At the Hands of a Stranger (11 page)

I did that one time to a human. We were in the middle of a confrontation. He had a big loose male and there was a female. It was a real melee. This was one of the few times that the guy wasn't bigger than me. Usually, if you have a stick, the guys always try to be bigger than you. Well, this time the kid wasn't. He was only my size, boring right in on me, so I did my thing. You know, I did like that real quick. So what happens is the tip of the stick is going right at you, and then coming back so you don't get the traversing motion. You don't get the impression of that traversing motion; and as a result, it was so quick that he didn't even see it.

But the point is that I goofed up and I just touched him. He didn't even see it, but he felt it. He said, “I don't believe you did that. I don't believe you did that. Did you see him do that?” I look behind and his buddy was coming up behind me, which was another thing. Keep your focus light when you're fighting. That's a critique that you can always make no matter how good of a fighter you are. Stick fighter or a street fighter. You do these post after-action critiques, and you break it down and try to analyze what you did wrong, what you did right, so you can learn from it.

You can always make a critique; I didn't keep my focus wide. You tend to fixate on the target. You've got to keep your focus wide. Not only to look for other threats, but to look for witnesses. Witnesses, of course, are a whole different thing. If you have witnesses, you act in some way; and if you don't, you may act another way.

Typically, you want witnesses 'cause they always lie, naturally. But again, the police can tell when I'm telling the truth. They come, and I tell them the truth, and it makes sense to them; and the other people are—are not telling the truth and they're giving a lot of excuses and rationale why they assaulted me, basically. But anyway, what I learned from that, in addition to keeping your focus wide, which is always what you're learning, is that when you do a feint—number one, when you feint against a human, don't do it at combat speed. Make your feint real broad, okay? Don't do it at combat speed. And number two, don't feint to the head area. That's so if you goof up, you won't have a head strike, you know, which you never hit a person in the head or neck unless it is a fatal-force scenario.

In other words, you never hurt them unless you're willing … unless you want to kill or seriously injure them. A fatal-force scenario is where you got a big guy, and he's got you. No hope at all of escape. That's a fatal-force scenario. But up to that, it's going to be a … Knee is my favorite place. That works pretty good.

Hilton enjoyed telling about his prowess in fighting and of the people he had beaten in hand-to-hand combat. With his oldest acquaintance, Walter Goddard, Hilton acted out his moves with the baton, performing what he envisioned as a graceful ballet of martial arts, with himself as the hero.

He had telephoned Goddard a day or so ago and left a long rant on Goddard's answering machine after John Tabor had refused to give him the $25,000 he demanded. Anything bad that happened to the girl now was Tabor's fault; it was on Tabor's head, not his own. His white-hot anger at Tabor was bubbling like the lava inside a volcano preparing to erupt.

Hilton poured the remainder of the coffee in his cup into the campfire. It hissed and blew a cloud of steam as he stood up. He stretched his body to prepare for the long day he knew lay ahead and picked fresh clothes from the van for Emerson. She would never wear them; they were for show, to keep her calm. He fished around in the tool well in the van until his fingers found and gripped the handle of a heavy, rusty steel jack. He tested its heft in his right hand and covered it from view with Emerson's fresh clothing before he walked back to where he had tied her.

Emerson's eyes grew wide and frightened when she saw him.

“Nothin' to be worried about, hon,” he said. “You're going home today.”

Emerson gave him a look that told him she doubted him and that she was afraid.

“Look, I even brought fresh clothes for you,” he said.

Emerson appeared to be relieved. She thanked him and asked if he would be sure to leave her cell phone with her because the addresses and phone numbers of her friends were stored in its memory. Hilton told her that he had the phone, but he didn't inform Emerson that he had taken out the battery and thrown it away.

Hilton stepped slightly behind her and tossed the clothing he held onto the ground. Emerson was looking away. Taking a handful of her hair, he tugged it gently back.

“I need you to put your head back so I can untie these knots better,” he said.

Emerson complied and turned her head slightly toward him as she did so. She saw the tire tool in his fist, raised high, already coming down toward her in a blur. “No,” she whispered a fraction of a second before the heavy tool crushed into her skull.

Hilton struck Emerson's skull again and again with the tool, since he was the consummate professional combat soldier going about the final phases of his mission. He struck her until he was sure she was dead; then he sagged, with his back against a tree, exhausted, panting, arms hanging at his side. Before he completed the remainder of his duty at the site, he had several tasks to perform.

When he felt rested, Hilton freed Emerson's body from the tree and laid it on the ground. He walked back to the van and retrieved a cheap kitchen butcher knife with serrated teeth on a thirteen-inch blade. Back at the body, he stripped off the clothing and put it aside and started to remove the head. He sawed and sawed, thinking that he and Emerson had had several good days in the woods together—even going on a long hike with their dogs—before it ended like this.

Once the head was separated from the body, Hilton placed it inside a plastic garbage bag and filled another bag with Emerson's bloody clothing. He used a larger black trash bag to hold her body and dragged it into a tangled area of vegetation and dropped it on the ground and removed the bag before concealing it with fallen branches. Hilton didn't want the body to be buried because it decomposed faster when exposed to the elements, and then it took law enforcement longer to identify. After finishing this task, Hilton carried the bag with the head and bloody clothes to a spot about thirty yards from where he had placed the body and covered it the same way. He walked by both sites several times and was satisfied that everything was hidden even at close range.

Hilton rested again and washed his hands and arms with bleach from one of the buckets he had purchased from a Dollar Store to remove any trace of Emerson's blood. Bleach was one of the few chemicals that washed blood away; but even when it was thoroughly cleaned, there were still traces. Blood, which was unseen by a forensic scientist, could be detected by spraying an area with luminol, darkening the room, and then illuminating it with ultraviolet light. Blood spatters previously unseen popped out in brilliant blue. A new way to find blood DNA that is even more sensitive than luminol is now being used by some forensic investigators. Hilton's attempt to destroy the blood evidence was absolutely futile.

When he had finished, Hilton telephoned Brenda to beg for money to buy enough gasoline to get out of Georgia. He was surprised and furious when Brenda broke the telephone connection after she recognized his voice. He dialed again and got a busy signal. Around four o'clock in the afternoon, he dialed John Tabor's telephone and Tabor broke the connection. Furious, Hilton called Tabor back, around six o'clock, and was transferred to voice mail, where he unleashed a lengthy verbal onslaught against his former boss.

Hilton drove to Cumming, where he looked for a suitable location to turn Ella loose. He just couldn't find it in himself to kill the dog, and now he didn't want it to wander into traffic and get hit by a car. He found a busy shopping area with a Kroger grocery store and a pizza shop and released Ella. There were food smells and pizza deliverymen milled around outside. Sooner or later, he believed, Ella would make her way over to someone and be recognized as Emerson's dog from television news or a photograph in a newspaper.

Emerson had told him that there was a microchip implanted under Ella's skin and it would not be difficult to identify the dog. At the very least, Ella would smell the pizza and walk over to where the delivery boys were smoking and joking with one another. Hilton had not asked, but Emerson voluntarily told him about Ella's microchip. The dog would be associated with him when he set it free, Hilton knew, but he just couldn't kill Ella—even though he had not given a second thought to brutally killing the dog's owner.

As Ella trotted away, Hilton drove off to find a place where he could dispose of all the bloody evidence that littered the floor of his van.

Hilton pulled into a gas station/convenience store near Cambridge Square Shopping Center, at the corner of Johnson Ferry and Ashford Dunwoody, and parked near one of the large green Dumpsters not far from an air pressure pump. He walked inside the Chevron gas station and received permission from the clerk to throw some things out of his van into the Dumpster. Hilton turned his van so that its rear door faced the Dumpster and began carrying large trash bags and other items from the back of the vehicle. Dandy stayed near him.

Hilton seemed unconcerned. He didn't realize that there were people watching him and recognizing him as the man suspected of having kidnapped Meredith Emerson. His photograph had been plastered all over the newspapers and on television throughout Georgia and Florida, and Dandy's description had also appeared. Hilton had become what he thought of as “famous,” the very thing he believed would lead to his downfall.

One alarmed person watching Hilton unload his van was Diane Clohessy. She immediately dialed 911, and a dispatcher asked for the location of her emergency.

Clohessy gave him the information and hung up without knowing that another dispatcher was taking information from another concerned citizen parked near her. Paul Craine had recognized Hilton and the dog the instant he pulled into the Chevron station. He immediately called 911 and said: “The person of interest in that missing woman case is at this Chevron gas station at Ashford Dunwoody.”

 

Two DeKalb County police officers were the first to arrive on the scene. Lieutenant D. L. Tracy was the first. He had pulled his car into the Chevron station and saw Hilton squatting in the grass near a white Astro van. Hilton had been unloading garbage bags from the vehicle and placing them on the ground. Tracy leaped out of the vehicle with his gun drawn and identified himself as a police officer.

“Get down on the ground and place your hands behind your back!” Tracy said.

Hilton looked surprised to see a policeman with a gun pointed at him. He did what he was told to do. Within a minute, another officer, who was also with the DeKalb County Police Department, arrived and quickly handcuffed Hilton's wrists as police officers from several jurisdictions pulled up to offer assistance.

After being convinced that Hilton had been squeezed into that area by his pursuers, John Cagle, the GBI's special agent in charge (SAC), had saturated the DeKalb County with officers from several jurisdictions. Among the police units to arrive were the Georgia Highway Patrol (GHP) and the U.S. Marshal's Office. The marshals wanted to arrest Hilton on a warrant for failure to appear, while the GBI and the Union County Sheriff's Office wanted to question him about the disappearance of Meredith Emerson.

Hilton had laid “numerous” items on the ground by the van, including clothing, and a large stack of plastic trash bags filled with other items. Numerous things had been thrown into the Dumpster, but the van still contained a welter of gear, including more filled trash bags, sleeping bags, clothing, and a portable stove. The license tag on the van was for North Carolina: WWZ8113. Both callers had failed to report the tag number accurately.

Police officers taped off the crime scene and forensic investigators arrived to start the laborious process of searching for evidence. Their job of retrieving and marking items from the Dumpster was not as glamorous as is the work of CSI detectives on television. It is tedious and takes close attention to detail, but forensic evidence is vital in putting together a criminal case in this high-tech age.

The police secured search warrants for the van, Dandy, and a warrant to search Hilton and to get samples of his hair, fibers, and DNA. They were careful to do everything by the book, and were careful in their documentation and identification of evidence.

Special Agent Jeff D. Branyon, of the GBI, took hundreds of photos at the crime scene, in and around the van; and Hilton was taken to the GBI Region 8 office by the DeKalb police, where he would be interviewed. When samples of hair and fibers were taken from Dandy, the dog was turned over to DeKalb Animal Control.

Special Agent Dustin Hamby helped Branyon sort through, itemize, and bag evidence from the Dumpster and from the bags Hilton had piled in the parking lot. Some of the clothing, sleeping bags, and other items were still wet with blood. This fact alone gave nightmares to most of the law enforcement officers who were involved in the hectic race against time to find Meredith Emerson alive. They had probably missed catching Hilton and saving the murdered hiker by just thirty minutes.

Special Agent B. D. McElwee contacted Branyon from GBI district headquarters and told him that Hilton was complaining that he needed some medicine that was located in a “fanny pack” on the Astro's dashboard. The fanny pack contained odds and ends, such as tweezers and a whistle. There was a medicine bottle from Dixie City Pharmacy in Gainesville, Georgia, for twenty-milligram tablets of Methylin, prescribed by Dr. Harry Delcher, an Atlanta endocrinologist. Hilton paid in cash, as he always did, and there was a receipt for ninety dollars from the doctor's office. Methylin is used primarily for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and narcolepsy. ADHD is a disorder that can cause hyperactivity, inability to sit still, and inability to concentrate. Narcolepsy is a sleep disorder that can cause a person to fall asleep without warning during normal daytime activities. Delcher had diagnosed Hilton previously with MS, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and autoimmune disease. Hilton paid $185 in cash for the diagnostic visit.

Hundreds of items were bagged and marked for evidence. Significantly, backpacks, envelopes, jackets, and pillows were found with rust-colored stains, which tested positive for blood. Field testing determined that some of the blood found among the evidence was human, but it could not be associated with either Emerson or Hilton. Hilton had been trying to discard all items with blood spatter—except the floor's van, which he had attempted to scrub with bleach.