Gary Michael Hilton, 61, a drifter serving a life sentence in Georgia for the decapitation murder of hiker Meredith Emerson, is fighting extradition to Florida where he has been indicted on charges of murder and kidnapping in the death of nurse Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, 46, whose body was found December 19, 2007 by a group of hunters in the Apalachicola National Forest, southwest of Tallahassee, decapitated. Representing himself at a hearing on Friday, May 2, 2008 in Butts County, where he is imprisoned at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center, Hilton voiced his denials.
"Your honor," Hilton told the judge, "I deny that I'm a fugitive from justice. I deny that I'm guilty of the crimes that I have been charged with."
Nonetheless, Hilton's extradition to Florida was green-lighted by Superior Court Judge Thomas Wilson, who ruled that all of the conditions for Hilton's extradition had been met. While Hilton has 30 days to appeal the judge's ruling, Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs told a reporter for the Associated Press of his plans to seek the death penalty against the murder suspect.
Hilton, incidentally, has sufficient suspected kills under his belt that would, if convicted of all of the slayings for which he is suspected, qualify him as a serial killer in terms of numbers. According to the police, Hilton is also a suspect in the deaths of an elderly North Carolina couple, John and Irene Bryant, who met their untimely fate while hiking in a wooded, mountainous region.
In the Florida case, Cheryl Hodges Dunlap vanished on Saturday, December 1, 2007, a month before Meredith Emerson was killed in Georgia, and she was reported missing the next day after she did not show up at her church to teach her Sunday school class. Shortly after Dunlap disappeared, security video cameras at a bank ATM captured surveillance images of a tall, thin man. He was wearing gloves, a hat, and a mask-like covering on his face in an attempt to conceal his identity while he withdrew money from the ATM using Cheryl Dunlap's bank card and personal identification number on three occasions—December 2, 3, and 4. Although detectives conducted a stake-out at the undisclosed location of the ATM for a week, the man did not show up again. A month later, Meredith Emerson was killed under similar circumstances.
Although Dunlap's car had been located two days after she had disappeared, parked on the shoulder of a highway with a flat tire, it had not yielded any clues that had been able to help point investigators toward a potential suspect. In fact, it had taken the news and publicity surrounding the Emerson case in Georgia, and the subsequent information that had been released about the deaths of the couple in North Carolina, to facilitate the police in Florida investigating Dunlap's death and connecting it to Hilton.
Investigation Discovery will continue to provide updates on this story when they occur.