At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher
subdued her.
Emerson groaned and ceased to struggle. Hilton held her down for a few minutes and continued talking. He assured her that he had no intention of hurting her. All he wanted was her identification, ATM bank card, and PIN code. And then he heard hikers on the main trail and squatted down, partly behind a tree, to hide from them. They passed without saying anything, and Hilton hoped they had not seen him. If they had, perhaps they thought he was having a bowel movement.
When he believed Emerson could resist no more, he tied a rope in a slipknot around her neck and told her to walk ahead of him onto a contour trail, where they would be less likely to meet anyone. It was a trail that couldn’t be seen by anyone from the Byron Herbert Reece Trail. The woman didn’t scream or yell, but suddenly she turned again and attacked. The force of her body hitting him sent both tumbling out of control down another ravine. He managed to hold on to the limb after they stopped rolling, but Emerson avoided his first swing at her and kicked him. The fight lasted for several minutes. The killer wished that he had not chosen this woman because she was strong, fast, brave, and seemed to have training in martial arts. He repeatedly clubbed her head until she could fight no more and then dragged her down the mountain, where he used black plastic zip ties to fasten her to a tree. Emerson was not unconscious, but there was a lump on her forehead, her nose looked broken, and both of her eyes were black and swollen almost shut.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Hilton said. “Stop fighting and be quiet or you will get hurt. Listen, honey, I ain’t going to spend my life in prison, so you better be quiet. I’ve got a gun and I’ll shoot your ass.”
Hilton was the professional soldier again, in control, showing what he called his command presence. “You wait here and I’ll be back. I have to get something.”
He wanted to clean up the crime scene where he had first attacked the girl. He needed to retrieve the knife, bayonet, water bottle, scraps of clothing, the girl’s dog leash, and anything else that could tie him to the crime scene. The baton was the killer’s favorite weapon, and he knew where it had fallen. However, there was nothing at the crime scene when he arrived. He assumed that one of the hikers he had seen had found everything and would report suspicious behavior to the authorities. That was a stroke of really bad luck.
Now he had to hurry to get out of the park because the woman had fought so long that he was afraid a park ranger would find his van, which was supposed to be out of the park by nightfall. He needed to load the woman into the van and get away from Vogel Park fast.
“Hon, we got to get out of here,” he told Emerson. “This place is gonna be crawling with cops. Give me the keys to your car.”
She told him the keys were in her fanny pack. He got them. “What kind of car is it?”
“A white Chevrolet Caprice.”
“Where’s your purse?”
“Under the driver’s seat.”
It was dusk when he approached his van, which was half filled with sleeping bags, shoes, socks, toiletries, a small cooking stove, pornographic magazines, and a cooking kit. A heavy metal chain, about eight feet long, lay across a pile of cargo bags. One end was locked to a steel seat support, secured with a padlock. There was also a padlock on the other end. Another chain, four feet long, was padlocked to a different seat support; and a nylon rope, about five feet long, was tied with a series of square knots to a metal eyelet welded on the floorboard. Hilton drove the van and parked it so that the sliding side door was next to Emerson’s car; then he returned to where she was secured to a tree.
The young woman saw him approaching and said, “No. No.”
He leaned close.
“Honey, don’t worry,” he said. “I’m not going to hurt you. I just want your credit cards and PIN numbers. But if you try to run away, I’ll shoot your ass down. If I was going to hurt you, I’d have already hurt you. Understand, hon?”
The girl didn’t answer but offered no resistance as he grabbed one end of the rope with a slipknot noose around her neck and cut the straps that held her to the tree. He marched her like a dog down a steep ravine, following behind her. She stumbled and fell once and moaned, but she did not yell. Ella, Emerson’s dog, was frightened and confused as she trotted next to her owner. The sun had dropped below the horizon and it was getting cold, so Hilton put one of his extra jackets around the girl’s shoulders and led her up a steep ravine. They waded across a creek, climbed down a boulder field, and walked several yards through thick brush in the direction of where he had parked his van next to her car.
He asked about her purse with the credit cards and she told him again that it was beneath the driver’s seat. Hilton kept a tight grip on the leash around Emerson’s neck and continually warned her to keep quiet or he would kill her. Emerson had made a lot of noise during their struggle; he feared an army of cops would be arriving any minute.
Just a few yards inside the woods, but near the parking lot, Hilton strapped Emerson to another tree outside of view. He took Emerson’s car keys from her fanny pack and slid the side door of his van open. The purse was beneath the passenger seat. He thought the woman was brain-dead for trying such a stupid trick by trying to fool him by saying it was under the driver’s seat. Did she think he wouldn’t look there? Dumb. Going back to the tree, he cut the straps free and led her to the vehicles and told her to get into his van. Ella followed along uneasily, obviously afraid of Hilton.
“Get in,” Hilton ordered.
“No,” Emerson said, resisting. “They told me never to get into a vehicle.”
“Get in, bitch!” He shoved her inside and pointed to several cargo bags. “Lie down on those.”
The young woman did as she was told. Hilton looped the longer chain around her neck so that she could not slip her head out of it. He secured it with two padlocks. He tied a rope from an eyelet on the floorboard around her ankle and secured it with seven square knots, one on top of the other. She could untie the square knots, he knew, but it would take a long time to undo so many. He would hear her before she got loose. Even if she untied her ankle, she wasn’t going anywhere with the chain around her neck. Emerson lay on her side, trussed in heavy chains like a piece of equipment.
Ella was nervous and ran in circles outside the van, barking and whining, but not threatening him. Hilton didn’t want the dog to be found running loose, because someone might know to whom it belonged. Worse, the dog might have an identification microchip embedded beneath its skin. Just one more problem for him. He forced the dog into Emerson’s car and closed the doors.
“No!” the woman said. “You can’t leave her like that. She’ll die.”
Disregarding the woman’s protests, the killer drove away and headed north on Highway 129, moving toward Blairsville, about fifty miles away. Emerson continued to worry about the dog and begged Hilton not to leave Ella in the car to freeze to death. A few miles down the road, he began to be concerned that the woman’s aggravation might cause her to start making more trouble for him. He wanted her to be nice and compliant. He was amazed at how quickly they always became compliant: unaware that in his observations he had used the plural “they” instead of the singular “she.”
“You want me to turn around and go back to get your damn dog?” he asked.
“Yes. Please.”
He turned the van around, drove back to the park, took Ella from the car, and put her inside the van. The dog immediately lay down beside the girl and started to lick her face. Hilton thought he had once more demonstrated his professionalism. The dog’s presence helped keep his prisoner quiet, and his decision to go back and get it would make the woman think he was kind. It was important for her to think of him as just a harmless guy with a couple of screws loose who wouldn’t really hurt her. He wanted her to see him as quirky, intelligent, intuitive, well-read, and essentially a decent human being who cared about her. Hilton talked nonstop as he drove toward Blairsville and asked about her job and hobbies. He complimented her combat skills. He learned that she studied judo and karate and held a green belt in judo and a brown