Disturbing History - Nightmare In The National Forest

Episode Date: September 9, 2026

A warning before you press play: this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and what was done to several victims, including after death.In early January 2008, police searching a dumpster and nearby van north of Atlanta found blood-soaked clothing, weapons, restraints, and evidence connected to missing hiker Meredith Emerson. The man cleaning that van was Gary Michael Hilton.What followed exposed a 75-day killing spree across national forests in Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida.This episode of Disturbing History examines Hilton's life, the murders of Meredith Emerson, John and Irene Bryant, and Cheryl Dunlap, and the evidence that finally brought him down.It also looks at several other unsolved disappearances and murders where his name has surfaced over the years, while separating proven facts from speculation.Hilton was ultimately sentenced to death in Florida and multiple life sentences elsewhere.Years later, he publicly confessed to killing Cheryl Dunlap after previously denying prosecutors could prove the case.Disturbing History is a Paranormal World Productions podcast, hosted, researched, and produced by Brian King-Sharp.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact, this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner.

of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist. Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself,

just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors. victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. I don't cover a lot of true crime on this show. Disturbing history tends to live in disasters and cover-ups in the strange corners of the record,

and that's where I'm happiest. But I used to host a true crime podcast, and I spent 16 years in law enforcement before I ever sat down in front of a microphone. So this kind of story has a special place for me. It's the kind of case I'd have been reading about at the kitchen table long before anybody paid me, to. I hope you'll indulge me if I throw one of these in from time to time. As always, I want to hear from you. If there's a story or an event you'd like to hear covered on the show, or if you just want to tell me what you think of this one, email me. The address is Brian. That's B-R-I-A-N at paranormal world productions.com. I read everything that hits my inbox. I also want to give you a heads up before we start. This episode has violent situations in it, and it has descriptions of what

was done to the victims. If you've got little ones in the car or nearby, this might be one to save for later. This one's about a man who lived in the woods with a dog and a van, and what he did in the last 10 weeks of 2007 and the first four days of 2008. On the evening of the 4th of January, 2008, a man named Stephen Shaw was at a gas station on the north-south. of Atlanta when he noticed an older man carrying an armload of things around the back of the building toward the dumpsters. The older man had been on every newscast in Georgia for two days, and Shaw called the police. DeKalb County officers got there within minutes, pulled the man away from the dumpster, and went through it themselves. They found a United States Forest Service citation

for unauthorized camping, a knife and a sheath, a pair of high-tech boots, a length of chain, a padlock, a pair of gloves, a jacket, a blue backpack, and a folding police baton. A search warrant filed the next day, added three fleece tops soaked in blood, and a blood-stained strip of seatbelt that had been cut out of a 2001 Chevro van, parked a few feet away. The man was Gary Michael Hilton, 61 years old and missing most of his teeth, and when the officers walked up, he was in the middle of cleaning that van. The rear seat belt was already gone, and by the officer's account, he'd vacuumed and washed the inside before they got there.

He hadn't gotten around to the bleach. His face had been on television because a 24-year-old woman named Meredith Emerson had walked up Blood Mountain with her dog on New Year's Day and hadn't come down, and the hikers who'd passed her on the trail kept describing the same older man with the same reddish dog, walking a few steps behind her. Three days after the arrest, on the 7th of January, Hilton walked a group of Georgia Bureau of Investigation agents into the Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area, about an hour north of Atlanta, and showed them where he'd left her. Her body was in one place, and her head was in another. Gary Michael Hilton was born in Atlanta on the 22nd of November, 1946. His father was gone early, his mother remarried, and the family moved around the southeast with some years and, Florida. In 1961, when he was 14, he shot his stepfather. He survived the shooting, and Hilton

said at the time that he was protecting his mother. His lawyers would say the same thing almost 50 years later in a Florida courtroom. He was evaluated by psychiatrists after the shooting, and those records became part of his defense in 2011, when his lawyers described a childhood of emotional abuse and a lifetime of drug use. He went into the army in the mid-1960s and came to the came out a few years later, and after that the record is vague at best. There were several marriages, there was sales work, siding, telemarketing, and odd jobs. And there were arrests here and there. But none of them for anything that would have put his name on anybody's list.

Somewhere in the 1990s, he crossed paths with an Atlanta lawyer named Samuel Rail, who represented him and gave him work. In 1995, Rail produced a low-budget film called Deadly Run, shot in the North Georgia. of Woods, about a man who kidnaps women, turns them loose in the forest, and hunts them. Rail would tell the Associated Press in the Atlanta Papers 13 years later that Hilton had done more than pitch an idea, that he'd worked on the film and the plot was his. Rail ended up on the state's witness list in Florida, though I couldn't find a record of him testifying, and nobody has ever suggested he knew what his former client was.

By the 2000s, Hilton was living out of a white Chevrolet Astro van with a golden retriever named Dandy. He'd camp for weeks at a time on Forest Service land in Georgia, North Carolina, and the Florida Panhandle, and move on when a ranger rode him up. National forests allow what they call dispersed camping, which means a person can pull off a forest road and set up almost anywhere for a limited stretch, usually 14 days, before the rules say to move along. and a man who wanted to be around hikers without being noticed by anybody in authority could live that way for years.

And Hilton did. The people who crossed paths with him in the fall of 2007 described the same man, older and thin and missing teeth, talkative, with a friendly dog at his heel. He carried a bayonet, and he carried a folding police baton of the kind officers call an expandable, which is a strange thing for a hiker to have, and he kept chain and a padlock in the van. Sixteen years of police work leaves a person with a habit of looking at what people carry. Every item on that list is legal to own, and half of them are ordinary,

because a knife or a jacket or a pair of boots doesn't tell anybody anything. The baton and the chain and the padlock are the ones that don't belong to a man who says he's camping, and nobody who met him had a reason to see the whole kit at once. The whole kit is what shows what he was. A Baptist pastor in Madison, Florida, named Delbert Reddett, told reporters that Hilton walked into his church one Sunday in November of 2007, sat through the service, and left with leftovers from the church supper that a member of the congregation gave him. A deacon recognized his face in the newspaper two months later.

Nobody reported him for anything that fall, because there was nothing visible to report. John Bryant was 80, and Irene Bryant was 84. They'd been married 58 years. They lived in Horseshoe, North Carolina, west of Asheville, and they'd hiked their whole lives. The Atlanta Journal Constitution ran a profile of them after the arrest in which a neighbor described Irene asking him to call her whenever he saw deer, so she could slip outside and look. And the paper said their love of the outdoors had steered a lot of the decisions in their life, including where they lived.

Irene had worked in veterinary medicine at a time when almost no women did. John had been an insurance, and he went by Jack. On the 21st of October 2007, at the peak of the leaf season, they drove about 20 miles into the Pisgah National Forest near Brevard to hike. The Pisgah is half a million acres of the Blue Ridge, waterfalls and hardwood, and the kind of high country that fills up with cars from Atlanta and Charlotte every October, and the Bryants had been walking it for years.

They parked their red ford escape on Yellow Gap Road off, Highway 276 and went into the woods. Sometime that afternoon, somebody tried to dial 911 from one of their cell phones, and the signal dropped before the call went through. The next evening, the 22nd, somebody used the Bryant's bank card at an automated teller machine in Ducktown, Tennessee, 75 miles away across the state line. Ducktown is an old copper mining town in the corner of Tennessee where the state meets Georgia and North Carolina, and the machine was on the way to anywhere a man might want to go from the Pisga if he didn't want to stay in North Carolina. Whoever it was took out $300, which was the daily limit, and the camera at that machine recorded a figure in a hooded yellow

rain jacket with the face turned away. The Bryant's son later said the jacket looked like his fathers, which meant that whoever was standing at that machine had either taken it off John Bryant or had John Bryant with him. The couple weren't reported missing for days because they were independent and hard to reach, and a couple who'd hiked their whole lives not answering the phone for a day or two wasn't the kind of thing that alarmed anybody who knew them. When their son did report it, he drove out to the forest himself and found the escape sitting on Yellow Gap Road. The search that followed run by the sheriff's office with Forest Service and volunteer crews, concentrated on the trails and the pink beds loop area, an easy stretch of trail near the cradle of forestry that a couple

in their 80s would have been likely to walk, and it worked outward from where they were expected to have gone. That's how a search for a missing hiker is supposed to work, because a hiker is usually down a slope somewhere along the route they meant to take. What it doesn't account for is a person who never made it onto the route. On the 9th of November, nearly three weeks later, searchers found Irene Bryan about 25 yards from the Ford Escape, within sight of where it was parked under a few twigs and leaves. The state medical examiner in Chapel Hill found she died of multiple blows to the head. John Bryant was nowhere in that forest. Because the death happened on federal land, the FBI came in and posted a $10,000 reward, and Transylvania County Sheriff

David Mahoney ran the case with them and put the image from the ducktown camera out to the public. What they had was a body, a dropped emergency call, a hooded figure at a bank machine in Tennessee, and witnesses in the forest who remembered an older man with a retriever. A woman who drove a delivery route through Ducktown later told the Hendersonville Times news that she remembered seeing Hilton around town that week, and she said it after his face was in the paper, so I'd treat it as that kind of memory. It's also the only witness anybody's produced who puts a man matching him in that town, and it lines up with the camera. Cheryl Hodges Dunlap was 46, and lived in Crawfordville, Florida, south of Tallahasse,

She was a nurse at Florida State University's Student Health Center. She taught Sunday school at her church in Tallahassee, and she had two grown sons. Her friends called her Sherry, and one of them, Gloria Tucker, said later that she'd come out of a bad home and grown up to be a lovely person. One of the places she liked to go by herself was the Leon Sinks Geological Area, a stretch of sink holes and boardwalks inside the Apalachicola National Forest, a few miles south of the city. of the city. It's a few miles of trail through pine and hardwood past a string of deep limestone sinks with clear water at the bottom. The kind of place people go on a Saturday afternoon to walk and sit and read, and it's off a state highway with a parking lot and a trailhead like any other. Her aunt worried about her going out there alone, and she went anyway, usually with a book.

On the morning of Saturday 1st of December 2007, she called a friend named Cuyna Hill, and made plans for dinner that evening. And that afternoon she drove to Leon Sinks. A couple named Michael and Vicky Shirley saw her there at about half-past one, in jeans and a sweater, carrying a hardback book, and they're the last people known to have seen her alive. She didn't come to dinner that night, and she wasn't at church Sunday morning. A friend from church, Tanya Land, went by the house,

found her dog inside, and her car gone, and called the police, and a Wakula County deputy took the missing person, report on Monday the 3rd. That same day her white Toyota Camry turned up on the side of Crawfordville Highway, the main road between Crawfordville and Tallahassee with a flat tire. The tire hadn't gone flat on its own. Her purse was in the car and her cash and her bank card weren't. Between the second and the fourth of December, somebody made three withdrawals from her account totaling $700 and two more attempts that were declined for going over the limit. The The machines were in Tallahassee, a few miles up the highway from where the Camry had been left,

and the cameras at them show a man with his face covered. For the first two withdrawals, the covering was tape, layered across his face, which a video analyst would later describe as medical tape, and by the last one he'd switched to cloth. The Leon County Sheriff's Office and the Wakula County Sheriff's Office worked it together as a missing person case with one live lead, the masked man at the machine. They put out the footage and asked the public for help.

And they put out word that they wanted to find a truck seen on surveillance video near one of the machines on West Tennessee Street in Tallahassee. A truck the early press accounts describe as green in one place and camouflage in another. The truck went nowhere and neither did anything else. On Saturday the 15th of December, hunters in the Appalachicola found a woman's body with no head and no hands. What was left of her head and hands turned up later in a fire pit at a campsite off Joe Thomas Road, about seven miles from where the body had been left. Bone fragments were recovered from the ash, and the identification was made from what remained.

The Appalachicola is the biggest national forest in Florida, more than 600,000 acres of pine flat woods and swamp between Tallahassee and the Gulf, cut with sand roads and primitive campsites, where a man in a van could sit for two, weeks without seeing a ranger. And Joe Thomas Road is one of those roads. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. After the arrest, witnesses came forward who'd seen an older man with a retriever camping in the forest that December, and the Florida Supreme Court's summary of the evidence puts it in one line that Hilton had been seen in the area during that time. The sheriff's office announced that Dunlap's death was a homicide and kept

working the truck, and the case looked cold for the rest of December. Meredith Hope Emerson was 24. She'd grown up in Longmont, Colorado, come to Georgia for college, graduated from the University of Georgia, and stayed, and by the end of 2007, she was living in Beaufort north of Atlanta. She had a blue belt in martial arts and a black Labrador mix named Ella. On the 1st of January 2008, she drove up to Union County, about 100 miles north of Atlanta near Vogel State Park and parked her 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier at the Byron Herbert Rees Memorial Trailhead to hike Blood Mountain with the dog. Blood Mountain is the highest point on the Georgia section of the Appalachian Trail, a little under 4,500 feet. The trailhead sits along Highway 129 near Neal Gap,

a few hundred yards from the old stone outfitter at Wallasi Yee, where the Appalachian Trail runs through the breezeway of the building. From the parking, lot, the Reese Trail climbs about a mile to meet the Appalachian Trail. And from there, it's another mile and a half of switchbacks and rock to the summit, where a stone shelter built in the 1930s sits on the rock and the view opens up in every direction. Through hikers come through Neil Gap in the spring and day hikers come the rest of the year. And on New Year's Day and a clear year, the parking lot fills up before noon. Plenty of people were on the mountain that day. And that's the reason plenty of people saw her. When she didn't

come home that night, her friends reported her missing on the second, and the car was still sitting at the trailhead with her belongings inside it. Union County deputies, GBI agents, Forest Service people and volunteers started working the trails and the drainage off them in January cold, with the trailhead lot as the staging area, on the assumption that a hiker had gone off trail and fallen and was somewhere on the mountain waiting to be found. By the third, the witnesses had changed that. Several hikers had seen a young woman with a black dog, and several had also seen an older man with a reddish retriever who seemed to be walking with her or close behind her. The descriptions agreed on the important points, a man somewhere in his 60s, thin, missing teeth, carrying what more

than one person called a police baton. The GBI put out a description of the man and his dog that day, and the same day an Atlanta attorney called in to say he recognized him. The Reporting on that call identifies the attorney as Samuel Rail. That evening, the Bureau named Gary Michael Hilton as a person of interest, said they wanted to talk to him and described his white astro van, and the Associated Press reported that the phones lit up after that with people who'd seen him or the van or the dog somewhere in the mountains. Investigators said later that he was well known on that mountain,

that people had seen him up there before with Dandy and with the baton, and that more than one hiker that week knew him by someone. sight. The search on the mountain kept going through the fourth all the same, because a person of interest isn't a body, and nobody could say she wasn't still up there somewhere. Searchers on the trail found a dog leash, a water bottle, and a folding police baton. Hilton would later tell investigators where to find a bayonet he'd left on the mountain. That's what was on Blood Mountain when the search started. A baton somebody had dropped in a fight and a bayonet somebody had hidden afterward. What happened on the trail comes from Hilton himself in his

interviews with the GBI after the arrest and from what the physical evidence supported. He's the only living witness to most of it, but the parts investigators could check. They checked. And what follows is the version the prosecutor stood behind in open court. He met her on the trail with the dog. He had a knife and the baton. And he'd planned, according to what he told investigators and what Dawson County District Attorney Lee Darrah said afterward to abduct her and take money out of her bank accounts. She fought him, and Darrah told reporters afterward that she'd fought for her life twice, first physically on the trail and later by her wits.

Hilton described a woman who wouldn't stop, who went after him with everything she had and got him hurt doing it. He hit her with the baton, the struggle went downhill off the trail, and he lost the baton and the bayonet on the mountain, which is how they ended up in the search area. Somewhere in that fight, Ella got loose and ran because she turned up alive three days later in a grocery store parking lot 50 miles south.

Hilton got Emerson to the van, and then he kept her. The contemporary reporting and the Georgia indictment say he killed her on the 4th of January, three days after he took her. He spent those days driving around North Georgia with a woman in the back of the van and a search for that woman on every television in the state. The arrest warrant says he tried to use her bank card

And the Associated Press, covering the plea hearing, Summed it up in one sentence. For three days, a grizzled drifter tried to drain the bank accounts of the young hiker he'd abducted. The attempts failed, because the number she gave him was wrong, and she gave him wrong numbers more than once. Every failed attempt left a record with a time and a place on it, and those records helped the GBI trace,

where he'd been after the fact. The route stays inside a small piece of North Georgia. Blood Mountain is in Union County. The dog and the purse turned up and coming in Forsyth County, about 50 miles south, and Dawson Forest, where he killed her, sits between the two. The gas station where he was arrested is on the north side of Atlanta, another 30 miles down the road. For three days, he stayed within about an hour's drive of the mountain,

in a white van that had been described on television since the third. while hundreds of people searched the wrong mountain. There are cases in every department's files where somebody in a car with a stranger did the one thing that bought them another hour. And this is one of them. Meredith Emerson kept a 61-year-old man who'd already killed three people guessing about four digits for three days. And on the fourth day, he stopped guessing. The three days are the part of that I've never been able to make add up.

He was living out of a van, so money mattered to him. But a robbery with a hostage who won't give up the number ends when the robber gives up on the number, and the attempts had been failing from the start. Whatever those three days were about, it was more than the card, and he's never said what. What Hilton told investigators about the 4th of January, Dara laid out at the plea hearing. On the 4th, Hilton told Meredith Emerson he was going to let her go. Then he hit her in the head with a tire iron, the jack handle out of the van, and kept hitting her until she was dead.

Darra's words to the court were that Hilton had meant to abduct her for money, but that at some point he knew he was going to take her life. He'd driven her into Dawson Forest to do it, 20 miles or so from coming, and afterward he cut off her head. He told investigators he couldn't bring himself to kill the dog. He let Ella go and coming, and she was found the same day wandering the parking lot of a Kroger,

which put him in that town on the afternoon of the fourth, 50 miles from the trailhead where the search was still running. Near it was a dumpster beside a quick trip, where Emerson's purse and wallet would turn up, along with her driver's license and her University of Georgia identification card, and where investigators would find her bloodied clothing and a blood-stained piece of seatbelt that matched what had been cut out of the van. Hilton had used a pay phone at that store and nobody's ever said who he called. Then he drove south toward Atlanta, pulled into a gas station, and started cleaning the van.

and Stephen Shaw went to a phone and called police. Crime scene analysts pulled blood out of the van before he could bleach it, and it came back to Meredith Emerson. The seatbelt he'd cut out was the rear one. The piece of it that turned up in the coming dumpster was bloodstained. He was booked that night on a warrant for kidnapping with bodily injury because nobody outside that van knew whether she was alive. Hilton wasn't talking.

The searchers were still on Blood Mountain, more than 40 miles from where she actually was. The GBI had a suspect, a bloody van and a dog in a Kroger parking lot, and no Meredith. Her family had come in from Colorado. The investigator who tells the story on the Fox Nation series describes going to the jail and meeting Hilton's lawyers, then waiting several hours while they talked to their client. When the lawyers came out, they asked whether the local prosecutor would take the death penalty off the table, in exchange for her location.

He made the call to the prosecutor himself. He calls it a deal with the devil. The prosecutor was Stan Gunner, the district attorney for Union County where she'd been taken. Gunner confirmed the terms afterward. It took from the night of the fourth to the morning of the seventh to put it together. Hilton would lead investigators to the body

and plead guilty to one count of murder, and the state wouldn't seek his execution. Hilton drew a map on the seventh. Then, in custody, he rode out with agents into Dawson Forest and walked them to her. The medical examiner confirmed what the recovery had already shown. She died of blows to the head and been decapitated afterward. The wildlife management area is about 25,000 acres of hardwood and pine along the Ettawa River, laced with old roads from the years when Lockheed ran a nuclear aircraft research site there.

Without him, it could have taken weeks to find her. Without the deal, Georgia would have had a kidnapping case with a bloody van and a dog, and no proof of death. Gunder took the only offer on the table. Darra, who inherited the deal once the body was found in his county, told the Gainesville Times that a flurry of meetings with law enforcement, with Emerson's family, and with prosecution experts, followed before he extended the formal offer.

He said no prosecutor could have moved that fast without the GBI and the union. Dawson and Forsyth County Sheriff's Departments, handing him a solid case in a short time. The family, he said in court, was pleased with how quickly it had moved. The first thing that put Hilton's name next to the Bryant's was a license plate. The Astro van he was arrested in was wearing a plate stolen off a disabled car in Transylvania County, North Carolina,

the county where the Bryant's died. The owner hadn't noticed it was missing until the arrest made the news. Sheriff Mahoney announced the place. within a week and told reporters there was a positive link between Hilton and Irene Bryant's death. In the middle of January, sheriffs and agents from North Carolina and Georgia sat down with the GBI to compare what they had. Mahoney told reporters afterward only that the evidence tied the North Carolina deaths to the Georgia killing. The same week, Leon County named Hilton a prime suspect in the Dunlap murder. By the middle of November, the Transylvania County Sheriff and the FBI

had said in public that Irene Bryant was murdered, that her husband was missing, that somebody had used the couple's bank card in Ducktown, and that the person on the camera wore a hooded yellow raincoat. Witnesses had described an older man with a retriever, and the FBI's reward poster was on television in Asheville. By the middle of December, the Leon County Sheriff's Office had said in public that Cheryl Dunlap was murdered, that her body had been dismembered and left in a national forest, and that a man with his face covered had used her bank card in Tallahassee. That man was on television there. Two hikers had been taken in two national forests. Two bank cards had been used, and two figures with their faces hidden, had stood at bank machines

about 400 miles and six weeks apart. On the 4th of January, the Duktown footage and the Tallahassee footage were sitting in two evidence rooms in two states, and nobody had held them up next to each other. Each case was a local homicide with a local suspect pool. The man connecting them didn't live anywhere, and his name wasn't in either file. There's no database that takes a description like older man with a retriever and matches it across state lines, and a sheriff's office with one murder and no suspect doesn't spend its week calling other sheriff's offices 400 miles away. The system is built around fingerprints and DNA and names, and Hilton hadn't left any of those in either forest. Both files did have a dog in them. Witnesses in North Carolina described an older man

with a retriever. Witnesses in the Appalachicola described an older man camping with a retriever. On Blood Mountain, the hikers who described the man behind Meredith Emerson described the retriever. It comes down to human nature, really. A friendly, golden retriever on a trail is what people remember, and a thin, older man isn't. The same dog, as far as anybody could tell, was a at every one of those places. There was a second van. In late January, a hunter found a white astro van abandoned on Forest Service land in White County, Georgia, one county over from Union in the same mountains. By the time the GBI heard about it, somebody had towed it. The Bureau's spokesman, John Bankhead, said it was a different vehicle from the one Hilton was arrested in and that

investigators wanted access to it. After that, it drops out of the reporting. A man, who'd been living out of a white astro van for years, turned out to have had two of them within 50 miles of each other, and nothing in the record says what was in the second one. The plea came 24 days after Hilton was charged. Murder cases in Georgia commonly take two years or more. The reporter who covered the hearing for the Gainesville Times said later it closed out quicker than any murder case he'd ever seen. On the morning of Thursday, the 31st of January 2008, a specially called Dawson County Grand Jury, indicted Hilton on one count of murder, blunt forced trauma to the head on the 4th of January. That afternoon, he was in Dawson County Superior Court in Dawsonville,

in an orange jumpsuit and a bulletproof vest in front of Judge Bonnie Cheshire Oliver. She asked him how he pleaded, and he said guilty. Reporters in the room wrote that he said almost nothing else, and that he answered the judge's questions in a firm, clear voice. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The deal Gunner made had already been signed, and Dara said so. He told reporters that anyone's emotional reaction, including his own, would appropriately be that this defendant deserved the penalty of death, but that he'd had to take into account everything that happened before the case reached him. He said a life sentence was, in practical terms, a death penalty in and of itself, and that Hilton would most likely die in

prison and most certainly never see the light of day again. Hilton's lawyer, Brad Morris, didn't comment. David Emerson, Meredith's father, spoke to the judge. He said no punishment was too great for the man in front of her and that their days were filled with tears and blank stares. Oliver gave Hilton the mandatory term, life with parole eligibility after 30 years. He'd be 91 before a parole board could look at him. She told him she wasn't taking mercy on him because of his age, and that he was that he was. that justice in his case would have been an immediate execution. Meredith's parents told the Gainesville Times afterward that they were satisfied he'd slowly rot in prison. From the courtroom he went to the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson,

south of Atlanta, where the state processes every man it sends into its system. That's where Florida's deputies would find him in June. The plea also covered a dog. Dandy was to go to a good home, and the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported that an investigator in the Dawson County Public Defender's Office, Nancy Cup, took him. Ella went home to Colorado with Meredith's parents, Dave and Susan Emerson, who adopted her. A family spokeswoman, Peggy Bailey, told the Denver Post that the dog was a part of Meredith they'd always have. That October, Friends in Georgia held the first Ella's run,

a five-kilometer race in Meredith's memory named for the dog, and ten years later, it was still running. Two days after the plea on the 2nd of February, a hunter named Mark Waldrup was walking through an illegal dump off a Forest Service road called the Switchbacks in the Nantahala National Forest in Macon County, North Carolina, near the Georgia line. He found a human skull among paint cans and old clothes. He called a deputy, and the two of them found a pelvis and a spine about 20 yards away. The remains went to the medical examiner in Chapel Hill. They were John Bryant and he'd been shot. The announcement came on the 4th of February. The Bryant's had died in two different national forests in two different counties, roughly 100 miles apart. Irene was beaten to death

50 paces from her car. John was taken somewhere else and shot, and investigators said publicly what the bank camera implied, that he'd been kept alive at least until the evening of the 22nd when somebody in his rain jacket needed the number for his card. The switchbacker, Flavax climbs out of the valley south of Franklin toward the state line. Ducktown is about 60 miles west of the pull-off where the skull was found. Blood Mountain is about 40 miles south, and for a man living in a van, all of it is a morning's drive. Three weeks after that in late February, Florida indicted Hilton for Cheryl Dunlap's kidnapping

and murder. Florida authorities picked him up at the prison in Jackson that June and drove him to Tallahassee. The state attorney Willie Megg set a trial was likely within the year. It took closer to three years, and by the time it started, Hilton was 64. On the 25th of February, 2010, while Hilton was sitting in the Leon County Jail waiting for that trial, a true crime writer named Fred Rosen on assignment for Hustler magazine, filed an open record's request with the GBI for the Emerson crime scene and autopsy photographs. Her body had

been found unclothed as well as decapitated, and those were the pictures he was asking for. The GBI turned the request down. The Bureau's spokesman John Bankhead called it an affront to the victim's family and said it was incredible that anybody would ask for something like that. The Speaker of the Georgia House, David Ralston, a Republican from Blue Ridge up in the mountains, said Georgia had long since banned the release of autopsy photographs, but had left a loophole for crime scene photographs. He called the request sickening and disgusting and vile and said he'd talked with Meredith's mother, who was extremely distraught that it could even happen. A state representative from Atlanta, Jill Chambers, said she'd introduce a bill that week

and said that Meredith wasn't in any position to give permission to have her body exploited in that kind of venue. Hustler and its publisher, Larry Flint, said they were exploring their legal options. The Emerson family went to a DeKalb County Superior Court judge, Daniel Corsy and got a temporary restraining order in March, barring the Bureau from releasing any image of Meredith unclothed or dismembered. The same day, a committee of the Georgia House passed Chambers' bill. It became House Bill 1322, the Meredith Emerson Memorial Privacy Act. It takes any crime scene photograph or video that shows a victim nude, dismembered or decapitated out of the reach of the open records law, while still letting police, lawyers, and credentialed

reporters view them at GBI headquarters without copying them. The House passed it on the 18th of March, and Governor Sonny Perdue signed it that spring. Rosen wrote a piece for the Atlanta Journal Constitution saying he'd wanted the photographs and the transcripts to understand the case, and that there was nothing prurient in it. Open government advocates warned the law was broader than it needed to be. The magazine never got the pictures. In Georgia, Hilton had traded the location of a body for his life. In Florida there was nothing left to trade, and the state attorney's office said from the start that it would seek death. The case was circumstantial, and the defense said so in its opening and again in its closing. Nobody had seen Hilton with Cheryl Dunlap, and there was

no confession. What the state had was a man who'd been seen in the Appalachicola at the right time, who'd been convicted in Georgia of an almost identical crime four weeks later, and a set of physical facts that all pointed the same way. The most damaging piece of the state's case came out of Hilton's own mouth. In the Leon County Jail while he was waiting for trial, he talked to a fellow inmate named Summers. A corrections officer named Caleb Winn overheard him and later testified to it. Hilton told the inmate he could answer all the state attorney's questions if he were given a life sentence. He said he'd reveal where the head was. He said his bayonet had been used on Dunlap's tire and that he'd explain how he pulled it off on a busy highway. He said he'd spent a few hours

or a few days with her, and that the only regret he had was getting caught. Her Camry had been found on Crawfordville Highway, with a tire that had been punctured on purpose. The bayonet he'd hidden on Blood Mountain was the one he'd told the GBI, where to find. The jail conversation was the only place Hilton connected himself to the tire, and the tire was the one thing about the Camry that couldn't explained any other way. The state also played a recording in which Hilton talked about disposing of Dunlap's body and then, in the prosecutor's description, tried to walk it back and put distance between himself and it. The defense argued the recording never amounted to an admission of killing her. The trial ran in February of 2011 in Tallahassee in front of

Circuit Judge James Hankinson, with Georgia Kaplanman and Willie Meggs prosecuting. The state took the jury through the 1st of December in order. Keona Hill and the dinner plans, the Shirley's at Leon Sinks at half-past one, Tanya land at the house on Sunday morning with the dog inside and the car gone, deputy Stephen Ganey taking the report, the Camry on the shoulder with the cut tire, the three withdrawals and the two declined attempts, the video analyst and the tape on the man's face, the hunters on the 15th, and the fire pit off Joe Thomas Road. Then came the witnesses who'd seen Hilton in the forest. Then Officer Wynn, then the recording. The defense position was that none of it put Hilton's hands on Cheryl Dunlap. The jail

conversation was a guard's memory of what one inmate said to another. The recording was a man talking about a body, and a man can know where a body is without having made it one. The jury convicted him of first-degree murder and kidnapping. The penalty phase opened on the 17th of February, and the state called Clay Bridges of the GBI to tell the jury what Hilton had done to Meredith Emerson. The Georgia plea counted as a prior violent felony under Florida law, which meant the whole story of Blood Mountain and Dawson Forest went in front of 12 people who just convicted him of the same thing. The defense called experts and family history and asked the jury to see a man whose childhood, whose emotional abuse, and whose decades of drug use

had built what one of his lawyers called a perfect storm. The 1961 shooting was part of it, and so was the psychiatric evaluation that followed, and so was a long history of prescribed stimulant use that the defense argued had been excessive and had done damage. The court eventually found one statutory mitigating factor and eight non-statutory ones. It weighed them against six aggravators.

The jury was out about an hour on the penalty, and the vote for death was 12 to nothing. Meg's told reporters the unanimous vote surprised him, then said that if there were ever a case for it, this was it. Kauffelman said the jury saw what needed to be done. Gloria Tucker, who'd known Cheryl Dunlap as Sherry, told the same reporters she didn't think any family had gotten justice, and that he was no equal for her friend.

In April of 2011, Judge Hankinson followed the recommendation and sentenced Hilton to death. North Carolina came last, and it went to federal court because both Bryant's had died on federal land. In March of 2012 in Asheville, Hilton pleaded guilty to kidnapping resulting in death and related federal charges for John and Irene Bryant. He admitted killing John Bryant with a firearm in the National Forest in Macon County and killing Irene Brian Brian in the Pisgah National Forest in Transylvania County. United States District Judge Martin Reitinger gave him four life-sense sentences without parole, to run consecutively to the Florida death sentence and the Georgia life sentence. The United States Attorney, Ann Tompkins, said afterward that nothing could bring the Bryant's

back, but that she hoped the people affected could find some closure. North Carolina had a death penalty on the books, but its executions had been on hold for years over litigation about the method, and a state capital trial would have taken years more. The federal charge carries a mandatory life sentence when death isn't solved. and Hilton was already under a death sentence in Florida. The plea didn't produce an account. Hilton admitted the elements of the offenses and nothing else. Nothing in the public record from that hearing says

where the couple were between the afternoon of the 21st and the evening of the 22nd. Or how John Bryant came to be a hundred miles from his wife, or where the gun came from, or where it went. No firearm was listed among what came out of the van or the dumpster in Georgia. The Bryant's son got a plea in a sentence. By the end of 2012, Gary Michael Hilton stood convicted of four murders in three states, and he'd been in custody four years. From the 21st of October to the 4th of January is 75 days.

Whether four was the whole number had never been answered, and it still hasn't. When a man like this gets arrested, every open case in a 500-mile radius gets pulled and laid next to him. An older victim in a forest, a missing hiker, a body with the head gone, a bank card used after a disappearance. Any of those gets a phone call to the GBI or the Leon County Sheriff's Office asking whether the dates fit. Most of them don't. A few can't be ruled out, and those stay attached to his name for the rest of his life, whether he did them or not. In January of 2008, while the Emerson case was still open, both the GBI and the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, said publicly that they were looking at Hilton for other disappearances, and Florida investigators said the same. The list of cases where his name has come

up since then is long. One of those cases is Rosanna Miliani. She was a Florida woman in her 20s. On the 7th of December 2005, she told her family she was going hiking, and she was last seen in Bryson City, North Carolina, the Swain County seat, on the edge of the Great Smoky Mountains, with the National Forest a few miles to the south. A clerk at a store in Bryson City later told investigators that a woman matching her description came in that day with an older man, that they bought a sleeping bag, and that the man said they were going camping in the mountains.

Her body's never been found and nobody's been charged. In Ormond Beach, Florida, on the 27th of November, 2007, the dismembered body of a 27-year-old man named Michael Scott Lewis was found in the Tomoka River, four days before Cheryl Dunlap disappeared 200 miles to the northwest. Florida investigators said in January 2008, they were looking at Hilton for it, and dismemberment is what put it on the list. He's never been charged. Nothing in the reporting puts him in Volusia County that week, beyond the general fact that he was somewhere in Florida. Further back in September of 1997, hikers found scattered human bones and personal items near a campground in the Pisgah National Forest. They belonged to Judy Smith, a 50-year-old nurse from Newton, Massachusetts, who'd vanished that April after traveling to Philadelphia with her husband for a conference.

And then, by every indication, ended up in the mountains of North Carolina with no explanation anybody's ever produced. Hilton's been named as a suspect in later reporting because of the place. and the method, and because the Pisgah is where the Bryant's died 10 years later. Nothing in the public record puts him there in 1997. In April of 1998, a 20-year-old Clemson University student named Jason Knapp disappeared from Table Rock State Park in the South Carolina upstate, about 40 miles from the Pisga. His car was found in the park lot. No trace of him has turned up since, and his name attached itself to Hilton after the arrest

because of the geography. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. And in coming Georgia, in April of 2004, a hairdresser named Patrice Andres vanished from her salon in the middle of a workday. Her remains were found in Dawson County in December of 2005.

The same county where Meredith Emerson's body would be found two years later, and Hilton was living in that part of Georgia at the time. A man named Jeremy Jones, a convicted murderer in Alabama, confessed to killing Endres, and later withdrew the confession. The André's case is still open. Samuel Rale's movie is about a man who lets women loose in the woods so he can hunt them. What Hilton actually did, four times that a court has established,

was find people who were already in the woods, take what they had, keep them alive as long as they were useful, and end it when they weren't. There was no chase in any of it. What he needed from them was a bank card. and the number that went with it. Hilton is 79 years old. He's on death row at Union Correctional Institution in Rayford, Florida, about 40 miles southwest of Jacksonville,

where the state keeps the man, it's sentenced to die. He's been there since 2011. His Florida appeals went the way most of them go. The state Supreme Court affirmed in 2013. When the United States Supreme Court threw out Florida's death sentencing scheme in 2016, on the grounds that juries and not judges have to make the findings that support a death sentence. A lot of Florida cases got reopened. His didn't, because his jury had voted 12 to nothing,

and the Florida courts treated unanimous recommendations as safe. His federal habeas petition was denied, and in April of this year, 2026, the 11th Circuit affirmed that denial, rejecting four claims that his trial lawyers had been ineffective. As of this recording, there's no death warrant. with his name on it. Florida's been signing warrants faster than it has in decades, and his case has been fully litigated for a while, so that could change between the time I

record this and the time it airs. In the spring of 2025, he did something he hadn't done in 17 years. He sat down with a reporter from court TV named David Scott on camera and confessed to killing Cheryl Dunlap. The confession changed nothing about his legal position. A jury had settled the Dunlap question in 2011 without his help, and he'd already been sentenced to death for it. In Georgia, he'd given up a location when it bought his life. On television, he gave up a confession when it cost him nothing. On the 1st of January, Meredith Emerson walked up a mountain with her dog on a clear afternoon with dozens of people around her, and a man with a knife and a baton picked her out of all of them. She hit him back hard enough that he lost both weapons on the

mountainside. She sat in his van for three days with the whole state of Georgia looking for her, and every time he asked her for four numbers, she gave him the wrong ones. Every wrong answer went into a bank's computer with the time and the place on it. He got the right numbers from the Bryant's, and he got $700 out of Cheryl Dunlap's account. He got nothing out of Meredith Emerson's. On the 4th of January, he told her he was letting her go, and he killed her. And a few hours later, A man at a gas station watched him carry a jacket and a police baton and a bloody seatbelt toward a dumpster and called it in. The Forest Service had written him a ticket for camping in the wrong place. It was in the dumpster with everything else.

In all the years he spent in those forests, that citation is the only time anybody with a badge ever wrote down his name.