At the Hands of a Stranger (16 page)

Goddard seemed surprised by the question. “Did I loan him money? No, but he always had money. He had bogus accounts set up, but he always had money with him in an envelope, sometimes two thousand dollars.”

The GBI agent asked, “Did he ever say anything about people he doesn't like? Did he say anything about having a list of people he needed to kill?”

“No, but it wouldn't surprise me to know that,” Goddard said. “If you turned on him, it wasn't a good thing. He never let things go. He never liked his father or anybody. I hate to say this, but if she (Meredith Emerson) had turned on him, telling him to leave her alone, he would take that as a personal rejection. He probably would have approached nicely—he's a nice guy, he really is—but if he felt rejected, it would go from bad to worse. He might have gotten a little pissed,” Goddard said. “I'm saying he's capable of that. He would take a rejection personally. I don't, in general, think of him being the type who would harm somebody. I really don't.”

“If it was a guy, could he do it?”

“If it was a guy, maybe, but I don't know. I really don't know.”

The GBI concluded the interview, but they would have more questions for Goddard later. Goddard's father had sold Hilton a car, and Goddard remembered in the years that he knew Hilton, he had owned a black Mazda pickup and a dark-colored Camaro. Since the GBI opened its tip line, it had received scores of calls about encounters with a man resembling Hilton. Some of them described him as having a black Mazda; others, as having a car similar to a Camaro in different years.

There were already suspicions that Hilton might be responsible for at least one other death. Law enforcement officers in the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, GBI, FBI, and FDLE had already noted some similarities in the deaths of Irene and John Bryant in North Carolina, Cheryl Dunlap in Florida, and Meredith Emerson in Georgia.

“I hope you guys get him,” Goddard said. “I feel sorry for this girl's parents.”

As the agents were leaving, Goddard recalled something.

“I just remembered. He went by the name of Mack. He thought Gary was too feminine.”

The group of men had gathered on Monday under close security to form a secret caravan to Dawson Forest that cool evening of January 7 at about 5:30
P.M
. The center of attention was Gary Hilton, whose inflated sense of self basked in its warmth like a cat lying in a sunbeam. The GBI was represented by Special Agents Clay Bridges and John Cagle; Union County by Sheriff Scott Stephens; Todd Dawson, investigator with the public defender's office; Neil Smith represented Hilton; and last, but not least, Enotah Judicial Circuit district attorney (DA) Stanley “Stan” Gunter.

The meeting and its purpose had been kept secret because none of them, with the possible exception of Hilton, wanted to have a huge contingent of news media representatives to be present at such a critical junction.

Gary Hilton had agreed to tell where Meredith Emerson's remains were in exchange for a plea of guilty to murder and a sentence to life in prison. The man who had been running from death all of his life was still running.

There were two police vehicles in the caravan. Other police units had already been dispatched to the general area where the caravan would go. Hilton sat in the back-seat of the lead car with Bridges, who would record an interview with Hilton as they drove to the crime scene in Dawson Forest. Smith and Gunter accompanied them and Stephens drove. The others followed behind them in a separate car.

Dawson Forest was so big—and the area they were heading to was so remote—that no one except Hilton knew precisely how to get there. They discussed the best way to go.

“I'm sitting here trying to rack my brain on how to get down there,” the sheriff said to the others. “We could take those back roads ….”

Cagle agreed and they started off.

“You need anything to eat?” Hilton asked, as though hosting a friendly social gathering.

No one was hungry.

“I've got to keep you alert now,” Hilton said, expressing concern for everyone's blood sugar levels. “Sheriff, could you take your police radio down just a notch? Or off. Or whatever you want to do?” Hilton asked. He nodded toward Bridges. “I'm gonna talk to him on the way down there.”

Stephens switched the radio off and Bridges asked him for clearer directions on how to get to where they needed to be. Hilton rattled off instructions and looked pleased at his knowledge of the backwoods areas.

“Cut loose with a cigarette, Sheriff,” he said. “If you got any.”

Bridges told Hilton they would get on down the road and then get out of the car for a cigarette.

“Forget it,” Hilton snapped. “I don't have any.”

“Did you know Meredith Emerson before …?” Bridges asked.

Hilton answered that he had not. Under questioning by Bridges, Hilton told his version of how the events had occurred. He said he had gone to Blood Mountain because there were always a lot of people there and “it was a good place to hunt.” He wasn't sure, but he thought he had been camping illegally at Vogel Park for two or three days before he saw Emerson. He mentioned that he had stalked another woman the day before he saw Emerson, but he had abandoned the hunt because he discovered she had family just a short distance behind them.

When he first saw Meredith Emerson, Hilton said, he approached her while she ate trail mix and fed her dog. He started to chat, and then kept walking with her as they headed toward the summit. Hilton said he let Emerson go on ahead of him because his multiple sclerosis made it too hard for him to keep up. Instead, he intended to attack her when she descended.

“Did you form an opinion at that point, or did you form an idea at that point that you wanted to abduct her?” Bridges asked.

“Yeah. This was driven really by nothing but the desire to obtain her cards and PIN number,” Hilton said. “Rather than pick a couple and the guy fights back and you gotta kill him. Well, where are you at?

“So I felt it would be easier to establish control over a female than a male. Not that I couldn't whup a male, but once you whip 'em, you might be left holding the bag, so to speak.”

Hilton was getting revved up; and the more he talked, the faster the words came out of his mouth. The answers were sometimes to the point or followed a tortuous route of disjointed and bizarre ideas. Bridges would then have to stop him frequently to get him back on the subject or to answer the specific question.

“Then you had decided to specifically abduct her on the trail to get her cards and PIN number?” Bridges asked.

“Well, I should say, potentially. If nothing better came along.”

Hilton told how he had waited off the trail and stepped out when Emerson came back. He had a knife in his hand and demanded her cards and PIN numbers. Instead, she surprised him by knocking the knife away and disarmed him again when he pulled out his bayonet. They went tumbling down a ravine, along with Emerson's water bottles, and chew food for her dog.

“And then I produced the baton. She fought that and I lost control of the baton,” Hilton said. “And I'm good, too. This little girl, hundred-some-pound girl, was whupping my ass.”

Hilton said they wrestled and went tumbling down a ravine. “I had to hand fight her. That's where I got multiple fractures in my right hand. I could not get control of her. She would pretend that I was in control and then start fighting again. So I had to hit her a number of times.”

Bridges asked if he had used only his right hand, and Hilton answered yes. “Straight punches in the face or the head.” He claimed that Emerson was in no pain when the fight was over, after he had clubbed her with a heavy branch, and only suffered a broken nose and two black eyes.

“Hold on a second,” Bridges said. “Once you hit her in the head and the face, how many times would you estimate that happened?”

“Hard to say. She wouldn't stop fighting. And then she'd stop and she'd start fighting again. And yelling. I needed to control her and silence her.”

Bridges asked Hilton what happened after he gained control. Hilton said that he took her on a switchback trail that couldn't be seen from the Byron Herbert Reece Trail, tied her to a tree, and then went back to “clean up the crime scene.” He wanted to retrieve his baton, knife, bayonet, and anything that might have shown that a struggle took place. Three hikers were already there, Hilton said. While hiding behind a boulder, he saw that these items already had been found and that the hikers were heading down the trail. Hilton lay flat on his stomach for a while as he tried not to be seen.

Hilton next told Bridges that he returned to Emerson, untied her, and removed the duct tape he had used to help secure her to the tree. He put a noose around her neck with a three-hundred-pound test line, and he marched her off the trail to an area not too far from where their vehicles were parked in a lot at Vogel Park.

“Were her hands free?” Bridges asked. “You didn't have those zip tied?”

“No. Just had the noose around her neck. I told her I had a pistol, which I didn't. By that time she was totally compliant.”

That made him “very solicitous of her condition and comfort.” He added, “My intent was not torture. I understood the situation.”

The two police cars were driving on steep, winding mountain roads, and Bridges had to stop the interview for a few minutes. He said he was getting dizzy and needed a short break. Once they got on a smoother, more level stretch of the highway, he continued the interview. Hilton told how he had tied Emerson to a tree in the woods that was close to the parking lot but couldn't be seen because the shrubbery was so thick.

It was just before sunset, Hilton said, when he brought Emerson out of the woods and secured her inside with chains and a rope. They were both getting cold, Hilton said, and he was worried that the law would show up any second, because he thought the hikers who found his weapons and Emerson's water bottles and dog stuff would have notified the cops.

“It was cold, and as soon as the sun goes down, the heat radiates right out and the temperature drops like a rock,” Hilton said. “I was concerned that someone might have heard her yelling, because sound carries forever in cold air.”

After he got Emerson in the car, Hilton said, he made sure she couldn't get away.

“I had two lengths of chain padlocked to the seat mounting. The front-seat mounting. One chain padlocked to a seat attached to the car. The shortest one was four or five feet long. The other was about nine feet long. It was a link chain.”

“How did you chain her?” Bridges asked.

Hilton told how he had used chains and padlocks to chain up her body. He used the short chain, about four feet long, to wrap around her neck and pulled it so tight that Emerson could not possibly have gotten her head free. Hilton claimed that he didn't secure her feet or hands and that Emerson was never gagged, or had her mouth taped shut, even though he said he had taken duct tape with him when he abducted her.

“She could have grabbed something, smacked me up the side of the head while I was driving,” he said. “She could have reached around and got a stranglehold. It was just to keep her from jumping out. I put a childproof latch on the sliding door so it could not be opened from the inside.”

He told Bridges how he had put the dog in Emerson's car and headed toward Blairsville. Emerson, he said, was worried about her dog and she continued to express her concern to him, even after he was several miles away on Highway 129 North. To keep her calm, more than out of concern for Ella, Hilton went back for Emerson's dog.

“Did she ever give you her PIN number while you were asking for it on the mountain?”

“After I got control of her, she gave me a PIN number. It was incorrect. She never gave me a correct number. Sorry if my breath is bad. I been drinking coffee.”

“You had her cards and PIN number and took her just to make sure it was the right PIN number?”

“Correct.”

“Is that something that you had planned to do, anyway?”

“Yeah.”

This was critical information and Bridges wanted to make certain he wasn't going outside the limits of the plea agreement. He turned to Hilton's lawyer, Neil Smith.

“Neil, everything with you okay so far?”

It was. Then without prompting, and in the most casual conversational voice, Hilton said:

“I'm gonna tell you right now. There was never any plan to let her go. I knew if I let her go, I would be identified. I knew that she couldn't be let go.”

“So you …”

“I knew she was doomed.”

The law enforcement officers in the car felt the information settle down on them like a dark fog. Hilton had just confessed to premeditation to murder. They were being civil, acting friendly, to keep Hilton talking freely. Not showing their anger and disgust took a great deal of effort, but they were able to maintain their professional detachment, at least on the surface. Bridges had never felt such disgust for a person and he said later that being near Hilton caused him to feel waves of evil washing over him, something he had never felt before.

He asked if Hilton was telling him that he decided to kill Emerson while they were on the Reece and Appalachian Trails, and Hilton said that wasn't what he meant.

“I can't … I'm not telling you that,” Hilton said.

“On advice of counsel?”

“You already told him, I think,” Smith told Hilton.

Hilton continued with his story, telling how he had driven to the Appalachian Community Bank in Blairsville. Emerson kept him running back and forth to the ATM, which was across the street from where he had parked, and none of them would work. After several attempts he drove to a bank in Canton and went through the same futile motions, holding a towel over his face. He warned Emerson that she had better stop dancing him around.

“She said, ‘Well, I think I just changed it, and I'm not sure of this, and blah, blah, blah. Go try it again.'”

Hilton said he tried again—with the same results. “So she's telling me, ‘It's gonna work. Must be a wrong bank. Maybe a Wachovia?' Just a whole bunch of stuff she said, and—”

“So you went to Gainesville to attempt it?”

“Yeah, I needed a larger metropolitan area because I'm walking up to ATMs with my face covered. Late at night with my face covered. You gotta be kinda careful about what ATM you use. If anyone sees you on a cold, late night on foot at a drive-in ATM and covering your face with a towel—you know some police officer just passing by …”

Hilton explained that he liked to try ATM cards after dark, but not too late. The temperature had dropped and it was also cold, which was something that worked against him.

“On a bitterly cold night, a police officer passing by would have been curious as to why is this guy walking around at an ATM holding something over his face?” Hilton said.

“Gainesville was pushing the envelope. It's a fairly large metropolitan area, still active by the time I got there. But on such a bitterly cold night, it's effectively late early, because people clear off—”

“You're telling me it needs to be dark, but there needs to be enough people so that you don't stand out,” Bridges said.

“Exactly. Any police officer is curious and inquisitive if he's any good,” Hilton said. “Anytime he sees anything that's inappropriate to any situation, he asks himself, ‘Why is that guy here?'”

Even though conditions were okay in Gainesville, Hilton said, Emerson sent him to the ATM machines at least five times with incorrect PINs. He started to get worried about being there so long and “throwing up a red flag” to a policeman who might pass by. Throughout all of this, he claimed that Emerson was in the van, secured only by a loose chain, and that she could have yelled for help.

“Could she have slipped it over her head?” Bridges asked.

“No. What I mean, loosely is—”

“She wasn't choking?”

“No. It was just so she couldn't slip …. She had freedom of movement around in the van.”