Original subtitles

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

CLAY: Meredith Emerson,

the Bryants, Cheryl Dunlap...

♪♪ ♪♪

Hikers going missing in national forest property.

- What was really going on?

Was Meredith's case connected to any others?

SEARCHERS: Meredith! Meredith!

KIMBERLY: We all hoped that we'd find Meredith,

and we'd find her alive.

[police siren wailing]

CALLER: I have this as a person of interest

in the missing woman case.

TIM: He's got that mask on,

just like in a horror movie or something.

RONNIE: I looked around thinking,

good Lord, is somebody watching me?

KIMBERLY: Just like a cat-and-mouse game.

Here he is, and we're trying to play catch-up.

- I immediately said, I think we're dealing

with a serial killer.

[elk calls]

NARRATOR: Secrets in the wild,

beautiful yet treacherous places.

These are the stories of the investigators who solve

crimes in the wilderness.

♪♪ ♪♪

[bird cawing]

[somber music]

♪♪ ♪♪

SEARCHER: Meredith!

REPORTER: Miles up the road, the search continued

for Meredith Emerson with small search teams

looking in ditches and ravines along mountainous roads.

[dramatic music]

- We had JBI helicopters, which use flare to see if they

could find a heat source.

The Air National Guard came in.

We had deputies from metro Atlanta,

from Marietta, from Gilmer County,

all of the surrounding area.

- She's not just some...

♪♪ ♪♪

INTERVIEWER: She was your roommate.

- [sniffles] Sorry.

I'm good.

She's not just some 24-year-old girl.

You know, everybody here loves her.

- This is like everybody's sister or family member.

[dog barking]

KIMBERLY: One thing that we were worried about

was that she was abducted.

♪♪ ♪♪

I hoped she was hunkered down in a cave,

somewhere that she could just protect herself.

♪♪ ♪♪

CLAY: Junior Young had contacted us

as the North Carolina case agent

for John and Irene Bryant.

He was adamant that he felt like the case

that we were investigating was eerily similar to the case

that he had.

- He also asked if we knew about a Florida case,

the case of Cheryl Dunlap.

JOHN: Cheryl Dunlap's case was similar in that you have

a single female disappearing from national forest land.

♪♪ ♪♪

[birds chirping]

STEVE: My name is Steve Ganey.

And I was connected to this case as a responder

to the first call that came in, referenced Cheryl Dunlap.

♪♪ ♪♪

[phone ringing]

It was a Monday, December 3, 2007.

I get a transfer call from dispatch.

They say, I need to report someone missing.

♪♪ ♪♪

She's very reliable, and she works at FSU nursing station.

♪♪ ♪♪

She hasn't shown up there for work,

and she was supposed to teach a Sunday school class

and failed to show up at the Sunday school class.

This really triggered me at the beginning.

There's something wrong here.

♪♪ ♪♪

GLORIA: I got a phone call, and it was from my son.

And he told me that Cheri was missing.

And I said, missing from what?

And he said, she's just missing.

Nobody had seen her.

- She was like a little sister to us.

She was like our little sister.

GLORIA: She was just a sweetheart to be around.

She was funny.

Cheri was a part of an evangelical church.

They were a very close-knit group of people, very loving

towards each other and towards the community.

Cheri's life was a little hard.

Cheri and her husband divorced.

So she was a single mom for a long time.

Cheri really enjoyed her granddaughter.

She did so many things for her family, for the kids.

She reveled in loving her children and spoiling them.

- A friend of Cheryl's called me later that afternoon

and told me that she had found her car.

It was on 319 South coming into Crawfordville,

or Wakulla County.

She said, it's on the right-hand side of the road

just above the county line in Leon County at Leon Sinks.

♪♪ ♪♪

Leon Sinks is a very peaceful sanctuary.

And a lot of people go there to walk their dogs,

read books, just enjoy nature.

[bird cawing]

A lot of people go there just for solitude

and to clear their head, and enjoy the peace of the day.

I saw the car not parked in a normal position

for a disabled vehicle.

This car was parked almost in the wooded area.

And when I looked, I saw the right rear tire was flat.

So I get to look in closer, and it looks like

someone has stuck a knife into the sidewall

to flatten the tire.

Someone drove that car there, parked it the way it was,

then deflated the tire and left the scene.

I opened the door.

The door wasn't locked.

I looked on the passenger side.

Her purse had been scattered, you know,

like somebody rifled through her purse

looking for cash.

So when I saw that, I'm like, I believe she was abducted.

I also noticed in the floorboard

there was beads, multicolored beads.

And I thought that was strange.

Did she have a bracelet on, a necklace?

How did these beads get down there?

Did they grab her?

Were they torn off of her?

And I'm like, we have a problem here.

I made contact immediately with the bank,

and I talked to the supervisor there.

I explained to him, we need a tracer on a debit card.

I said, please let us know immediately if anybody tries

to get money on this card.

[dramatic music]

[indistinct chatter]

♪♪ ♪♪

TIM: My name is Tim Baxter.

And I was the supervisor at the time of what

we call the persons unit.

We did a grid search around the area

where her vehicle was found and had a big group

that went out and walked through the woods,

trying to find any trace of her around there.

STEVE: Of course, Leon Sinks backs up

to the Apalachicola National Forest.

So our emphasis was in the national forest.

- You know, the forest is...

I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of acres.

You're in the woods surrounded by woods...

no real eyewitnesses, no surveillance cameras.

- The vast majority of it is wildlands.

It's woods, trees, bushes that sometimes

never see a footstep of man.

- You can hide a body in the national forest pretty easily.

If you get the hell out of here,

you could get away with it.

- We looked everywhere... nothing, nothing.

SEARCHER: Let's call it a day.

- And that's very frustrating for us.

- I was reading the paper, and there was a picture

of a woman on the front page and an article

about her being missing.

I looked back at the picture, and I realized

it was the same woman that my wife and I saw

at Leon Sinks, who was now missing.

♪♪ ♪♪

That Saturday, we hiked clockwise around the loop.

And my wife and I stopped and looked down in the water.

And we're looking at fish and turtles

in the water and just kind of talking.

A woman was sitting about maybe 35 feet away.

She was sitting there just quietly reading a book.

It was red in color, and I believe it was a hardcover.

And as we began walking in her direction,

she quietly got up, closed her book,

and came walking back towards us, and walked past us.

It was Cheryl Dunlap.

I felt a real sense of surprise that she was missing

and that it was actually somebody we had seen.

And then I felt deep concern for a fellow human being

that may have gone missing and may be in trouble.

I called the tip line and said, my wife and I saw her

at Leon Sinks on Saturday.

STEVE: They had walked past her.

She was reading a book.

She seemed normal, waved at them.

They waved back at her, and they kept going.

We went back to Cheryl's house after we had the information

from the two witnesses.

Upon entry into the house, we looked around.

There was a bookshelf.

And there were six or seven books

in a collection... red, hardback,

almost like a burgundy color.

And they were in order except for one perfect space

where the book was taken out.

This same description we got from the witnesses

of her reading a red book, and one book

is missing out of this collection.

So it has to be the book that they were talking about.

That was another dot that was connected

in our investigation.

So now we're getting a timeline of where she's been.

When's the last time she was seen?

Who's seen her?

REPORTER: Dunlap, a 46-year-old nurse

and Sunday school teacher disappeared

7 miles from home, her car found here with a flat tire.

♪♪ ♪♪

- At first, you think maybe this is just a mistake.

Maybe she's, you know, going somewhere.

Maybe she's just taking a little sabbatical,

so to speak.

But after just a few days,

you know that's not true.

Something has really happened.

STEVE: The call from the bank came in saying

they had someone attempt to take

money out of Cheryl's account.

So we looked at the footage sent to us,

and there was the suspect trying

to get cash out from the ATM.

- Even though at that time I had

27 years of law enforcement experience, it scared me.

She's been missing for a period of time now,

and you've got somebody using her ATM card,

and he's dressed up like that.

He's got that mask on just like in a horror

movie or something.

You're dealing with somebody that knows what he's doing.

He knows how to hide his identity.

Fear ran up and down my spine.

- We did stakeouts at the bank.

We just felt like there's a great opportunity

that he might come back, and we couldn't

afford not to be there.

- Every so often, a criminal does something dumb

and goes back and does the same thing over again,

and you can catch them.

[radio chatter]

- Unfortunately, he never came back.

But you couldn't not do it.

TIM: At the time that he was trying to withdraw her money

from the ATM, we discovered there was a camouflage truck

that drove through the parking lot

just a minute or two after he walked away from the ATM.

[radio chatter]

- And so we started putting out BOLOs to stop and FIR anybody

in a camouflage-wrapped truck.

[radio chatter]

- I guarantee you there were at least 50

camouflage trucks pulled over.

None of them had anything to do with it whatsoever

that we can determine.

[radio chatter]

STEVE: It is frustrating because you're chasing

down every possible lead.

And everywhere we turned, it's a dead end.

[police radio chatter]

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

- While we were actively searching, Meredith's

parents came in from Colorado.

- I appeal to everyone to search their hearts

and memories for anything they can remember

and do to help us find Meredith and return her home.

JOHN: They stayed in a cabin very near our command cabin.

And I went and met them

and saw the kind of people they are...

just good, solid people.

- They were awesome.

Her parents were so loving.

We kept them abreast of everything that was going on.

We didn't want to hide anything from them.

JOHN: They were just horrified.

But they were strong, very strong.

[chatter, phone ringing]

We began to get a lot of information coming in

through the tip line describing a person

that had been seen with Meredith on the trail.

They provided information about what he looked like.

REPORTER: They say he may have some missing teeth.

He had a dark reddish retriever,

who he was calling Danny, and was wearing

a yellow jacket and backpack.

JOHN: And once we put out the information to the media,

we're looking for this man of this description

driving a white van,

that's when we got a very critical call

from a man named John Tabor.

John Tabor actually broke the case

as to who we were looking for.

We knew that was going to be extremely important.

REPORTER: Emerson hasn't been seen since New Year's Day,

when she came to the mountains to walk her dog.

REPORTER: Investigators say their only clue comes

from other hikers who saw Meredith Emerson talking

with a man around 60 years old.

REPORTERS: Authorities and more than a hundred volunteers

have been searching the mountains...

- I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing.

I was in my home gym working out.

REPORTER: Her one-year-old black lab.

- The top story was, of course, the missing hiker,

Meredith Emerson.

REPORTER: Information from authorities that they

have a person of interest in her disappearance.

JOHN TABOR: But what really got my attention

this time was, they provided more details,

and there were witnesses that described an older white male

that also had a dog that she was seen

talking to on the trail.

REPORTER: May have some missing teeth.

He had a dark reddish retriever

who he was calling Danny and was wearing...

- That's when it hit me.

I knew of this person of interest.

It was Gary Hilton.

♪♪ ♪♪

I first met Gary Hilton when he replied to a help

wanted ad for telemarketers.

The telemarketing operation was mostly

geared toward generating business

interest leads for my home improvement company.

He was productive. He was reliable.

And when it comes to telemarketers,

that's about as good as it gets.

- Gary Hilton worked on and off for Tabor in the past.

At times, he could be very nice, and very knowledgeable,

and articulate.

- He actually described Hilton as being very charismatic

very likable guy.

- It's hard to describe exactly

when and how he began to change.

♪♪ ♪♪

He became more combative and belligerent.

It got to the point where he just started demanding money.

Once he attached a threat to it as well,

then I realized that this had just

gotten way out of control.

- Tabor described Hilton toward the end of his employment

as being very volatile and kind of scary.

So firing Hilton was a real good idea.

- Now I just felt like I needed to call

the authorities at that very moment

and tell them everything I know.

CLAY: John Tabor was very instrumental on getting

to know more about Hilton...

how he thought, how he acted.

- Tabor gave us some identifying data, allowing us

to get a criminal history, start doing

some background on Hilton.

Gary Hilton's criminal history was petty crime.

CLAY: He had several misdemeanor charges.

He had some misdemeanor marijuana charges.

JOHN: Nothing that would make any of us

think that this would happen.

- If I hadn't turned him in, who else would have?

No one else had this information.

No one else knew anything about him.

- After we were able to get the name of Gary Hilton

from John Tabor, we get a driver's

license photograph of Hilton.

And immediately, we have another press conference

and provide all that information to the media

to push out that picture.

- Investigators are looking for a Gary Michael Hilton.

This is the picture that we have for Mr. Hilton

at this time.

- When we put out his name and his photo, we knew

that everybody was looking for him.

We put out as much information on that,

and we continuously would get just tips.

JOHN: One of the folks we talked with

was a lawyer called Samuel Rael.

He said he represented Hilton in some cases years ago,

some of the minor cases he had gotten involved with

in metro Atlanta.

SAMUEL: I'm Samuel Rael.

And I'm an attorney.

And I've been one for...

what is it, close to 50 years?

Gary Hilton was my very first client.

It was just a small, little case in the municipal court

there in Atlanta.

How he made his money was, he'd call everybody

and say this is some kind of charity,

and could they not help?

And he would get $15 here, $20 there.

Of course, it was a total con because he pocketed the money.

That's who he was.

I always knew that.

But he could get away with it because he was charming.

He was articulate.

He was a man who you would feel very comfortable with.

I felt comfortable with him,

or I wouldn't have been around him.

- And then he told us a very bizarre

story about Gary Hilton.

He began to tell me about a movie called "Deadly Run"

that he had helped produce and create

in which Gary Hilton was an advisor.

- I have done a lot of criminal law and also got

involved in the film business.

I wanted to become a movie producer because

that's always what I wanted.

That's my love.

I have a legal background and was able to raise some money.

And I learnt a lot, hired the right people,

hired the right actors.

And so I became a movie producer.

"Deadly Run" was a film that we decided to do

that would involve a serial killer.

- [gasps]

- What would happen is, we would take

these women up into the woods.

- [shouting]

- And then we would hunt them down...

- Run, little bunny!

Might even get away!

- Ah!

- And kill them.

- Ah!

- It's a low-budget movie, low tech.

- Oh, my God, Nancy!

Ahh!

[taser buzzing]

- And as soon as I mentioned serial killer,

Gary just couldn't wait to be of help

and couldn't wait to do anything and everything

that would help make the movie.

Gary seemed to know everything about how

a serial killer would act and how

a serial killer would work.

- Let go of me.

SAMUEL: He was constantly coming up with ideas.

Gary helped me with picking out what props we should do.

He helped me with finding the right locations.

And he helped with the actors to get them real.

- Let go of me!

- He had suggested that we get women who would fight back,

and that would make it more interesting.

- It was just hard for me to believe that they would

use Gary Hilton as an advisor.

Rael claimed to be a very influential lawyer.

But I'm thinking, why are you making these movies

and using people like Gary Hilton?

- I mean, it was just unbelievable, eye-opener.

I mean, how could this fellow from all these years ago

that I knew him, all of a sudden he's there in the news

and on TV?

JOHN: It was bizarre for this lawyer to be telling me,

you know, this story.

CLAY: When I found out that the movie took place

where it took place...

the cabin is actually no more than 20 minutes

from Blood Mountain...

it was, to say the least, disturbing.

JOHN: Based on what Sam Rael was telling me,

I believe that Gary Hilton was acting out the movie

"Deadly Run," hunting people in the national forest

and killing them.

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

- On the evening of January 3rd at about 6:00,

we received another call from John Tabor.

♪♪ ♪♪

- I just heard from Gary Hilton.

[phone ringing]

My phone rang.

To my shock, I immediately recognized the voice.

It was Gary Hilton.

I couldn't believe it.

He told me that he was apologizing for what he

had done and all the threats.

I didn't believe any of it, but I just

played the part of believing.

He said he needed some money to get his act together.

He told me how much he wanted...

$600 or $700, whatever.

He said he couldn't meet me right then,

but he wanted me to leave it at the office for him

and that he would be there to get it.

CLAY: Tabor was going to leave a check at his office,

which Gary Hilton either had a key to

or knew how to get into.

- The agent told me, go ahead and do

what you told him to do,

and we'll be there waiting for him.

CLAY: We notified DeKalb County, who deployed

a SWAT team to watch that location in case he did

show up to try and retrieve that money.

- We felt like if this thing actually worked,

we could grab Gary Hilton and maybe save Meredith.

DeKalb County SWAT team stayed out there all night.

[birds cawing]

Hilton didn't show up.

I wanted to find Meredith and return her to her parents.

That's all we all wanted to do.

But we seemed to be just a little bit behind.

♪♪ ♪♪

[phone ringing]

There were two other cases involving missing persons

from the national forest that were very similar to what

we were looking at.

Both cases involved somebody utilizing their banking cards.

So early on, on January 2nd, we had

to ask the bank to let us know in the event there

was any activity on Meredith's ATM card.

We were told at that point that Meredith's

ATM card had not been used.

But that changed on January 4th

when the U.S. Marshals Service told us that someone had

tried to use her ATM card...

- Meredith's bank account had been attempted

to be used three times.

JOHN: On January 1st at a bank in Blairsville, Georgia.

There was a second attempt at a bank

in Gainesville, Georgia,

and another attempt on January 2nd over in Canton, Georgia.

- There was a lot of those moments in this case

where things just couldn't have gone worse.

And that was one.

I was needing that information right then so that we

could try to track him down.

And to find out that it was there

but it was not given to me, that's as angry as I get.

I was livid.

- I was pissed, highly pissed off,

because that's information that we

could have used at that time had the bank given it to us.

CLAY: Once we got the banking information,

we were very concerned that we've

got the same guy involved in all three of these cases.

JOHN: And as I learned more about the Cheryl Dunlap case

in Florida, alarm bells started going off.

♪♪ ♪♪

- My name is Ronnie Rentz.

I've lived in Tallahassee for 55 years.

I love it. It's home.

We love to hunt and fish.

I do most of my hunting in the Apalachicola National Forest.

It's an outdoorsman's paradise.

[birds chirping]

On the morning of December the 15th, me and my son,

we got up like any other day, looking for deer tracks

so we can put our dogs on it.

When we got in there, I seen buzzards

fly up on the side of the road.

[birds cawing]

And when I stopped, I told him...

I said, well, just sit tight just a minute.

Let me go see what's going on here.

I was expecting to see a deer belly laying there and guts

or whatever, you know.

When I got up there closer, I realized

that it was something else.

And then when I bent down, I seen her feet sticking up.

And my knees went weak.

[flies buzzing]

There was no head.

All I could see was the torso and the legs.

It's hard to even explain it.

I thought maybe whoever had done it was still there.

And then I looked around, you know, scanned the woods,

thinking, good Lord, is there somebody watching me?

♪♪ ♪♪

I walked back up to the truck.

And my son, he asked me... he said, what was that, Daddy?

I really didn't want to say anything,

but I knew I had to say something.

And I told him... I said, well...

I said, son, that's a dead body out there.

And he started tearing up.

He said, let's get out of here.

You know, you read about stuff, but you never

believed it would be you.

♪♪ ♪♪

- I get a text telling me that some human remains have

been found in the national forest.

I get there to the scene, and my job

when I get there is to start coordinating

the investigation.

Number one, we have to start looking for things

so we can determine who this person is

and then start building the investigation from there.

The head was missing from the body and both hands.

When I see a body like this, you somewhat have

to disassociate yourself because if you get so wrapped

up in your emotions or your feelings,

you're not going to do a good job.

So even if it had touched me inside, which it did,

I have to hide my feelings to get the job done.

Without the head and hands being there present

with the body, you cannot get an immediate identification

of who the body is.

Most average killings are not like this.

They don't think of hiding the body in the national forest.

They don't think of doing things

to keep them being identified.

So this was a very knowledgeable person

who knew what they were doing.

- We're thinking we're 99.9% sure we

have discovered Cheryl's body.

But you have to identify her literally, like,

without a shadow of a doubt.

TIM: So we requested the medical examiner

to do anything he can to try and draw

some DNA from the body.

And then we obtain a hairbrush and some other items

out of her house, and we were able to get a match

identifying the deceased as Cheryl Dunlap.

- In the absence of her head, they were unable

to determine the cause of death.

She could have been hit in the head multiple times

and died as a result of a brain injury,

and there's no way to say that.

You couldn't say what killed her.

TIM: In an investigation like this,

even though you have some leads...

the guy at the ATM, whoever the camo driver is,

you still have other people you have to eliminate.

We went and interviewed family members, found out

about anybody she had possibly dated, people she worked with.

MIKE: We tried to talk to all of those people...

friends, people that go to church with her,

her co-workers, her family.

So we had access to a lot of people in Cheryl's life.

We talked to everybody that we could,

but none of these people were nefarious,

or criminals, or bad actors.

If she had an enemy, I didn't know about it.

I can tell you that.

GLORIA: The whole county is in an uproar.

No one knows what's going on.

People are buying guns.

The people living there, they were so afraid.

DAWN: We have three kids.

I didn't want them walking down the road.

I didn't want them checking the mailbox.

I didn't want them going out the back door

to play with the dog unless there

was an adult there because, again,

you don't know who did this.

You don't have anybody in custody.

GLORIA: It was really a stressful time

for the whole county.

I believe probably almost 100% of the county

was just engulfed in this trauma.

- I was worried sick constantly day in and day out.

- You're starting to get frustrated because you're

not getting anything really that's taking you anywhere.

And, again, you're in the national forest.

You're in the wild.

You're dealing with hundreds, and hundreds, and hundreds

of miles of national forest.

We know of no witnesses to how her body got there.

So there's nobody to interview on what they saw.

It's the hardest environment I've

ever had to work a case in.

- So we were feeling like we were maybe butting

our head against a wall.

We were swinging and missing at every lead.

- It was very upsetting just to think about Cheri going

through that and what she must have felt and how horrible

a situation it was.

- I'm not really sure how anybody could be

so cruel to another human being.

TIM: I hated to even entertain the thought.

But I said, I think we're dealing with a serial killer.

[dramatic music]

♪♪ ♪♪

- The case in Florida involving Cheryl Dunlap had gone cold.

[chatter, phone ringing]

We were hopeful that our case was not connected

to the Florida case because the outcome they had

was not a positive one at all.

SEARCHER: Meredith!

- We all hoped that we'd find her

and we'd find her alive.

JOHN: We had to stay focused on what we were doing.

We had to keep looking for Meredith Emerson.

REPORTER: Catch up now on the latest in the search

for a missing Georgia woman.

REPORTER: Gary Michael Hilton of suburban Atlanta

is in his 60s.

- For Gary Michael Hilton. He's 61 years old.

REPORTER: Hilton was the last person seen with missing

hiker Meredith Emerson.

JOHN: The whole state was looking for Gary Hilton.

We put out a nationwide be on the lookout for Hilton

and certainly his van.

The media was still anxious to get information to put out.

REPORTER: Her black dog, Ella, also missing,

was playing with Hilton's golden retriever, Dandy,

on a trail in Vogel State Park.

JOHN: Meredith had adopted a dog,

a black lab she called Ella.

In the photographs we put out, we also

put out photographs of Ella.

We get a call to the tip line from a lady who said,

I believe the dog you're looking for just walked

in the Kroger grocery store.

- They had a black lab that had been seen wandering

around the parking lot.

So we immediately got the dog sent to a nearby vet.

MITCHELL: Her coat was clean.

It looked like she had been fed,

looked like she had water to drink,

had been well taken care of.

Ella had a chip.

We needed to scan the chip to verify that the dog was,

in fact, Ella.

And it was.

[dog panting]

MITCHELL: Finding Ella did give us hope.

And the hope was that we would find

Meredith next, that if Ella was here, then where's Meredith?

Is Meredith in a car?

Is she in the woods here, and we just haven't seen her yet?

We thoroughly searched the area around the grocery store.

We didn't know if Hilton or Meredith was still there.

CLAY: Right across the street where Ella had been located

was a QuikTrip gas station.

JOHN: The clerks at the QuikTrip said that they

remembered Hilton coming there,

that he used the pay phone

and milled around outside for a little while, and then left.

MITCHELL: I ask her about the surveillance camera.

Unfortunately, the cameras only showed the inside

of the store, and he used the pay phone

on the outside of the store.

- We didn't see Hilton's van or Hilton.

CLAY: But the clerk tells him that he had been parked

down next to the dumpster.

- There was a dumpster directly beside the QuikTrip.

After we have done everything else that we knew to do...

interviews, everyone that was there,

searched the surveillance system,

we decided just to take a look inside the dumpster,

just in case.

♪♪ ♪♪

It was like, holy crap.

We see a lot.

What we noticed was different colored garbage bags from what

the QuikTrip would use.

We looked inside the garbage bags, and we found a wallet.

We found Meredith's driver's license,

Meredith's University of Georgia student

identification card.

We found bloody clothes.

It was fresh blood and not congealed,

which told me it was not very old.

That obviously concerned me a lot.

That was big evidence.

That was a big find.

But I wasn't ready to admit that Meredith wasn't alive.

- We were definitely against the clock.

It was like a cat-and-mouse game.

Here he is, and we're coming behind trying

to play catch-up.

MITCHELL: We knew that he was close.

JOHN: Our tip lines were still very active.

[phone ringing]

OPERATOR: DeKalb 911, what's the exact location?

- At approximately 8:00 p.m., 911 calls began to go

into DeKalb County 911 center.

CALLER: I have this as a person of interest

in that missing woman case.

This is definitely him. The van is there.

The dog is there. I saw his face.

And I've been watching the news, and I know it's him.

I know it's him.

You guys got to hurry.

♪♪ ♪♪