Speaker 1: You have a moniker, the National Forest serial killer.
Speaker 2: Oh really, I think I prefer the Beast of Blood Mountain.
Speaker 1: A killer perversely proud of his crimes.
Speaker 2: I set the record. I'm the oldest serial killer in
American history. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1: He lurked in the woods, preyed on hiking trails, and
displayed the evil that can be found in the wilderness
of a human mind.
Speaker 2: I'm your worst nightmare, David Gary.
Speaker 1: Michael Hilton is talking about his crimes for the first
time ever.
Speaker 2: After ignoring innumerable request from every kind of person in
the world. This time to break my silence.
Speaker 1: And he'll be confronted like never before. Now you keep
pointing to Rob Ready, But was that just an excuse
to torture and kill people?
Speaker 2: Torture and kill people? Hold on, torture. I didn't torture anybody.
Speaker 1: Cannot people chain them up in your car to beat
them to death, you rape them. Most people regard that
as torture.
Speaker 2: No, no, Now, where are we going with this?
Speaker 1: Well, I think we're going to the mind of a psychopath.
A psychopath a void of empathy, mercy or decency, narcissistic, psychotically, So.
Speaker 2: You're nuts, heal them with it.
Speaker 3: Yes, you who.
Speaker 1: Now awaiting a death sentence in Florida, Hilton says he's
finally ready to come clean.
Speaker 2: I'm going to give you a news scoop.
Speaker 3: I did it to him.
Speaker 2: I'm confessing to a murder on camera and.
Speaker 1: Reveal what really happened to his victims.
Speaker 2: She said something that really grabbed me.
Speaker 1: What she said. It's the last chapter of an American
crime saga. Do you hate women?
Speaker 2: Yes?
Speaker 1: Enough yes, And our last chance to look inside the
mind of one of the country's most terrifying serial killers.
You have the power to haunt our dreams, yes, turn
them into nightmare. Do you enjoy having that kind.
Speaker 3: Of power over us?
Speaker 2: You know, in a perverse kind of way.
Speaker 3: I do.
Speaker 1: By now, I've come face to face with my share
of killers. They've been deranged, troubled, violent, their heinous crimes
defined by a lifetime of hate or a split second
of evil. But nothing could have prepared me for the
likes of Gary Michael Hilton. New questions an about whether
the man accused of killing and decapitating a Georgia hiker
may in fact be a serial killer. In two thousand
and seven, at the ripe age of sixty one years old,
Gary Hilton made national headlines by launching a shocking murder
spree in an unexpected crime scene, the sprawling wilderness of
America's national forests. Over four months, he abducted, raped, murdered,
and decapitated unsuspecting hikers, terrifying park visitors across the country.
With Hilton lurking in the woods, no one was safe.
It was like something out of a horror movie. Wearing
a makeshift mask, Hilton used his victims atm cards in
the aftermath of each grisly murder. Then in January two
thousand and eight, a massive manhunt led to his capture
again that one whilet's take back, okay, get hired.
Speaker 2: I have this.
Speaker 4: The person of interest in that missing woman case is
at this Chevron gas statue. He's throw himself in the
sulmster here.
Speaker 1: I can go take him down if you want.
Speaker 2: Old Day right there coughed, yeah, wait for there.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Hilton's arrest made national news and brought an end to
the carnage.
Speaker 5: Cops tracked this guy down and captured him.
Speaker 6: Sixty one year old Gary Michael Hilton now sits in
a county jail.
Speaker 1: Charge with abducting and killing twenty four year old Meredith
the Emmerson.
Speaker 3: The suspect in this case, is also a possible suspect
in other murders.
Speaker 1: His interrogation brought into focus a terrifying villain.
Speaker 7: Once you'd take him someone, you're either gonna kill them
or are you gonna get caught?
Speaker 1: Wickedly intelligent, boastful of his crimes.
Speaker 2: I'm the one to kill the girl, okay, I'm.
Speaker 1: The one to kill, and contemptuous of his victims.
Speaker 2: I didn't kill the coast for any satisfaction.
Speaker 1: It was distasteful.
Speaker 2: It was dreadful, trust me.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 2: Of course I was able to do it because of
my general legy in society.
Speaker 1: Cut Horse, cup Horse Hilton pleaded guilty to murdering twenty
four year old Meredith Emerson in Georgia, as well as
John and Irene Bryant, an elderly couple in North Carolina.
He was also tried, convicted, and sentenced to death for
the murder of forty six year old Sheryl Dunlap in Florida,
a crime to which he has never confessed until now. Today,
he awaits execution after more than a decade on Florida's
death Row, but questions remain about Hilton's terrifying rampage, many
only he can answer. At sixty one years old, he
claims he became America's oldest serial killer. What caused him
to snap? Why did he do it? Are there other victims?
Despite all the attention, Hilton has never before spoken to
the media. Okay, so clock starts now ten forty two. Good,
good time, We have exactly sixty minutes. It was my
first interview with a murderer sentenced to die after all
these years. Why did Hilton finally want to talk and
what would he now reveal?
Speaker 8: Here?
Speaker 1: You are on death row, Yes, talking for the first
time publicly about your crimes.
Speaker 2: That's right.
Speaker 1: We're here today, sir, to try and understand the mindset
and motivations behind your actions in these cases. You're seventy
eight years old now, right, Yes? In poor health? You say, yes,
very poor health.
Speaker 2: That's one reason I'm doing this because I'm going to
die soon. I have a congestive heart failure. Tell me,
in your own words, why are you breaking your silence? Well,
you hit it right on the head, and I also
an answer is I don't know. All I can say
is is time. After seventeen years, after ignoring innumerable request
from every kind of person in the world, It's time.
Speaker 1: That's the way I feel.
Speaker 2: It's time, after seventeen years, to break my silence.
Speaker 1: In our correspondence, he said, I think I'm prepared to
give you an interview that's a lollapalooza. It'll knock your
socks off. Yes, I will answer any question, yes, about
any subject, truthfully and completely.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Can I count on you for that?
Speaker 2: You sure can?
Speaker 1: You said, be prepared to meet a whole different breed
of cat? What breed exactly?
Speaker 2: Well, I'm just like no one else really, you know,
serial killer.
Speaker 1: There are a dime a dozen psychopaths, no sociopath I
have part of that in me. In the years since
his murder spree, Hilton's infamy has seemingly only grown. He's
been the subject of doctors, mentories, and internet lore.
Speaker 2: This is the case of Gary Hilton.
Speaker 1: His crimes spanned three states and millions of acres of
Christine National Forests and terrorized hikers everywhere. What did you
think when the media dubbed you the National Forest serial Killer?
Speaker 2: I think I prefer the Beast of Blood Mountain, The
Beast of Blood Mountain?
Speaker 1: Does that give you a sense of accomplishment? Now bound
by chains and shackled to a violent past, Hilton may
look different now after twelve years on death row, but
he's about to give his first interview ever and open
a window into a mind deranged since childhood.
Speaker 2: From a child, a little child, Oh, I was always
fascinated with death and destruction and guns and war as
a child at five six years old, Countly, I've just
he's always been fascinated with it.
Speaker 1: Born in Atlanta and raised in Florida by his mother
and stepfather, Hilton's troubled and violent mind was evident as
a teenager. Four minutes into the police interrogation, you call
yourself a sociopath. Do you remember that? He said, I'm
a sociopath.
Speaker 2: But they call him anti social. That's best the new
name for it, an anti social personality. In my day,
it was called a sociopathic character disorder.
Speaker 1: Were you diagnosed as As a matter of fact, I
was at age fourteen, Hilton fired a shotgun at his stepfather,
nearly killing him. Authorities ordered a mental evaluation.
Speaker 2: At fourteen, I was seeing the head of the Dade
County Child Goddex Clinic, who was a psychiatrist. I saw
Emperor of a year or two and he just flat
told me, what did he tell you? You have a
sociopathic character disorder.
Speaker 1: Hilton had other textbook markers for psychopathy and a condition
called paraphilia, an obsession with violent sexual fantasies. You admit
to paraphilia strong, strong, strong.
Speaker 2: That's one of the reasons I am a chiller. I've
had strong paraphilia all my life. When I accidentally discovered
masturbation my paraphilia, as I was doing it for years.
It was a battlefield and they were women nude, and
they were spread over a tree stump, and I would
come along with a sword.
Speaker 1: Hilton went on to describe vile acts against women. That's
how you would get off.
Speaker 2: This is my birth sexual.
Speaker 1: Feeling. His adulthood was marked by a string of failed
marriages and short lived jobs, until in middle age he
found himself broke, homeless, and alone. But for the pet dogs,
he says he fell closer to than any human being.
You have an odd relationship with dogs. You seem more
bonded with dogs than with the people in your.
Speaker 2: Life, and your million times more.
Speaker 1: Is that fair? Yeah, you told police. In the wolf
world there are no assault in battery laws, there are
no murder laws. Right, imagine such a world where there are.
Speaker 2: No murder laws. Yes, that's the world they live in.
Speaker 1: But in reality, in the real world, you're not a wolf,
you're a human being, and she's an innocent stranger. So
why kill? Why murder? Meredith Emerson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question. That's a good question. We'll
see answer.
Speaker 1: It's not clear exactly when Gary Hilton decided to start
stalking and killing people, but it is known that for
years he frequented national parks in multiple states in his
white van, posing as an ordinary hiker. What's doing out here?
Speaker 4: We come along?
Speaker 1: At some point in his middle age, a lifetime of
madness and failure had pushed him over the edge. Outside
of crime, your life is utterly unremarkable.
Speaker 2: That's true. That's a fair A complete abject failure, a
nothing for nobody, who never achieved anything, that never followed
through on anything, who is a failure? And everything except killing?
Well that was that started when I was sixty one.
Speaker 1: In January two thousand and eight, Hilton was scouting the
trails of Georgia's Blood Mountain for human prey. He was
armed with a bayonet, a police baton, and a friendly
red retriever named Dandy. Chattahoochee National Forest seven hundred and
fifty thousand acres of thick woodlands in the North Georgia Mountains.
At what point did you first spot Meredith? Can you remember?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I was coming down off the Blood Mountain Trail
and she was just coming out when she had stopped
and opened up her little collapsible dog bowl.
Speaker 1: Twenty four year old Meredith Emerson was hiking with her
dog on that day. The recent University of Georgia graduate
was just settling into a new career and a bright
future when she crossed paths with evil. She fit the profile.
Speaker 2: Single definitely good looking, single woman, everything unlikely to.
Speaker 1: Resist, or so you thought. You told police that your
mo was to lurk and sometimes watch with the binoculars
from a distance, just like a hundred wood Yeah.
Speaker 2: The Blood Mountain Trail is the most used day high
thing trail in the state of Georgia. So on the
one end, that makes it an excellent hunting crown. On
the other hand, it makes it no good because there's
so many witnesses.
Speaker 1: You positioned yourself at the intersection of two trails.
Speaker 2: No, I was just coming down off the trail and boom,
there she was.
Speaker 1: At what point did you decide she was the one
you were going to strike.
Speaker 2: I'd already decided to intil I saw her.
Speaker 1: Closing the distance to Meredith on the trail was easy
with the help of Hilton's dog, Dandy. You deploy your
unwitting accomplice, Dandy, right, the icebreaker.
Speaker 2: I mean, you can't help but not use them. He's
so lovable.
Speaker 1: E well, you told police that was part of the strategy.
Speaker 2: You see reverse anthropomorphism. Rather than assigning human qualities to
an animal, they assign animal qualities to humans. So he's
got his laughing, lovable Golden Retriever. He must be okay, right,
reversed anthwermorphisms.
Speaker 1: Some men use dogs to meet women that way. You
use your dog to meet victims that way. It worked
on her. Right now, you're walking up towards the summit
on the trail in close proximity. The presence of so
many other people in the trail didn't dissuade you.
Speaker 2: I'm telling you it should have. I walked up up
the trail with her for a ways and several people
saw me with her right and as a matter of fact,
one guy and it turns out that he was law enforcement.
Yeah yeah, one guy said, are you with her? And
I said no, that was bachelor tiling right there.
Speaker 1: Moments later, alone with Meredith on the trail, the former
army soldier brandished his bayonet blade and prepared to strike,
but subduing her wouldn't be nearly as easy as he expected.
Meredith Emerson was trained in martial arts and ready for
the aging maniac. You confront her with the bayonet, she
attacks the weapon.
Speaker 2: She shocked me. She had real quick hands and she
grabbed the knifely. She cut her head slightly. Like I said,
the byonet was not sure. She grabbed it and I
was so slack, I was like body gagging around. Didn't
have a good firm grip on it, and she twisted
it right out of my hand. So she disarms you,
but she loses control of the bayonet too. At the
same time.
Speaker 1: Now you know you've badly miscalculated, you resort to your
second go to weapon, the police batona.
Speaker 2: And she just were seated to grabb modan and took
the lad out of my head.
Speaker 1: So now you're getting your ass kicked by a girl
in the wood.
Speaker 2: No, No, sounds like it, not at all. Really.
Speaker 1: I sensed it this moment that pressing Hilton might help
reveal just how prideful and heartless he is. To get
inside his head, I needed to get under his skin.
Speaker 2: What are you armed?
Speaker 3: She's not?
Speaker 1: You have what forty or fifty pounds on her? Not
very manly of you, mister Hilton. You pick a week victim.
An army soldier would call that a punk move.
Speaker 2: No one was there but her and me. And I'm
telling you, frankly, even the best.
Speaker 1: Of us have bad days.
Speaker 2: Okay, And no, it wasn't a punk move because she
guess what happened? Then after she took the bat, she
took the bend. At what happened?
Speaker 1: Then you had to hand fight her, you said?
Speaker 2: And what happened?
Speaker 1: Then you overpowered her? Just barely.
Speaker 2: It sounds like no, not just barely. No, where did
you get that at? Well?
Speaker 1: You said to the police. I had to hand fighter.
I probably have multiple fractures in my right hand. Yes,
I still couldn't get control of her. She would feign
or pretend that I was in control and then start
fighting again. So I had to hit her a number
of times, straight punches to the face or the head.
Speaker 2: Right, But I had control of her. I had her,
had her with my left hand the whole time. So
what happened? I beat her rash?
Speaker 1: Can I ask you this empathy, mercy, decency? Did those
ideas ever register with you at all?
Speaker 2: Yes? I have four different personalities, A soldier, a scientist,
an artist, and a comedian.
Speaker 1: Hilton says he has multiple personalities to which he ascribes
four respective professions, though he is qualified in none.
Speaker 2: The soldier and asia this they're codally rational, unemotional. The
artists concern with the textures and feelings and emotions, and
the comedian wants to let people happy. The soldier personalities
and is emotionless killed them. I'll let God sort them out.
That's the soldier mentower.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that all that talk about being an
army soldier was delusional on your part?
Speaker 3: Now?
Speaker 2: No, Now, I've been tested too many childs. I've been
in two too many bites for over twenty years.
Speaker 1: Hilton forcibly abducted Meredith Emerson and chained her to the
chassis inside his white van. While Meredith languished. A massive
search was underway to find her. That garnered widespread media attention,
but the scale of the crime scene, nearly a million
acres of Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest, was daunting. No trace
yet of a missing twenty four year old Gwinnette County woman.
Speaker 3: We were there from sun up to sundown.
Speaker 5: Meredith Emerson could do anything.
Speaker 1: If anybody can.
Speaker 5: Survive this, she can't.
Speaker 2: We haven't found anything here yet.
Speaker 1: The community rallies.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I thought this would just pass unnoticed, just another
hiker missing in the mouse and no big deal. Maybe
a paragraph in the paper could agree.
Speaker 1: Suddenly the investigation was blown wide open. Police pick up
a digital trail as Meredith repeatedly sends Hilton to ATM
machines with the wrong pin number signaling his location. Hilton
is publicly identified as the prime suspect, last seen by witnesses.
With Meredith Emerson alive, the race is on to rescue
Meredith and apprehend Hilton.
Speaker 9: It is going to be a white male between the
ages of fifty and sixty years old.
Speaker 1: But the next discovery would change everything.
Speaker 10: Bobby of mayby four year old Irene and Bryan. It
was discovered on November ninth in the North Carolina Woods,
and her husband, eighty year old John, is still missing.
Speaker 1: It turns out that Meredith Emerson is not the first
person attacked on Hilton's killing spree, only the latest.
Speaker 2: You never intended to let her go never.
Speaker 1: Now you keep pointing to robbery, but that sure seems
like a pretext for what you described as paraphilia. Was
that just an excuse to torture and kill people?
Speaker 2: Now, torture and kill people? Hold on, torture. I didn't
torture anybody.
Speaker 1: Cannot people chain them up in your car, you beat
them to death, you rape them.
Speaker 2: Most people would regard that as torture. No, no, no, no.
Where are we going with this?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 1: I think we're going to the mind of a psychopath.
A psychopath, a void of a thief, mercy or decency, narcissistic, psychotically.
Speaker 2: So your nuts, I'm nuts, Yes, you are nuts?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 11: This week Lori Valudebo representing herself what to expect and
what to look for each day in the Cult Mom Conspiracy.
Speaker 1: Trial Opening Statements with Julie Grant Mornings at eighty seventh
Central on Core TV.
Speaker 11: The NWSL is on Ion, Barbara Banda and the Pride Battle,
the Spirit.
Speaker 5: In le Bonza and the current take on the Dash.
Speaker 11: Thirdday COVID starts Saturday, five pm Ion.
Speaker 3: It's on.
Speaker 2: All day above Blood Mountains.
Speaker 6: The State Patrol's infrared detectors scanned for body heat below.
Speaker 1: The search for Meredith Emerson made national headline and was
a desperate race against time.
Speaker 12: Do everything we can do to make sure that if
she's up there, that we get her out of there,
get her out of there safely.
Speaker 1: Police now knew who took her and which way he
was driving. They also knew that Hilton could snap at
any moment.
Speaker 2: It's a missing person's investigation right now, and that's how
we're pursuing it.
Speaker 1: And the scale of the investigation had expanded to three
states when police realized that Meredith Emerson wasn't Hilton's first victim,
only the latest.
Speaker 10: The body of eighty four year old Irene Bryant was
discovered on November ninth in the North Carolina Woods, and
her husband, eighty year old John, is still missing.
Speaker 1: Four months earlier, John and Irene Bryant had just arrived
at Pisca National Forest in North Carolina. The retired couple
were eighty and eighty four years old, but fit and
young at heart and avid hikers. But on this day,
the Bryants walked onto the trailhead and into an ambush.
Sixty one year old drifter Gary Hilton was armed and
lying in wait Irene and John Bryant right October two
thousand and seven. Hilton has never discussed exactly what happened
to the Bryants until now. The crime scene is North
Carolina's Pisco National Forest, half a million acres with hundreds
of miles of hiking trails. At what point did you
spot the two octogenarians.
Speaker 2: When they got out of their car at the trailhead
in the parking lot? Yeah, there was just a little
parking lot.
Speaker 1: And why then were there no loane girls out there
that day?
Speaker 2: To pick on? No again, I bowled one of my rules.
I said no couples, because two murders would generate a
lot of publicity. I was down to one riddling two
spoons of coffee two dollars. I'd been living out a
dumpsters from a picnic area for two weeks. I lost
a ton of weight. I think I was probably about
a down to one hundred and forty, and I just said, hey,
this has got to stop. And I had to take
some money.
Speaker 1: What do you mean when you say you had to
take someone to get money for robbery purposes?
Speaker 2: Well, well, yes, I'm going to stake out this trailhead
and the first person that shows up goes the bans.
Speaker 1: Yes, okay, what happens next?
Speaker 2: So I kind of geared up, and so I said
to John Bryant, you know what, We're going to take
your credit card and run it. And he said, I'll
go to hell. And he just rushed right past me,
and I deployed the baton and hit him on the
back of his left knee. So the guy whirls around.
He was a big guy, a big strong man, just
as bit as can be. It whirls around. He's carrying
this trekking stick, this hiking stick that they love to carry.
So he goes out to me with that. So I
just brushed it.
Speaker 1: Away and I'm whack.
Speaker 2: He didn't on the side of her head, then pulled
out of a pepper sprayed him in the face. He
steps forward a few feet and goes down where was Irene.
She was a few feet ahead of him, and then
he does the craziest thing. I can't believe this, he said, Irene.
I can't see he didn't. I'd just beaten him down.
And he's a big guy, six foot plus, and now
he's telling his wife to fight me. And bless her heart, Irene,
she was all hard.
Speaker 1: She comes at you.
Speaker 2: She springs right into a fencing position, you know, like
on guard, you know, and pop and she stabs me.
I go ah, and I brush it to one side
and whack hit her with the expander. She goes down.
Then I'm going to take him with me. Brian never
gets up. But there's another crazy thing. Well, he's sitting there.
He pulls his wallet out and he takes his credit
cards out and he froze them. Inexplicable.
Speaker 1: Did you abduct both of them at that point?
Speaker 2: No, no, I have only adducted him. She wouldn't get
in the band.
Speaker 1: So what did you do to her?
Speaker 2: Well, I put him in the van, locked him in
the van and closed the door, and I went back
over to her a few feet away. She knew what
was coming, and she said, I'm not getting in the band.
The police always tell you don't get in the vehicle.
You're as good as dead, and she says, I'm not
getting in the van. I gave him a dirty Harry voice.
I said, you're not getting into van? She said no,
and I immediately laid into her. I beat her, and
her blood blew up and hit me in the eyes
that had turned my vision rag. Oh, nasty, nasty, nasty, nasty.
Speaker 1: Hilton jumped Irene Bryan's body near the trail and held
a battered John Bryant captive in his white fan. He
masked his face with duct tape and used the Brian's
ATM card to withdraw his payday for murder and kidnapping
three hundred dollars. There are easier ways to get money,
there are, so you were it was all.
Speaker 2: It was all stupid, very stupid.
Speaker 1: I mean, yielding what a few hundred dollars or in
the course of.
Speaker 2: This all very stupid. The smart thing to do would
be to take people in parking lots.
Speaker 1: Okay, what about getting a job and earning some money?
Take anybody.
Speaker 2: I'm sixty one years old, I'm sick with MS, I'm
burned out, I have no resume. I'm going to walk
into a phone room looking for a job as a telemarketer.
Speaker 1: Better than going out there killing innocent people, right.
Speaker 2: Well, robbing a bait was better than that. No, no,
there was no practical way of working.
Speaker 1: Hilton then drove John Bryant deep into yet another national park,
the Nanta Howand National Forest, to end his life.
Speaker 2: I wanted to give him a little further away because
there were some houses within earshot. But John tried to
run from me, and he fell down an embankment and
he caught his arm between two trees and broke and
broke right here. So I tried to get him up,
and he couldn't get up like that, So you know,
I had to pistol in my pocket. I just wow
shot him in the side of the head, through and through.
Speaker 1: Shot. John and Irene Bryant left four children and eleven
grandchildren behind. For the next few weeks, Hilton was in
between murders what criminologists called the serial killers cooling off period.
Can you explain to me what happens in your mind
in that cooling off period.
Speaker 2: I'm putting the Beacher out of my mind. I had
Beacher fork shortening. I just get up every day and
go hiking. You're not thinking about it at all. Trying
not to.
Speaker 1: Is the appetite for it rebuilding over the course of
weeks in between?
Speaker 2: There was never an appetite for it. Well, how can
that be, because I told you as I started this,
I said, now, well why didn't you stop? Then?
Speaker 1: As soon as he started.
Speaker 2: It, Well, I didn't see any alternative.
Speaker 1: What do you mean?
Speaker 2: That's what I mean. And if that sounds illogical, well
that was my state of mind.
Speaker 1: Your mindset was that you couldn't see a way forward
without continuing to kill. Yes, just weeks after murdering the
Bryans in North Carolina, Hilton was yet again broke and
out for blood. He had made his way to Florida's
Apalachrical and National Forest, a thousand square miles of dense woods,
and set his sights on a nurse and Sunday school
teacher named Eryl Dunlin.
Speaker 2: She was walking on the trail.
Speaker 1: She was walking. Now, you've never publicly told exactly what
happened there, right.
Speaker 2: No, I haven't, and that case currently is under appeal.
As a matter of fact, it hasn't been finally jdicated.
But hey, I'm going to give you a newscoop.
Speaker 1: This is Gary Hilton at an ATM machine in Tallahassee, Florida,
in December two thousand and seven. His face is disguised
to hide his identity. He's robbing his latest victim, but
that is the least of his sins. You have the
power to haunt our dreams, yes, turn them into nightmares,
to worry about our daughters, to worry about our mothers,
to worry about ourselves. Do you enjoy having that kind
of power over us?
Speaker 2: You know, in a perverse kind of way. I did
the woman I killed in Tallahassee that I have my
current destin at ur She was a devout Christian and.
Speaker 1: A real wheel in the church. Cheryl Dunlop. Yes, Now,
you've never publicly told exactly what happened there, right, No,
what happened, and that case currently is under appeal.
Speaker 2: Right as a matter of fact, it hasn't been finally adjudicated.
But hey, I'm going to give you a news scoop.
I did it, So there you have it.
Speaker 3: You did it.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm confessing to a murder on camera that I've
never had before. You murdered, So I'm giving you something, David,
You murdered, Cheryl Dunlap Yes, I did I did it,
and I'll be glad to tell anyone I did.
Speaker 1: After committing a double murder in North Carolina in the
fall of two thousand and seven, Hilton fled one massive
crime scene for another. Arriving in Florida's Apalachicola National Forest.
Yet again, Hilton found himself broke, hungry, and hunting for
a human target. He was living out of his van
and living out a fiendish killing spree. Where did you
first spot her?
Speaker 2: In the Leon Sinks Recreation Area on the trail?
Speaker 1: Did you follow her?
Speaker 2: I'd staked out on the trail and I had binoculars.
I was covered with a mosquitaet I see for camouflage.
Speaker 1: Now, this is part of the Appalachicola National Forest, another enormous,
enormous stretch of a thousand square miles.
Speaker 2: It's about forty forty miles. I finally had to get
somebody because I had a little bit of peanut butter,
some prude ju ju one riddled in a few spoons
of coffee, and I had to take some money.
Speaker 1: When Ryl Dunlap was intending to her patients as a nurse,
she was teaching Sunday school, but on this day she
was simply enjoying a walk in the Pristine National Forest,
held him kidnapped and held Cheryl Dunlap captive, just as
he had done two other victims, keeping her for days
bound by chains to trees and inside his van. After
using her ATM card to steal her money, he decided
to end her life, but first he would toy with her.
Speaker 2: I put all her stuff together, that I'd taken her
car keys and her cell phone and everything, and said,
I'm gonna let you go, but I burst, I'm going
to go into down and run your credit card, just
to make sure it's good. Did she seem hopeful? Did
she believe you? I believe so?
Speaker 1: Okay, tell me how did Cheryl die?
Speaker 2: I said, come on, let's go. I'm want to train
you to a tree. And I have a chain at
a lock, and she grabs it and goes right down
and to put it on herself. She was already used
to is real, and I kind of had a feeling
that she was going to try to not click that lock,
you know what I mean, just pretend it was locked.
And as soon as she was down there and with
her back to me, I had my pistol in a
bandic pact there a little twenty two, and I pulled
it out and shot her.
Speaker 9: In the.
Speaker 1: Hilton, then dismembered her head and hands and burned her body.
Speaker 2: Cheryl Dunlap, she was all religion, and it gave me
a kind of a perverse amusement to thing. I just
terrorized an entire church. Okay, I just have affected their
life for the rest of their life. They'll never forget it.
And all those world kids that she taught Sunday school
tea to find out that she was killed and her
head was cut off and her hands were cut off.
It you know, it could hot them and.
Speaker 1: Well it will scar them for the rest of their lives. Yes, right,
you enjoy that amuse yourself.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's just I have to admit, Yeah, I kind
of like ha ha ha ha. You know, but she
said something that really grabbed me, kind of rattled me.
What's she say?
Speaker 11: Cheryl was sitting here and the girls that we mentored
together were running through the room and they were smiling
and laughing, and Cheryl had the biggest smile on her face.
Speaker 5: She was so proud of them, and she loved them
so much.
Speaker 11: She had her scrubs on I'll love that picture because
she just it was Cheryl.
Speaker 1: Cheryl Dunlap had lived a life of service.
Speaker 11: There's probably not a day that goes by that I
don't think about her, because she was really we were like,
you know.
Speaker 5: In each other's lives, you know, in a deep way.
Speaker 1: When she wasn't treating patients in her nursing job, she
was teaching Sunday school.
Speaker 9: The thing that I miss most about Cheryl is her
ability to listen. We spoke every day on the phone.
Speaker 1: Cindy Wector and Laura Mayo, where Cheryl Dunlap's best friends.
Speaker 11: I miss the thought that she was always praying for me,
and I knew that no matter what was going on
in my life, wherever she was and wherever I was,
and even if we didn't talk, if something was going
wrong in my life, she would know about it and
she would be praying for me.
Speaker 1: On December first, two thousand and seven, she disappeared.
Speaker 9: So I got a call and was told that she
didn't show up for Sunday school and asked if I
had heard from her, and I said no. I said,
but that doesn't sound like Cheryl, And I said, this is.
Speaker 1: Concerning Dunlap's disappearance matched Hilton's mo She was last seen
in the Apalachicola National Forest just outside Tallahassee, Florida. Withdrawals
were made from her bank account by a man wearing
a makeshift mask of tape, and then two weeks later,
her decapitated body was discovered by a hunter.
Speaker 10: Authorities also believe Hilton may be connected to yet another
woman's disappearance in Florida.
Speaker 5: From the first time I saw him, and from the
first time.
Speaker 11: I heard him speak, I knew that something was just
not right with him. I just felt this sense of
darkness and avil.
Speaker 9: The first time I heard the name Jerry Hilton was
as Cindy said, wow, it was like there was no soul,
but he was definitely an evil person.
Speaker 1: Hilton had never before confessed to Cheryl Dunlap's murder. We
played part of his confession for Cheryl's dear friends Cindy
Wector and Laura Mayo. How did Cheryl die gunshot head?
You were walking her behind her?
Speaker 2: No, no, I said, I was letting her go.
Speaker 1: Oh that trick, Yeah, that trick.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a trick you got.
Speaker 1: Seventeen years later, Hilton still recalls her final words that
shook the hardened killer to his core.
Speaker 2: But she said something that really what she said, she said,
before you die, ask Jesus if we give you or
what you've died. And Jesus said, kind of rattle me.
Speaker 1: Did that make you think twice? We did that make
her more huge? Why do you?
Speaker 2: Oh? She was human, didn't matter, didn't matter.
Speaker 9: What I thought about was God's grace was right there
with her even though she was facing death. You're telling
him to ask for forgiveness. I think that's so powerful.
She would start sentences off like if my life is
to be prophetic, and she would say that in a
way that she knew certain things. And I don't think
she knew all of this, but you know how there
are times there are people that have a knowing. So
when I heard that, it just brought me a miss
joy and.
Speaker 5: I was just so proud of my friend. I'm just
so proud of her.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and seven, there were few clues
as to how Cheryl died, and Hilton might have gotten
away with it if he hadn't had the urge to
strike again just one month after killing Sheryl Dunlap Hilton
prowled another national forest out of money and out of
his mind. This time it was Georgia's Blood Mountain, where
another missing woman was fighting for dear life. Do you
hate women?
Speaker 2: Yes and no?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, But Hilton's final murder victim, Meredith Emerson, had
a clever plan of her own that would lead to
Hilton's capture and end the killing.
Speaker 4: All right, I had this as a person of interest
in the missing woman case. Is at this chevron dass
vide she has her own stuff in the sulta for here.
I can go take him down if you want, say
right there the yeah.
Speaker 1: Gary Michael Hilton is finally about to face justice. He
lurked in the woods, preyed on hikers, and says he
became America's oldest serial killers.
Speaker 2: I was always real good to my victim until you
bludgeon them. They either shot them, they're bludge them. Once
you've taken someone, you're living to kill them? Are you
gonna get caught?
Speaker 1: In two thousand and seven, Gary Michael Hilton, a deranged
sixty one year old drifter, launched a killing spree in
national forests spanning three different states. John and Irene Bryan
had been slain in North Carolina, Sheryl Dunlap was murdered
in Florida, and on New Year's Day in two thousand
and eight, a young woman named Meredith Emerson went missing
on Georgia's Blood Mountain.
Speaker 2: You never intend to let her go.
Speaker 3: Never.
Speaker 2: Right Right now, Hilton's.
Speaker 1: Talking for the first time ever about his murderous midlife crisis.
Speaker 2: I'm going to give you a news scoop.
Speaker 1: I did it, making news with a murder confession.
Speaker 2: Yes, I'm confessing to a murder on camera that I've never.
Speaker 1: Had before and opening a window into the mind of
a madman. Outside of crime, your life is utterly.
Speaker 2: Unremarkable, a complete abject failure.
Speaker 1: Except killing.
Speaker 2: Well, that was that started when I was sixty one?
Did it?
Speaker 3: Really? Man?
Speaker 2: I know, I knew that was coming. I set the record.
I'm the oldest serial killer in American history. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 1: On New Year's Day two thousand and eight, twenty four
year old Meredith Emerson went for a walk on a
mountain park trail and cross paths with evil. You told
police that your m was to lurk and sometimes watch
for the binoculars from a distance, just like a hunter
wood yep, and were you doing that on this day?
Speaker 2: No, I was just coming down off the dreel and boom,
there she was.
Speaker 1: Meredith fiercely fought the attacker, but Hilton overpowered her and
chained her inside the white van he lived in, and
thus begins four days of living hell for Meredith Emerson.
Speaker 9: No.
Speaker 1: Yes. Sitting across from Hilton on Florida's death Row, I'm
staring at a real life paradox. He's happy to admit
to serial murder but protests being characterized as inhumane.
Speaker 2: She had a good time. No she didn't, Yes, she did.
Speaker 3: No, she didn't.
Speaker 2: David, I was there.
Speaker 1: I knew you were there, but you were in Gary
Hilton world. In the real world, she was being tormented
and tortured. She was not tormented and tortured.
Speaker 2: They fly and then, and a lot of it is
because of me.
Speaker 1: I really sure that is going to be okay.
Speaker 2: But quick by, now, are you going to get her?
Speaker 1: Seventeen years ago, when he was interrogated, Hilton told police
he had a magical ability to comfort and lull his
victims into submission, and he still stands by that claim.
Speaker 2: All of my victims fought me initially, but I quickly
gained control, and then they all became strangely submissive. That's
because of my power. I could put them at ease.
Speaker 1: She stuck in your van, chained to the chassis.
Speaker 7: No, no, she was.
Speaker 2: She was unrestrained ninety percent of the time. Only during
transit was she restrained, had collar on her neck. I'm
telling you, wait, a relax in time. I gave her
books to read. She would read them and everything. She
wouldn't need anything. I kept trying to No.
Speaker 1: You're so delusional that you think she was having a
good time.
Speaker 2: Oh well, she wasn't big torture.
Speaker 1: You told police. She's she was not having a bad
time at all, enjoying herself. I could tell that well
in the sense she did.
Speaker 7: He advice to people if there actor is to engage
your abductor and to make yourself a person to.
Speaker 1: The Hilton offered police this advice for anyone being held captive.
Speaker 7: Telling about your family, what your dreams and homes and
plants and steams are.
Speaker 2: Because the inductor is psychopathic, he's looking at you in
a way you want to make yourself again.
Speaker 1: Turns out that's exactly what Meredith Emerson tried to do
in the clutches of the madman. But the cruel irony
is lost on Hilton. She would joke, this is her
engaging you to try and save her life.
Speaker 2: David. You you are talking through your ass.
Speaker 1: You might be you might be telling yourself that to
make yourself appear lessie evil. But she was not having
a good time, mister Hilton.
Speaker 2: No, I'm not less evil. I'm your worst nightmare. David.
Speaker 1: You're not trying to appear less evil.
Speaker 3: No.
Speaker 1: Here she is fighting for her life heroically, valiantly. That
meant nothing to you in terms of empathy, mercy or decency.
Speaker 13: Hit it.
Speaker 1: Not at that moment.
Speaker 2: I was always real good to my victims. I treated
them good.
Speaker 1: Do you think so? I know I did until you
bludgeon them.
Speaker 2: Until they eat your shot them or bludgeon.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but you have zero point zero empathy. First chance
you get your raper.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker 1: Paraphilia, that was yes. Paraphilia is a fixation on sexual sadism,
a condition Hilton admits drove him to Meredith Emerson, and
yet he denies both the brutality and the gratification of
the act.
Speaker 2: I didn't I didn't enjoy it. I just did it
because I planted.
Speaker 1: Come on, no expect anyone to believe that. Yes, you
also told the police that you didn't force her. Now
that seems ridiculous. You're enforcing, You're forcing this whole song.
Speaker 2: Made no mistake, But I didn't overphysically overpower her anything.
No trace yet of.
Speaker 1: A missing twenty four year old Gwinnett County woman.
Speaker 6: All day above Blood Mountain, the State Patrol's infrared detectors
scanned for body heat below, but.
Speaker 1: There's still hope for Meredith Emerson. As news crews and
search teams descend on Blood Mountain.
Speaker 13: We heard that there was a missing hiker January second.
It was in an area within the jurisdiction of my unit.
Speaker 1: The detective John Cagel of Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but
forgot the call to find Meredith Emerson.
Speaker 2: We learned that Meredith was a recent graduate of the
University of Georgia.
Speaker 13: She was living in an area north of Metro Atlanta
and had a job in marketing.
Speaker 1: She was an experienced hiker.
Speaker 13: She also had studied martial arts, so this is not
somebody who would have just gotten lost on the trail.
We all became very concerned that this was something more
than an overdue hiker. We had hundreds and hundreds of
volunteers just show up to help look from Meredith. We
organized search teams to go on Blood Mountain and to
search not only the trail, but off the trails.
Speaker 2: Searches on that was a shocker.
Speaker 1: You told police you didn't like seeing that. You've ridiculed
the people who didn't know her but came out to help.
Speaker 2: Anyway, I ridiculed the people, No, I did it. You
see the candlelight Marchis or Meredith Emerson and other people,
and people show up and they care, people that.
Speaker 1: Don't even know the girl.
Speaker 2: I mean, thirty five thousand people a year gets shredded, maimed,
and beaten to death in car wrecks. Okay, I mean yeah,
what I'm talking about is a virtual greed.
Speaker 1: An enormous crime scene. It's it's no wonder the police
were stymied for so long. You watched this search unfold
right civilly, hundreds of searchers, helicopters, dogs, people walking the
grid out there in the middle of nowhere. Did you
just watch all that play out.
Speaker 2: And all now I didn't know anything about that.
Speaker 1: You didn't know. Hilton didn't know it, but he had
just become the prime suspect and was about to become
the prey.
Speaker 3: We began to.
Speaker 13: Interview people that had been on Betrayal New Year's Day
and had seen Meredith. They began to comment that they
had seen her talking with an older guy. The older
guy was acting very strangely, So we began to put
out a description of this person that had been seen
with Meredith, and we got a call to our tip
line from someone who says, I think I know who
you're looking for.
Speaker 1: His name is Gary Hilton. After stalking and killing unsuspecting
hikers in two other states, Hilton is now the one
being hunted. The captive Meredith has a plan of her own.
Speaker 2: They fight, and then they suit men and a.
Speaker 1: Surprise in store for the aging maniac. She kept on
fighting you, right with her brains, outsmarting you with the
bank cards.
Speaker 2: She didn't now smart, got you running around you think,
so huh oh?
Speaker 1: Absolutely did you not figure out what she was doing.
In the days after Meredith Emerson's disappearance on New Year's
Day two thousand and eight, police are on the brink
of finding her and her captor Gary, Michael Hilton. She's
an innocent stranger. So why Meredith Emerson.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question. It's a good question. What's
the answer. It was just the mission, after.
Speaker 1: God, the mission at the time, yep, the mission to.
Speaker 2: What to till murder and take her ATM card and
get the money out of it.
Speaker 1: But when Hilton demanded Meredith's ATM card, she repeatedly gave
him bad pin numbers, which he used at machines along
the escape route, leaving a trip of digital breadcrumbs for
Georgia Detective John Cagle.
Speaker 13: We found out that there in fact had been activity
throughout the week. The first night on January first, there
was activity about at a bank about fifteen miles from
Blood Mountain, and then another attempt at a bank about
forty miles south, and then the following day there was
another attempt about seventy miles southwest of Blood Mountain. So
they're all over the place. She was doing that to
give us time to try to catch up.
Speaker 1: She kept on fighting you right with her brains, outsmarting
you with the bank cards.
Speaker 2: She didn't now smart, I knew what she was doing.
Speaker 1: How many times did she have you running to ATMs.
Speaker 2: One of the several times five times.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gave the police a virtual roadmap as you
tried to use her ATM card. She knew this was
the way to hold the window open for a rescue
and to be tracked.
Speaker 2: You think so, huh?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely did you not figure out what she was doing?
I think she misjoculated.
Speaker 1: Well, kept her alive for four days. You might have
killed her that first day, Who knows. Thanks to Meredith,
police now have a bead on Hilton, but they know
that time may be running out for her because the
killer could snap at any moment.
Speaker 13: We were getting closer to Hilton, but we seem to
be just a step behind. The longer these things go on,
the less likely there's a good outcome.
Speaker 1: You told police there was never any plan to let
her go, right. I knew that if I let her go,
I'd be identifying. I knew she couldn't be let go.
I knew she was doomed. Yep, I was as good
as card if I let her go. On the last day,
you pull the cruelest trick of all on her. You
told her you were letting her go home. Oh cruel,
very cruel, pure evil. No, what if I told her today.
Speaker 2: I'm going to kill you, equally evil, equally equal.
Speaker 1: Yes, you tie her to a tree, you bag up
all her stuff, and now it's the iron bar, right, Yes,
solid iron bar. Struck her with that, Yes, she said no,
let me go. Yes, you remember that? Put her hands up. Yeah,
you keep striking her. You'll see some defensive wounds to
her hands. Oh god, Yes, beat her into unconsciousness. And
you say I kept striking her to ensure she was dead.
Speaker 2: Yep?
Speaker 1: Feeling anything at this point?
Speaker 2: Or yes?
Speaker 1: What are you feeling?
Speaker 2: Blobing's terrible. Beating someone to death is number one. Is
a hard way to eye and it's a hard way
to kill anyone. Oh, I wouldn't have done it if
I had my guns with me.
Speaker 1: Did you ever consider not killing her? No, not taking her? No,
you didn't have to kill her, Yes I did. If
you didn't kill her, you wouldn't have to cut her up? Right,
If I didn't kill her out of being caught.
Speaker 2: And then.
Speaker 1: You decapitate her with what you described as a standard
serrated Regen knife bread knife? Why did you do that?
Speaker 2: Because her hair is full of forensic cabinets, including dog hare.
Her hair is full of dandy's hair and they get
DNA off dog airs.
Speaker 1: You say you did that for forensic reasons, right, Yes,
it's like a lot more common variety paraphilia, because now
the filing of corpse is a telltale sign of paraphilia.
Speaker 9: No.
Speaker 2: No, you're barking up the wrong tree. Yeah, sure, positive.
It was dreadful. I'd already told you. I couldn't even
look the fact.
Speaker 13: That he had decapitated her. I asked him why what
was that about? And he said that he had done
that for forensic purposes. And uh, if anybody who's ever
met Gary Hilton, uh, he did that because he liked it.
Speaker 1: Finally, police use Meredith atm smoke signal to hone in
on Hilton and spread the word.
Speaker 2: Ska that one. What's the exactly, pay? I have this?
Speaker 4: The person of interest in that missing woman case is
that this chevron gas that the van is here. The
dog has hit the red dog and I saw hit
the man's space and I've been watching the news and
I knows him, I know it him. He's throwing something
the dulpster here. I can go take him down if
you want, say.
Speaker 2: Okay, do you a fuck?
Speaker 4: He's finishing off.
Speaker 3: You guys got a hurry.
Speaker 1: Just hours after Hilton murdered Meredith, police tracked him down
outside a gas station here going to college. Yea brought
to heal by a young woman who outsmarted a serial
killer and lost her life in the process of stopping him.
Speaker 2: Meredith was not with him when he was arrested. We
did not believe this was going to have a good outcome.
Speaker 1: For meridianth Hilton's arrest made headlines as hikers across the
southeast could breathe a sigh of relief. Gary Michael Hilton,
of course it is this aspect.
Speaker 2: He is now a custody. Cops tracked this guy down
and captured him. Sixty one year old Gary Michael Hilton
now sits in a county jail. Wasn't there than to
ask you about that?
Speaker 7: You got to put something to keep her quiet, gags
out of Baker, anything on dad?
Speaker 2: She was she unconscious of that or never she hard did.
Speaker 1: Prosecutors in Georgia cut a deal with Hilton for the
sake of the victim's family. Tell police where he hid
Meredith's remains, and the state will take the death penalty
off the table. Cagel then set out to bring Meredith
home from a remote location in the woods.
Speaker 13: I found her clothes first, and I began to just
on my hands and knees, began to push back leaves
and brush next to the tree, and I went probably
fifteen feet maybe twenty feet doing that until I was
able to uncover the leaves that exposed her her head.
I had another agent with me, and I said, I
told him to stay with Meredith, because we're not going
to leave her.
Speaker 1: The Emersons were finally able to lay their beloved and
brave daughter to rest.
Speaker 13: They had a memorial service from Meredith and Anthens, Georgia,
and thousands of people came to day.
Speaker 2: Didn't even know me.
Speaker 13: Her friends, her family were all alike. They were all
just good, solid people. So it was a tough time
for the family and the friends and the hiking community.
Speaker 1: But to authorities in Georgia, there were still unanswered questions.
Why did Gary Hilton kill these people and what set
him off?
Speaker 2: Listen, I know as well as anyone, I'm a crime expert,
and I know that serial killers never ever start when
they're sixty one years old, and they don't wake up
and start killing people. It doesn't happen, So how do
you account for that? Well, let me finish, It's never
happened in the past, and it's never going to happen again.
I set the record for I'm the oldest serial killer
in American history, and I understand that the probability, you know,
that I have been chilling people before it is perhaps
ninety percent, you know, so I can understand someone not
believe in me, and trust me, nobody will believe me.
My best friend of ten years, of ten years, was
visiting me a couple of weeks ago. He still was
not sure. My legal team is still not sure.
Speaker 1: Do you maintain that contrary contrary to common sense and
logic and statistics only?
Speaker 2: Let me answer that with a saying that I've come
up with you must always leave room for the exception.
So you maintain you must always leave room for the coincidence.
Speaker 1: All these years later, Hilton remains perversely proud of his crimes.
But this deranged serial killer's reign of terror is over,
and now Gary Hilton is the one in chains and
about to finally face justice.
Speaker 9: I believe he is nothing more than a bully and
a weak minded power to praise on others.
Speaker 3: Take this.
Speaker 1: In the nineteen ninety five b horror movie Deadly Run,
a psychotic killer kidnaps women and releases them into a
mountain wilderness, only to stalk and hunt them down. Gary
Hilton is listed on the movie's IMDb page as an
uncredited member of the crew. The film's producer Sam Rail
says Hilton even embellished the screenplay with detailed ways of
tormenting the female characters. Some scenes were filmed near Blood Mountain,
where Gary Hilton abducted twenty four year old Meredith Emerson
in two thous eight. Back in ninety five, you help
make a movie called Deadly Run. Is that art imitating
life or life imitating art?
Speaker 2: It's neither. This is Sam Reel acquired this. Here's here's
the genesis of that. Sam Reel acquired this property. In
other words, a screenplay.
Speaker 1: But he did work on the film, right, No, you
didn't help him with the film. No, that he credits
with you with ideas like let's have the women fight back.
Speaker 2: Yes, that that guy has caused me more mischief in
a word, not a chance.
Speaker 1: You say, none of that's true. No, okay, it's an
eerie coincidence. That the plot of the movie revolves around
hunting women down and killing them. It is the cabin
used to shoot a scene as Stone's throw from one
of your old crime scenes.
Speaker 3: No it isn't.
Speaker 1: It's blood Mountain. No it's not a stone's throw twenty minutes,
twenty miles.
Speaker 2: Well, it's a long throw.
Speaker 1: It's surprising that Hilton would deny an association with the film.
In the aftermath of his arrest, he appeared to relish
any notoriety.
Speaker 2: I'm kind of like a Hollywood celebrity that's been banned.
Speaker 3: And now.
Speaker 1: You see what I mean.
Speaker 2: The more you limited, the bigger demand it may.
Speaker 1: You are infamous, Yes, sir, Collectors of murder memorabilia think
you're a big celebrity.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I'm a hot commodity.
Speaker 1: You enjoy all that attention.
Speaker 2: It's better than being ignored.
Speaker 1: After Hilton cut a deal in Georgia to avoid the
death penalty there, police tried to get him to talk
about his other crimes, the murders of John and Irene
Bryant in North Carolina and the king of Sheryl Dunlap
in Florida, but instead he put on a dizzying display
of derangement.
Speaker 7: Let me bekay in warn a half bollion you son
is going to run out of nuclear pool if she
will a little started collapsing on herself. Kind of like
the Lone Rangers, and the lone Ranger would come galloping
into town. They would be all the smart towns people
right and here the lone Ranger would be wearing this
night the skin kind out this but really elaborate two
gun red mounted the silver with chrome pistol. I have
a ring against society, and I guess most people would
fit the bill as far as a lot them good.
Speaker 2: One thing he had asked me what they'd.
Speaker 14: Like to get some months Hell, okay, uh it was
dragonful And the only thing you can do is so
dractful that the only thing you can do is go
on autop I told you.
Speaker 3: It wasn't work.
Speaker 13: Hilton's no different than any other serial killer. They always
think they're the most you know, important and the smartest
person in the room. And Hilton's no exception. The only
time he's smarter than anybody is when he's alone in
his cell. That's the time he's the smartest guy in
the room.
Speaker 1: Do you think you're smart?
Speaker 2: I am you do now.
Speaker 1: They say serial killers are the smartest of the killing group.
They do, but I can't tell how smart you are. Cunning, sure,
uneducated for the most part. Basing your crimes in such
sprawling settings seems clever, But you did a lot of
stupid things along the way too, sure did. Hilton's many
missteps would come back to haunt him, this time in
a Florida courtroom where the death penalty was back on
the table.
Speaker 14: And if they want to spend a million dollars the
two million to kids death for me, and then another
two million to get death and then another eight million
to get in the death penalty.
Speaker 1: That's exactly what authorities did in Florida State Court for
the abduction and murder of beloved nurse Ryl Dunlap.
Speaker 2: Arry was not the ordinary killer. There were too many
levels to him.
Speaker 1: Forensic psychiatrist doctor Abbe Strauss was one of the first
to evaluate Gary Hilton's mind for the Florida court case.
Speaker 8: I was hired by the Office of the Public Defender
in two thousand and nine to see him to do
a psychiatric evaluation, and I was trying to get a
sense of what happened.
Speaker 12: Why did you not kill anybody until you're sixty one
years old.
Speaker 1: Hilton greeted Dr Strauss with his characteristic grandiosity.
Speaker 12: I said, mister Hilton, glad to meet you, and he said,
doctor Strauss, Oh, yes.
Speaker 2: I knew you were coming. By the way, did you
read the New York Times today?
Speaker 12: I am there to talk to him about the charges
of murder against him, and it seemed almost like it.
Speaker 2: Was a deflection of some sort.
Speaker 12: Gary had a script, obviously very bright, and he basically
tried to control the interview. At first, he said that
he was happy to be in jail. He took a
lot of the pressures off. He didn't have to worry
about anything, and he was going to retire in jail.
But when we started talking about his mother, things changed.
He talked about how indeed he is a misogynous he
hates women, and his hatred was deep.
Speaker 2: Do you hate women? Yes?
Speaker 13: And no?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, here's how you described women to police. You
see part of my dislike or I wouldn't call it hatred,
but almost for women is that they have all the advantages.
Speaker 2: You don't be fooled by a woman's nurturing instinct. Look
at their free will, personalities and you're gonna find women who.
Speaker 7: Are the most hateful, avaricious, a humulative, greedy, and heartness.
Speaker 2: Believe all that women have all the advantages. They're smarter,
they're more intuitive, they're more patience, which is a very
prime bird you it's very valuable virtue. They're more patient,
and they have all the tea. It's not there. It's
not fair.
Speaker 1: Are those your reasons for hating It's just not there.
Speaker 2: I can't tell if you're joking or not.
Speaker 9: No.
Speaker 1: Doctor Streuss has a theory about Hilton's hatred of women.
Speaker 12: Apparently, his mother divorced his biological father when he was
roughly five years old, and they got married to this
stepfather and it was not a good relationship. Gary said
that his mother would speak to him about the importance
of giving her new husband a good orgasm. How destructive
to a kid who's trying to figure out life to
have to live but he knows about his mother's orgasmic history.
Speaker 1: Streuss testified at the Dunlap trial.
Speaker 2: State of Florida very security Michael Hilton.
Speaker 1: And presented his findings as a mitigating factor during the
sentencing phase.
Speaker 2: A child can grow up with his emptiness inside of them.
Speaker 12: I got the feeling the jury thought I was getting
them a bunch of psychological bs.
Speaker 1: The evidence against Hilton was overwhelming. Your lawyers are presenting
mitigating factors which were underwhelming, and then the state plays
videos of you post murders, happy go Lucky, basically celebrating.
At one point, you say in a sing song voice,
I had to kill those pitches.
Speaker 2: I deal them with it to them because of the mark. Yeah,
but first I gotta go hide his come more up. Yes,
you know that was funny because I funny.
Speaker 3: This was up to Ryl.
Speaker 2: This is empty. Yeah, it was funny because I wanted
to erase delete everything on the camera. This is a
digital camera, and I knew that you just can't hit
a delete. I don't remember saying that, but it sounds
like something I would say.
Speaker 1: It showed how devoid of remorse you were.
Speaker 2: Boy. Ye, you're on an attack. You've got me at
a loss for work.
Speaker 3: Lay.
Speaker 1: In twenty eleven, Hilton was convicted of first degree capital
murder in Florida, where.
Speaker 2: He'll face the death penalty in the killing and decapitation
of this woman, Cheryl Dunlap.
Speaker 1: He also pled guilty to the murders of Irene and
John Bryant in North Carolina. Their family took to local
media to express their outrage at the serial killer.
Speaker 2: He beat my mother to death, he shot my father
in the head.
Speaker 7: He murdered two people for no reason other than the
trophies of their clothes and the three hundred dollars he
got from their bank card.
Speaker 2: But Brian's children say they don't believe that Hillton is sorry.
Speaker 1: No empathy, no mercy, no decency.
Speaker 2: Well, I think let's not go that far. Although let
me tell you, Meredith is the one that really gets stingy.
She was twenty four years old. I stole over fifty
years of her life. She was such a great girl,
just graduated from a fine school Georgia, and I had
a bright future and I took it all from her.
It's terrible.
Speaker 1: It was terrible, you said about Cheryl Dunlap. The community
went absolutely nuts over this. Sure, she's a nurse and
she teaches Sunday school to fifth graders, But you'd think
I killed mother Teresa.
Speaker 2: Hey, look, it's just another murderer. So you know there's
a million murders.
Speaker 1: This is how you're discussing the murder victim you're waxed
poetic about Meredith and your regrets over her loss, and
here you're deriding Cheryl.
Speaker 2: It's just nothing.
Speaker 3: What you.
Speaker 2: I don't know? I answer that.
Speaker 1: Having terrorized and taken the lives of others, Hilton is
now about to reveal the one thing that terrifies him.
You said death is like a roaring fire. It can
induce a blind panic that will make you trample your
best friend to get away with it. Very true, and
Gary Michael Hilton is about to meet his fate. The
idea of your own death still frightens you. Yes, you're
seventy eight years old, now right?
Speaker 2: He can this short? I guess you could. You could
say that, man, it is against me.
Speaker 9: As far as Gary Hilton getting the death penalty, The
law is the law.
Speaker 1: Laura Mayo and Cindy Wector were Cheryl Dunlap's best friends.
Cheryl's life was mercilessly cut short by serial killer Gary
Michael Hilton in two thousand and seven.
Speaker 9: I know that my faith dictates that I forgive, but
the fact that he got the death penalty is probably
fitting for someone like him. He cannot hurt anybody else,
and I hope that he can reconcile everything he's done
with God.
Speaker 11: I also felt like he realizes that he's killed so
many people, but yet he.
Speaker 5: Realizes he's going to die. And so it did, like
Laura said, it did feel like it was fitting.
Speaker 11: It was the law and the people who made the
judgments and everything decided that this was fitting.
Speaker 1: Back in two thousand and eight, Hilton taunted investigators and
dared the courts to charge him with capital murder.
Speaker 2: I'll telling you right now, I'm going to dig my heelton.
Speaker 14: I didn't get around to executing the seventeen years from now,
when I'm seventy eight years old, I've decredited in anything.
Speaker 1: Hey, they can do it. But now, exactly seventeen years later,
I'm sitting across from a decrepit seventy eight year old
Gary Hilton, and today it is the death penalty that
he fears most. You said something in the correspondence that
I thought it was a specially striker. I thought I'd
start with this, he said, Confronting the reality of death. Yes,
is of course much different from the abstract concept. Is
death is like a roaring fire. It can induce a
blind panic that will make you trample your best friend
to get away with it?
Speaker 2: Very true?
Speaker 1: Have you witnessed this intimately in the course of imposing
death on your victims?
Speaker 3: No?
Speaker 2: Their death was to them completely unexpected.
Speaker 1: And yet what surprises me about that statement is that,
even after all the cruelty and killing you've done, the
idea of your own death still frightens you.
Speaker 2: Yes, and for that, I'm ashamed.
Speaker 1: And I feel guilty because the way you struck down
those innocent people. Yeah, you think that life is cheap
to you, but that's right. Does that just apply to
other people's lives, not your own?
Speaker 2: No, it applies to their lives to you, Does it
apply to yours? Yes? And when I say I want
to live, well, they wanted to live too. I know
they did, and I know what I took from them.
Speaker 13: He wants people to remember how big a serial killer
he is when he dies, and we'll see what the
look on his face is when they bring him in
to be executed.
Speaker 1: Detective John Cagele once helped bring Hilton in and now
helps one day to see him off.
Speaker 13: I look forward to being there for that.
Speaker 1: To stave off execution. Hilton has been appealing his death
sentence for years. His latest effort is now pending at
the US Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals. It's unclear how
his stunning admission to the Dunlap murder earlier in our
interview will impact his appeal.
Speaker 2: I'm going to give you a news scoop.
Speaker 1: I did it.
Speaker 2: You did it. Yes, I'm confessing to a murder on
camera that I've never had before. You murdered. So I'm
giving yourself a David.
Speaker 1: You murdered Cheryl Dunlap.
Speaker 2: Yes, I did. I did it, and I'll be glad
to tell anyone I did.
Speaker 1: Why do you wait so long to confess to this crime?
Speaker 2: You know you have lawyers and they pounded in you.
You know, not to say anything. But as I told
you before, I'm to the point where I don't care.
I don't care. There's nothing they can.
Speaker 3: Do to me.
Speaker 1: Hilton may finally be on the brink of his long
overdue demise, But seventeen years on, will nature take him
before the State of Florida can put him to death?
You're in poor health, you say.
Speaker 2: Yes, very poor health, because I'm going to die soon.
Speaker 1: Is that why you're here today?
Speaker 2: Well? Yeah, yeah, time is short, but hey, and then
there's the question of other victims. No prior murders, No
prior Belanese committed violent LaNese committed against persons.
Speaker 1: Of any type until you're sixty one years old.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to believe.
Speaker 2: Isn't that amazing.
Speaker 1: It's hard to imagine that Gary Michael Hilton's compulsion to
kill started so late in life, and some in law
enforcements suspect that Hilton could be behind similar unsolved murders.
For former Georgia detective John Cagel, there's one outstanding case
that hits close to home, the two thousand and four
disappearance of Patrese Andras, a hairdresser from Coming, Georgia.
Speaker 13: Patrice had been abducted from her hair salon that she had.
Speaker 1: In his lengthy interrogation with investigators, Hilton revealed that he
liked to visit beauty salons to hustle money for a
fake charity. That's when that shotguns trong Ay. They're working
on Saturday.
Speaker 2: And that's primarily that's their day.
Speaker 1: That's when the owner is going to be there.
Speaker 14: That's the busiest time of the wait on any beauty shop.
Speaker 2: An they did to give up good money, you know.
Speaker 1: Patrice's remains were found near the same wooded area where
Hilton hid Meredith Emerson's body.
Speaker 13: The remains of Patrice Andras were recovered three miles from
the Dawson Forest Wildlife Management area. The loose connection to
a beauty salon or a hair salon and then the
proximity of the forest where her remains were recovered kind
of reopened our thoughts.
Speaker 1: No prior murders, No prior.
Speaker 2: Felonese committed violent Felanese committed against persons of.
Speaker 1: Any type until you're sixty one years old.
Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
Speaker 1: It's very hard to believe.
Speaker 2: Isn't that amazing? When I started doing this, after having
all these fantasies and everything, but so long, I found
that I didn't like it at all. It wasn't anything
like the day dreams. The reality. No, and I dreaded
it and then putting it off and putting.
Speaker 1: It off, procrastinating it because the impulse was in you.
Speaker 2: No, I didn't. Once I actually did it, I see,
once I actually did it.
Speaker 1: Hilton has come under suspicion in connection with several other
missing persons in the years leading up to his killing. Spree,
including Judy Smith, Jason Knapp, Rosana Miliani, and Michael Scott Lewis,
all vanished from national forests in the southeastern United States
Hilton's hunting grounds, but he has never been charged in
connection with these or any other attacks.
Speaker 2: When I started out, if anyone saw me in the area,
or even worse, with the victim, it was in aboard season. However,
by the end of the whole thing in my mind
was just ragged, you know, disordered, and.
Speaker 1: As a result of these crimes or some kind of
descent into madness.
Speaker 2: Not into madness, I was already mad.
Speaker 1: Were you taking these chances to amuse yourself or increase
the challenge involved?
Speaker 2: Now?
Speaker 1: Is there anything that could have happened to prevent you
from murdering these people? Is there anything we at large
could have done to stop this? How would you advise us?
With respect to all the other Gary Hilton's out there?
Speaker 2: Couldn't help you on that? Yeah, thank you, madam.
Speaker 1: And with that, Gary Hilton's first and likely last interview
comes to an end. If he has any secrets left,
he may now take them to the grave, While the
families and friends of his victims continue to pick up
the pieces of their lives from the carnage left in
his wake. For Detective John Cagel, the Meredith Emerson case
would finish a long career in law enforcement.
Speaker 13: This was the last case I worked at GBA. I
retired in April to Tiles Night. There are people, even
to this day, seventeen years later, they remember this case
and an are are steel struggling with it.
Speaker 1: As for Laura Mayo and Cindy Wector, the last thing
they want to do is think about the man who
took their dear friend, Cheryl Dunlap's life.
Speaker 9: When I think about Hieryl, I do think about her life.
I'll think about just a something funny, and I would
get in her car for lunch and her car would
be a mess.
Speaker 5: I remember the good times.
Speaker 11: I remember us walking around the lake like Yellow Member
in Tallahassee, and then we would stop and pray and
we would talk about things, and she was just always there.
Speaker 9: You know.
Speaker 5: I want Cheryl to be defined by her life and
not her death.