At the Hands of a Stranger (9 page)

Once, after five years of being out of touch, Hilton telephoned and asked Brenda to go hiking with him. She accepted his invitation, and said it was not a date, just a hike, but that she never told her husband about it. Brenda told Howard how her husband came home early and found Hilton's dog staked in the yard.

“I never had a sexual relationship with him again and he never tried,” she said. “He knew all about hiking. He was very, very smart and he knew all of the trails—Blood Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Stone Mountain …. He had spent most of his time in the mountains.”

Since the last hike, Brenda said, she had not seen him in years. “And all of a sudden he just shows up at my office,” she said. “He looked very weird. I didn't even recognize him, and I don't know how he knew where my office was. He freaked me out the minute he walked in. He didn't look anything like he did. I mean he had [no] teeth.”

Hilton was homeless, so far as Brenda knew. She had never asked where he lived after he left the complex that her mother managed. Brenda said Hilton complained that he had multiple sclerosis and was dying. She said that Hilton hated John Tabor because he believed Tabor had cheated him out of sales commissions.

“When did he start to talk strange?” Howard asked.

Brenda laughed. “Gary's always been a talker. He talks loud, over himself, like he's in another world. Gradually he started being mean and saying things when he was mad. Each time it was a little worse. He would say things that scared me and I was afraid to be around him.”

Howard asked if she could give some specific examples, but Brenda wasn't able to do so. She explained it like this: “He would say things that scared me. I don't know. Just the tone of his voice. He'd be mad at the world. Everybody was stupid. It wasn't like he was mean to me, but to everybody. It was more like a gut feeling that I had.”

“Was there a lot of anger?”

“He thought everybody was stupid and he thought all men were faggots. He thought John Tabor was a faggot.”

“He actually thought that?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Howard asked what he had said about Tabor.

“That he was a crappy salesman. That he was married, but he was a faggot. He said Tabor was too good-looking not to be a faggot.”

Brenda explained that before she left for college, Hilton talked so mean and hateful that she “freaked. It got to the point that I didn't even want to talk to him.”

“Did he ever make direct threats about harming somebody, like John Tabor, to you?”

“No. He talked bad about people, but he never said that.”

Brenda said that he had worked for years for Tabor and had been criticizing him for most of the time. His criticism would be vitriolic.

Did you ever wonder why this guy was keeping him on if Hilton hated him so much? Howard asked.

“No. It was like Gary was a bright star doing his job, and Tabor was a total fuckup who couldn't sell. That's how Gary explained it.”

Brenda told Howard that Hilton and she had hiked in all of the parks in Georgia, and that Hilton was an expert who knew about the most isolated places.

“Thinking back to those past years, and knowing what you know now, did he ever say or do anything that might have made you think he would do anything like this?”

“I've really thought about that and I can't think of anything,” Brenda said. “I just kind of thought he was an outcast and didn't have anything to do with anyone. When he called, he said he was telemarketing. I wouldn't want to talk to him, but I was afraid not to. He was always talking bad about people. He would never say ‘I'm gonna kill them.' I would have told somebody if I had heard that.”

Thinking back, Brenda changed her mind about telling Howard that Hilton had not stalked her. Now she remembered that she felt that he stalked her most of the time she was in college. She said that Hilton would show up everywhere.

“Was there anything to indicate that he might have been doing [this] with other girls?”

“No, he never discussed anybody else.”

Although the change she saw in Hilton was gradual, Brenda also remembered that there
had
been an abrupt change in his behavior. She said that Hilton had “talked mean” about everybody until she got married, and then there was a “distinct” change.

“He used to be happy and then, all of a sudden, about the time I got married, whenever I talked with him, he would always be mad. I could see his mood change from happy to pissed off really fast. He never forgot it if somebody crossed him, even on small things.”

To illustrate, Brenda told Howard that Hilton took every rejection personally. Should he ask someone to walk to the store with him, and that person declined, Hilton would take it as a personal rejection, Brenda said, and would explode. And he would never let it go.

“Did he ever talk about a girlfriend?”

“He used to talk about his ex-wife, the lady who worked at Stone Mountain. He said she was a good woman.”

When he returned to the room, Mack said he had met Hilton several times before he and Brenda were married. The first time was at the apartment she shared with a girlfriend in Marietta. “Brenda had told me about Hilton, an older man who was just a friend. He wouldn't look me in the eye and kept his distance. He acted strangely,” Mack relayed.

Mack said that just before he and Brenda were married, he found Hilton sitting in the house that he and Brenda shared. “He jumped up real quick and asked me if I was there to install an alarm system. I told him I wasn't. I didn't want an altercation because there were other people in the house, but I led him away and told him in no uncertain terms to get out of my house.”

Brenda told the GBI agent that she had never seen Hilton with a gun, but that he always carried high-powered pellet guns and carried a baseball bat and pepper spray, explaining that it was to protect him from unleashed dogs.

Special Agent Matthew Howard concluded the interview and verified that Brenda's home and workplace would be under surveillance in case Hilton returned.

On the morning of January 3, 2008, John Tabor was stunned when he saw the first news report about a young woman hiker missing on Blood Mountain and the circumstances surrounding it. The man whom the hiker had been seen with sounded like a former employee, who had threatened him numerous times over the past ten or twelve years: a drifter named Gary Hilton. He read the description several times with growing alarm and trembling hands.

According to witnesses, the man had a dark red Irish setter named Danny. Hilton had a red Irish setter whose name was Dandy. The man wore a utility belt and carried an extendable police baton, a knife, a bayonet, and cans of Mace. So did Hilton. The man's physical description also matched Hilton's.

Tabor's first thought was that it was Gary Hilton, a dangerous man with a hair-trigger temper, a man who had had altercations with residents of local parks.

A day earlier, before he knew that Hilton was in any way tied to the disappearance of a young hiker in the area, Hilton had telephoned Tabor. Hilton went into one of his maniacal rants, saying that he was starving and didn't even have money to buy dry dog food. Tabor said no and hung up on him.

Tabor wondered how his good intentions—his kindness, really—had managed to turn out so bad. One reason he had hired Hilton as a telemarketer twelve years ago was that he felt sorry for the pathetic, disheveled, and eccentric man, who seemed to have hit rock bottom. Tabor's good deed quickly blew up in his face, and he and his family had lived in fear of Hilton for years. Hilton had left veiled threats on Tabor's phone for a decade and had confronted him in Tabor's own yard, always keeping an estimated thirty feet away, having calculated that, if attacked, it would give Hilton time to grab one of his weapons and launch a deadly counterattack.

Tabor thought in alarm,
That young lady's life is in danger.
He quickly called the Forsyth County Police Department (FCPD) and reported his concerns. “I'm absolutely, one hundred percent certain it's Gary Hilton,” he told the unidentified deputy. “He's got a red Irish setter named Dandy and he carries the same kinds of weapons as the man described in the story. He's very dangerous. He telephoned here yesterday, begging for money and his old job back. I hung up on him.”

Tabor told the deputy that he and his wife were afraid for their lives. He had moved his wife and daughter into a relative's house following Hilton's latest telephone call. Given the opportunity, Tabor said, he was certain that Hilton would try to hurt them. He told the deputy that he was sure Hilton would contact him again to demand money.

The deputy took Tabor's telephone numbers, his home and business addresses, and said a GBI special agent would contact him right away. As he waited for the GBI to contact him, Tabor recalled meeting Hilton at a residence on Clermont Road in Chamblee that he used as the business office for his siding company. Tabor needed a telemarketer to make cold calls to solicit people who might want to have their homes re-sided. He had placed an advertisement in a local newspaper about the position.

Hilton showed up to interview for the job. Tabor was startled at his appearance. Hilton wore brightly colored hiking clothes, which were dirty and wrinkled. It appeared as if he had been sleeping in them. Hilton's skin was weathered and he had an unkempt beard, just longer than stubble, and was developing male-pattern baldness. Hilton wore a utility belt and carried a bayonet, knife, and two cans of Mace around his waist, a high-powered pellet pistol jammed into his waist, and held a leash attached to the collar of a large, friendly, tail-wagging dog, with his tongue flopping through what appeared to be a toothy canine grin. Hilton had good teeth, blue eyes, and looked exceptionally fit.

“I'm Mack Hilton,” the man said. “I'm here about the job you advertised in the newspaper.”

“I thought it was Gary.”

“That's too sissified. Just call me Mack.”

Tabor was surprised that anyone would apply for a job looking the way Hilton did, but, then again, a telemarketer didn't have to make a good physical impression on a prospective customer. All he had to do was read a prepared spiel and fill in pertinent information so that a salesman could call. It really didn't matter how he looked.

Tabor learned that Hilton was living in his van at a storage facility in Atlanta and had worked for various telemarketers in the past. The storage space Hilton rented had no running water or any other amenities, but he had no complaints. Moving would not be a problem for him. He told Tabor that he was a former paratrooper in the army and had been involved in transporting tactical nuclear weapons, which were designed for battlefield use.

Tabor knew that telemarketers jumped from one job to another and that some had shady pasts. Because of this, background checks were rarely made on prospective employees. Tabor came to regret this; but, since no one was knocking down the door to apply, Tabor hired Hilton. Working on a commission basis, Tabor told Hilton his telemarketers averaged about three to four hundred dollars a month.

Hilton agreed, but had two conditions: “I can't do it unless I can bring my dog to work, and I need a lot of time to be in the mountains.”

Tabor was surprised at such unconventional demands, but he felt sorry for Hilton, who reminded him of a Vietnam War veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They agreed and shook hands on the deal. Later on, Tabor remembered something he had heard:
No good deed goes unpunished.
Hiring Hilton proved to Tabor just how true that was.

Hilton arrived for work with his dog, which lay quietly by his desk. Hilton caused a little curiosity because of the out-of-door clothes he wore and the weaponry on his utility belt. But he proved to be charismatic, charming, and very intelligent. The women almost swooned when Hilton's blue eyes captured their gaze, and he could talk about anything. Most of the people believed that Hilton was “very intelligent, probably at the genius level,” according to Tabor.

Hilton also proved to be a gifted mimic. Sometimes he sounded like Cary Grant when he made his telephone calls. At other times the voices coming from his mouth seemed to be John Wayne, Jerry Lewis, or some other Hollywood celebrity.

A woman at a desk near his asked him why he did it. Hilton shrugged and explained that it made things more interesting.

Hilton told Tabor that he was living in a storage unit with two dogs, Dandy and Ranger, another Irish setter. Hilton slept on an air mattress and sleeping bags. A step up from the storage unit he had left in Atlanta, this shed had electricity and Hilton could watch television.

Hilton stayed at the telemarketing headquarters about two hours the first day, then disappeared. He always left with the cell phone Tabor provided and some contact sheets. For the next twelve years he would come and go sporadically, sometimes staying away for months at a time. The trouble he caused snowballed over the years.

And it got worse and worse for John Tabor. Special Agents Dustin Hamby and Matt Howard arrived to interview Tabor at his home in Duluth and could hardly believe the bizarre relationship Tabor described with Hilton. Even though Hilton rarely came to work, he began to accuse Tabor of cheating him out of commissions. Tabor almost always gave in because he was convinced that Hilton would have no qualms about killing him and his family.

“He always had weapons,” Tabor said. “All the time. He would wear a belt and have a police baton, two pepper spray cans, and knives and a collapsible baton that he would buy at police utility stores. He ran with his dogs in the mountains for hour and hours, days at a time. That's pretty much all he did. After a few years he started to carry high-powered pellet guns. He knows how to use a firearm. He demonstrated his marksmanship on many occasions.”

Hilton also boasted to Tabor of his expertise in the use of the baton. Sometimes he would show off his fighting skills and explain his method of using that weapon. “You got to know what to do, stay back, aim low,” Hilton told Tabor. “I have good luck with the knees. You don't want to go up high, for the head, because once you've done that, brother, you've raised the level of violence and someone's going to get a world of hurt.”

Tabor told the agents that he didn't think Hilton owned a real gun, “but he always craved one and mourned the fact that he couldn't get one as a convicted felon.” Although he didn't care for guns, Tabor had once owned a .38-caliber Colt Special and an old single-shot twelve-gauge shotgun. He said that a couple of things caused him concern.

Tabor told the agents that he kept the Colt in his truck because a lot of his work was in high-crime neighborhoods. “I didn't look at it every day to see if it was there, but one day, several years ago, it disappeared. The shotgun was stolen from the house. I imagine he stole them.”

Tabor said that although the Colt was stolen several years ago, he had never reported it to the police. The gun was still registered in his name. The shotgun, he said, was stolen within the past year from the house that Tabor had used for his telemarketing operations. “He probably still had a key to the house, and I imagine he has that.”

Although he had known Hilton a dozen years, Tabor said, Hilton was an “off and on” employee, sometimes staying away as long as two years. That wasn't unusual, he said, because there is rapid employee turnover in the business. Hilton would disappear and then show up again without notice.

“The last time I saw him, he came to my house about three months ago,” Tabor told the agents. “During the past couple of years, he said he was sick, needed money, medicine.”

In what appeared to the agents to be an odd twist in Tabor's recollection was that, in spite of problems with him, Tabor allowed Hilton to use the bathroom at the house he used for his siding operation. Tabor said he shut down the telemarketing operation in 2000 and allowed Hilton to live in the house for most of the past five years without having to pay rent or utilities.

“He just started staying there,” Tabor said. “I didn't really object because I had no other use for it at the time. There might have been a time or two that he packed up and left for a few months.”

During the periods Hilton was gone, Tabor didn't specifically know where he was, but thought that he spent most of his time in the North Georgia Mountains. He didn't limit his hiking to Georgia, but camped in forests from Florida to New England. Hilton spent a year in the Rocky Mountains but returned to the Appalachians because he liked them better. The mountains in the western part of America were too stark for his taste.

“He's been all over the area in the past thirty years,” Tabor said. “He would be gone for weeks, if not months, at a time. He would violate the time limits on camping in parks, but he never got in trouble with the park rangers.” Sometimes Hilton would want to look over a trail map for Tabor to see where he had been, but Tabor wasn't interested in such things.

Even when Hilton was on his mysterious disappearances, he took the cell phone that Tabor provided, the contact spiel and forms to record information on solid leads for siding, and made sure that Tabor got them. Hilton regularly argued with Tabor, claiming that he was being cheated out of commissions. For his part Tabor didn't know if Hilton had made the contacts or simply filled in the forms himself, using names from the telephone book. Tabor knew that Hilton was capable of violent behavior.

“Over the years he said lots of things, but they went in one ear and out the other,” Tabor said. “He liked to talk like a big, tough guy. He had trained himself to fight and would show me little moves he had. He told me several times that over the years he had made a list of people he wanted to kill. When he got in a condition where he couldn't work, he was going to kill his dog, kill other people on the list, and then kill himself.”

Howard asked if he knew who were the people on Hilton's “kill” list.

“It was pretty much just people who had caused him grief, and almost always the same thing,” Tabor answered. “Anytime he went to a public park, he couldn't go without getting into an altercation with someone. People would come up to meet his dog, just wanting to be friendly. He would tell them, ‘No, you stay away. Keep away.' He would do something inappropriate to cause them to get hostile. He would spray people in the face with pepper spray. He would spray dogs. Things would escalate to where people called the police. He never got arrested because he knew police procedures so well.

“He would make the threat indirect,” Tabor continued. “He would never say that he was going to kill them, but he would imply it. When the police came, he twisted everything so that the police believed
he
had been threatened and was just defending himself with the pepper spray.”

In early September 2007, Hilton's anger at Tabor, who he believed had cheated him out of thousands of dollars in commissions, erupted like a volcano. Hilton had not seen Tabor in a few months because he had been on one of his extended treks into the woods. He telephoned Tabor in a rage and wanted five thousand dollars in what he said were unpaid commissions. He was so angry that Tabor could barely understand him.

“He would just shout out at me, incoherent, just crazy stuff, accusing me of cheating him out of thousands of dollars,” Tabor said.

On September 9, 2007, Tabor told the GBI, he went to Fulton County's Northeast Precinct and filed a “harassing communication problem that may lead to serious safety issues for himself and his family.”

In this formal complaint Tabor said how Gary Hilton, a former employee who had become homeless, had made threatening telephone calls to him over the past two years.
The victim advised that he has received numerous phone calls trying to extort money from him,
the complaint read.

Tabor said Hilton complained that he was hungry and that he needed money to feed his dog and demanded that Tabor pay him anywhere from five hundred dollars to $25,000. Tabor remembered what Hilton said on the telephone, which he recorded.