At the Hands of a Stranger (3 page)

I don't know what I'm doing,
Hilton thought.
What the hell do I have in mind? How do I find a campsite? How do I keep the cop from coming over?

In a panicked daze Hilton managed to turn the van around and start back down. He discovered that he had slid off the road into someone's yard, but his tires found traction and he was soon back on the road. Hilton passed within a few feet of the deputy sheriff on the way up and then again on the way back down. Hilton did not understand why Emerson had made no noise, unless she was afraid of the threat he had made to shoot her ass.

Hilton drove through the vast darkness toward a remote area of Dawson Forest, where he didn't think anyone would ever think to look. He had to move a
ROAD CLOSED
barrier before he could drive to where he would make camp, and then put it back in place after brushing away tire marks and footprints. Hilton was exhausted from his long day and all the hell that the woman had put him through. He felt himself coming down, ready to crash, and he needed to take an upper, downer, or anything he could find. Hilton made Emerson help him unload the camping gear, even though she complained of a severe headache and her eyes didn't seem to focus. Although he was angry, Hilton gave Emerson what he considered to be his best cold-weather sleeping bag. It was a high-quality bag, but it was filthy.

Hilton was infuriated by all of the hard work and nothing to show for it.

“Honey, I told you I was gonna let you go,” he told her. “You've run me around. You've run me all over northern Georgia, made me put one hundred fifty miles on my van. You lied to me. You've run me around. Now you owe me some pussy.”

He unzipped his pants and raped her while she was chained and on the lumpy cargo bags, surrounded by two dogs, empty food cans, banana peelings, and other trash. Emerson was unresponsive, but Hilton believed that she was enjoying herself and saw the kidnapping, beating, and rape as part of an unexpected and exciting adventure on what would otherwise have been a dull, routine day for her.

After all of this had transpired, Emerson lay on those same cargo bags inside the van with Ella. Her abductor and his dog, Dandy, slept in the front seats. It was bitterly cold and Hilton sometimes ran the engine for short periods to get heat inside the vehicle. Emerson had a heavy five-foot-long steel chain padlocked around her neck, which was also padlocked to a metal seat brace inside the vehicle. Her right ankle was tied with a short rope, which was also secured to a fixture inside the van.

“This is just in case you decide to wander away, cunt,” the abductor had said before getting into his sleeping bag.

Emerson lay in the cold van, chained up, in the vast and lonely expanse of Dawson Forest.

Held captive by a homicidal maniac, she waited for whatever would happen.

Julia Karrenbauer saw Meredith Emerson still asleep in her bedroom in their Duluth, Georgia, apartment on Tuesday morning, New Year's Day, 2008. Ella, Emerson's black rescue dog, part Labrador retriever, was asleep in the room with her. Karrenbauer had last seen Emerson awake on New Year's Eve, at about six o'clock at night. She had no reason to be concerned about her roommate not being home on New Year's Day afternoon. Emerson was gone, but she had left a note on the chalkboard saying that she had taken Ella for a hike. Not worried, Karrenbauer went to bed and slept until 3:30
P.M
. that day.

It wasn't unusual for Emerson to go hiking, and Karrenbauer thought that Meredith had gone with her boyfriend, Steve Segars. Karrenbauer continued with her day and made preparations to watch the University of Georgia game, to be televised later that afternoon, with Brent Seyler, her boyfriend. What Karrenbauer didn't know was that Emerson had gone hiking with just Ella and that Segars was not with her.

Emerson and Segars had left a New Year's Eve fireworks display in Lawrenceville at about 11:30
P.M
. because Emerson wanted to get home before the holiday traffic became too congested. Segars remembered that they had made plans to spend part of New Year's Day together, but he didn't hear from Emerson. He texted her twice that morning to remind her. He didn't receive an answer. At about 10:00
A.M
., Emerson, whom Segars referred to as his “best friend and girlfriend,” telephoned him to say that she had just awakened and had to take Ella for a walk.

Segars thought that Emerson didn't seem to care that their plans for the day were ruined because she had slept late. He said later that he was “terse and short” when he asked her to find something else to do. It was not a serious dispute, but Segars felt bad about the tone he had used with Emerson and telephoned back at about one o'clock to apologize. The call was transferred to Emerson's voice mail. Segars left a message and started to work on a bedroom that he was remodeling.

Segars tried numerous times to telephone Emerson that afternoon; each time the call was transferred directly to voice mail. None of the messages brought a response. He thought that Emerson might have turned her telephone off. Starting to be concerned, Segars went to Emerson's residence at about 7:00
P.M
. He asked Brent Seyler about Meredith's whereabouts, and was told that they hadn't seen Emerson all day. Both Steve Segars and Julia Karrenbauer were starting to feel concerned now.

On Wednesday, January 2, at ten in the morning, Emerson's boss, Chris Hendley, telephoned Karrenbauer and told her that Emerson had not come to work and had not phoned in. Karrenbauer called Segars to pass on the information, but he had already received a call from Emerson's boss to tell him the same thing. Karrenbauer told Segars that Emerson had not come home Tuesday night, nor had she telephoned. For Meredith Emerson, this was completely out of character.

The situation suddenly escalated from the category of “unusual” to “alarming.” Karrenbauer remembered that one of Emerson's friends in Colorado, where she had been visiting family over the Christmas season, had told her by telephone that Emerson said she had plans to go hiking on New Year's Day. Segars decided to start looking at some of her favorite hiking areas.

First he drove to DeSoto Falls, which was one of the areas where he and Emerson loved to hike together. He looked around the area but didn't see Emerson's car or any sign that she had recently been there. He continued driving and went to the Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trailhead, at Vogel Park, and saw Emerson's Chevrolet Caprice in the parking lot. The car was dusted with snow and there were no footprints in the fresh snow around the vehicle. It didn't look as if the car had been moved since the snow fell.

Segars ran up the trail for a short distance and shouted Emerson's name, again and again. Failing to get a response, he hurried to a small store at the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and State Highway 129. He contacted Emerson's friends by text and cell phone and told them that he had found her car at Vogel Park. Friends arrived and they began to search the trail after Segars left a “sticky” note on Emerson's car window, telling her not to leave and that he would be back.

Emerson's family was told about what had happened, and Margaret Bailey, of Athens, Georgia, who was a close family friend and Emerson's godmother, telephoned the Gwinnett County Police Department (GCPD) and spoke with Officer Jeff Legg. Legg also spoke with Emerson's mother, Susan. Both women told him that this type of behavior was “unlike” Meredith.

During her initial contact with the police, Bailey didn't know that Emerson's car had been found at Vogel Park in Union County. Bailey had also learned, for the first time, that Emerson had a boyfriend and that he and Emerson had plans to hike together on New Year's Day. Somehow, those plans had fallen through. Legg elicited additional information and filed a report that read in part:
(Bailey) also stated she was told that there was a witness in the area of Blood Mountain that saw the victim and her dog hiking in the area and also saw a male walking down the trail with some sort of police baton. During the search effort, the baton and some of the victim's belongings were located but the victim and the victim's dog are still missing.

No one, at the time, knew who this witness was.

Legg completed a form for missing persons and entered it into the Georgia Crime Information Center/National Crime Information Center (GCIC/NCIC) database and the information was immediately available to police officers throughout the United States. Meredith Emerson officially became a missing person at 11:37
A.M
. on Wednesday, July 2, 2008. It would not be long before she was classified as an endangered kidnapping victim.

Emerson's friends, volunteers, Union County sheriff's deputies, Dawsonville police officers, fire and rescue personnel, and national and state forest rangers poured into Vogel Park. They faced the daunting task of combing thousands of acres where Emerson could be lying injured—or worse. Vogel Park was part of Dawson Forest, which included thousands of heavily wooded acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Appalachian Trail, one of the longest and most scenic hiking trails in the world, stretched through it, running 2,160 miles from Mount Katahdin, Maine, to Springer Mountain in Georgia. Dedicated hikers sometimes took a lifetime to walk various parts of the scenic trail, until they traversed the full distance, following blazed trees that served as markers along the way.

Dawson Forest itself was huge and had trails that were suitable for biking, horseback riding, and single-file walking. People came to the Edge of the World Falls; they canoed, fished, hunted, camped, and studied endangered land and water species. In 1956, ten thousand acres had been used for military research by Lockheed's Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory (GNAL) to try and develop a nuclear-powered warplane. Lockheed decommissioned the facility in 1971 and sold the property to the city of Atlanta.

Vogel Park, located near Dawsonville, was just more than thirty miles from Duluth, where Karrenbauer and Emerson lived. Had Emerson intended to hike up Blood Mountain with Ella and return straight home, she would have arrived home not long after dark on New Year's Day. She had climbed to the summit of the 4,458-foot-high mountain on many occasions and was familiar with the terrain. The origin of Blood Mountain's name was disputed. Some say it came about because of the color of the lichen and Catawba rhododendron that grow near the summit. Others claim the mountain was named for a fierce and bloody battle in the late 1600s between the Cherokee and Creek Indians near Slaughter Gap, when the two tribes were fighting for dominance. The Cherokees won the skirmish, and a tremendous amount of Native Americans died in the fight.

Hiking isn't without danger, and hiking solo poses even more hazards. You could slip, fall off a trail into a ravine, and be knocked unconscious. Nobody would be around to notice. You could be hurt during an encounter with a wild animal. Even in a park that is marked well, a hiker can wander off the trail and get lost. There is the danger of sudden extreme changes in the weather, especially in higher elevations, and dehydration is something that should always be considered. Furthermore, a lonely forest, far from civilization, is also a good place for sociopaths who are looking for easy targets to rob, hurt, rape, abduct, or kill. Emerson was aware of all of these pitfalls and had taken courses in both self-defense and hiking safety.

A college graduate with a degree and work experience in public relations, Julia Karrenbauer knew the value of people who use ink by the barrel and paper by the ton, and who send television news to millions of viewers around the world. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), Karrenbauer and Steve Segars made telephone calls to dozens of friends, who agreed to meet at Vogel Park to start searching. Flyers with information and a photograph of Meredith Emerson with Ella were distributed. The GBI said Karrenbauer took a big step toward speeding the search for Emerson when she took the initiative to contact people in the media and tell them that Emerson was missing and what the circumstances were.

Time is critical in bringing an abduction case to a successful conclusion, and Emerson's friends and family had done all the things the police tell people to do in such matters. Maybe it was not too late to save Meredith Emerson.

Scores of people congregated at the entrance to Vogel Park to help search for the missing woman. Uniformed deputies from the Union County Sheriff's Office (UCSO), as well as members of the Union County Fire Department (UCFD), organized search parties. Now that Emerson's car had been found at Vogel Park, which was in Union County, the crime came under the jurisdiction of the UCSO. The Dawson County Sheriff's Office (DCSO) and Dawsonville Police Department (DPD) continued to help.

Several of Emerson's friends, who had hiked on Blood Mountain, had already started to comb the trails in search of the missing hiker. First Lieutenant Brad Niebrand, of the UCFD, found several volunteers with medical training who knew the park well. He immediately sent them out with his own men in case Emerson would need medical help when found. Deputies found Emerson's car, a 2000 white Chevrolet with the Georgia license plate number WX311S, abandoned at the Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trailhead parking area near Blairsville. Segars's “sticky note” was still attached to the driver's-side window. The area was cordoned off with yellow tape with black letters that read
CRIME SCENE
to keep people away so crime scene investigation (CSI) officers would have an “uncontaminated” area in which to work their forensic wonders.

 

For a man who was trying to remain anonymous, Gary Michael Hilton might as well have been wearing neon lights for all the attention he attracted on Blood Mountain, not just on New Year's Day, but several days before. He stood out like a black spider on a white wedding cake. Deputies didn't have to wait long before finding evidence of a suspicious character on Blood Mountain the day that Meredith Emerson went missing.

Casey Smith noticed a man on Herbert Reece Trail who wore “a goofy furry hat” and had only one tooth in front. About sixty years old, the man wore a yellow wind-breaker with black patches on the elbows and black stripes on the sides. The man carried a black backpack, carried a big knife on his waist and a collapsible nightstick, which looked like a police baton, and was accompanied by a red Irish setter. The man wasn't on the trail, Smith told a deputy, but that he had actually burst unexpectedly onto the trail from a heavily wooded area. He said the man was talking to himself.

Smith said he and the man talked together for a short time before they separated. Smith and his dog went to the parking lot. Just before he drove from the lot, Smith saw the same man come out of the woods, again off trail, with his dog and get inside a “dingy” white Astro van. The time was about five o'clock in the evening when Smith left. The unidentified man in the van was still in the parking lot.

Liz Porterwood and her husband, Randy, also remembered encountering a man on Blood Mountain on New Year's Day. Although the man looked scruffy and was missing at least two front teeth, Liz Porterwood described him as being “nice.” Like the man Smith saw, the person with whom the Porterwoods talked wore a yellow wind-breaker with yellow stripes and elbow patches. Even though he wore a fleece hat, the flaps were tied up, so they could tell he was balding and what little hair he had was gray, as was his beard. Liz Porterwood noticed that his skin was weathered and that he had numerous age spots on his skin. There were duct tape patches on the toes of both shoes. There was a scar above his upper lip, Porterwood said, and he had “really clear blue eyes.”

The man said he hiked almost every day.

“Oh, you must live around here,” Liz Porterwood had said.

The man didn't respond. Instead, he began to criticize other hikers for being ill prepared to hike the mountains and complained that the rescue personnel were “fat and lazy.”

“I only packed for one day and I still didn't pack enough,” he told Liz. He reached back and squeezed his partially filled backpack. “People aren't prepared enough. If anyone ever had a broken leg or any other trouble, they might not last through the night because of the weather. It gets down to forty degrees at night, even during the summer.”

The man told Liz Porterwood that he had found a man with a broken shinbone who was being helped by a young firefighter, who was making little progress until Hilton stepped in to help.

“They send the young, inexperienced ones up because most of the ones who have experience are too fat to climb the mountain,” he said.

The UCSO moved a mobile command post into Vogel Park to coordinate the search. They used a Global Positioning System (GPS) to divide the mountain into quadrants so that not one inch would be overlooked. Infrared heat-sensing devices, which can detect a person at night and in densely wooded areas, were used in the attempt to find Emerson. Helicopters patrolled the rivers, creeks, and lakes, where the lack of foliage allowed spotters to search from the air. The army of searchers came up empty.