At the Hands of a Stranger (24 page)

Susan Emerson posed the possibility that her daughter may have seen the capacity for evil in Hilton and “at a soul level” decided “to take him out so he could never harm another innocent person. It's the strength and the type of person that she was at the core.”

Emerson said that she had been “shown a vision” of Hilton as a mass of darkness with a tiny pinpoint of light. She said he didn't have the courage to nourish the light and become someone worthwhile. “Instead, he made one conscious choice after another to become the pathetic shell of a man that he is,” she said. Hilton knew this in the deepest part of his soul, Emerson said.

“God may choose to forgive him,” she said. “However, he is not worth the time and energy it would take me to do so. My focus will remain on all the good Meredith stood for and still does. She lives on, and I know her energy is strong and expansive. I have seen it and have experienced it in the past weeks.”

She thanked the court, and Judge Oliver offered the family her deepest sympathy.

 

Court was recessed and Gary Michael Hilton's trial was over in Georgia. He would spend the rest of his life in prison, but the death penalty still stared him in the face. A trial date for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap in Florida had not yet been set.

Hilton, who had spent his life on a “Deadly Run” of his own, had not won the race. He had merely dodged it.

Death still looked him squarely in the eye.

Almost as soon as he left the courtroom, Hilton began plotting to attempt blocking his extradition to Florida. On February 28, less than thirty days following his guilty plea to Meredith Emerson's murder, Hilton had been indicted on charges of murder, kidnapping, and two counts of grand theft in the murder of Cheryl Hodges Dunlap. Leon County, Florida, SA William Meggs announced at that time that he would seek the death penalty in the Dunlap case.

Prior to Gary Michael Hilton's indictment, investigators had stated they knew that Hilton was in Florida when Cheryl Dunlap disappeared on December 1. They knew this because of a run-in he'd had with a forestry agent in the area of the Apalachicola National Forest. Major Mike Wood, of the Leon County Sheriff's Office, told the media that the agent ran Hilton's license plate as a “routine check” at that time and had a conversation with him, but the tag number checked out to have no reported warrants on file for its driver. Investigators later learned that Hilton had been stopped by a U.S. Forestry officer in November, approximately two weeks before Cheryl Dunlap's disappearance, and the tag on his white van was checked, also without results at that time.

A hunter in the area also reported he had seen a man fitting Hilton's description in the national forest on December 7. He described him as “homeless-looking and disheveled.” The hunter said the man had a knife. He warned the man, he said, that it wasn't very safe for him to be in the forest during hunting season. As soon as the hunter realized that he might have encountered Dunlap's killer, he quickly came forward and told the authorities about his meeting with the man who fit the description of the suspect he had seen on the news.

Because of the national coverage of the Meredith Emerson case, Gary Hilton had already achieved a great deal of notoriety. When he was officially identified as the prime suspect in the murder of Cheryl Dunlap, hundreds of other tips came in concerning the case, and over twenty people reported seeing Hilton in the Tallahassee area. Some of the sightings dated back almost ten years and were obviously a case of mistaken identity, but Leon County sheriff Larry Campbell told the
Tallahassee Democrat
that sixteen of the reported sightings had taken place within the previous three months.

“The accuracy of those sightings is absolute,” he said. “No question about it.”

Major Mike Wood said his department's investigation was “focused utterly and completely on Mr. Hilton.”

 

Hilton, who was being held at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, was well aware of his risky position. He had nothing to bargain with in the Dunlap case. He knew that he would not be able to wrangle another deal with prosecutors in Florida, as he had done in Georgia, where he had led investigators to the location of Meredith Emerson's body in return for having the death penalty taken off the table. He began working on his plan to fight extradition to Florida.

On April 3, Gary Hilton notified the court of his intention and was given twenty days to either file a petition or retain an attorney to do it for him. On April 22, he submitted his paperwork, an Extradition Habeas Petition, to the Superior Court of Butts County, Georgia, acting as his own attorney. The petition contained a considerable amount of whining and complaining about his circumstances at the prison:

I have no access to the telephone, the Internet, and very little U.S. Mail; the stamp and envelope that I am using to mail this was given to me by another inmate,
he claimed.

Hilton said he was being held in such tight security that he was unable to get an address for the court, and was not sure it was the correct address.

That means that it took me 13 days just to get this court's possible address,
he complained.

Hilton also said his rights were being denied because he hadn't received a copy of the arrest warrant from Florida.

Butts County district attorney Richard Milam, handling the extradition for Georgia, said Hilton's filing was insufficient to stall the process and called it “just a delaying tactic.”

 

On May 2, Hilton was given an eleven-minute hearing in front of Judge Thomas Wilson in the second-floor courtroom of the Butts County Courthouse. Security was unusually tight for the hearing; SWAT team members and other officers with semiautomatic rifles guarded the courtroom and were stationed outside the building. Hilton's handcuffs were tethered to waist chains; and when he was brought into the courtroom, corrections officers sat on either side of him. These security measures served as a dramatic background for Hilton's histrionics. Still acting as his own attorney, he intended to have his say concerning the unfair treatment he believed he was receiving.

His main concern, however, seemed to be his insistence that the court should have appointed him an attorney to aid in his fight against extradition. Hilton told the judge that he thought it was clearly the law that he should have the right to a court-appointed lawyer.

“Georgia is under no obligation to provide you an attorney,” replied Judge Wilson, but Hilton continued talking, saying he denied the Florida charges and challenged the legality of his arrest.

“Do not interrupt me, Mr. Hilton,” the judge warned him, telling him that retaining an attorney was Hilton's own responsibility, not the court's, because extradition was a civil, not a criminal, matter.

Hilton went on to complain that he'd had no access to a telephone to find a lawyer and was locked up the majority of the time, unable to leave his cell long enough to retain an attorney.

“I haven't been able to make a phone call. How can I procure counsel?” he asked the judge.

Wilson replied that he could have written letters, since that was how he got the hearing.

In answer to Hilton's complaint that his right to have a court-appointed lawyer had been violated, Wilson told him that the only matters in question concerning his extradition were that there was a valid indictment against him in the state of Florida, and that orders for his extradition had been signed by both Georgia's and Florida's governors.

Then Wilson issued his decision: Hilton was ordered to be extradited to Florida, but would have thirty days in which to file an appeal.

 

There was disappointment after the hearing among the authorities who had come prepared to transport Hilton back to Florida. Both William Meggs and Richard Milam felt that Hilton had stalled long enough, but they knew that there was only another thirty days left for them to wait if Hilton failed to file his appeal on time.

When the filing deadline approached and nothing had been received by the Butts County Superior Court, officials grew hopeful that time would expire and Hilton could finally be transported to Florida to face the charges there.

Two days prior to the deadline, no notice of an appeal had arrived and court officers had not notified either Milam or Meggs of any developments. The Georgia State Attorney's Office had not notified the Leon County, Florida, Sheriff's Office about any pending plans to transport Hilton, and a spokesman for the sheriff's office said that they planned to make arrangements for transport as soon as they got the go-ahead. Just to be on the safe side, the Georgia attorney general decided to wait a few days past the deadline before releasing Hilton to Florida in case his appeal had been mailed prior to the deadline but had not yet arrived at the court.

“As long as the document is received by the prison on the thirtieth day,” said Georgia Attorney General's Office communication director Russ Willard, “then it will have satisfied the requirement.”

Willard said his office was not sure if anything had been submitted to be mailed by Hilton at the prison, and Hilton would be sure to press charges against the Georgia Department of Corrections (DOC) if his paperwork was delayed at the prison and he did not get to exhaust his right to appeal.

Finally, since no appeal was received within several days past the deadline, and there was no indication that Hilton had made any attempt to file one, a group of six Leon County SWAT team officers took custody of Hilton and left the prison in Georgia in three unmarked cars en route to Tallahassee, taking their prisoner to face trial for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap.

Leon County sheriff Larry Campbell told the press that Hilton had fought extradition to Florida for quite some time, but his efforts had been in vain.

“We've sat patiently waiting for him to go through the legal process in North Carolina and Georgia, and now it's our turn,” he said.

Campbell also said that Willie Meggs planned to prosecute the case personally and would seek the death penalty. Hilton was calculating, ruthless, and dangerous, Campbell said, and had roamed through society preying on unsuspecting people.

Hilton had done everything he could to keep himself from being apprehended and prosecuted for his crimes, Campbell said, including destroying evidence and dismembering his victims. His efforts had proved useless, however, in keeping him from arrest and extradition.

“He should have stayed out of Florida,” said Campbell.

 

Around five hours after leaving the prison in Georgia, Hilton's motorcade arrived at the Leon County Jail. Cuffed to a waist chain and wearing leg irons, Hilton walked into the jail without commenting to the reporters who waited, hoping for a word from him. He was due for his first appearance in court the following morning, to have the charges against him read. The two assistant public defenders who had been appointed for him, Ines Suber and Steven Been, were both specialists in cases of capital murder.

After Hilton had been booked into the jail, Sheriff Campbell held a press conference to answer questions from the large number of reporters who were waiting for information. Campbell told them he didn't plan to put Hilton in solitary confinement, but would probably place him in a pod for inmates charged with the most serious crimes.

“I don't want him to have a private room,” Campbell said. “He'll be right out there with the rest of them. We don't want him to have cruel and unusual punishment. We want him to be with his peers.”

Campbell acknowledged that it was possible that Hilton would be connected with yet more crimes, possibly crimes that were thus far undiscovered. And in answer to questions about the expense incurred by the state of Florida in trying Hilton for the murder of Cheryl Dunlap, when he was already serving life in prison in Georgia for Meredith Emerson's death, Campbell said that money was not the point.

“This isn't about money. This is about justice,” Campbell said. “This is about the lady that he murdered very viciously, in cold blood, in our state.”

While Hilton waited in jail for the wheels of justice to grind their way slowly to his trial and punishment date, he was interviewed by Captain Dewey Smith, of the Pickens County Sheriff's Office, South Carolina. Smith hoped to get any scrap of information to help solve the disappearance, ten years earlier, of Jason Knapp, a young man who had gone missing at South Carolina's Table Rock State Park. During the interview Hilton made some chilling comments that revealed details about Cheryl Dunlap's murder that had not, at that time, been released to the press. He showed his intent to try bargaining his way out of the death penalty, if at all possible.

Hilton had denied any knowledge of Jason Knapp's disappearance, and in regard to his other alleged victims, Smith told him that he hoped Hilton would someday “come to peace with all the officers and courts” so he didn't leave other grieving families with no closure.

“Yeah, yeah,” Hilton said, “that's up to them, though. That's up to them. Because if they're gonna try to kill me, of course I'm not gonna give them nothing. What would you do? You'd be pissed off. You'd fight everything. Everything is gonna be a big deal, starting with from extradition to whether I got enough blankets in jail. I am gonna fucking raise hell. Total hell. I told my Florida lawyers, I won't be happy unless it takes three to four years to go to trial, and unless we have a one-thousand-person jury pool, and unless we have at least two changes of venue. And that's just to begin with.”

Hilton went on to tell Smith what a long, drawn-out, expensive trial he planned to have, how he might not be able to get out of bed to go to trial because “I got MS, and if I say I can't get out of bed, I can't get out of bed, man.”

Hilton said that since he already had life in prison, he'd offered the state a deal to give the family closure; but if they wanted to do it the hard way, then that was how he would do it.

“And if that's so, if the way we're gonna do it is the hard way, we're gonna spend four million dollars and fifteen years” to try, convict, and execute him and never know the truth about what happened to Cheryl Dunlap.

“They may in Florida … there may be missing body parts. They may have recovered body parts. They could be missing [some].”

Hilton then told Smith that Cheryl Dunlap was decapitated, claiming that was a well-known fact about the case.

“Well, they may be missing her head,” he said. “And if they were missing her head, and if I did it, I could give them that head and I'd be happy to do it. But if they don't want to get her head, et cetera, and they want to kill me, instead, and spend four mil, et cetera, et cetera? Bring it on!”

He was sixty-one years old, Hilton told Smith, and had seventeen years' life expectancy.

“Bring it the fuck on! If you want to get me into the execution chamber when I'm almost eighty years old, hey, knock your fucking self out! You got a fight on your hands.”

Smith asked Hilton how he knew that Florida planned to seek the death penalty.

“I actually don't know that,” he said, but he indicated that he had a fairly good idea that was what would be in store for him in Florida.

“I've offered Leon County detectives the deal,” he said. “I know they're not the state attorney, but I told them to take it back to him.”

Hilton said that since he already had a life sentence, they couldn't give him another day.

“So what does that leave?” he asked. “Why are they extraditing me when I said, ‘You don't have to bother with that.'”

He liked Georgia prisons, he said, and wanted to stay in Georgia because “they understand that a prisoner who is reasonably happy is not likely to assault guards.”

During the course of his interview seeking information about Jason Knapp, Captain Smith had also gleaned some very telling details from Hilton from the implications he had made about the Cheryl Dunlap case—details that Hilton would have been hard-pressed to know if he had not had firsthand knowledge of the crime.

 

In late September 2009, Hilton's trial date still had not been set. Leon County Circuit Court judge Terry Lewis had attempted to move the proceedings along earlier in the year by giving his approval for discovery materials—except for those things that either the prosecution or the defense felt might prejudice potential jurors when the case came to trial.

This situation did not sit well with the
Tallahassee Democrat,
and a motion was filed by the newspaper's attorney, Michael Glaser, for access to the pretrial evidence and to those items that were normally released. Glaser said the public was entitled to have access to the withheld items prior to the trial, as was customary in such criminal cases.

“What's important about this is that it deals with the public's right of access,” he said, adding that his motion was not about the newspaper, but about the public's rights.

Hilton's attorney, assistant public defender Ines Suber, was opposed to the release of those items of evidence she had asked to be withheld from the public, and blamed Hilton's many mentions in the news for the need to withhold them. She said that reporters “had the nerve to do their own investigation,” and had been harassing witnesses when attorneys were not present to inform them of their right not to talk.

Judge Lewis told both sides of the case to advise him as to which items of information they believed should be closed, and to meet with him again the following month, on October 23, after which he would decide what would be released. He also hoped to set a trial date during the hearing, but Suber claimed she couldn't get ready to go to trial until 2011 because of what she claimed was a huge amount of evidence and unusually large number of witnesses involved in the defense. However, Assistant State Attorney (ASA) Georgia Cappleman told the judge she saw no reason why the trial couldn't begin the following spring.

“Two thousand eleven seems like an awful long time to get ready,” the judge told Suber. “If you have a lot of witnesses, you want to lock them in on a trial date.”