willie is going away for life, he s leaving corrections. why does florida need to go to the expense of a capital murder trial? my belief is this is an evil, bad person, and there ought to be a consequence in life to evil acts. i don t think murderers ought to be cheaper the more you do. with the dunlap case looking like a carbon copy of the meredith emerson murder, you might think the case would be a gimmee for the prosecutors. but far from it. they would not be allowed to introduce hilton s conviction in the emerson murder despite its similarity to cheryls. nor his connection with that horror movie deadly run or the fact he was the prime suspect in the murders of two elderly hikers in north carolina. florida department of law enforcement special agent annie white was part of the team charged with making the case. months earlier, the cops had developed a partial chronology for cheryl dunlap on the saturday she vanished. we started receiving calls. people saying, we saw her at w
mr. hilton, before he had killed miss emerson and been caught, our analysts in our lab showed us, this is the style, this is what the knife is going to look like. cameras and memory cards were found inside the van. the techy detectives in the fdle computer lab were working overtime trying to unscramble deleted material from the evidence. and deep in their dna lab, more than 700 samples were being analyzed in an attempt to find some link between gary hilton and the late cheryl dunlap. had gary hilton managed to outsmart them all? would florida be able to make the case against him? three years after cheryl dunlap s death, it was finally going to trial. coming up. your palms are sweaty and your heart is beating. the dramatic case begins. how would it end? you could just see the jurors, saw it in their eyes, they knew. when mystery on blood mountain continues.
bayonet had slashed cheryl dunlap s tire. and that was it for the defense. gary hilton declined to take the stand. do you wish to testify? no. one in 63 million in her closing argument, the prosecutor reminded the jury of those big number dna matches. what are the odds that somebody else s dna is on that sleeping bag other than cheryl dunlap? one in 11 trillion caucasians. inez suber s close for the defense was far more limited than her witness list might have suggested. we have absolutely no evidence, no direct evidence that mr. hilton committed murder. the jurors began their deliberations. cap l man and her boss waited for them to return their verdict. you ve done a lot of trials. is this just another day at the office? no. oh, no, it s never. when you re waiting for a verdict, your palms are sweaty and your heart is beating and you re very nervous.
so we started backtracking those just trying to get the time line. the investigators knew that cheryl s morning had included some shopping in tallahassee, cashing a check at the bank, and using a library computer to send some e-mail to her son in the army. they even had a last sighting. witnesses identified cheryl as the woman peacefully reading a book here at a popular pot called leon sinks in the national forest. the couple that saw her at the sinks hole was adamant that was her. but the trail had gone cold at the tallahassee atm where a disguised man used the cards. the look out for gary hilton during the meredith investigation had the phones in florida lighting up again. when he started hitting the news media, our citizens here started seeing him and immediately recognized him. and started calling. and that tip line kept ringing. one caller remembered an odd guy
with a handsome red dog. that sighting led investigators down another national forest path and to another discovery. more remains. he was positive it was mr. hilton, described the dog, the van, and so that was one of the camps where the bones were found. deep in the national forest, five miles from where cheryl dunlap s torso had been found, investigators came upon a charred piece of skull and the bony fragments of a human hand in the ashes of a camp fire. they were badly burned. fire pit kind of thing? aes yes, sir. he had done a good job of covering it up as well. he covered up straw, measures to hide his tracks. the fire had been so thorough it was impossible to stralextraa from the bones. who had killed cheryl dunlap had gone to extraordinary lengths to eliminate physical evidence. there was one thing about