Kidnap Victim Accompanied a Serial Killer in Final Days of His Rampage. Now She's Speaking Out

Some things can’t be unlearned.

Tina Marie Risico was 16 when Christopher Wilder kidnapped her from a California mall in 1984. He had told the aspiring model he could make her dreams come true.

Forty years later, Risico says she still sleeps with her arms crossed above her head, as Wilder made her do each of the nine nights he forced her to lay beside him in bed as they traveled from one hotel to the next on his killing rampage.

“And to today, this is the only way I fall asleep,” she says in her first interview in decades in an upcoming docuseries. “It was very traumatic, very exhausting.”

The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror, a new true-crime three-part docuseries produced by ABC News Studios, Ample Entertainment and 101 Studios, delves into the unlikely and mostly untold stories of survival of women like Risico who endured harrowing hardship at the hands of the serial killer. It begins streaming on Thursday, May 16, only on Hulu. (Watch an exclusive clip below.)

Targeting young women – most of whom were aspiring models – in 47 days in 1984, the so-called Beauty Queen Killer was linked to the deaths and disappearances of at least nine girls and women, leading to what was then the FBI’s largest manhunt.

Weaving between stories of the young women Wilder killed with those who survived to tell their own, the series explores different types of victimization– including the particular torture endured by Risico, who was forced to witness and take part in her own captor’s brutality, even helping him abduct another teenager girl in order to survive herself.

Risico was with Wilder for his final murder, when he fatally shot a woman.

In another instance, he forced Risico to wait in the car while he dragged another girl into the woods, stabbing her and leaving her for dead. But the girl survived, playing a pivotal role in Wilder’s ultimate undoing.

In her first-ever interview with UPI in 1984, Risico, then 17, said she had survived Wilder’s nightly assaults because she was no stranger to sexual abuse and had grown up with a mother who hung around violent motorcycle clubs.

“There's something inside of me that I knew how to play along,” Risico told the outlet months after her kidnapping.

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Wilder was fatally shot by police while trying to flee to Canada.

But just before that, he bought Risico a plane ticket back home to California, dropping her off at the airport.

In her interview with UPI, she said she believed “he knew he was too close to being killed,” and wanted her to survive. She noted that before leaving her, he made her kiss his cheek goodbye and told her: “All you gotta do kid, is write a book.” 

“It was heartbreaking,” Risico said at age 17. “It was so sentimental.”

Back home, many questioned her role in her captivity and the impossible decisions she was forced to make.

But now, 40 years later, Risico can see her experience for what it was.

She describes his sexual assaults of her as "so disgusting.”

Recalling “his hand on my body,” she says: “Just his near touch was just — I couldn't shutter, but inside and internally I was shuttering.”

“Every night stopping at the hotels were continuous rape for me,” Risico adds, recounting how Wilder subjected her to electric shocks.

She says that Wilder forced her to wallow in the sense of uncleanliness she felt after the assaults, only allowing her to bathe once in the nine days before he let her go.

“The Beauty Queen Killer: 9 Days of Terror” begins streaming Thursday, May 16, only on Hulu.

If you or someone you know has been sexually assaulted, please contact the National Sexual Assault Hotline at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or go to rainn.org.