At the Hands of a Stranger (5 page)

“You better not be lying to me, cunt,” he said in his strange, chilling voice. “I'll shoot your ass.”

The abductor looked mean and angry, and he had cold blue eyes with small pupils, which made him appear sinister. The eyes were colder than icicles and his face was frozen in an expression that was both menacing and without pity. How much longer could she keep him running from ATM to ATM before he decided to go ahead and do whatever he intended to do with her?

 

The Blood Mountain hiking area swarmed with an unprecedented number of people trying to find Meredith Emerson. Officials for more than a dozen federal, state, county, and city agencies—aided by scores of volunteers—looked for anything that might lead to Emerson's whereabouts. Although it was only a day after Emerson had been reported missing, word of mouth and a short newspaper notice had spread the news like wildfire.

Police departments throughout northern Georgia were being flooded by calls from people telephoning to report seeing Emerson, an older man, and two dogs matching Dandy and Ella on Blood Mountain.

Adam Linke told Special Agent Casey Smith that sometime between 1:45 and 2:00
P.M
. that he and his father-in-law, Dr. James Frazier, encountered a hiker named Seth Blankenship, who passed them on the trail going up Blood Mountain. Blankenship was walking a dog, and Linke had two dogs on leashes. After he passed the two hikers, Blankenship talked briefly with an older man wearing a yellow jacket with black stripes, fingerless gloves, and a knit hat. The man had moved about thirty feet off the trail and an Irish setter trotted beside him.

“Is your dog friendly?” Blankenship asked.

The man said that he was.

Blankenship stopped to pet the dog. “What's his name?”

“Dandy.”

Blankenship, a former Florida police officer, noticed that the man carried an Armament Systems and Procedures (ASP) police baton at his side. He asked the man if Emerson, who was about thirty feet ahead of him, was hiking with him. The man said they weren't together, but that he had moved off to the side of the trail to let some other hikers pass.

Around 2:30
P.M
., Linke and Frazier met Emerson, who was heading back down the mountain. An unleashed black retriever frolicked around her, tail wagging. The three hikers stopped and chatted for a few minutes while their dogs played together. Emerson wore a baby blue fleece jacket with black shoulders and black pants, with no pockets in the back. Linke described Emerson as being “very chipper and happy.”

As they continued up the trail, Linke and Frazier met an older man in a yellow jacket with bold black stripes. The man was about twenty-five feet behind Emerson. When he saw Linke and Frazier, he immediately moved twenty feet farther off the trail, as if to avoid a close encounter. The man wandered off the trail and into the woods, still going downhill, but out of their line of vision. They noted, however, that the older hiker could still see Emerson from his vantage point. The other hikers thought it was strange, but they continued on to the summit and spent a few minutes exploring the Rock House, a shelter on top of the mountain, and chatting with Blankenship.

Blankenship started back down the trail, ten or fifteen minutes before Frazier and Linke began their descent. They met at the last creek that the trail crosses on the way down Blood Mountain. Blankenship was concerned because of some unusual items he had found at a switchback trail that split from the main trail: a dog's leather leash, an expandable baton made by ASP, a plastic bag of dog treats, a hair barrette, and two Eddie Bauer water bottles. Blankenship recognized the baton as the one the older hiker wearing the yellow jacket had carried at his side.

“Something's not right,” he said.

At the bottom of the trail, the three men put the items down and Blankenship expanded the baton to examine it. He didn't see anything to make him think it had been recently used. Two women and a boy came down about five minutes later. They told Blankenship they saw the man in the yellow coat farther up the trail, but off into the woods. They agreed to show Blankenship where they had seen the man. It was about fifty feet from where Blankenship had found the baton and other items.

The three hikers left to drop the items Blankenship had found off at a store on Neel's Gap, while he, still feeling that something was wrong, decided to walk back up the trail and look around. He met Frazier and Linke again and asked about the older hiker. Both saw him and remembered him well because he had such “unusual eyes.” Before leaving the park, Blankenship entered the Neel's Gap Store, gave his name and telephone number to the clerk, in case the police needed it, and then went home about 4:45
P.M
.

Linke told a police officer that on his way back down the trail he had heard people yelling. He had expected to come upon some playing children, but they met no one else on the trail.

By the end of the day, police had consistent descriptions of the man who might have abducted Meredith Emerson. Perhaps the best one was from Nancy Linkes. Linkes told police she saw him when coming down from the summit on Reece Trail between three and four o'clock. He passed by her before going off into the woods to take a shortcut that put him farther ahead of her on the same trail.

According to Linkes, he had a black backpack and a dog named Dandy. He wore “parachute” pants and had duct tape around each shoe. She remembered seeing something black tied to his legs.

“He had light blue eyes and he looked weathered, like he had been in the sun a lot, old and wrinkly,” she said. “He had very large, deep-set eyes, and was creepy-looking. The dog wasn't on a leash. He was saying how disgusted he was with how people came on the trail [and] were not prepared. They could get hurt easily, and he said I should have a sleeping bag with me …. When he went off the trail, the man complained about some hikers wearing shorts, and he was angry because they could step off the road and get hypothermia in minutes.”

Jason Hill, who was hiking with his wife and little girl, saw the man on Blood Mountain and “he gave me the creeps. He was mumbling something and kept looking at my little girl at the very peak of the mountain. I thought the man was crazy. He was leering at women and would not look at me. He just looked at little girls and women. He was a freak.”

That night, while Hilton was frantically deciding his next move, two specially trained police teams were still searching trails on Blood Mountain. Hilton was getting ever more tired and jittery and “felt the demons descending” on him. With each second that passed, the situation became more perilous for Meredith Emerson.

Less than three months before Meredith Emerson went missing on January 1, 2008, two gruesome murders had occurred in Florida and in North Carolina. Another North Carolina hiker was missing and presumed dead. None of the police organizations in the different locations knew about the others, and none had a suspect.

The first to go missing were John Bryant and his wife, Irene, who hiked rigorous trails in North Carolina when many of their contemporaries were content to settle down and take things easy. John was seventy-nine years old and in robust health, except for painful arthritis in his back, which he refused to let change his activities. Irene, his wife for fifty-eight years, was a fascinating former veterinarian of eighty-four, with sparkle, verve, and insatiable curiosity.

They were both born in the Pacific Northwest and lived in Montana. Irene and John met there. Since they were both avid outdoors people, their dates were often hikes in the mountains. The first member of her family to attend college, Irene earned a doctorate from Washington State University (WSU) in veterinary medicine. She opened a clinic for large animals. Irene was the first female large-animal veterinarian in Montana, crashing the glass ceiling before most people had a name for it.

After a few years in Montana, the Bryants moved to the Finger Lakes district in Upstate New York, one of the most scenic areas in the Northeast. John was an engineer who worked on the Saint Lawrence Seaway while he earned a law degree at Cornell. After he passed the bar, he opened a practice in Syracuse. He served as the town attorney for Skaneateles, population 7,500, where they lived. He always underbilled for his services. Colleagues urged him to charge more. He told them that some people serve as volunteer firemen; this was his way of giving back to his community. Irene owned a large-animal clinic in New York, but she closed it to become a full-time mother to her daughter, Holly, and two sons. A woman with insatiable curiosity, Irene also took graduate courses in such things as psychology, forestry, and ichthyology.

The Bryants never lost their thirst for adventure and visiting new places. They traveled all over the United States and to various places around the world. They sent friends Christmas cards from their world travels, usually featuring photos of them posing in their hiking gear on the summit of a mountain. When they decided to retire, they still felt the call of the wild and moved to Horse Shoe, North Carolina, a small town near Pisgah National Forest, a place of steep climbs, wild rivers, and a variety of deciduous and coniferous trees. Wildlife was abundant.

Doctors told John that he should cut back on hiking because of the arthritis in his back, but John had other ideas. Hiking was his life. Instead of giving up, he took two years and conquered the Appalachian Trail in successive hikes; each one lasted about a week.

During retirement they hiked two or three times a week in Pisgah Forest, often choosing trails that were too difficult for inexperienced hikers to tackle. They roamed among the four-thousand-foot mountains, which were as colorful as a Claude Monet painting. The couple still enjoyed traveling and kept two full bags packed so they could take off at a moment's notice—should they find a special rate on a trip they couldn't resist.

On October 21, 2007, they decided to go for a hike in Pisgah Forest. They told friends and family and said they would call regularly so everyone would know they were fine. But something terrible happened near the Cradle of Forestry and Pink Beds in Transylvania County, near Brevard, North Carolina. There was a 911 emergency call from their cell phone, and it was abruptly disconnected. The call never reached the emergency dispatch office. No one even knew about the telephone call at the time, because there was no reason for anyone to worry about the Bryants, who were careful and experienced hikers.

And then the newspapers started to pile up in front of their house. Neighbors watched with growing alarm and telephoned Bob Bryant, their son, who lived in Austin, Texas. Bob telephoned his mother's sister, who usually talked with his mother once a week, and she had not heard from Irene Bryant, either. Bob caught the first flight he could from Austin and broke into his parents' locked house. Nothing seemed to be out of place, but the hiking gear was gone. Bob Bryant telephoned the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office (FCSO) and reported that his parents had not been seen in two weeks.

The sheriff's deputies found the Bryants' vehicle at a trailhead in Pisgah Forest, and a massive search was started. As is standard operating procedure (SOP) today, the area was divided into grids and marked by GPS. Hundreds of trained search-and-rescue people and volunteers combed the trails. Aircraft with spotters and infrared heat sensors streaked across the park looking for live or deceased bodies. Although unlikely, people clung to the hope that the Bryants had merely gotten lost.

That hope vanished on the second day of the search. Deputies discovered that Irene and John Bryant's ATM card had been used to withdraw three hundred dollars from their account at a People's Bank ATM at Five Points Drive in Ducktown, Tennessee. The bank's security camera showed a man in a yellow jacket, with the hood up to obscure his face, making the withdrawal. The jacket had black elbow patches and wide black stripes. Bob Bryant thought that the parka looked like one his father owned.

The unauthorized use of the Bryants' ATM card made it clear that this was more than a case of missing hikers. Sheriff David Mahoney assumed foul play and feared for the lives of the elderly couple.

On November 9, 2007, Mahoney's misgivings proved to be right. Irene's skeletal remains were found beneath a covering of branches and leaves. The remains were forty-six yards from their Ford Escape, on Yellow Gap Road.

Irene Bryant died from blunt trauma to the head and had defensive wounds on her right arm. There were three fractures on the right side of her face, and a massive fracture at the back of her head that crushed the skull. There were several fractures on her right arm, probably received when she tried to protect herself, and the right arm was severed and found several feet from the body. There was no sign of her husband; alarming fear mounted for his safety.

The Bryants' son Bob couldn't understand why a robbery had turned into a murder. At their age, he said, his parents posed no physical threat. Had they been confronted by someone who merely wanted money, Bob Bryant said, his parents would simply have handed over their wallets and money. Neither of them would have resisted, he said, unless one, or both of them, had been assaulted.

Mahoney called off the search for missing hikers and sent the volunteers home. This was clearly a homicide—maybe a double homicide—or possibly one homicide and one kidnapping, with assault and bodily harm. The search for John Bryant and his wife's killer would be continued by professionals. The Transylvania County Sheriff's Office (TCSO), North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (NCSBI), and the Polk County Sheriff's Office (PCSO) searched for several more weeks without finding Bryant, alive or dead. There was little hope that he would be found alive. Bob Bryant was asked how he felt when he saw the picture of the man in the yellow parka. “I'm not consumed with hatred or anything like that. I want to find my dad, and I want law enforcement to find these people and give them a fair trial.”

A newspaper delivery driver in Ducktown told the police that she saw a balding, bearded man in a yellow coat with black patches driving a white Astro van at about the same time that the card was used. In the area, during that same time, several people reported seeing a balding, bearded, scruffy-looking man, about sixty years old, weighing 160 pounds.

On October 26, 2007, Cherokee County deputy Will Ballard drove to a private hunting preserve to answer a complaint about an unauthorized camper. The hunting preserve is in northwestern Georgia, about seventy miles from Ducktown, Tennessee, where someone had used the Bryants' ATM card to withdraw three hundred dollars. Ballard's dashboard video/audio recorder was operating when he found the trespasser: a bald, weathered man about sixty years old, weighing about 160 pounds. He met Ballard in front of the deputy's car so that much of their twenty-minute conversation was recorded by the video/audio dashboard device. The man was talkative and animated, sometimes almost jumping in circles as he talked. He had blue eyes and no front teeth.

“Howdy, Deputy,” he said. “How are you today?”

“Can I get your ID real quick?” Ballard asked.

“Yes, you sure can.”

Ballard entered the information into his computer to search for outstanding warrants or BOLOs (be on the lookout for) and continued talking to the trespasser.

“You got any weapons on you? Anything in the van?”

“Oh, just the usual stuff.” The deputy made a move toward the van, but the man hopped ahead of him. “Oh,” he said, as if just remembering, “there's a backpack with an expandable police baton in it. I don't want you to get nervous. I'll get it for you.”

He hurried to the van and retrieved the backpack and hopped back to the deputy. They were out of the dashboard video's range, but the audio was recorded.

“I was a paratrooper,” the man said. “What I'm doing now is I'm on perpetual professional field maneuvers. You never know who or what you're gonna meet up here.”

Ballard found no outstanding warrants on the man and told him he should leave.

“It's the first day of hunting season,” Ballard said. “You should leave before you get shot.”

“I'm leaving. I'm getting out of here!” the trespasser howled, flapping his arms. “God Almighty!”

“Have a nice day,” Ballard said as he drove away.

“I love you!”

“Take care and be safe, Mr. Hilton,” the deputy replied.

Ballard had just talked with Gary Hilton in northwestern Georgia, a day after a man fitting Hilton's description had used the Bryants' ATM card in Ducktown, Tennessee, about fifty miles away. In spite of an intense search, the police could not find John Bryant's body and had no suspect for the murder of Irene Bryant.

 

On December 1, 2007, Cheryl Dunlap left her house in Crawfordville, Florida, to take advantage of the one free day each week that she had to herself. Dunlap telephoned a friend about nine in the morning to say that she was going to the public library in Medart, just a few miles away. Crawfordville is in Wakulla County, a sparsely populated area that is a bedroom community for suburbanites who work in the state capital of Tallahassee, located about twenty miles farther north. The town is some three hundred miles south of Blood Mountain, from where Meredith Emerson would be kidnapped. The terrain in that area of Florida is heavily wooded and encompasses several parks, some of which bump shoulders with the Appalachian Trail.

Cheryl Dunlap was a healer, not just of the body, but of the spirit. Her long hours were not from obligation but from personal commitment. A registered nurse, Dunlap worked at Thagard Student Health Center at Florida State University (FSU), and was considered one of the best. According to the logbooks, she often saw patients right up to the last minutes of her shift.

Dunlap was the mother of two sons, Mike and Jake, and had been divorced from their father since they were little boys. Mike lived in Crawfordville and Jake was serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. The other passion in Dunlap's life was her faith. She lived in Crawfordville all of her life and was a sixth-generation member of the White Church Primitive Baptist, a church with a congregation of a little more than sixty members. Jake won an award there for attending Sunday school every week for seven years. The church had a small congregation, but they were an active group of hardy souls.

They pitched in to help one another remodel homes; and even though it was small, the church had outreach programs and performed missionary work in foreign lands. Besides being a full-time single mother and nurse, Dunlap sang in the choir and taught Sunday school and Bible school. Dunlap was so passionate about her faith that she even made time to attend and graduate from the FIRE School of Ministry in Pensacola. Following graduation she made several trips to China and South America as a missionary, who worked in medicine and spread the Gospel.

When Hurricane Ivan threatened the central Alabama Gulf Coast in September 2004 with 165-miles-per-hour winds and lashing rain, more than two hundred thousand people in the area fled their homes in Florida and Alabama as the fifth strongest hurricane ever to develop in the Gulf Basin came closer. In spite of a slight weakening, Ivan was still a Category 3 hurricane, with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour, when the storm struck the Alabama and Florida coasts.

This killer storm produced a storm surge as high as ten to fifteen feet from Destin, in the Florida Panhandle, westward to Mobile Bay/Baldwin County in Alabama. One wave, which was measured by the buoy from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reached the monster height of fifty-two feet in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Mobile, Alabama.

The storm caused catastrophic damage and loss of life from Florida through Nova Scotia. The worst damage was along the Alabama and Florida coasts with wind and water sweeping away buildings, ripping up trees, and even knocking down a huge section of a bridge on Interstate 10. Thousands were injured and left homeless without fresh water, utilities, medical aid, communications, and food.

Dunlap was one of the first to volunteer and spent several weeks in the most needful areas dispensing medical aid and spiritual comfort. It was a job for which she had unique qualifications. Dunlap was an important member of the River of Life Church. Everyone at the small church knew her.

The children whom Dunlap taught in Sunday and Bible school referred to her fondly as “Ms. Cheryl.” It was surprising when Dunlap didn't appear on Saturday at the public library in Medart, where she usually went. Although a registered nurse with a good salary, Dunlap lived modestly and didn't have an Internet connection at her apartment. Surprise elevated to a mood of shock for the congregation at the River of Life Church when Dunlap didn't show up to teach her Bible studies class on Sunday morning. This type of behavior was totally out of character for her. She would never miss a class without making arrangements for a substitute and letting people know ahead of time. On Monday morning Dunlap didn't show up for work at Thagard Student Health Center.