Dunlap Cheryl - At the Hands of a Stranger

On New Years Day, 2008, the killer watched a young woman with shoulder-length blond hair as he waited for a chance to strike. It was a cold day on Blood Mountain in Georgias Vogel State Park; the temperature was just above freezing, in the crisp afternoon light. The woman was accompanied by a mixed-breed black dog, which seemed to be part Labrador retriever. His own dog was a red Irish setter named Dandy, and the canine had not had a bath or brushing in a long time.

The killer had come to Blood Mountain two or three days beforehe had lost track of timebecause it was a good place to hunt women. He considered himself to be a professional soldier who was always on combat maneuvers; he used his training and keen powers of observation to scrutinize his surroundings in detail. He was always on high alert. The womans unleashed dog was of no concern to him, because he had been attacked by canines many times in the past. Usually, it was the other way around: He attacked dogs when he disapproved of their behavior. The dogs didnt have a chance against him. Sometimes pepper spray would be enough to chase a dog off; but if one was determined, he always had his butcher knife, bayonet, and a collapsible police-style baton, which snapped into a yard-long club that could crush bone.

Its easy to kill a dog, he would say, even to strangers. He boasted that for a man with his fighting skills, it was also easy to kill a human being.

Blood Mountain, about ninety miles northwest of Atlanta, was an ideal setting for the killer. It rises 4,458 feet into the air and is thick with trees and hiking trails so narrow that in some parts two hikers cant walk side by side. There were still smudges of gold, brown, and red on the poplar, birch, oak, and maple treesalthough the height of the color season had passed and most of the deciduous leaves were on the ground. During the peak of autumn, Blood Mountain trails were thick with hikers who wanted to walk among this splendid beauty.

With the colorful foliage almost gone, there were fewer hikers than usual, but that suited the killers purpose. The less populated the trails, the better his chances were of not being seen by someone who could identify him later. He wasnt famous yet, except in his own mind, but it seemed to him that he attracted attention like the Lone Ranger, who wore a skintight outfit, a fancy two-gun holster rig, and rode a palomino. That was all staging and show business designed to draw attention so that when people asked, Who was that masked man? everyone knew that it was the Lone Ranger. None of that shit for him. Once he drew attention to himself, and his picture was published in a newspaper, he was done for; and he had already been screwed, blued, and tattooed by society in every way imaginable.

People invariably remembered him because of his brightly colored, expensive hiking clothes, a weird demeanor, scary appearance, and general attitude of menace.

Im the fucking Lone Ranger, he sometimes told people to describe the attention he generated.

The killer was Gary Michael Hilton, a former paratrooper and career criminal, who had been hiking and running for years along the Appalachian Trail and in remote mountain forests of the Northwest region of the United States. Except for a two-year enlistment as a U.S. Army paratrooper, Hilton had been a drifter most of his life. He had chosen to become homeless about fourteen years earlier. At five feet ten inches tall and 160 pounds, Hilton was lean and strong, with whipcord muscles connecting tendons like steel cable beneath his weathered brown skin.

Although only a fringe of gray hair formed a horseshoe on his head, he was tougher than a pine knot and could run through the mountains for hours and walk all day and all night toting a seventy-pound backpack. No one had better mess with him, and people seldom did because he looked mean. A former roommate had described Hilton as being a sociopath with a mean streak. He was insulted at first, but then he realized it was trueand he liked it. He was mean and he knew it. The unkempt gray goatee on Hiltons face and lack of all but one jagged, brown front tooth accented his menacing appearance: when he smiled, there was only a black hole with the jagged tooth between his lips. Hilton had pulled most of his teeth out with a pair of pliers rather than get dental care. It was something else he bragged about. Hilton was also a sociopathand he knew that, too. This self-awareness made him superior to other people who were also mean and sociopathic, but were unable to recognize it in themselves.

He had told an acquaintance that he had no conscience and felt sorry for people who did, because having one made life too complicated.

The woman he had decided to hunt today was Meredith Emerson, a twenty-four-year-old graduate of the University of Georgia, who was employed in an executive-training position by an Atlanta company that sold shipping boxes in bulk. An avid hiker and outdoorswoman, Emerson started to walk up a feeder trail with her dog frolicking around her, but she almost immediately met another couple coming from the other direction with their dog on a leash. They stopped and Hilton watched as they took turns petting the dogs and chatting. People with dogs were the easiest targets, he believed, because they were more likely to be approachable. All you had to do was start talking about what a good-looking dog they had blah, blah, blah and they became instant buddies. This was something he had learned during the forty years that he had been on perpetual combat control.

Hiltons money supply had dwindled to forty dollars. He figured he had to spend at least thirty dollars to put gasoline in his filthy, dilapidated 1996 Chevrolet Astro van. The vehicle, which he called home, had been running on fumes. He was hungry, and he needed more money; that was why he had driven to Blood Mountain. Although it was against park rules to camp in the parking lot, Hilton had managed to get away with it for the past two or three nights by unloading his equipment after sundown and long before sunrise. At these times it was too late or too early for anyone to be at the park. It was another carefully thought-out tactical maneuver, and he enjoyed his clever deceit.

The van was dented and rusty, muddy, filled with empty food cans, rotten fruit peelings and cores, and cargo bags filled with camping gear. The back door was held on with bungee cords, because the hinges were broken. It attracted as much attention as Hilton did. The camper was careful to move the van to a new spot every day and park in the space that was in an out-of-the-way spot, to lessen the chances of the van being noticed by others walking to the Blood Mountain hiking area.

Although Hilton had been homeless for the past decade, he still needed money to eat and buy incidentals. Any kind of work, of course, was beneath his status as a perpetual soldier and professional criminal, and he wouldnt be caught dead in some of the cheap, inadequate hiking gear that others wore. He wore the best microfiber clothing that was available, and that was one of the reasons people noticed him. Anyone seeing him today, he knew, would remember the bright yellow jacket, with the black stripes and patches on the elbows, and the black backpack that he carried, and they would wonder how such a dirty, strange, unkempt man could afford such expensive clothing. It was seldom that anyone asked about the clothing; but if they did, Hilton told them that he had a marketing arrangement with the manufacturers. Or he would freak them out with a glare and say, Because Im Microfiber Man. He never revealed how he really got the clothing. The hiking clothes and gear were the best money could buy, and the clothing drew attention to him, but that was the risk he had to take for being a professional.