Photo: AP Photo/Ben Gray, Family photos
On Jan. 1, 2008, 24-year-old University of Georgia graduate Meredith Emerson vanished while hiking with her dog on Georgia’s Blood Mountain.
The news of her disappearance quickly spread. Calls began to come in about an older man and his red-colored dog who’d been seen hiking near where Emerson disappeared.
“Fairly quickly, they were able to broadcast this information, and a former employer of Gary Hilton’s, was like, ‘That’s Gary Hilton,'” Paul Holes, host of HLN’sReal Life Nightmare, which has its season premiere episode, titled “Blood Mountain: The Hunting Ground,” Sunday at 9 p.m. ET/PT. (An exclusive clip is shown below.)
“He’s got a dog,” Holes said of the suspect description. “He’s out there in the forests all the time and that description matches him.”
Hilton was arrested three days later, on Jan. 4, at a convenience store gas station after a clerk identified him from news reports. “Law enforcement rolls up and it’s Gary Hilton literally trying to clean his van of evidence because he’s seeing his photograph in the newspapers.”
Soon after, Hilton, an Army veteran and survivalist, agreed to lead authorities to Emerson’s decapitated body in exchange for being spared the death penalty.
Because of media coverage on Emerson’s case, authorities received multiple tips and sightings of Hilton at Leon County, Fla., campsites. After a search, authorities discovered in a fire pit what they believe were the incinerated head and hands of 46-year-old Cheryl Dunlap.
Dunlap, a nurse and Sunday school teacher, went to the Leon Sinks geological area in Florida’s Apalachicola National Forest to read when she vanished on Dec. 1, 2007. Hunters found her torso on Dec. 15, about seven miles away from where her head and hands were discovered.
“People in our community started to see these newscasts and see photographs of Gary Hilton and his dog,” former Leon County Sheriff Mike Wood says in the clip of “Blood Mountain.”
“We would go to each and every one of those sites. We were finding consistent items up to and including the name brand of the dog food that he fed his dog. We had a tip from a gentleman that he had run into an older man in the woods, and fit Gary Hilton’s description to a T. So, we go to that campsite and we found what had been covered up with straw and hidden fairly well was a small burn pit, and it had ashes and debris. Ultimately, they turned out to be identified as bone fragments from fingers and a skull.”
Rossana Miliani.Department of Justice
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Hilton was also linked to the slayings of John Bryant, 80, and his 84-year-old wife, Irene who were out hiking in North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest on Oct. 21, 2007, when they encountered the serial killer. Irene was found dead from head trauma on Nov. 9 near the Pinks beds area of the park. John was found dead three months later in the Nantahala National Forest. He had been shot.
Holes says that Hilton, like most serial predators, hunted where he felt most comfortable.
“He is very accomplished at living in the outdoors and knows the terrain, knows where there would be a victim pool and which areas in these forests would be best for him to get away with committing these crimes,” Holes says.
The attacks, Holes believes, were planned in advance.
“He goes, ‘I would go out on the hunt,'” Holes says of Hilton. “There’s twofold motivation for him. In part he’s having that urge to go out there and get control over a woman. And he also runs into financial situations where he was down to $40 and two days of food. And he’s going, ‘I had to.’ Just to be able to get financial assets to keep living, I had to go and find a victim.'”
Holes, who specializes in unsolved murders, says he believes there are more Hilton victims out there.
One possible victim is 28-year-old Florida resident Rossana Miliani, who was last seen with an older man with gray hair in Dec. of 2005 in a general store in Bryson City, N.C.
Hilton, now 75, is on Florida’s death row for the murder of Dunlap. He was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Emerson and the Bryants.
Anyone with information about Rossana Miliani’s disappearance is asked to call the Swain County Sheriff’s Office in North Carolina at 828-488-0159.
source: people.com
