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After 5 years, notorious crime still haunts
Witness, authorities left asking, 'What if?'
Posted: 10:40 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 16, 2013
Meredith Emerson's tragic tale ignited national concern. The fate of her killer, however, is in the hands of Florida judicial system. Gary Michael Hilton is appealing a death sentence for the murder of a nurse in the state.
By Bill Torpy
Eerie and disturbing is how Seth Blankenship recalls the scene he encountered on Blood Mountain on the afternoon of New Year’s Day 2008.
The hiking trail before him was torn up like there had been a fight. Water bottles, a leather dog leash, sun glasses, a police baton and a women’s hair barrette littered the ground.
Blankenship did not know exactly what had just transpired or the horror that was about to unfold. At this moment, he was what an excruciating number of others would soon become — one step behind serial killer Gary Hilton.
Minutes earlier, Blankenship saw a weathered, toothless man with a sheathed police baton walking near a pretty young woman carrying that leash. He thought they might be a father and daughter. But Blankenship, a former cop, got a gut feeling something was wrong after finding the odd assortment of gear. He started asking others if they had seen anything strange.
Bill Clawson, another hiker, had. Minutes earlier, Clawson, who was with his son and then-fiancé, spotted a scruffy man skulking in the woods as his family enjoyed a scenic moment. The man seemed impatient, as if waiting for the family to leave. Clawson and Blankenship walked back to where the stranger lurked.
Clawson left and turned in the items found on the trail to a nearby store. Blankenship readied the pistol in his pack and kept searching.
Blankenship found nothing, so he left as dusk approached. But despite his concern, his searching and questioning others at the scene, he failed to do something that still haunts him: “I didn’t call the police,” he said recently. “It’s horrible, but I didn’t call. If I had done things different, she could be alive today.”
“She” was Meredith Emerson, a 24-year-old woman who vanished from the busy trail that day. Six days later, police found her headless body in another forest 40 miles away. She had survived for nearly 72 hours after being kidnapped by Hilton, held captive in his van as he drove town to town unsuccessfully trying to withdraw money from her bank account before returning to the forest to hide out.
The intense manhunt for Emerson became national news, with scores of searchers hitting the trails and hundreds of tips flowing into police. The search grabbed the public. It was every parent’s nightmare. The young woman fought a violent battle on the trail against a vicious and evil tormentor and kept herself alive for three days by refusing to give up her ATM code.
The case has faded in the five years since. But not for witnesses such as Blankenship, Emerson’s friends and family and investigators close to the case. For them, it is still filled with heartbreaking what-ifs and couldabeens that haunt them to this day.
The tragedy was compounded by the fact that the troubled inklings several hikers had Jan. 1 were not weaved together until a full day after Emerson was reported missing and two days after her abduction. The search never fully widened from the trails until the last few hours of the young woman’s life.
“There were so many close calls,” said John Cagle, the former GBI agent who headed the search. “I don’t want to go as far as saying missed opportunities. I guess I’d say close encounters or near misses.”
Interviews and an exhaustive reading of the voluminous case file shows Hilton repeatedly was on the edge of being detected any number of times during the last 72 hours of Emerson’s life.
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