he knew to come and show up? it was certainly my objective to get him to a place where authorities could apprehend him. the trap was set at a building owned by tabor where hilton had lived for a while. the s.w.a.t. team was dispatched. would hilton fall for the pick up some money ruse? and what about the missing woman? in your gut, did you think meredith was still alive? meredith s name was meredith hope emerson. we all hoped she was alive. but, you know, the longer these things carry on, as time passes, you continue to hope but it diminishes after time. as the manhunt continued, there was a glimmer of hope. january 4th, 2008, four days after meredith vanished, the u.s. marshals service traced activity on meredith s bank cards. the card was used at a local bank 15 miles from the abduction site, and then again 50 miles south of the abduction site.
thought, that has to be gary hilton. hilton was a guy who worked on and off for him for years, first as a telemarketer, and then as an independent contractor in a siding business. he even lived for a while in this house taibor owned. what was the thought that s taking shape? the first thing that got my attention is where the event happened, where she went missing, blood mountain. i knew that was a place he liked to hang out, that he had a dog with him. and most importantly was the evidence that they had found at the scene. i knew hilton always had an expandible police baton with him. the tip and a name quickly led to a georgia driver s license for 61-year-old gary michael hilton. investigators showed the photo to hikers who i.d. d him as the scruffy mystery man meredith was seen on blood mountain. the manhunt was on. we put the face out. it s plastered all over the atlanta metro area.
police were looking for a man named gary hilton in connection with the disappearance of meredith. here again is dennis murphy. on blood mountain, there was still no trace of meredith emerson. her friend julia and the other searchers found no news to be good news. i think it might be a good thing, that she might be somewhere warm with her dog, you know, and somebody might just have her. or something like that. kind of makes me feel a little better knowing that we haven t found anything here yet. while hundreds of volunteers and deputies scoured the forest for clues, detectives were trying to get it a handle on gary are hilton, the suspect in her disappearance and who was by now a person of interest in at least two murders. john tabor, hilton s former boss, gave investigators what information he had on his eccentric loner employee. tabor had known him for nearly a decade. the only interests he had in life seemed to be his dog and
arts skills, as he tells it, very nearly got the better of him. first she disarmed him, taking away his knife and then his police baton. i lost control of both of them, both the knife and the bat. she s real quick with her hands and had no hesitation about grabbing weapons and everything. and not only that, she was hard to subdue. she fought like hill, man. hilton said they scrapped so hard they tumbled off the trail. separated by a few yards now from that dropped police baton and meredith s water bottle, the dog s leash, objects importantly soon to be recovered. meredith, meanwhile, kept right on hilton. she started fighting again. i had to fight her again 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. you talks about fighting with meredith. yep. that she almost took him. i don t
that was it, huh? yeah. the awareness was there. it was surreal, the thing you hear about in movies. it it was so close to home that in our small community that something like this could happen. now, with cops in florida looking hard at gary hilton in the dunlap murder, and counterparts in georgia convinced that he had taken meredith emerson, authorities started hearing about yet another national forest homicide, this one in north carolina. so then you ve got to be saying to your team of investigators, what do we have here? that s right. now we re wondering who we really have here and where is he. and, more importantly, where s meredith? coming up do we have a killer running around loose in the national forest? concern for meredith deepens, but her friends know something that man on the mountain couldn t. a blue belt in akeyed doe and