Mystery on Blood Mountain

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Speaker 6 I'm Lester Holt.

Speaker 7 Tonight on Dateline, The first thing that really got my attention is where she went missing. Blood Mountain.

Speaker 8 You know, you have to be aware of your surroundings all the time because you just never know.

Speaker 9 It started with a frightening horror flick from the 80s.

Speaker 11 The primce of the movie is we're going to take some women into the woods and then poof, they're going to be hunted down.

Speaker 9 Decades later, it was happening for real.

Speaker 9 A strange vanishing in the forest.

Speaker 13 We began to get disturbing news.

Speaker 14 Your heart just broke.

Speaker 10 Then another.

Speaker 16 The tire looked like it had been purposely flattened.

Speaker 17 If someone has her, she's afraid.

Speaker 18 Do we have a killer running around loose in the National Forest?

Speaker 9 Could this old movie hold the key to these new cases?

Speaker 12 This film where he's sending women out in the woods. Do you think that's the template for what he does?

Speaker 21 That's what's so chilling.

Speaker 14 If anybody could survive it, it was Meredith.

Speaker 14 And if anybody could fight, it was Meredith.

Speaker 9 Here's Dennis Murphy with Mystery on Blood Mountain.

Speaker 8 Our national forests are places of refuge for folks that want to get away from the city and have a sense of peace,

Speaker 8 commune with nature.

Speaker 8 But you have to be aware of your surroundings all the time because you just never know.

Speaker 26 The splendors of America's national parks and forest lands are poems just waiting to be written by each new visitor.

Speaker 10 From the cathedrals of the Rockies to the quiet glades and old growth of the Appalachians.

Speaker 6 It's here in the parks we have the promise of stepping out of the hubbub of our chattering daily routine.

Speaker 36 That was the kind of serenity Meredith Emerson sought on a crisp New Year's Day in the North Georgia Mountains.

Speaker 23 Not more than foothills, really, for a young woman who loved to trail climb her native Rockies.

Speaker 28 It was 2008 as the young sales assistant set out from Buford, Georgia with her dog Ella.

Speaker 23 A roomie, Julia Karenbauer from college days, had slept in that morning.

Speaker 14 She had left me a note, just a little note on a chalkboard, took Ella, went hiking. Not where, not when, not when I'm going to be back.
So it wasn't really anything out of the ordinary.

Speaker 42 Meredith, like Roomie Julia, was a dog person.

Speaker 44 She doted on Ella, her black lab mix, since finding her at a rescue shelter.

Speaker 14 She had two dogs growing up and she wanted one of her own.

Speaker 14 And so she just kind of talked about it and researched what she wanted and definitely wanted to rescue a dog and finally found one, went out, loved her, brought her home and it really was the light of her life.

Speaker 10 Julia, the roommate, didn't know that Meredith and Ella were heading 40 miles north to Blood Mountain in the Chattahoochee National Forest.

Speaker 38 Despite the creepy teen slasher movie name, Blood Mountain is one of the most popular places to hike in the southeast.

Speaker 48 The famous Appalachian Trail to Maine takes off from just south of here.

Speaker 52 Back in Buford, the roommate spent her New Year's Day with friends and didn't notice that Meredith hadn't come home until the next morning, a back-to-work day.

Speaker 14 She would leave Ella in my room and I would take care of her in the morning.

Speaker 14 And I'm like, oh, Ella's not here. That was a little strange to me.
And I called her cell phone and I went straight to voicemail and kind of thought maybe she was at work.

Speaker 14 When did you become anxious, Julia? When I got to work, she worked with a good friend of ours. And the friend called me and said Meredith didn't show up for work.
And Meredith was always at work.

Speaker 14 She was the first one at work.

Speaker 35 Reliable Meredith wasn't where she was supposed to be.

Speaker 55 Julia called the sheriff's office.

Speaker 56 Then she and some of Meredith's other friends assembled a search party.

Speaker 36 Maybe she'd twisted her ankle hiking and taken a tumble.

Speaker 52 They started with that note on the chalkboard.

Speaker 12 Do you know where I'm going hiking would naturally be?

Speaker 14 We had a few ideas. We took some books that she had and some places that she highlighted and kind of just started driving.

Speaker 31 The friends split up, looking for Meredith's car at trailheads she'd marked in her hiking guides.

Speaker 14 There was four of us in the car. We were trying to call park rangers and anybody that may have seen her or her car.

Speaker 14 And then a friend of hers found her car, called us and said, I found it, and there was snow on it.

Speaker 27 The car was in a parking area at the base of Blood Mountain.

Speaker 14 And we drove as fast as we could there and just knew, you know, just that sinking feeling when you first see it.

Speaker 6 The friends raced up the Blood Mountain feeder path to the Appalachian Trail, but no trace of Meredith or Ellen.

Speaker 61 So by nightfall, the search became all the more urgent as a cold front moved in and temperatures on Blood Mountain plunged below zero.

Speaker 62 At daybreak, Thursday now, the friends were joined by deputies from the local sheriff's office.

Speaker 35 John Cagle, just shy of retirement, was the agent in charge for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the state's top cops.

Speaker 13 We received a request from a local agency to help with a missing hiker.

Speaker 36 The case of the hiker missing for two days didn't look good to the seasoned detective because of some disturbing items that had been recovered on the trail.

Speaker 12 What were the things that were found out in that trail area that you thought were alarming?

Speaker 13 A couple of water bottles, a dog leash, and a police expandable baton.

Speaker 12 This is a piece of professional gear.

Speaker 13 It is. It's just a metal pipe that is expandable.
You see almost every uniformed police officer in the nation carrying these things.

Speaker 12 Did those artifacts, the water bottle, the baton found together, tell you a story at all or suggest something ominous?

Speaker 13 Yes. When we found those items in an area where the ground had appeared to have been disturbed, then we became concerned that possibly a struggle took place there.

Speaker 49 Meredith's water bottles, Ella's leash, and signs of a struggle.

Speaker 56 Nothing about the scene looked good to the veteran lawman, especially that expandable police baton that was found.

Speaker 10 He called in help.

Speaker 13 We've eventually partnered with over 18 or 19 police agencies to help for the search for Meredith.

Speaker 67 Her friends were naturally beside themselves.

Speaker 14 You know, your heart just broke because you think something happened, Somebody had a weapon and her stuff was there.

Speaker 12 So you're thinking at the very least she's been abducted.

Speaker 14 Yep, and it was so hard because it wasn't something that we could talk about until we could actually prove that.

Speaker 68 The cops commandeered a park building as headquarters.

Speaker 13 We began getting information pretty quickly.

Speaker 12 From people who had hiked the trails that day?

Speaker 22 Right. Remembered her.

Speaker 13 Remembered her. And we began to get disturbing news of a strange-looking individual with Meredith who also had a dog.

Speaker 12 Thumbnail description. This other person.
What were you hearing?

Speaker 10 Strange-looking,

Speaker 13 just a wiry kind of guy.

Speaker 22 Older guy. Older guy.

Speaker 13 We even developed a vehicle description, a white van.

Speaker 30 The lead on the van came from this photo taken by a hiker in the Blood Mountain parking lot the night before Meredith Emerson went missing.

Speaker 27 A be on the lookout advisory went out for the guy driving a white van accompanied by his reddish dog.

Speaker 71 It is going to be a white male between the ages of 50 and 60 years old, approximately 160 pounds. It was described as he is bad dental.
He had a dark reddish-colored retriever.

Speaker 13 We put out that information through the media in Atlanta and actually got a call from someone who said, I think I know who this is.

Speaker 9 When we return.

Speaker 9 This mysterious stranger would prove to be stranger than anyone expected.

Speaker 7 I just turned white. I felt the blood leave my face.

Speaker 9 Meredith Emerson had not been the only one missing in the forest.

Speaker 17 If she's still alive and someone has her, she's afraid.

Speaker 74 Meredith Emerson and her lab Ella were two days missing on Georgia's Blood Mountain early in a freezing January of 2008.

Speaker 4 Her friends had alerted the authorities and people from all over Greater Atlanta were scouring the hiking trails.

Speaker 74 So many volunteered they couldn't use all of them.

Speaker 14 People just showed up and just said, I have a daughter who likes to hike. I have a sister who could have been Meredith easily and they just volunteer their time.

Speaker 23 But the search in the National Forest had become something more ominous than a lost hiker incident.

Speaker 32 Meredith had been last seen in the company of an unsavory looking stranger, and law enforcement was about to identify him.

Speaker 48 The tip came from John Tabor, an Atlanta businessman.

Speaker 27 He was watching the continuing news coverage of missing Meredith during his morning workout.

Speaker 7 When they started giving the description of the person of interest, my ears really perked up. I think I just turned white at one point.
I felt the blood leave my face.

Speaker 32 Tabor, the businessman, thought, this has got to be Gary Hilton.

Speaker 78 Hilton was a guy who'd worked on and off for him for years, first as a telemarketer, then as an independent contractor in a siding business.

Speaker 32 He even lived for a while in this little house that Tabor owned.

Speaker 12 What was the thought that was taking shape as you're listening to this?

Speaker 7 The first thing that really got my attention is where the event happened, where she went missing, Blood Mountain. I knew that was a place he liked to hang out, that he had a dog with him.

Speaker 7 And most importantly, was the evidence that they had found at the scene. I knew Hilton always had an expandable police baton with him.

Speaker 35 The tip and a name quickly led to a Georgia driver's license for 61-year-old Gary Michael Hilton.

Speaker 61 Investigators showed the photo to hikers who ID'd him as the scruffy mystery man seen with Meredith on Blood Mountain.

Speaker 42 The manhunt was on.

Speaker 13 We put that name and face out and it's plastered all over the metro Atlanta area.

Speaker 59 It is.

Speaker 81 The APB went well beyond the Georgia border.

Speaker 4 Hilton's name and picture were all over the regional news.

Speaker 69 Light bulbs began going off to the south around Tallahassee, Florida's capital, when people there saw his photo on TV.

Speaker 54 The search for Gary Hilton was about to widen.

Speaker 85 The mystery man, person of interest in the Meredith Emerson case, looked familiar to people who thought they'd seen him just about the time they'd learned of the sad case of another woman who'd gone missing, Cheryl Dunlap, a nurse and mother.

Speaker 35 When Cheryl didn't turn up for church one December Sunday in 2007 and then missed her Sunday school class, red flags went up.

Speaker 61 Next door neighbor and friend Tanya Land.

Speaker 86 Sunday morning at church, I turned around and looked at her usual spot and she wasn't there.

Speaker 12 And she didn't teach her classes.

Speaker 87 She didn't.

Speaker 17 And immediately, we knew something was wrong because that's just not like her.

Speaker 42 Everyone who knew her agreed 46-year-old Cheryl was reliable.

Speaker 61 A woman solid in her faith and set in her habits.

Speaker 51 Her fellow nurse, friend, and prayer partner, Laura Walker.

Speaker 17 She always liked to hear

Speaker 17 what we call our praise reports, like something good that happened with a patient or a co-worker.

Speaker 88 When Monday morning rolled around and Tanya still hadn't been able to reach Cheryl, she walked next door.

Speaker 86 I went back down to her house and saw that the dog was at the house but the car was gone so I called her office several times and they hadn't seen her.

Speaker 84 Cheryl's daughter-in-law Tabitha called the sheriff's office to report her missing.

Speaker 16 When Tanya said she didn't show up for work I knew that there was a problem.

Speaker 75 After that missing person's report was filed, the friends heard about a car that looked like Cheryl's spotted on the side of the highway leading into Tallahassee.

Speaker 50 They headed up there.

Speaker 86 It was Cheryl's car and immediately they sent a deputy up there and just took over from that point.

Speaker 59 Are you apprehensive?

Speaker 86 Yeah, I was very uneasy. I knew that there was something wrong.

Speaker 68 Cheryl's car was parked well off the highway.

Speaker 48 Florida Department of Law Enforcement Agent Annie White.

Speaker 16 It was pretty clear from the beginning that that's not someplace that she would have parked it. as well as the tire looked like it had been purposely flattened on the vehicle.

Speaker 23 An abandoned car, a slash tire.

Speaker 14 Lord, where is she?

Speaker 41 Searchers, law enforcement, volunteers began fanning out into the adjacent 57,000-acre Apalachicola National Forest, all of them with dread in their hearts.

Speaker 5 I would be devastated if something like this happened to my family, and so that's why I want to be out here and try to help as much as I can.

Speaker 93 There were massive searches in town. Thousands of people showed up to comb the woods looking for her.
It was clear very early on that this was unusual for her.

Speaker 93 She would not have gotten in the car with someone. She just was not the person who would have disappeared.

Speaker 88 Tallahassee Democrat senior writer Jennifer Portman covered the story.

Speaker 93 We're talking about North Florida in the Panhandle area. People are bound by their schools, by their family, by their churches.

Speaker 12 And Sunday school teachers with children and a grandchild don't go missing.

Speaker 14 That's exactly right.

Speaker 83 Her friends and family were as baffled as the police by Cheryl's disappearance.

Speaker 35 Law enforcement was trying to put the pieces together.

Speaker 94 When they looked into Cheryl's background, nothing jumped out at them.

Speaker 54 Two sons, a long long settled divorce, no boyfriends.

Speaker 58 Then, on Tuesday, four days after she was last seen, the cops got her bank records.

Speaker 66 Something was up.

Speaker 16 We found where some ATM activity had occurred in Leon County. So that's a big break.
Yes, sir. And then upon viewing that video in Leon County, it was clear it was not her.

Speaker 16 This was a male subject using her card and he was disguising his face. So we knew at that point, definitely, that it was probably not going to be a good outcome for for Miss Dunlap.

Speaker 84 The disguised man made three separate withdrawals of $700.

Speaker 41 The ATM he tapped was in downtown Tallahassee near the campus of the state U, miles from where Cheryl's car was found.

Speaker 12 So you and the team stake out the ATM machine.

Speaker 16 We stayed there several days, day and night, watching the ATM, and he never came back to that one.

Speaker 82 The search for Cheryl stretched on for weeks.

Speaker 86 But a lot of us went out on our own and searched the woods and went to places we thought she she could possibly be.

Speaker 12 But the more time goes on, inevitably,

Speaker 22 the fear sinks in. Yeah, just sleepless nights, just

Speaker 17 because I'm thinking if she's still alive and someone has her, she's afraid.

Speaker 47 Mid-December, two weeks after Cheryl disappeared, some hunters out training their dogs in the national forest noticed a vulture circling in the sky above them.

Speaker 16 And went to check it out and discovered the body.

Speaker 90 A female body missing its head and hands, a grisly fact not released at the time.

Speaker 12 You'd think that this is someone trying to conceal the identity.

Speaker 22 Very much.

Speaker 42 It took a DNA sample from her toothbrush to identify the remains as those of Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 17 Someone called and said, Laura, they found a body. We pulled over on the side of the road and just, you know, just...

Speaker 12 That was it, huh? Yeah. The awareness was there.

Speaker 10 It was surreal.

Speaker 16 It's, you know, the thing you hear about in movies. But it was so close to home that in our small community that something like this could happen.

Speaker 61 Now with cops in Florida looking hard at Gary Hilton in the Dunlap murder and counterparts in Georgia convinced that he'd taken Meredith Emerson, authorities started hearing about yet another national forest homicide, this one in North Carolina.

Speaker 12 So then you got to be saying to all your team of investigators, what do we have here?

Speaker 7 That's right.

Speaker 13 And so now

Speaker 64 we're really wondering who we have here.

Speaker 13 And where is he?

Speaker 13 And more importantly, where's Meredith?

Speaker 95 Coming up.

Speaker 18 Do we have a killer running around loose in the National Forest?

Speaker 9 Concern for Meredith deepens, but her friends know something. That man on the mountain couldn't.

Speaker 14 A blue belt in Aikido and a blue belt and judo. But if anybody could survive it, it was Meredith.

Speaker 9 When dateline continues.

Speaker 42 Where was Meredith Hope Emerson?

Speaker 54 Could she still be alive somewhere out there in Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest?

Speaker 25 And did the 24-year-old hiker have a prayer if she were indeed in the clutches of mystery man Gary Hilton?

Speaker 65 The search on Blood Mountain went into a third day.

Speaker 14 We had the hope. I mean, we were there from sunup to sundown, plus.
I mean, we were there through the night and the cold and all the searchers. But if anybody could survive it, it was Meredith.

Speaker 14 And if anybody could fight somebody like that, it was Meredith.

Speaker 33 Meredith's parents had flown in from Colorado and joined the searchers.

Speaker 27 Peggy Bailey, a family friend, was their spokeswoman.

Speaker 96 Let me tell you something. Meredith Emerson could do anything.

Speaker 71 She is feisty.

Speaker 96 She is strong. She's tiny and petite, 120 pounds.
But let me tell you, I have every hope that if anybody could, she can run those mountains.

Speaker 96 She's a strong person.

Speaker 96 If anybody can survive this, she can.

Speaker 61 The missing woman was deceptively strong.

Speaker 36 Not just an experienced hiker, but an accomplished martial arts enthusiast as well.

Speaker 14 A blue belt and a kido and a blue belt and judo.

Speaker 12 So take her on at your peril.

Speaker 14 Absolutely. I mean she would fight you and she would actually come home and tell me, you know, I threw this 220 pound man.
I beat him up today in class.

Speaker 61 By now, with half of Georgia looking for this Gary Hilton, authorities outside Tallahassee, Florida to the south were wondering about his connections with the missing woman there.

Speaker 23 It was then that the detectives got solid information about another killing in a national forest.

Speaker 13 We were in our command post and a detective walked in and said that they had a case took place in North Carolina involving husband and wife, that the wife had been murdered in the Pisco National Forest.

Speaker 27 That detective was working an unsolved case that had cops in North Carolina bewildered.

Speaker 76 David Mahoney is sheriff of Transylvania County, a beautiful place with an ominous ominous name that has nothing to do with Fang's dripping blood.

Speaker 18 We have some wonderful attractions here. All those things, along with the slower pace of life, is what brings folks and keeps folks here.

Speaker 27 Folks like John and Irene Bryant, who after raising a family, retired here, far from the brutal winters of upstate New York and close to the hiking trails they loved.

Speaker 41 Holly Bryant is the youngest of their four children.

Speaker 98 They love the outdoors. When they were first married, they used to go out hiking in the mountains.
They would take us hiking and

Speaker 98 as they got older they'd take the grandchildren out hiking too.

Speaker 26 The Bryants had a lifetime of outdoors experience, had hiked all over the world.

Speaker 98 My father completed the Appalachian Trail which is 2,000 miles from Georgia to Maine.

Speaker 98 They traveled extensively to New Zealand and all through Europe, all through America, especially the southwestern and northwestern United States.

Speaker 65 In late October, two months before Meredith Emerson disappeared, the couple set off on a day hike in the 500,000-acre Piscon National Forest.

Speaker 32 No one heard from them for two weeks.

Speaker 98 They always let us know if they were going on one of their many trips. So it was totally unlike them to just disappear.

Speaker 82 Their son Bob flew in from Texas.

Speaker 98 The newspapers were around the doorstep.

Speaker 98 He broke into the home

Speaker 98 and found their breakfast was still out on the table, but obviously many days old, and he knew something was terribly wrong. My brother searched.

Speaker 98 He went up and down every little back road throughout the park.

Speaker 81 He found their car at a trailhead in the National Forest.

Speaker 83 By then, Sheriff Mahoney's office was involved.

Speaker 18 The rescue squad began a search assuming that there had been some medical problem or some illness that had fallen upon them.

Speaker 98 In my heart, I knew that wasn't the case.

Speaker 98 There was just no way they would

Speaker 98 both be hurt like that. They were very, very experienced.

Speaker 18 Unfortunately, it was not very long after we began that search that we discovered the body of Ms. Bryant.

Speaker 98 It was a sense of finality.

Speaker 98 I knew she was gone already, but that little glimmer, particle of hope was extinguished when they found her body.

Speaker 50 Irene Bryant's remains were located 30 yards from where her son had come upon the car.

Speaker 27 She had been bludgeoned to death.

Speaker 97 But where was the husband?

Speaker 18 We began an even more extensive search for Mr. Bryant.
That search really involved the entire area of the Pisgah National Forest.

Speaker 69 Within hours of discovering Irene Bryant's body, detectives learned $300 had been withdrawn from the Bryant's accounts using an ATM card in Duxtown, Tennessee.

Speaker 28 They had a picture from the machine.

Speaker 18 The The man that had concealed his head and face that was able to successfully use the Bryant's ATM.

Speaker 27 Whoever was making the withdrawal, it wasn't 79-year-old John Bryant.

Speaker 61 But time and geography were working against the lawmen.

Speaker 18 We spent weeks everywhere in that entire area. We did everything from vehicle patrol, ATV patrolling, horseback, on foot, everywhere.

Speaker 70 John Bryant had seemingly vanished from the face of the earth.

Speaker 63 The FBI posted a $10,000 reward for information, but the Bryant case went cold until Meredith Emerson loomed on the lawman's radar.

Speaker 18 Our lead investigator began following that case and immediately there were some similarities that we saw between the two cases. Both of these incidents occurred on Forest Service land.

Speaker 15 We really felt like that the two were probably connected.

Speaker 18 We may go years without a homicide. This was very, very different.
Do we have a killer running around loose in the National Forest?

Speaker 92 In Georgia, the searchers looking for Meredith Emerson and her dog Ella on Blood Mountain were hoping and praying that they weren't dealing with a homicide.

Speaker 99 Do everything we can do to make sure that

Speaker 99 if she's up there that we get her out of there, get her out of there safely.

Speaker 99 If she's not up there to do everything we can do to eliminate that as a possibility and then continue the investigation from there.

Speaker 53 Georgia authorities were compositing a profile of Gary Hilton who was starting to look like a person of interest not only in the Meredith Emerson disappearance case, but in at least two unsolved murders in the National Forest.

Speaker 91 Their findings were deeply troubling.

Speaker 95 Coming up,

Speaker 9 might a movie hold the key to this case?

Speaker 11 The premise of the movie is we're going to take some women into the woods and then poof, they're going to be hunted down.

Speaker 12 Is Gary involved in this?

Speaker 11 Gary is helping me throughout.

Speaker 50 On Blood Mountain, there was still no trace of Meredith Emerson.

Speaker 40 Her friend Julia and the other searchers found no news to be good news.

Speaker 14 I think it might be a good thing that, you know, she might be somewhere warm. with her dog, you know, and somebody might just have her or something like that.

Speaker 14 Kind of makes me feel a little better knowing that we haven't found anything here yet.

Speaker 23 While hundreds of volunteers and deputies scoured the forest for clues,

Speaker 97 detectives were trying to get a handle on Gary Hilton, the suspect in her disappearance, and who was by now a person of interest in at least two murders.

Speaker 97 John Tabor, Hilton's former boss, gave investigators what background he had on his eccentric loner employee.

Speaker 40 Tabor had known him for nearly a decade.

Speaker 7 The only only interests that he had in life seemed to be his dog and going out camping with his dog for extended periods of time in the wilderness.

Speaker 44 Hilton's dog, Dandy, had been at his side since he started working for Tabor.

Speaker 102 The former boss had come to regard Hilton as a hair-triggered nutcase.

Speaker 7 He often told stories of going to parks with his dog, and he would end up in altercations with other pet owners. It was always the same story.
He would reprimand the other dog owner's behavior.

Speaker 7 Then the other dog owner would get angry at him and verbally or physically assault him. So he was always the victim.

Speaker 47 For the first nine years, Hilton worked at his siding business.

Speaker 34 Tabor recalled him as a good employee.

Speaker 66 Then something seemed to snap.

Speaker 7 Things started to change quite dramatically starting in 2007.

Speaker 12 And what happened then?

Speaker 7 He just wasn't doing any work. I decided to go and just see what was going on over there.
It was a very bizarre scene.

Speaker 59 How so?

Speaker 7 His physical appearance was quite different. He immediately smiled to show that he he was missing several teeth.

Speaker 7 And he went on to explain that he had actually taken a pair of pliers and removed some of his teeth. And he said he enjoyed doing that because it frightened people.

Speaker 30 Tabor fired Hilt, who then turned around and claimed Tabor owed him money.

Speaker 58 By mid-summer 2007, the siding guy said he feared for his safety.

Speaker 7 He finally threatened to kill me. I mean, he made it very clear.

Speaker 33 Tabor took those threats seriously.

Speaker 7 I immediately armed myself with a Glock 9mm and an AR-15 assault rifle, started driving a rental car so he wouldn't know what vehicle I was in.

Speaker 6 He was your boogeyman.

Speaker 7 Absolutely. It was a terrifying ordeal.
Not to know what was going to happen, to pull in your driveway and have someone jump out of the bushes and maybe assassinate you.

Speaker 62 When the former boss finally went to the police with his story, it seemed to do the trick.

Speaker 7 Within a day or two, he had packed up all of his belongings and moved on.

Speaker 12 Put all the stuff in the van and took off.

Speaker 72 Yes.

Speaker 37 John Tabor was relieved to see Hilton in his rearview mirror, but he was nonetheless puzzled by the change that had come over the man.

Speaker 7 When you're around someone for nearly 10 years and it's uneventful, there's nothing that ever happens that suggests a demonic, violent personality that apparently materialized somehow.

Speaker 50 Tabor had part of the Gary Hilton picture.

Speaker 61 A veteran Atlanta criminal defense lawyer added more.

Speaker 44 Sam Rail had defended Hilton years back on some minorish beefs.

Speaker 11 We did a jury trial on a drug case possession. He was accused on a misdemeanor of acting like a charity, and he really wasn't a charity.
He'd raise money to help the little children.

Speaker 11 Of course, he pocketed it.

Speaker 12 Did he have a job to speak of or anything that he did professionally?

Speaker 11 His job was scamming. That's what he did mostly.

Speaker 12 You knew him as con man, basically. Right.

Speaker 103 He was a little con.

Speaker 12 And when he got tripped up, he'd go call on you.

Speaker 103 He did.

Speaker 61 Rail, the lawyer, wears two hats.

Speaker 47 He's also a movie producer, not Hollywood, but more of the release direct-to-video school.

Speaker 84 This is his latest release.

Speaker 51 Herbert, I can't do that.

Speaker 103 Don't do it. Shoot me, dude.
No, don't. Shoot me!

Speaker 38 Horror, gory.

Speaker 10 What's the genre?

Speaker 11 Try not to make it gory,

Speaker 11 but at the end of the day,

Speaker 11 a little blood, a little sex, a little

Speaker 11 violence can't hurt.

Speaker 69 As it turned out, cops on the Meredith Emerson case were particularly interested in Rails' first movie, Deadly Run.

Speaker 33 He made it back in 1985 with the assistance of his scam artist client, Gary Hilton.

Speaker 11 The premise of the movie is that we're going to take some women into the woods, then we're going to befriend those women,

Speaker 11 and then poof, they're going to be hunted down and killed.

Speaker 12 Is Gary involved in this in the sense of like a scriptwriter or anything that formal?

Speaker 11 Gary is helping me throughout and then helping the star figure out how to be a serial killer.

Speaker 12 These are ideas you guys are knocking around.

Speaker 11 Gary has a dark side sometimes here and there. He wants to get involved in the movie, but he wants to make it darker and more horrible.

Speaker 11 He'd like to have more blood, more gore, have rape, have more killings, things like that. I thought we toned it down and made a better movie.

Speaker 11 He suggested that we do it up in the woods. He helped me find some of the locations.
We found the cabin.

Speaker 41 That cabin used in the movie happened to be in the Chattahoochee National Forest,

Speaker 43 just north of where Meredith Emerson went missing.

Speaker 12 He's around the table. As you guys collaborate on this film, how's he behaving around your group of movie people?

Speaker 11 When the movie was being made, he's animated but interesting.

Speaker 12 So he's not a loner?

Speaker 6 No, he's a loner.

Speaker 11 He's a psychopath. He's a sociopath.
He's always trying to get one step ahead of the law. He's always doing something a little bit wrong.
But all my clients, they do that too.

Speaker 12 It sounds like you're talking about kind of a charming guy.

Speaker 11 He was charming. He was personable.
He was a fellow that you'd want to meet.

Speaker 12 Which are all skills you need to be a successful con man if you're going to keep an edge.

Speaker 4 But the lawyer and movie producer had a falling out with Hilton over, of all things, a dog.

Speaker 12 Dogs seemed to be important to him.

Speaker 11 Dogs were very important to him. He wound up with my dog, but

Speaker 11 I had a dog, a nice little golden retriever. We had him in the backyard.

Speaker 11 All of a sudden, I come back one day, the dog is gone. Of course, I'm very upset about it.
Then I find out that Gary took the dog.

Speaker 12 He stole your dog?

Speaker 12 Yeah.

Speaker 81 As their profile of Hilton became clearer and became more troubling, investigators looking for him and Meredith were desperate for any lead on his whereabouts, and they were about to get one.

Speaker 7 I answered my cell phone, and I heard his voice.

Speaker 12 Couldn't believe it.

Speaker 9 Coming up, a trap is set to lure Gary Hilton from the hiding spot.

Speaker 7 He's trying to play it cool.

Speaker 9 And a dramatic new lead could lead police to Meredith.

Speaker 41 She could be alive, and we just can't let up.

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 56 Police were convinced the missing hiker Meredith Emerson was under the control of Gary Hilton somewhere in North Georgia.

Speaker 43 The more they learned about the survivalist Oddball, who was a person of interest in two murders in National Forests elsewhere, the more they feared for her.

Speaker 23 A friend of Meredith's family appealed directly to Hilton.

Speaker 96 I hope that if he realized that this would be helpful, that his heart would be softened and turned to

Speaker 96 coming forward with

Speaker 96 So please, please have the courage to come forward. We need you.

Speaker 37 Their next lead, the big one, came from an unlikely source, the suspect himself.

Speaker 23 Three days into Meredith's disappearance, Gary Hilton called his old boss, Tabor.

Speaker 7 I answered my cell phone, and I heard his voice.

Speaker 12 Couldn't believe it.

Speaker 7 He pretended and acted as though nothing was wrong.

Speaker 12 So he didn't let on to you that he was the subject of a manhunt?

Speaker 7 No, absolutely not. He acted as though he knew nothing about it, which apparently was the case.
He apparently had no idea.

Speaker 6 Startled but thinking fast, Tabor tried to lure Hilton to an agreed-upon location with a promise of money.

Speaker 7 I was trying to play it cool as though I didn't know anything about what was going on. I told him that I would give him a check for $800 and we discussed a place to leave the check.

Speaker 12 Were you baiting that place that he knew to come and show up?

Speaker 7 Well, it was certainly my objective to get him to a place where authorities could apprehend him.

Speaker 36 The trap was set at a building owned by Tabor where Hilton had lived for a while. The SWAT team was dispatched.

Speaker 27 Would Hilton fall for the pick-up-some money ruse?

Speaker 44 And what about the missing woman?

Speaker 59 In your gut, did you think Meredith was still alive?

Speaker 13 You know, Meredith's name was Meredith Hope Emerson, and we all hoped that she was alive.

Speaker 48 As the manhunt continued, there was a glimmer of hope.

Speaker 23 Friday morning, four days after Meredith vanished, the U.S.

Speaker 58 Marshal Service traced activity on Meredith's bank cards.

Speaker 13 The card was used at a local bank, you know, 15 miles from the abduction site, and then again, 50 miles south of the abduction site, and then the next day, 80 miles.

Speaker 13 These were attempts where no money was taken.

Speaker 12 Which suggests what?

Speaker 13 Suggested that Meredith wouldn't give him the right pen.

Speaker 12 Which also suggests maybe she's still alive.

Speaker 103 That's right.

Speaker 26 Investigators, meanwhile, had been able to trace the phone Gary Hilton used earlier to call his old boss, John Tabor, who'd set that trap for him.

Speaker 56 That call was made from a restaurant about about 50 miles from Blood Mountain.

Speaker 89 Hilton, it seemed, was moving south towards Atlanta.

Speaker 35 Metro PD SWAT concealed themselves in and near Tabor's building.

Speaker 6 That was the drop point where his old boss had promised Hilton he'd leave him $800.

Speaker 12 You stake at the location, you're surveilling it, and he didn't show. No show.
No show.

Speaker 13 We're still looking and wondering where could this guy be? Now we have him. 50 miles from Blood Mountain.

Speaker 27 The tip line kept ringing with leads good and bad. Then four days in, a Friday afternoon, a shopper called to say that she'd found a black lab mix wandering around a supermarket parking lot.

Speaker 105 I was surprised to see any dog running loose in the parking lot and then to find out that it's the one that Meredith

Speaker 105 was her dog was, you know, a pretty big surprise and shock.

Speaker 37 She took the dog to an animal clinic where the vet was able to read an identity chip implanted in her.

Speaker 80 Sure enough, it was Ella.

Speaker 4 But where was her owner, Meredith?

Speaker 88 Now events were moving quickly.

Speaker 23 Right away came another tip.

Speaker 13 We get a call from a female acquaintance of Hilton stating that she had just hung up the phone. He had called her and wanted money.

Speaker 13 And she commented that she said, Don't you know the world's looking for you?

Speaker 22 And he hung up.

Speaker 35 Hilton called from a payphone at a convenience store near where Meredith's dog had turned up.

Speaker 12 You have a living pet, a missing owner, and a phone which is somewhere in the vicinity of this guy you believe is her abduction.

Speaker 13 While the agents are searching in an area of the convenience store, they look in a dumpster.

Speaker 13 And it was in the dumpster we found Meredith's identification, her purse, bags of bloody clothing.

Speaker 22 And at that point,

Speaker 13 we felt like

Speaker 13 this was not going to turn out as we'd hoped.

Speaker 38 Then, around eight that night, still Friday, not far from where Tabor had set the trap for Hilton, more than one eagle-eyed citizen noticed a man emptying a white van.

Speaker 106 And at the gas station up here, there's a white van and a red dog wandering around.

Speaker 42 Calls lit up 9-1-1.

Speaker 44 This one lasted for 12 minutes.

Speaker 8 Okay, that one, what's the exact location?

Speaker 108 I have this. The person of interest in that missing woman case is at this Chevron gas station on Ashford-Dunwood.
The van is there.

Speaker 108 The van is here. The dog is here.
The red dog. And I saw the man's face.
And I've been watching the news and I know it's him. I know it's him.
He's emptying all this stuff out of his van.

Speaker 108 There's heading around like he's his guilty offending. I can go take him down if you want.
No, there, stay right there. Here comes the cops.
Yes. He's sleeping the bag.
They got him now.

Speaker 108 Here's a few cruisers pulled up on him. Two of the cabs trying to assume.

Speaker 23 Gary Hilton was under arrest.

Speaker 52 Detectives swarmed over the filthy Astro van and inventoried his possessions looking for any clue to Meredith's fate.

Speaker 35 A GBI spokesman updated the media.

Speaker 101 It's a missing persons investigation right now, and that's how we're pursuing it.

Speaker 101 The important key might be any knowledge that Mr. Hilton has.

Speaker 12 Take me inside your situation room when you get the news that Atlanta's got him.

Speaker 13 We're very pleased with the fact that now we have this man,

Speaker 13 but we can't lose sight of the fact we don't have Meredith yet and the possibility that she could be alive, and we just can't let up. And so we attempt to interview him.
He refuses.

Speaker 109 In no statements, I'm waiving no rights. I want an attorney appointed to represent me.
I want to speak with that attorney, and I want that attorney attorney present during questioning.

Speaker 63 Cops had their man, but not Meredith.

Speaker 32 Could they crack him, get from him the story of what had happened in the National Forest?

Speaker 12 In your decades as a law enforcement agent, have you ever had a session of interviews like this one?

Speaker 13 No. No, he was very straightforward and was very nonchalant.

Speaker 54 Saturday morning, five days after Meredith Emerson vanished on Blood Mountain, Gary Hilton was charged with a crime against her, kidnapping with bodily injury.

Speaker 78 Hilton was in custody, but he was uncooperative, zipped up, giving his interrogators nothing on Meredith's whereabouts and what he'd done with her.

Speaker 64 Meredith's middle name is Hope.

Speaker 104 And that's exactly what the Lord Lord gives us for her. So we are hoping that we're talking of Meredith in the present tense and that we will be finding her and that she will safely come home to us.

Speaker 41 The searchers in the field, meanwhile, shifted their focus from Blood Mountain to these woods called Dawson Forest, about 30 miles to the south.

Speaker 36 It was from around here that Hilton had made those phone calls to his ex-boss.

Speaker 25 Remember, by then, Meredith's bloody clothing had been retrieved from a dumpster, not a good sign at all.

Speaker 77 But as long as there was the most remote remote chance that she was still alive, the search was going to continue.

Speaker 25 But lead agent John Cagle knew these vast woodlands very well, and he knew the odds of finding needles and haystacks.

Speaker 20 As he saw it, he had only one option, repugnant as it was, and that was to cut a deal with Gary Hilton.

Speaker 13 Sunday morning,

Speaker 13 we got him a lawyer, and I went up and had

Speaker 22 a talk with our lawyer and essentially laid out our case.

Speaker 30 Hilton's lawyer then conferred with his client.

Speaker 42 The district attorney was brought into the loop and a deal went down.

Speaker 53 Hilton would plead guilty to murder because that is what it had been.

Speaker 41 And then he said he'd lead investigators to Meredith's body in exchange for taking the death penalty off the table.

Speaker 12 Nobody in law enforcement likes to make deals without holding their nose.

Speaker 13 We had to do it. And, you know, we needed to find Meredith.

Speaker 22 And

Speaker 13 given the circumstances, I would do the same thing now.

Speaker 12 So I'm guessing, Agent, the situation in your interview room is, Gary, you told us what you did to her.

Speaker 36 Now, where'd you put her?

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 13 he told us.

Speaker 25 A manacled Hilton was loaded into a vehicle and he led Lawman down a trail in Dawson Forest.

Speaker 110 You said the body is down there on the left, how far off the road? The body will be approximately 40 yards or 120 feet.

Speaker 111 It's covered by leaves and

Speaker 19 brush.

Speaker 110 The head will be missing. Where's the head? The only reason, by the way the head was removed was forensic loot.

Speaker 19 Right.

Speaker 40 A clearly shaken Agent Kagle told Atlanta about the tragic outcome.

Speaker 112 At approximately 7.30 this evening, the body of Meredith Emerson was discovered in a wooded area. The specific information given as to the location of the body was given to me by Gary Hilton.

Speaker 36 The kidnapping charge was anti-dock.

Speaker 114 Mr. Hilton is being charged one count of murder of Meredith Emerson.
He has been taken into custody and brought to our detention centers where he's been housed.

Speaker 12 In your decades a law enforcement agent, have you ever had a session of interviews like this one?

Speaker 22 No.

Speaker 13 No, he was very straightforward and was very nonchalant about the whole thing.

Speaker 115 So you get down to the point where, well, with like Meredith, I had $40

Speaker 115 money and several days food.

Speaker 115 I was going to have to kill somebody

Speaker 115 in that period of time.

Speaker 42 After his initial confession, Gary Hilton, the man of stony silence, became a chatterbox, spilling out a story that sickened detectives who thought they'd heard everything.

Speaker 25 He began with Meredith's abduction here on a hiking trail on Blood Mountain.

Speaker 77 He said that he ambushed Meredith and her dog Ella as she came down the trail.

Speaker 6 It was a struggle.

Speaker 26 And Meredith, with her martial arts skills, as Hilton tells it, very nearly got the better of him.

Speaker 77 Twice she disarmed him, first taking away his knife and then his police baton.

Speaker 115 I lost control of both of them, both the knife and the bat. She was real quick with her hands and had no hesitation about grabbing weapons and everything.
And not only that, she was hard to subdue.

Speaker 115 She fought like yell, man.

Speaker 25 Hilton said they scrapped so hard they tumbled off the trail.

Speaker 10 Separated by a few yards now from that dropped police baton and Meredith's water bottles, the dog's leash.

Speaker 25 Objects importantly very soon to be recovered.

Speaker 64 Meredith, meanwhile, kept right on Hilton.

Speaker 115 She started fighting again, and I had to fight her again for several minutes. And her doing that is what got me caught.
Because if I'd been back to the crime scene

Speaker 115 just a few minutes sooner, just several minutes sooner, I would have beat those people that found the bat and I would have picked it up.

Speaker 12 And talks about fighting with Meredith. That she almost took him.

Speaker 14 I don't really believe everything that he says, but that part I believe. There's no doubt that she fought.

Speaker 14 And, you know, maybe it's a little bit that kind of gives you a little smirk to know that you know She almost she almost got him She gave him a run for his money and I'm sure that he may have thought I should have maybe chosen somebody else Eventually Hilton wore Meredith down by then they were way off the main trail Hilton tied his captive to a tree and then doubled back to that site where he'd been stripped of his weapons The bayonet was gone lost on the forest floor and a hiker had already picked up the police baton Hilton returned to Meredith.

Speaker 115 And I told her that I had a gun and that, you know, I'm just gonna to shoot her ass now.

Speaker 70 Skirting the main trail, Hilton led Meredith back to his van in the trailhead parking area.

Speaker 51 There, he secured her with chains in the back of his vehicle and then proceeded to steal her bank cards from beneath the front seat of her car.

Speaker 81 Hilton drove off, heading 12 miles north to an ATM in Blairsville, Georgia.

Speaker 27 He told detectives Meredith had given him her PIN numbers back on Blood Mountain.

Speaker 62 Did Meredith suspect it would be all over for her if she gave him the correct numbers?

Speaker 92 In any case, she'd given him bad information.

Speaker 116 And it didn't work.

Speaker 117 Thought of it, though.

Speaker 116 She's still telling me it's going to work.

Speaker 108 It's going to work.

Speaker 116 It must be a wrong bank.

Speaker 70 Hilton next tried to use Meredith's cards at a bank 50 miles south in Gainesville, Georgia.

Speaker 76 Again, no dice.

Speaker 27 He made camp that night with his captive in a remote spot in the forest.

Speaker 44 The next morning, Hilton attempted to use Meredith's bank cards still again at an ATM in Canton, Georgia.

Speaker 38 Nothing.

Speaker 25 They returned to his hidden campsite.

Speaker 10 He held Meredith altogether in the woods for four days.

Speaker 37 And what nature of man is Gary Hilton?

Speaker 41 Well, listen to the confession tapes to what he says about Meredith's dog, Ellen.

Speaker 44 Hilton says he knew the pet had that identifying chip when he let the dog go in the supermarket parking lot.

Speaker 110 If I wanted to ensure that no one would associate the dog with her, I would have killed the dog. But there's no way I can do that.

Speaker 24 He was too much of a softy to kill the dog, as he explained it.

Speaker 42 But poor Meredith, Ella's owner, never had a chance.

Speaker 115 Yeah, she was.

Speaker 115 Because I just told you, once you've done it, you're either going to kill her or get caught.

Speaker 115 There's no other solution. And if that sounds cold and cruel, yeah, it was.

Speaker 42 In his unbelievably cold recollection of the crime, Hilton said he told Meredith he was going to let her go after four days of captivity.

Speaker 117 We're packing up and telling her I'm taking her and I'm going to release her.

Speaker 42 Instead, Hilton went to the van, came back with a tire iron, and bludgeoned Meredith Emerson to death. In an attempt to thwart investigators, he decapitated and poured bleach over the body.

Speaker 12 This is gruesome beyond belief.

Speaker 22 Yes, for what reason? You know, I don't know.

Speaker 23 Hilton had confessed to killing Meredith Emerson. But what about those other cases in the National Forests?

Speaker 28 A woman in Florida, the elderly couple in North Carolina.

Speaker 13 You He would not talk about anybody to us other than Meredith.

Speaker 12 Because you have to wonder when the switch was thrown in this man. I know, I know.
How many decades maybe does this go back?

Speaker 13 I don't know. Do people just wake up when they're 61 and start to do these kinds of crimes the way he did them?

Speaker 13 And, you know, I would think not.

Speaker 95 Coming up.

Speaker 9 How a terrifying movie fantasy morphed into real life.

Speaker 12 Do you think that's the template for what he does decades later?

Speaker 21 That's what's so chilling.

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 9 Continuing with our story, Meredith Emerson went for a hike with her dog on Blood Mountain in the Chattahoochee National Forest, then suddenly vanished.

Speaker 14 Your heart just broke.

Speaker 13 We became concerned that possibly a struggle took place.

Speaker 9 Days later, a survivalist named Gary Hilton confessed to her murder.

Speaker 12 He talks about fighting with Meredith. That she almost took him.

Speaker 14 She almost got him. She gave him a run for for his money.

Speaker 9 Investigators fear there are more victims. Could this old movie hold the key to these other cases?

Speaker 12 Are there scenes that were reenacted?

Speaker 16 There's definitely a lot of similarities.

Speaker 21 That's what's so chilling.

Speaker 9 Here again is Dennis Murphy.

Speaker 44 Meredith Emerson went missing New Year's Day.

Speaker 34 Less than a month later, Gary Michael Hilton appeared in a Georgia courtroom and pleaded guilty to her murder.

Speaker 91 I feel like he. Meredith's parents were there.

Speaker 61 Her mother, Susan, addressed Hilton.

Speaker 106 I believe he is nothing more than a bully and a weak-minded coward who preys on others.

Speaker 106 He fancies himself a survivalist. Well, anyone can see he's a scared little man on the run.

Speaker 27 The state honored the deal it made with the killer, no death penalty, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Speaker 37 Hilton admitted nothing beyond the Emerson murder.

Speaker 116 This first time you ever had anything like this,

Speaker 110 I'll let Night Turny answer.

Speaker 43 By now, investigators from a half dozen southeastern states as well as FBI profilers were rummaging through Hilton's past.

Speaker 83 By the time he was captured, he wasn't much more than a vagrant in a van, but his past was more complex.

Speaker 27 As an Army veteran, Hilton had earned an associate's college degree, gotten a private pilot's license on the GI Bill, and been married three times before the wheels apparently came off.

Speaker 32 True crime author Fred Rosen has written more than 25 books, including Trails of Death, about Hilton.

Speaker 21 To underestimate him is foolish. This is a very dangerous person.

Speaker 51 According to Rosen, he was shaped by a number of factors.

Speaker 52 Hilton, who never knew his biological father, was raised by his mother and a stepfather, a horse trainer from Argentina.

Speaker 25 Do juvenile authorities run into young Gary Hilton along the way?

Speaker 21 When Gary is 14 years old,

Speaker 21 He takes a gun and he shoots his stepfather. He doesn't kill him, but he wounds him very severely.
And he's institutionalized. They put him in a mental hospital out in Miami.

Speaker 34 Hilton went to high school in Hialeah, Florida, played in a rock band, and eventually joined the Army.

Speaker 78 A cocky Hilton made sure that the cops who arrested him knew of his Army service back in the 60s with a unit armed with tactical nuclear weapons.

Speaker 115 I've handled atomic bombs of Galilee special weapons, and I've handled atomic bombs that damn big. That's worth 79 pounds.

Speaker 52 And Hilton bragged to the officers about his con man criminal past.

Speaker 115 I've never worked full-time anyway in my life except for the U.S. Army.
I've been a criminal, okay?

Speaker 115 I was a career criminal and lawful charity from 73 to 93, okay, for 20 years.

Speaker 21 He's collecting money for charities.

Speaker 12 He's a scam artist.

Speaker 21 He's a scam artist, exactly.

Speaker 27 And what about Hilton's dip into the movie business with that semi-slasher flick deadly run that he helped make in the 1980s?

Speaker 12 This film where he's setting women out in the woods and killing them, hunting them.

Speaker 112 I hope you liked your little outfit I picked up for you, Barbara.

Speaker 122 I think the look is definitely new.

Speaker 12 Do you think that's the template for what he does decades later?

Speaker 6 Yes, I do.

Speaker 21 And that's what's so chilling to me about the whole thing because in the millennium he'll make

Speaker 21 art into reality.

Speaker 10 You can hear the echoes of this, huh?

Speaker 21 You're already beginning to see the lack of conscience.

Speaker 27 In his interview with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, Hilton put forth a grandiose sense of himself, a Renaissance man of many hats.

Speaker 115 I'm a philosopher, I'm a soldier, I'm a scientist, and I'm an artist. What do you mean by artist? My art is my life.

Speaker 115 And my art is weird.

Speaker 59 He's kind of a philosopher king, isn't he?

Speaker 20 I'm an artist.

Speaker 12 And you poor dumb cops don't have the luxury of being able to think the big cosmic thoughts that I do.

Speaker 21 He almost feels sorry for them that they can't keep up with him when he starts going about this, that, and the other thing.

Speaker 25 Hoping for crumbs of clues in those other open cases, murders in the national forests, the agents wanted to keep Hilton talking.

Speaker 115 Where all have you, Hyde? Where all have you been?

Speaker 115 All over the United States, as far as I can. Oh, I know what you're getting at, the unsolved murders.

Speaker 12 Gary Hilton thinks he's smart, is he?

Speaker 21 Gary has an IQ of 120, and that's considered to be way above average.

Speaker 115 The reason I'm so seemingly intelligent is that I, alone amongst almost anyone, including you dudes,

Speaker 115 have time to actually stop and think about things.

Speaker 12 He'll rattle on as long as someone will listen to him.

Speaker 49 Yes.

Speaker 12 On any topic under the sun, virtually, huh? Yes.

Speaker 68 Pick a topic, any topic.

Speaker 57 How about volcanology?

Speaker 115 Hey, don't you know

Speaker 115 the super volcano under Yellowstone, there's over 70 super volcanoes. When it erupts, it basically blankets

Speaker 115 in a cone,

Speaker 115 the whole eastern seaboard of the U.S. under several feet of ash and would just destroy any civilization in that area.

Speaker 83 The fast-talking flim flam man was on display in some of Hilton's home videos found in his van.

Speaker 58 Here's Hilton giving a cop that stopped him some lip.

Speaker 107 You tell me what that you're the law man, you are the law. I'm going to check it out.
And if it ain't the law and you're wrong, you consult me. I'm not talking to nobody.

Speaker 107 I'm falling and I'm suing because you're interrupting my work.

Speaker 21 You hear Gary bragging about how smart he is, how well he does his job. But at the same time, what you hear is an incredible narcissistic personality, which is typical of serial killers.

Speaker 21 He sets up the camera, and there's Gary going...

Speaker 107 171 pounds.

Speaker 21 And he starts pumping up his biceps like he's Arnold Schwarzenegger. I mean, he's, you know, very narcissistic.

Speaker 41 So why were detectives enduring Hilton's self-centered ramblings?

Speaker 81 Clearly, they were hoping he'd blurt out something about his involvement in the other unsolved cases in the National Forest.

Speaker 115 Basically on our timeline you basically are telling me that you committed no crimes

Speaker 115 between 97 or 95. 95.

Speaker 39 He'd escaped the death penalty in Georgia, but despite his denials, Hilton remained the prime suspect in the murder of that elderly couple, Irene and John Bryant.

Speaker 27 Mr.

Speaker 57 Bryant's remains had been found in January in the North Carolina forest.

Speaker 18 As a result of the investigation in Georgia, I was absolutely convinced at that point that Gary Hilton was our suspect.

Speaker 27 But there was another open homicide case that seemed to fit Gary Hilton like a custom-made suit.

Speaker 24 Down in Florida, the body of Cheryl Dunlap had been found in a national forest.

Speaker 27 Her ATM card stolen.

Speaker 36 the remains decapitated.

Speaker 58 Detectives thought that fit Hilton's M.O.

Speaker 27 to a T.

Speaker 70 And Gary Hilton, still playing the smartest kid in the class, defied Florida to come after him.

Speaker 63 All that time, all that money.

Speaker 115 And if they want to spend a million dollars, two million to convict me, and then

Speaker 115 another two million to get death, and then another $8 million to defend the death penalty and

Speaker 115 get around to executing me 17 years from now when I'm 78 years old,

Speaker 115 I'm decrepit and anything. Hey, they can do it.

Speaker 91 Two tough Florida prosecutors, it turned out, would be the match of his defiant taunt.

Speaker 15 My belief is, is this is an evil, bad person,

Speaker 15 and there ought to be a consequence in life to evil acts.

Speaker 95 Coming up,

Speaker 9 justice for Cheryl.

Speaker 6 The hunt for evidence begins.

Speaker 16 She took the floors up, the seats out. She dismantled that van.

Speaker 23 Suspected serial killer Gary Hilton had already pleaded guilty to the murder of Meredith Emerson in the Georgia Mountains, but he cheated the executioner there with a plea deal that led police to his victim's body.

Speaker 66 To the south, authorities in Florida were convinced he had murdered nurse and mother Cheryl Dunlap, whose partial remains had been recovered two weeks before Meredith Emerson went missing.

Speaker 52 Hilton was defying the authorities in Florida to make the charges stick.

Speaker 115 If they want to spend a million dollars, two million to convict me, and then

Speaker 115 another two million to get death, hey, they can do it.

Speaker 47 Leon County, Florida state's attorney Willie Meggs had heard enough and indicted Hilton for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 12 Willie, he's gone away for life. He's going to be leaving Georgia corrections in a pine box.
Why does Florida even need to go to the expense of a capital murder trial?

Speaker 15 My belief is, is this is an evil, bad person, and there ought to be a consequence in life to evil acts.

Speaker 125 I don't think murders ought to be cheaper the more you do.

Speaker 69 With the Dunlap case looking like a carbon copy of the Meredith Emerson murder, you might think the case would be a gimme for the prosecutors, but far from it.

Speaker 34 They would not be allowed to introduce Hilton's conviction in the Emerson murder, despite its similarity to Cheryl's, nor his connection with that horror movie, Deadly Run, or the fact that he was the prime suspect in the murders of two elderly hikers in North Carolina.

Speaker 33 Florida Department of Law Enforcement Special Agent Annie White was part of the team charged with making the case.

Speaker 38 Months earlier, the cops had developed a partial chronology for Cheryl Dunlap on the Saturday she banished.

Speaker 16 We started receiving calls, people saying, you know, we saw her at Walmart, we saw her here. And so we started backtracking those, just trying to get the timeline.

Speaker 56 The investigators knew that Cheryl's mourning had included some shopping in Tallahassee, cashing a check at the bank, and using a library computer to send some email to her son in the Army.

Speaker 42 They even had a last sighting.

Speaker 30 Witnesses identified Cheryl as the woman peacefully reading a book here at a popular spot called Leon Sinks in the National Forest.

Speaker 16 The couple that I interviewed that saw her there at the sinkholes was very adamant that that was her.

Speaker 57 But the trail had gone cold at the Tallahassee ATM where a disguised man had withdrawn money using Dunlop's bank cards.

Speaker 42 A month after Cheryl went missing, the Be on the Lookout for Gary Hilton during the Meredith Emerson investigation had the phones in Florida lighting up again.

Speaker 16 When he started hitting the news media, our citizens here started seeing him and immediately recognized him

Speaker 16 and started calling.

Speaker 61 And that tip line kept ringing. One caller remembered an odd guy with a handsome red dog.

Speaker 45 That sighting led investigators down another National Forest path and to another discovery. More remains.

Speaker 16 He was positive it was Mr. Hilton, described the dog, the van, and

Speaker 16 so that was one of the camps where the bones were found.

Speaker 85 Deep in the National Forest, five miles from where Cheryl Dunlap's torso had been found, investigators came upon a charred piece of skull and the bony fragments of a human hand in the ashes of a campfire.

Speaker 16 They were badly burned.

Speaker 59 Little camp fire pit kind of thing?

Speaker 16 Yes, sir, and he had actually done a pretty good job of covering it up as well. He had covered it with straw and took measures to hide his tracks.

Speaker 54 The fire had been so thorough, it was impossible to extract DNA from the bones.

Speaker 31 Whoever killed Cheryl Dunlop had gone to extraordinary lengths to eliminate any physical evidence.

Speaker 12 So you'd think that this is someone trying to conceal the identity.

Speaker 22 Very much.

Speaker 12 Chills must have gone up your spine when you heard the details of what had happened to Meredith and how closely it matched Cheryl.

Speaker 16 Yes, sir.

Speaker 12 Both taken to the woods, abducted.

Speaker 59 Yes, sir. Both decapitated.

Speaker 16 It was just, you know, eerily similar.

Speaker 53 There was one thing about tracking the odd guy with the red dog that they had going for them.

Speaker 27 State's assistant prosecutor Georgia Kappelman.

Speaker 8 Fortunately, for the investigation, if somebody saw Gary Michael Hilton, they remembered him. He's got that kind of a face or presence that you don't forget.

Speaker 8 Once we had the description, we had tons of witnesses coming forward.

Speaker 102 While doing the legwork that was turning up more witnesses putting Hilton in the area, Agent White screened Deadly Run, the horror thriller about tracking down and killing women in the forest that Gary Hilton had worked on years before.

Speaker 12 Were there scenes that you see in the movie that were reenacted in this actual spree of crimes?

Speaker 16 Not in every detail, but there's definitely a lot of similarities.

Speaker 53 And investigators had those home videos of Hilton to screen as well.

Speaker 107 Last time it was Swanee that was out here. I don't think Swanee was here unless they followed you.
No.

Speaker 16 Watching the was very educational because I saw him by himself. I saw him with other people.

Speaker 39 People like this restaurant manager suffering a rant from Hilton about his delivery drivers.

Speaker 107 You tell these guys to quit terror driving. Has he received any driving safety education? Sure, he has.

Speaker 16 I saw him with law enforcement.

Speaker 16 He had many different sides.

Speaker 63 I'm leaving. I'm getting out of here.
God almighty.

Speaker 12 And he thought he was the smartest bear in the woods. Definitely.
Smarter than the officers apprehending him.

Speaker 16 Definitely.

Speaker 16 Definitely.

Speaker 45 They now had numerous Hilton sightings around where Cheryl Dunlap vanished.

Speaker 78 But despite all the investigative work by multiple sheriff's offices and the FDLE, no witness came forward to put him together with Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 78 The nurse's remains were in such poor condition they told investigators nothing about how she died. But there were thousands of other pieces in the puzzle investigators were trying to solve.

Speaker 51 Hilton's van, jammed to the roof with hundreds of items, was trucked to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Crime Lab.

Speaker 16 Our crime scene analyst spent day and night, literally, weeks.

Speaker 59 That van was a mess, right?

Speaker 16 She lived in that van for weeks. She dismantled that van.
Every item that was in it was taken out,

Speaker 16 and then the van itself was dismantled. She took the floors up, the headliner out, the seats out, every scrap of paper, every piece of hair.

Speaker 27 All that evidence from the van was added to items recovered from the dumpster outside Atlanta where Hilton had been captured.

Speaker 49 A Georgia cop on Blood Mountain with a metal detector had found the bayonet Meredith Emerson had wrestled away from Gary Hilton.

Speaker 88 Now investigators in Florida had a theory.

Speaker 16 What was interesting about that knife is before we knew of Mr.

Speaker 16 Hilton, before he had killed Miss Emerson and been caught, Our analysts in our lab showed us this is the style, this is what the knife's going to look like.

Speaker 54 Cameras and memory cards were found inside the van.

Speaker 69 The techie detectives in the FDLE computer lab were working overtime trying to unscramble deleted material from the evidence.

Speaker 76 And deep in their DNA lab, more than 700 samples were being analyzed in an attempt to find some link between Gary Hilton and the late Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 33 Had Gary Hilton managed to outsmart them all?

Speaker 62 Would Florida be able to make the case against him?

Speaker 48 Four years after Cheryl Dunlap's death, it was finally going going to trial.

Speaker 95 Coming up.

Speaker 8 Your palms are sweaty and your heart's beating.

Speaker 9 The dramatic case begins. How would it end?

Speaker 93 You could just see the jurors. You saw it in their eyes and knew.

Speaker 9 When dateline continues.

Speaker 32 Gary Hilton's trial for the Florida murder of Cheryl Dunlap began in February 2011, a little more than four years after he'd pleaded and skated the death penalty in Georgia.

Speaker 67 But there was no chance of a plea deal in this Tallahassee courtroom.

Speaker 69 He might be doing life in Georgia, but this was a capital murder case.

Speaker 46 If convicted, Hilton could die by lethal injection.

Speaker 30 Remember, lead prosecutor Georgia Kappelman couldn't tell the jury about Hilton's conviction in the Meredith Emerson murder.

Speaker 81 or mention he was the prime suspect in that North Carolina double homicide, nor tell the jury anything about that slasher in the forest movie Deadly Run that he'd helped make.

Speaker 106 Ms. Dunlap found herself in a situation and ultimately came to an end

Speaker 106 that is something that we only think about in nightmares.

Speaker 27 The state built the brick and masonry of its story on the timeline investigators had so painstakingly assembled.

Speaker 25 An attorney hiking with her husband in the National Forest at Leon Sinks that Saturday morning remembered seeing Cheryl.

Speaker 16 I looked at her and I said, it's peaceful out here, isn't it?

Speaker 87 And she looked at me and she nodded and she smiled, and then she exited the boardwalk.

Speaker 23 Then a parade of witnesses testified to seeing Hilton out and about in the National Forest.

Speaker 70 There was the motorist who noticed a man near Cheryl's car with a flat tire.

Speaker 8 How confident are you that Mr.

Speaker 87 Hilton was the man that you saw at that vehicle?

Speaker 8 Very confident.

Speaker 27 Others remembered Dandy, the man's good-looking reddish retriever mix.

Speaker 22 I'll show you what I learned at State's Exhibit 37. 37.

Speaker 26 That's it.

Speaker 8 That looks like the dog you saw that day?

Speaker 22 Yes.

Speaker 27 A picture of Hilton's dog, Dandy, Exhibit 37, was looking to be the state's key piece of evidence.

Speaker 15 Quite sure that's the dog.

Speaker 52 Another witness recounted a creepy conversation with Hilton at a country store.

Speaker 127 And then he said, isn't it bad about that girl that

Speaker 127 was murdered? And I said, yes, it is. He said, well, you look like her.
And I said, well, I don't think so.

Speaker 49 And hunters, too, identified the old guy with the nice dog.

Speaker 122 He's just acting real weird.

Speaker 128 He came up, he's flagging us down like it's an emergency or something.

Speaker 27 What the prosecution couldn't tell the jury was exactly how Cheryl had died.

Speaker 27 A county medical examiner had to work with severed remains that had been exposed to the elements he thought for at least a week or more.

Speaker 126 Are you able to tell this jury how this woman died?

Speaker 7 No, ma'am.

Speaker 97 Not a cause of death, but what the prosecution did have was forensic evidence galore.

Speaker 52 Hundreds of items recovered from his van and from Hilton's suspected campsites deep in the woods.

Speaker 101 There's two items here, duct tape with hair and then there's another piece of duct tape

Speaker 101 or masking tape with hair.

Speaker 33 One of the items crime scene text recovered was Hilton's video camera.

Speaker 27 He tried to delete the images on it.

Speaker 126 I'm able to see the entire device so I'm able to recover those previously deleted files.

Speaker 62 Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab experts had been able to salvage the audio Hilton did not want the world to hear, and with good reason.

Speaker 52 This is Gary Hilton two days after Cheryl Dunlap's disappearance, singing into the camera microphone and gassing with his dog Dandy.

Speaker 27 It sounded as though he was confessing to the dog. I killed him with it.

Speaker 82 A hushed courtroom listened to Hilton's monologue.

Speaker 10 But first, I gotta go hide this somewhere

Speaker 54 The state's forensic people introduced evidence about Cheryl's slash tire.

Speaker 62 A tool mark expert said the bayonet recovered on Blood Mountain up in Georgia was an exact match for the sharp object that caused the puncture down in Florida.

Speaker 41 But the state's say-goodnight evidence was without question the DNA work.

Speaker 68 Genetic expert Joe Ellen Brown spent two years testing more than 750 pieces of evidence in the case.

Speaker 42 Brown told the jury she was able to match Cheryl Cheryl Dunlap's DNA to blood on two of Hilton's sleeping bags and on the shoelaces of his hiking boots.

Speaker 129 The major donor does match Cheryl Dunlap. The frequency of occurrence of this major contributor DNA profile is 1 in 29 quadrillion Caucasians.

Speaker 106 That's a 29 with how many zeros?

Speaker 129 15 zeros.

Speaker 78 And with that, after six days of testimony, the prosecution rested.

Speaker 6 Now the defense, holding a very poor hand, would have to fight for Gary Hilton's life.

Speaker 69 Its case was brief.

Speaker 42 Lead attorney Inez Suber called only one witness, an expert on tool mark identification who testified by videotape, arguing that the bayonet and evidence could not, in her opinion, be determined to be what had been used to slash the victim's tire.

Speaker 130 It's subjective. It's based on the individual examiner's training and experience.

Speaker 78 The defense was trying to impeach the testimony of the state's expert who said Hilton's bayonet had slashed Cheryl Dunlap's tire.

Speaker 33 And that was it for the defense.

Speaker 48 Gary Hilton declined to take the stand.

Speaker 18 Do you wish to testify?

Speaker 22 No.

Speaker 8 One in 63 million Caucasians.

Speaker 64 In her closing argument, the prosecutor reminded the jury of those big-numbered DNA matches.

Speaker 106 What are the odds that somebody else's DNA is on that sleeping bag other than Cheryl Dunlap?

Speaker 131 One in 11 trillion Caucasians.

Speaker 20 Inez Suber's close for the defense was far more vigorous than her limited witness list might have suggested.

Speaker 98 We have absolutely no evidence, no direct evidence that Mr. Hilton committed murder.

Speaker 27 The jurors began their deliberations.

Speaker 46 Kappelman and her boss waited for them to return their verdict.

Speaker 12 You've done a lot of trials.

Speaker 58 Is this just another day at the office?

Speaker 22 No. Oh, no.

Speaker 98 It's never.

Speaker 8 When you're waiting for a verdict, your palms are sweaty and your heart's beating and you're you're very nervous.

Speaker 114 And I can tell you, I've been doing it 35 years now. It's never gone away from me.
There's this,

Speaker 15 oh, you'd really like to throw up while you're waiting on them to do. And until you hear it read,

Speaker 122 it is

Speaker 15 tense.

Speaker 95 Coming up.

Speaker 9 What would they decide?

Speaker 113 Would the jury find as follows as the verdict.

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Speaker 50 The trial of Gary Hilt for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap had taken seven days.

Speaker 27 The six-man, six-woman jury needed less than three and a half hours to reach its verdict on multiple counts.

Speaker 113 State of Florida versus Gary Michael Hilton, we, the jury, find as follows as to count one of the indictment. The defendant Gary Hilton is guilty of first-degree murder.

Speaker 10 Count two of the indictment.

Speaker 32 Gary Hilton was found guilty of the first-degree murder of Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 68 Guilty on all counts except car theft.

Speaker 28 The same jurors would soon reconvene to decide if Hilton would die by lethal injection.

Speaker 41 He'd dodged death in Georgia, and now it was time to see if he could do it again.

Speaker 10 You might think that capital punishment, but Florida's active death row would have been a given for Gary Hilton.

Speaker 48 But not so, says Tallahassee Democrat, senior writer Jennifer Portman.

Speaker 93 In Leon County, we had not even sent anyone to death row in 20 years.

Speaker 12 So it's not a foregone conclusion that this is going to be a hangum jury.

Speaker 93 Absolutely not. We've had our share of horrendous crimes, don't get me wrong.
But the jurors here are just very uneasy about sending people to death row.

Speaker 87 This man, Mr.

Speaker 122 Hilton.

Speaker 38 Assistant State's Attorney Georgia Kappelman got the initial conviction of Hilton.

Speaker 12 What are the words you'd use to describe this guy?

Speaker 8 He's a psychopath, and, you know, there's crazy sick and there's crazy mean. He's just crazy mean.
He's intelligent. He's a college graduate.
He was a member of our armed forces.

Speaker 8 He's probably smarter than everybody sitting in this room.

Speaker 33 There were different rules in this, the penalty phase.

Speaker 27 Unlike in the trial, prosecutors were now able to disclose to jurors that Hilton murdered Meredith Emerson on Blood Mountain.

Speaker 51 And state's attorney Willie Meggs did just that, calling to the stand Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents who'd worked on the Emerson case.

Speaker 114 You indicated that Ms. Emerson's body was nude.

Speaker 114 Did Gary Michael Hilton tell you why it was nude?

Speaker 15 He did.

Speaker 111 He basically stated that he had removed the head and stripped the clothing for forensic purposes.

Speaker 92 Meggs was able to introduce portions of those chilling interviews that Hilton gave the authorities in Georgia.

Speaker 115 Once you've taken someone,

Speaker 115 you're either going to kill them or you're going to get caught. It's as simple as that.

Speaker 93 Penalty phase was one of the more interesting parts of the trial. That's where you started getting this information about

Speaker 93 Emerson.

Speaker 77 That's the first time the Georgia information was allowed into the.

Speaker 93 Correct. So that is when you really start seeing the jurors taking in the enormity.
Then you really see the impact of all this coming through.

Speaker 128 Morning, ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker 30 Robert Friedman was the defense's lead attorney in the penalty phase.

Speaker 27 His strategy was to present Hilton as so mentally damaged as to be incapable of responsibility for his actions.

Speaker 84 Friedman began with a PET scan expert who testified about traumatic brain damage Hilton had suffered as a 10-year-old when a Murphy bed accidentally fell on him and nearly scalped him.

Speaker 122 He was taken to St. Joseph Hospital in Tampa and given 200 stitches.

Speaker 113 And this is an example of a Murphy bed.

Speaker 48 And jurors, that's not all, the defense's expert continued.

Speaker 49 Hilton was abused as a child, and he lashed out as a teenager.

Speaker 61 The doctor testified that Hilton was so deluded that he believed he had worked on a movie about killing women in the forest.

Speaker 36 That, of course, was a slip-up.

Speaker 84 Hilton had done just that, and the defense error opened the door for the prosecution to tell the jury about the movie, Deadly Run.

Speaker 45 But would that be delusional if it's the truth?

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 47 A defense neuropsychologist tested Hilton, who it turns out, is as bright as he thinks he is.

Speaker 131 On the Wechsler Adults Intelligence Scale, he scored an overall verbal IQ of 120, which puts him in the upper 10% or so of the population.

Speaker 56 Another psychiatrist diagnosed him with schizoaffective and antisocial personality disorder, compounded by an old-fashioned Oedipal complex.

Speaker 49 So we call it an unresolved Oedipal complex, and a child can grow up with this emptiness inside of them.

Speaker 62 To top it off, the defense continued, Hilton was self-medicating with prescription drugs.

Speaker 7 Ritalin and Ephexa will basically push you over that line.

Speaker 73 The defense then treated jurors to Gary Hilton, This Is Your Life, a saga of abuse, neglect, and injury.

Speaker 43 It included an audio tape of Hilton's late mother talking about how, as a teenager, Hilton had wounded his stepfather.

Speaker 134 And he said, Shoot me, shoot me, go ahead, shoot me. I dare you to shoot me.
Gary shot him. In the legs or in the stomach, lower part of the stomach.

Speaker 32 A junior high girlfriend testified that Gary wasn't a bad guy back in the day.

Speaker 93 And he was funny and outgoing and smart.

Speaker 113 The defense rests.

Speaker 32 Once the defense rested, Willie Meggs called his rebuttal witness, a clinical psychologist, to revisit the essential issues.

Speaker 113 Did Mr.

Speaker 10 Gary Hilton, did he know right from wrong?

Speaker 123 My opinion is that yes, he clearly knew right from wrong, and clearly he knew the criminal nature of his conduct.

Speaker 123 And my opinion is that he is a psychopath, and that's what generated the murders and nothing else.

Speaker 41 The attorneys made their final appeal to the jurors.

Speaker 114 I'm going to ask every one of you individually to go back in that jury room and vote to recommend that Gary Hilton be put to death.

Speaker 111 On behalf of Mr. Hilton, I'm asking all of you collectively and individually

Speaker 111 to recommend a life sentence in this case.

Speaker 49 The jurors then retired to deliberate nothing less than whether Gary Hilton should live or die.

Speaker 95 Coming up,

Speaker 9 another haunting question: Were there more victims out in the forest?

Speaker 16 I personally believe there are.

Speaker 9 And a legacy.

Speaker 64 She's really the hero.

Speaker 13 It was through her efforts that we were able to catch her killer.

Speaker 9 Remembering Meredith Hope Emerson?

Speaker 9 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 41 The same jurors who found Gary Hilton guilty of murdering Cheryl Dunlap were now trying to decide if they should recommend Hilton spend life in prison or be put to death by lethal injection.

Speaker 6 Their life or death debate lasted an hour and 20 minutes.

Speaker 113 A majority of the jury, by a vote of 12 to nothing, advise and recommend to the court that it impose the death penalty on Gary Michael Hilton.

Speaker 36 Hilton sat expressionless as the results were read.

Speaker 27 Two weeks later, an equally emotionless Hilton listened as the judge pronounced his sentence.

Speaker 128 It is ordered and judge that you, Gary Michael Hilton, be sentenced to death for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap. May God have mercy on your soul.

Speaker 34 Gary Michael Hilton was sent to Florida's death row for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 81 Three months later, he was shackled and transported to Western North Carolina and indicted in federal court there for the murders of John and Irene Bryant.

Speaker 48 The government alleged the serial killer murdered the elderly couple in October of 2007, shortly before killing Cheryl Dunlap and Meredith Emerson.

Speaker 67 Hilton pleaded not guilty.

Speaker 80 The forensic team from Florida that helped convict him there was all set to testify in the federal trial.

Speaker 80 And all that evidence, stored in the FDLE's basement just across the hall from the boxes containing evidence against Florida's more infamous serial killer, Ted Bundy, was ready to get truck milk.

Speaker 74 Hilton was facing another death sentence in the federal trial.

Speaker 36 And David Mahoney, the local sheriff, was certain a jury would provide justice for the Bryants.

Speaker 18 We have a good case. A tremendous number of man-hours spent in the investigation.
Tremendous cooperation between all of the local, state, and federal agencies that were involved in all three states.

Speaker 73 But a trial wouldn't be necessary.

Speaker 67 In March 2012, Hilton pleaded guilty to killing John and Irene Bryant and got another life sentence.

Speaker 73 Law enforcement officials from across the Southeast have met with Hilton on Florida's death row, attempting to find out how many more of his victims might be out there.

Speaker 59 You think there are others?

Speaker 13 I think there's certainly the potential to be others. I don't know that we'll ever know for sure unless he tells us.

Speaker 44 So far, Hilton is sticking to his story that he started hunting, as he describes it, in October of 2007, that there were no murders before then.

Speaker 35 Like most of the other officers who've investigated Hilton, Agent Annie White isn't buying it.

Speaker 29 She says they have a lot of work ahead.

Speaker 59 Is it your belief, Annie, that there are more out there, more victims of Gary Hilton?

Speaker 16 I personally believe there are. He's just been too many places, so it just makes me think that there's probably more.

Speaker 16 We're going to continue to look at every case that we can and compare profiles and look for evidence.

Speaker 33 The pain and suffering of the families of Hilton's victims and suspected victims dulls but never ends.

Speaker 98 He's taken so much from me and my family. What can you say to someone who would murder two wonderful people for

Speaker 98 $300?

Speaker 98 And

Speaker 98 Meredith Emerson, a beautiful young lady.

Speaker 98 And Cheryl Dunlop and very possibly many more. The man is not even what I think of as human.
He is something else. A true psychopath who needs to to be put where he can never harm anyone else again.

Speaker 47 For Cheryl Dunlap's friends and family in Florida, Hilton's conviction provoked conflicting feelings.

Speaker 17 And I think,

Speaker 17 believe it or not, that Cheryl would want us to forgive.

Speaker 17 And when I went into the courtroom and I actually saw him,

Speaker 17 my thought was not that they put him to death or this or that. I was glad he was off the street, but

Speaker 17 I have to forgive Gary Hilton. I have to.

Speaker 12 Tabby, in the family, it was a death penalty case, and the jury recommended the death penalty, and that was the sentence. Does it matter to you?

Speaker 16 We were pleased with the outcome, yes.

Speaker 86 And like Laura said, he's off the streets.

Speaker 16 He's not able to hurt anyone again.

Speaker 16 Yes, I think it matters.

Speaker 47 And there are regrets on the part of the officers who investigated the Hilton cases.

Speaker 12 Could there have been one tip line that had come in sooner? Could there have been one fragment of information we could have put together more quickly and spared her?

Speaker 13 There hasn't been a day go by since then. I haven't thought about Meredith Emerson and what we could have or should have done differently.
But see, she's really the hero.

Speaker 13 She did the best she could in hopes that we could catch up. It was through her efforts that we were able to catch her killer, but also the killer that was responsible for the killing of Cheryl Dunlap.

Speaker 27 In Georgia, for Meredith Emerson's closest friends, it's time to forget about Gary Hilton and remember her.

Speaker 14 He took our friend, he took a daughter, a sister, but he can't take her memory. He can't take the things that we love about her away.

Speaker 55 There is, they say, important work to be done.

Speaker 14 We started an organization in her memory.

Speaker 39 Julia Karenbauer, Meredith Emerson's one-time roommate in Georgia, has founded along with others something called Right to Hike, advocating hiker's safety.

Speaker 14 We didn't want anybody to go through this again either to bring awareness of what happened and how it happened and maybe make you think about going hiking by yourself twice to take a friend. Yeah.

Speaker 14 You know, to be a little safer.

Speaker 73 The organization founded by Meredith Emerson's friends has sponsored events with a huge turnout of people and dogs.

Speaker 50 Meredith's dog, Ella, went to live with her parents in Colorado.

Speaker 14 Any event that we ever have for Right to Hike, just seeing people come and say, I never met Meredith, but I feel like I know her and I wanted to come out and support.

Speaker 14 And that was the biggest biggest thing, the community outreach after everything happened.

Speaker 48 Right to Hike has aided humane societies, educated hikers on safe practices, and put cell towers on trailheads.

Speaker 14 One of the big things that we realized very quickly on these trails that our cell phones didn't work and Meredith had her cell phone with her and that didn't help her.

Speaker 61 And if you ever hike Blood Mountain, you just might notice a little sticker there as you head out.

Speaker 34 Remember me, M.E.

Speaker 50 Meredith Emerson.

Speaker 37 She, most of all, would like you to enjoy your day in the outdoors.

Speaker 14 She just really enjoyed being out with nature and, you know, watching Ella run through the forest and, you know, play with other dogs. I think it was just a really peaceful place for her to be.

Speaker 13 People go to these places to relax and get away from everyday life and enjoy the outdoors, and they should continue to do that. These are some of the safest places there are to go.

Speaker 12 Until the monster shows up. Yeah.

Speaker 80 Gary Hilton has been on death row since April 2011.

Speaker 74 His appeals continue.

Speaker 73 The average stay on Florida's death row is 12 and a half years.

Speaker 9 That's all for this edition of Dateline.

Speaker 111 We'll see you again next Friday at 9, 8 Central. And of course, I'll see you each weeknight for NBC Nightly News.

Speaker 10 I'm Lester Holt for all of us at NBC News. Good night.

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