Original subtitles

So here's the thing about the National Forest.

If you enjoy isolating yourself from the real world,

a criminal has that same opportunity.

- You don't expect to encounter a monster on a hiking trail.

In northeast Georgia, a search continues

for a missing 24-year-old hiker.

It is impossible to commit a crime

without leaving evidence.

- There's not much chance that she's still alive.

- And I realized that I was a potential victim.

- He is acting out hunting scenes from a movie.

Young women being set loose in the forest

and then hunted down and murdered.

- Everybody was looking for him.

Emergency 911.

- At some point, there will be more victims.

I got a really weird feeling.

This is a human skull.

- It's the stuff of nightmares.

- One of the most vile murderers

I've ever dealt with.

Secrets in the wild.

Beautiful, yet treacherous places.

These are the stories of the investigators

who solve crimes in the wilderness.

We're at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

It's steep, it's rugged, and it's mountainous.

Lots of lakes, streams.

Lots of hiking, lots of camping.

The mountains of north Georgia

offer a lot of opportunities for the people

who live and come to this area.

- It's managed to be more remote and more pristine,

like its natural state, than other parts

of the National Forest.

So backup or law enforcement assistance may be hours away.

- People do let their guard down some up here,

but they should remember that sometimes,

bad things happen in good places.

The first day I met Meredith, I remembered,

because she had a very unique and smart personality.

You felt connected to her from the first time you met her.

There's a lot of questions and a lot of whys

that we'll never know the answer to.

You never really know when you might not see someone again.

On January 2, 2008,

the Union County Sheriff's Office

got a call of a missing hiker that was up on Blood Mountain.

Her name was Meredith Emerson.

The call came in from her roommate...

Saying that Meredith had left a note that she went hiking,

and never came home.

She left me a note that just said,

"Gone hiking, took Ella."

Um, and that was normal.

She would normally just take her dog.

She loved to do, and take her dog hiking.

She got a little worried.

Meredith did not come home overnight.

And that's when she made the phone call

to Union County for us to go up there and check.

Her boyfriend located her car in the parking lot

of the Byron Herbert Reece connector trail.

He had left a yellow sticky note on it,

telling her to stay there,

that they were looking for her.

As a patrolman, we would get

these missing hiker cases all over the state.

Somebody overestimated how fast they could get from point A

to point B and popped out on a different part of the trail,

not where they left their car.

So nobody really got overly worried

initially on this case.

When we arrived at the trailhead,

Meredith's friends were already there.

They started putting search teams together

to go out and search the woods.

Blood Mountain is a part of

the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest

in very close proximity to the Appalachian Trail.

Atlanta is not very far away, but you'll find yourself

in a totally different area where

it's very rugged and remote.

If you get off the road itself, there's nothing.

It's wilderness.

There's no houses, there's no neighborhoods to speak of.

From the parking lot

at Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trail

to the peak, round trip, is a little over four miles.

People come there to get away, to let their guard down,

which makes them a little bit more vulnerable.

The fact that you have somebody hiking on

a heavily-used trail in the middle of the day

just vanish, is extremely unheard of.

- As time went on, we became a little bit

more concerned that maybe some foul play might be involved.

This was getting

a lot bigger than what we expected.

And that's when we called in the GBI.

GBI stands for Georgia Bureau of Investigation,

created to assist local law enforcement.

We get requested by the chief of police,

the sheriff, the district attorneys,

Superior Court judges.

The more rural areas have limited resources.

They tend to lean on the GBI more than the urban areas.

GBI brings in a level of specialization

and can concentrate with the sheriff's department

on conducting the investigation

into Meredith Emerson's disappearance.

My name is John Cagle.

I was the Special Agent in charge

of the GBI Regional Office.

The Union County Sheriff's Office called me

about 9:00 on the night of January 2.

We knew it was going to take us all to go to Blood Mountain

and get this thing organized.

The GBI has been requested to join in this effort.

We have GBI agents on site here,

as well as other law enforcement personnel

from many different agencies.

John is a true mountain man.

He's one of the best GBI agents I ever worked with.

The motto that I tried to live by

was never get too close.

Never let it get personal.

And I was able to maintain that

until the Meredith Emerson case.

Friends of Meredith Emerson sent this picture

to us showing Emerson and her dog.

They hope it will help authorities find her.

The search for Emerson is taking place on Blood Mountain

in Union County right now.

- Meredith's roommate got a lot of media contacts

and sent the world to Blood Mountain.

The one thing we know, if Meredith is there,

then her dog is there.

And, um... and just wouldn't leave her side for anything.

So, uh, we're hopeful that if they're out there,

that they're together.

So they prepared some posters with a picture

of Meredith that she was missing.

So they got the word out fairly quickly, too,

to their friends and their network of friends.

I went to school with Meredith.

Been best friends with Meredith

for about six years now.

So, you know, knowing her,

everything's going to end up OK

and we're just going to be out here for her until it is.

We do something called victimology

to find out just as much as we could

about Meredith Hope Emerson...

her habits, who she hung out with, what she liked to do.

She was 24 years old

and graduated from the University of Georgia.

And then she adopted her dog, Ella.

Meredith was not the kind of person

that would just disappear.

As soon as she didn't come home,

then everybody's radar went up.

Growing up in Colorado and being an experienced hiker

that, um, that we are, we are hopeful,

um, but of course, we're also, you know, scared.

- The more we found out about her and her abilities,

this is probably not an injured hiker

or somebody who got lost on the trail.

Family and friends have been gathering here,

and of course, are staying in close contact

with the law enforcement authorities.

In a missing persons case,

you always want to talk with the boyfriend

or the husband or wife.

Were they troubled? Were they mad?

Were they upset about something?

The Union County Sheriff's Office

actually thought that the boyfriend might

be involved in the disappearance of Meredith.

- She's alone wherever she is,

and it's probably very silent there.

It's probably very cold there.

He was very dry, unemotional.

So our Spidey senses definitely went up.

He found her car.

He knew where to look.

That was strange, in and of itself.

Things started stacking against him pretty quickly.

He told us they had plans

and they talked that morning

and the plans changed, and Meredith decided

just to take Ella and go hiking.

When you're dealing with somebody missing

that you think something may have happened to,

90% of all cases

tends to go toward someone that you know,

someone that knows you.

He said he was with friends

in metro Atlanta that day.

We confirmed that with those friends.

We also accessed his phone records,

which showed that his phone was in metro Atlanta all day.

It was very clear that he was nowhere near

Blood Mountain on January 1.

In northeast Georgia,

a search continues in the woods

for a missing 24-year-old hiker.

- Meredith!

We had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers

that were scouring the mountain,

looking for any evidence or clues

that, uh, would give us a direction.

- We literally just hit the ground.

Meredith!

There were a number of civilian searchers

that were out there.

So we try to say, look, if you find something

you think is important, don't touch it,

don't pick it up, hold what you have,

let us come photograph it, collect it.

But as 48 hours ticked by,

no sign of the woman, nor her dog.

And in this case, we needed help.

So one thing we always do in these kinds of cases,

we try to rapidly set up a tip line,

so that the public can call.

We want to talk to anybody who saw Meredith

on the trail New Years Day.

- We got to ask the public who have seen something

or heard something to get in touch with us.

My father-in-law was looking at

retiring in Georgia, and he loves to hike.

It was New Year's morning and I was like,

hey, we should go hike Blood Mountain.

It's about an hour and a half from our house.

It was a beautiful morning. It was nice and sunny.

I would say there's probably 30 to 40 people

in various places all throughout the mountain.

We were not very far in,

maybe 3/4 of a mile into the trail.

Meredith was jogging down the mountain.

I wouldn't have even noticed, because there were

a lot of people on the trail that day,

except for the fact that

I have these two crazy dogs that were puppies.

She had a dog, and my dogs immediately

ran up to her and her dog.

So I was like, I'm sorry, sorry.

And she's like, it's fine, it's fine.

And after we passed by her,

the next person I saw was this old guy

in a yellow and black North Face jacket

walking down the mountain with his dog.

He intentionally avoided us off the trail.

That caught my eye a little, just because everybody

kind of stays on the trail,

and he just went around.

Like, it didn't feel right.

It didn't feel...

it didn't feel normal.

Another witness had seen Meredith Emerson

on January 1 hiking.

And he had also seen a strange-looking individual

that seemed to be trying to catch up to her.

The guy he described was a man in his 50s or 60s.

He was wearing high-end hiking gear.

He had a police-style baton,

had a bayonet knife on his belt.

What he couldn't shake, was the fact that

he had duct tape on his shoes.

Somebody that's a very experienced hiker,

why would you have duct tape on your shoes?

He didn't give much credence to it at first.

But when he was coming back down the trail after hiking,

he noticed two water bottles,

a dog leash,

and the expandable police baton on the ground.

- A police baton, it is an expandable baton.

It can go from this short to this long.

It is used to subdue a person to get them to comply.

- It's just not normal to see that on someone

other than a police officer.

Some of the reports that we had gotten,

was that along this area in these rocks,

they had seen a man kind of crouching down

behind the rocks, hiding in this area.

And didn't know exactly what he was doing.

Right at this switchback is where he had found the items.

He said that there was disturbed earth

between this trail and this trail

where it looked like somebody had tumbled off

the trail down to the other.

And within that area, he had found the water bottles,

police-style baton, and the dog leash,

and the dog treats.

And the fact that that baton had been found

near items we believed belonged to Meredith,

it just scared us to death.

This trail on January 1, 2008, had to be a real busy day.

And it had to happen so quickly

with that number of people on the trail...

I just don't understand how.

There might have been somebody else coming down

that would have heard the commotion

and heard her scream.

This had to be the spot.

She's alone,

and it didn't take long.

I was with my husband,

my father, my stepmother, and a friend.

It was cold, so I started walking

a little faster than my group.

I turned back and I saw that a man had cut in front of them

and was coming towards me.

As I stepped aside for him to pass me,

I started talking about his dog.

I was like, wow, what a beautiful dog.

What's her name?

He said, his name's Dandy, like a fancy dresser.

Didn't look at him, I was looking at his dog.

When I saw his face, I was like,

this guy's very creepy.

And all of a sudden he goes, you know,

I get so pissed off when I come up here,

because people are not prepared.

He was like, you know,

most people carry cell phones these days.

Do you have a cell phone with you?

I was like, well, no.

And he was like, well, are you alone?

As we got to that point where the trail split,

my father had caught up to me and was right behind me.

I was like, well, it was nice talking to you.

And I didn't really think anything more about it.

And then days later

when we found out that Meredith was missing,

everything crashed in

and I realized that I was...

a potential victim.

He was hunting people on New Year's Eve.

Had she been alone,

then he would have had a victim New Year's Eve.

The focus pretty quickly

became that Meredith Emerson had been abducted.

- Things were changing very, very rapidly.

We literally were some of the last people

off the mountain that day.

And when we got down there, almost to the parking lot,

I only saw two cars.

I saw the white Astrovan, and like a little smaller car.

Through our interviews with some witnesses,

one of them had taken a photograph.

And in the background,

you could see a man standing by a white van.

And in that picture,

he had on a yellow raincoat.

We knew we were on the right track,

because of the consistency of all those witnesses

that we wanted to find this man.

- Meredith Emerson has been missing now

for two bitterly cold nights.

We just received information from authorities

that they have named a person of interest

in her disappearance.

Authorities are looking for

a 50 to 60-year-old white man, about 160 pounds.

He had a dark reddish retriever

and was wearing a yellow jacket and backpack.

They are hoping that they will be able to find Emerson alive.

- We began to get a lot of information

coming in through the tip line.

We were literally getting thousands of calls.

Some, you could dismiss relatively quickly,

but some of them wound up being extremely valuable.

That's when we got a very critical call

that just scared everybody.

On January 3,

we received a telephone call

from North Carolina authorities.

It was a Special Agent named Junior Young.

He felt like the case that we were investigating

was eerily similar to the case that he had in North Carolina.

- He said the person that we were looking for in our case

matched the description of a person they were looking for

in an abduction and murder case

in the Pisgah National Forest.

We're overlooking the Pisgah National Forest

on the Pisgah Ranger District here.

Primarily, the area here in Transylvania County.

This was my office.

This is where I worked.

Great views.

Unfortunately, for a few,

this is not such a great place.

My name is Harold Young, Jr.

I'm a retired special agent

with the United States Forest Service.

The Pisgah Ranger District is comprised of approximately

162,000 acres.

That's just this district alone.

For me as an investigator with the forest service,

I just primarily focused on crimes in a National Forest.

On November 6, 2007, I was working in my office

and the front desk person at the, uh, visitor center

came back and said there's a gentleman out here,

would like to talk to you about his missing parents.

It was Robert Bryant,

the son of John and Irene Bryant.

He explained to me that somewhere in the vicinity

of about two weeks, he had lost contact with them

on October the 21st.

He was trying to figure out what location

he needed to focus to try to find his parents.

John and Irene Bryant

moved here about the same time we did.

And we knew 'em for six, seven years.

And they were directly across the street.

John was... you know, I would call him

a self-effacing individual,

an attorney by trade, and a very smart guy.

But you would never know it.

You would just think he was just a Joe next door.

Irene Bryant was a veterinarian

most of her working life.

They were a great couple, easy to get along with.

Easy to like.

I believe it was the love of the mountains

that brought John and Irene to Western North Carolina.

Folks on our street started noticing

the newspapers were piling up on the doorstep.

And we all started getting a little concerned.

The sheriff called John and Irene's son.

Bob flew up the next day from Texas and knocked on my door.

Said, Matt, do you know where the key is to my dad's house?

I said, no, but let's go break in.

And Bob knew I think right away

that something bad was happening, or had happened.

The fruit was in the fruit bowl, had already rotted.

And there was laundry in the washing machine

that hadn't been laundered.

It was an eerie feeling, because you were breaking

into someone's house that hadn't been there

for, you know, a week or more.

We said, this is not good.

Robert had found several photographs of them

in the Pisgah National Forest,

and he explained that they loved to come up

into the forest and hike.

And he felt like, based on photographs,

that they frequented the area

near the Pisgah Ranger District.

I suggested he focus on the area around the fish hatchery

and cut off of that onto Yellow Gap Road,

which circles back into Hendersonville

where the Bryants lived.

Probably about 45 minutes to an hour later,

Robert returns to my office and he said,

I found my dad's vehicle,

which kind of sent a few cold chills down my spine.

So, showed me exactly where the car is, and in the meantime,

I'm calling a rescue squad to get them up here

and we'll start a search.

- In the rescue squad, we have been very active

in years past for search for lost persons

and rescues of injured persons on trails.

Pisgah National Forest is very widespread

with various areas of terrain.

It is very dense in a lot of locations.

This is Transylvania County, which means across the valley.

Of course, people associate us more

with the typical Transylvania stigma of vampires and bats

and Dracula and all that.

We do have a lot of bats.

This is our busiest recreation area

and time of year.

The fall of the year,

this area is just unbelievably beautiful.

So at the time that they disappeared,

there would have been an unbelievable amount

of visitors in the National Forest.

I followed Robert up to where the car was located

in a little parking area right beside the trail

at Bennett Gap.

You could see all of the dust

that had accumulated on the car,

so obviously, it had been there a while.

The car was not broken into.

The car was locked.

And there didn't seem to be anything amiss with the car.

We start getting maps out,

look at where the vehicle's located,

and we consider that what we call a point last seen.

And deploy personnel on various trails

that the lost persons could have taken.

- I want to be involved, because this was my...

my neighborhood, my patrol area.

Out of the 400 miles of roads and trails,

Yellow Gap Road was one of the main roads I patrolled.

And it was an all-out search.

Then after, say eight, 10, 12 hour-day, you go home.

And then you start the process all over again the next day.

We had been unsuccessful

in locating anything

related to them on all the trails.

Something's just not adding up.

We need to change the focus of this search

and do a much more methodical search

from a law enforcement perspective at that point.

We're looking for a body.

We're looking for a piece of clothing.

We're looking for a purse, maybe.

We're looking for a wallet that they may have dropped.

We formalized a plan to start doing a grid search.

Basically, start walking through an area,

arms width apart, looking at everything on the ground

and covering a certain area.

- Did not take very long at all

before we unfortunately found Ms. Bryant.

We responded, and a little bit of frustration

and embarrassment.

The body was found

maybe 150 feet from the car.

When I arrived at the scene,

rescue squad members met me here

and they pointed this direction and said,

we found skeletal remains down here.

They pointed down this direction here.

We walked down this area, keeping in mind,

that particular day,

all the foliage was much greater than it is now.

At about this point, I could see skeletal remains

and some clothing items laying on the ground

just in front of me here, about 30 feet.

I was confident we had a criminal investigation

because the proximity to the car, just...

there was no reason for that body to be here.

But I immediately...

I'm starting to look around. And where is John?

The perpetrator did not want Irene Bryant found,

at least immediately.

She was in a state of decomposition,

and it was apparent to us

that she had suffered some sort of blunt force trauma

to her head.

Up close and personal in contact with the victim,

overpowering her with an object to the head.

Maybe something round,

uh, like a piece of pipe or something

similar to that.

And the scene was...

I'm trying to think of a decent way to say...

had been disturbed by wildlife in the area.

- The collection of evidence always

revolves around timeliness.

At this point, the leaves are starting to fall,

so you have even further camouflage, if you will.

So we began to document that area through photographs

and try to collect as much evidence as we could.

We started processing the car for evidence.

Latent fingerprints, fibers,

anything that could possibly lead to a suspect.

My experience has always been,

especially in murder investigations,

it's the small things that solve the crimes.

It's not the large things.

I knew that on board diagnostic tests on cars

could tell mechanics a lot of things about a vehicle.

I had the Bryants' car towed to the local Ford dealership,

and they were able to tell me

that the vehicle was last running

on October the 21st at 1:59 p.m.

Based on that information, we started having a timeline.

Everything of our investigation

started at 1:59 p.m.

on the 21st of October.

- The working theory is that they had arrived

back at the vehicle and met someone

who probably attacked at least Ms. Bryant,

and then disposed of her body in that wooded location.

In terms of a working theory on Mr. Bryant,

I don't know that we necessarily had one.

Anything could have been possible.

I got called in to secure her remains

and to prevent people from going beyond

that taped area for the night.

Up until probably 7:00 or 8:00 the next morning...

Her death was on my mind.

And what can I do to make amends,

to right a wrong?

I try not to take it personal,

but I took it a little personal that it was under my watch,

and it made me angry.

And I'd like to have five minutes with him in a room,

whoever did that.

It's something I'll never forget.

In reference to what happened

to Robert and the family

after we discovered the body,

I remember when we told him we'd found the...

a body that we believed was his mom.

You could tell it's setting in.

"My mom's not coming home."

And we don't know where dad is.

And you could see tears in his eyes

and he's just reliving his whole life

with his mom that is no longer going to be around.

When they found Irene's body in the National Forest,

that was a tough day.

I think everyone that knew Jack and Irene were totally

in disbelief that this could happen

in our little section of Western North Carolina,

and the way it did.

You go through a lot of different scenarios

in your mind.

Why was John not with Irene?

When someone wants to conceal evidence

of a crime in a area this vast,

it's extremely difficult to find.

I mean, as far as you can see here,

this is primarily National Forest lands.

And where do you look?

It's hard to imagine

doing a crime scene in this big of an area.

Once we found Irene,

I almost became two investigators in one.

One of me was trying to solve who did this horrendous crime

to Irene, and the other is,

what have they done or what are they going to do with John?

Where is John Bryant?

- In this case, there was pressure to find Mr. Bryant.

There was pressure to find the individual

or individuals responsible for committing these crimes.

We had hundreds of thousands of people

patronize Pisgah National Forest in Transylvania County.

It could be anyone that came into the area from anywhere.

And you have to rely on where they messed up.

- We get the phone records of John Bryant,

and lo and behold, on the 21st of October,

it shows a 911 call

at 3:59 p.m., I believe it is.

So the call from John Bryant's phone

made it to the cell tower, but the cell tower

was unable to forward it on to the 911 system

because of lack of, uh, signal.

Very frustrating, and very sad

that there was a possibility we could have helped

or stopped this incident.

We knew from investigations

that cell carriers can actually triangulate

if there is at least three towers involved.

They could tell you almost exactly

where the phone call was made.

That area is approximately 15 to a 20-minute drive

from the site of where Irene's body was found,

and where the car was found.

I believed that that call was probably

made by John Bryant,

who was in the vehicle with the suspect.

He may have gotten caught trying to make that call.

My working theory was that John was abducted,

Irene was killed,

probably because the perpetrator

did not want to keep two people with him.

I remember having a feeling

that it was somehow bigger than anything

we had seen at that point.

And so we know that we're already

two weeks behind locating what happened and who did it.

We want to talk to every single person

that was in the National Forest

on the Pisgah Ranger District in Transylvania County

on October 21.

We were hopeful that someone in the area

may have seen something and can provide us

with any information.

Someone acting funny, acting strange.

We did not have the social media

that we have nowadays back then.

So we had local media, newspapers,

radio stations, television.

We had hundreds and hundreds of leads called in.

And they ranged from, I saw a suspicious person,

or I saw this campsite that had been abandoned

that just didn't really look right.

And you never know when that one lead is the one.

That's where we started getting reports

of the white van and a older man

with a dog from numerous individuals.

We interviewed two females

that was at the Pink Beds Picnic Area

just near the crime scene on the 21st of October.

They explained having an encounter with an older man

driving a white van with a dog that approached them,

and they believe tried to befriend them,

because they had two dogs.

And he kind of wanted their dogs to play together.

They described that something inside them

set off alarms with this person.

The hair on the back of her neck kind of stood up

like, something's not right here.

We need to get away from this guy.

We had another witness come forward

that said they had observed this older male in a white van

with a dog say that he had an extendable baton

and that he knew how to use that baton to protect himself.

We know that Irene Bryant was killed

as a result of blunt trauma

with something with a cylindrical shape,

according to the medical examiner.

So now we've got a possible murder weapon

associated with older model white van

in the area of the crime scene.

Old man with a dog.

This started to paint a picture to me.

I'm dealing with somebody that is here constantly.

He's making the effort to make some kind of contact

with a potential victim or victims.

He's confident.

He still has that determination.

"I'm going to commit a crime."

But unfortunately, for whatever reason,

the Bryants turned into a victim.

We're hopeful that we'll be able to locate this person,

uh, and interview him concerning his contact,

uh, with Ms. Emerson there at the trailhead.

The suspect in North Carolina

was an exact match for the person that we believed

abducted Meredith Emerson.

For somebody to take somebody from the trail

down the side of a mountain to a van...

With nobody seeing anything, with nobody hearing anything,

is just absolutely unheard of to law enforcement.

Meredith's phone was shut off, so we started initially,

looking for electronic trails.

The sheriff's office had contacted Meredith's bank

and asked, had there been any banking activity.

We asked the bank to let us know

in the event there was any activity with the ATM card

or anything like that.

The bank reported no activity on her debit card

or her bank accounts at all.

We knew that there was one killing in North Carolina,

but we didn't know where John Bryant was.

That was disturbing.

If we had a chance of recovering Meredith Emerson

and saving her life,

we were going to do everything possible to do that.

- If you can't find out what happened

within a couple of days, it's going to go cold quickly.

Looking at the obituary

for Irene Woods Bryant that is dated November the 25th, 2007.

And heartbreaking to me,

is that this one paragraph here,

that Irene is survived by her husband,

John Davis Bryant.

The Bryants disappeared on the 21st of October,

and this is the 25th of November,

so we're talking four weeks plus.

For the family to go through this service

and know that their mother is deceased,

yet their father is missing,

but they don't know where he's at.

I think a lot of people thought after Irene's body

was found that maybe there was hope for Jack

and that he had survived or escaped

or overtaken his assailant.

But as every day went by,

uh, there was just less and less hope.

I believe that it is absolutely impossible

to commit a crime without leaving evidence.

It's your job as an investigator

to find that evidence and link it to a suspect.

A lot of crimes that I investigated,

especially people crimes, are associated with

a sexual drive or money-driven.

I didn't think that John was a sex-driven incident,

so we figured it was money.

That's why the bank ATM cards and bank information

is critical to find out,

did somebody take money from the victim?

- It was determined that John Bryant's credit card

was used at an ATM in Ducktown, Tennessee,

over a two-hour drive from where

John and Irene Bryant's vehicle was located

in Pisgah National Forest.

- $300 was taken from their account, which at that time,

I believe was the limit that you could get on an ATM

in one transaction.

The murder occurs on the 21st

at about 2:00.

911 call's made right at 3:59.

The ATM is used the following day

at about 7:00 p.m. on the 22nd.

It's got to be John, or it's got to be somebody

using John's card with John's consent,

or against his will.

When we got the video from the ATM,

we clearly saw a person who had spent some time

trying to disguise themselves

so that they could not be identified as they were using

that ATM card.

As you can see, fairly grainy, not very much detail.

He's clearly aware there's cameras.

He's using camouflage of covering his face.

Also of interest in this, you can see this yellow jacket.

There's duct tape across the front here.

I have no clue what that's for or why,

but it's just kind of unusual.

Whether it was Mr. Bryant or whether

it was some other suspect, at that moment, we...

we couldn't tell.

We were interested in a height and least a weight,

at least to eliminate him from being a possibility

of John Bryant doing it.

We took measurements of the known points that

could be seen in photographs, such as the post for the porch

that covered the ATM.

5' 10", slender build, not a heavyset person,

which did not match John Bryant's descriptive.

After this perpetrator got the money,

which direction did they go, which unfortunately,

this surveillance system was not aimed in a way

that we were able to tell the direction of travel

after he gained access

to John and Irene Bryant's bank account.

Whoever our suspect was,

they picked remote locations

both in the forest and also the ATM usage

in Ducktown, Tennessee.

It's no longer just Transylvania County.

It's Western North Carolina,

and then Tennessee.

Everybody's job just became more complicated

by adding all of this volume of land and roads

and businesses and homes and forest.

Where could John be?

If you have an individual

who doesn't mind giving up a few creature comforts,

it's incredibly difficult

to try to track those folks down.

So I'm two, three, four weeks into this.

It's almost just like throwing darts.

Things were slowing down.

We wasn't getting anywhere that I could tell

with the investigation.

The road was leading nowhere.

There was an incredible amount of pressure

from our community asking me

if it was safe for our residents

to take their family into the forest.

We need to catch the person responsible

and bring him to justice.

One of our detectives came to me and said,

hey, Sheriff, you might want to take a look at this.

It was a news article that had a photograph of an individual

disguised attempting to use an ATM card

belonging to a young lady in Florida.

And I remember seeing that article

and seeing that photograph and having chills

run down my back, thinking,

my God, that's just like what we saw with the Bryants' card.

I think immediately we all thought,

there's got to be a connection somehow.

We still had Mr. Bryant that was missing.

We had female victims, Forest Service land,

a disguise.

As we were searching for Meredith,

we were contacted by the Florida authorities,

who were investigating the disappearance of a female

in the Apalachicola National Forest near Tallahassee.

Same circumstances. Same MO.

This is a person that knew

how to target and victimize

people visiting the National Forest.

I think that was the first time

that that initial thought I had,

that this is somehow bigger than... than here,

I think that was the first time that we had something to say,

yes, it is.