At the Hands of a Stranger (19 page)
Read At the Hands of a Stranger Online
Authors: Lee Butcher
There were dozens of unanswered questions remaining in the murder of Meredith Emerson, especially concerning Hilton's relationship with John Tabor, which the GBI found confusing. Why did Tabor buy Hilton an Astro van, which he drove into a rut and smashed the oil pan? Why did Hilton call him for help? Why did Tabor rent a vehicle to pick up Hilton and his belongings from the ruined van? Why did Tabor pay for a new van? Furthermore, why didn't Tabor mention that two additional guns were missing from his house, including a MAC-10 automatic assault rifle and a handgun of the same caliber that was used to kill Jack Bryant?
The police also hoped for additional clarification as to why Tabor didn't call them on January 4, 2009, about an hour before Emerson was murdered. The GBI said he had promised to do so if Hilton telephoned again. In fact, the GBI said Tabor never contacted the police, but waited for the police to contact him.
These questions might or might not be answered when Hilton was tried in Florida, depending on what evidence from previous cases was allowed to be heard. In the meantime Hilton held the reputation of being a vicious, sociopathic killer, even in the unlikely event that he was exonerated in Florida and in North Carolina.
Hilton was also named as a suspect in at least two other unsolved murders:
A fisherman made a grim discovery on December 6, 2007, in Ormond Beach, near Daytona Beach, while fishing from the Tomoka River Bridge. He found several plastic trash bags containing a dismembered human body. The victim of this grisly murder was Michael Scot Louis, a twenty-seven-year-old man from nearby South Daytona. Police believe the case bears a strong resemblance to Hilton's other crimes.
Rossana Miliani telephoned her father in Miami from a Cherokee Ramada Inn, near Bryson City, North Carolina, on December 6, 2005. That was the last time he saw or heard from her. Miliani was on a hiking trip from Miami when she disappeared. She was seen in the company of a man around sixty and seemed to be exceptionally nervous. A sketch of the man, drawn by an FBI-trained artist, bore a striking resemblance to Hilton.
Police in Bryson City listed Hilton as a person of interest.
For a man who had been involved in so much petty theft, the police record for Gary Hilton was skimpy. Hilton had more than fifty run-ins with the police in the past thirty years, not counting those that were scrubbed from his juvenile record. The police knew very little about the man who had become so notorious. Was he a longtime serial killer who had managed not to attract attention, or had he simply gone on a rampage, as he claimed? The GBI and FBI were attempting to gather as much information as they could to develop a profile.
Hilton was interviewed frequently, and after his initial freeze on communication, he had thawed and information flowed from him in torrentsâsome of which helped develop the murder case against him in Florida, and some which simply showed how his mind worked. Bridges and Howard let Hilton talk as much as he wanted, because his revelations were sometimes surprising.
Bridges: I understand the FBI came and talked to you the other day.
Hilton: On Thursday.
Bridges: We're not with them on anything. We just basically want to get a background on Gary Hilton, just to finish up our case.
Hilton: Yeah.
Bridges: It's our policy that we go ahead and make sure that you still understand what your rights are.
Bridges read Hilton's rights to him again and continued the interview.
Bridges: I understand that you met your first wife in the military?
Hilton: Yeah.
Bridges: What was her name?
Hilton: Ursula.
Bridges: And you met her in Germany?
Hilton: Uh-huh.
Bridges: How long were you guys married?
Hilton: Just married in ⦠married in '68 and divorced in '71. I'd been going with her since '65. She was sixteen when I met her.
Bridges: Really?
Hilton: Yeah. Yeah, that was the worst mistake I ever made was running her off.
Bridges: Really?
Hilton: Gorgeous girl. I mean, truly gorgeous. I'm telling you, the best body I've ever seen. She had a body so good she'd be at the swimming pool. She'd be going to the ladies' room, and IâI walked along behind and seen the little boys in a trance walk behind and follow her right into the ladies' room. I mean, she was stunning. Stunning, and not only that, she was a good German hausfrau. Her father was a police First Sergeant.
Bridges: That's like a chief, right?
Hilton: He was enlisted, though, not an officer. That would be the highest enlisted rank â¦. He was a police officer. She had an older sister that had already married a GI, an E-5, so that kind of smoothed the way for me. But, at any rate, she was gorgeous, a fine girl brought up by a police officer, a fine German hausfrau. Kept a spotless house, meals ready, only wanted to do what I wanted to do. And not only that, she had ⦠Her training was as a draftsman. In Germany, they start them at about fifteen into an apprenticeship program where they go to high school half a day and learn a trade, or a vocation the other half. Whether you're going to be a waitress or whatever you're going to be. It's called learner, an apprentice. So her apprenticeship was as a draftsman. It was no computer-assisted drafting back then. None, no CAD.
Howard: Those women hand-drew everything, didn't they?
Hilton: Everything, hand-lettered everything.
Howard: Even on the symbol.
Hilton: Yeah. It's what a draftsman was, so it was a high-paying trade, and it was hard to learn, very demanding and difficult. And, of course, right up a German's alley because it demanded precision.
Howard: I was just thinking that.
Hilton: She came over after I married her. She immediately proceeded to get a job. Leslie Lumber Company. My mother worked there, so that was her in. She got a job working in the Truss Company, drawing trusses. They made trusses to order for buildings, and every one had to be drawn. That kind of thing.
Bridges: So you actually brought her back toâ
Hilton: Yeah. I married her after I'd been going with her a couple of years. I married her shortly before I left for the States so that would put her in line for a visa. American visas were hard to get. Now she was my spouse, you know, an advantage. I left, and she stayed briefly with my parents. Rented a guest-house, on a property on the Biscayne River. A hundred twenty-five a month. Sort of catty-cornered across by my mother and stepfather's house, and about two to three months later she came over. I worked another couple of months until December and quit.
What got me off of that is that I worked fifteen hours a week as a student assistant at the college in the audiovisual department.
Bridges: Right.
Hilton: At that time, mind you, the campus was the largest in the nation. Twenty-seven thousand students in one campus. Their audiovisual department wasn't just a bunch of old sixteen-millimeter projectors. We're talking about production studios, TVs, movie production studios, on-staff artists, on-staff announcers. We could make our own slide presentations and everything with our artists. Announcers could narrate them. We had a closed-circuit TV system in '67.
Howard: Really?
Hilton: Yeah, using the old one of the two-inch tape. We had what we called a “film tray,” where we could project movies into a TV camera and show them over closed circuit. Nobody had that. There was no such thing as a VCR or VTR, then videotape recorder, back then. Totally cutting-edge, and so it was a big operation. Their distribution center, which did every kind of presentation, handled every kind of in-class presentation, from slides to putting a TV set in for closed circuit to actually a movie. We did over two hundred runs a day out of our distribution center. It was a real operation. They'd have about thirty student assistants per shift just working in the distribution center, with two staff members supervising them. I worked as a student assistant for fifteen hours a week. When I graduated, they offered me a staff job, good pay. Good pay, $3.25 an hour. That's like UPS drivers started back then, which is the equivalent of fifteen an hour now.
Bridges: So you went to work there?
Hilton: I worked there in 1970 until late 1971, and they fired me.
Bridges: Why did they fire you?
Hilton: Absenteeism. Taking quaaludes. Like I said, I ran that girl off. You know why?
Bridges: Is that about the time you and her split?
Hilton: Yeah. Within four months after we divorced, I ran her off. I decided here we are, beautiful girl. Made even at that time twenty-five, thirty percent more money than I did even on my good-paying staff job. In other words, she made the equivalent of twenty dollars an hour, okay? Good grief. Well, perfect house, squeaky cleanâyou could eat off the damn floorâmeals ready, worked to boot, gorgeous girl, and, really, only wanted to do what I wanted to do.
And if I didn't want to do anything, she'd, you know ⦠didn't like it, but she would do it. If I wanted to sit around and smoke pot or something, you know, she didn't do any drugs, didn't drink. I was a pothead, of course, by then, and we smoked â¦. We used to smoke on campus. The staff would go into the air-conditioning room and take some student assistants there, and we would go in and smoke. We had a film society where we showed avant-garde films every Thursday night, that kind of thing. The auditorium would be lit. Finally the cops would get wind of it, came in, and busted twenty-seven people. That was the end of the film society. Drugs back than had not been demonized. They were demonized very effectively under Reagan.
Bridges: Right.
Hilton: And he finally got that federal Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 in, which did it for drugs. That was in '86. So you end up with a Jamaican housewife importing a kilo of coke with two other people, and one of them had a firearm in their house, and they was arrested. They add that up ⦠Macon housewife got thirty years, no parole, and is serving it right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's your demon facing drugs right there.
Bridges: You say you got fired from that job for absenteeism because you were taking quaaludes? How many years were you married to her?
Hilton: Summer of '68 to summer of '71.
Bridges: So three years?
Hilton: Uh-huh.
Howard: Did you break it off with her or didâ
Hilton: I ran her off. You know why I ran her off? You know, I'm telling you all these qualities she had â¦. Well, remember this is the cultural revolution. It's really hitting home. By 1970, everyone was, in effect, doing the '60s. You know what I'mâ
Howard: Caught up to everyone?
Hilton: Yeah, you know, it really hit people in California who were doing the '60s in the early '60s. They were taking acid while it was still legal, you know. In '63, â62, â61, you know, and so they were really doing the '60s. The real hippies, and by 1970, now, you know, the masses, including me, were doing the '60s. So I was doing the '60s in the '70s.
Howard: Well, the army took away from that, too, I imagine.
Hilton: Oh yeah. I did a flip from being gung ho to being a liberal. You know, down with the establishment. Anyway, we had the cultural revolution going on, and I was in college, and even though I wasn't on the teaching staff, it was almost as being on staff. Air-conditioning, blue-collar job. Nothing else. It's white shirt and tie, and running a learning center or running a distribution center or this and that, supervising thirty student assistants, that kind of thing. Air-conditioned, intellectual, that kind of academic atmosphere. Right?
Howard: Yeah.
Hilton: And my gripe against her was that she was just empty-headed and didn't have a thought in the world. She was not sophisticated enough and not intellectual enough. You talk about stupid. Women today have too many thoughts. You know what I mean? If you could find a woman that's just simple and plain or “Whatever
you
want, honey, and here's your food, and I got the house clean. I'm good-looking to boot, and I make more money than you.” Well, my God, you see how stupid I am? I'm an idiot. There's a pattern throughout my life of taking good things and just squashing it.
Bridges: Did you ever run around on her while she was working at the college? I mean, all theâ
Hilton: No, I didn't, except at the end.
Bridges: After college, or after yourâ
Hilton: Well, I fell into the clutches of this woman who was eight years older than me. She was from a New York Jewish diamond family. That Fifty-fourth Street diamond family. Diamond folks. That dude has done million-dollar deals with a handshake. They wrap the diamonds in paper. Everyone's got their particular fold, and they hand each other a million bucks in diamonds and shake hands, and that's it. You can't get into it. You got to be born into it and Jewish. Okay?
Howard: What was her name?
Hilton: Paulette. Her maiden name is Paulette Goldman.
Bridges: Paulette Goldman? And she was four years older than you?
Hilton: Eight.
Bridges: Eight years older than you? Okay?
Howard: And it was the Greenwich Village of Florida?
Hilton: Yeah. All that stuff has probably been torn down now and big condos probably put on it. Back then, it was a village. Like Buck-head Village used to be, but only much, much bigger. All kinds of cool, hip people lived there. And, of course, Coral Gables was a very rich placeâand this was right on the boundaryâso they bought her a house, and she'd come to the university by majoring in sociology. She managed to graduate with a bachelor's degree in sociology. I moved in with her. And, boy, you know, that was not a good influence.
Bridges: Really?
Hilton: She's the one that got me started on the downs. I never had a down. We called them downs. Central nervous system depressants. Put it that way. Depress the functioning of your central nervous system.
Bridges: Right.
Hilton: Back then, it was the hypnotics in the form of hydrochloride, which is a quaalude, high risk. And, of course, the barbiturates. Barbiturates were still widely prescribed at that time, just for sleeping pills. We're talking about Amytal, Seconal, Nembutal, and the combination of Seconal and Amytal was Tuinal. It was blue and red. Cats liked that, and they were considered the king. They were very narcotic. Your opium derivative.
Bridges: What was the street name for them back then?
Hilton: Downs.
Bridges: Just downs?
Hilton: Tuinols, or tummies, and then others were called by the colors they were. Reds, blues, and yellows. I wouldn't be surprised if it's impossible to get ahold of a barbiturate these days.
Bridges: Right.
Hilton: Then there were classes of antidepressant and sleeping pills, you know. That was what people said. “Oh, go take a sleeping pill.” That's what they were talking about.
Bridges: Did you classify yourself as a hippie back then?
Hilton: You know, by then, you know what the hippies were? It was just every kind of outlaw street person in the world. Kind of counter-culture.
Bridges: Right.
Hilton: Misfits. And the whole country was awash in them. It was just awash in them.
Howard: That was the thing to be back then. That was the movement coming.
Hilton: Yeah, of course, they, themselves, were wearing a uniform and doing the stuff. Piedmont Park and Peachtree in Atlanta was just awash in them. The whole country was full of just raggedy-ass young people hitchhiking and doing not much of anything. At that time we thought drugs were going to be legal within a few years. The amazing thing to me that I'm always shaking my head over is this great big, huge cultural revolution that we had in the '60s and '70s has almost utterly vanished. It's back to the '50s now. Back in the '60s, that would be a bad thing.
“Get into business and take care of business, Mr. Businessman.” That would be a bad thing to say about someone. And now what does every young person want to do? They're all just, you know, little geeks on, you know, keyboards pecking away, you know. The Bible said, “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Well, I know what he meant, just a fat fuck behind the keyboard. Right? Got ten times more power than me and I'm a stud. I can whip ass left and right. More powerful than me. Fat fuck sitting at a keyboard.
Howard: Sitting at a keyboard.
Hilton: Yeah. I learned to type in the '60s in the army when almost nobody could type unless you were a reporter or a writer, but I won't type now. Shows that I'd never make it on the outside, which is why I'm sitting here doing like and realizing this is the only place for me. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. You could take me to the front door of this jail and say, “Go forth and sin no more.” I would literally have to turn back around and walk back in here. There is nothing out there for me, and you see what my relationship with society as a whole is. I mean, it's only five percent of people that will come forward to knock me, but the other ninety-five percent are going to speak up â¦. “Oh, I know Gary Hilton. He's a great guy.” “I know Hannibal Lecter, you know Hannibal the Cannibal? I know Hannibal Lecter. He's a great guy.” No, they're not going to say a damn thing.
Howard: You'd be surprisedâpeople who come forward and talk pretty good about you, actually.
Hilton: Oh, really?
Howard: Yeah.
Bridges: Getting back on track to the '70s. How long did you stay with ⦠What was her name?
Hilton: Paulette.