At the Hands of a Stranger (2 page)

After he got to his feet, he managed to hit her in the face several times with his right fist. It felt like he had broken several of his fingers. But the woman kept fighting, until he found a heavy limb on the ground and smashed it against her face. The woman went limp and the killer felt a thrill of triumph because he finally had subdued her.

Emerson groaned and ceased to struggle. Hilton held her down for a few minutes and continued talking. He assured her that he had no intention of hurting her. All he wanted was her identification, ATM bank card, and PIN code. And then he heard hikers on the main trail and squatted down, partly behind a tree, to hide from them. They passed without saying anything, and Hilton hoped they had not seen him. If they had, perhaps they thought he was having a bowel movement.

When he believed Emerson could resist no more, he tied a rope in a slipknot around her neck and told her to walk ahead of him onto a contour trail, where they would be less likely to meet anyone. It was a trail that couldn't be seen by anyone from the Byron Herbert Reece Trail. The woman didn't scream or yell, but suddenly she turned again and attacked. The force of her body hitting him sent both tumbling out of control down another ravine. He managed to hold on to the limb after they stopped rolling, but Emerson avoided his first swing at her and kicked him. The fight lasted for several minutes. The killer wished that he had not chosen this woman because she was strong, fast, brave, and seemed to have training in martial arts. He repeatedly clubbed her head until she could fight no more and then dragged her down the mountain, where he used black plastic zip ties to fasten her to a tree. Emerson was not unconscious, but there was a lump on her forehead, her nose looked broken, and both of her eyes were black and swollen almost shut.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” Hilton said. “Stop fighting and be quiet or you
will
get hurt. Listen, honey, I ain't going to spend my life in prison, so you better be quiet. I've got a gun and I'll shoot your ass.”

Hilton was the professional soldier again, in control, showing what he called his command presence. “You wait here and I'll be back. I have to get something.”

He wanted to clean up the crime scene where he had first attacked the girl. He needed to retrieve the knife, bayonet, water bottle, scraps of clothing, the girl's dog leash, and anything else that could tie him to the crime scene. The baton was the killer's favorite weapon, and he knew where it had fallen. However, there was nothing at the crime scene when he arrived. He assumed that one of the hikers he had seen had found everything and would report suspicious behavior to the authorities. That was a stroke of really bad luck.

Now he had to hurry to get out of the park because the woman had fought so long that he was afraid a park ranger would find his van, which was supposed to be out of the park by nightfall. He needed to load the woman into the van and get away from Vogel Park fast.

“Hon, we got to get out of here,” he told Emerson. “This place is gonna be crawling with cops. Give me the keys to your car.”

She told him the keys were in her fanny pack. He got them. “What kind of car is it?”

“A white Chevrolet Caprice.”

“Where's your purse?”

“Under the driver's seat.”

It was dusk when he approached his van, which was half filled with sleeping bags, shoes, socks, toiletries, a small cooking stove, pornographic magazines, and a cooking kit. A heavy metal chain, about eight feet long, lay across a pile of cargo bags. One end was locked to a steel seat support, secured with a padlock. There was also a padlock on the other end. Another chain, four feet long, was padlocked to a different seat support; and a nylon rope, about five feet long, was tied with a series of square knots to a metal eyelet welded on the floorboard. Hilton drove the van and parked it so that the sliding side door was next to Emerson's car; then he returned to where she was secured to a tree.

The young woman saw him approaching and said, “No. No.”

He leaned close.

“Honey, don't worry,” he said. “I'm not going to hurt you. I just want your credit cards and PIN numbers. But if you try to run away, I'll shoot your ass down. If I was going to hurt you, I'd have already hurt you. Understand, hon?”

The girl didn't answer but offered no resistance as he grabbed one end of the rope with a slipknot noose around her neck and cut the straps that held her to the tree. He marched her like a dog down a steep ravine, following behind her. She stumbled and fell once and moaned, but she did not yell. Ella, Emerson's dog, was frightened and confused as she trotted next to her owner. The sun had dropped below the horizon and it was getting cold, so Hilton put one of his extra jackets around the girl's shoulders and led her up a steep ravine. They waded across a creek, climbed down a boulder field, and walked several yards through thick brush in the direction of where he had parked his van next to her car.

He asked about her purse with the credit cards and she told him again that it was beneath the driver's seat. Hilton kept a tight grip on the leash around Emerson's neck and continually warned her to keep quiet or he would kill her. Emerson had made a lot of noise during their struggle; he feared an army of cops would be arriving any minute.

Just a few yards inside the woods, but near the parking lot, Hilton strapped Emerson to another tree outside of view. He took Emerson's car keys from her fanny pack and slid the side door of his van open. The purse was beneath the passenger seat. He thought the woman was brain-dead for trying such a stupid trick by trying to fool him by saying it was under the driver's seat. Did she think he wouldn't look there? Dumb. Going back to the tree, he cut the straps free and led her to the vehicles and told her to get into his van. Ella followed along uneasily, obviously afraid of Hilton.

“Get in,” Hilton ordered.

“No,” Emerson said, resisting. “They told me never to get into a vehicle.”

“Get in, bitch!” He shoved her inside and pointed to several cargo bags. “Lie down on those.”

The young woman did as she was told. Hilton looped the longer chain around her neck so that she could not slip her head out of it. He secured it with two padlocks. He tied a rope from an eyelet on the floorboard around her ankle and secured it with seven square knots, one on top of the other. She could untie the square knots, he knew, but it would take a long time to undo so many. He would hear her before she got loose. Even if she untied her ankle, she wasn't going anywhere with the chain around her neck. Emerson lay on her side, trussed in heavy chains like a piece of equipment.

Ella was nervous and ran in circles outside the van, barking and whining, but not threatening him. Hilton didn't want the dog to be found running loose, because someone might know to whom it belonged. Worse, the dog might have an identification microchip embedded beneath its skin. Just one more problem for him. He forced the dog into Emerson's car and closed the doors.

“No!” the woman said. “You can't leave her like that. She'll die.”

Disregarding the woman's protests, the killer drove away and headed north on Highway 129, moving toward Blairsville, about fifty miles away. Emerson continued to worry about the dog and begged Hilton not to leave Ella in the car to freeze to death. A few miles down the road, he began to be concerned that the woman's aggravation might cause her to start making more trouble for him. He wanted her to be nice and compliant. He was amazed at how quickly
they
always became compliant: unaware that in his observations he had used the plural “they” instead of the singular “she.”

“You want me to turn around and go back to get your damn dog?” he asked.

“Yes. Please.”

He turned the van around, drove back to the park, took Ella from the car, and put her inside the van. The dog immediately lay down beside the girl and started to lick her face. Hilton thought he had once more demonstrated his professionalism. The dog's presence helped keep his prisoner quiet, and his decision to go back and get it would make the woman think he was kind. It was important for her to think of him as just a harmless guy with a couple of screws loose who wouldn't really hurt her. He wanted her to see him as quirky, intelligent, intuitive, well-read, and essentially a decent human being who cared about her. Hilton talked nonstop as he drove toward Blairsville and asked about her job and hobbies. He complimented her combat skills. He learned that she studied judo and karate and held a green belt in judo and a brown belt in karate. That meant she was fairly advanced in karate. No wonder she almost kicked his ass.

He had determined that her name was Meredith Hope Emerson, but he never used it. He called her “hon,” “honey,” “bitch,” or “cunt.” It was unprofessional to form an attachment to her; he had to think of her as just a faceless person whom he was going to kill. That was easy because he hated people. At the very gut level, he was filled with rage against society, especially women, because they tried to turn a man into a domestic faggot. A man was meant to be wild and free, not sit at home in a house with frilly curtains and cute little whatnots. A man might protest against this by having a few manly tools in the garage to fool him into thinking he was still a man, but he was really a neutered faggot.

Women controlled men because they had the pussy and knew how much men valued it. Women could threaten to withhold it, which increased the pussy's value. They could threaten to give it to someone else, and that increased its value, too. The only time the pussy lost value was when women threatened to give it away and actually did. Males were safe when they were kids; but when puberty kicked in, they were trapped and led around the rest of their lives by the pussy.

Hilton pulled the van to a stop opposite a convenience store and warned Emerson to be quiet. He pumped thirty dollars of gasoline into his van. He was down to ten bucks now. Then he drove to the Appalachian Community Bank in Blairsville and checked the surroundings. Inside Emerson's purse he had found not just one ATM card, but three: Frontier Visa, Capital One Visa, and MasterCard. He had struck the mother lode. There were just enough people on the street, for him not to arouse suspicion at the ATM. This was the tricky part. You couldn't try to get money when there were
too few
people or
too many
people because, either way, you stood out. You couldn't go when it was too dark or some dickhead cop would drive by the ATM and become suspicious. The fuckers were born suspicious.

Holding a towel in front of his face, he walked over, inserted a card in the ATM, and punched the PIN code that Emerson had given to him. The ATM rejected the PIN and spit out the card, but no money. Growing increasingly frustrated, Hilton tried two more cards; they were rejected, too.

He walked angrily to the van. “Them's the wrong numbers. You better give me the right ones.”

Emerson insisted that the PINs were correct. He tried again but received no money. Emerson suggested that he try another bank, so he drove to Gainesville, twenty-three miles away, and then another forty-two miles to Canton. He tried the cards at different banks. Still, no money. Emerson gave him different numbers and convinced him each time that she was telling the truth. The killer was nervous because of the television security cameras that recorded activities at ATMs. He concealed his face with a towel and a mask made of duct tape and goggles, but that was even more suspicious.

It became too late to try the ATMs without attracting a cop, if one should drive by on patrol. It had also turned bitterly cold. He returned to the van. Hilton was also feeling weak, like he was going to crash, physically, as if he couldn't keep going. His damn multiple sclerosis. He would crash and then the demons would come; and hours later he would find himself with shredded tires, wondering what the hell he had been doing all that time. The demons. Death chasing him since he was four.

“You're running me around like a fucking idiot,” he said. “Keep this up and I'll shoot your ass. Make one sound and it's curtains.”

Hilton laughed bitterly at himself. The woman had him running back and forth like a trained monkey. He knew she was lying about the PINs, but the eternal optimist, he just kept going. Finally he was exhausted, and it had become too risky that he would be spotted with a towel in front of his face. He needed to find a campsite somewhere in a remote area. He thought of some higher elevations in Dawson Forest. The problem with that was the ground had frozen and snow was coming in; it would be heavier at higher altitudes and accumulating rapidly on the ground. He didn't want to have a wreck or get stuck in a snowbank.

Two inches of ice and snow were already on the road, and Hilton's tires had little, if any, treads. He almost lost control several times. The snow slashed parallel through the twin beams of the headlights, and the wipers labored to keep two half-moons of the windshield clear of slush. It was nerve-wracking in the dark, and then there was a heart-stopping incident.

Hilton's van was sliding out of control as he drove around a curve. In the stabbing beams of the headlights, he saw that another car was stalled on the shoulder. Worse, there was a sheriff's patrol car beside it, with the blue lights flashing. Hilton's van continued to struggle up the hill as he fought panic and weighed the situation. The cop was only a few feet away and his attention was riveted on the car that had slid off the road. Emerson was quiet and didn't seem to know what was happening. If she started to make a ruckus, though, the cop might hear her and make Hilton stop the van. The van's windows were black and opaque from the outside, but you could still see in from the outside of the windshield.

Hilton struggled to maintain control of his emotions—and the vehicle—and he knew conditions would only be worse at higher elevations. The deputy would more than likely stop him, put up a roadblock, and tell him not to go up any higher. If he didn't turn around and start back down, Hilton believed, the cop would stop him and tell him he was nuts. And he might see or hear Emerson in the van. He had no choice except to turn around and go down the hill and hope the cop didn't interfere with him.