Original subtitles

All she's doing is, on New Year's Day,

taking a hike with her dog.

The blood was wet.

It was fresh.

That was disturbing.

It was a calm place, she thought.

And then she was kidnapped.

The way in which this person gets money

is by abducting these victims.

He fits the definition of a serial killer, by far.

I mean, he's just pure evil.

It was too much to even comprehend.

And she kept repeating, he's going to kill me.

And he shoots my daughter.

That's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

You can run.

You can't hide.

North Georgia is a really unique area.

It's a very mountainous area.

National Forest land is abundant.

Blood Mountain is actually the highest

peak in Georgia that the Appalachian Trail crosses.

It's beautiful.

There's waterfalls and great mountain views.

And so we have lots of tourism and lots

of hikers and campers in these areas.

The forests, as they are, are remote locations

throughout the United States.

But they bring leisure to most people,

but sadly can be an opportunity for those

looking for horrific activities,

criminal activities to take place.

My name is Clay Bridges.

I was working for the region 8 GBI office.

And we would be called in any time

there was a missing person, homicide,

suicide, those type thing.

I was driving home and received a telephone

call from the chief deputy of Union County Sheriff's Office.

He contacted me and said that they had a missing

person on Blood Mountain.

So my first action was to learn as much as I could

about her, as to what could have happened to her.

Meredith Emerson was 24 years old.

She lived at the time in a northern suburb of Atlanta.

And she was an avid hiker.

By the next day, when Meredith Emerson did not show up

for work, and the fact that the weather conditions on Blood

Mountain had deteriorated greatly, we all were concerned

that even if it was an injured hiker or just a lost hiker,

or got off the trail and was lost,

could anybody survive that kind of environment?

We set up a command post at the Vogel State Park,

which is right there at the base of the mountain,

just running down any kind of leads.

So a lot of what we were doing was making phone calls,

just trying to-- you know, anybody in the area,

trying to identify anyone who may have seen anything.

The tips we began to receive were sightings of Meredith

and her dog, Ella, that she took with her

that morning to go hiking.

I went to the parking lot of the

Herbert Reese Memorial Trailhead

there at Blood Mountain.

I call that the approach trail.

When we discovered her water bottles

and some of her effects at the trail,

we felt like something bad had happened.

There was also a police baton found in the area.

That was concerning for us.

And, you know, I wonder if someone

had tried to strike her with that.

The ground was so disturbed in that area

where the-- you could tell it was a very violent fight that

had taken place right there.

That was the trigger that prompted them to contact

my office, just in case this was going to be

more than an overdue hiker.

All she's doing is, on New Year's Day,

taking a hike with her dog.

I was there on January 2nd when all this came to light

and searches began to happen there on Blood Mountain.

We needed to close the trail and the parking lot

and move down to the state park, where

we set up our search effort.

You can walk for literally days

and not come across a road.

It's just vast amounts of--

vast amounts of woods, nothingness.

If someone disposes of a body in a national forest,

you'll never find them.

We have lots of tourism and lots

of hikers and campers in these areas.

So a lot of what we were doing was making phone calls,

just trying to-- you know, anybody in the area,

trying to identify anyone who may have seen anything.

We pushed out information asking

the public to call our tip line if they had

seen Meredith on the trail.

We began to get reports of a strange-looking man

with Meredith on the trail.

They all described him almost identical-- you know,

older gentleman, very fit, wearing high-end hiking gear,

but he has duct tape on his shoes.

He's got a dog with him.

And they saw him around a white van.

The very first thing I did, I checked her phone

records and her bank records.

We determined that Meredith's debit card

had been attempted to be used at various ATMs

off the mountain.

There was one attempt 45 miles away the first night.

There was another attempt 80 miles away from the abduction

site the next day.

At that point, we were actually contacted

by law enforcement in North Carolina

and said, hey, we had a couple just

like that, that were hiking, that

went missing without a trace.

John and Irene Bryant were in their late 70s, early 80s.

They were experienced hikers.

And they took out one afternoon to just do

a day hike in the Pisgah National Forest,

which is probably a couple hours from our office

here in Georgia.

And the Pisgah National Forest is extremely remote,

consists of several thousand acres of forest land.

John and Irene Bryant were very friendly people,

well-liked in the community.

And they had told someone that they were going hiking

in the National Forest area.

They disappeared.

And so, when the authorities began

to search for John and Irene, they found the body of Irene,

but not--

no signs of John.

They stated that she had been killed with blunt-force trauma.

And it was a cylindrical object with what looked like

maybe a ball at the end of it.

I immediately thought, there's a police-style baton

up here on this trail.

We believe John tried to call 911.

And the call was almost immediately

dropped because the signal was too low.

Later on in the same day, John's debit card

was used at an ATM in an area called Ducktown,

Tennessee, which is about two hours from the Pisgah

National Forest.

And that's when North Carolina officials

also told us about the Florida case concerning Sherry Dunlap.

My name is Gloria Tucker.

My cousin, Cheryl Dunlap, which I referred to her

as Sherry all the time, she was a beautiful person

inside and out.

She had two grown children.

She was divorced.

She was somebody who kept herself busy, primarily

serving other people.

She was a devout Christian, very involved in her church.

Sherry loved her children.

She had two boys.

She took home the burden of really caring for the boys

totally all by herself.

She was just a very home-oriented

person who wanted to help other people have a good life.

She went for a day hike in the Apalachicola

National Forest in an area called Leon Sinks.

It's very much like any other national forest.

There's hiking trails, you know, just a very nice area

to spend time.

And then she was kidnapped.

The search for Cheryl was on down there,

very similar to the search for John

and Irene Bryant in North Carolina.

They had volunteers who came into the forest

to look for Cheryl.

And not too far into the search,

Cheryl's car was found just outside the forest.

And the driver's side rear tire had been punctured.

He had his face taped up.

He didn't want anyone to recognize who he was.

The county, at that time, was just in an uproar.

Some hunters in the forest

saw some buzzards circling in the area and went over

and found the remains of Cheryl.

Her head had been removed, as well as her hands.

But they were able to identify her through some DNA.

It was unnerving, you know, the manner in which

Cheryl Dunlap had been found.

I didn't want to know anything about it.

But several people told my sister and myself about it.

So, you know, it was--

it wasn't a good thing.

It's just an overwhelming feeling when you have to deal

with that much tragedy.

Just a terrible thing.

When we learned of those cases,

then we began to talk to both jurisdictions

about the similarities.

The photographs of the person walking up to the ATMs

was very, very similar.

The way in which this person gets money

is by abducting these victims.

And then, when we got our photographs from our ATMs,

there was no doubt that it was the same person.

We got a telephone call to the tip line

from a lady about 60 miles south of Blood Mountain who

said, I think I just saw Meredith Emerson's

dog walk into a grocery store.

And the video surveillance at the grocery store

shows it walking around, almost--

it almost looked like it was asking for help.

We were able to pick up the dog very quickly

and identify the dog as Ella through an ID chip

that she had in her.

So we knew that Ella was in an area 70 miles

south of the abduction site.

And the agents I sent down there found

a dumpster in the parking lot.

And they decided to look in the dumpster.

And that's where we found the things that

I had hoped that we wouldn't.

We found bloody clothing.

We found Meredith's driver's license and wallet.

We found other clothing,

men's clothing with blood on them.

And this is not just blood stains.

This was blood that you could--

so much, you could wring it out.

The blood was wet.

It was fresh.

That was disturbing, because up

to this point, we were all holding out

the hope that Meredith's alive.

We're going to, you know, capture the bad guy

and recover her.

And it's going to have a happy ending.

My name is John Tabor.

I own a telemarketing operation.

I was working out and caught the top of the news

where they--

they broke to cover this case of the missing

girl up in North Georgia.

They said that there was evidence

of a struggle in the parking lot

where they found Meredith's vehicle.

But what really got my attention was,

they said they found an expandable police baton.

That's what really made me stop in my tracks.

I knew someone who used to work for me

who carried a police baton.

And now I'm just staring at the television.

I just remember just going numb.

John Tabor contacts us and says,

I know who you're talking about.

His name is Gary Michael Hilton.

I first met Gary Hilton when he replied to a help

wanted ad for telemarketers.

He was very fond of the outdoors.

And he was a smart individual.

He could do rather complex mathematics

in his head and spit numbers out that most

people couldn't do.

He did his job.

And my impression was just that he never got along

that well with other people and just, therefore,

seemed to prefer the company of his dog

rather than other humans.

He worked in that office

uneventfully for a decade.

I got frustrated at some point, where it just

became obvious that he had lost interest in actually working.

And then, suddenly, within a matter of a few weeks,

he became extremely distant and belligerent.

I realized at that point that this is a real problem.

The situation just spiraled downward rapidly.

I decided to stop by the office

one evening unannounced.

The first thing I noticed, there were

no lights on in the office.

And the back door was wide open, which was also unusual.

I just had this feeling of doom.

Nothing seemed right.

Everything seemed out of order.

And then suddenly, he pops out of a doorway.

So I immediately noticed that he was much

more disheveled than normal.

And I noticed that several of his teeth were missing.

And I was pretty shocked by that.

And I just said, oh, well, you know, what happened to you?

He said, I pulled them out with this pair of pliers.

He said he did it so it would frighten people

when they looked at him.

I knew at that point, I needed to get the hell out of there

as soon as I could.

I felt like something bad could happen at any moment.

It really hit home when

he demanded a certain amount of money, $3,000.

And he said, you know, John,

you've got a great life, beautiful wife,

this beautiful young son.

It would be such a shame for you to lose all that.

It's a hell of a thing to be confronted with.

I agreed to write this check for him.

I told him I would put it by the front door of my house,

and he would come get it, so I did.

I wrote the check

put it by the front door of my house.

And Hilton came out of the woods,

out of nowhere, at exactly the same time

as I was walking down the driveway.

So we literally are now facing each other.

And all I can remember thinking at that point was,

wow, I wish I had on a bulletproof vest and a firearm

right now.

I felt incredibly vulnerable.

I knew at that moment, I needed to get inside that front door

of my house as quickly as possible,

because I had a Glock 9-millimeter positioned

close to the front door.

I dropped my belongings on the floor, got my firearm,

chambered the round, and came right back out the front door

with the gun pointing in the direction he was in.

He was now maybe a hundred feet away,

and he was fleeing back off into the woods.

I believed that one of us was going to end up dead.

We found out of his bizarre encounters

with law enforcement in the past.

For instance, he would be confronted in the forest

for camping in an unauthorized area.

That was captured on video.

And he was acting extremely bizarre.

When we look at people who have gotten in trouble

with the law, they don't necessarily

fit our idea as a society of acceptable behavior.

That's where most serial killers kill, in an area

where they are the most comfortable,

and they feel the most in control.

He has the upper hand.

He knows this area backwards and forwards.

So it was easy for him to scout,

to have this fantasy of whatever he's doing.

He knows exactly what to do to get these people to do

what he wants them to do.

Authorities hold out little hope of finding 24-year-old

Meredith Emerson alive.

At that time, the newscast was,

missing young girl up here in North Georgia mountains.

I remember running upstairs after watching that broadcast

and telling my wife, you know, hey,

you're not going to believe this.

But did I just hear an expandable police baton?

Because that's something that I knew

Hilton had with him all the time.

He used those to protect his dog from other dogs

approaching his dog.

And again, I had never met anyone

in my life that carried around a police baton

unless they were a police officer.

And I said, I think I need to call the police.

I basically just said--

told them who I was and that I knew someone

who carried a police baton.

He fit the description, had a dog that fit that description.

I told them his name.

I told them the vehicle that he was driving.

John Tabor says, I can give you the tag number to the van

because I bought it for him.

So we pull a driver's license photo of him

and put it out onto the news media.

Maybe six hours after I made that phone call, and--

this is the part that still stuns me today--

my phone rang.

And it was him.

After seven months of absolutely no communication,

and there he was, on the phone with me, out of nowhere,

like a ghost.

I'm just, you know, sitting in my car

in a state of disbelief.

And I played along.

And he said he needed some money to get started,

you know, to get back to work and whatnot.

And I said, hey, that's no problem.

How much do you need?

We discussed an amount.

And I said, yeah, I'll be more than

happy to give you the check.

I tried to meet him right then and there.

I said, well, where are you?

I'll bring you a check right now.

He just said that that's not possible.

I can't meet you.

He could not meet me then under any circumstances.

But within the next couple of days,

he would come get the check.

Once we learned that there was a possibility that Hilton

would go to pick up the check,

we got with the local jurisdiction in Atlanta.

And they deployed their SWAT team around the business.

And they were prepared to grab him if he showed up.

They stayed all night, into the next day, and into Friday,

and he didn't show up.

It wasn't that long until a citizen called 911 in that

jurisdiction in Atlanta and said,

I think I'm looking at the guy that y'all

have been looking for all week with the missing hiker.

DeKalb 911.

What's the exact location?

Basically stayed on the phone,

watching him, while the officers were responding

to take him into custody.

He was not talking.

But we knew that there were answers to some

of our questions in the van.

Three bloody fleece tops and a bloodstained piece of a car

seat belt were found in a trash bin

beside a convenience store where

Hilton had used a pay phone.

Hilton had attempted to vacuum and wash

portions of his van.

Basically, everything that had blood on it, or he thought

had blood on it, or anything that could tie him to Meredith,

he was trying to rid his van of it, basically.

We had DeKalb County transport him to our headquarters.

When I arrived at the scene, Gary's vehicle was there.

There were witnesses that had seen Gary taking items out

of his vehicle and throwing them in the dumpster

at the convenience store.

So I had a long night ahead of me.

I had to go through the dumpster,

process every item in the dumpster

behind a convenience store.

I then had Gary's van, which we made the decision

to tow the van and process it in a controlled environment

back in our lab.

When I first met him, he was on the floor in a conference

room in GBI headquarters.

Gary was lying on the floor in a fetal position

and kept saying that he had multiple sclerosis,

and he needed an immediate shot of folic acid,

and just kind of talking crazy.

He had a fingernail gouge into his nose,

a pretty substantial cut on his nose from a fingernail.

It looked to be a defensive wound someone

else had inflicted on him.

And his hand was obviously broken.

And I said, hey, I just want to talk

to you a little bit about where Meredith Emerson is.

He said, I believe verbatim, he said,

I'm answering no questions.

I'm waiving no rights.

I want an attorney present with me before any questioning.

In Georgia, police are questioning

the man last seen with missing hiker Meredith Emerson.

Emerson disappeared on New Year's Day

after going to a state park for a hike with her dog.

Once we had his van, we had tons of evidence.

The first obvious blood pattern that was located

was on the back of the driver's seat.

So we cut it out.

We had blood in the van that matched Meredith Emerson.

Cheryl Dunlap's car had a flat tire.

And there was a bayonet that we recovered,

like a military-style bayonet knife.

And Florida forensics were able to match that

to the puncture in the tire.

In a couple of the videos,

where Gary is trying to get money out of the ATM,

he's wearing a yellow jacket with a piece

of reflective material on it.

That jacket was in the van.

In Georgia, there is a criminal statute

called kidnapping with bodily injury,

which carries a life sentence.

So we knew that we had him for that.

We got a call from the prosecutor

and said, OK, he's willing to meet and tell

you where Meredith is.

He is such a narcissist

that he believes that he is the best at what he does.

And I believe that for him to be caught

was almost humiliating to him, because he was

smarter than anybody,

smarter than any of us in the room with him.

Everything I've studied throughout my career

tells me that he's probably a sexual sadist psychopath.

One thing that he wanted very much

was to have the death penalty taken off the table

before he would talk.

At that point, we knew we had John Bryant

DNA in that van.

Some boots had Cheryl Dunlap's blood on it.

So we knew we had a couple of more bites at the apple

of giving him the death penalty,

and agreed to go ahead and take

the death penalty off the table for Meredith

and recover her body.

Went up to the jail.

And Clay and I went into a room.

And they brought him in.

And I said, I understand that you want to tell

us where Meredith is now.

And so he began to tell us the story.

Meredith decided to go for a hike and a jog on New Year's.

Gary sat up in the woods and surveyed the parking lot

and made the decision on who he was going to abduct

and carried out his plan.

Hilton basically saw her on the trail.

She had a dog.

He had a dog.

He knew that he could strike up a conversation

about the dogs.

Eventually, she said, OK, I'll talk to you later.

And she pretty much ran up the trail.

And she probably sensed that there

was something-- something wasn't good about it,

and left him behind.

So he concealed himself along the trail.

Some people had actually seen him hiding,

crouching behind the rocks.

Gary Hilton waited on Meredith as she was

coming back down the trail.

And he attacked her.

Meredith was trained in martial arts.

And Gary Hilton would later tell

us that she almost took him.

In other words, she almost beat him up.

He finally got control of her by convincing her he had a gun.

And so he makes his way back down to the parking lot

and forces Meredith into the van, along with Ella,

and they leave.

The bank should have known that her PIN and her card

was used.

For whatever reason, since no money was taken out,

they didn't classify that as being used, or something.

But I feel confident that in Meredith's mind,

she was doing that

in hopes that we would be able to track her

and be able to find her sooner.

She was thinking, well, if I can just

keep him at bay just a little bit longer,

they're going to find me.

They're going to find me.

I listened to all that and him

describe how he took her life.

And once he was taken away, it all flooded in on me,

and I just began to cry.

It was nothing I've ever experienced

before, nothing like anything I've ever been around.

It was too much to even comprehend,

how he could be that cruel,

that evil, and commit the horrific acts that he did.

It's sickening.

It makes me sick today, just thinking about it.

I'm sick to my stomach.

I wish I had killed him.

After the fact, finding out

everything that she did and how close we came to catching him

on numerous occasions, and she was still alive,

to this day, it breaks my heart.

He agreed to tell us where the body was.

And he started showing us on a map.

And he said, the head will be missing.

So we took Hilton to that area.

We take him with us down there because I

was not sure at all that we could find both scenes.

And so we were able to find Meredith's body.

Well, the body was covered with leaves

and limbs and debris.

Literally, you could be standing a couple of feet away

and not know there was a body there.

So he had done a very good job of concealing the body.

He had taken her head off and moved it

to another location about a mile away from her body.

And we walked him down a little road inside the forest.

And he told me to walk up over a small bank

to a dead tree that would be lying on the ground.

On one end of the tree would be some

of Meredith's clothing.

And toward the other end would be her head.

And we secured both scenes and went to work

that night in the forest.

Gary Hilton was very arrogant.

He was very nonchalant about what he had done

and why he had done it.

I asked him why he had removed her head.

And he said, for forensic purposes.

Gary Hilton didn't do that for forensic purposes.

He did it because he liked it.

As soon as I was able to find

Meredith's head

I guess that's about the only time in my career

that I just wanted to shoot him.

He has absolutely no redeeming features at all.

So we got him out of there very quickly

and took him back up to the jail.

It was the most horrific thing I think I had ever heard.

You really start getting a sense

of this dehumanization and complete lack of any ability

to care about anybody else.

He seemed to have no trouble whatsoever murdering Meredith.

But he cannot murder Ella.

And I think that's very, very significant.

It just speaks to the lack of attachment

that Gary Hilton seems to have with anybody.

John Bryant was taken, held captive

in the back of Hilton's van.

He chained him around the neck and padlocked the chain.

And takes him to another park.

And then he kills him, uses his bank card, and gets $300.

And that is what he gets in exchange for, you know,

just a beautiful couple's life.

And it was later on that John's body

was found in the Nantahala National Forest.

And he was identified by his pacemaker, I believe.

He had a pacemaker inserted.

And it was still within his remains.

I do think, once he crossed the line,

once he murders Irene and John, I think there is no going back.

And I think he would have continued

to kill until he was caught.

It tells us a lot about Gary Hilton in terms of how he views

his victims, essentially as objects

that he's got to now figure out how to disguise and get rid of.

We know he allegedly had a psychotic break.

And there have been several people who've said that perhaps

he had some severe mental illness,

like schizoaffective disorder and those kinds of things.

He goes in all these rants.

He talks about all these things that

don't seem to have anything to do with the reason

he's being interrogated about.

He absolutely does seem to be, you know,

disturbed in some respects.

There is no doubt in my mind that he

killed many other people.

You don't wake up at 61 and start

doing these kinds of crimes the way he does them.

Dismembering bodies is not something

you just decide to do.

There's no way to know that unless he tells you that,

unless you can prove to him that you

can prove that he did do it.

I think that Gary Michael Hilton

is a coward.

What he did to Meredith and what he did to Sherry,

just absolutely, totally wicked.

Gary Hilton's absolutely evil.

You look in his eyes, and you can tell that.

He brags about being the smartest guy in the room.

Yeah, even though he has a fairly high IQ,

he made some serious mistakes in these cases

that helped us prosecute him.

But he's a typical serial killer, very narcissistic,

holds himself in very high regard,

has to be the center of attention when you talk to him.

He fits the definition of a serial killer, by far.

I honestly believe that there's countless victims that

fell victim to Gary Hilton.

But he will never say anything about it

unless his execution date is set and the time draws near.

He may bring something up just to remain alive.

So I'm holding out hope that when that day comes,

and hopefully in the near future, that he will

start to open up a little bit.

But unless you can show Gary Hilton that he is caught,

he will admit to nothing.

He's just pure evil.

You can see it in his eyes.

I've never met anybody that you could

literally look in their eyes and see evil, but him.

And he is.

He's truly evil.

He called himself a sick ripper.

He was an affable southern gentleman,

had a good sense of humor, and was very easygoing

and laid back.

He shows that picture and tells a jailhouse inmate,

I'm the one that murdered this young woman.

She was stepping into a death chamber.