At the Hands of a Stranger (26 page)

Minutes after 9:00
A.M
. on January 31, the first fifty prospective jurors were seated in room 3G at the Leon County Courthouse. They and the rest of the 220-member initial jury pool would be questioned that day and the following day about publicity, and those who remained in the jury pool were to be brought back on Wednesday to be questioned further.

Suber again requested a delay of the trial, which was denied by Judge Hankinson, and asked once again for a change of venue, which was also denied. Hankinson told the prospective jurors that those selected would not be sequestered during the trial, but would be during deliberations. The trial, he said, could last three weeks once a jury was struck.

Questioning of the jurors was done individually, to determine their knowledge and opinions about the case. They were called, one at a time, into an adjoining room and were seated at a table, along with the prosecution, the defense team, the judge, and Hilton—who, the jurors said, sat only three feet away, tapping his feet, staring ahead, and sometimes glancing over at them. Several said they were extremely unnerved to be so close to him as they answered questions about the case and whether they thought Hilton was guilty or innocent. Many admitted knowing quite a bit about his criminal history; others denied any knowledge of the cases he was a suspect in. Many said they had already made up their minds that he was guilty.

Out of the total of 110 jurors who were summoned on January 31, forty-seven were asked to come back on Wednesday, and thirty-six were excused because of hardship or exposure to pretrial publicity about the case.

On February 1, as the second day of jury selection continued, Judge James Hankinson stated that any prospective jurors who were aware of Hilton's conviction for Meredith Emerson's murder in Georgia would be excused. However, if they were only aware of the case but did not know Hilton had pled guilty and had been convicted, they wouldn't necessarily be excused.

As the interviews continued privately, one at a time, one potential juror was immediately excused from the jury pool when he revealed that he and his wife had spent a week hiking in Georgia, in the mountains near the area where Meredith Emerson had disappeared. That case had happened during the time they were there, the man said, and he and his wife had seen Hilton at a camp store. That surprising revelation earned the juror a quick excuse from courtroom 3G.

Defense attorney Ines Suber once again requested a change of venue, but Hankinson turned her down and repeated that he hoped to have a jury seated by the end of the following day. He remained determined to try and keep the trial where he believed it belonged, in Cheryl Dunlap's home county, where the murder had occurred.

As jurors continued to be questioned individually, another surprising revelation came from one woman who said during her interview that a friend of hers, a law enforcement officer, had talked with her about the murder. He had worked the scene where the body of Cheryl Dunlap had been found, she said, and he had told her that the body had been dismembered. Instead of dismissing her, however, Judge Hankinson asked her to return the following day for further questioning.

By the end of the day, all prospective jurors had finished their first round of questioning, and a total of eighty were instructed to return the following day for more questions, which would include their personal beliefs on capital punishment.

On the third day of jury selection, only a few of the potential jurors said they couldn't sentence someone to the death penalty. One said she wasn't sure she could live with having to make the decision whether or not someone should live or die; most of the other jurors said they could.

SA William Meggs told them they wouldn't be judging Hilton; they'd be judging the evidence and the facts. Meggs warned them the case wouldn't be concluded quickly.

“This is not
CSI,
” he said. “We're not going to get this done in an hour.”

 

When defense attorney Ines Suber spoke to the jury, she told them she had tried to speak without her heavy accent, but she found it impossible. Suber, a Colombian native, had been in the United States since 1968, and said she was a United States citizen. She asked the jurors to let her know if, at any time during the trial, they had any trouble understanding her.

Suber went on to ask if any of the potential jurors who had attended FSU, where Cheryl Dunlap had worked, would be influenced by that, or whether any of them had camped or hiked in the Apalachicola National Forest. None said the university connection would prejudice them, and several others said they had either camped or hiked in the forest. Those who said they had been to the forest were asked several times by Suber if they took rubber bands to secure their pants legs, and all said no. Suber also asked the jury not to be prejudiced against Hilton by viewing the gruesome photos from Cheryl Dunlap's autopsy and from the scene of the discovery of her body.

“So there will be a lot of pictures,” she told them. “Do any of you have a problem viewing that type of photograph?”

As the questioning had progressed, the jurors began to understand why Suber had made a point of mentioning her heavy accent. Those who would be finally selected for duty would come to be very familiar with that accent before the conclusion of the trial.

 

Following their return from the lunch break, the prosecution gave their witness list of sixty-six potential witnesses, which consisted of law enforcement officers from Florida and Georgia, a forensic anthropologist, Cheryl Dunlap's two sons, and more.

Hilton's defense team had submitted a list of sixty-five witnesses, with their own doctors, tool mark experts, and more, coming from several states, and even one witness hailed from Argentina. It remained to be seen whether or not they would all be called.

When the day ended, a jury of six men and six women, plus two alternates, were selected to serve at the capital murder trial of Gary Michael Hilton, which would begin the following morning, Friday, February 4, 2011, at eight-thirty. WCTV, in Tallahassee, announced its live streaming video of the trial would begin—gavel-to-gavel coverage—at that time on their website. This was great news to the hundreds of true-crime fans, amateur sleuths, and others who were interested in the case, almost six hundred viewers at times. They would avidly watch and listen as the proceedings went online.

Cheryl Dunlap's family and friends were very anxious for the trial to begin and expected Hilton to be found guilty, but they dreaded having to hear what their loved one had suffered.

“It would have been better if he just—if he were going to kill her—just do it right then and not put her through anything,” Cheryl's cousin Gloria Tucker told the media. “I don't want to know what she had to go through.”

 

With the trial about to begin, the audience area was filled with spectators that included Cheryl's aunt and cousin, along with several of her closest friends. Some of them couldn't contain their emotions and began to cry when Gary Hilton was brought into the courtroom. He was seated at the defense table, but he turned around in his chair to look over the audience. His appearance had changed dramatically since his arrest for Meredith Emerson's murder. Then he looked like the fit, tanned outdoorsman that he claimed to be. Now he entered the courtroom, plodding along in an outdated suit, pale and thin, like a weak old man.

Suber tried again for a trial delay, claiming once more that she hadn't had enough time to prepare. Judge Hankinson refused the delay. Then she tried to unseat two of the jurors she claimed were aware of Hilton's connection to the murders of Meredith Emerson and the Bryants. Hankinson turned her down again, refusing to disqualify the jurors.

After the jury entered the courtroom, the prosecution outlined some of the evidence that the jurors would hear and see, and Suber went on the attack, trying to refute much of the evidence.

Prosecutor Georgia Cappleman said that Hilton had kidnapped Cheryl from Leon Sinks, kept her prisoner for possibly as long as two days, killed and beheaded her, then burned her head and hands, which he had also removed, in his campfire. There were also self-made videos, DNA and blood evidence, and much more that would prove Hilton's guilt, she told the jury.

Suber claimed it could not be determined if a number of human head and hand bones that had been found in the burn pit at Hilton's campsite were those of a man or a woman. Suber also disputed the surveillance video evidence of a disguised man in a striped dress shirt who used Dunlap's ATM card. It could not be proven that it was Hilton, she claimed. And some plastic beads found in Cheryl Dunlap's car, more of which had been found at the campsite and in Hilton's backpack, had “suddenly appeared” during a second search of the car, she claimed. She was confident that the jury, she said, would have a reasonable doubt about Hilton's guilt.

 

When the testimony began, the first witness called to the stand was Tonya Land, who was one of the first persons who had reported Cheryl Dunlap missing. She gave her report that day to Captain Steven Ganey, of the Wakulla County Sheriff's Office, who later went to look at an abandoned car parked on the side of the Crawfordville Highway, which turned out to be Cheryl's.

Ganey said that right from the start, he felt that the slash mark in the car's tire looked staged.

“What it appeared to us,” he said, “is that someone had punctured the tire in a place to make it look [like the car] was disabled on the side of the road.”

Another of the early witnesses for the prosecution was Michael Shirley, who said that he and his wife often hiked in the Leon Sinks area of the Apalachicola National Forest, an area where there were limestone sinkholes. He said that on December 1 they had seen Cheryl Dunlap sitting, reading a book, on one of the hiking area's boardwalks. They were shocked, he said, to see her picture and an account of her disappearance a few days later: “I looked back at the photograph and immediately recognized it as the woman we had seen at Leon Sinks.”

Michael said he and his wife had gone back to the Sinks to see if maybe Cheryl had fallen into one of the holes. They didn't see anything in the crystal-clear waters of the sinkholes; but as they were leaving, they saw the red book that Cheryl had been reading. It was lying on the side of the road near where she had been sitting and reading it, on December 1, when the Shirleys had seen her.

Shirley said he immediately went to a location nearby where the search for Dunlap was underway. He told the deputies on the scene that he and his wife had seen her reading her book on December 1, and told the deputies where the red book was lying.

Other early witnesses included two of Cheryl's friends. One had first reported her missing when she was unable to contact Cheryl, and the other was scheduled to go out for dinner with Cheryl on the night of December 1. Cheryl had never called or come by, she said, and she, too, had become alarmed.

 

Following the court resuming after the day's lunch break, Teresa Denise Johnson took the stand and testified that she was at an Express Lane convenience store on Highway 20 in Bristol, Florida, when a man she identified as Gary Hilton had approached her. They talked briefly, and Johnson said that Hilton had said, “Isn't that bad about that girl who was murdered?” Johnson said yes, it was; then Hilton told her that she looked like Cheryl Dunlap. He then followed her to the cash register, still talking, before she left the store. If circumstances had been different, Hilton might have found another victim that day, but the lucky woman got into her vehicle and left without having any idea of the danger that she might have been in.

Others who unknowingly had dangerously close encounters with Hilton were Loretta Mayfield, who, along with her aunt, was going out to help with the search for Cheryl Dunlap. They ran into Hilton at Glenda's convenience store in the Crawfordville area. His white van was parked near where he was trying to use the pay phone—his dog, Dandy, was at his side.

“He said, ‘You know, you can get out and pet him if you want to, he's not going to bite.' His dog was in the passenger seat, and I told him that was okay.”

Mayfield stated that she told Hilton she and her aunt were going to help in the search for Cheryl Dunlap.

“He said, ‘You never know people in this world'—is basically what he said,” Mayfield testified.

While she and her aunt were searching on the dirt roads in and around the forest later that day, Mayfield stated, they had passed Hilton in his van two other times, both times inside the forest.

Another witness, George Ferguson, might also have had a close call; he testified that Hilton had flagged him down and told him his van wouldn't start. Hilton asked if he'd help him jump the van off. It was parked off L. L. Wallace Road, Ferguson said. Ferguson became suspicious that there wasn't really a problem with the van when it started immediately and gave no signs of trouble. He believed, he stated, that Hilton had faked the incident.

 

The testimony of Ronnie Rentz brought everyone in the courtroom to attention when he described what happened on December 15, 2007, when he stumbled upon Cheryl Dunlap's headless, handless body while on a hunting trip in the forest. When he got to the place where he customarily unloaded and released his hunting dogs, Rentz said, he noticed buzzards circling overhead. He began to investigate and quickly spotted a body in the undergrowth, partially covered with palmetto leaves and brush.

“I could see to the waist,” he said, “and as I got closer, I bent over and looked, and could see the legs and feet of a body.”

Rentz said it shocked him so much that he backed up for a moment, trying to think what he should do. He called the police as soon as he regained his composure, and they arrived on the scene to find that Rentz had discovered the dismembered body of a white female.

Rentz told the court he'd hunted in the Apalachicola National Forest for years but never had an experience like that. It was something he would never forget.