Wild Crime

So here's the thing about the National Forest.

If you enjoy isolating yourself from the real world,

a criminal has that same opportunity.

- You don't expect to encounter a monster on a hiking trail.

In northeast Georgia, a search continues

for a missing 24-year-old hiker.

It is impossible to commit a crime

without leaving evidence.

- There's not much chance that she's still alive.

- And I realized that I was a potential victim.

- He is acting out hunting scenes from a movie.

Young women being set loose in the forest

and then hunted down and murdered.

- Everybody was looking for him.

Emergency 911.

- At some point, there will be more victims.

I got a really weird feeling.

This is a human skull.

It's the stuff of nightmares.

- One of the most vile murderers

I've ever dealt with.

Secrets in the wild.

Beautiful, yet treacherous places.

These are the stories of the investigators

who solve crimes in the wilderness.

We're at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains.

It's steep, it's rugged, and it's mountainous.

Lots of lakes, streams.

Lots of hiking, lots of camping.

The mountains of north Georgia

offer a lot of opportunities for the people

who live and come to this area.

- It's managed to be more remote and more pristine,

like its natural state, than other parts

of the National Forest.

So backup or law enforcement assistance may be hours away.

- People do let their guard down some up here,

but they should remember that sometimes,

bad things happen in good places.

The first day I met Meredith, I remembered,

because she had a very unique and smart personality.

You felt connected to her from the first time you met her.

There's a lot of questions and a lot of whys

that we'll never know the answer to.

You never really know when you might not see someone again.

On January 2, 2008,

the Union County Sheriff's Office

got a call of a missing hiker that was up on Blood Mountain.

Her name was Meredith Emerson.

The call came in from her roommate...

Saying that Meredith had left a note that she went hiking,

and never came home.

She left me a note that just said,

"Gone hiking, took Ella."

Um, and that was normal.

She would normally just take her dog.

She loved to do, and take her dog hiking.

She got a little worried.

Meredith did not come home overnight.

And that's when she made the phone call

to Union County for us to go up there and check.

Her boyfriend located her car in the parking lot

of the Byron Herbert Reece connector trail.

He had left a yellow sticky note on it,

telling her to stay there,

that they were looking for her.

As a patrolman, we would get

these missing hiker cases all over the state.

Somebody overestimated how fast they could get from point A

to point B and popped out on a different part of the trail,

not where they left their car.

So nobody really got overly worried

initially on this case.

When we arrived at the trailhead,

Meredith's friends were already there.

They started putting search teams together

to go out and search the woods.

Blood Mountain is a part of

the Chattahoochee-Oconee National Forest

in very close proximity to the Appalachian Trail.

Atlanta is not very far away, but you'll find yourself

in a totally different area where

it's very rugged and remote.

If you get off the road itself, there's nothing.

It's wilderness.

There's no houses, there's no neighborhoods to speak of.

From the parking lot

at Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trail

to the peak, round trip, is a little over four miles.

People come there to get away, to let their guard down,

which makes them a little bit more vulnerable.

The fact that you have somebody hiking on

a heavily-used trail in the middle of the day

just vanish, is extremely unheard of.

- As time went on, we became a little bit

more concerned that maybe some foul play might be involved.

This was getting

a lot bigger than what we expected.

And that's when we called in the GBI.

GBI stands for Georgia Bureau of Investigation,

created to assist local law enforcement.

We get requested by the chief of police,

the sheriff, the district attorneys,

Superior Court judges.

The more rural areas have limited resources.

They tend to lean on the GBI more than the urban areas.

GBI brings in a level of specialization

and can concentrate with the sheriff's department

on conducting the investigation

into Meredith Emerson's disappearance.

My name is John Cagle.

I was the Special Agent in charge

of the GBI Regional Office.

The Union County Sheriff's Office called me

about 9:00 on the night of January 2.

We knew it was going to take us all to go to Blood Mountain

and get this thing organized.

The GBI has been requested to join in this effort.

We have GBI agents on site here,

as well as other law enforcement personnel

from many different agencies.

John is a true mountain man.

He's one of the best GBI agents I ever worked with.

The motto that I tried to live by

was never get too close.

Never let it get personal.

And I was able to maintain that

until the Meredith Emerson case.

Friends of Meredith Emerson sent this picture

to us showing Emerson and her dog.

They hope it will help authorities find her.

The search for Emerson is taking place on Blood Mountain

in Union County right now.

- Meredith's roommate got a lot of media contacts

and sent the world to Blood Mountain.

The one thing we know, if Meredith is there,

then her dog is there.

And, um--and just wouldn't leave her side for anything.

So, uh, we're hopeful that if they're out there,

that they're together.

So they prepared some posters with a picture

of Meredith that she was missing.

So they got the word out fairly quickly, too,

to their friends and their network of friends.

I went to school with Meredith.

Been best friends with Meredith

for about six years now.

So, you know, knowing her,

everything's going to end up OK

and we're just going to be out here for her until it is.

We do something called victimology

to find out just as much as we could

about Meredith Hope Emerson--

her habits, who she hung out with, what she liked to do.

She was 24 years old

and graduated from the University of Georgia.

And then she adopted her dog, Ella.

Meredith was not the kind of person

that would just disappear.

As soon as she didn't come home,

then everybody's radar went up.

Growing up in Colorado and being an experienced hiker

that, um, that we are, we are hopeful,

um, but of course, we're also, you know, scared.

- The more we found out about her and her abilities,

this is probably not an injured hiker

or somebody who got lost on the trail.

Family and friends have been gathering here,

and of course, are staying in close contact

with the law enforcement authorities.

In a missing persons case,

you always want to talk with the boyfriend

or the husband or wife.

Were they troubled? Were they mad?

Were they upset about something?

The Union County Sheriff's Office

actually thought that the boyfriend might

be involved in the disappearance of Meredith.

She's alone wherever she is,

and it's probably very silent there.

It's probably very cold there.

He was very dry, unemotional.

So our Spidey senses definitely went up.

He found her car.

He knew where to look.

That was strange, in and of itself.

Things started stacking against him pretty quickly.

He told us they had plans

and they talked that morning

and the plans changed, and Meredith decided

just to take Ella and go hiking.

When you're dealing with somebody missing