Wild Crime

Meredith Emerson,

the Bryants, Cheryl Dunlap...

Hikers going missing in national forest property.

What was really going on?

Was Meredith's case connected to any others?

Meredith! Meredith!

We all hoped that we'd find Meredith,

and we'd find her alive.

I have this as a person of interest

in the missing woman case.

He's got that mask on,

just like in a horror movie or something.

I looked around thinking,

good Lord, is somebody watching me?

Just like a cat-and-mouse game.

Here he is, and we're trying to play catch-up.

- I immediately said, I think we're dealing

with a serial killer.

Secrets in the wild,

beautiful yet treacherous places.

These are the stories of the investigators who solve

crimes in the wilderness.

Meredith!

Miles up the road, the search continued

for Meredith Emerson with small search teams

looking in ditches and ravines along mountainous roads.

- We had JBI helicopters, which use flare to see if they

could find a heat source.

The Air National Guard came in.

We had deputies from metro Atlanta,

from Marietta, from Gilmer County,

all of the surrounding area.

She's not just some--

She was your roommate.

Sorry.

I'm good.

She's not just some 24-year-old girl.

You know, everybody here loves her.

- This is like everybody's sister or family member.

One thing that we were worried about

was that she was abducted.

I hoped she was hunkered down in a cave,

somewhere that she could just protect herself.

Junior Young had contacted us

as the North Carolina case agent

for John and Irene Bryant.

He was adamant that he felt like the case

that we were investigating was eerily similar to the case

that he had.

- He also asked if we knew about a Florida case,

the case of Cheryl Dunlap.

Cheryl Dunlap's case was similar in that you have

a single female disappearing from national forest land.

My name is Steve Ganey.

And I was connected to this case as a responder

to the first call that came in, referenced Cheryl Dunlap.

It was a Monday, December 3, 2007.

I get a transfer call from dispatch.

They say, I need to report someone missing.

She's very reliable, and she works at FSU nursing station.

She hasn't shown up there for work,

and she was supposed to teach a Sunday school class

and failed to show up at the Sunday school class.

This really triggered me at the beginning.

There's something wrong here.

I got a phone call, and it was from my son.

And he told me that Cheri was missing.

And I said, missing from what?

And he said, she's just missing.

Nobody had seen her.

- She was like a little sister to us.

She was like our little sister.

She was just a sweetheart to be around.

She was funny.

Cheri was a part of an evangelical church.

They were a very close-knit group of people, very loving

towards each other and towards the community.

Cheri's life was a little hard.

Cheri and her husband divorced.

So she was a single mom for a long time.

Cheri really enjoyed her granddaughter.

She did so many things for her family, for the kids.

She reveled in loving her children and spoiling them.

- A friend of Cheryl's called me later that afternoon

and told me that she had found her car.

It was on 319 South coming into Crawfordville,

or Wakulla County.

She said, it's on the right-hand side of the road

just above the county line in Leon County at Leon Sinks.

Leon Sinks is a very peaceful sanctuary.

And a lot of people go there to walk their dogs,

read books, just enjoy nature.

A lot of people go there just for solitude

and to clear their head, and enjoy the peace of the day.

I saw the car not parked in a normal position

for a disabled vehicle.

This car was parked almost in the wooded area.

And when I looked, I saw the right rear tire was flat.

So I get to look in closer, and it looks like

someone has stuck a knife into the sidewall

to flatten the tire.

Someone drove that car there, parked it the way it was,

then deflated the tire and left the scene.

I opened the door.

The door wasn't locked.

I looked on the passenger side.

Her purse had been scattered, you know,

like somebody rifled through her purse

looking for cash.

So when I saw that, I'm like, I believe she was abducted.

I also noticed in the floorboard

there was beads, multicolored beads.

And I thought that was strange.

Did she have a bracelet on, a necklace?

How did these beads get down there?

Did they grab her?

Were they torn off of her?

And I'm like, we have a problem here.

I made contact immediately with the bank,

and I talked to the supervisor there.

I explained to him, we need a tracer on a debit card.

I said, please let us know immediately if anybody tries

to get money on this card.

My name is Tim Baxter.

And I was the supervisor at the time of what

we call the persons unit.

We did a grid search around the area

where her vehicle was found and had a big group

that went out and walked through the woods,

trying to find any trace of her around there.

Of course, Leon Sinks backs up

to the Apalachicola National Forest.

So our emphasis was in the national forest.

You know, the forest is--

I mean, there's hundreds of thousands of acres.

You're in the woods surrounded by woods--

no real eyewitnesses, no surveillance cameras.

- The vast majority of it is wildlands.

It's woods, trees, bushes that sometimes

never see a footstep of man.

- You can hide a body in the national forest pretty easily.

If you get the hell out of here,

you could get away with it.

- We looked everywhere-- nothing, nothing.

Let's call it a day.

- And that's very frustrating for us.

- I was reading the paper, and there was a picture

of a woman on the front page and an article

about her being missing.

I looked back at the picture, and I realized

it was the same woman that my wife and I saw

at Leon Sinks, who was now missing.

That Saturday, we hiked clockwise around the loop.

And my wife and I stopped and looked down in the water.

And we're looking at fish and turtles

in the water and just kind of talking.

A woman was sitting about maybe 35 feet away.

She was sitting there just quietly reading a book.

It was red in color, and I believe it was a hardcover.

And as we began walking in her direction,

she quietly got up, closed her book,

and came walking back towards us, and walked past us.

It was Cheryl Dunlap.

I felt a real sense of surprise that she was missing

and that it was actually somebody we had seen.

And then I felt deep concern for a fellow human being

that may have gone missing and may be in trouble.

I called the tip line and said, my wife and I saw her

at Leon Sinks on Saturday.

They had walked past her.

She was reading a book.

She seemed normal, waved at them.

They waved back at her, and they kept going.

We went back to Cheryl's house after we had the information

from the two witnesses.

Upon entry into the house, we looked around.

There was a bookshelf.

And there were six or seven books

in a collection-- red, hardback,

almost like a burgundy color.

And they were in order except for one perfect space

where the book was taken out.

This same description we got from the witnesses

of her reading a red book, and one book

is missing out of this collection.

So it has to be the book that they were talking about.

That was another dot that was connected

in our investigation.

So now we're getting a timeline of where she's been.

When's the last time she was seen?

Who's seen her?

Dunlap, a 46-year-old nurse

and Sunday school teacher disappeared

7 miles from home, her car found here with a flat tire.

- At first, you think maybe this is just a mistake.

Maybe she's, you know, going somewhere.

Maybe she's just taking a little sabbatical,

so to speak.

But after just a few days,