At the Hands of a Stranger. Lee Butcher
as he, Emerson, and the two dogs hiked along Shoal Creek.
Hilton could tell that Emerson was having a good time because she kept chatting. It didn’t occur to him that she might be talking because she was nervous, afraid, hungry, in pain, cold, and that she had just been beaten and raped hours earlier. No, she was not having a bad time—even though she had been kidnapped. He wouldn’t say she was really happy about the situation, but consistent with his perception on her situation of being beaten up and kidnapped, he believed she was enjoying herself.
Of course, he had laid down the law before they started out on the hike. He wanted to make it perfectly clear that he was the professional, that he had the upper hand, and that she had no chance to escape.
“There’s nowhere for you to go, honey,” he said. “So remember two things. Number one, if you bust out running on me through the woods, I’ll shoot your ass down.”
He showed her a gun, which looked like a Colt Combat Commander, and she said, “No, no. Don’t show me the gun. I don’t want to see the gun.”
“Just remember two things,” he said. “If you bust out through the woods, the pursuer has the advantage. If you bust out running down the road or anywhere else, I’ll shoot you down—and I’m a good shot, left-or right-handed.” Hilton wasn’t lying about that: he had earned expert sharpshooter medals when he was a paratrooper in the U.S. Army.
“If we come upon someone, don’t do anything, or I’m gonna start shooting everybody,” Hilton told Emerson. “Unless it’s law enforcement. I won’t shoot it out with law enforcement ’cause I won’t win. But if it’s anyone else, everybody is gonna get killed.”
They started the hike, with Emerson walking ahead of Hilton. She was not wearing any restraints. Where is she going to go? he asked himself. Nowhere, he answered. There was absolutely nowhere Meredith Emerson could go from here.
He mocked the way the cops shot their guns when he watched them on TV, and he thought about this and many other things during his hours alone in the woods. The cops came out facing their opponent, holding the gun in front of themselves with both hands, giving the other shooter a wide target. The Western gunfighters stood face on, too, but used a single-handed grip. He, among all men, knew how brain-dead this was: you stood sideways, making yourself a small target, while taking steady aim with one hand. That was the way the pros, like himself, did it—not like the dumb-ass actor cops on television.
As he contemplated his situation, Hilton continued to believe that Emerson was having a good time and was in no mental distress. She commented time and again on how beautiful it was. So far as Hilton was concerned, she was a happy camper.
In fact, Meredith Emerson was cold and scared. Her abductor had stopped somewhere in Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area to camp for the night, and she had spent the night without sleep. Emerson had intended to hike on Blood Mountain with her dog, Ella, for just a few hours and had brought no heavy clothing and had carried only a few necessities in a fanny pack.
She was bloody and sore as she shivered inside the ratty sleeping bag, which her abductor had provided for her. It was colder than usual. The temperature that time of year was usually fairly mild, but it had turned bitterly cold, dropping to eleven degrees, equaling a record low set there in 1940.
So far, Emerson had done everything she had been taught to fight against being abducted and how to behave if she was abducted. Getting into an abductor’s vehicle increased the odds that things would end badly for the victim, and she had resisted as hard and as long as she could, using everything she had learned about self-defense in her judo and karate classes. She kept fighting, even when she thought she had no strength left, because getting under the abductor’s control was the last thing she wanted.
But she had failed. He was too big and too strong and the blow to her head from a tree limb sent waves of pain and shock through her so that she could no longer resist. Then she had been chained and tied inside the abductor’s dirty van and made to lie or sit on hard, lumpy cargo bags. She had been forced to listen to his manic voice and his vulgar and obscene railing against anything and everything, and she felt the lash of the vile names he called her.
Emerson was trying to stay alive because people would be looking for her. Before she left to go hiking on New Year’s morning, she had left a note on the chalkboard, where she and her roommate, Julia Karrenbauer, used to leave messages for one another. Emerson had written a note telling Karrenbauer that she was taking Ella for a hike, and she tacked on a personal note about the New Year’s Eve party Julia had attended: Hope you had a good time.
Karrenbauer would be expecting her to return during the evening of New Year’s Day. Her friend would not wait long to get word out that Emerson was missing, and then a search would soon be under way. People might already be looking for her. Emerson was doing her best to buy time, to give searchers a chance to find her. She had given her abductor false PIN numbers. When no cash came out, she convinced him that he had not entered the correct number. After several failed attempts to get cash, Emerson started telling her abductor that certain cards only worked at designated ATMs.
“You better not be lying to me, cunt,” he said in his strange, chilling voice. “I’ll shoot your ass.”
The abductor looked mean and angry, and he had cold blue eyes with small pupils, which made him appear sinister. The eyes were colder than icicles and his face was frozen in an expression that was both menacing and without pity. How much longer could she keep him running from ATM to ATM before he decided to go ahead and do whatever he intended to do with her?
The Blood Mountain hiking area swarmed with an unprecedented number of people trying to find Meredith Emerson. Officials for more than a dozen federal, state, county, and city agencies—aided by scores of volunteers—looked for anything that might lead to Emerson’s whereabouts. Although it was only a day after Emerson had been reported missing, word of mouth and a short newspaper notice had spread the news like wildfire.
Police departments throughout northern Georgia were being flooded by calls from people telephoning to report seeing Emerson, an older man, and two dogs matching Dandy and Ella on Blood Mountain.
Adam Linke told Special Agent Casey Smith that sometime between 1:45 and 2:00 P.M. that he and his father-in-law, Dr. James Frazier, encountered a hiker named Seth Blankenship, who passed them on the trail going up Blood Mountain. Blankenship was walking a dog, and Linke had two dogs on leashes. After he passed the two hikers, Blankenship talked briefly with an older man wearing a yellow jacket with black stripes, fingerless gloves, and a knit hat. The man had moved about thirty feet off the trail and an Irish setter trotted beside him.
“Is your dog friendly?” Blankenship asked.
The man said that he was.
Blankenship stopped to pet the dog. “What’s his name?”
“Dandy.”
Blankenship, a former Florida police officer, noticed that the man carried an Armament Systems and Procedures (ASP) police baton at his side. He asked the man if Emerson, who was about thirty feet ahead of him, was hiking with him. The man said they weren’t together, but that he had moved off to the side of the trail to let some other hikers pass.
Around 2:30 P.M., Linke and Frazier met Emerson, who was heading back down the mountain. An unleashed black retriever frolicked around her, tail wagging. The three hikers stopped and chatted for a few minutes while their dogs played together. Emerson wore a baby blue fleece jacket with black shoulders and black pants, with no pockets in the back. Linke described Emerson as being “very chipper and happy.”
As they continued up the trail, Linke and Frazier met an older man in a yellow jacket with bold black stripes. The man was about twenty-five feet behind Emerson. When he saw Linke and Frazier, he immediately moved twenty feet farther off the trail, as if to avoid a close encounter. The man wandered off the trail and into the woods, still going downhill, but out of their line of vision. They noted, however, that the older hiker could still see Emerson from his vantage point. The other hikers thought it was strange, but they continued on to the summit and spent a few minutes exploring