At the Hands of a Stranger (17 page)

“And her dog was with her, so you think she felt comfortable … not making any noise?”

“She wasn't going nowhere,” Hilton said, “and I told her if she made any noise, it was curtains.”

“How did you put that to her?”

“You go messing around and I'll shoot your ass.”

“Four or five times she kept trying to convince you [the PIN] would work?”

“Oh, she convinced me. She ran me back and forth like an idiot.” Hilton laughed. “I mean, really. You know. Some eternal optimist.”

Hilton said that Emerson kept making up different stories about why the cards weren't working and continually convinced him that she had finally told him the right one. “She kept me running.” He laughed. “She sent me running back and forth to that thing holding a damn towel in front of me.”

Finally, he said, it was becoming too late to keep trying without arousing undue suspicion. “I'm like … some days with the MS I can't get out of bed. Some days I get to this point I can't even remember anything. By this time I'd had it.”

He drove toward Dahlonega and up into the higher elevations. It started to snow. He wanted to go higher up, Hilton said, but by then he was shot, couldn't think straight, looking for a place to camp. For some reason he went into downtown Dahlonega, but he didn't remember why. He wasn't mentally functioning by then. He was starting to “flag out” and couldn't think or focus.

“The snow was coming and it was accumulating rapidly, and there was probably two inches on the ground,” he said. “I was losing traction and control and I came around a curve, and a car had sort of slid off the road and there was a sheriff's deputy there—car, with its blue lights. And I was struggling uphill. I knew it was just gonna get worse.”

Hilton told how he worried about the deputy stopping him, or that Emerson might cry out for help, and he knew the deputy was going to block off the road to keep people from driving higher up the mountain. He turned around and drove back. The deputy was busy assisting a motorist who had run off the road and gotten stuck.

Driving on, Hilton told how he found a place to camp on private property in a remote area off Nimblewill Creek Road, where he made camp for the night. According to him, Emerson helped unload the van. They spent the night outside in sleeping bags. Hilton did not mention that he raped his captive, as he had told the police in a previous interview.

At this point Hilton asked, “Sheriff, could someone spring for a cup of coffee for me at a drive-in so that I can keep going on this thing? I'm sorry. There's McDonald's.”

Bridges told him that they would keep talking for now and get coffee later. Hilton said there was a McDonald's they could go to when they made a turn at Dawson Creek Road. Hilton apologized and reassured the others in the car that he wasn't going to back out of his deal to show them where to find Emerson's body.

Returning to the business at hand, Hilton told how Emerson had run him around with false PINs at Regions Bank in Canton and he got no money. Remembering, Hilton broke out laughing and shook his head. He said that after he found a campsite, they spent two nights there, and they went for a long hike in the woods the next day when the temperature reached a record low of eleven degrees.

“She had a good time,” Hilton said.

“How did you keep her from running off while you were hiking?”

“Even though she's been kidnapped, she's having a good time. I told her I'd shoot her ass down if she tried to run. No, she commented on how beautiful it was. She was enjoying herself. I could tell.”

Bridges asked how long they had hiked and if Emerson ever tried to get away.

“We hiked for hours,” Hilton answered. “She never tried to get away. She was very compliant. They always become compliant.”

It was as if a jolt of electricity had struck the law officers in the car. Hilton had said
they
become compliant, not that
she
had. Was it a slip of the tongue, or had he done this kind of thing before? At this point there was no connection made between the Cheryl Dunlap murder in Florida, Irene Bryant in South Carolina, and her husband, John, who was missing and presumed dead.

“I don't know exactly why that I didn't try to run the cards or do the end result.” (By this, Hilton meant why he wasn't trying the ATM cards or killing Meredith Emerson, the young woman he said was having such a good time.)

By now, they were getting near the crime scene and the police were having difficulty finding their way around. Hilton gave them directions from memory, as if he knew every stone and fallen branch in the deep forest. As he gave directions, Hilton described how he had seen a tanker truck drawing water near his campsite and had driven off in a hurry after he and Emerson packed the camping gear.

Bridges interrupted the interview when he saw other vehicles on the road when they were about a mile from Shoal Creek.

“That's not the media, is it?” he asked. “How the hell did they—”

“You want my boys to take care of it?” the sheriff asked.

“Yeah. What can we tell 'em? Tell 'em to get out of here?”

There were several trucks from television stations and cars filled with reporters who had somehow not only gotten word that Hilton was taking police to Emerson's body, they had also managed to find the remote area without Hilton's help. The police officers who had driven ahead of the van carrying Hilton herded reporters and vehicles behind the police cavalcade. They wouldn't let them follow any farther.

Hilton described the short, but complicated, route he took to drive Emerson to where he said he told her she was going home. A fast talker by nature, Hilton was speaking with such rat-a-tat-tat excitement that Bridges had to remind him several times to talk slower.

“…She just laid down in the back and relaxed,” Hilton said to the special agent. “She was always at ease ….”

The sheriff had missed a turn and was lost, but Hilton knew exactly where they were. He steered them back on course, scolding them for being so inept. “We goofed up. I told you the first road. This is not it,” he said. “We got to go to the next road.”

After the cars were on track again, Hilton continued telling Bridges how they had driven to the site in the deep woods, secured her to a tree with line and a chain. He made several trips to the van, which he had parked several yards away, and brought Emerson's clothing and cell phone. He said he made a big show of putting the gear where she could see it. After that, he went back to the van, made a campfire, and brewed coffee.

“I'm staggering around by now,” he said. “I have just, I have had it. I can't even think straight. I'm, you know, I'm just staggering—just staggering—multiple sclerosis.”

Hilton said he drank a cup of coffee and tried to pull himself together. When he felt calmer, he took a tire iron from the van, held it by his side to conceal it from Emerson, and walked back to where she was tied and chained. She looked nervously at him.

“I was afraid you weren't coming back.”

At this point, Hilton laughed. “You glad to see me?” he asked.

“I gave her a book to read and walked up and made as if to unsecure the chain, uh, struck her with the … jack handle. Just a straight jack handle. The solid iron bar. Struck her with that. She said, ‘No. Let me go.' She put her hands up …. I kept striking her and she … You'll see some defensive wounds to her hands. She lost consciousness and … I kept striking her to ensure she was dead.

“I unsecured her, removed her clothing, for forensic evidence, you know …. That blue jacket you have, uh, that's soaked with blood, that's mine. The pile pullover, the fleece pullover that's soaked with blood … that's mine. The pile pants that she wore—she had a pair of sweatpants on over that—that's mine. She was wearing a lot of my clothes 'cause I kept her dressed warmly.”

It appeared that most of the clothing Hilton removed from Emerson's body belonged to him; the blood, however, was from the brutally beaten body of the young woman.

Bridges asked where they would find the tire iron, which had not been found. Hilton said it should be on the grass near the air pressure pump at the Chevron station, because he had intended to throw it in the Dumpster with the blood-soaked clothing.

Hilton continued, “Okay, removed her head with a serrated knife. Which you probably have in the Dumpster.”

“A serrated knife?” Bridges asked.

“Yeah, like a butcher knife … just like it would come in a set of serrated knives. One sharpened edge … it was just your standard, cheap, twelve-inch. You would call it a butcher knife.”

“Is that difficult to do? To take somebody's head off? I'm not asking for—”

“It didn't seem real. It doesn't seem real—looking back on it.”

“I can't imagine a kitchen knife being able to do that, is what I'm getting at,” Bridges said.

Hilton held his hands about a foot apart. “This is a knife with a blade this long that's serrated. And so it's a saw.

“It's just sawing,” Hilton said. “All you gotta do is keep sawing, sawing …”

“Right.”

“…Sawing, sawing. Then you get through the joint …. That's what it's made for …. A little bigger than you would use to cut up a chicken … but you'd cut up a leg of lamb or anything else.”

“I—I …” Bridges couldn't get his words out.

“Simple as can be,” Hilton said. “Just a cheap knife.”

“Did you conceal her head in anything, or did you …?” Bridges asked.

“No. I bagged her head, in a white bag, and took it with me. Took that and the two sleeping bags she was using—and the mattress and the book she was reading—back to the van and drove up to whatever it is to the next place we'll be going. And took some of her bloody clothes … Actually, the bloody clothes I discarded at the head were her clothes and the bloody clothes I discarded in the Dumpster were my clothes.”

“Right.”

“That I wanted to keep and wash because they are nice clothes.”

Hilton described his grisly activities with the calm detachment of an accountant reading a routine financial report. He was careful to accentuate every detail to emphasize that he was a “professional,” who would leave nothing to chance. He told Bridges that he had poured bleach all over Emerson's head and body after he had removed all of her clothing and bagged it. He was hoping to remove fibers from his clothing and his DNA, he said.

Hilton took the head and clothing to one location, removed the head from the bag, and loosely covered it with branches and leaves and other forest debris, leaving openings so that the elements would cause it to deteriorate faster. He said he did the same with the bagged clothes at another site, about twenty feet west of where he placed the head.

“And so I poured liquid bleach over her and, again, this is not to … done to preclude identification or for any other reasons,” Hilton said. “I knew the body would be found sooner or later. These bodies, the body in here sooner or later is gonna come to light. It is.”

The next sentence caused the hair on Bridges's neck to prickle.

“And this is not the first body that's been discarded here,” Hilton said.

The sheriff's police radio crackled.

“They got the body,” Stan Gunter announced.

Cagle replied, “Go where the head is. We got the body.”

The sheriff was having trouble finding the spot where the body was, even though other law officers were already there. Hilton knew exactly where they were, even deep in a remote area of Dawson Forest. He described what he had done to hide the body while he gave directions to what he called “the kill site.”

He directed the sheriff over a series of ridges, then to find a small road and go down a steep hollow. When he first went to the site, Hilton told them, he saw what he thought was a lost camper in a pickup truck.

“I saw a pickup there, but I stopped, backed in, and turned around to the kill location,” Hilton said. “As he drove by, I waved at him. It was law enforcement.”

“Really?” Bridges asked.

“Yeah. It was that close. It was that close. She wasn't even secured, either.”

After a while the law enforcement officers were deep into the woods and could go no farther in the car. They got out and walked among trees, and boulders, across rock and leaf-strewn ground and found the bloody clothing and body. The law enforcement officers had been working around the clock for weeks; their red-rimmed eyes were bloodshot in sockets darkened by fatigue. Tears welled in those eyes and lumps formed in stomachs and throats.

“Was this difficult for you at all?” Bridges asked. “As far as to take her life? Do you have feelings one way or the other about it, or was … You just needed her for a necessity for you?”

“No, but it was like an—an out-of-body experience. Of course it's surrealistic. Removing a head is just unreal,” Hilton said. “You look back on it and you say, ‘That wasn't even real.' I don't know what it was. You might say an altered state? I—I just don't know. It was hard. You gotta remember we had, uh, spent several good days together, actually.”

“Right. Right,” Bridges said.

“Actually, she did not have an unpleasant time … consistent with being kidnapped. We did all the camping activities together.”

“Is this the first time you ever done anything like this before?” Bridges asked.

Hilton referred the question to his attorney, who told Bridges that the plea agreement stated that he would only be asked about the murder of Meredith Emerson. Neither Hilton nor his attorney answered the question.

The crime scenes were secured and Hilton was taken back to jail. Dozens of forensic technicians worked all day and late into the night, gathering and tagging evidence.

When they were finished and the cars had left, one by one, Bridges remained behind. He walked to where the body had been found and felt an ache in his heart as he thought of the victim chained, frightened, and doomed, listening to Hilton's warped ideas spilling out of his mouth in an incessant torrent of words. He shuddered, closed his eyes, and prayed for Meredith Emerson.