Beauty Queen Killer/The

by Bruce Gibney

Book Overview

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1558173455
• ISBN13: 9781558173453
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Pinnacle Books
• Length: 8 Pages
• Weight: 0.30 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Another Day, Another Sexual Deviant

In the true crime work THE BEAUTY QUEEN KILLER, author Bruce Gibney presents a chronicle of the last few months of the life of serial killer Christopher Wilder. Wilder, a psychopathic deviant living in Florida, was considered by those who knew him to be a great guy: friendly, well mannered, at least semi-suave, and genuinely concerned about others. Unfortunately, the highly attractive young women Wilder approached with non-existent modeling jobs -those who were naïve enough to trust him - saw another side of him, a side which generally left them dead. Gibney's book is pretty much standard true crime. There is little background material on Wilder and there are small though adequate sketches of the majority of the victims. The first 80 or so pages set the stage and deal with the disappearances of two beautiful young women, Elizabeth Kenyon and Rosario Gonzales, whose lives are described in somewhat greater detail. After kidnapping these two women (and presumably murdering them - their bodies have never been found) and realizing that he was being looked at as a suspect, Wilder went on a three week driving odyssey back and forth across the country, kidnapping, torturing, and murdering. The rest of the book describes these three weeks. THE BEAUTY QUEEN KILLER is not a deep book, nor does it pretend to be. Gibney's writing is good if unpretentious and works well for what he is doing, which is to present over the last 120 pages a day by day chronicle of Wilder' and his victims' days on the run. His writing is totally reportorial; there are no personal asides, no wise-guy remarks, no semi-professional attempts to inject himself into the story. And what the reader is left with is kind of like a well executed car chase movie. The pace of the book is fast and captivating. I finished it in two days never wanting to put it down. A few other comments: 1. The picture section is very good. It is neither "shocking", disturbing", or any of the other nonsense descriptions which grace the covers of today's true crime. It just contains relevant pictures of Wilder and his victims. 2. There is an oddly included appendix, written by a Judith Light, consisting of twelve pages of her dealings with a trusted (by her) psychic. Light believes implicitly in the psychic and when the visions don't lead to bodies, Knight writes that she "hadn't lost faith in (the psychic's) very amazing ability....I was only disappointed in my own interpretation of her vision." Well, that's just terrific. In my opinion, that section of the appendix was diseased and should have been removed long before it burst into print. As long as the true crime reader is not looking for deep research into the backgrounds of the players and will be satisfied with a quick and entertaining read, THE BEAUTY QUEEN KILLER is recommended.