Meredith Emerson

On New Year's Day 2008, 24-year-old Meredith Emerson left her home with her faithful dog, Ella, a black Labrador.  With Ella following closely alongside her, Meredith set out on a day-long hike in the rugged mountains of the Chattahoochee National Forest, located some 90 miles north of Atlanta.
When Meredith failed to return home later that evening, her friends and relatives became worried and reported her missing.  Search efforts comprised of 15 search and rescue teams, including canine teams and helicopters, failed to find the missing woman despite combing a nearly 400-square-mile area. Meredith’s dog, Ella, was later found wandering around outside a grocery store some 40 miles from where her car had been discovered.
A break in the case finally came on Jan. 4, when police picked up a toothless, unshaven 61-year-old man named Gary Michael Hilton at a convenience store outside Atlanta. Hilton had reportedly been seen with Meredith several times on New Year’s Day. The police subsequently served a search warrant on Hilton’s 2001 Chevrolet Astro van and a Dumpster outside the convenience store where he was taken into custody.  They found three bloodstained fleece tops and a bloodstained car seatbelt inside the Dumpster, and noted that a rear seatbelt was missing from Hilton’s van.  It was obvious that he had attempted to vacuum and wash down areas of the vehicle’s interior.
Only hours after being charged with kidnapping with intent to cause bodily injury or harm and having his bail request denied Hilton, in a surprise move, told the police the location where Meredith’s body would be found.  He led the cops to a wooded area where investigators found Meredith’s decapitated body, miles from where she had last been seen on the hiking trail.
In an unusually fast confession, after reaching an agreement with prosecutors to not seek the death penalty in his case, Hilton said that even though he knew from the outset that he would eventually kill her he had initially kidnapped her to obtain her credit cards and personal identification numbers (PIN) so that he could obtain cash.  However, Meredith had given him incorrect PIN numbers and he eventually, apparently in frustration, beat her to death with a tire iron.  He said that he had cut off her head to make it more difficult for investigators to identify her remains.

On Thursday, Jan. 31, exactly 30 days after Meredith disappeared, Hilton pleaded guilty to the young woman’s murder in what was described as a frustrated robbery attempt.  The judge immediately sentenced Hilton to life in prison with the possibility of parole after serving 30 years, citing his age and the fact that he would most assuredly die in prison.
Hilton is now being investigated in other unsolved cases, including the kidnapping and death of a Florida nurse whose body was found Dec. 19, 2007, and the case of John Bryant and his wife, Irene, both in their 80s, who failed to return from an October 2007 hiking trip in the mountains of western North Carolina.