Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hi, 2020 podcast listeners. This is Deborah Roberts, co-anchor of 2020. We're back with season three of Wild Crime, a series from ABC News studios about elite investigative teams that solve dangerous crimes in our national parks and wilderness areas. Here's Blood Mountain, episode one, The Missing.
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 the movie. Young women being set loose in the forest and then hunted down and murdered. Everybody was looking for him. Emergency 911.
on the news who kidnapped and killed hikers is here we think 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 once you've taken someone you either kill them or you get caught 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, it's mountains. 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 2nd, 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." 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 Reese 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 Byram Herbert Reese 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 attorney, 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 o'clock on the night of January 2nd. 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've 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 just wouldn't leave her side for anything. So 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 friends with Meredith for about six years now. So, you know, knowing her, everything's gonna end up okay. We're just gonna 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 we are hopeful. 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 towards 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 1st. In Northeast Georgia, a search continues in the woods for a missing 24-year-old hiker. We had hundreds and hundreds of volunteers that were scouring the mountain looking for any evidence or clues that would give us a direction.
We literally just hit the ground. There were a number of civilian searchers that were out there. So we try to say, look, if you find something you think's 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 off, 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 Year's Day. We've got to ask the public who've 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 was 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 three quarters 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 normal. Another witness had seen Meredith Emerson on January 1st 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 and 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.
This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call
Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.
Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com.
This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call
Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.
Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com.
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.
Within that area, he had found the water bottles, police-style baton, the dog leash, and 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 1st, 2008, it 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, 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, 'cause 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, and she'd 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 a white Astra van 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 6-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 3rd, we received a telephone call from the 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 Forest Service, I just primarily focused on crimes in the national forest.
On November 6, 2007, I was working in my office, and the front desk person at the visitor center came back and said, "There's a gentleman out here who 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 them for six, seven years. And they were directly across the street. John was, you know, I would call him a selfie-facing 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. It 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 Yallagap Road which circles back into Hendersonville where the Bryants live.
Probably about 45 minutes to an hour later, Robert returns to my office and he said, "I found my dad's field," which kind of sent a few cold chills down my spine. So, show me exactly where the car is, and in the meantime, I'm calling the 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 wanted to be involved because this was 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.
It 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 of 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,
like a piece of pipe or something similar to that. - And the scene was, 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 onboard diagnostic tests on cars could tell mechanics a lot of things about a vehicle. I had the Bryant's 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 or 8 o'clock the next morning, her death was on my mind. And what can I do to make amends to right a wrong? You 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 her, whoever did that.
Something I'll never forget.
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This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call
Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.
Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com. In reference to what happened to Robert and the family after we discovered the body,
I remember when we told him we'd found a body that we believe was his mom. You could tell it's setting in, "My mom's not coming home." And we don't know where dad is. 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 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 an 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 Bright'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 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 believe 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 21st. 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." You never know when that one lead is the one.
That's where we started getting reports of the white van and an 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 believed 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 their neck kind of stood up. It's 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 block 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 of going to commit a crime.
Unfortunately, for whatever reason, the Bryants turned into a victim. We're hopeful that we'll be able to locate this person and interview him concerning his contact 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 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 Bright was. That was disturbing. If we had a chance of recovering Meredith Emerson and saving her life, we're 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.
This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call
Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.
Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com.
This is Brad Milkey from the ABC News podcast Start Here. As hard as it is to imagine, family doctors used to frequently make house calls. If you were sick, they would pack up their little black doctor's bag and they would come to your home to examine you. Those days seem long gone, but one company is giving new meaning to the term house call
Teladoc Health. You can choose a board-certified doctor that's right for you and get primary care from the comfort of your own home. Connect via phone or online with a board-certified doctor who will get to know you and provide whole-person care. Advice, prescriptions, even mental health support and referrals.
Teladoc Health is not only convenient, it's affordable too, and it's covered by a surprising number of insurance plans. Download the app to get started today or go online to register or schedule a visit at teladochealth.com. That's teladoc, T-E-L-A-D-O-C, health.com. We're 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 Irina 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, 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. 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 Pissac National Forest.
$300 was taken from their account, which at that time, I believe, was the limit that you could get in an ATM in one transaction. The murder occurs on the 21st at about 2:00. 911 calls 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 themself 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 couldn't tell. We were interested in a height and at 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 description.
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 forests. 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 needed to catch the person responsible and bring them 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 Bryant's 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 M.O. 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 here. I think that was the first time that we had something to say, yes, it is. This is Deborah Roberts. Wild Crime was produced by Lone Wolf Media for ABC News Studios. You can catch Episode 2 of Wild Crime, Blood Mountain, in the feed next week. Or you can find the series on Hulu.
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