The unauthorized use of the Bryants’ ATM card made it clear that this was more than a case of missing hikers. Sheriff David Mahoney assumed foul play and feared for the lives of the elderly couple.
On November 9, 2007, Mahoney’s misgivings proved to be right. Irene’s skeletal remains were found beneath a covering of branches and leaves. The remains were forty-six yards from their Ford Escape, on Yellow Gap Road.
Irene Bryant died from blunt trauma to the head and had defensive wounds on her right arm. There were three fractures on the right side of her face, and a massive fracture at the back of her head that crushed the skull. There were several fractures on her right arm, probably received when she tried to protect herself, and the right arm was severed and found several feet from the body. There was no sign of her husband; alarming fear mounted for his safety.
The Bryants’ son Bob couldn’t understand why a robbery had turned into a murder. At their age, he said, his parents posed no physical threat. Had they been confronted by someone who merely wanted money, Bob Bryant said, his parents would simply have handed over their wallets and money. Neither of them would have resisted, he said, unless one, or both of them, had been assaulted.
Mahoney called off the search for missing hikers and sent the volunteers home. This was clearly a homicide—maybe a double homicide—or possibly one homicide and one kidnapping, with assault and bodily harm. The search for John Bryant and his wife’s killer would be continued by professionals. The Transylvania County Sheriff’s Office (TCSO), North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation (NCSBI), and the Polk County Sheriff’s Office (PCSO) searched for several more weeks without finding Bryant, alive or dead. There was little hope that he would be found alive. Bob Bryant was asked how he felt when he saw the picture of the man in the yellow parka. “I’m not consumed with hatred or anything like that. I want to find my dad, and I want law enforcement to find these people and give them a fair trial.”
A newspaper delivery driver in Ducktown told the police that she saw a balding, bearded man in a yellow coat with black patches driving a white Astro van at about the same time that the card was used. In the area, during that same time, several people reported seeing a balding, bearded, scruffy-looking man, about sixty years old, weighing 160 pounds.
On October 26, 2007, Cherokee County deputy Will Ballard drove to a private hunting preserve to answer a complaint about an unauthorized camper. The hunting preserve is in northwestern Georgia, about seventy miles from Ducktown, Tennessee, where someone had used the Bryants’ ATM card to withdraw three hundred dollars. Ballard’s dashboard video/audio recorder was operating when he found the trespasser: a bald, weathered man about sixty years old, weighing about 160 pounds. He met Ballard in front of the deputy’s car so that much of their twenty-minute conversation was recorded by the video/audio dashboard device. The man was talkative and animated, sometimes almost jumping in circles as he talked. He had blue eyes and no front teeth.
“Howdy, Deputy,” he said. “How are you today?”
“Can I get your ID real quick?” Ballard asked.
“Yes, you sure can.”
Ballard entered the information into his computer to search for outstanding warrants or BOLOs (be on the lookout for) and continued talking to the trespasser.
“You got any weapons on you? Anything in the van?”
“Oh, just the usual stuff.” The deputy made a move toward the van, but the man hopped ahead of him. “Oh,” he said, as if just remembering, “there’s a backpack with an expandable police baton in it. I don’t want you to get nervous. I’ll get it for you.”
He hurried to the van and retrieved the backpack and hopped back to the deputy. They were out of the dashboard video’s range, but the audio was recorded.
“I was a paratrooper,” the man said. “What I’m doing now is I’m on perpetual professional field maneuvers. You never know who or what you’re gonna meet up here.”
Ballard found no outstanding warrants on the man and told him he should leave.
“It’s the first day of hunting season,” Ballard said. “You should leave before you get shot.”
“I’m leaving. I’m getting out of here!” the trespasser howled, flapping his arms. “God Almighty!”
“Have a nice day,” Ballard said as he drove away.
“I love you!”
“Take care and be safe, Mr. Hilton,” the deputy replied.
Ballard had just talked with Gary Hilton in northwestern Georgia, a day after a man fitting Hilton’s description had used the Bryants’ ATM card in Ducktown, Tennessee, about fifty miles away. In spite of an intense search, the police could not find John Bryant’s body and had no suspect for the murder of Irene Bryant.
On December 1, 2007, Cheryl Dunlap left her house in Crawfordville, Florida, to take advantage of the one free day each week that she had to herself. Dunlap telephoned a friend about nine in the morning to say that she was going to the public library in Medart, just a few miles away. Crawfordville is in Wakulla County, a sparsely populated area that is a bedroom community for suburbanites who work in the state capital of Tallahassee, located about twenty miles farther north. The town is some three hundred miles south of Blood Mountain, from where Meredith Emerson would be kidnapped. The terrain in that area of Florida is heavily wooded and encompasses several parks, some of which bump shoulders with the Appalachian Trail.
Cheryl Dunlap was a healer, not just of the body, but of the spirit. Her long hours were not from obligation but from personal commitment. A registered nurse, Dunlap worked at Thagard Student Health Center at Florida State University (FSU), and was considered one of the best. According to the logbooks, she often saw patients right up to the last minutes of her shift.
Dunlap was the mother of two sons, Mike and Jake, and had been divorced from their father since they were little boys. Mike lived in Crawfordville and Jake was serving with the U.S. Army in Iraq. The other passion in Dunlap’s life was her faith. She lived in Crawfordville all of her life and was a sixth-generation member of the White Church Primitive Baptist, a church with a congregation of a little more than sixty members. Jake won an award there for attending Sunday school every week for seven years. The church had a small congregation, but they were an active group of hardy souls.
They pitched in to help one another remodel homes; and even though it was small, the church had outreach programs and performed missionary work in foreign lands. Besides being a full-time single mother and nurse, Dunlap sang in the choir and taught Sunday school and Bible school. Dunlap was so passionate about her faith that she even made time to attend and graduate from the FIRE School of Ministry in Pensacola. Following graduation she made several trips to China and South America as a missionary, who worked in medicine and spread the Gospel.
When Hurricane Ivan threatened the central Alabama Gulf Coast in September 2004 with 165-miles-per-hour winds and lashing rain, more than two hundred thousand people in the area fled their homes in Florida and Alabama as the fifth strongest hurricane ever to develop in the Gulf Basin came closer. In spite of a slight weakening, Ivan was still a Category 3 hurricane, with sustained winds of 125 miles per hour, when the storm struck the Alabama and Florida coasts.
This killer storm produced a storm surge as high as ten to fifteen feet from Destin, in the Florida Panhandle, westward to Mobile Bay/Baldwin County in Alabama. One wave, which was measured by the buoy from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), reached the monster height of fifty-two feet in the Gulf of Mexico, off the coast of Mobile, Alabama.
The storm caused catastrophic damage and loss of life from Florida through Nova Scotia. The worst damage was along the Alabama and Florida coasts with wind and water sweeping away buildings, ripping up trees, and even knocking down a huge section of a bridge on Interstate 10. Thousands were injured and left homeless