Gary Michael Hilton was born in 1946 and spent most of his adult life moving around the southern Appalachians in a white van with a dog, camping in national forest shelters, working intermittently and being asked to move on.
He was known. Hikers wrote about him in online trail journals: a man with a white van and a dog who walked alongside people to establish whether they were alone, who made everybody uncomfortable, who followed cars from lookouts and drove aggressively to keep up with them. He occupied one shelter on a two-weeks-on, one-day-off cycle so that he never breached the limit, and refused to let other campers use it. Rangers and police were told repeatedly. In October 2007 a deputy evicting him from a private hunting preserve recorded the exchange on a dashboard camera. Nothing followed from any of it.
In October 2007 he killed John and Irene Bryant, an elderly couple hiking in the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina. In December 2007 he killed Cheryl Dunlap, a Sunday school teacher, in the Apalachicola National Forest in Florida. On January 1, 2008, he met Meredith Emerson, twenty-four, walking her dog on Blood Mountain in Georgia.
The others named in the record are Rossana Miliani, twenty-six; Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, forty-six; and Michael Scot Louis, twenty-seven.
Emerson fought him. She knew martial arts, grabbed the blade of his knife, and knocked both his weapons out of his hands before he overpowered her. He kept her alive for three days, driving around north Georgia, and she kept him alive too by repeatedly giving him the wrong PIN for her bank card, which put him on camera at cash machines and in a Waffle House and gave investigators the trail. He killed her on January 4.
He pleaded guilty in Georgia in exchange for life without parole and telling police where her body was. He was convicted in Florida in 2011 of Cheryl Dunlap's murder and sentenced to death, and pleaded guilty in North Carolina in 2012 to the Bryants. He is on Florida's death row.