At the Hands of a Stranger (7 page)

It was true that the police had no idea who had killed the woman believed to be Cheryl Dunlap.

The small communities were gripped by terror.

Special Agent Clay Bridges, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, didn't know that a search was under way for a missing hiker in Vogel Forest until he received a telephone call at his district office in Cleveland from the Leon County Sheriff's Office on Wednesday afternoon, January 2. The LCSO deputy told him they needed help with the search.

“We think there's foul play involved,” the deputy said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because we found a police-style baton, water bottles, and a dog leash beside the trail. Someone else found it and turned it in. We have to suspend operations now because it's dark and there's snow falling.”

Bridges told the deputy that he would be there as soon as possible. The agent wanted to have a meeting that night, but there were conflicts in timing. Bridges went to a breakfast meeting the first thing on Thursday morning. He explained the situation, picked up additional investigators, and left for Leon County.

 

Clay Bridges had known what he wanted to do with his life from his first memories. He wanted to be a police officer, but not just any police officer. Bridges wanted to be a special agent with the GBI, the crème de la crème of Georgia's law enforcement agencies, much as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is viewed as
the
top criminal investigative organization in the United States.

The GBI agent had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Making it to the GBI had required dedication, hard work, and perseverance—all qualities that would serve him well if he ever managed to become a law officer. Bridges was hired as a rookie in 1991 by the Clarksville Police Department (CPD) and was recruited a short time later by the larger Gainesville Police Department (GPD).

Clarksville wanted him back again in 1995 and offered Bridges the job of chief of police for the seven-member force. Bridges had not given up on joining the GBI and told the city council that he would take the job with the understanding that he would continue his college studies and try to get hired by the GBI when he received his undergraduate degree.

“They were nice enough to do that,” Bridges said. “I became a chief of police at age twenty-six. The council worked around it.”

Bridge's life-long dream came true in 1999 when he graduated from college and was sworn in as a special agent with the GBI. Originally, the GBI put him to work in hard drug enforcement. He was undercover for the first two years before being assigned to a unit that concentrated on breaking large drug-smuggling operations. Bridges was transferred to the regional office in 2005 and had investigated about twenty homicides by the time he arrived to help find Meredith Emerson.

 

Arriving at the mobile command headquarters, Special Agent Bridges found good and bad news. The bad news was that the corrections officer who had found the baton did not wait longer to report it, or perhaps did not wait longer before he left. The abductor (police officers still didn't know his or her identity) had waited until after dark to bring Emerson to his van. During that time she had been secured to a tree just minutes away from help. There was no one to see Hilton drive away, and precious hours tracking him had been lost.

On the positive side, though, leads and tips were coming in by the hundreds. Special Agent Bridges credited Meredith Emerson's roommate, Julia Karrenbauer, for using her knowledge of public relations for getting the media involved on a large scale.

“She had reached out and talked to all kinds of media and notified them that her roommate was missing, and she got them mobilized,” Bridges said. “That, in itself, was a good thing for us. She had already put out pictures and had people looking for her. Several groups were already searching when we arrived.”

The media kept coming from throughout all of Georgia, until the entrance to Vogel Park bristled with television satellites and transmitting radio towers, as well as reporters from all around the country. Emerson's picture, description of her possible abductor, and other information soon found its way all across the United States. And more media units continued to arrive. Tips were coming in from people located as far away as California, who thought they had seen Emerson.

A psychic from New Orleans advised that the girl was in a culvert under a bridge. She was cold. She had hurt the man. The man had hurt her. She heard the searchers, but they couldn't hear her. She possibly broke the man's leg. The dog was not with her. She was possibly
harmed.

Another tip came from a woman on Interstate 95 driving from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington, DC. Along the way she stopped at a gasoline station. There was a man in a white van. He was dressed in black and with a black dog. It looked like a bed had been built in the back of the van.

He got out, and the dog got out. He let it go pee, and then he put the dog back in the van. The dog seemed to be hyper. There was a possible spot of white on one paw. There may have been another dog in the van. It might have been an English pointer. The man was about the same size as the one described on TV.

There were also helpful communications from people who wanted to donate helicopters and other equipment to aid in the search.

Regardless of how trivial the tip might seem, none could be disregarded. They had to be written down and put in some kind of order. Bridges's first order of business was to establish what the GBI called a leads management system (LMS). The purpose of LMS was to filter through the leads and assign them priority. Bridges would decide how important the leads were and assign them to field agents to be checked out.

“There was already a lot of media there,” Bridges said. “Once we got there and established a tip line and released it to the media, the leads started to flood in. There were a lot of people on the list to be checked out. We checked them out, sometimes by phone, to ask whether they had seen anything strange.”

On a missing persons case, standard operating procedure called for Bridges to learn everything he could about the victim and the possible abductor. “I wanted to get to know Meredith as well as I could,” Bridges said. “I wanted to know how she might react in any given situation. I wanted to learn anything at all that might help lead us to her.” The same was true for the abductor, but the GBI did not yet know who that was.

As he learned about Meredith Emerson, Bridges came to know a lovely young woman with family and friends whom she adored and who returned her affection in kind. Although she was petite, Emerson was not a “girly girl,” preferring to hike over rugged mountain terrain than to sit and sample high tea—although she would have been comfortable in such a social setting.

One characteristic about Meredith that people mentioned to Bridges was her burning desire to be a good person, to do good, and to make the world a better place. She often said: “I want to make a difference.”

 

A native of South Carolina, Meredith Emerson had lived in North Carolina and Longmont, Colorado, with her parents and brother, Mark. She loved the South and its mountains and moved back to them when she enrolled in the University of Georgia to major in business. She changed her major to French literature. Emerson not only became fluent in French, but she also received the Joseph Yedlicka Scholarship for Study Abroad and earned the Cecil Wilcox Award for Excellence in French. A popular student, Emerson served as an officer for the French Honor Society (Pi Delta Phi) at the university's local chapter.

And although Emerson was fit and athletic, she was enchanted by such romantic frills as the book
Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote. Emerson loved to read and spent many quiet hours being swept off on a sea of words to new worlds of adventure and learning. No one ever had to be at a loss as to what she would like as a gift: She would always be happy with a book. She read in English and in French. One of the books on her “wish list” was the French translation of the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.

Friends described Emerson as being athletic and careful of her personal safety. She had earned a green belt and a brown belt in judo and karate, which she wore proudly around the waist of her
gi
at the dojo where she studied. Most of the students were men and they had a tendency to be gentle with the petite Emerson until she set them straight. She wanted no favoritism, no holding back. She once thanked a man for knocking the breath out of her when he threw her hard against the mat. Similarly, she gave as good as she got, and would be ecstatic when she sent a two-hundred-pound man flying over her shoulder and to the floor, or she sent him into a parallel free fall with a foot sweep.

Emerson enjoyed helping people, and she loved animals. She adopted from a shelter a mixed-breed dog, which was part Labrador retriever, and she showered the dog with love. Not wanting to be “babied” herself, she expected the dog, which she named Ella, to stay fit. No matter what the weather, Emerson and Ella took a daily walk. It could be raining buckets outside, but Emerson and Ella jogged together as they wore drenched but joyous expressions.

Emerson went out of her way to help her friends, even if she had to do things that weren't particularly appealing to her. She wasn't crazy about being photographed, but she agreed to model for a friend who was building a portfolio. Emerson had kidded that it amounted to “torture by photography.” The efforts of the model and photographer resulted in a stunning display that highlighted various aspects of Emerson's personality.

There she was, in one picture, hanging upside down by her knees over a steel bar, wearing a white turtleneck and jeans, not a piece of clothing out of place. On the other hand, her long hair hung straight down, almost touching the ground. The pose accented Emerson's strength and athleticism. Although it would have been difficult for most people to maintain, the whimsical smile on Emerson's face, with her hands in her pockets, showed that the pose was a piece of cake for her.

Another photograph showed Emerson in a more glamorous, feminine light, with her long hair decorated with small, delicate beads and braids. There was a mischievous smile on her face, and her eyes were laughing. The photograph showed her with fairy wings, and the beautiful young woman looked as if she had plenty of fairy dust to share.

 

Brenda Porter (pseudonym) was filled with dread when her cell phone rang on January 3 and she recognized a chilling voice from the past. It was a man who terrified her, and who she had hoped would be out of her life forever.

“I'm in a fix,” Gary Hilton told her. “I need some money. Can you lend me two hundred bucks?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“Give me a hundred.”

“The only reason I ever gave you money, Gary, was because I'm scared to death of you,” Brenda told him.

“I need some gasoline. How about some money for that?”

“No, Gary. No.”

Brenda hung up in a hurry but remembered to save the telephone number from where Hilton's call had originated. She trembled with fear. She lived in a wooded area and there were many nights she had spent in the house thinking,
God, he might be out in the woods right now.

 

Brenda met Hilton twenty years ago when she lived in Atlanta with her mother, the manager of an apartment complex where Hilton rented a one-bedroom unit. Brenda was a star on the high-school girls' basketball team and regularly ran to stay in shape. She had noticed that Hilton ran almost every day, too. One day they struck up a conversation and started running together.

Brenda was fifteen years old and Hilton was forty-four when he persuaded her to have a sexual relationship with him. She had looked at him as a father figure and she admired his broad area of knowledge. They talked about everything, and the conversation eventually came around to sex. Hilton was in exceptionally good physical condition in those days, Brenda remembered, with taut muscles, a nice tan, “and the most beautiful blue eyes you've ever seen. He had hair and teeth then, and he could run circles around me. He really looked good.”

Talking about sex increased their intimacy and she was curious about relationships between men and women. Having grown up without a father at home, Brenda found her affection toward Hilton growing. One thing led to another and she found herself having sex with him. Although he was often harsh with others, Brenda felt that he was kind to her.

“He was never mean to me and he could talk about anything,” she said. “He was always reading magazines and encyclopedias.”

Hilton gradually started talking to Brenda about intimate things and touching her. As a woman in her thirties, Brenda thought that Hilton took advantage of her inexperience. “I was a young girl and I was curious,” she said. “It was consensual sex in that he never hurt me. Now I know what a big deal it was to be an inexperienced teenager with a man in his forties.”

Their relationship grew; and, after a time, when Hilton called, Brenda jumped. “‘Hey, let's go for a five-mile run,' he would say, and I'd go right over.”

Brenda never saw him pay much attention to anyone else on their excursions. He pretty much focused on her. His eyes didn't wander to other women, and he never made inappropriate comments about them. The world he encompassed during these runs seemed to be composed of nothing more than Brenda, the woods, and Ranger, the Irish setter he loved more than anything in the world.

Hilton was still living in the apartment complex when Brenda moved away to attend college in western Georgia. He called her occasionally, and over time she noticed a gradual change in his demeanor. Always a nonstop talker, Hilton started to rant at everybody and about everything. He never made much sense, and she felt incoherent vitriol flowing from him in torrents, like lava from an active volcano.

“He never threatened me, but he would go from happy to pissed off in a flash,” Brenda noticed. “He just thought everybody in the world was stupid and incompetent, and that he was so much smarter than anybody else. He thought all men were faggots. He never made any direct threats to anyone, but his voice was so mean that he scared me. I told him to stop calling because I was afraid of him.”