At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher
2008. Ella, Emerson’s black rescue dog, part Labrador retriever, was asleep in the room with her. Karrenbauer had last seen Emerson awake on New Year’s Eve, at about six o’clock at night. She had no reason to be concerned about her roommate not being home on New Year’s Day afternoon. Emerson was gone, but she had left a note on the chalkboard saying that she had taken Ella for a hike. Not worried, Karrenbauer went to bed and slept until 3:30 P.M. that day.
It wasn’t unusual for Emerson to go hiking, and Karrenbauer thought that Meredith had gone with her boyfriend, Steve Segars. Karrenbauer continued with her day and made preparations to watch the University of Georgia game, to be televised later that afternoon, with Brent Seyler, her boyfriend. What Karrenbauer didn’t know was that Emerson had gone hiking with just Ella and that Segars was not with her.
Emerson and Segars had left a New Year’s Eve fireworks display in Lawrenceville at about 11:30 P.M. because Emerson wanted to get home before the holiday traffic became too congested. Segars remembered that they had made plans to spend part of New Year’s Day together, but he didn’t hear from Emerson. He texted her twice that morning to remind her. He didn’t receive an answer. At about 10:00 A.M., Emerson, whom Segars referred to as his “best friend and girlfriend,” telephoned him to say that she had just awakened and had to take Ella for a walk.
Segars thought that Emerson didn’t seem to care that their plans for the day were ruined because she had slept late. He said later that he was “terse and short” when he asked her to find something else to do. It was not a serious dispute, but Segars felt bad about the tone he had used with Emerson and telephoned back at about one o’clock to apologize. The call was transferred to Emerson’s voice mail. Segars left a message and started to work on a bedroom that he was remodeling.
Segars tried numerous times to telephone Emerson that afternoon; each time the call was transferred directly to voice mail. None of the messages brought a response. He thought that Emerson might have turned her telephone off. Starting to be concerned, Segars went to Emerson’s residence at about 7:00 P.M. He asked Brent Seyler about Meredith’s whereabouts, and was told that they hadn’t seen Emerson all day. Both Steve Segars and Julia Karrenbauer were starting to feel concerned now.
On Wednesday, January 2, at ten in the morning, Emerson’s boss, Chris Hendley, telephoned Karrenbauer and told her that Emerson had not come to work and had not phoned in. Karrenbauer called Segars to pass on the information, but he had already received a call from Emerson’s boss to tell him the same thing. Karrenbauer told Segars that Emerson had not come home Tuesday night, nor had she telephoned. For Meredith Emerson, this was completely out of character.
The situation suddenly escalated from the category of “unusual” to “alarming.” Karrenbauer remembered that one of Emerson’s friends in Colorado, where she had been visiting family over the Christmas season, had told her by telephone that Emerson said she had plans to go hiking on New Year’s Day. Segars decided to start looking at some of her favorite hiking areas.
First he drove to DeSoto Falls, which was one of the areas where he and Emerson loved to hike together. He looked around the area but didn’t see Emerson’s car or any sign that she had recently been there. He continued driving and went to the Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trailhead, at Vogel Park, and saw Emerson’s Chevrolet Caprice in the parking lot. The car was dusted with snow and there were no footprints in the fresh snow around the vehicle. It didn’t look as if the car had been moved since the snow fell.
Segars ran up the trail for a short distance and shouted Emerson’s name, again and again. Failing to get a response, he hurried to a small store at the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and State Highway 129. He contacted Emerson’s friends by text and cell phone and told them that he had found her car at Vogel Park. Friends arrived and they began to search the trail after Segars left a “sticky” note on Emerson’s car window, telling her not to leave and that he would be back.
Emerson’s family was told about what had happened, and Margaret Bailey, of Athens, Georgia, who was a close family friend and Emerson’s godmother, telephoned the Gwinnett County Police Department (GCPD) and spoke with Officer Jeff Legg. Legg also spoke with Emerson’s mother, Susan. Both women told him that this type of behavior was “unlike” Meredith.
During her initial contact with the police, Bailey didn’t know that Emerson’s car had been found at Vogel Park in Union County. Bailey had also learned, for the first time, that Emerson had a boyfriend and that he and Emerson had plans to hike together on New Year’s Day. Somehow, those plans had fallen through. Legg elicited additional information and filed a report that read in part: (Bailey) also stated she was told that there was a witness in the area of Blood Mountain that saw the victim and her dog hiking in the area and also saw a male walking down the trail with some sort of police baton. During the search effort, the baton and some of the victim’s belongings were located but the victim and the victim’s dog are still missing.
No one, at the time, knew who this witness was.
Legg completed a form for missing persons and entered it into the Georgia Crime Information Center/National Crime Information Center (GCIC/NCIC) database and the information was immediately available to police officers throughout the United States. Meredith Emerson officially became a missing person at 11:37 A.M. on Wednesday, July 2, 2008. It would not be long before she was classified as an endangered kidnapping victim.
Emerson’s friends, volunteers, Union County sheriff’s deputies, Dawsonville police officers, fire and rescue personnel, and national and state forest rangers poured into Vogel Park. They faced the daunting task of combing thousands of acres where Emerson could be lying injured—or worse. Vogel Park was part of Dawson Forest, which included thousands of heavily wooded acres in the Blue Ridge Mountains. The Appalachian Trail, one of the longest and most scenic hiking trails in the world, stretched through it, running 2,160 miles from Mount Katahdin, Maine, to Springer Mountain in Georgia. Dedicated hikers sometimes took a lifetime to walk various parts of the scenic trail, until they traversed the full distance, following blazed trees that served as markers along the way.
Dawson Forest itself was huge and had trails that were suitable for biking, horseback riding, and single-file walking. People came to the Edge of the World Falls; they canoed, fished, hunted, camped, and studied endangered land and water species. In 1956, ten thousand acres had been used for military research by Lockheed’s Georgia Nuclear Aircraft Laboratory (GNAL) to try and develop a nuclear-powered warplane. Lockheed decommissioned the facility in 1971 and sold the property to the city of Atlanta.
Vogel Park, located near Dawsonville, was just more than thirty miles from Duluth, where Karrenbauer and Emerson lived. Had Emerson intended to hike up Blood Mountain with Ella and return straight home, she would have arrived home not long after dark on New Year’s Day. She had climbed to the summit of the 4,458-foot-high mountain on many occasions and was familiar with the terrain. The origin of Blood Mountain’s name was disputed. Some say it came about because of the color of the lichen and Catawba rhododendron that grow near the summit. Others claim the mountain was named for a fierce and bloody battle in the late 1600s between the Cherokee and Creek Indians near Slaughter Gap, when the two tribes were fighting for dominance. The Cherokees won the skirmish, and a tremendous amount of Native Americans died in the fight.
Hiking isn’t without danger, and hiking solo poses even more hazards. You could slip, fall off a trail into a ravine, and be knocked unconscious. Nobody would be around to notice. You could be hurt during an encounter with a wild animal. Even in a park that is marked well, a hiker can wander off the trail and get lost. There is the danger of sudden extreme changes in the weather, especially in higher elevations, and dehydration is something that should always be considered. Furthermore, a lonely forest, far from civilization, is also a good place for sociopaths who are looking for easy targets to rob, hurt, rape, abduct, or kill. Emerson was aware of all of these pitfalls and had taken courses in both self-defense and hiking safety.
A college graduate with a degree and work experience in public relations, Julia Karrenbauer knew the value of people who use ink by the barrel and paper by the ton, and who send television news to millions of viewers around the world. According to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI), Karrenbauer and Steve Segars made telephone