“I’m in a fix,” Gary Hilton told her. “I need some money. Can you lend me two hundred bucks?”
“No,” Brenda said.
“Give me a hundred.”
“The only reason I ever gave you money, Gary, was because I’m scared to death of you,” Brenda told him.
“I need some gasoline. How about some money for that?”
“No, Gary. No.”
Brenda hung up in a hurry but remembered to save the telephone number from where Hilton’s call had originated. She trembled with fear. She lived in a wooded area and there were many nights she had spent in the house thinking, God, he might be out in the woods right now.
Brenda met Hilton twenty years ago when she lived in Atlanta with her mother, the manager of an apartment complex where Hilton rented a one-bedroom unit. Brenda was a star on the high-school girls’ basketball team and regularly ran to stay in shape. She had noticed that Hilton ran almost every day, too. One day they struck up a conversation and started running together.
Brenda was fifteen years old and Hilton was forty-four when he persuaded her to have a sexual relationship with him. She had looked at him as a father figure and she admired his broad area of knowledge. They talked about everything, and the conversation eventually came around to sex. Hilton was in exceptionally good physical condition in those days, Brenda remembered, with taut muscles, a nice tan, “and the most beautiful blue eyes you’ve ever seen. He had hair and teeth then, and he could run circles around me. He really looked good.”
Talking about sex increased their intimacy and she was curious about relationships between men and women. Having grown up without a father at home, Brenda found her affection toward Hilton growing. One thing led to another and she found herself having sex with him. Although he was often harsh with others, Brenda felt that he was kind to her.
“He was never mean to me and he could talk about anything,” she said. “He was always reading magazines and encyclopedias.”
Hilton gradually started talking to Brenda about intimate things and touching her. As a woman in her thirties, Brenda thought that Hilton took advantage of her inexperience. “I was a young girl and I was curious,” she said. “It was consensual sex in that he never hurt me. Now I know what a big deal it was to be an inexperienced teenager with a man in his forties.”
Their relationship grew; and, after a time, when Hilton called, Brenda jumped. “‘Hey, let’s go for a five-mile run,’ he would say, and I’d go right over.”
Brenda never saw him pay much attention to anyone else on their excursions. He pretty much focused on her. His eyes didn’t wander to other women, and he never made inappropriate comments about them. The world he encompassed during these runs seemed to be composed of nothing more than Brenda, the woods, and Ranger, the Irish setter he loved more than anything in the world.
Hilton was still living in the apartment complex when Brenda moved away to attend college in western Georgia. He called her occasionally, and over time she noticed a gradual change in his demeanor. Always a nonstop talker, Hilton started to rant at everybody and about everything. He never made much sense, and she felt incoherent vitriol flowing from him in torrents, like lava from an active volcano.
“He never threatened me, but he would go from happy to pissed off in a flash,” Brenda noticed. “He just thought everybody in the world was stupid and incompetent, and that he was so much smarter than anybody else. He thought all men were faggots. He never made any direct threats to anyone, but his voice was so mean that he scared me. I told him to stop calling because I was afraid of him.”
Brenda actually knew very little about Gary Hilton. He never spoke of his family life, except that he didn’t like his mother because she had refused to loan him money to post bail. He had no brothers or sisters, so far as Brenda knew. Hilton was proud of having been a U.S. Army paratrooper and often performed combat demonstrations for her, advising her that “this is how the paratroopers do it.” Hilton liked to brag that he had been in combat, but he confided to Brenda that he had not.
The telephone calls that Hilton made to Brenda after she left for college were not very revealing about him. They talked about the little things people do when they’re catching up on news about each other. She told him about her college life, and Hilton related how he was raising money for various charities as a telemarketer. Brenda was proud of him for doing something so selfless. Of course, she didn’t know that most of Hilton’s telemarketing jobs were nothing more than scams: he got telephone pledges for a phony charity, had the pledges collected, and kept the money for himself. Brenda was on the college women’s basketball team, and Hilton sometimes showed up to play one-on-one with her or to go for one of their power hikes.
Hilton’s calls became fewer and angrier when Brenda told Hilton she had a serious boyfriend.
“He got scarier and scarier,” Brenda said. “The way he talked about people was so mean and so ugly. Then he started to say mean things about me.”
Hilton told Brenda that she was stupid and would never amount to anything. She was ugly and no man would ever want her. She was clumsy, silly, knew nothing about anything, and didn’t know how to think analytically. The things she chose to read were worthless and a waste of time.
“He was never physically mean to me,” Brenda remembered. “He was just verbally abusive. I was scared to death to be around him.”
Hilton still continued to call; and like many women who suffer from battered woman syndrome (BWS), Brenda continued to take his calls, hoping things would get better. She believed she was so vulnerable because he was such a strong father figure to her. Hilton began to attack her boyfriend verbally and to make Brenda feel worthless.
“You’re so stupid,” he said. “He’s in college with all those prettier girls around. You have to know he’s fucking around on you. La-de-da. You’re never going to amount to anything, and he’s going to fuck all the pussy he can.”
The only person Brenda remembered hearing Hilton speak kind words about was his second wife, Donna Coltrane (pseudonym), a former law enforcement officer at Stone Mountain Park. Hilton would praise Coltrane one minute and the next would eviscerate her with vile, cutting accusations. He didn’t know why he had married the bitch. He believed she had married him because he qualified for a Veterans Administration (VA) home loan. She was a whore, who fucked anybody anytime. Oddly enough, Hilton said Coltrane had a lot of good qualities about her, but he never mentioned one specifically. He would rant for hours about her faults, but Coltrane still seemed to be the only person in the world about whom he ever said anything nice.
Following graduation from college, Brenda and Mack Porter (pseudonym) were married. She had not talked with Hilton for several months and Brenda thought that might be the end of it. But it wasn’t. He telephoned her cell phone during the Christmas holidays and, on one occasion, she even met him for a hike, which she didn’t tell her husband about. She insisted that it was nothing more than a hike.
About three years passed without Brenda seeing Hilton; then, one day, she was in her office building and looked up to see an unkempt, balding, almost toothless man sitting in the area that she supervised. His feet were propped on a desk and he was telling stories to three of Brenda’s subordinates. Brenda was so startled at his appearance that she almost fainted. Her heart pounded. In a state of disbelief, she walked over to Hilton, looked at him closely, and asked, “Gary? Is that you, Gary?”
Once she got him into the privacy of an office, she looked at him closer and shivered. This man was weird and scary and had unkempt hair and a straggly beard. He had only one tooth in front. He had a maniacal look in his eyes, and he talked in an almost incomprehensible stream of disassociated thoughts. The old anger at the world had only festered with time and was now encapsulated in a thin veneer that seemed on the verge of erupting.