The Reel Review
16 years ago today, Meredith Emerson was abducted while hiking North Georgia’s Blood Mountain, a popular destination in the Chattahoochee National Forest, an hour and a half’s drive north of Atlanta. Within days, her killer – Gary Hilton – would be apprehended, exposed as an off-the grid serial killer who also eventually would be convicted of three additional murders during the prior ten weeks in national forests in North Carolina and Florida. This four episode crime docuseries looks at the details of this case and how Emerson’s actions while in captivity helped solve her own murder and prevent the future deaths of more individuals.
Compiling an impressive array of evidence and meticulous details from Emerson’s abduction and kidnapping, the team at ABC News in this third season of Wild Crime is able to piece together the events – not only of Gary Hilton’s kidnapping and murder of Emerson, but Hilton’s murder of John and Irene Bryant in the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina and Cheryl Dunlap in the Apalachicola National Forest in Florida. It also explores Hilton’s possible involvement in a number of missing persons cases.
Hilton’s taped interviews confessing to what happened the day he kidnapped Emerson, and how she fought back and almost escaped, are chilling. Also noteworthy – the emotional toll this case took, not only on family and friends, but on now-retired investigators. While most people will be fortunate enough never to face this situation, it is still a cautionary tale about the dangers of being alone in public.
REEL FACTS
• Gary Hilton, dubbed the National Forest Serial Killer, currently resides on death row at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida. Both state and federal authorities denied his 2018 appeal. An investigator in the Dawson County public defender’s office adopted and renamed Hilton’s dog, who died in 2015.
• Meredith Emerson’s parents adopted her dog Ella in 2008 and brought her to live with them at their home in Longmont, Colorado.
• Hilton told his attorney that he had been planning to kidnap another victim at an Atlanta shopping mall on the day that authorities arrested him while he was trying to dispose of evidence at a Chamblee gas station.
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