At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher
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