At the Hands of a Stranger (15 page)

And so did Hilton. On and on. Howard tried to guide Hilton back to what he meant by calling himself “a professional.”

“You read ahead and knew the law, that sort of thing,” Howard said. “That professionalism is kind of permeated throughout—”

“When you get desperate, you ignore it,” Hilton said. “In other words, when you're going out to kill somebody. If you're seen by a single, other person on the trail, then that day is screwed. But when you procrastinate because you don't want to get up and kill somebody and you let it go and you say, ‘Oh, I won't kill anyone today. I'll just go hiking with my dog and have fun. We're doomed, anyway.' So you get down to the point where, well, with like Meredith, I had forty dollars and several days' food. So I had to kill somebody in that period of time. When you get down to the bitter end, you ignore all the rules you set, which I did, which got me caught.”

“You strayed outside your own criteria.”

“In other words, Blood Mountain is a good place to hunt because it's the most used day-hiking trail in the state of Georgia. I mean, this is a three-and-a-half-mile hike up, fourteen-hundred-foot climb and return, so it's a seven-mile walk with fourteen-hundred-foot elevation gain. I'm amazed at the number of people that do it. I've seen people in the bitter weather that Meredith was taken in—eleven degrees at night. I saw the sun setting behind my shoulder and three boys going up, not carrying a single thing, and one of them wearing shorts. They're betting their life, literally, that they don't stumble and hurt themselves, and it's amazing not more people get in serious trouble up there. It's a good place to hunt in that you have a huge selection, but it's a bad place because you—”

“Too many witnesses?” Howard asked.

“So the way you would do it would be to lurk in a blind, so to speak. Off the trail. Observe with binoculars and lurk. But I didn't do that, either, because … and a bunch of people saw me, and then it was a mistake to pick Meredith. Because she almost whipped my ass. She damn sure did. I lost control of both weapons, both the knife and the bat. Showed her the knife, she grabbed the fucker. It was a bayonet, so dull as shit. All it is, is a spike to stick with. It's not a knife. Grabbed the bayonet, and somehow I lost control of the bayonet and lost it period. It went down.

“I pulled the bat and deployed it. Grabbed that. I mean, I'm better than that. I am, but I found out she was a fucking black belt, which don't mean shit. Again, they're styling. These black belts, they're styling. They're not fighters. On the other hand, doing that kind of thing does increase your coordination, your hand eye, et cetera …. It gets you more used to hand-to-hand combat as opposed to an untrained person, even though they're not really fighters and she really … She was real quick with her hands and had no hesitation about grabbing weapons and everything. Not only that, she was hard to subdue. She fought like hell, man. Fought, and fought, and fought. Then once I gained control of her and got her ten, fifteen feet away from the trail, on the little side trail I told you about, she started fighting again, and I had to fight her again for several minutes, and her doing that is what got me caught because, if I had been back to the crime scene just a few minutes sooner, just several minutes sooner, I would have beat those people that found the bat and I would have picked it up. But I had to fight her twice, bring her all the way around the corner of the mountain and then secure her to a tree. She fought me fair and square.”

Walter Goddard told the GBI that he was startled to answer the phone on January 2, 2008, and find a message from Gary Hilton. Goddard said he had met Hilton more than twenty years ago and that he knew him better than anyone, but he had not heard from him in several weeks. Goddard immediately called the GBI when Hilton left a message and the telephone number to a cell phone that John Tabor had given him to make calls for Tabor's siding business.

“I'm concerned about this girl and her parents,” Goddard said. “I hope he has done nothing. I know him. I read about the couple up in Ducktown (John and Irene Bryant), but I don't think he's capable of doing something like that—although he has recently gone through some bad times with this Tabor guy.”

Goddard said he knew quite a bit about Hilton. He met Hilton when Goddard was in his early twenties and they were both telephone sales solicitors for a defunct chemical company in Tucker called KEM Manufacturing.

“I'm fifty-two and I've known him since I was twenty-three or twenty-five,” Goddard said.

Hilton always struck Goddard as “a kind of a homeless guy. I've seen the dog and I've seen the van. He's not a friend, but more of an acquaintance, but I've seen him for sure within the past three to four weeks.”

When Goddard saw a photo of Hilton and Dandy on television, he turned to his wife and said, “I think that's Gary. It looks like his dog and his van.”

Basically, what it boiled down to was that he's a con man, Hilton told the GBI special agents. He was a nice guy, but he was a con man. He was not honest and had spent a little time in jail for telephone solicitation, Goddard said.

During the last telephone call, Goddard said, Hilton ranted and raved almost incoherently on their voice mail, until it could store no more information. Then he telephoned a second time and did the same thing again. Goddard's wife was having a good time entertaining people by having them come over to listen to the rant. Goddard described it as “a long, expansive message about how he got screwed by Tabor.”

Goddard described Hilton as “pretty athletic and a big-time runner. I just kind of stayed in touch with him somewhat distantly. Quite honestly, I kind of feel a little sorry for him in a way. He got some raw deals, but he brought a lot of it on himself.

“He might have had a pretty bad temper if you really crossed him, but I just don't see him doing some of the things they're talking about,” Goddard said. “He's lonely, a loner. He pretty much told everybody he was going to live in mountains. He had telephone books and got paid a percentage for siding jobs.”

The agents wanted to know if Hilton was charismatic. The answer from Goddard was an unequivocal yes.

Goddard remembered that Hilton told him that he had some military background and that he was “somewhat of a survivalist. He can take care of himself. He told me recently he was diagnosed with MS and he was under the belief that he was dying. He told me that about the late [part of] this past summer.”

Goddard said that Hilton talked “a little bit” about his military background and that, at one point, he was a pilot. Hilton liked guns and loved to talk, using aviation terminology.

“He craved a gun,” Goddard said, “but he couldn't get one after he got arrested, so he used air guns and a police baton.” He and Hilton used to go into the woods and shoot air guns on occasional weekends, Goddard said.

Hilton liked to explain and act out maneuvers that highlighted his fighting skills. These were long monologues:

“The old Flying Boxcar–the instructor said the hardest thing about jumping a Fairchild C-119 is getting up to twelve hundred feet. You talk about fear. I've never been so afraid in my life after that first jump. Ever. A gut-wrenching, knee-knocking fear.

“Usually, it's the first. After that, they get progressively easy. The courage fades over time, just like combat. After you're out of it for a while, and you got to go back, you're real scared at first. I'll tell you, I just didn't know what to expect that first time, so it was just a wild ride for the first trip to the door. But after that, I got used to it, but at the same time that's something you always think about.

“Everybody visualizes what a parachute jump would be. I did, too, before I made one. What everyone fails to realize or visualize is the noise.

“It's just the noise and the wind. Most people, they think of parachute jumping, they think they're just jumping out because you see it. It's not a sound picture. It doesn't have that C-130 drop speed of one hundred twenty-five knots, you know, and so you're one hundred thirty-five miles an hour—that's about a class—every piece of nylon goes waving.

“Just turned seventeen when I joined the army …. Got my first adult arrest. I was seventeen in late November, and I got my first adult arrest. The judge nol-prossed it when I told him I was going in the army. That's what the army was like back then.

“They waived my felony rules. They may have waived even a high-school diploma. They're going right back where they were in the '60s. A bunch of kill-crazy psychos, man. Cheap-paid killers, man. That's what we all were.

“Oh, man, I'm telling you. My—my right … I was in Bravo. A Bravo company for a year before I went into special weapons, and the great majority of the guys in there were not high-school graduates. One enlisted man had some college. He had two years of college, and he was actually a U.S Reserve—that is volunteer airborne. And then re-upped and became RA (regular army). Yeah, so he was a draftee. He was the one draftee in the company, and he was the one that had any college at all.

“That's what it was like back then. It was like a French Foreign Legion, you know. You get out of going to court by saying you're going into the army, you know. So, yeah, I got a vagrancy arrest, childish stunt. Me and another guy was going in the back of Royal Castle, which is like Krystal. That was in Florida, Miami-Dade County, where I lived, and the Krystal of, like, Florida. You knock and use the bathroom. We were going in the back and stealing food out of the back of it, and then throwing it at cars. Seventeen years old, acting like a child. You know, we … you know, a gross of eggs, which is only about that big. A gross of eggs is one hundred forty-four eggs.

“Oh, chocolate custard pie. Just walk out in the … I'm a sociopath, man. I'm what they call an antisocial. That's the new name for it, an antisocial personality. In my day it was called a ‘sociopath character disorder,' is what it was known as.

“Yeah. You just walk out in the middle of a street, stand on the yellow line, four lanes, you know. Some people come along, you're standing right there in the middle on the yellow line, center line, and they're looking at you, and you're looking at them …. They're thinking, ‘He's not going to throw that thing, is he?' And then run like hell. Oh, I mean, tons of fun, man. Idle youth, you know what I mean?”

Hilton also told Goddard about how he became a pilot who never flew again after obtaining his licenses:

“I entered Miami-Dade Junior College, going pilot, a career pilot program using my GI Bill. It paid ninety percent. Back then, a private pilot license cost nine hundred bucks. You can get a Cessna C-150S for eleven bucks an hour. Dual, with an instructor, for fourteen an hour. The VA would pay ninety percent of your flight costs.

“Oh yeah, and the tuition was one hundred fifty a semester because it was a community college. So I got the degree and the commercial ticket with a multinational engine and instrumental reading, and I got a Certificate of Flight Instructor Instrument also.

“CMII, CFL license, Certificate of Flight Instructor Instrument. Yeah, yeah. The instrument reading then was an additional forty hours, as much as it takes to get a private ticket. Private ticket was forty hours approved.”

Goddard had asked if Hilton got a commercial license, too.

“Oh yeah, commercial, with a multi and instrument, and then the instrument instructor. I've never flown since.”

Hilton gave demonstrations and lectures on how to fight:

“If you know how to use it, it's a whole lot different than not knowing how to use it. You don't do it this way, like this. You should sling it out. If backed up against a wall, I can take care of myself.”

“Once we were out on a trail and a guy approached him,” Goddard said. “Gary got mad and said he was going to take him out. I thought he was kidding. He came across as a very gentle person.”

Goddard wasn't sure about Hilton's sexual orientation, but he thought that he “might go both ways.” He mentioned that Hilton had stalked a “girlfriend” for years. When he described the object of Hilton's attention, it seemed to the GBI agents that he was describing Brenda, the sixteen-year-old girl he had sex with and then stalked at her college basketball games.

Goddard said he couldn't put his finger on anything specific to make him think that Hilton had homosexual tendencies. He reached the conclusion through a number of things. First, there was where Hilton had lived back in those days, on Eleventh Street, near a notorious hangout for gay men looking for companionship. Hilton used to spend many of his evenings, and late into the night, cruising through the park, according to Goddard's recollection. He thought he saw a hint of the feminine in the way Hilton dressed.

Back in those days Hilton loved the sport of bodybuilding, and Goddard said that he was “very strong for a little guy. The pictures in the newspapers, they make him look like a stooped old man, but I tell you, that guy is strong as an ox. When he got into bodybuilding, he thought he was Superman. He thought he could beat up on somebody. What happened is he approached someone on Eleventh Street and that guy just beat the absolute crap out of him down there. But he kept hanging around the gay guys' park.”

On the other hand, there were signs that Hilton had what Goddard considered ordinary sexual habits. “I will tell you that if you pull him over and look in his van, you'll find a bunch of pornography books. Old ones. Nothing you'd see on the shelf. Not
Penthouse
or
Hustler.
He carried porn. He was very peculiar in a lot of ways, and I don't know anything about his family or even if he has one.”

He's pretty much a loner, Goddard said. He was in the hospital having stents put into his coronary arteries following a heart attack when he saw him on TV. “I couldn't believe it. It almost gave me another heart attack.”

Hilton was involved in illegal telephone solicitations much of the time that Goddard knew him. Hilton would make the calls to prospects that he selected by driving in neighborhoods and getting the addresses of people who needed siding. He would match the address with a name and telephone number and call to make his pitch for siding. If not actually working for someone, Goddard said, Hilton simply made up a product or charitable organization and made a telephone call.

Goddard said Hilton ran newspaper ads to find people to pick up the checks. It amounted to chump change, ten or fifteen dollars. But it was flimflam. He wasn't getting rich off it. Goddard was quick to note that he didn't stick around long enough to get details on how Hilton went about it. The agents told him they would come back later if they needed more information.

The agents asked Goddard if Hilton had any particular fetish in pornography.

“Maybe, but nothing really kinky,” Goddard said. “I'd say it wasn't even true hard-core. Old stuff, which was surprising.”

Any girlfriends? the GBI asked again.

Goddard shrugged as if that wasn't much of a possibility.

“He was kind of ugly, too,” he said. “Last time I saw him, he had a front tooth that had rotted out. He looked awful. He couldn't drink, or at least he couldn't handle it. He might have been on some medication.”

Hilton lived with a guy that Goddard didn't know. He thought the roommate might have been a lawyer, but he wasn't sure.

“He didn't really have a home. He paid for his residence on Eleventh Street, paid by the week.”

Goddard said Hilton was always prepared to protect himself in the woods. He had three to five pepper spray canisters, the collapsible baton, and an air pistol. But he wanted a real handgun badly, Goddard said. He said that Hilton was “quite knowledgeable” about guns. He said that Hilton once told him, “If you looked at my military records, you would find that I'm a sharpshooter with rifle and pistol, either hand, and an expert in knife and bayonet fighting.”

The GBI checked this information and found it to be true. The weapons that Hilton said he “handled” were not conventional bombs and bullets: they were nuclear weapons designed for tactical battlefield use.

Goddard said that Hilton was intimately familiar with all of the hiking areas in the Appalachian Mountains and would be anywhere. He knew that Hilton traveled from one part of the country to another and was almost always on the move. The Atlanta Tract of the Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area was one of the places he liked best. Goddard said that Hilton knew Atlanta's parks well and had even traveled to the western United States to hike.

“The harder and colder it is, the better he likes it. He was into power hiking in a big way,” Goddard said. “He loved to go to the mountains. He went to St. Helens. He liked to do things to the extreme. If it was snowing up there, he was right up there. That was right up his alley. He liked it hard. I've seen him running in snow at Stone Mountain.”

Goddard told the GBI agents the same thing that Brenda had said: Hilton had changed a great deal for the worse in the past few months. Just as Brenda hadn't recognized Hilton three months ago, neither had Goddard.

“He had lost a lot of weight,” Goddard said. “He was quirkier and he had pulled his front teeth out. He looked awful.” Goddard thought that Hilton might have said something about having gone to a VA hospital, but he wasn't certain. Hilton had not asked him for money, as he had asked Brenda.