At the Hands of a Stranger (8 page)

Brenda actually knew very little about Gary Hilton. He never spoke of his family life, except that he didn't like his mother because she had refused to loan him money to post bail. He had no brothers or sisters, so far as Brenda knew. Hilton was proud of having been a U.S. Army paratrooper and often performed combat demonstrations for her, advising her that “this is how the paratroopers do it.” Hilton liked to brag that he had been in combat, but he confided to Brenda that he had not.

The telephone calls that Hilton made to Brenda after she left for college were not very revealing about him. They talked about the little things people do when they're catching up on news about each other. She told him about her college life, and Hilton related how he was raising money for various charities as a telemarketer. Brenda was proud of him for doing something so selfless. Of course, she didn't know that most of Hilton's telemarketing jobs were nothing more than scams: he got telephone pledges for a phony charity, had the pledges collected, and kept the money for himself. Brenda was on the college women's basketball team, and Hilton sometimes showed up to play one-on-one with her or to go for one of their power hikes.

Hilton's calls became fewer and angrier when Brenda told Hilton she had a serious boyfriend.

“He got scarier and scarier,” Brenda said. “The way he talked about people was so mean and so ugly. Then he started to say mean things about me.”

Hilton told Brenda that she was stupid and would never amount to anything. She was ugly and no man would ever want her. She was clumsy, silly, knew nothing about anything, and didn't know how to think analytically. The things she chose to read were worthless and a waste of time.

“He was never physically mean to me,” Brenda remembered. “He was just verbally abusive. I was scared to death to be around him.”

Hilton still continued to call; and like many women who suffer from battered woman syndrome (BWS), Brenda continued to take his calls, hoping things would get better. She believed she was so vulnerable because he was such a strong father figure to her. Hilton began to attack her boyfriend verbally and to make Brenda feel worthless.

“You're so stupid,” he said. “He's in college with all those prettier girls around. You have to know he's fucking around on you.
La-de-da.
You're never going to amount to anything, and he's going to fuck all the pussy he can.”

The only person Brenda remembered hearing Hilton speak kind words about was his second wife, Donna Coltrane (pseudonym), a former law enforcement officer at Stone Mountain Park. Hilton would praise Coltrane one minute and the next would eviscerate her with vile, cutting accusations. He didn't know why he had married the bitch. He believed she had married him because he qualified for a Veterans Administration (VA) home loan. She was a whore, who fucked anybody anytime. Oddly enough, Hilton said Coltrane had a lot of good qualities about her, but he never mentioned one specifically. He would rant for hours about her faults, but Coltrane still seemed to be the only person in the world about whom he ever said anything nice.

Following graduation from college, Brenda and Mack Porter (pseudonym) were married. She had not talked with Hilton for several months and Brenda thought that might be the end of it. But it wasn't. He telephoned her cell phone during the Christmas holidays and, on one occasion, she even met him for a hike, which she didn't tell her husband about. She insisted that it was nothing more than a hike.

About three years passed without Brenda seeing Hilton; then, one day, she was in her office building and looked up to see an unkempt, balding, almost toothless man sitting in the area that she supervised. His feet were propped on a desk and he was telling stories to three of Brenda's subordinates. Brenda was so startled at his appearance that she almost fainted. Her heart pounded. In a state of disbelief, she walked over to Hilton, looked at him closely, and asked, “Gary? Is that
you,
Gary?”

Once she got him into the privacy of an office, she looked at him closer and shivered. This man was weird and scary and had unkempt hair and a straggly beard. He had only one tooth in front. He had a maniacal look in his eyes, and he talked in an almost incomprehensible stream of disassociated thoughts. The old anger at the world had only festered with time and was now encapsulated in a thin veneer that seemed on the verge of erupting.

“I need money,” Hilton said in a menacing voice.

Brenda couldn't hide a nervous tremor. She didn't recognize this man. He terrified her. He didn't look anything at all like the man she had known as Gary Hilton. She was scared to death. She summed up her courage and made her voice as firm as she could.

“Gary, I'm going to write a check and give you the money,” she said. “But the only reason I'm doing it is because I'm afraid. You're acting really weird, Gary. I'm afraid of you and I don't want to talk with you again after I give you this money.”

Brenda gave Hilton four hundred dollars, believing that he needed it to pay a fine after having been arrested for possession of marijuana.

“I never saw him take any other drugs, but I always knew he was a pothead,” Brenda said. “He's been a pothead since I've known him.”

In spite of his promise not to contact her again, Hilton had pushed his way back into her life, asking for more money. Brenda didn't know what to do. She didn't want to tell her husband about the telephone call because he had had a belly full of Gary Hilton.

About three months earlier, he was scheduled to leave his office and go on a short business trip, but he returned home a few hours later to get something he had forgotten. There was a familiar red Irish setter chained to a stake in the yard.

“Where's the owner of that dog?” he asked.

“I'm just keeping it for a friend,” Brenda said.

“I know whose dog that is,” Mack said. “He damn well better be gone when I get back.”

 

Brenda saw no way out of the mess she was in now. She was afraid of Hilton and worried about her husband's reaction when he learned she had loaned Hilton four hundred dollars.

Hilton's current call could endanger her marriage. Mack had told Hilton to “leave my wife alone” four months ago. Brenda couldn't stop thinking about the situation all day. Brenda thought of Hilton possibly hiding in the dark woods at her house and trembled. She felt dazed by the danger she had placed her marriage in—all because she was too terrified of Gary Hilton.

When he came home from work, Brenda took a deep breath and told her husband about the telephone call.

“You've got to call the police,” he said. “He's a wanted man now. You can't fool around.”

“I know. I'm scared.”

“Make the call. You might save that girl's life.”

Brenda wrote down the number she had saved from Hilton's call and telephoned the GBI. Special Agent Clay Bridges answered the telephone.

“I know exactly who you're looking for,” she said. “Gary Hilton. In fact, I just got through talking with him on the telephone.”

“Do you know where he is?” Bridges almost jumped out of his chair.

“No, but I saved the telephone number.”

Bridges had the number traced and discovered it designated a coin-operated telephone in Cumming.

“We have a patrol in that area,” he told Brenda. “We're dispatching them now. Please stay on the line.”

Two GBI agents received the assignment and started racing in silent mode toward the convenience store from where Hilton's call had originated. Less than half an hour later, they arrived at the telephone. No one was using the telephone, and there was no white van in the parking lot. They described Hilton and asked the clerk if he had been there.

“He was,” the clerk said. “You just missed him. He left about fifteen minutes ago.”

It was frustrating to have come so close to catching Hilton and to miss. The police didn't know if Meredith Emerson was still alive at this point, but everyone hoped and prayed that she was. There was no time to mull it over as the search for Emerson switched into the highest gear possible. At the command center, Bridges had also received telephone calls from three others who knew Hilton: a former wife, a former employer, and a former friend.

 

It was just January 3 and Bridges had established the GBI's LMS that morning. Police officers, however, had begun gathering information since Emerson was reported missing on January 2. As searches go, things were moving along at lightning speed.

“As soon as we established a tip line with the media, the calls started to pour in from people who were on Blood Mountain on New Year's Day,” Bridges said. “A lot of calls started coming in about a strange individual named Gary Hilton. They said they had seen him hanging around the parking lot, with a red Irish setter named Dandy, and that he might be driving a white van. As soon as we released this information and named him as a person of interest, it was a train wreck.”

Special Agent John Cagle, who was nearing retirement from the GBI, worked around the clock, as did Special Agent Bridges and most of the law enforcement officers. They felt they were drawing the noose tighter around Hilton's neck. Their main worry was about Emerson. The chances of finding her alive and unharmed faded with each passing minute. The police believed that Hilton might try to get back in touch again with Brenda and received permission to establish stakeouts at her home and workplace.

 

Meanwhile, Special Agent Matthew L. Howard interviewed Brenda at her home with her husband present. Matt Howard was careful to be delicate when asking about the sexual aspect of Brenda's past relationship with Hilton. The GBI needed all of the information it could get to help catch Hilton, and his sexual preferences could illuminate his personality and help anticipate his reactions.

“It would be hard for me to talk if I was in your shoes,” Howard said. “You're embarrassed. We deal with this kind of thing all of the time, and there's nothing for you to be embarrassed about. It's very important that we know everything about him—when all this started, what made him tick, did something happen that triggered this behavior? Did he ever want to do something weird?”

“Why? Is he saying that?”

“No. We're just trying to find out everything we can about him. Do you know anything about his family?”

“Only that he had a mother he didn't like. He never mentioned her name. I think he must have had a tough childhood, but he never really talked about it.”

“Did he ever try to pursue a physical relationship with you? Like boyfriend, girlfriend?” Howard asked.

Brenda hesitated and Mack voluntarily left the room. Howard resumed the interview. “I'm not trying to embarrass you. These are important questions.”

Brenda said she was just a kid at the time.

“Obviously, there was an age difference,” Howard said. “Was he pursuing younger women at the time?”

Brenda said she didn't know. She said that her physical relationship with Hilton began when she was fifteen or sixteen.

Howard asked: “How did he pursue that? What were his actions toward you?”

Brenda hesitated a long moment.

“This is totally confidential,” Howard reassured her. “When we find out what he's all about, maybe we can even solve other crimes he may have been involved in—to try and get the families some closure.”

“I don't know what to tell you.”

“Was it something that he forced on you, or was it consensual?” Howard asked. “How long did it last? Did he say he was interested? Did he come on to you?”

There was a long pause. “I guess it was consensual.”

“If it was forced, we need to know that.”

“I was a kid and I was curious.”

“There's nothing wrong with that,” Howard said gently. “There are things that happen in college and high school that we're not proud of. We all make mistakes. That doesn't make anybody a bad person.”

Brenda said, “I look at it like I was taken advantage of.”

“Did he talk you into it?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of things did he say? If he was preying on children, we need to know that.”

Brenda told Howard she had never known or suspected that Hilton was sexually attracted to children. She reiterated that he was like a father to her and treated her differently after their sexual relationship began. He bought things for her, gave her a new bicycle, and called her regularly on the telephone to chat, mostly about her. He was often verbally abusive, she said, but not toward her. The telephone calls dwindled away when she left for college.

“So far as physical abuse, he never put a hand on me,” she said.

Howard pursued the sexual aspect of the relationship further. Brenda's husband had come back into the room. Howard asked if there was anything involved in the sexual relationship besides sex, anything unusual. “What kinds of things did he talk about? What happened between you?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause and Brenda made several false starts, clearly nervous and embarrassed.

“Go ahead, honey,” Mack said. “It's no big thing.”

“It is, too, a big deal!”
Brenda snapped.

At her request Mack left the room again.

“This isn't easy,” she said.

“Take as much time as you need, ma'am. Don't think you have anything to be ashamed of.”

“We had a sexual relationship.”

“Did he force you to try things during intercourse?”

“Persuaded, but he didn't force. He never did anything to me. He never hurt me. God, he was forty years older than me.”

“He never tied you up or made you do anything?”

“No. I always believed he loved me.”

Howard asked if Hilton had stalked her. Brenda replied that she believed she saw him in the crowd at several of her college basketball games, but they didn't acknowledge one another. After college, Brenda said, she received infrequent telephone calls from Hilton, and they usually occurred around Christmas. Then a few years would pass with no contact.