At the Hands of a Stranger (10 page)

“Do what is right,” he told Tabor. “Do not think I'm afraid of you.”

He told Tabor to leave a check for $25,000 at his front door and he would come by the next day, Wednesday, to pick it up. “I will never make an unlawful threat to you,” he continued. “I will whup your ass. If that's a threat, so be it. I will fuck you up.”

Tabor wasn't sure what to do. Reporting Hilton's actions to the police might result in nothing more than a charge involving harassing telephone calls. That would make Hilton even angrier and more dangerous than he already was.

Tabor said he had decided that the best way to get rid of Hilton was just to pay him. He wrote Hilton a check for $2,500, but he couldn't resist placing a note inside an envelope with
RANSOM
written in big red letters with a marking pen. The note Tabor included was typed in large upper case letters and showed Tabor's disgust and resentment. Tabor wrote that Hilton was a tough guy who made threats to get money that was not owed. So far as he was concerned, they were more than fair and square, with Hilton getting the better of the deal. Tabor called Hilton an unappreciative piece of garbage; and if it had not been for Tabor, Hilton would either be spending his life behind bars or six feet under the ground.

I HAVE DONE MORE FOR YOU THAN ANYONE ELSE IN YOU [
sic
] MISERABLE FUCKING LIFE, Tabor wrote.

Tabor's letter claimed that Hilton was homeless, with no means of support, and that Tabor took pity on him by employing him and taking in his dog and giving them a place to stay. Tabor noted that when Hilton's van broke down, it was he who came to his rescue and even bought him a new van. Tabor said he had paid Hilton every penny due to him and $18,000 more by Hilton's own count. Tabor said the $18,000 figure didn't even include the $70,000 Hilton received from him in the form of free rent and utilities. Who else would have done so much for him? Tabor asked Hilton.

SO FUCK YOU,
Tabor concluded.
HERE IS YOUR $2,500 RANSOM.

There was no way that Tabor had wanted to come face-to-face with Hilton. He left the envelope for him, but Hilton didn't appear to retrieve it. Tabor told the agents he believed that Hilton thought Tabor might be setting a trap for him. Tabor stayed away from the house the next day but drove to the location on September 6, at about ten o'clock at night. He saw Hilton standing on his driveway with his dog.

“I had to drive right past him in my driveway to park my vehicle,” Tabor said.

According to Tabor, Hilton began heckling him, but keeping his distance. Both men held packages or a bag in front of themselves so that it was impossible for either one to tell if the other had a gun. Still facing Hilton, Tabor said, he had backed over to a different door and gone inside his house. Tabor got his Glock 17 nine-millimeter handgun and went out the front door to confront Hilton. When Hilton saw the Glock, Tabor said, he ran to the end of the cul-de-sac and then disappeared into the woods. Tabor said he assumed Hilton had parked his van there.

After Hilton left, Tabor saw that he had ripped the check to shreds and left it, along with the note Tabor had written. Tabor believed that he had done nothing more than stoke the rage inside of Hilton and was very much afraid for his wife and five-year-old daughter, who were in the house the night Hilton confronted him. He had reported the incident to the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office the next day.

The GBI special agents had already seen the complaint that Tabor had filed. He had told the deputy that his wife and daughter had arrived approximately twenty minutes before he did and didn't see Hilton on the property.

According to the police report, Tabor said that Hilton must have hidden in the woods behind his house and didn't step back on his property until his wife and children went into the house. Hilton wore camping clothes and a webbed belt around his waist, and attached to the belt were an ASP baton and cans of pepper spray. Tabor said that he owned a house in Chamblee and that Hilton might be using it to make camp with his van. According to the report, Hilton had lived in the residence during the time he worked for Tabor, and Tabor believed that he might have retained keys to the house. Tabor was told to save all of his telephone messages.

Victim advised that his wife and he are afraid of what the offender might do next,
the report read. Tabor said he would send his family to stay with relatives in Lawrenceville, but he would remain at the house.

Even as Tabor filed the complaint at the police station, Hilton called and yelled at him over the telephone in such a rage that he was incomprehensible. When Tabor told the GBI agents that he had been paying for the telephone that Hilton used then—and over the past few years—they could hardly believe it. Tabor explained that he kept Hilton on as a “consultant” after he closed the siding business and let him keep the telephone. He said it would be a way for him to keep track of Hilton by getting a bill showing from where calls on the telephone were made. Unfortunately, he could only track Hilton after receiving a bill, not in real time when the calls were made.

Hilton called him again on January 3 and demanded money again. This time he claimed that Tabor owed him $10,000 and went into another rant, and warned him not to try and set a trap for him with the police. Tabor played a portion of the conversation, which was recorded on his voice mail for the GBI agents.

“Don't do anything stupid,” Hilton said. “If the heat's on me, I'll know where it came from, and I know where the hammer will fall.”

Tabor told the GBI that he had been afraid of Hilton since January 2007. “He started to say he had multiple sclerosis and couldn't work,” Tabor said. “He started to say he had MS without ever getting a clinical diagnosis. I only talked with him a couple of times a week. He found someone who prescribed Ritalin and something else that he injected into his leg.”

When Tabor saw Hilton in September, he said there was a marked change in him both physically and mentally. “He'd speak so fast you could hardly tell what he was saying,” Tabor told the GBI. “You could tell he was really juiced up. He was taking more than one hundred milligrams of Ritalin a day. He smoked pot.”

Tabor noted that Hilton's appearance had also changed. His eyes were wild, he was scruffier, and he had lost his front teeth. “He told me that he pulled some of them himself with a pair of pliers,” Tabor said. “He became increasingly odd.”

Howard asked Tabor if he and Hilton ever had any “guy talk” about women, and Tabor said no and that he had only seen Hilton with Brenda Porter a few times. “He had a general loathing of women, particularly lesbians,” Tabor said. “He thought they were the meanest people on earth. But he had been married several times for short periods.

“He never looked at chicks,” Tabor continued. “The only thing he seemed to have genuine affection for was his dog, Ranger. That dog was the only thing he seemed to care about. Both dogs (Ranger and Dandy) were the only things that were important to him.”

When Ranger died, Tabor said, Hilton was depressed for weeks and he carried Ranger's body all the way to the other side of Big Stone Mountain. Hilton selected a site he liked, buried Ranger, and lugged fifty-to one-hundred-pound stones all day to build a monument to the dog.

That was the last question of the interview, but the GBI would find gaping holes in Tabor's answers, which would bring them back to question him once again about Gary Hilton.

The devils had come to Hilton during the night, driving him half crazy with their taunts and visions of terror. There was Gary Hilton, aged four, looking at his hand and realizing that he would die and that he would someday be nothing more than a skeleton. There was death awaiting him in a pit filled with thrashing alligators as his stepfather held him over it, high in the air, and threatened to drop him in.

Hilton had come back angry to the hidden campsite in Dawson Forest. He was furious with the world and with John Tabor, in particular. That Tabor had expected him to settle for $2,500 after all the thousands he had been cheated out of was beyond belief. He had worked his ass off and it wasn't his fault that Tabor was a lousy closer.

Then there was Brenda, whom he had treated like a princess, never hitting her, educating her. She was only fifteen or sixteen when they met and he had taught her so much. She had appreciated his brilliance and the practical knowledge he had accumulated by being almost thirty years older than she was. Used him up and dumped him. Now, in the time of his greatest need, she had turned her back on him over a few lousy bucks for gas money.

And there was Meredith Emerson, the woman he had abducted, the one who pulled his strings like he was a puppet. All he wanted was her damn PIN numbers so he could get some money from one of her ATM accounts. But would she help? No. All she did was run him around in circles—lying to him, when he had been so solicitous of her well-being.

Now there was this god-awful noise of a motor revving and the high whining of wheels spinning not far in the distance. Some idiot had managed to get stuck. The cold snap had broken and the dirt road was muddy as the ice and snow melted.

Hilton was parked in the woods, but Michael Andrews, the truck driver, was stuck and his tanker truck blocking the road. Hilton believed that the man had been pumping or dumping water from Shoal Creek. He started walking toward the truck.

“Got stuck,” Andrews said, getting out. “Can you give me a hand?”

“No, you can get out your own self,” Hilton told him. “I've got stuck lots of times and got out by myself.”

Andrews noticed that the man kept his distance; and when Andrews moved, the man seemed to move into a defensive position between him and the dirty white Astro parked farther on into the woods.

“I don't know,” Andrews said. “It's stuck good. The GPS said the road was open.”

“I could've told you it was closed,” said Hilton, who knew the road was cut off long before the GPS did. “Did you call the police for help?”

Andrews told him that he had dialed 911.

Hilton cursed, turned, and hurried back to his van. On the far side of the van, and several yards away, Emerson was tied to a tree with Ella beside her. Camping equipment was scattered around the ground.

“We got to get out of here,” he said as he freed her. “This place is gonna be crawlin' with cops.”

Emerson began to gather up equipment in neat stacks. She had become very compliant, thanks to his professional behavior, Hilton told himself. Now she was being too compliant.

“We ain't got time to be neat, hon,” he said. “Just throw stuff in the truck so we can get out of here. There's gonna be cops any minute.”

Within minutes the space had been cleaned up and Hilton went screeching out of the forest with the rear tires throwing up a rooster's tail of mud. First he had secured Emerson, and then he went flying like a bat out of hell, thinking that the old clunker might fall apart any minute.

 

Dawson County Sheriff's Office deputy Chester received a call from dispatch at 10:24
A.M
. about a large truck broken down on Sweetwater Church Road on the dirt portion and that it was blocking the road. Dispatch connected again with the truck driver, Michael Andrews, via GPS and sent Chester the coordinates from him to type into his mapping system. The map showed that the truck was stranded on Shoal Creek Road inside Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area, just a few feet north of the River Ford.

The deputy arrived at the stranded truck at 11:24
A.M
. with Ranger Jason Robertson. The vehicle was a large white landscape truck bearing the name
Top Turf Lawn Care
on its side and was wedged between both banks of the roadway, completely blocking the road.

Robertson's GPS indicated that the road was passable, as did Chester's system. Unfortunately for Robertson, the water had risen in the creek and the narrow road was muddy. When he came to the ford, the water was so high and swift that he was afraid to cross it.

The deputy and ranger had both left the scene by eleven twenty-eight. They had missed Hilton and his captive by fifteen minutes.

 

Hilton drove on automatic pilot, thinking of the hardship in his life, his MS, how hard it was to get a few bucks ahead. Maybe he should give up and try a different line of work. But what had he ever done except be a professional criminal? Not much. He, among all men, knew that he could not lead an ordinary life. He had known it since he decided to go homeless and live mostly in the mountains away from people. It had dawned on him that he was a professional soldier on an eternal combat alert.

It wasn't much of a life, but what the hell, it was a life. It was
his
life.

After a while, Hilton found another secluded spot to pull over and hide the van. He led Emerson about one hundred yards into the woods and tied her to a tree. He felt that the MS made him shaky. After he chained Emerson, Hilton grabbed coffee, a cup, and the coffeepot and walked back to the far side of the van. He checked to make certain that Emerson couldn't be seen from the road, and then he made a small campfire to brew the coffee.

Being in the woods usually relaxed him, but everything seemed to be crashing around him. He reminded himself that he was a professional soldier, like one of those badass Navy SEALs who were the baddest of the badasses. He had a book about them in the van that he read and told himself he was like them, able to push himself to do ten times more than he thought he could. When he met that limit, he could force himself to withstand ten times more, again and again.

Hilton often tested himself by running through the forest, flashing through light and shadow like an old-fashioned flickering movie. Muscles burning, lungs aching, he kept running, pushing himself more and more, like a Navy SEAL. Overcoming the pain, outrunning the thrashing alligators in the pit below, running harder and harder, he was running from death. Ten years ago, he was younger and buff, and ran with his shirt off, showing off his rippling muscles beneath his mahogany tan, a smooth-operating machine that women couldn't resist. The female park rangers would make it a point to drive slowly beside him, hooting and hollering, giving him catcalls, reaffirming his life, leaving the fear behind.

Gary Hilton was running all of his life—running from death; staying ahead but never losing his fear; being tough; scaring people with his arsenal of bayonets, knives, and pepper sprays, beating them with his collapsible baton; being tough to stay ahead of the dark fear of becoming nothing more than a skeleton.

As he squatted by the small fire, he had one of his intense monologues that played frequently inside his head:

People who try to fuck with me are relatively rare, but I put myself in a position where I have a high exposure to that type of people. That was in dog situations. It's people with dogs. The average dog owner doesn't know jack shit about dogs. The average animal control officer doesn't know shit about them. They assign human qualities to dogs; and what that means is that they want dogs to be like humans, which is be nice and get along.

Well, that's not the way it is in the dog world, because when dogs talk to each other, they quite often revert to the wolf world; and the wolf world is more incredibly savage and brutal than you can ever imagine. Wolves are one of the only animals that I know of, other than human beings, that will run down, and run down, and run down, and run down, and go, and go, and go, after another member of their own species and kill it.

Just for the sake of killing?

No. It's if they get in their territory rather than just run them out, if they can … they'll go and go …. Other animals, it's just [protecting their territory], but a wolf pack, if they detect another wolf from outside their pack in their territory, they'll run it, and they'll run it, and they'll run it. They'll kill it. You've got your alpha male and alpha female within a pack. Leaders of the pack, okay? They're studying them out in Yellowstone now, so they're really getting good data on wolves in the last ten years. I heard a wildlife biologist on video say an alpha female may get up in the morning and kill her mother and run her sister off.

That's how savage and brutal the wolf world is, and that's what dogs can revert to when they're talking to each other. These humans don't understand that in the dog world or the wolf world, there are no assault and battery laws. There are no murder laws, and quite often, there is no fear. Imagine such a world where there is no murder laws, and there is no fear, which is why you see little Chihuahuas getting killed all the time. They won't back down, right? You grab them, one shake, and they're gone, man. Y'all have seen little dogs get killed that way, you know? They won't back down, you know? No murder laws. No aggravated assault. No assault and battery laws, and quite often no fear. That's what the dog world is, and you've got to understand that and be appropriately cautious.

Humans don't understand that. Not only that, they are aware that their dogs may fight and have fought. They're aware of that, but on the other hand they can't control the dog. The dog isn't trained. No one has enough time to spend with their dogs, to begin with, to get them properly trained. So that means the dog is going to have to lead his life at the end of a leash, and—and he's jerking around, and what they want to do is—is let their dog run loose, and every-everyone that the dog confronts they want to say it's okay. He's friendly. You know? And they know it. I had people … I've had people let their dog confront me, and fight … and me fight the dogs. Have them call the police on me, and then in the succeeding year have seen that same person and that same dog get in two or three more incidents of the same.

A woman at Stone Mountain had two dogs, one hundred fifty yards from me. I spotted them, and you're at a loss. You're kind of conflicted as whether to call her and warn [her] or not. The fact is, as soon as they hear you call, the dogs are coming after you. You know you don't really know what to do. I called to her, “Yo, got a dog here. Dog under control.” Dogs come right at me, from a long way's away. A hundred fifty yards away. Dogs split up, so I'm—I'm doing stick (baton) work on one; and when they split up, then you're going to have to use pepper spray if they split up. You're going to have to spray one with pepper.

But you had to be careful with the pepper. It's hard to actually disable a dog with pepper, but conversely, dogs sense the pepper immediately, and it will turn them. It will turn them momentarily. If the dog is determined, it will come back; so you know, you just take a shot at it, and do a little stick work. The thing about the stick or the baton is that it can be used in a graduated manner, and that it does command respect in most dogs. The beauty of the whole thing is the graduated manner, as opposed to pepper or opposed to a bullet.

In other words, in fighting a dog or a human with a stick, my goal is to shape the situation. My goal in a stick fight with a human or a dog is not to make contact with the dog. A successful stick fight is preventative. To me, it's shaping it with a stick and not making contact because it takes it to a whole new level, especially with a human being. You hit a human being with a stick—regardless of the situation—it's probably going to ruin your day, buddy. It may not go your way, either, even though it always has. I've had the police called on me thirty times at the least—and no exaggeration—in seventeen years. No exaggeration at all. At least thirty times.

I've had them called five times in Murphey Candler Park. I've had them called three times at Stone Mountain alone. That's eight times right there. At least thirty times. And in every single time that the police were called on me, the police have confirmed that I did not act unlawfully, and there's been a couple of times that police have written me a letter saying that I could press charges if I want. The one time it didn't go my way was not with a police officer. It was with animal control. Animal control are not police officers, and matter of fact … in uniform is all they are.

Police officers, the good ones, and most of them are good ones these days … police work, of course, has become highly professionalized, and I'm talking DeKalb North, in particular …. DeKalb North has seen a lot of me. Police officers are trained to interrogate people and to arrive at the truth. I found that police officers may not be able to tell if you're lying; but if you're telling the truth, they can tell generally. And in every thirty times, with the exception of that animal control, it went my way; and if it had not gone my way, I was going to jail with assault with a deadly weapon.

That can be up to twenty-thousand-dollar bond in some places. Like this instance I had to spray the dogs. Stick work in a graduated manner raises from merely presenting the stick, to all the way to contact. The feinting with the stick, faking with a stick, you know? One thing I learned about faking with a human being … dogs are real good with movement. They pick up movement like that, but humans, no.

I learned with humans that if you're going to feint at a human, don't do it at combat speed, because I'm too fast for them to see, and it doesn't make an impression on them.