decide if they should recommend hilton spend life in prison or be put to death by lethal injection. their life or death debate lasted an hour 20 minutes. the majority of the jury by a vote of 12-0 advise and recommend to the court that it impose the death penalty on gary michael hilton. hilton sat expressionless as the results were read. two weeks later, an equally emotionless hilton listened as the judge pronounced his sentence. it is ordered and adjudged that you gary michael hilton be sentenced to death for the murder of sheryl dunlap. may god have mercy on your soul. in april, gary michael hilton was sent to florida s death row for the murder of dunlap. last month he was shackled and sent to north carolina and indicted in federal court there for the murders of john and irene bryant.
and my family. what can you say to someone who would murder two wonderful people for $300 and meredith emerson, a beautiful young lady and sheryl dunlap and very possibly many more? the man is not even what i think of as human. he is something else, a true psychopath who needs to be put where he can never harm anyone else again. for sheryl dunlap s friends and family in florida, hilton s conviction provoked conflicting feelings. and think, believe it or not, that sheryl would want us to forgive. and when i went into the courtroom and i actually saw him, my thought was not that they put him to death or this or that. i was glad he was off the street.
when the prosecutor present ared the da evidence and the sleeping bag with sheryl dunlap s blood on it and gary michael hilton s blood on it, you could just see the jurors, for them, you saw it in their eyes. they knew. and with that, after six days of testimony, the prosecution rested. now the defense, holding a very poor hand, would have to fight for gary hilton s life. seresto, seresto, seresto.
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. little camp fire pit kind of thing? yes. he had actually done a pretty good job of covering it p up. he had covered it up with straw and took measures to hide his tracks. the fire had been so thorough it was impossible to extract da from the dons. whoever killed sheryl dunlap had gone to extraordinary lengths to eliminate any physical evidence. there was one thing about tracking the odd guy with the there was one thing about tracking the odd guy with the red dog that they had going for them. state s assistant prosecutor. fortunately for the investigation, if somebody saw gary michael hilton they
be cheaper the more you do with the dunlap case looking like a carbon copy of the meredith emor son murder, you may think it would be a gimme. far from it. they could not enter the evidence about the erm son murder or the movie deadly run or that he was the prime suspect in the murders of an elderly couple in north carolina. annie white was part of the team charged with making the case. months earlier, the cops had developed a partial chronology for sheryl dunlap on the saturday she vanished. we started receiving calls, we saw her at walmart, saw her here. we started backtracking those to try to get the time line. the investigators knew that sheryl s morning had included shopping in tal it hass see, cashing a check at a bank and using a library computer to send an e-mail to had her son in the army. they even had a last sighting. witnesses identified sheryl as the woman peacefully reading a book at this popular spot in the national forest.