At the Hands of a Stranger (28 page)

The jury inspected the items, passing them around so everyone could get a close look. A ceiling compartment from the van suspected of having bloodstains also had been collected, along with twenty-five swabs of blood from the inside of the van. And while the jury took an afternoon break, the prosecution and defense both spent the time looking through the piles of evidence bags and boxes, planning their next moves.

 

When the jury returned from their break, FDLE Crime Lab fingerprint analyst Marvin Lee Stephens was sworn in. Stephens told the court he had been with the FDLE for thirty-three years, was a senior analyst, and had been trained by the FBI as an expert in latent prints. Stephens went into detail explaining to the jury about latent fingerprinting, and told them the many factors that make latent fingerprints sometimes very hard to find. Such things as dry hands, calluses, surface on which the prints may be, and the type and amount of weather they had been exposed to can keep prints from being useable. Regarding the thousands of items he had fingerprinted for the case, he was unable to locate any prints for Cheryl Dunlap because he had nothing for comparison. He tested some items from the Dunlap home, but could not find enough good prints to have a complete set. Because of exposure to the weather, none of the items from the Joe Thomas Road campsite had any prints at all. Hilton's van was tested for prints, but because of lack of fingerprint standards for Cheryl Dunlap, he was unable to identify any of the prints as hers. Her Camry didn't have any of Hilton's fingerprints, and on cross-examination by the defense, Stephens also said he could not find prints on any of the chains, dog food cans, duct tape, or paper items from the Georgia Dumpster.

Next on the stand was GBI agent Clay Bridges. Suber immediately called for a mistrial because two of the jury members knew something had happened involving Gary Hilton in Georgia, and now, Suber said, the rest would also know.

Hankinson was clearly irritated because of Suber's request, and denied a mistrial, but the judge gave Bridges and all others in the courtroom a loud warning to “Stay away from [Hilton's] rights!” and not disclose that Hilton had been involved in any other crimes.

Hilton had told him he lost the bayonet on a hiking trail in Georgia, Bridges said, without mentioning any more about why Hilton had been talking to him about the bayonet. He then said that he had asked another officer, Mark Cecci, an investigator with the Union County, Georgia, Sheriff's Office, to go and find the bayonet, which he did.

Cecci was then called to the stand and identified the bayonet in the courtroom as the one he had found. It and the photos taken of it at the site were allowed into evidence.

When FDLE Crime Lab firearm and tool mark specialist Jeff Foggy testified, he concluded that he had tested sections of Cheryl Dunlap's tire to try and determine what type of tool had slashed the tire. He had no tool to compare it to, and chose a bayonet because of how the tool had entered, and then left, the tire. He testified that his testing showed a bayonet-type tool had been used on the tire, and he told law enforcement that was what they should be looking for.

When the bayonet that was recovered from Georgia arrived at the lab, he used it to cut into a test tire, compared the results, and determined that the bayonet found by Cecci in Georgia had made the cut in the tire. Foggy also said the lab had been sent vertebrae bones to be tested, but the tool marks on the bones were insufficient to identify what type of tool had made them.

On cross-examination Suber challenged Foggy's abilities because of his inexperience. She told the court Foggy had only been
training
in the tool mark testing of non-firearms. Foggy told the court this was true. This was the first case he had testified in that involved a bayonet. However, he said, the marks were very sufficient for identification and he was sure of his conclusion.

When court was called to order the following morning, Judge Hankinson told the jurors that the prosecution expected to finish calling their witnesses by the end of the day, and the defense would probably begin presenting their case on Monday, February 14. They might begin their deliberations, he said, by as early as Tuesday afternoon.

The first witness, LCSO sergeant David Graham, was one of the officers who went to Georgia to get DNA swabs from Hilton in February 2008. The jury would now get to hear the recording of a very one-sided conversation—almost a monologue—that was made during the time Graham spent with Hilton that day.

Hilton started by asking Graham about the weather in Tallahassee, saying old folks like him liked it “because it's real flat,” and calling it “God's country.” He then jumped to the Georgia/Florida/Alabama water controversy, accusing Georgia of taking up all of Florida's water, and said how “greedy pigs,” real estate developers in the Atlanta area, were engaged in excessive building.

Hilton then moved on to talk about the charges against him in Florida, telling Graham, “If they want to do immunity for me, I will be happy to give a full and complete statement.” He also said that he had committed no other crimes prior to September 2007: “Nothing before that. I started hunting in September.”

Graham said he was also one of the deputies that brought Hilton back to Florida after his extradition in June 2008. At that time the officers had been instructed not to engage Hilton in conversation or ask him any questions. Gary Hilton was only too happy to do most of the talking himself on the four-and-a-half-hour trip. He told the officers, “I'm not all bad, as I'm sure you can see. I'm a fucking genius, as I'm sure you can see. I'm not all bad.”

According to Graham, Hilton said at one point that he was a “sociopath character” who “got old and sick and couldn't make a living,” and went “into a rage against society.”

“I just lost, flat lost my fucking mind for a while, man. I couldn't get a grip on it,” he said.

When talking about his military experience, Hilton said his trainer in bayonet fighting had taught the recruits how to kill, saying that there were only two kinds of bayonet fighters, “good ones and dead ones.”

Since the prosecution had played only about six minutes of the conversation, Suber asked what else Hilton had talked about during the ride. He had run the gamut from one topic to another with lightning speed, Graham said, including gas prices, the Vietnam War, the housing crisis, the atomic bomb, marriage, Hurricane Katrina, credit card debt, volcanoes, interest rates, earthquakes, the Kennedy assassination, politics, and much more.

 

When the defense was finished questioning Graham, and the prosecution called their next witness to the stand, it set off a heated set of objections from Ines Suber. The jury was sent from the courtroom.

Caleb Wynn, a former Leon County Jail corrections officer, was not listed as a witness, Suber said, and also claimed it was done “deliberately and calculatedly” by the prosecution. Furthermore, she said, they had done the same thing earlier, with another witness.

Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman told the judge that Wynn's testimony had been mentioned in opening statements. He had been spoken of during jury selection, and Cappleman claimed that Hilton's attorneys had scheduled Wynn for a deposition the previous week, but then had called it off.

Suber claimed Wynn's deposition was canceled because she had not had time to check to see if Wynn had a prior record. This comment brought many indignant responses on the message board, where a relative of Wynn's posted: She has to know he doesn't have any sort of record at all, or he wouldn't be in law enforcement!

Suber also contended that she had requested records about the jail's intercom system's maintenance, which she had not received, and needed time to depose Wynn about that, too.

Hankinson chided the prosecution, ruling that they had indeed violated discovery rules but hadn't made any effort to hide Wynn or his testimony, having given Wynn's report to the defense several months earlier. Suber would be allowed twenty minutes to question Wynn. In the meantime the judge wanted to hear for himself what Wynn had to say before the jury was brought back into the courtroom.

On August 21, 2008, Caleb Wynn had been on duty in the jail and was monitoring activity in the cells through the intercom system, which was done regularly. He heard Gary Hilton talking to another inmate, Fred Summers, saying that if the state would give him life, he'd “tell them where the head was.”

“Did Mr. Hilton say anything about whether he has any regrets about killing Cheryl Dunlap?” asked Cappleman.

“Yes, ma'am,” Wynn said.

“What did he say?” Cappleman asked.

“He said that the only thing he regretted is getting caught. If he had a second chance, he'd do it right. He said he kicks himself in the ass every day for it,” Wynn told her.

Wynn also heard Hilton say he was “very selective” in choosing a victim. He told the other inmate that Cheryl was a Sunday school teacher and “plenty of guys would have wanted her.” When the inmate asked Hilton what it was like to kill, and if it was a “rush,” Hilton told him it was more like being in the military, when you went in and destroyed the whole village.

After hearing what Wynn would be testifying to, Judge Hankinson denied the exclusion of Wynn's testimony, but he ruled that he would not allow Hilton's comment about being “selective,” because it could imply that there had been other victims besides Cheryl.

After the defense team interviewed Wynn, they claimed that he couldn't say if Hilton's comments about getting caught and telling law enforcement the location of the head were referring to Cheryl Dunlap or Meredith Emerson.

Wynn took the stand, however, and the jury was brought back into the courtroom to hear the same testimony that Hankinson had heard, with the exception of Hilton's comment about being selective.

 

When court resumed after the lunch break, Suber moved for a mistrial on the grounds that the jury was contaminated because they knew Hilton had committed a crime in Georgia and had been arrested for it.

The judge denied her motion, and the state called their final witness, who would also be the person who would provide the most damning evidence of the entire trial: proof that directly linked Gary Hilton and Cheryl Dunlap by unshakeable DNA and blood evidence from many of the over 750 items tested for the case.

Jo Ellen Brown was introduced to the jury as an FDLE Crime Lab analyst specializing in bodily fluid DNA analysis and population statistics. Brown was careful to present her findings and to answer questions in a way that was easy for the jurors to follow, despite the technical complexity of DNA analysis. Her testimony was unimpeachable, and her findings were solid and conclusive proof that Cheryl Dunlap had been in Hilton's van and at his campsites.

The witness told the jury that she had been able to make a standard set of DNA from Cheryl Dunlap by comparing findings from Cheryl's toothbrush to those from a sample of muscle tissue taken from Cheryl's thigh. In Hilton's case she developed a full DNA profile from swabs from the inside of his cheek. On the items tested, she said, she was primarily looking for blood in order to extract DNA and try to determine whose it was.

Swabs from Dunlap's car were taken on the steering wheel and driver's-side control panel. They were Dunlap's DNA, primarily, but there was a minimal amount from a man—not enough to identify, however. A cigarette filter from the L. L. Wallace Road campsite was tested, along with pieces of plastic sheeting and paper towels. All tested positive for blood, but there was no DNA to be found because the items had been out in the weather, which degraded DNA.

The Joe Thomas Road campsite included some broken glass with unidentified female DNA, but no blood. A butt from a hand-rolled cigarette had partial DNA from Hilton, but the bayonet, too, had been left out in the weather. Although Brown had found blood, there was no useable DNA.

There were many items from the QuikTrip Dumpster that showed a mixture of DNA from two or more people, with Hilton included as one of them. The fingerless gloves and eight different areas on the hiking boots carried such DNA mixtures of Hilton and another person. After testing the blood found on the boot strings, Brown found a mixture of three people, with Cheryl Dunlap being the major contributor. A mixture of DNA from Hilton and Cheryl was on a black duffel bag.

Brown spent a great deal of the afternoon on the stand while jurors heard her testimony and passed around the items she described, looking at them while she gave her findings. They heard that several items showed indications of blood, but DNA could not be extracted. Those items included yellow overalls, a green-and-purple hat, a lime-green-and-white string from Hilton's van. Items that tested positive for both blood and DNA that matched Hilton's were a pink jacket, purple pants, a teal shirt, and three pairs of teal pants. A blue sleeping bag revealed blood, which was tested in nine different areas of the bag. At least two sets of DNA belonged to Hilton, with the other primary contributor being Cheryl Dunlap, and a purple sleeping bag contained blood and a mixture of DNA, one possibly being Cheryl's.

The analyst testified that when she was testing the black backpack, on which she found blood, she also found several items in the pack, which were plant material, a rubber band, masking tape, a stick, and a bead. The bead, which matched the others found in Cheryl Dunlap's car and at the fire pit, was entered into evidence.

Brown's final test results were on swabs from Cheryl Dunlap's thighs. She found foreign DNA, which she said was very degraded due to the length of time that had passed from the time of death to the time Cheryl's body was discovered. However, the foreign DNA, she said, was a possible match to Hilton's.

When Brown was excused from the stand, after a long and extremely well-presented testimony, Judge Hankinson turned to Georgia Cappleman and said, “You may call your next witness.”

“Your Honor,” Cappleman told him, “the state rests.”