Wild Crime

Three different national forests,

three different cases, and they're all hikers.

- Investigators are looking for Gary Michael Hilton.

We knew how dangerous he was.

- This witness felt so uneasy that they

decided to just take a picture in case something happened.

Emergency, 911.

We found metal chains.

- Everything I collected had some kind of blood on it.

Hilton was not expecting Meredith

to fight back.

- I knew I was making a deal with the devil,

but it was a deal that needed to be done.

Secrets in the wild,

beautiful yet treacherous places.

These are the stories of the investigators

who solve crimes in the wilderness.

Meredith!

Meredith! Meredith!

It's been four days since Meredith

has been missing, and police have found now...

The area that we are searching right now

is going to be 401 square miles.

If you put that down, that's going to be 253,496 acres.

That's a lot of area for us to be covering right now.

Because people are still strongly looking,

we're still hopeful.

We are thankful that Ella has been found,

but Meredith is still out there.

This person of interest, Gary Michael Hilton.

Gary Michael Hilton.

61-year-old Gary Hilton...

This is the picture that we have for Mr. Hilton

at this time.

Same place, just another day.

What you doing out here?

Hunting.

Life has been sweet.

- When we put out his name and his photo,

we knew that everybody was looking for him.

The police announced that they were looking

for a person of interest.

61-year-old Gary Michael Hilton.

Your instincts tell you,

get away from this person.

We need him to come forward.

I was at the command post on Blood Mountain.

At approximately 8:00 p.m., 911 calls began

to go into the DeKalb County 911 center.

Emergency, 911.

What's the exact location of the emergency?

- Gary Hilton, he was seen at a Chevron gas station

off Ashford Dunwoody Road in North metro Atlanta.

Please stay on the line, sir.

The caller described seeing Gary Hilton

cleaning out his van.

It's literally probably within two minutes

that DeKalb County officers arrive

and take him into custody.

Police, show me your hands.

Get on the ground right now.

Gary Hilton surrendered

as soon as they approached him.

I was with John Cagle when the DeKalb County

Police Department called.

We got your white van.

We got Gary Hilton.

But there's no Meredith Emerson here.

No sign of a victim.

The search for Gary Michael Hilton

ended at this Chevron station at the corner

of Ashford Dunwoody and Johnson Ferry Road.

- We're hopeful that there might be a break in this case

that might lead us to the whereabouts of Miss Emerson,

but we don't know at this point.

They finally have in custody Gary Michael Hilton

of DeKalb County, who was named as a person

of interest in the disappearance

of 24-year-old Meredith Emerson.

- And any question that he can answer,

I mean, would be a positive step in the right direction.

But police will not confirm what

Hilton was doing, only that missing hiker

Emerson was not with him.

So now we had Hilton.

Hilton was hauled off

to GBI headquarters for questioning.

We're making progress, we felt like,

but we just hadn't found Meredith.

And there had been opportunities.

- We restarted that search this morning at 8:00.

I think that broke a lot of our hearts,

that she was not in the van.

At this time, Miss Peggy Bailey

from the family, who was the family's spokesperson,

would like to make a statement from the family.

Good evening.

Once again, thank you for...

Peggy and Doug Bailey

were very close friends of the Emersons.

- Dave is still actively searching the trails.

Susan's hoping that word comes soon.

I don't think Peggy or the Emersons

ever gave up hope.

- Hope is pretty much what her family was holding to.

- Meredith's middle name is Hope,

and that's exactly what the Lord gives us for her.

So we are hoping that we're talking of Meredith

in the present tense.

Cheryl Dunlap, a 46-year-old nurse

and Sunday school teacher, disappeared 7 miles from home,

her car found with a flat tire.

- Once we knew there was a Gary Michael Hilton in existence

as a result of Blood Mountain, we ran his license,

and he had been issued a citation by a forestry officer

right in the heart of the Apalachicola National Forest,

and the date was completely consistent

with Cheryl's disappearance.

We had an onslaught of tips and sightings.

One of the sightings was a campsite off Joe Thomas Road,

which is out off Highway 20.

One of our crime scene detectives

saw some pine straw that had covered what looked like there

maybe had been a fire or something,

and so he moved the straw, and he started

to find hard fragments.

And those fragments were 100% identified

as skull fragments.

- There were burned finger bones and skull bones.

There were also a plastic bead and an earring,

some burned clothing.

Cheryl Dunlap's remains, couldn't get DNA

from them because they had been so, so burned

at high temperatures.

I mean, he burned her hands and her head

and beat it into pulp, so as to hide the things

that he was trying to hide.

As soon as I saw the bead at the fire pit,

I thought that they were very similar to the ones

that were in her vehicle.

Any time you come in contact with something,

you'll leave something behind,

and then you'll take something away.

It's like a triangle.

We're linking a victim, a suspect,

and a scene together.

And I found a clump of hair.

It was the same exact color of the pine straw that was there.

And in Cheryl Dunlap's car, I found a long hair,

and it was from a golden retriever.

We really felt like we had our suspect.

We felt like Gary was our guy.

After Hilton was arrested in Georgia,

several individuals advised they

saw Hilton in North Carolina.

We still don't know where John Bryant is.

The Sheriff's Department heard from an individual

that happened to be in one of the National Forest

picnic areas at Sycamore Flats in Brevard,

and that individual saw Gary Michael Hilton

in his white van with his dog unloading

the van at the picnic area.

This witness felt so uneasy that they decided to just take

a picture of it in case something happened,

and that picture places him without a doubt

in the area of the crime scene a couple of weeks

before the murder of Irene Bryant.

- We felt confident that he was our prime suspect,

but we had not yet developed a sufficient amount of evidence

to pursue it in court.

- Had that photo come sooner, we would have definitely

done something different.

He lived off the grid.

So he wasn't in the system.

How do we go from proving he was here

at the right time to proving

he was specifically at that scene with the Bryants?

We shared these photographs with Georgia

so that we could really begin that relationship

to work this together.

While Hilton was being transferred

to GBI headquarters, I had two teams

scouring for evidence that might

help us find the location of Meredith Emerson.

Investigators searched Gary Hilton's

white Astro van well into early Saturday

morning at this Chevron.

It's also where they found Hilton and his dog,

Dandy, Friday night.

- When I first opened the van, my impression was wow.

There's a lot of crap in here.

It was full of garbage bags and tote containers

and just all kinds of stuff.

Hilton was making trips from the van to the dumpster

at the Chevron.

There were a lot of things on the ground around the van.

He was in the process of cleaning it out.

So we started in the dumpster.

There were some critical pieces of evidence in there--

sleeping bags, a couple of duffel bags,