Gary Hilton : The National Forest Killer

the united states has 154 protected areas that are designated as national forests in 1891 yellowstone park timber and land reserve became the first national forest in the u.s and that number quickly grew due to president theodore roosevelt's love of nature by 2014 the national forest service managed more than 193 million acres or 762 000 square kilometers of land these protected areas helped maintain biodiversity and preserve the various unique ecosystems they also give people a plethora of outdoor activities like hunting fishing camping and hiking many people travel from the city to a national forest to enjoy the outdoors relax and de-stress which is why 170 million people visit national forests each year gary hilton believed that society was causing all of his problems and he wanted to live life in solitude in the forest with his dog unfortunately he wasn't able to sustain that lifestyle financially and decided that he would just steal that money from other people who were taking advantage of the national forests he would wait for them to enter the woods and make sure they were never seen again this is monsters [Music] [Applause] [Music] meredith emerson loved going on long hikes in the mountains she took her dog ella to vogel state park to hike up blood mountain it was a popular place to hike so seeing other people on the trail wasn't unusual she chatted with two other hikers for a while before they separated when the trail split it wasn't long before a man appeared behind her with his own dog and asked her what her dog's name was she told him and they chatted for a while about other hiking destinations before the man said goodbye and stopped for a break meredith reached the summit and took a minute to rest and drink some water she gave ella some water and then the two headed back down the trail towards the parking lot when she got to the point where she had separated from the man with the dog she was startled as he jumped out of the woods holding a bayonet and demanding her credit cards and pin meredith may have been startled but she wasn't afraid she had trained in both judo and aikido and she wasn't about to hand over anything to this predator she immediately moved forward and tried to grab the bayonet but missed she followed it up with a kick that did knock the weapon out of his hand the man pulled a retractable baton from his belt but meredith dodged the attack and punched the man right in the face causing him to drop the baton the young woman hit the man with everything she had but he was able to grab a tree branch and hit her directly in the face breaking her nose and disorienting her she finally succumbed to her attacker gary hilton was born on november 22 1946 in atlanta georgia william and cleo hilton had only lived together for three months after getting married in 1945 but it was enough time for cleo to get pregnant william was in the army medical corps so he spent most of his time in germany and when he returned she only saw him on weekends she wasn't entirely sure where he went during the week so she hired an attorney who had a private investigator track him down it was finally revealed that william had four wives in four different towns by the time gary was two years old cleo filed for an annulment and since her marriage was never legal in the first place it was granted cleo removed william from her and gary's lives and moved on cleo worked for a venetian blinds manufacturer that sold products in multiple states she took gary with her for a while but when they moved down to tampa florida she put him in daycare at the boys club of america there gary did well playing with other kids and he joined their rifle club he would go on to win multiple marksmanship awards in the program as a child gary showed all the signs of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder adhd though it wouldn't become commonly diagnosed amongst children until the 1990s it had been discovered as early as 1902 of course in the 50s it wasn't something that doctors would identify and treat so gary was left to struggle in school he couldn't keep his attention focused on one thing had trouble waiting his turn and was impulsive gary's adhd is clearly visible in his interrogation video it's four and a half hours long and there's maybe a collective 45 minutes where he actually talks about his crimes the rest of it is solid talking by gary about anything and everything else converted to energy it'll it'll make it a good nuclear reaction of the more heavy and complex elements that it's converted to helium into which means it'll expand on again you have your family you have your activities you have your your work you have your church what you're doing is running from existential anxiety this was in 79 and that's just when there's big real estate inflation [ __ ] now that those real estate that inflation of the late 70s and guess what he's got a cycle of 600 000 years and guess what it's been 630 thousand years since his life that they could pop off any minute now see what i mean i watched that whole thing and if i had hair i would have pulled it all out in the course of that interrogation in 1953 when gary was eight years old cleo met and married a man named denilo de bag who owned and trained race horses gary loved animals and would go with nilo early in the mornings to help with the horses and then turn around and go straight to school despite this nyla was old school argentinian and very strict with his stepson even suggesting at 10 years old that he quit school and get a job he and cleo separated seven times during their marriage but would always get back together this unstable relationship with the only father figure he had ever had didn't help gary at all by the time gary was 13 years old he had had enough of nilo's verbal abuse he was a skilled marksman and decided he was going to use that skill to end his stepfather's life in 1959 gary shot nilo but he didn't kill him nilo survived but he didn't press charges so gary went mostly unpunished instead of a juvenile prison he was sent to a psychiatric facility for a few months before he was released nobody seemed to think that a 13 year old attempting to murder their stepfather might be a sign of what may come his mother on the other hand was not willing to forgive her son so easily and she refused to let him come home gary was placed in a foster home for a few months while nyla recovered and cleo found a way to forgive him by the fall of 1959 gary was back home and he was about to enter junior high school when gary was 15 years old his mother asked some friends if they would take care of him she had grown tired of him and nilo not getting along and apparently picked her husband over her son so gary lived with the couple for two years during that time gary played drums in a band and began focusing his energy on becoming a professional musician after two years gary was sent back to live with his mother and he soon dropped out of school to take a job playing drums at a local club he was only 17 and when the club found out he was quickly fired with no other prospects gary enlisted in the army in 1963 he did well in basic training and qualified to start training to become a paratrooper excessive alcohol consumption negatively affected his performance and he washed out of the airborne program afterward he was stationed in germany where he got his ged instead of heading to vietnam like most people enlisted in the army at the time gary was accepted into what was called the davy crockett platoon the davy crockett was an ill-devised nuclear weapon that would be fired from one of two tripod launchers giving it a range of one and a quarter to two and a half miles or two to four kilometers testing showed that the weapon was not that accurate and the short range made it incredibly dangerous to the three man crew who would be manning it depending on the range in the wind patterns the crew could easily be killed by the blast or a lethal dose of radiation the platoon was supposed to use the davy crocket against the soviets if they entered germany fortunately the program was phased out in 1967 but gary wouldn't make it in the platoon that long gary claimed to be hearing voices and was sent to a psychiatric hospital where they believed he had a schizophrenic break they prescribed him thorazine a common medication for treating schizophrenia and gave him an honorable discharge from the army gary had met a woman named ursula in germany and married her before returning to the u.s back in florida he worked and went to school eventually getting a pilot's license and an associate's degree though it didn't seem he used either of them it wasn't long before ursula left him for another man and the two got a divorce his mother and nilo moved to argentina and with nothing keeping him in florida gary moved to georgia and got married again this time they were divorced after only 10 months gary had gotten into telemarketing and appeared to be good at it after a while he started his own company though not as a legitimate telemarketer he would call people and claim to be raising money for a charity he found a list of charitable organizations from the better business bureau and would claim to be from the georgia inspector general's office the southwest regional council or the georgia christian index he would ask people for donations and then would schedule a time to pick it up keeping all the money for himself gary married his third wife diana on march 1 1979. she was a divorced mother of two who loved running that's how she met gary running at stone mountain park outside of atlanta gary was doing well enough with his phone scams that he told diana she should quit her job and work for him he told her he was in advertising she worked part-time going around and picking up checks from people who thought they were donating to charity after a few years though she figured out what he was doing and things soured they separated but before they divorced gary was arrested for fraudulent telephone solicitation he pleaded down to a misdemeanor and was given probation he and diana sold their house and went their separate ways but due to his probation gary had to get a real job he got a job selling industrial chemicals over the phone for six months and once the authorities were off his back he went back to scamming people over the phone around this time gary also met film producer charles samuel real and helped develop the 1995 straight to video movie deadly run you won't find his name in the credits but the producer talks about the process in an interview gary came up with the idea of a wealthy man who brings women out into the woods to hunt them like animals it has a whopping 3.3 out of 10 stars on imdb and stars danny fendley who you probably don't know from such hits as demolition highway i surrender all and sandtown knowing what we know of gary hilton now this plot is not surprising though the video isn't remembered to be a big hit making straight to video movies could have been a good way for gary to make an honest living instead he began working for a man named john tabor selling siding while there he got a doctor to prescribe him ritalin which he began popping like speed this life sustained gary for the next 10 years though he would become angry and violent he scared jon a few times which led to gary leaving his employ in 2007 gary made the decision to take his dog dandy and travel around in a chevy astrovan kidnapping hikers and using atms to drain their bank accounts then he would kill them to leave no witnesses john and irene bryant had been married for 55 years and loved to go hiking on october 21 2007 they drove their red ford escape from their home in horseshoe north carolina 22 miles up highway 276 to pisgah national forest they parked near the pink beds trail loop area and set off for their hike somewhere in the forest they ran into gary and it's not clear exactly what happened but they must have not cooperated when gary demanded their credit cards and pin and irene tried to call 9-1-1 but was unsuccessful irene was killed there before gary kidnapped john gary likely kept jon while he went to an atm 75 miles away in ducktown tennessee and withdrew 300 then he took john out to the nantahala national forest and shot him in the head with a 22 caliber handgun he dumped his body in a ravine bob bryant was john and irene's son and after not being able to contact his parents in weeks he flew from his home in texas to north carolina to check on them at their home nothing was out of place it was as if they just disappeared he contacted the police and a search began soon they found their fort escape near the pink beds trail loop and a search team with dogs began covering the trail but it took three days to find irene's body during that time investigators found that her cell phone had dialed 9-1-1 on october 21st but she didn't seem to have enough signal in the call dropped then their bank records revealed the atm withdrawal two days later they checked the security footage but all they could see was a white male with a yellow jacket obscuring his face on november 9th the search team found irene's body in the woods the medical examiner determined that she had died from blunt force trauma to the head she had suffered multiple skull fractures from something like a hammer or a tire iron and her left forearm was fractured along with that all of the fingers on her left hand were broken which made it look as though she had put her arm up in a defensive position her right arm below the elbow was missing and it couldn't be determined if it was severed intentionally or if it was from animal activity john's body was not found in the same area so authorities believed he must have been abducted in order to get money for the attacker they could only hope that he was still alive but with nothing more to go on finding him seemed unlikely forty-six-year-old cheryl dunlap was a divorced mother of two adult sons she was a full-time registered nurse at that student health center at florida state university who also sang in her church choir and taught sunday school and bible school with all that going on she had very few days off and when she did she made the most of it on december 1st 2007 she got into her white toyota camry and went into crawfordville just south of tallahassee florida she ran some errands in town before driving to tallahassee and stopping at the library once finished at the library cheryl stopped at a target retailer where she ran into an old colleague she had worked with years earlier when she was done at target she got back into her car and drove towards her home at 3 30 pm highway patrol officer jack miller saw a white camry parked off the side of the highway facing south like it had been heading into crawfordville he pulled over to check it out and there was nobody in the car he waited for a few minutes but assumed that someone had car trouble and walked into town so he shrugged it off and went on his way at six o'clock that evening a different highway patrol officer trooper brett colt saw the same car parked in the same area again he didn't think it was entirely suspicious but it was getting late so he made a mental note to swing back by and check on the vehicle in a few hours at 11 o'clock trooper colt came back and when he saw the car still there he got out and took a closer look he saw that one of the rear tires was flat and assumed the person was going to come back with help so he continued on his patrol the next day wacola county sheriff's deputy frank wagner saw the car and ran the plates it came back as registered to cheryl dunlap and she had a clean record and the car had not been reported stolen so he red tagged the car officially labeling it as abandoned later that morning when cheryl didn't show up to teach sunday school one of her friends from church tried to call her but got no answer eventually cheryl's friend brittany found out she was missing and went to her home to check on her monday morning december 3rd when she got no answer she looked in a window and saw cheryl's dog buddy but cheryl was nowhere to be found brittany called the sheriff's office and reported cheryl missing detective doug chapman took down the information and called cheryl's employer to see if she had shown up for work she hadn't and she hadn't called in something he was told was unusual for cheryl so he opened a missing person's case once detective chapman found the report of the abandoned vehicle he saw that it was actually just over the border in the next county so detectives there began working on the case as well now cheryl had two sheriff's departments investigating her disappearance they photographed her car and dusted it for prince unfortunately it had been raining while the car sat on the side of the road which might have washed away any usable prints inside the car though they found a number of cards from the same man expressing his love for cheryl did she have a stalker they wondered the next day they were informed that someone used cheryl's atm card to make multiple withdrawals from a nearby bank they went to the bank and watched the surveillance footage the man had used white surgical tape and wrapped it around his face to disguise himself the other times he made withdrawals he was wearing different clothes but the same makeshift mask the videos were of no help identifying where cheryl was or who had taken her her sons were interviewed and they didn't know of anyone who would want to harm their mother investigators asked who the man was who sent her the cards and they were told he was a man she had dated two years prior but they didn't think he was dangerous and they were right the man who sent the cards professing his love was persistent but he hadn't taken cheryl that's because gary hilton had at some point on december 1st cheryl drove to the leon sinks geological area where she relaxed and read a book it's known that gary was in the area at the time because he had been in contact with multiple forest rangers between late november and the beginning of december it's believed that gary may have followed her from there to the target and sabotaged her tire then he followed her when she left when she was forced to pull over due to a flat tire he probably pulled up behind her and offered to help then he pulled her into his astro van when her guard was down gary had done the same thing to cheryl that he had done to jon bryant he held her captive as he used her atm card multiple times to withdraw cash totaling 700 then he drove into the apalachicola national forest south west of tallahassee where he killed her her body was discovered by a father and son who were hunting on december 15th when authorities went to take a closer look they found cheryl's body missing the head and the hands authorities searched nearby but didn't find them though they assumed the body belonged to cheryl dunlap they couldn't be sure until they compared her dna from a reference sample taken from her home in this case it would be her toothbrush gary removed her head and hands which he claimed to have burned in a campfire in order to slow her identification the dna confirmed that it was cheryl's body investigators received a few tips that pointed to a strange man with a dog in a white astro van but they were never able to piece together who it was and the case went cold meredith emerson was a 24 year old who had recently graduated from the university of georgia she had a bachelor's degree in french worked in sales and was devoted to her church oh and she had also spent the past two years studying martial arts specifically judo and aikido she had spent new year's eve with her boyfriend steve segers and watched fireworks but they went home early to beat traffic the following morning meredith slept in until about 10 am and headed to vogel state park to go on a hike with her dog ella here on the way back down from the summit she engaged gary hilton in a fight for her life didn't you say i bet that 120 pound girl almost what you're at she don't sweat my hands she damn sure did i lost control of both of them uh both the knife and the bat showed her the knots grabbed the [ __ ] it's a banana sort of dull [ __ ] anyway all it is is the spike to stick with you know it's not a slasher grab the manhattan somehow i lost control of that and it lost it period and it went down i pulled the bat deployed it grabbed that i mean it was not my finest hour it was not my i mean i'm better than that i am but i i found out she was a [ __ ] black belt kid which don't mean [ __ ] again they're styling these blacked out they're styling they're not fighters they're they're they're learning to do some little but on the other hand doing that kind of thing does uh increase your coordination your hand eye etc and it gets you more used to hand-to-hand combat as opposed to an untrained person even though they're not really fighters and she really she didn't do no [ __ ] it's just that she had no she was real quick with her hands and had no hesitation about grabbing weapons and everything and not only that she was hard to still subdue and i just felt like hell man thought and thought fought and fought and then once i gained control over and got her 10-15 feet away from the trail on that little side trail i told you about start fighting again and i had to fight her again for several minutes and her doing that is what got me caught because if i if i've been back to the crime scene uh just a few minutes sooner just several minutes sooner i would have beat those people that found the bat and i would i would have picked it up first meredith wasn't a black belt in either of the disciplines she had studied but she was advanced in both also gary was a massive narcissist who saw himself as some perfect specimen of a human being he saw himself as the only person who knew what he was doing in the wilderness and also saw himself as this highly skilled vietnam veteran paratrooper but the truth was he washed out of airborne school and though he was in the army while the vietnam war was going on he never set foot in vietnam he spent his entire life as a con man and it seemed as though the biggest victim of any of his cons was himself he wanted to claim that being trained in martial arts didn't mean [ __ ] but an opponent who was smaller than him who was not fully trained was still able to give him a decent whooping and her ability to fight him was by his own admission the reason he got caught so although those martial arts skills didn't save her own life they saved the lives of countless other people gary could have gone on to kill meredith is quite frankly a hero and gary's fragile ego can't handle it once gary finally had her down he pulled her over to a side trail that was rarely used he made a loop and a piece of rope and put it around meredith's neck like a leash and ordered her to walk toward the parking lot in front of him after a few feet the young woman had caught her breath and she suddenly stopped pivoted and attacked gary again she slammed against the man with all of her force which caused them both to tumble down a ravine gary had managed to keep a hold of the branch he was using as a weapon and though she managed to duck the first swing he caught her on the second and the third nearly knocking her out then he dragged her down the mountain and tied her to a tree where he told her that he only wanted her atm card and pin if she gave him that he wouldn't kill her then he left her there and walked back up to where they first fought so he could retrieve his baton and bayonet and her water bottle and leash by the time he got back to the spot though everything was gone another hiker must have come by obviously found it suspicious and took it they would likely be reporting it to authorities very soon gary quickly returned to the parking lot and pulled his van up next to meredith's car he used her key to open the car and retrieve her purse from underneath the seat then he put meredith in the back of his van and connected a chain around her neck locking it with a padlock the other end was locked to part of the van he had her lay down on some duffel bags and tied one of her ankles to the van with at least seven square knots he told investigators later that he knew she could untie them but it would take her time to get through all of the knots ella was running around the van whining and barking so gary put her in meredith's car and closed the door he drove away but meredith begged him not to leave ella in her car like that she could easily freeze to death gary believed that she might start fighting again if she thought her beloved dog was going to die so he turned around and retrieved ella from the chevy gary drove out of the forest and stopped at a gas station where he spent 30 of his last 45 dollars on gas then he drove to a nearby bank and dug three atm cards out of meredith spurs he went up to the atm holding a towel over his face because that's not suspicious and tried to use the pin that meredith had given him but it didn't work he went back to the van and yelled at meredith demanding the correct number but she insisted that it was the right one he tried again but it still didn't work back at the van meredith suggested he'd try a different bank so he drove to one in a different town and tried again but no luck meredith convinced him again to try a different bank so gary drove 42 miles to canton and tried again there gary was angry at the world because and this is a quote from him women wanted to turn all men into domestic [ __ ] he believed that men settling down and having families was making them no longer men and that was destroying the world but in reality it was just gary trying to overcompensate for failing to be able to do that three times he had three failed marriages but instead of taking responsibility for those failures it was society that was the problem he believed that men were only able to be controlled by women because they had the [ __ ] again his words not mine he saw himself as being the only truly free man in society who wasn't being led around by the dick but there he was driving all over the place because a woman had convinced him that he needed to go to different banks in order for her atm cards to work if he is the only free man in society then that just makes him a massive idiot he tried another bank and when that didn't work meredith admitted that she gave him a fake pin and gave him another one convincing him that she was absolutely telling the truth that time he ran back over to the atm and tried again only to have it not work he returned to the van angry at meredith for lying but also at himself for believing her it was getting dark and he didn't want to try to withdraw money at night because he said it looked suspicious weather was more suspicious than holding a towel over his face or having his face covered with medical tape i don't know but that's what he told investigators when he finally found a place to camp he raped meredith in the back of the van gary believed she owed him that for making him run around all day meredith was supposed to spend time with steve after her hike and when he didn't hear from her for a while he called her but got no answer he went to her apartment and asked if her roommate julia knew where she was but neither her nor her boyfriend had seen her since earlier that morning they were all concerned but they assumed there was a good reason for her absence on january 2nd meredith's boss called both steve and julia reporting that meredith hadn't shown up for work and that he was getting no answer from her cell phone knowing that meredith had planned to go hiking with ella on the first steve drove out to where he knew his girlfriend liked to hike he drove to de soto falls first but couldn't find any sign of her then he went to the brian herbert reese memorial trail at the base of blood mountain there he saw meredith's red chevy caprice in the parking lot he raced up the trail and looked for her but didn't find anything meredith was reported missing and soon the parking lot was filled with police and friends of meredith's sam schneck was the hiker that had picked up the items on the trail he had seen a thin man with gray hair and a beard carrying the same baton earlier on the trail and now it was laying on the ground with other belongings like an attack had happened he thought it was suspicious so he gave the items to the owner of the store at the trailhead along with his phone number in case police needed to contact him investigators talked to him and a few other hikers who had seen gary they were able to give a description and also tell them that he had an irish setter with him who they thought was named danny it was quickly determined that meredith had been kidnapped and the georgia bureau of investigation got involved they brought out dogs and helicopters to scour the area but there was no sign of meredith the same day gary tried another atm but meredith had still not given him her real pin she was buying time to be rescued and so far it was working gary became desperate and began calling past acquaintances asking for money he first called an ex-girlfriend who lived close by and asked for money but she said no and hung up then he called his old boss john tabor and asked for money john agreed to give gary money and told him he could pick it up at the office that morning john opened the newspaper and read a story about a missing young woman and the suspicious man that had been seen in the area at the time the physical description was a dead ringer for gary and they described him being with an irish setter named danny which john knew was gary's dog dandy after gary's phone call where he had let slip a few details about meredith john called the police who connected him with the gbi with the full details about who the kidnapper was authorities plastered information about gary all over the media gary hiding deep in the woods had no idea i wasn't in the paper that day i i joked about it with a girl this this is the second day or third day i i had her second or third day i've had her and she still wasn't in the paper i said you know something no one's even missed you and she said well i'd be mad if i once you let me go and i came back and my boyfriend said have you been gone she said i real we were laughing about it because nothing had appeared in the paper it was like she hadn't even i said damn before did you miss him yeah it was like the second or third day or the third day after she went missing something like that the day before she was killed okay the day before she was killed taylor had already turned me in but it hadn't hit the papers yet okay it hit the papers on friday i got that and i was on the property well i saw that article like two hours after i killed it if i had bought a paper that morning on friday instead of that afternoon she would have been alive because there they my pictures on the front page or color picture on the front page of the ajc looking for me and everything i wouldn't kill her i mean repeat no gary had begun living in a delusional world where meredith was enjoying her time with him she chatted with him most likely to humanize herself to him so it would be harder for him to kill her he saw her time with him as being some sort of fun adventure gary also claimed that if he had known that authorities knew who he was that he wouldn't have killed her he blamed john tabor for not telling him he said that if john had told him on the phone that the police knew his identity he would have let meredith go because he only killed her to try to evade arrest instead jon promised him money which was really a setup so gary thought he was in the clear and killed meredith it's always somebody else's fault on the morning of january 4th gary told meredith she was going to go home he had her tied to a tree and he went around behind her claiming that he was going to untie her instead he beat her to death from behind with a tire iron then he used a serrated kitchen knife to cut off her head he stripped off all of her clothes and threw them along with her head off of one of the trails he moved her body to the brush where it was out of sight then gary packed up and drove away leaving ella in the woods with her dead owner she would eventually wind up at a nearby store and would be identified by her microchip gary drove to a nearby shopping center in atlanta and started throwing evidence away in a dumpster at a gas station he didn't realize that there were people nearby who recognized him and his van from the description on the news people began calling 9-1-1 to report his location the person of interest in that missing woman case is at this chevron gas station on ashford dunwoody chevron gas station yeah you've got the man in there the van is here the dog is he's the red dog and i saw the man's face and i've been watching the news and i know with him i know with him he's got a green uh walking sweatshirt and he's wearing a hat and he's emptying all this stuff out of his van pillows and a blanket and it looks like he's got a sleeping bag right now okay sir and the dumpster is at the rear of the location yeah the dumpster well it's kind of right in the front it's right by the car wash okay here comes the college yes yes they got them i mean they don't have them yet but they're getting out police arrived at the scene and placed gary under arrest inside the garbage bags he had been throwing in the dumpster were clothes that had meredith's blood on them in an interrogation room at the local police station gary hinted at killing meredith then he said he wanted a lawyer after talking with a public defender he said he would confess to killing and decapitating meredith and lead them to the body in exchange for life with parole the district attorney and meredith's parents agreed to the deal in an effort to recover her body gary gave directions to authorities of exactly where meredith's body was when he was asked if her body was intact he said that her head had been removed and then went on to explain that he only did it for forensics reasons he seemed concerned that people might think he was some kind of monster that liked to cut people's heads off that's just crazy i mean he did cut heads off but he didn't want to cut heads off big difference he also explained how he never got any money from meredith i hadn't gotten any money off her you know i had gotten to die i spent money on her i had 45 dollars to my name and i don't spend 30 dollars i was driving all over north georgia trying to work her idea card on the bogus number she gave me i have lost money on that deal you know that deal like kidnapping a woman trying to steal money from her and then murdering her is some sort of business transaction he also made this ridiculous claim when they say well you're the one that chose to make money by killing there's other ways to make money there's bank robbery and so forth well you know in retrospect i regret not attempting a bank robbery i really do because all this [ __ ] got me nowhere to caught okay and so i might have been caught robbing a bank but if i'd have scored if i got five grand i could i could live off that over half a year in the woods you know and so yeah yeah but as to why i chose to kill for money that's part of that was rage against society sociopathic rage against society he regrets killing but only because he got caught he should have robbed banks he was mad at society because this was all their fault what a crock of [ __ ] he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole in 30 years shortly after his arrest a hunter found a skull in nantahala national forest in north carolina when authorities arrived they searched the area and found skeletal remains they were soon identified as john bryant and now authorities were looking for a suspect in a double murder once the story of gary's arrest hit the national news investigators in florida immediately noticed the similarities between the murder of meredith emerson and the unsolved murder of cheryl dunlap they contacted the authorities in georgia and prepared gary to be extradited to florida to be charged with another murder then authorities in north carolina connected the murder of john and irene bryant to gary and now he had a list of other states where he had charges pending in june of 2008 gary hilton was extradited to florida to stand trial for capital murder gary had managed to cop a plea deal and get himself out of a death sentence in georgia but florida wasn't going to play that game he offered to confess to everything for a life sentence but the district attorney said no they intended to sentence him to death and they had the evidence to do it the prosecution paraded a long list of officials that had documented interactions with gary in the national park around the time of cheryl's disappearance they had also found cheryl's dna on one of the boots that gary was wearing at the time of his arrest in georgia the final nail in gary's coffin though would come from gary himself gary talked like i said earlier he talked a lot like a single four hour long sentence with two dozen different topics all combined that wasn't exclusive to his interrogation though while he was in jail he talked to the guards and other inmates while he was being transported he talked to the officers he talked and talked and talked one of those times he was talking to another inmate while being held in jail before his trial in florida the cells had microphones and the guards could listen in to any of the cells while listening to gary's cell the guard heard him talking to another inmate about the deal he had made in georgia and then he began telling the inmate about cheryl dunlap he explained that he had spent days with her and that she was a sunday school teacher he went on to tell the inmate that he got a thrill from killing like he did when he used to jump out of planes in the army many profilers find it hard to believe that gary suddenly became a serial killer at the age of 61. it was almost unheard of though it had happened there is a case that may pop up on this channel in the near future but gary showed all the psychological characteristics of a serial killer long before october of 2007. one psychiatrist said that his misuse of ritalin later in life could have contributed to his escalation and violence his claim in jail makes it sound like he had been killing before the bryants but it will most likely never be known for sure gary hilton was found guilty of the first degree murder of cheryl dunlap and after the penalty phase where the prosecutor could tell the court about his other murder conviction he was sentenced to death gary was sent to death row in a florida state penitentiary and eventually north carolina came for him too the state was originally going to try for the death penalty as well but since he already was sentenced to death in florida they instead let him plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence without the possibility of parole gary was returned to florida to await execution and if for some reason that didn't happen he had two other life sentences to serve he would never be released from prison he appealed his death sentence and was denied by both state and federal courts he is 75 years old and is currently awaiting execution dandy was adopted out to a good home of someone who had been involved in gary's defense team ella remained with meredith's parents if you're the victim of domestic abuse please reach out to someone for help please talk to your local battered women's shelter or call the national domestic abuse hotline at 1-800-799-safe that's 1-800-799-7233 or you can go to thehotline.org to chat with someone online the great thing about this website is that at any time hitting the escape key twice will take you to a google search page that way if your abuser is nearby you won't get caught looking for help if you're having feelings of harming yourself or someone else or even just need someone to talk to please contact your local mental health facility call 9-1-1 or call mental health america who operate the national suicide prevention hotline at 1-800-273-talk that's five 1-800-273-8255 they're available 24 hours a day seven days a week and we'll talk to you about any mental health issue you might be facing thanks so much for watching this video you can help us out by hitting the like button or leaving us a comment you can also subscribe to the show to ensure you don't miss an episode if you'd like to support the show you can do that by checking out our merchandise at teespring you can also discuss the channel and the episodes on our subreddit are forward slash this is monsters you can find more ways to support our show and how to find us on social media by visiting this is monsters.com thanks again and be safe you

Channel: this is MONSTERS

Views: 405,076

Keywords: True crime, gary hilton, national forest, killer, serial killer, Meredith Emerson

Id: jN3nzUD9PXQ

Length: 42min 31sec (2551 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 28 2022