Trigger warning: The article contains mention child abuse that may be disturbing. Reader discretion is advised.
First, there was a phone call by the serial killer. A kind woman from the school spoke with 11-year-old Kristine Heck about her interests in modeling, tennis, and roller skating. The caller said to her, “Your mom is worried about you,” “She claims that you skate and model. You require a companion.
Their Boynton Beach home continued to get calls, and Kristine didn’t want to be impolite when she finally discovered that the caller was a man. As the conversations went on, he began discussing sexual topics that unnerved her. She told her parents at that point, and they advised her to cut off communication with him.
When she saw her eerie caller again, it was face-to-face and at guns. Christopher Wilder kidnapped Kristine and her 10-year-old sister on a sunny day in June 1983, within sight of the Boynton Beach Library, and carried them miles away to Okeeheelee Park in West Palm Beach.
Christopher Wilder was free to attack 11-year-old and 10-year-old girls in Boynton Beach. Then he abducted 12 and killed 9 across the U.S. https://t.co/t57jh58dcI
— Sarasota Herald-Tribune (@HeraldTribune) May 21, 2025
They would survive the subsequent sexual attack. Four hours after he had abducted them, Wilder placed them exactly where he had taken them. Police started looking into the girls’ attacker that day, but it would take them almost a year to identify him. This was because Wilder, a self-made millionaire who lived in Boynton Beach, had gone on a nearly two-month rampage in which he abducted 12 women nationwide and killed nine of them, placing him at the top of the FBI’s Most Wanted list.
After two self-inflicted gunshot wounds during a confrontation with police, 39-year-old Wilder passed away at the end of the rampage, as reported by Palm Beach Post. The Canadian border was ten minutes away. Forty years after the attack, Kristine (now Conyers) is sharing her experience for the first time. Her trauma lasted for many years.
Even after investigators identified Wilder as the perpetrator of Kristine and her sister’s abuse after his death in 1984, the suffering persisted. The grownups in her life did not support her or assist her in understanding what had transpired. Rather, she alleged, they committed her to a mental health facility for most of her middle school years.
In her early twenties, she was sexually assaulted once more. Kristine was also devastated by her mother’s admission that she had known Wilder before he targeted her and her sister in 1983, decades after the attack.
Another tragic detail is that, in an attempt to find solace, Kristine told some of her classmates in high school that she had been the victim of a man who later turned out to be a serial killer. However, because she survived, they didn’t believe her.
