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Hi, it's Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. You're about to hear the second installment in our four-part series, Wild Crime, Blood Mountain. Here's episode two, Cat and Mouse. 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? We all hoped.
And we'd find Meredith. And we'd find her alive. I had this person of interest in that missing woman case. He's got that mask on. Just like in a horror movie or something. I looked around, thinking, "Good Lord, is somebody watching me?" It's 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." Secrets in the wild. Beautiful, yet treacherous places.
These are the stories of the investigators who solve crimes in the wilderness. Miles up the road, the search continued for Meredith Emerson with small search teams looking in ditches and ravines along mountainous roads. We had GBI helicopters which used FLIR 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-- She was your roommate. 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. 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. 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. Cheryl Dunlap's case was similar in that you have a single female disappearing from national forest land. My name is Steve Ganey and I was connected to this case as a responder to the first call that came in referring to Cheryl Dunlap.
It was a Monday, December 3rd, 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.
I got a phone call, it was from my son, and he told me that Sherry 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. She was just a sweetheart to be around. She was funny. Sherry 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. Sherry's life was a little hard. Sherry and her husband divorced, so she was a single mom for a long time. Sherry 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 what we call a 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.
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 looking closer,
And it looks like someone had 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." My name is Tim Baxter and I was the supervisor at that time of what we call the person's 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.
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 wild lands. 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 can get away with it. We look everywhere. Nothing. Nothing. 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." 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. Dunlap, a 46-year-old nurse and Sunday school teacher, disappeared seven miles from home. Her car found here with a flat tire. At first, you think,
Maybe this is just a mistake, maybe she's 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. 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 for 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 him. Unfortunately, he never came back. But you couldn't not do it.
At the time that he was trying to withdraw her money from the ATM, we discovered there was a camouflaged truck that drove through the parking lot just a minute or two after he walked away from the ATM. And so we started putting out bolos to stop and FIR anybody in a camouflaged wrapped truck. I guarantee you there were at least 50 camouflaged trucks below. None of them had anything to do with it whatsoever that we can determine.
It is frustrating because you're chasing down every possible lead and everywhere we turn, it's a dead end. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Do you have a point of sale system you can trust or is it a real POS? You need Shopify for retail. From accepting payments to managing inventory, Shopify POS has everything you need to sell in person.
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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. 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. They're just horrified.
But they were strong, very strong. 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. 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.
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.
Emerson hasn't been seen since New Year's Day when she came to the mountains to walk... Investigators say their only clue comes from other hikers who saw Meredith Emerson talking with a man around 60 years old.
Authorities and more than 100 volunteers have been searching the mountains... I remember exactly where I was, what I was doing. I was in my home gym working out. ...in her one-year-old black lab. The top story was, of course, the missing hiker, Meredith Emerson. ...information from authorities that they had a person of interest in her disappearance... 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. He had some missing teeth. He had a dark reddish retriever who he was calling Danny. 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 a 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. John Tabor was very instrumental in 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. Giving Hilton's criminal history was petty crime. He had several misdemeanor charges.
He had some misdemeanor marijuana charges. 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. ♪♪
One of the folks we talked with was a lawyer called Samuel Rail. He said he represented Hilton in some cases years ago, some of the minor cases he had gotten involved with in Metro Atlanta. I'm Samuel Rail and I'm an attorney and I've been one for close to 50 years. Gary Hilton was my very first client.
It's 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 learned 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.
What would happen is we would take these women up into the woods. And then we would hunt them down. And kill them. It's a low-budget movie, low-tech. 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! 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. 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.
Rayl 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? It was bizarre for this lawyer to be telling me this story.
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. Based on what Sam Rayle was telling me, I believe that Gary Hilton was acting out the movie Deadly Run, hunting people in the National Forest and killing them.
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On the evening of January 3rd, at about 6 o'clock, we received another call from John Tabor. I just heard from Gary Hilton.
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.
Six or seven hundred dollars, 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. 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, "You go ahead and do what you told them to do and we'll be there waiting for them."
We notified DeKalb County, who deployed a SWAT team, to watch that location. And Casey 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. The DeKalb County SWAT team stayed out there all night. 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. 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. 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. 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. Once we got the banking information, we were very concerned that we've got the same guy involved in all three of these cases. And as I learned more about the Cheryl Dunlap case in Florida, alarm bells started going off. My name is Ronnie Rents.
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 Apalachicola National Forest. It's an outdoorsman's paradise. 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 other side of the road.
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 expected to see a deer belly laying there and guts or whatever, you know. When I got a bit 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. Back there there was no head.
All I could see was the torso and the legs. It's hard to explain it. I thought maybe whoever had done it was still there. I looked around, scanned the woods thinking, "Good Lord, is somebody watching me?" 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, 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 had 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. So we request the medical examiner to do anything he can to try and draw some DNA from the body. And then we obtained a hairbrush and some other items out of her house, and we were able to get a match identifying the deceased to 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?" In an investigation like this, even though you have some leads, the guy at the ATM, whoever the camera 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.
We tried to talk to all of those people, friends, people that go to church with her, her coworkers, 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. 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. 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. It was really a stressful time for the whole county. I believe probably
Almost 100% of the county was just engulfed in this trauma. Worried, sick, constantly day in and day out. You're starting to get frustrated because you're not getting anything, really it'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 have 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 in every lead. It was very upsetting just to think about Sherry 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.
I hated to even entertain the thought, but I said, "I think we're dealing with a serial killer."
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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. We all hoped that we'd find her and we'd find her alive.
We had to stay focused on what we were doing. We had to keep looking for Meredith Emerson. - Now on the latest in the search for a missing Georgia woman. - Gary Michael Hilton of suburban Atlanta is in his 60s. - Gary Michael Hilton, he's 61 years old, and was the last person seen with missing hiker Meredith Emerson. - The whole state was looking for Gary Hilton. We put out a nationwide bill to look out for Hilton and certainly his van. The media was still anxious to get information to put out.
Her black dog Ella, also missing, was playing with Hilton's golden retriever Dandy on a trail in Vogel State Park. Meredith had adopted a dog, 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. Her coat was clean, looked like she'd 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. 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. Right across the street where Ella had been located was a Quick Trip gas station. The clerks at the Quick Trip said that they remembered Hilton coming there, that he used the payphone and milled around outside for a little while and then left.
I asked 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. But the clerk tells him that he had been parked down next to the dumpster. There was a dumpster directly beside the Quick Trip. 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 Quick Trip 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 a big evidence. That was a big fine. 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. We knew that he was close.
Our tip lines were still very active. Approximately 8:00 PM, 911 calls began to go into the DeKalb County 911 Center. I have this person of interest in that missing woman case. It's 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.
This is Deborah Roberts. Wild Crime was produced by Lone Wolf Media for ABC News Studios. You can catch Episode 3 of Wild Crime Blood Mountain in the feed next week or find the series on Hulu. Thanks for listening.