Ilana Leeds

A well researched book that delves into the mind of this extremely complex and flawed human being. The fact that he was such a consumate actor and could appear so polite as to fool an investigative detective in Florida whose wife did the monogramming on his racing suits, showed just how devious and cunning this predator was. The question for me(and it still irks me) is what drove him to do what he did to those women? How shocking his crimes are for his family too who seemed quite a normal middle class Australian family. Then the families of victims who will never see their loved ones again, but suspect they died in horrific circumstances, as well as those who buried their kin. Intriguing is the fact that he let some go, especially Tina in the end and the two who escaped and lived to tell the tale of his torture. I would have loved to write a screen play for a film about Wilder. He is fascinating, creepy and oh so evil but oh so ordinary. The complexity of such a being is both horrifyingly chilling, yet he could have been your average man. What went wrong in his psychological make-up? Was it present from birth or did it just happen through events in early childhood? Who knows? I am rereading the book. Pity he died at the end, as he would have made a good subject for psychological analysis for some of the professionals working in the field....