Gary Hilton

• 1. Introduction

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  Gary Michael Hilton, born in 1946, earned the nickname The National Forest Serial Killer because every one of his four known murders took place inside a national forest. Those killings came between 2007 and 2008 and stretched across three states. The victims were hikers and a woman whose car was left on a country road. Most were found by hunters walking with their dogs. Hilton was an older drifter with a golden retriever at his side, and for months nobody linked the crimes. Investigators in different counties and different states worked on what they believed were separate cases. How did one man move between forests without being noticed? What finally pointed police toward him? And how many other people might he have harmed before anyone caught on? The answers begin with an elderly couple who walked into the North Carolina mountains and did not come back.

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• 2. Pisgah and Nantahala

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  Jack and Irene Bryant lived in Horse Shoe, North Carolina, and loved to hike. Jack was 80 and Irene was 84. On the 21st of October 2007 they left their maroon Ford Escape at Yellow Gap Road, near U.S. Route 276, and set out into Pisgah National Forest. Two weeks passed with no word from them. Their family then reported them missing to the Henderson County Sheriff's Office. A search began with more than thirty volunteers, cadaver dogs and a helicopter. Phone records added a haunting detail. Jack had tried to dial 911 on the day they vanished, but the signal failed and the call dropped.

  On the 10th of November 2007 searchers found a woman's body on the Barnett Branch trail, covered with leaves. It went to the state medical examiner's office in Chapel Hill. Three days later it was identified as Irene. She had been beaten to death with a blunt object. Because the death occurred on federal land, the FBI took over and offered a $10,000 reward. Soon another clue surfaced. A bank card belonging to the Bryants had been used to take $300 from an ATM in Ducktown, Tennessee. Surveillance video showed an older white man in a yellow rainjacket, his hood hiding his face. Jack was still listed as missing, and investigators feared he had been taken by his wife's killer.

  The answer for Jack came from a hunter. On the 3rd of February 2008, Mark Waldrop found a skull in Nantahala National Forest, just off a service road known as The Switchbacks. He and a local deputy examined the area and found a pelvis and spine about 20 yards away. There was no clothing and no identification. The bones went to Chapel Hill, and after two days they were confirmed as Jack's. By then, a woman in Florida had been missing for two months.

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• 3. The Sunday School Teacher

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  Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, lived in Crawfordville, Florida, and taught Sunday school at a church in Tallahassee. On the 3rd of December 2007 she failed to show up there. Her family found the absence so out of character that they reported her missing the next day. Her white Toyota Camry had been left north of the county line. About five days later, a search party of around 180 people gathered. They found nothing at first, yet many still hoped to find her alive.

  On the 16th of December 2007, a hunter named Ronnie Rentz was walking his dogs through Apalachicola National Forest when he came upon a decomposing body. The woman had been decapitated. The medical examiner used DNA profiling to confirm that she was Dunlap, and her death was ruled a homicide. Police then asked the public about a green truck seen near the place she disappeared. Its driver had used her ATM card five times in Tallahassee and taken out $700.

  Tips poured in. Several described an odd homeless man with a dog who drove a green 2001 Chevrolet Astro van, but nothing came of it and no one was arrested. Rumors spread that a serial offender was working somewhere between Georgia and Florida. The Leon County Sheriff's Office stayed cautious and said it was treating the case as a single, isolated killing. Within a month, a young woman in Georgia would set out for a New Year's hike.

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• 4. The Man on Blood Mountain

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  Meredith Hope Emerson, 24, worked as a sales manager and chose to spend New Year's Day of 2008 on the Freeman Trail on Blood Mountain, in Georgia's Vogel State Park. Her black Labrador retriever, Ella, went with her. Several witnesses later said an older man with a dog had been following the pair along the trail.

  On the 3rd of January 2008, authorities found her 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier. Inside were a water bottle, a dog leash and a police baton. The same day, the inquiry into the man on the trail produced a name. He was Gary Hilton, 61, a local drifter known for odd behavior and a vicious temper. He often walked his golden retriever, Dandy, along that same trail. Police named him a person of interest and said they wanted to question him formally.

  A day after that announcement, Ella turned up wandering through a Kroger parking lot and was returned safely to Emerson's family. Her owner was still missing. On the 5th of January 2008, searchers found more of her belongings in a dumpster near a QuikTrip lot in Cumming. There were bloodied clothes, her wallet, her driver's license, a University of Georgia ID card and a bloodstained car seat belt. That seat belt would soon matter a great deal.

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• 5. Anonymous Tips and a Bargain

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  Only five hours after the dumpster discovery, police arrested Hilton. Two anonymous callers had told them he was vacuuming out his van at a local business. He was taken to the county jail and charged with kidnapping, based on the physical evidence tying him to Emerson. Authorities checked his van, the same 2001 Chevrolet Astro that witnesses had described in the Florida tips. Its rear seat belt was missing, and the one in the dumpster matched it. Meanwhile, as Hilton sat in custody in Atlanta, searchers combed a 90-square-mile area of Chattahoochee National Forest for Emerson.

  Prosecutors then made him an offer. They would drop the death penalty if he told them where her remains were, and if his dog Dandy was placed in a safe new home. Hilton agreed. He led investigators to the Dawson Forest Management Area. The coroner found that Emerson had been decapitated after death, apparently to keep her from being identified.

  Hilton gave his own account. He said he had abducted her to get her bank cards and PIN, and that she died after he struck her repeatedly with a tire iron. He pleaded guilty to her murder. The sentence was life in prison, with parole possible after 30 years. Florida prosecutors were already preparing their own case.

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• 6. Two Courtrooms

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  A hiker's discovery of camping supplies in September 2009 gave Florida prosecutors new material. The gear was believed to be Hilton's, and it was handed over for the coming Dunlap trial. Prosecutors said forensic evidence connected him to her killing. He fought extradition, but in June 2008 he was moved from the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification State Prison to Leon County to await trial. His public defenders were Ines Suber and Steven Been, attorneys who specialized in capital murder cases.

  At trial, the prosecution said Hilton had taken Dunlap from the Leon Sinks Geological Area and held her for two days before killing her. They said he then tried to destroy evidence by burning her head and hands in a fire pit, and left her body in the forest. The defense answered that no forensic evidence proved he had done it. Prosecutors pointed to a recording in which Hilton said he had disposed of her body, then tried to back away from the statement. After four hours of deliberation, the jury convicted him on three of four charges and recommended death. On the 22nd of February 2011, he was sentenced to death.

  A third trial came in 2012, for the Bryant killings. This time Hilton accepted another plea deal and admitted guilt, receiving a further life term with no chance of parole. In the hearings he described killing Irene on the spot. He said he took John captive to pressure him for bank details, then shot him in the head with a .22 Magnum.

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• 7. Cases Left Open

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  Judy Smith, 51, was a hiker last seen in Philadelphia on the 10th of April 1997. Five months later, on the 7th of September 1997, bones and belongings were found scattered near a campground in Pisgah National Forest. Some have speculated that Hilton was involved, since he later left one of his known victims in a similar state close to that spot.

  Jason Andrew Knapp, a 20-year-old Clemson University student, was last seen by his roommate on the 11th of April 1998, watching a movie around 10:30 that night. His white 1990 Chevrolet Beretta was found abandoned nine days later at Table Rock State Park in Pickens County, South Carolina. He was declared legally dead in 2018. Hilton was proposed as a suspect because of similarities to his known crimes, but he denied any link.

  Patrice Marie Tamber Endres, 38, vanished from her hair salon in Cumming, Georgia, on the 15th of April 2004, between 11:37 and 11:50 in the morning. Her remains turned up in Dawson County in December 2005. Hilton had been stopped for a traffic violation in nearby Forsyth County. He also told investigators he often visited hair salons around lunchtime to ask for money. Police could not establish an alibi for him that day.

  Rossana Miliani, 26, a hiker from Miami, was last seen on the 7th of December 2005 at a Ramada Inn in Cherokee, North Carolina. She told her father she planned to hike the Appalachian Trail. A store clerk in Bryson City later recalled selling a backpack to Miliani and an unidentified white man in his 60s. After Hilton's arrest, the clerk contacted police because he resembled that man.

  Michael Scot Louis, 27, of South Daytona, went missing on the 21st of November 2007. On the 6th of December, a fisherman found his dismembered remains in black bags in the Tomoka River at Ormond Beach. A California lab identified them several days later, and his head was never found. Authorities say Hilton was in the area and remains a suspect, but not the only one.

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• 8. What the Profilers Saw

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  FBI profilers, along with investigators from agencies around the country, attended Hilton's court proceedings and sought interviews with him. Many came away doubting that his first murder was in 2007. Criminologist Eric Hickey believed Hilton had probably killed before then. Other veteran profilers agreed, and found it hard to accept that a man would begin killing in his 60s.

  Hilton, meanwhile, kept fighting his punishment. In 2018 he tried to have his death sentence overturned, arguing that his defense team had been dysfunctional and ineffective. State and federal authorities both rejected the appeal. The sentence stands, and the unsolved cases on his list remain open.

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