On New Year's Day 2008, Meredith Hope Emerson, twenty-four, a sales manager, set out along the Freeman Trail on Blood Mountain in north Georgia with her black Labrador, Ella. Hikers later remembered an older man with a dog following her. On January 3 the police found her car, a 1995 Chevrolet Cavalier, with her water bottle, a leash and a police baton inside, and that day they identified the man on the trail as Gary Michael Hilton, sixty-one, a drifter known locally for strange behavior and a vicious temper who walked a golden retriever named Dandy there. Ella turned up wandering in a Kroger parking lot. On January 5 her bloodied clothes, wallet, driver's license, university ID card and a bloodstained seat belt were found in a dumpster near a QuikTrip in Cumming. Five hours later, acting on two anonymous calls saying he was vacuuming out his van, the police arrested him. His van, a 2001 Chevrolet Astro, was missing its rear seat belt.
Hilton was born on November 22, 1946. He had held Meredith Emerson for days to get her bank cards and PIN and had beaten her to death with a tire iron. In exchange for the state dropping the death penalty, and a promise that Dandy would be placed in a good home, he led investigators to her body in the Dawson Forest Management Area. She had been decapitated after death to prevent identification. He pleaded guilty to her murder and was sentenced to life, with the possibility of parole after thirty years.
By then two other cases were waiting for him. On October 21, 2007, John Davis Bryant, called Jack, eighty, and his wife, Irene Woods Bryant, eighty-four, retired hikers from Horse Shoe, North Carolina, left their car on Yellow Gap Road for a walk in the Pisgah National Forest. John tried to call 911 that day, and the call dropped. Irene's body was found under leaves on the Barnett Branch trail on November 10; she had been bludgeoned. Their bank card was used to take three hundred dollars from an ATM in Ducktown, Tennessee, by an older white man in a yellow rain jacket with the hood up. A hunter found John's skull in the Nantahala National Forest on February 3, 2008. Hilton later said he had killed Irene on the spot and taken John away to get his bank details, then shot him in the head with a .22 Magnum.
On December 3, 2007, Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, forty-six, of Crawfordville, Florida, failed to appear to teach Sunday school at her church in Tallahassee. Her white Toyota Camry was found abandoned, and a hunter came upon her decapitated body in the Apalachicola National Forest on December 16. Someone had used her ATM card five times in Tallahassee to take seven hundred dollars. Prosecutors said Hilton had taken her from the Leon Sinks Geological Area, held her for two days, killed her, and burned her head and hands in a fire pit. His lawyers argued there was no forensic evidence against him; the state played a tape in which he spoke of getting rid of her body. After four hours the jury convicted him on three of four counts and recommended death, and on February 22, 2011, he was sentenced to die. In 2012 he pleaded guilty to the Bryant murders and received a further life term. In an April 2025 television interview he admitted killing Dunlap, saying he had told her he was letting her go and then shot her in the back of the head.
FBI profilers and investigators from across the country came to interview him, and criminologists doubted that a man had begun killing in his sixties. He remains a suspect in several other deaths: Judy Smith, fifty-one, whose bones were found in the Pisgah National Forest in 1997; Jason Knapp, a Clemson student whose car was left at Table Rock State Park in 1998, a case he has denied; Patrice Endres, taken from her salon in Cumming in 2004; Rossana Miliani, twenty-six, last seen setting off for the Appalachian Trail in December 2005; and Michael Scot Louis, twenty-seven, whose remains were found in the Tomoka River in December 2007, a case in which the authorities say he is not the only suspect. None of them has been charged to him.