At the Hands of a Stranger (13 page)

And then he remembered Ranger, the dog that Hilton had before Dandy. People had told him that Hilton loved that dog more than anything. Hilton had wept for days when Ranger died. Ranger was his best friend, and even a psychopath needed a friend, and it was Ranger he talked to and with whom he discussed things.

Such was his love for Ranger that Hilton had carried him high up on Big Stone Mountain to one of his favorite views. There he buried Ranger and spent most of the day lugging huge rocks to build a monument to his friend. Hilton visited the monument regularly to remember his dead dog.

Bridges knelt on the floor next to Hilton and put his lips close to his ear. “I want you to think about her family,” he whispered. “I know that probably doesn't mean anything to somebody like you, because you are obviously deranged. How about this? Do you remember how much you loved Ranger? How about I go to Stone Mountain and I take Ranger's body and I put it someplace where you'll never know where it's at? That's how the family of this girl feels. They don't even know where her body is. How would you feel if you didn't know where Ranger's body was? How much would that hurt?”

Hilton's eyes filled with tears and he turned toward Bridges with a look of pure hatred. “Why don't you just go ahead and stick the needle in my arm now, bitch?”

“Okay,” Bridges said.

Those eyes,
the special agent thought. He would never forget those eyes.

But the dam had cracked and, after resisting all night long, Hilton was ready to talk.

Once Hilton allowed himself to be moved off the floor, he was escorted to the Atlanta Detention Infirmary, where he was treated for broken fingers on his right hand. Hilton had noticed when he first met Hilton that his right hand was swollen to twice the size as his other hand. Hilton had refused to have treatment except to complain about needing medicine for his MS.

Hilton had decided to talk—on his conditions—but he continued to be surly and growled at the doctor and the nurse in the dispensary.

“What happened?” the doctor asked.

“You haven't been keeping up with the news,” Hilton growled. “It's from punching that missing girl hiker. You know, bone against bone.”

The doctor looked surprised. “Fist against cranium,” Hilton said. “Don't worry. It hurt me a lot more than it hurt her.”

Following treatment, police asked the doctor if he had noticed anything symptomatic of multiple sclerosis.

The doctor replied, “No. I'd be much more likely to diagnose him with psychopathic bipolar disorder.”

Based on the interview and what Bridges said was “significant” DNA evidence, the possibility of a plea bargain was almost immediately started. The plea bargain would call for Georgia to take a possible death sentence off the table and substitute it for a plea of guilty—with Hilton being sentenced to life in prison. Under such an arrangement Hilton would almost certainly never breathe free air again. He would be ninety-one years old when he became eligible for parole, if he beat the odds and was still alive at that time.

The GBI was under the impression that the murder had been committed on Blood Mountain, which would have been in Blairsville. Special Agents Matthew Howard and Dustin Hamby loaded Hilton into a police car for the two-hour trip from the Atlanta Police Department (APD). Hilton was handcuffed and shackled, according to GBI policy, and his seat belt fastened. They left Saturday, January 5, 2008, at 6:30
P.M
. for the Union County Jail in Blairsville.

Hilton had reverted to his motormouthed persona and talked incessantly during the two-hour drive. His pleasantries began with a dark scowl and angry voice: “You guys are pissed at me. Eye fucking me. That Atlanta jail is just torture. I'm just waiting to die. You want to torture me in the meantime? Good, we torture lots of people.”

Howard said they weren't going to torture him; they were just taking him back to the mountains. Hilton had expressed disdain for urban environments, and Howard thought this might have a calming effect. Hilton said he thought Blood Mountain was in Lumpkin County.

“That's good,” Hilton said. “The Union County Jail would be mostly white. They're going with state charges? They want to turn me over to the state so they can execute me.

“I'm fucked, totally fucked. I was just trying to figure out who I was going to give my dog to before I was going to turn myself in.” He looked at Howard. “Why don't you take my dog, man? If I sign a release form? Hey, I ain't going nowhere. I'll never breathe free air again, pal.”

The police officers had their digital recorders on and were recording every word. Through some convoluted feat of reasoning, Hilton started to talk about himself, which seemed to be his favorite subject.

“Son, I'm telling you, I'm an observer,” Hilton said. “I'm a philosopher. I'm a man of vast … I've been a professional beggar for twenty years, and I'm going to tell you who has the biggest heart is going to be men.”

“Really?” Howard asked.

“You're fooled by a woman's nurturing instincts and her softness, but a woman isn't soft. It's the difference in our personalities. Men tend to be more confrontational and grab the whole thing, while women affect an air of softness and get it a bit at a time.”

“In other words, manipulative, you mean?”

“Much more. And always remember, they got the pussy. We're fucked. We're totally. But hey, that's okay. Don't worry about it. Be a Republican. Have a party. Your world is kaput. Your world is over, pal. It's gone. Your children will never, never … You want your kid to grow up to be a lawyer? Forget about it. There is no future for your kids. There is none.”

Hilton continued nonstop with his bizarre, nihilistic rampage: “The Muslims got us by the gasoline. Before, they had to come across oceans to get at them, and once they came across oceans, they had this huge country that, even if they could get at it, they couldn't invade us and occupy us. Napoleon was over half-a-million men. The Germans were three-and-a-half-million men. Okay, these were huge armies. Napoleon, in 1812, over half a million … half a million. Okay, the Russians just soaked them up. Just the vastness of it. They couldn't get at us. Now they don't have to.

“Again, I'm going to tell you … I've told you before, and I'm going to tell you again, we have this huge, vast, interconnected, socioeconomic structure. You're embedded in a matrix, in a world that isn't real. That has been constructed totally for you, and is all interconnected. It's built on values [that] are virtual, okay? But it's built upon the harsh reality of cheap gasoline. It's a house of cards, and, son, once that starts, the ripple effects are going to be unimaginable. But, just to give you guys an idea of what ripple and the interconnectedness of everything, we have a bunch of people here with subprime mortgages that don't pay their mortgage. Okay. A bunch of African Americans and other low-rent people that don't pay their mortgages, and what does it end up?

“Now that's child play,” Hilton said.

“But you see?” Hilton continued. “You see the interconnectedness of this? Now, what's going to happen when that … What's going to happen if gasoline … If nothing goes bad—I told you—I told you before, I've handled atomic bombs. Okay? I was in special weapons, and I've handled atomic bombs that damn big that weigh seventy-nine pounds, and what's going … That's assuming nothing like that happens.

“That's assuming nobody gets weaponized anthrax and shuts down our postal system. All it would take is a few anthrax letters to shut down our postal system. Everybody's forgotten that. Okay. But if nothing bad happens, what's going to happen if gasoline goes up a buck a year for ten years, and in ten years it's thirteen dollars a gallon? Son, it's going to bring you down. It's going to bring you down. That's why they can bring the fucking death penalty on me. Okay? Go ahead. Try me. Bring it on, okay? Because it's going to take three or four years to come to trial. It's going to—even at the federal level—they'll be able to knock a little time off.”

Hilton stopped talking long enough to make a quick calculation. “It's going to take an average of about twelve years to—to impose it,” he said. “Maybe even longer, really. And—and—and by then, you know, now we're talking seventeen years, this society …

“You were a little rough on me the first night,” Hilton said, “but I don't blame you. You might have had a live girl on your hands, for all you knew, but you treated me fairly. You've been a man of your word. You're cops, of course. I understand that, and we're never going to be friends, but you've been a man of your word, and in the end you lived up to your deal, and in the end you treated me professionally, so I'm—I'm giving you something. I've given you cooperation. I promised you cooperation that night. I gave it to you. The only question I didn't answer was on the advice of my attorney, and I would have answered that.

“You asked whether she was doomed from the beginning.”

The agents wanted to know why.

“Because I just told you, once you've done it, you're either going to kill her or get caught. There's no other solution. If that sounds cold and cruel, yeah, it was. It's the soldier in me. A soldier just does or dies. Okay?”

A moment of hesitation, and then Hilton continued speaking. “Yeah. And I'm trying to impress on you, though, there was nothing sexual or pleasurable …”

“You talk about being a pro.”

“It was dreadful. It was dreadful,” Hilton said. “You asked me what was it like to cut someone's head off.”

“Okay. It was dreadful,” Hilton said. “It was so dreadful that the only thing you could do is go on autopilot. I told you it wasn't real. Yeah. It's so fucking dreadful that all you can do is do your duty or go on autopilot. It's the same as combat soldiers that told me from Vietnam … they told me the same thing. They'd see bodies, you know, with guts, you know, roped all over the place, heads blown off, and it didn't …. It wasn't real. It just didn't look real.

“But it's dreadful. There was no pleasure or anything else, and when they say, well, you're the one that chose to make money by killing. There's other ways to make money. There's bank robbery, and so forth. Well, you know, in retrospect I regret not attempting a bank robbery. I really do. 'Cause all of this shit got me nowhere but caught. Okay? And so, I might have been caught robbing a bank, but if I had scored … if I had got five grand … I could—I could live off that for over half a year or worse, you know, and so, yeah, yeah …. But as to why I chose to kill for money, part of that was rage against society. Sociopathic rage against society. Against all those people that are now coming forward and so forth. How did you find Walter Goddard? He must have called you, or did you get him off my cell phone?

“Anyway, I … we did a deal. I promised you cooperation, and by all rights, I shouldn't be talking to you,” Hilton said. “My attorney has warned me a million times don't talk to no one without an attorney, but I'm not telling you nothing, you know what I mean? We're talking about history, and I was going to save the history for the profilers, but there will be psychologists and psychiatrists, so they'll want to go over that. I'm telling you right now, I'm going—I'm going to dig my heels in. I don't want federal custody. They're going to send me to supermax. I just know they are. What about it?

“They sent Ted Kaczynski there (
Editor's note: Commonly known as the Unabomber
). All the notorious people. Listen, Rudolph went there and he only killed one person, and indirectly two. (
Editor's note: Eric Rudolph killed two people, and one person indirectly, in 1996 and 1998 when he exploded pipe bombs near Olympic venues in Atlanta and at abortion clinics near Birmingham, Alabama.)
Okay? He killed one woman with a bomb, and another guy had a heart attack. Okay? He only killed one person. Oh, no, he killed two. The police officer. He only killed two people and they—they sent Kaczynski there and he only killed two people, but it was the Unabomber.

“And he's in supermax,” Hilton said. “So it's where they send the notorious, infamous people. Okay, they're sending my ass to supermax—”

“It's debatable on who calls you notorious and who calls you, you know, just a … a mad guy. You know what I mean?” Howard said.

“You know, Jack the Ripper, whatever you want to put it. Okay?” Hilton said. “But, of course, first, they've got to convict me. And if they want to spend a million dollars, two million to convict me, and then … and then another two million to get death, and then another eight million to defend the death penalty and get around … and get around to executing me seventeen years from now, when I'm seventy-eight years old and I'm decrepit and everything. Hey, they can do it.”

“Who is going to be the one that has to call you notorious, though?”

“Me.”

“You are?”

“I'm infamous,” Hilton said. “My God. I mean I've read a little of the news. My lawyer's brought me a little bit, but I don't really want to read it …. It's really a fucking … you know … a drifter with a mean streak. That's what the
AJC
(
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
) article was. ‘Drifter with a Mean Streak.' Or no,
misfit.
‘Misfit with a Mean Streak.' Yeah. Well, misfit I am. Well, maybe it's true. I do have a mean streak.

“They don't understand there's something a little more than that, though.

“They don't understand that, except for this rampage, I was the injured party,” Hilton said. “I kid you not. They have screwed, blued, and tattooed me every which way, society has. They've called the police on me thirty times when they were the transgressor trying to get—”

“Those people in the park?” asked Howard, meaning parks where Hilton walked his dogs.

“Yeah. And all of society trying to get me in trouble. If they had their way, they would tell lies to the cop. The cop would arrest me and send me to the penitentiary, take my dog away, and ruin my life just because they don't want to be wrong. Okay? It's as simple as that. You talk about cruel and heartless, man. You talk about, you know, killing motherfuckers. You start getting that thing, you know. You're just raging at society.”

“You're getting … You're getting a little bit into the … in the … You're, you know … more than what we're trying to discuss here,” the GBI agent said, warning Hilton that he might be exceeding the parameters of the plea bargain.

“What are you trying to get at, except a biography? You're not going to give this to the press?”

“No.”

“I'm saving this for a book, man. Hey, I've got to keep some money on the books,” Hilton said. “No one's called you up and said, ‘Hey, I got some money for Gary Hilton.' I got to get some money on the books. And my coverage, you know, I deliberately kept coverage of me limited. You notice when they try to do the perp walk, I insist that we run? I got the vest on and everything, and the sooner they can get me into that car, the better—although they don't even have to get me in the car. They can walk me right through, and I'm the one that insists on running to the car, you know. Did you see the way we … Did you see it on TV?

“…Oh, yeah, running. I'm the one that wants to do that. I was going … I was leading them, and they opened that door, and another one opened that door, and I'm the one that just dives in headfirst, you know,” Hilton continued. “Kind of like a Hollywood celebrity that's been bad, and now … you see what I mean? The more you limit it, the bigger demand it makes. If I had come walking out like Eric Rudolph, they'd have said, ‘Oh, he's so fucking smug is all he is.' But when I come … you know, when I come running out and dive into the car wearing the vest, it's a mystique, you know.”