Читать книгу At the Hands of a Stranger - Lee Butcher - Страница 10

Special Agent Clay Bridges, of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, didn’t know that a search was under way for a missing hiker in Vogel Forest until he received a telephone call at his district office in Cleveland from the Leon County Sheriff’s Office on Wednesday afternoon, January 2. The LCSO deputy told him they needed help with the search.

“We think there’s foul play involved,” the deputy said.

“What makes you think that?”

“Because we found a police-style baton, water bottles, and a dog leash beside the trail. Someone else found it and turned it in. We have to suspend operations now because it’s dark and there’s snow falling.”

Bridges told the deputy that he would be there as soon as possible. The agent wanted to have a meeting that night, but there were conflicts in timing. Bridges went to a breakfast meeting the first thing on Thursday morning. He explained the situation, picked up additional investigators, and left for Leon County.

Clay Bridges had known what he wanted to do with his life from his first memories. He wanted to be a police officer, but not just any police officer. Bridges wanted to be a special agent with the GBI, the crème de la crème of Georgia’s law enforcement agencies, much as the Federal Bureau of Investigation is viewed as the top criminal investigative organization in the United States.

The GBI agent had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. Making it to the GBI had required dedication, hard work, and perseverance—all qualities that would serve him well if he ever managed to become a law officer. Bridges was hired as a rookie in 1991 by the Clarksville Police Department (CPD) and was recruited a short time later by the larger Gainesville Police Department (GPD).

Clarksville wanted him back again in 1995 and offered Bridges the job of chief of police for the seven-member force. Bridges had not given up on joining the GBI and told the city council that he would take the job with the understanding that he would continue his college studies and try to get hired by the GBI when he received his undergraduate degree.

“They were nice enough to do that,” Bridges said. “I became a chief of police at age twenty-six. The council worked around it.”

Bridge’s life-long dream came true in 1999 when he graduated from college and was sworn in as a special agent with the GBI. Originally, the GBI put him to work in hard drug enforcement. He was undercover for the first two years before being assigned to a unit that concentrated on breaking large drug-smuggling operations. Bridges was transferred to the regional office in 2005 and had investigated about twenty homicides by the time he arrived to help find Meredith Emerson.

Arriving at the mobile command headquarters, Special Agent Bridges found good and bad news. The bad news was that the corrections officer who had found the baton did not wait longer to report it, or perhaps did not wait longer before he left. The abductor (police officers still didn’t know his or her identity) had waited until after dark to bring Emerson to his van. During that time she had been secured to a tree just minutes away from help. There was no one to see Hilton drive away, and precious hours tracking him had been lost.

On the positive side, though, leads and tips were coming in by the hundreds. Special Agent Bridges credited Meredith Emerson’s roommate, Julia Karrenbauer, for using her knowledge of public relations for getting the media involved on a large scale.

“She had reached out and talked to all kinds of media and notified them that her roommate was missing, and she got them mobilized,” Bridges said. “That, in itself, was a good thing for us. She had already put out pictures and had people looking for her. Several groups were already searching when we arrived.”

The media kept coming from throughout all of Georgia, until the entrance to Vogel Park bristled with television satellites and transmitting radio towers, as well as reporters from all around the country. Emerson’s picture, description of her possible abductor, and other information soon found its way all across the United States. And more media units continued to arrive. Tips were coming in from people located as far away as California, who thought they had seen Emerson.

A psychic from New Orleans advised that the girl was in a culvert under a bridge. She was cold. She had hurt the man. The man had hurt her. She heard the searchers, but they couldn’t hear her. She possibly broke the man’s leg. The dog was not with her. She was possibly harmed.

Another tip came from a woman on Interstate 95 driving from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington, DC. Along the way she stopped at a gasoline station. There was a man in a white van. He was dressed in black and with a black dog. It looked like a bed had been built in the back of the van.

He got out, and the dog got out. He let it go pee, and then he put the dog back in the van. The dog seemed to be hyper. There was a possible spot of white on one paw. There may have been another dog in the van. It might have been an English pointer. The man was about the same size as the one described on TV.

There were also helpful communications from people who wanted to donate helicopters and other equipment to aid in the search.

Regardless of how trivial the tip might seem, none could be disregarded. They had to be written down and put in some kind of order. Bridges’s first order of business was to establish what the GBI called a leads management system (LMS). The purpose of LMS was to filter through the leads and assign them priority. Bridges would decide how important the leads were and assign them to field agents to be checked out.

“There was already a lot of media there,” Bridges said. “Once we got there and established a tip line and released it to the media, the leads started to flood in. There were a lot of people on the list to be checked out. We checked them out, sometimes by phone, to ask whether they had seen anything strange.”

On a missing persons case, standard operating procedure called for Bridges to learn everything he could about the victim and the possible abductor. “I wanted to get to know Meredith as well as I could,” Bridges said. “I wanted to know how she might react in any given situation. I wanted to learn anything at all that might help lead us to her.” The same was true for the abductor, but the GBI did not yet know who that was.

As he learned about Meredith Emerson, Bridges came to know a lovely young woman with family and friends whom she adored and who returned her affection in kind. Although she was petite, Emerson was not a “girly girl,” preferring to hike over rugged mountain terrain than to sit and sample high tea—although she would have been comfortable in such a social setting.

One characteristic about Meredith that people mentioned to Bridges was her burning desire to be a good person, to do good, and to make the world a better place. She often said: “I want to make a difference.”

A native of South Carolina, Meredith Emerson had lived in North Carolina and Longmont, Colorado, with her parents and brother, Mark. She loved the South and its mountains and moved back to them when she enrolled in the University of Georgia to major in business. She changed her major to French literature. Emerson not only became fluent in French, but she also received the Joseph Yedlicka Scholarship for Study Abroad and earned the Cecil Wilcox Award for Excellence in French. A popular student, Emerson served as an officer for the French Honor Society (Pi Delta Phi) at the university’s local chapter.

And although Emerson was fit and athletic, she was enchanted by such romantic frills as the book Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Emerson loved to read and spent many quiet hours being swept off on a sea of words to new worlds of adventure and learning. No one ever had to be at a loss as to what she would like as a gift: She would always be happy with a book. She read in English and in French. One of the books on her “wish list” was the French translation of the Harry Potter books by J. K. Rowling.

Friends described Emerson as being athletic and careful of her personal safety. She had earned a green belt and a brown belt in judo and karate, which she wore proudly around the waist of her gi at the dojo where she studied. Most of the students were men and they had a tendency to be gentle with the petite Emerson until she set them straight. She wanted no favoritism, no holding back. She once thanked a man for knocking the breath out of her when he threw her hard against the mat. Similarly, she gave as good as she got, and would be ecstatic when she sent a two-hundred-pound man flying over her shoulder and to the floor, or she sent him into a parallel free fall with a foot sweep.

Emerson enjoyed helping people, and she loved animals. She adopted from a shelter a mixed-breed dog, which was part Labrador retriever, and she showered the dog with love. Not wanting to be “babied” herself, she expected the dog, which she named Ella, to stay fit. No matter what the weather, Emerson and Ella took a daily walk. It could be raining buckets outside, but Emerson and Ella jogged together as they wore drenched but joyous expressions.

Emerson went out of her way to help her friends, even if she had to do things that weren’t particularly appealing to her. She wasn’t crazy about being photographed, but she agreed to model for a friend who was building a portfolio. Emerson had kidded that it amounted to “torture by photography.” The efforts of the model and photographer resulted in a stunning display that highlighted various aspects of Emerson’s personality.

There she was, in one picture, hanging upside down by her knees over a steel bar, wearing a white turtleneck and jeans, not a piece of clothing out of place. On the other hand, her long hair hung straight down, almost touching the ground. The pose accented Emerson’s strength and athleticism. Although it would have been difficult for most people to maintain, the whimsical smile on Emerson’s face, with her hands in her pockets, showed that the pose was a piece of cake for her.

Another photograph showed Emerson in a more glamorous, feminine light, with her long hair decorated with small, delicate beads and braids. There was a mischievous smile on her face, and her eyes were laughing. The photograph showed her with fairy wings, and the beautiful young woman looked as if she had plenty of fairy dust to share.

Brenda Porter (pseudonym) was filled with dread when her cell phone rang on January 3 and she recognized a chilling voice from the past. It was a man who terrified her, and who she had hoped would be out of her life forever.

“I’m in a fix,” Gary Hilton told her. “I need some money. Can you lend me two hundred bucks?”

“No,” Brenda said.

“Give me a hundred.”

“The only reason I ever gave you money, Gary, was because I’m scared to death of you,” Brenda told him.

“I need some gasoline. How about some money for that?”

“No, Gary. No.”

Brenda hung up in a hurry but remembered to save the telephone number from where Hilton’s call had originated. She trembled with fear. She lived in a wooded area and there were many nights she had spent in the house thinking, God, he might be out in the woods right now.

Brenda met Hilton twenty years ago when she lived in Atlanta with her mother, the manager of an apartment complex where Hilton rented a one-bedroom unit. Brenda was a star on the high-school girls’ basketball team and regularly ran to stay in shape. She had noticed that Hilton ran almost every day, too. One day they struck up a conversation and started running together.

Brenda was fifteen years old and Hilton was forty-four when he persuaded her to have a sexual relationship with him. She had looked at him as a father figure and she admired his broad area of knowledge. They talked about everything, and the conversation eventually came around to sex. Hilton was in exceptionally good physical condition in those days, Brenda remembered, with taut muscles, a nice tan, “and the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen. He had hair and teeth then, and he could run circles around me. He really looked good.”

Talking about sex increased their intimacy and she was curious about relationships between men and women. Having grown up without a father at home, Brenda found her affection toward Hilton growing. One thing led to another and she found herself having sex with him. Although he was often harsh with others, Brenda felt that he was kind to her.

“He was never mean to me and he could talk about anything,” she said. “He was always reading magazines and encyclopedias.”

Hilton gradually started talking to Brenda about intimate things and touching her. As a woman in her thirties, Brenda thought that Hilton took advantage of her inexperience. “I was a young girl and I was curious,” she said. “It was consensual sex in that he never hurt me. Now I know what a big deal it was to be an inexperienced teenager with a man in his forties.”

Their relationship grew; and, after a time, when Hilton called, Brenda jumped. “‘Hey, let’s go for a five-mile run,’ he would say, and I’d go right over.”

Brenda never saw him pay much attention to anyone else on their excursions. He pretty much focused on her. His eyes didn’t wander to other women, and he never made inappropriate comments about them. The world he encompassed during these runs seemed to be composed of nothing more than Brenda, the woods, and Ranger, the Irish setter he loved more than anything in the world.

Hilton was still living in the apartment complex when Brenda moved away to attend college in western Georgia. He called her occasionally, and over time she noticed a gradual change in his demeanor. Always a nonstop talker, Hilton started to rant at everybody and about everything. He never made much sense, and she felt incoherent vitriol flowing from him in torrents, like lava from an active volcano.

“He never threatened me, but he would go from happy to pissed off in a flash,” Brenda noticed. “He just thought everybody in the world was stupid and incompetent, and that he was so much smarter than anybody else. He thought all men were faggots. He never made any direct threats to anyone, but his voice was so mean that he scared me. I told him to stop calling because I was afraid of him.”

Brenda actually knew very little about Gary Hilton. He never spoke of his family life, except that he didn’t like his mother because she had refused to loan him money to post bail. He had no brothers or sisters, so far as Brenda knew. Hilton was proud of having been a U.S. Army paratrooper and often performed combat demonstrations for her, advising her that “this is how the paratroopers do it.” Hilton liked to brag that he had been in combat, but he confided to Brenda that he had not.

The telephone calls that Hilton made to Brenda after she left for college were not very revealing about him. They talked about the little things people do when they’re catching up on news about each other. She told him about her college life, and Hilton related how he was raising money for various charities as a telemarketer. Brenda was proud of him for doing something so selfless. Of course, she didn’t know that most of Hilton’s telemarketing jobs were nothing more than scams: he got telephone pledges for a phony charity, had the pledges collected, and kept the money for himself. Brenda was on the college women’s basketball team, and Hilton sometimes showed up to play one-on-one with her or to go for one of their power hikes.

Hilton’s calls became fewer and angrier when Brenda told Hilton she had a serious boyfriend.

“He got scarier and scarier,” Brenda said. “The way he talked about people was so mean and so ugly. Then he started to say mean things about me.”

Hilton told Brenda that she was stupid and would never amount to anything. She was ugly and no man would ever want her. She was clumsy, silly, knew nothing about anything, and didn’t know how to think analytically. The things she chose to read were worthless and a waste of time.

“He was never physically mean to me,” Brenda remembered. “He was just verbally abusive. I was scared to death to be around him.”

Hilton still continued to call; and like many women who suffer from battered woman syndrome (BWS), Brenda continued to take his calls, hoping things would get better. She believed she was so vulnerable because he was such a strong father figure to her. Hilton began to attack her boyfriend verbally and to make Brenda feel worthless.

“You’re so stupid,” he said. “He’s in college with all those prettier girls around. You have to know he’s fucking around on you. La-de-da. You’re never going to amount to anything, and he’s going to fuck all the pussy he can.”

The only person Brenda remembered hearing Hilton speak kind words about was his second wife, Donna Coltrane (pseudonym), a former law enforcement officer at Stone Mountain Park. Hilton would praise Coltrane one minute and the next would eviscerate her with vile, cutting accusations. He didn’t know why he had married the bitch. He believed she had married him because he qualified for a Veterans Administration (VA) home loan. She was a whore, who fucked anybody anytime. Oddly enough, Hilton said Coltrane had a lot of good qualities about her, but he never mentioned one specifically. He would rant for hours about her faults, but Coltrane still seemed to be the only person in the world about whom he ever said anything nice.

Following graduation from college, Brenda and Mack Porter (pseudonym) were married. She had not talked with Hilton for several months and Brenda thought that might be the end of it. But it wasn’t. He telephoned her cell phone during the Christmas holidays and, on one occasion, she even met him for a hike, which she didn’t tell her husband about. She insisted that it was nothing more than a hike.

About three years passed without Brenda seeing Hilton; then, one day, she was in her office building and looked up to see an unkempt, balding, almost toothless man sitting in the area that she supervised. His feet were propped on a desk and he was telling stories to three of Brenda’s subordinates. Brenda was so startled at his appearance that she almost fainted. Her heart pounded. In a state of disbelief, she walked over to Hilton, looked at him closely, and asked, “Gary? Is that you, Gary?”

Once she got him into the privacy of an office, she looked at him closer and shivered. This man was weird and scary and had unkempt hair and a straggly beard. He had only one tooth in front. He had a maniacal look in his eyes, and he talked in an almost incomprehensible stream of disassociated thoughts. The old anger at the world had only festered with time and was now encapsulated in a thin veneer that seemed on the verge of erupting.

“I need money,” Hilton said in a menacing voice.

Brenda couldn’t hide a nervous tremor. She didn’t recognize this man. He terrified her. He didn’t look anything at all like the man she had known as Gary Hilton. She was scared to death. She summed up her courage and made her voice as firm as she could.

“Gary, I’m going to write a check and give you the money,” she said. “But the only reason I’m doing it is because I’m afraid. You’re acting really weird, Gary. I’m afraid of you and I don’t want to talk with you again after I give you this money.”

Brenda gave Hilton four hundred dollars, believing that he needed it to pay a fine after having been arrested for possession of marijuana.

“I never saw him take any other drugs, but I always knew he was a pothead,” Brenda said. “He’s been a pothead since I’ve known him.”

In spite of his promise not to contact her again, Hilton had pushed his way back into her life, asking for more money. Brenda didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to tell her husband about the telephone call because he had had a belly full of Gary Hilton.

About three months earlier, he was scheduled to leave his office and go on a short business trip, but he returned home a few hours later to get something he had forgotten. There was a familiar red Irish setter chained to a stake in the yard.

“Where’s the owner of that dog?” he asked.

“I’m just keeping it for a friend,” Brenda said.

“I know whose dog that is,” Mack said. “He damn well better be gone when I get back.”

Brenda saw no way out of the mess she was in now. She was afraid of Hilton and worried about her husband’s reaction when he learned she had loaned Hilton four hundred dollars.

Hilton’s current call could endanger her marriage. Mack had told Hilton to “leave my wife alone” four months ago. Brenda couldn’t stop thinking about the situation all day. Brenda thought of Hilton possibly hiding in the dark woods at her house and trembled. She felt dazed by the danger she had placed her marriage in—all because she was too terrified of Gary Hilton.

When he came home from work, Brenda took a deep breath and told her husband about the telephone call.

“You’ve got to call the police,” he said. “He’s a wanted man now. You can’t fool around.”

“I know. I’m scared.”

“Make the call. You might save that girl’s life.”

Brenda wrote down the number she had saved from Hilton’s call and telephoned the GBI. Special Agent Clay Bridges answered the telephone.

“I know exactly who you’re looking for,” she said. “Gary Hilton. In fact, I just got through talking with him on the telephone.”

“Do you know where he is?” Bridges almost jumped out of his chair.

“No, but I saved the telephone number.”

Bridges had the number traced and discovered it designated a coin-operated telephone in Cumming.

“We have a patrol in that area,” he told Brenda. “We’re dispatching them now. Please stay on the line.”

Two GBI agents received the assignment and started racing in silent mode toward the convenience store from where Hilton’s call had originated. Less than half an hour later, they arrived at the telephone. No one was using the telephone, and there was no white van in the parking lot. They described Hilton and asked the clerk if he had been there.

“He was,” the clerk said. “You just missed him. He left about fifteen minutes ago.”

It was frustrating to have come so close to catching Hilton and to miss. The police didn’t know if Meredith Emerson was still alive at this point, but everyone hoped and prayed that she was. There was no time to mull it over as the search for Emerson switched into the highest gear possible. At the command center, Bridges had also received telephone calls from three others who knew Hilton: a former wife, a former employer, and a former friend.

It was just January 3 and Bridges had established the GBI’s LMS that morning. Police officers, however, had begun gathering information since Emerson was reported missing on January 2. As searches go, things were moving along at lightning speed.

“As soon as we established a tip line with the media, the calls started to pour in from people who were on Blood Mountain on New Year’s Day,” Bridges said. “A lot of calls started coming in about a strange individual named Gary Hilton. They said they had seen him hanging around the parking lot, with a red Irish setter named Dandy, and that he might be driving a white van. As soon as we released this information and named him as a person of interest, it was a train wreck.”

Special Agent John Cagle, who was nearing retirement from the GBI, worked around the clock, as did Special Agent Bridges and most of the law enforcement officers. They felt they were drawing the noose tighter around Hilton’s neck. Their main worry was about Emerson. The chances of finding her alive and unharmed faded with each passing minute. The police believed that Hilton might try to get back in touch again with Brenda and received permission to establish stakeouts at her home and workplace.

Meanwhile, Special Agent Matthew L. Howard interviewed Brenda at her home with her husband present. Matt Howard was careful to be delicate when asking about the sexual aspect of Brenda’s past relationship with Hilton. The GBI needed all of the information it could get to help catch Hilton, and his sexual preferences could illuminate his personality and help anticipate his reactions.

“It would be hard for me to talk if I was in your shoes,” Howard said. “You’re embarrassed. We deal with this kind of thing all of the time, and there’s nothing for you to be embarrassed about. It’s very important that we know everything about him—when all this started, what made him tick, did something happen that triggered this behavior? Did he ever want to do something weird?”

“Why? Is he saying that?”

“No. We’re just trying to find out everything we can about him. Do you know anything about his family?”

“Only that he had a mother he didn’t like. He never mentioned her name. I think he must have had a tough childhood, but he never really talked about it.”

“Did he ever try to pursue a physical relationship with you? Like boyfriend, girlfriend?” Howard asked.

Brenda hesitated and Mack voluntarily left the room. Howard resumed the interview. “I’m not trying to embarrass you. These are important questions.”

Brenda said she was just a kid at the time.

“Obviously, there was an age difference,” Howard said. “Was he pursuing younger women at the time?”

Brenda said she didn’t know. She said that her physical relationship with Hilton began when she was fifteen or sixteen.

Howard asked: “How did he pursue that? What were his actions toward you?”

Brenda hesitated a long moment.

“This is totally confidential,” Howard reassured her. “When we find out what he’s all about, maybe we can even solve other crimes he may have been involved in—to try and get the families some closure.”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Was it something that he forced on you, or was it consensual?” Howard asked. “How long did it last? Did he say he was interested? Did he come on to you?”

There was a long pause. “I guess it was consensual.”

“If it was forced, we need to know that.”

“I was a kid and I was curious.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” Howard said gently. “There are things that happen in college and high school that we’re not proud of. We all make mistakes. That doesn’t make anybody a bad person.”

Brenda said, “I look at it like I was taken advantage of.”

“Did he talk you into it?”

“Yes.”

“What kind of things did he say? If he was preying on children, we need to know that.”

Brenda told Howard she had never known or suspected that Hilton was sexually attracted to children. She reiterated that he was like a father to her and treated her differently after their sexual relationship began. He bought things for her, gave her a new bicycle, and called her regularly on the telephone to chat, mostly about her. He was often verbally abusive, she said, but not toward her. The telephone calls dwindled away when she left for college.

“So far as physical abuse, he never put a hand on me,” she said.

Howard pursued the sexual aspect of the relationship further. Brenda’s husband had come back into the room. Howard asked if there was anything involved in the sexual relationship besides sex, anything unusual. “What kinds of things did he talk about? What happened between you?”

There was a long, uncomfortable pause and Brenda made several false starts, clearly nervous and embarrassed.

“Go ahead, honey,” Mack said. “It’s no big thing.”

“It is, too, a big deal!” Brenda snapped.

At her request Mack left the room again.

“This isn’t easy,” she said.

“Take as much time as you need, ma’am. Don’t think you have anything to be ashamed of.”

“We had a sexual relationship.”

“Did he force you to try things during intercourse?”

“Persuaded, but he didn’t force. He never did anything to me. He never hurt me. God, he was forty years older than me.”

“He never tied you up or made you do anything?”

“No. I always believed he loved me.”

Howard asked if Hilton had stalked her. Brenda replied that she believed she saw him in the crowd at several of her college basketball games, but they didn’t acknowledge one another. After college, Brenda said, she received infrequent telephone calls from Hilton, and they usually occurred around Christmas. Then a few years would pass with no contact.

Once, after five years of being out of touch, Hilton telephoned and asked Brenda to go hiking with him. She accepted his invitation, and said it was not a date, just a hike, but that she never told her husband about it. Brenda told Howard how her husband came home early and found Hilton’s dog staked in the yard.

“I never had a sexual relationship with him again and he never tried,” she said. “He knew all about hiking. He was very, very smart and he knew all of the trails—Blood Mountain, Lookout Mountain, Stone Mountain …. He had spent most of his time in the mountains.”

Since the last hike, Brenda said, she had not seen him in years. “And all of a sudden he just shows up at my office,” she said. “He looked very weird. I didn’t even recognize him, and I don’t know how he knew where my office was. He freaked me out the minute he walked in. He didn’t look anything like he did. I mean he had [no] teeth.”

Hilton was homeless, so far as Brenda knew. She had never asked where he lived after he left the complex that her mother managed. Brenda said Hilton complained that he had multiple sclerosis and was dying. She said that Hilton hated John Tabor because he believed Tabor had cheated him out of sales commissions.

“When did he start to talk strange?” Howard asked.

Brenda laughed. “Gary’s always been a talker. He talks loud, over himself, like he’s in another world. Gradually he started being mean and saying things when he was mad. Each time it was a little worse. He would say things that scared me and I was afraid to be around him.”

Howard asked if she could give some specific examples, but Brenda wasn’t able to do so. She explained it like this: “He would say things that scared me. I don’t know. Just the tone of his voice. He’d be mad at the world. Everybody was stupid. It wasn’t like he was mean to me, but to everybody. It was more like a gut feeling that I had.”

“Was there a lot of anger?”

“He thought everybody was stupid and he thought all men were faggots. He thought John Tabor was a faggot.”

“He actually thought that?”

“Oh, yeah.”

Howard asked what he had said about Tabor.

“That he was a crappy salesman. That he was married, but he was a faggot. He said Tabor was too good-looking not to be a faggot.”

Brenda explained that before she left for college, Hilton talked so mean and hateful that she “freaked. It got to the point that I didn’t even want to talk to him.”

“Did he ever make direct threats about harming somebody, like John Tabor, to you?”

“No. He talked bad about people, but he never said that.”

Brenda said that he had worked for years for Tabor and had been criticizing him for most of the time. His criticism would be vitriolic.

Did you ever wonder why this guy was keeping him on if Hilton hated him so much? Howard asked.

“No. It was like Gary was a bright star doing his job, and Tabor was a total fuckup who couldn’t sell. That’s how Gary explained it.”

Brenda told Howard that Hilton and she had hiked in all of the parks in Georgia, and that Hilton was an expert who knew about the most isolated places.

“Thinking back to those past years, and knowing what you know now, did he ever say or do anything that might have made you think he would do anything like this?”

“I’ve really thought about that and I can’t think of anything,” Brenda said. “I just kind of thought he was an outcast and didn’t have anything to do with anyone. When he called, he said he was telemarketing. I wouldn’t want to talk to him, but I was afraid not to. He was always talking bad about people. He would never say ‘I’m gonna kill them.’ I would have told somebody if I had heard that.”

Thinking back, Brenda changed her mind about telling Howard that Hilton had not stalked her. Now she remembered that she felt that he stalked her most of the time she was in college. She said that Hilton would show up everywhere.

“Was there anything to indicate that he might have been doing [this] with other girls?”

“No, he never discussed anybody else.”

Although the change she saw in Hilton was gradual, Brenda also remembered that there had been an abrupt change in his behavior. She said that Hilton had “talked mean” about everybody until she got married, and then there was a “distinct” change.

“He used to be happy and then, all of a sudden, about the time I got married, whenever I talked with him, he would always be mad. I could see his mood change from happy to pissed off really fast. He never forgot it if somebody crossed him, even on small things.”

To illustrate, Brenda told Howard that Hilton took every rejection personally. Should he ask someone to walk to the store with him, and that person declined, Hilton would take it as a personal rejection, Brenda said, and would explode. And he would never let it go.

“Did he ever talk about a girlfriend?”

“He used to talk about his ex-wife, the lady who worked at Stone Mountain. He said she was a good woman.”

When he returned to the room, Mack said he had met Hilton several times before he and Brenda were married. The first time was at the apartment she shared with a girlfriend in Marietta. “Brenda had told me about Hilton, an older man who was just a friend. He wouldn’t look me in the eye and kept his distance. He acted strangely,” Mack relayed.

Mack said that just before he and Brenda were married, he found Hilton sitting in the house that he and Brenda shared. “He jumped up real quick and asked me if I was there to install an alarm system. I told him I wasn’t. I didn’t want an altercation because there were other people in the house, but I led him away and told him in no uncertain terms to get out of my house.”

Brenda told the GBI agent that she had never seen Hilton with a gun, but that he always carried high-powered pellet guns and carried a baseball bat and pepper spray, explaining that it was to protect him from unleashed dogs.

Special Agent Matthew Howard concluded the interview and verified that Brenda’s home and workplace would be under surveillance in case Hilton returned.