The Friday the Thirteenth Reckoning
- Jun 2
- 7 min read
EPISODE 21
The Friday the 13th Reckoning: How the Biggest Manhunt in American History Ended in a Small-Town Gas Station
On the morning of Friday the 13th of April, 1984, serial killer Christopher Wilder was four hours south of the Canadian border, in a stolen gold Pontiac Firebird, with a stash of cash, a .357 Magnum in the glove compartment, and a map of Canada folded on the passenger seat. By lunchtime he would be ten minutes away.
He had one more day to live.
The girl who threw herself out of the car
At a quarter to eight that morning, on Route 128 in Wenham, Massachusetts, a nineteen-year-old named Carol Hilbert was standing beside her broken-down car. A gold sports car pulled up. The driver was friendly. He said his name was Chris. He offered her a lift to the nearest garage.
She got in. She gave him directions. He didn't follow them.
She had seen the news the night before. She knew who she was sitting next to. As the car slowed at a stop sign, she yanked the door handle, threw herself onto the hard shoulder, and ran to the first house she could see. She didn't look back until she was on the porch.
A few minutes later and Wilder would have been on an empty stretch of road. Carol Hilbert was the luckiest woman in America that day. Almost no-one knows her name.
A man who already knew where he was going
By eleven that morning, Wilder was in a tourist information centre in North Woodstock, New Hampshire, asking the assistant behind the counter for the best map he had of the area and of Canada. He asked two questions. How far to Colebrook? How far to the border?
Ninety minutes. Twelve miles further on.
He thanked the man and left.
This was not a man running. This was a man finishing a plan he had been working on for weeks. The cash had been hoarded. The credit cards had been stolen from his business partner so his own name wouldn't appear on a hotel ledger.
Every morning of the rampage had started with him hunched over a map. The border crossing at Colebrook was small, remote, and forty-two years ago it was the kind of place where a clean-shaven American man in a nice car would have been waved through without a second look.
We know how small it is. We drove past it ourselves by accident and were pulled over within seconds by an armed border guard who was, briefly, very unhappy with us. One lane in. One lane out. A small flag. A small post. Across that line was a new name, a new life, and a country that in 1984 had almost no chance of finding him.
The Speedy Chef
At lunchtime in Colebrook, three state troopers — Leo "Chuck" Jellison, Wayne Fortier and Howard Weber — were finishing lunch at the Speedy Chef restaurant on Main Street.
Jellison and Fortier got into an unmarked car and rolled slowly back through town. They were in plain clothes. They had been briefed that morning on a be-on-the-lookout alert. Gold Pontiac Firebird. Gold hubcaps.
Fortier saw it first, parked on the forecourt of Vladie's Getty service station. A tall white man was standing between the petrol pumps. He looked straight at them. Then he turned and walked inside.
That's the son of a bitch we've been looking for, Jellison said.
Inside the station, Wilder was asking the attendant what he needed to cross into Canada. An American driving licence would do it, the attendant said. Wilder turned to leave. Through the glass, he saw the unmarked car pulling onto the forecourt.
He ran for the Firebird.
The Locked door
He had to double back around the front of the car to reach the driver's door. He lost seconds he could not afford to lose. By the time he was reaching across the front seats for the gun in the glove compartment, Jellison, a bear of a man, was on top of him.
Jellison hadn't drawn his weapon. There hadn't been time. He locked his arms around Wilder in a bear hug, pinning his arms to his ribs, trying to stop him reaching the .357.
The gun went off once. The bullet passed through Wilder and into Jellison. Jellison staggered backwards, looked down, saw the wound, and called out to his partner.
I've been shot.
Then the second shot. Wilder turned the gun on himself.
He died on the forecourt, one boot off, one leg hanging out of the open driver's door. The bullet that had passed through him stopped half an inch from Jellison's liver. The surgeon told him so afterwards.
A local newspaper photographer named Terry Rosi, working at the Colebrook News and Sentinel a few hundred yards away, had seen Howard Weber sprint past his office with a shotgun. He grabbed his camera and ran. The photographs he took that afternoon went around the world. They are still the only record of the moment the biggest manhunt in American history ended. Terry shared them with us.
The minute that changed everything
Stand on the forecourt now and the margins are almost unbearable to think about.
If the passenger door of the Firebird had been unlocked, Wilder would have reached the gun. He would have shot Jellison, shot Fortier, and been a racing driver in a souped-up car ten minutes from a border post he could have driven through.
If he had walked out of the gas station one minute earlier, Jellison and Fortier would have cruised down Main Street and seen nothing.
He came that close to vanishing into a new country with a new name and a stash of cash. He didn't, because of a locked door and two off-duty troopers who recognised a car on their way back from lunch.
After the shooting, medics soon arrived and began to work on treating Trooper Jellison, who had been shot in the chest. Fragments of the bullet narrowly missed his liver.
Tina
Twelve hours earlier, Wilder had put sixteen-year-old Tina Risico on a red-eye flight from Boston to Los Angeles. By the time she walked into Torrance Police Station to turn herself in, she had been in the air for half a day. She sat down with the detectives. Ten minutes later, an officer walked into the room and told them that Christopher Wilder was dead.
Ken Whittaker — the private investigator hired by the parents of Beth Kenyon, one of Wilder's earliest victims — eventually got Tina on the phone. He asked her, gently, whether Wilder had ever spoken about the two young women who had disappeared from Miami at the start of the rampage. Beth. Rosario.
He had, Tina said. Once. While he was attacking another woman, he had turned to Tina and said: turn around, otherwise you end up like the girls in South Florida.
That was the only time he ever mentioned them.
This is not the end
Christopher Wilder died on a gas station forecourt ten minutes from a new life. The headlines moved on within days.
The families didn't. Beth Kenyon's parents. Rosario Gonzalez's mother. The families of every young woman in this series whose name we still do not know.
The chase ended on Friday the 13th of April, 1984. The story did not.
The next episodes are going to prove it.
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Help Us to Keep Investigating
Contact us here if you know something about Christopher Wilder. If you had an encounter with him, are you are a friend or a family member of someone who never made it home, we want to hear your story:
Email: info@catchingevil.com
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Catching Evil is committed to making a meaningful impact in the lives of those affected by violent crime, particularly in light of the chilling legacy of serial killer Christopher Wilder, who left behind a still-growing number of victims. In our pledge to honour these individuals and support their families, we donate to not-for-profit groups in both America and Australia.
Survivors of Homicide Inc, based in Connecticut, provides assistance to anyone who has lost a loved one to violent crime.
All services are offered to members free of charge, including one-on-one counselling, support groups, court support throughout the judicial process and personal advocacy in working with law enforcement and other community agencies.
It was founded in 1983, just before Christopher Wilder went on his rampage, by a group of families trying to cope with the murder of a loved one that shattered their lives.
When you donate to Yesterday Today Tomorrow Women, you are investing in the empowerment of women across generations. This Florida based nonprofit was founded by Kris Conyers, who was abducted off the street at gunpoint by Christopher Wilder when she was 11 years old.
YTT Women is dedicated to advancing women’s mental health and social wellbeing and contributions directly support community-based initiatives that raise awareness, provide resources, and foster safe, supportive spaces for women to grow and heal.
Mary’s House Services was founded in 2015 by a dedicated group of concerned citizens from Sydney’s northern suburbs, close to where Christopher Wilder was born and lived wth his family. Members of the local clergy, health authorities, philanthropists and community and business leaders came together to help provide safety for women and their children, victim-survivors of violence and abuse.
The Mary’s House refuge was established to address the significant gap in government funded services and to save lives in the region by providing critical support and a safe space to cope with their trauma and begin to rebuild their lives.
How to donate: https://mhs-summer-appeal-2025.raiselysite.com/#donate
Catching Evil, proudly a part of the Acast Creator Network, is an Original Voices presentation for Sticky Toffee Media
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