sister by the hair to keep her from bolting.
They had to crawl over his lap to sit beside him on the bench seat. As Wilder drove, meandering across the central and western parts of the county, he talked about 'adult things,' the girls told police.
'Do you know what sex is?" Then he would explain. Each girl told police they didn't understand it.
The girls asked for his name. 'Steve,' he said. (Wilder's younger brother was Steven.)
Wilder told the girls he was taking them to a modeling agency, but one asked why he had to take them by force. He replied that no one would come any other way, according to the police report.
He took them to a wooded area west of Okeeheelee Park where he put down a painter's dropcloth then sexually assaulted them.
When he returned them to the tennis courts, the girls went to their mother's salon and told her what had happened.
When their mother said she was going to call the police, the girls became "hysterical,' the police report said. They told her that Wilder was a Boynton Beach police detective and would know if they reported the crime. They also said that he carried a rifle that could shoot a mile and would kill them.
But soon they led the officers to the scene, where they found the painter's cloth along with women's underwear that Wilder had been wearing.
They each described their assailant as about 5'8', 180 pounds with blue eyes and brown hair that was thinning on top. He looked to be about age 30 with a trimmed mustache. His T-shirt had a picture of a Smurf and the words, 'Smurf this.' He wore dark blue silky jogging shorts and KangaROOS brand tennis shoes in maroon.
They also described his El Camino in detail, including the rust color, the possible model and beige racing stripe on the hood.
Their recounting of the events, taking police right to where they were attacked and the detail they offered was impressive, especially for victims so young, said Michael Gauger, former chief deputy at the sheriff's office.
The day after the attack, as the investigation got rolling, Kristine's mother, Averil Heck, received two phone calls about two hours apart. Both times a male caller asked to speak with Kristine. Her mother said she wasn't there and offered to take a message. He hung up. During the second call, he replied, 'No, it has to be her' before hanging up.
Averil Heck didn't recognize his voice. She said in 2025 that she wasn't sure why. Both ran businesses within blocks of each other in downtown Boynton. She said she had heard him at city council meetings but had never spoken directly with him.
Kristine was gobsmacked in 2017 after her mother told her out of the blue that she'd known Wilder before the attack, but her mom wouldn't say much more.
After the calls in June 1983, police put a "trap" on the line but got nothing.
Police interviewed several suspects but couldn't find a way to tie them to the crime. One had gone into a bar wearing a Smurf T-shirt the evening of June 15. He didn't look like Wilder. Another had bought a dropcloth that day and drove a rust-colored El Camino, but the dropcloth didn't match the one in evidence.
Detectives worked through at least five sex offenders, but they didn't match the descriptions the girls gave.
The suspect police were seeking was one who targeted young girls under 14. Wilder typically preyed on older underage teens.
"I think the police did the best job they could," McNab said after examining the police report. "Police tend to look at age groups when chasing these people, and quite a few sex offenders target teens but not younger."
One sexual offender who matched the girls' description and had a similar M.O. was relayed to investigators by a West Palm Beach detective. He'd twice been arrested on lewd and lascivious charges on girls under age 14.
Kristine and her sister tentatively picked out the man from a photo array but couldn't positively identify him in an in-person lineup.
The case went cold.
Kristine's home life was rocked by the attack. Her family didn't speak of it.
In the fall, Kristine went back to King's Academy and completed the fifth grade with help from a kind teacher.
But she felt different, she said, when church officials admonished girls to save themselves for marriage.
"I felt like … that's who I am. I was labeled promiscuous," she said.
Her parents never brought up Wilder's attack again, and Kristine and her sister became separated for large swaths of time while they grew up.
One day Kristine's father caught her and her friends reading 'The Beauty Queen Killer,' a 1990 book by Bruce Gibney about Wilder. Her parents were incredulous, asking, ''What is wrong with you?' All I gained from that was shame,' she said.
As Kristine entered her teens, trouble in her home piled up. She recalls seeing her mom with another man and telling her father about it. Her mom, who didn't challenge that memory in a 2025 interview, tells the story instead of a troubled girl who ran away and needed professional help. Kristine doesn't recall running away until she was older, but remembers being told she was imagining things and needed therapy.
In the end, Kristine's parents made the call and she landed in inpatient care at a treatment center.
"This is when I learned a child was not going to win a 'he said she said' against a parent."
She said she was traumatized again, living in the hospital off and on for years.
'Going to the bathroom and showering with someone always watching you as a 13-year-old rape survivor was completely horrifying and humiliating," she said in a draft of her book, which is set to be published in 2026. 'We couldn't have razors, belts, certain bath products and appliances with electric cords. To me, this was so unbelievable and scary.'
When she was released, she attended Santaluces High School in Lantana but dropped out, saying she felt bullied by her classmates giving her a hard time about the attack.
At age 21, Kristine became a victim yet again, when she went on a rare night out with her friends to see a male revue in Fort Myers. She got caught up with the group of dancers behind the building and was raped, she said. When she reported it to police, they told her it was the dancers' word against hers so she dropped it.
Children who are abused sexually are nearly 50% more likely to be revictimized, according to a 2017 analysis posted on the National Institutes of Health website. Researchers are still trying to determine why.
Kristine eventually earned an associate's degree and at 53, runs a successful business. She has four sons and two grandchildren.
But it's not until now that she's started to shake the effects of a horrific sex crime against her at such a young age.
'I was paralyzed my whole adult life,' she says.
Kristine recently started a nonprofit called 'Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow Women' to help other survivors of sexual assault have a safe place to talk and for women in general to empower each other across generations.
Wilder had visited Australia six months before Kristine's attack. He was still on probation in the 1980 sexual battery case.
While he was there, in late December 1982, he was charged with sexual offenses against two minor girls. An Interpol agent alerted his probation officer in Palm Beach County, according to court documents.
With the help of his parents and uncle putting up their houses for his $400,000 bail, Wilder was able to fly home to Boynton Beach. The probation officer alerted Judge John Born, who had presided over the 1980 case. In February 1983, the judge let the millionaire out on $1,000 bond on charges of violating his probation.
Wilder remained free for 14 months, enough time to attack Kristine and her sister and to abduct 12 women and kill nine of them across the United States the next year.
Five of them were from Florida and four died, including the daughter of a police officer in Satellite Beach and a 15-year-old in Daytona Beach. A Florida State University nursing student escaped him and survived. Two from Miami have never been found.
The FBI hunted Wilder from Florida to California and back east to New Hampshire in spring 1984.
As detective Neighbors assisted them, something rung a bell about the girls' case. As he learned more, the evidence began to match Wilder and his M.O.: from the KangaROOS brand shoes to the phone calls to a scar on his ankle that one girl described.
But it was too late. Though Kristine and her sister each identified Wilder in a photo array, he was dead.
"I don't feel like what keeps me up is the event of being kidnapped," Kristine said. "It was the women who died after.'
Holly Baltz is the investigations editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Network. You can reach her at [e-mail].
This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Surviving a serial killer: She was assaulted at 11. Here is her story