At the Hands of a Stranger (32 page)

Agents from the GBI, led by Special Agent Matt Howard, had made a trip to visit Cleo at her home in Florida. She was quite ill at the time they visited her, the day after Hilton had made his plea deal in the murder of Meredith Emerson. Cleo subsequently died of her illness; and Hilton, hearing his mother's voice on tape talking for two hours about him, showed no visible emotion. His constant rocking back and forth, however, became slightly faster. He looked down and made even more of the lip-pursing, sucking mouth movements that he had made continuously throughout the trial. And as the interview progressed, he fidgeted in his chair more than usual. The fidgeting increased as time passed.

In the interview, after telling Cleo that Hilton had entered a plea the previous day, Howard told her that he and the other law enforcement agents who had been involved in the case were trying to learn as much as possible about Hilton to determine what had caused the crime.

“Gary did what he did, and in one case we have a very polite guy most of the agents have a personal relationship with. And on the other hand, we have this incident he did,” Howard explained.

Cleo tended to ramble a bit as she recalled bits of information, and Howard kept her on track as best he could. She was on oxygen at the time, and she told Howard that her memory had been somewhat affected by chemotherapy.

She began by telling the agents that Hilton had been “hiking all over the mountains out West. He sent me lots of pictures.” Howard asked to see the pictures, but Cleo told him she'd had to throw most of them out when she moved years earlier and had no place to keep many of her belongings.

Hilton's father, William Escoe Hilton, was originally from Arab, Alabama. He had never been a part of his son's life. He had another family, Cleo said, and when the double life he was living was exposed, the marriage ended. She and her son were on their own, until she married Nilo Dabag when Gary was nine years old.

The incident with the Murphy bed had happened prior to that, she said; she told the agents about the bed falling on top of him and almost taking off the back of his scalp. “It took over two hundred stitches,” she said, recalling how horrified she had been about the accident.

Gary was a good child who never complained much, his mother said. “He hardly ever cried,” she told the agents. He did well in school, when he wanted to, and he didn't fight or have problems. When he was in the sixth grade, though, he would customarily finish his work early, and then he would disrupt the class with talking and moving around. He went after school to the Boys Club, which Cleo said he enjoyed a lot, and won a sharpshooter award there. He liked playing with little cars throughout his entire childhood, she said, and she told the agents that she had a photo of Hilton taken on the day he joined the army, writing a letter to his girlfriend with some of his little cars around him on his desk.

Nilo Dabag was in the horse business; and after he and Cleo married, Gary enjoyed helping with the horses. But Nilo was jealous of him, she said, and resented her for paying too much attention to her child. He never physically abused the boy, but Cleo said there was a lot of verbal and emotional abuse.

“Nilo had a terrible temper,” she said. As a result, Gary wasn't very demonstrative or affectionate toward his mother.

“Would he tell you he loved you?” Howard asked.

“He wasn't really like that,” Cleo said. “He and I were very close, but I think he was worried about how my husband would act.” Cleo said she had left her husband seven times because of the friction between him and her son. Nilo would yell and break things in front of Gary.

“He was so sensitive,” Cleo said of her son, telling the agents that at one point he had overheard her talking with Nilo about expenses, saying they were going to have to “tighten their belts for a while.” At the end of the week, Gary came to her and handed her all of his lunch money in an attempt to help the family finances.

One incident that Cleo was very reluctant to talk about was the shooting episode when Gary was fourteen years old. Her brother was there, visiting with her, during the videotape session. She didn't want him to know about it. She told the agents she didn't want to talk about the shooting in front of him; so he left the room for a while, allowing her to speak privately.

“I've never talked to anyone about this,” she said. “I don't want [my brother] to get the wrong impression about my son.”

The shooting happened during a time when Cleo and Nilo were separated, she said. When he'd leave, he'd come back later and beg, promise Cleo and Gary all kinds of things about how he'd do better from then on. On one occasion, after a separation, Nilo had come back to the home. Gary had borrowed a gun from a neighbor, unbeknownst to Cleo, and he told Nilo, “Mom doesn't want you here,” and said he was going to shoot him if he didn't leave. Nilo dared him to shoot, and held up a mattress in front of himself. Gary shot him in the lower gut. Following that incident, Gary Hilton went to a juvenile detention center and had psychiatric care.

Cleo expressed a great deal of regret about the incident, because Gary's counselor at the detention center told her that her duty was to her husband. The counselor told her to get Gary a room or an apartment. “I shouldn't have listened,” she said, but she sent him away to stay with the Perchoux family, and she stayed with Nilo.

“I realize now that my duty was to my son,” she said.

When Cleo next left Nilo, she got an apartment, and Gary came back home.

The only girlfriend she could remember her son having was a girl named Sandy, whom Gary had liked a lot throughout high school.

Hilton dropped out of high school only a few weeks from graduation, Cleo said, because he played drums in a band and they were offered a job at a Miami Beach nightclub. Soon he decided to join the army, even though he was only seventeen years old. He was happy to go, his mother said, and a friend joined up at the same time. They left together and went to boot camp together.

After his time in the military, Hilton married for the first time, a girl named Ursula, and they lived in a house behind Cleo and Nilo. Hilton, his wife, and Cleo would go to a cabin in the Keys on weekends when Nilo was out of town, and Cleo said they all enjoyed spending time there. All seemed to be going well, until their divorce.

“He sort of fell to pieces after they separated,” she said; then he moved to Atlanta. “He got a nice apartment there,” Cleo told the agents, “and I'd go up to visit him every few weeks.”

Eventually, Gary married a woman with two children, she said, whom he seemed to like. They were married only a short time; she didn't know why. “He wasn't saying much then.” But she had stopped going up to visit him because he had started using drugs. She never knew whether he had stopped his drug use or not, she said.

One of the last times Cleo had spoken to her son, he had called her from jail after being arrested. At that time, she said, Nilo had fallen for a lottery scam and they'd had to scrape together everything they had to repay the $10,000 it had cost them. When Hilton called, hoping she could bail him out, she told him they were broke and did not have the bail money. Gary called her after he finally got out of jail and asked why she didn't help him. Cleo told him about the fraud and that it had cost them $10,000 to cover it.

“You had ten thousand dollars and didn't come bail me out?” he asked her. Then Hilton hung up the phone, and she never heard anything from him again.

“I didn't know if he was dead or alive. I haven't seen him since '86 or '87.”

Cleo told the agents that she didn't want to say anything that would hurt her son.

“He may have done something wrong, but he's still my son.”

Not even hearing the voice of his deceased mother speaking of her concern and support for him brought any sign of emotion from Hilton. He kept on rocking back and forth in his chair, moving his mouth, and looking down.

The message board reacted to Hilton's mother's interview: Well, that certainly didn't sound like a cold, uncaring mother to me.

She sounded like a good, loving mother, wrote another.

It was becoming clear that the defense was, for all intents and purposes, throwing Cleo Dabag under the proverbial bus. In their effort to save her son's life by putting a great deal of the blame on her for his problems, she was being portrayed as something she clearly was not.

 

The next witness in the courtroom was Nilo Dabag's sister, Maria, who had been brought up from Argentina by the defense to testify about Hilton's childhood. She was accompanied to the witness stand by a translator, who interpreted the questions and answers for her. Maria Dabag was a stern-appearing, very serious woman who took a no-nonsense approach to her testimony.

Maria knew Hilton when she visited her brother and Cleo, she said. She lived with them for a time when Gary was sixteen, she stated. She prepared food for him and did things for him, and she called him “a very grateful child.”

“Nilo had a very strong personality, very aggressive,” she said. “He was very dry, and he didn't associate with the boy much,” Maria said. “The boy bothered him.”

When asked about Hilton's mother, Maria said, “I never saw Cleo show love for him, hug him, kiss him, show any affection. No, she was very cold. She chose Nilo over him. She was selfish and cold. The boy grew up alone.”

When Willie Meggs cross-examined Maria, he asked her how long she had stayed with her brother's family, and she said she stayed for around three months the first time she visited them. From that time on, she visited nearly every year.

SA Meggs pointed out to the jury that Hilton was not living at home during the time Maria had said she made her first trip to her brother's home.

 

When the next witness was called, Hilton smiled and looked around to greet Sandy, his high-school girlfriend, as she came to the stand. Sandra Carr said that the Gary Hilton she knew had been funny, outgoing, and smart; although he was an underachiever for someone with his intelligence and ability. She said that he had taught himself the drums and she thought he played very well.

“He was there for me when I needed him,” she said. “I had problems with one of my parents, and he came and got me and helped me get to a safe place.”

Sandra said that when Gary was fourteen, there had been an altercation between him and Nilo.

“After that, he went to foster care. He seemed more relaxed then.”

Hilton came to see her before he went into the army, she said, “and after that, I never saw him again.”

Sandy, the girl Hilton had been so fond of as a teenager, looked over at him for the first time as her testimony ended, and gave him a small smile.

 

Next up for the defense was Roy Cave, from Hillsboro, Oregon, Hilton's high-school friend who was a fellow band member in the Majestics.

“We played at parties and nightclubs,” Cave said. “I thought we were pretty good.”

Like most bands of that type, Cave said, they broke up many times. When Hilton went into the army, so did Cave. They went together and stayed together through boot camp. Then they were separated, and Cave said he saw Hilton once more in Germany in 1966.

On cross-examination SA Meggs had only two questions for Cave: “Were you ever in a combat situation? Did your training cause you to have any kind of ‘rage against society'?”

“No,” said Cave.

When Cave left the stand, Hilton smiled at him, turning to watch his old friend walk by on his way out of the courtroom.

 

The next witness brought the most reaction from Hilton that he had shown at any point during the trial. When Stefanie Durham, of Jacksonville, Florida, came into the courtroom, Hilton grinned widely at her. She looked back at him with obvious affection. Stefanie had been thirteen years old when her mother and Hilton lived together for two years.

“He was absolutely like a father figure to me,” she said, “making sure I ate, got to where I needed to go, helped me with my homework.” She said Hilton had given her medicine when she was sick, had taken her to basketball games, and described him as “giving, caring, eccentric, fun, funny, and outgoing.”

Stefanie's feelings for Hilton were very positive, and so was her testimony. She repeatedly stressed that he “absolutely” was good, kind, loving, and caring to her during the time he and her mother were together, and she glanced at him repeatedly during her testimony.

When Meggs cross-examined her, he asked her if she was familiar with an arson case that Hilton had been charged with during the time she knew him, and she answered, “No.”

The jury had a question for Stefanie. They wanted to know how her mother and Hilton had met, but Stefanie said she didn't know.

As she left the stand, she and Hilton smiled at each other. Then, later in the trial, she was seated directly behind him and spoke with the defense attorneys at length during the next break.

 

After Stefanie Durham's testimony the next interview was a taped statement made on the phone by a Duluth, Georgia, police officer who was unable to be present in court because he was waiting to be deployed to Afghanistan. It concerned an incident that occurred on February 25, 2006, when the officer received a call concerning a suspicious person at the Riverbrooke tennis courts, in one of Duluth's better neighborhoods. When he arrived, he said, Hilton was there with his dog in a white van. Hilton seemed “agitated, confused, out of it,” and the police officer said Gary appeared “unstable.”

Next up was James Scott Gillespie, of Marietta, Georgia, who said that he had been at the Copper's Creek trout fishing area on Thursday, June 7, 2007, with a group of people. They came into contact with Hilton when they walked into his camp and saw him sitting on a rock, slumped over, sharpening a knife. He was rocking back and forth, Gillespie said, muttering to his dog, and he never spoke to them.