Blankenship started back down the trail, ten or fifteen minutes before Frazier and Linke began their descent. They met at the last creek that the trail crosses on the way down Blood Mountain. Blankenship was concerned because of some unusual items he had found at a switchback trail that split from the main trail: a dog’s leather leash, an expandable baton made by ASP, a plastic bag of dog treats, a hair barrette, and two Eddie Bauer water bottles. Blankenship recognized the baton as the one the older hiker wearing the yellow jacket had carried at his side.
“Something’s not right,” he said.
At the bottom of the trail, the three men put the items down and Blankenship expanded the baton to examine it. He didn’t see anything to make him think it had been recently used. Two women and a boy came down about five minutes later. They told Blankenship they saw the man in the yellow coat farther up the trail, but off into the woods. They agreed to show Blankenship where they had seen the man. It was about fifty feet from where Blankenship had found the baton and other items.
The three hikers left to drop the items Blankenship had found off at a store on Neel’s Gap, while he, still feeling that something was wrong, decided to walk back up the trail and look around. He met Frazier and Linke again and asked about the older hiker. Both saw him and remembered him well because he had such “unusual eyes.” Before leaving the park, Blankenship entered the Neel’s Gap Store, gave his name and telephone number to the clerk, in case the police needed it, and then went home about 4:45 P.M.
Linke told a police officer that on his way back down the trail he had heard people yelling. He had expected to come upon some playing children, but they met no one else on the trail.
By the end of the day, police had consistent descriptions of the man who might have abducted Meredith Emerson. Perhaps the best one was from Nancy Linkes. Linkes told police she saw him when coming down from the summit on Reece Trail between three and four o’clock. He passed by her before going off into the woods to take a shortcut that put him farther ahead of her on the same trail.
According to Linkes, he had a black backpack and a dog named Dandy. He wore “parachute” pants and had duct tape around each shoe. She remembered seeing something black tied to his legs.
“He had light blue eyes and he looked weathered, like he had been in the sun a lot, old and wrinkly,” she said. “He had very large, deep-set eyes, and was creepy-looking. The dog wasn’t on a leash. He was saying how disgusted he was with how people came on the trail [and] were not prepared. They could get hurt easily, and he said I should have a sleeping bag with me …. When he went off the trail, the man complained about some hikers wearing shorts, and he was angry because they could step off the road and get hypothermia in minutes.”
Jason Hill, who was hiking with his wife and little girl, saw the man on Blood Mountain and “he gave me the creeps. He was mumbling something and kept looking at my little girl at the very peak of the mountain. I thought the man was crazy. He was leering at women and would not look at me. He just looked at little girls and women. He was a freak.”
That night, while Hilton was frantically deciding his next move, two specially trained police teams were still searching trails on Blood Mountain. Hilton was getting ever more tired and jittery and “felt the demons descending” on him. With each second that passed, the situation became more perilous for Meredith Emerson.
Chapter 4
Less than three months before Meredith Emerson went missing on January 1, 2008, two gruesome murders had occurred in Florida and in North Carolina. Another North Carolina hiker was missing and presumed dead. None of the police organizations in the different locations knew about the others, and none had a suspect.
The first to go missing were John Bryant and his wife, Irene, who hiked rigorous trails in North Carolina when many of their contemporaries were content to settle down and take things easy. John was seventy-nine years old and in robust health, except for painful arthritis in his back, which he refused to let change his activities. Irene, his wife for fifty-eight years, was a fascinating former veterinarian of eighty-four, with sparkle, verve, and insatiable curiosity.
They were both born in the Pacific Northwest and lived in Montana. Irene and John met there. Since they were both avid outdoors people, their dates were often hikes in the mountains. The first member of her family to attend college, Irene earned a doctorate from Washington State University (WSU) in veterinary medicine. She opened a clinic for large animals. Irene was the first female large-animal veterinarian in Montana, crashing the glass ceiling before most people had a name for it.
After a few years in Montana, the Bryants moved to the Finger Lakes district in Upstate New York, one of the most scenic areas in the Northeast. John was an engineer who worked on the Saint Lawrence Seaway while he earned a law degree at Cornell. After he passed the bar, he opened a practice in Syracuse. He served as the town attorney for Skaneateles, population 7,500, where they lived. He always underbilled for his services. Colleagues urged him to charge more. He told them that some people serve as volunteer firemen; this was his way of giving back to his community. Irene owned a large-animal clinic in New York, but she closed it to become a full-time mother to her daughter, Holly, and two sons. A woman with insatiable curiosity, Irene also took graduate courses in such things as psychology, forestry, and ichthyology.
The Bryants never lost their thirst for adventure and visiting new places. They traveled all over the United States and to various places around the world. They sent friends Christmas cards from their world travels, usually featuring photos of them posing in their hiking gear on the summit of a mountain. When they decided to retire, they still felt the call of the wild and moved to Horse Shoe, North Carolina, a small town near Pisgah National Forest, a place of steep climbs, wild rivers, and a variety of deciduous and coniferous trees. Wildlife was abundant.
Doctors told John that he should cut back on hiking because of the arthritis in his back, but John had other ideas. Hiking was his life. Instead of giving up, he took two years and conquered the Appalachian Trail in successive hikes; each one lasted about a week.
During retirement they hiked two or three times a week in Pisgah Forest, often choosing trails that were too difficult for inexperienced hikers to tackle. They roamed among the four-thousand-foot mountains, which were as colorful as a Claude Monet painting. The couple still enjoyed traveling and kept two full bags packed so they could take off at a moment’s notice—should they find a special rate on a trip they couldn’t resist.
On October 21, 2007, they decided to go for a hike in Pisgah Forest. They told friends and family and said they would call regularly so everyone would know they were fine. But something terrible happened near the Cradle of Forestry and Pink Beds in Transylvania County, near Brevard, North Carolina. There was a 911 emergency call from their cell phone, and it was abruptly disconnected. The call never reached the emergency dispatch office. No one even knew about the telephone call at the time, because there was no reason for anyone to worry about the Bryants, who were careful and experienced hikers.
And then the newspapers started to pile up in front of their house. Neighbors watched with growing alarm and telephoned Bob Bryant, their son, who lived in Austin, Texas. Bob telephoned his mother’s sister, who usually talked with his mother once a week, and she had not heard from Irene Bryant, either. Bob caught the first flight he could from Austin and broke into his parents’ locked house. Nothing seemed to be out of place, but the hiking gear was gone. Bob Bryant telephoned the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office (FCSO) and reported that his parents had not been seen in two weeks.
The sheriff’s deputies found the Bryants’ vehicle at a trailhead in Pisgah Forest, and a massive search was started. As is standard operating procedure (SOP) today, the area was divided into grids and marked by GPS. Hundreds of trained search-and-rescue people and volunteers combed the trails. Aircraft with spotters and infrared heat sensors streaked across the park looking for live or deceased bodies. Although unlikely, people clung to the hope that the Bryants had merely gotten lost.
That hope vanished on the second day of the search. Deputies discovered that Irene and John Bryant’s ATM card had been used to withdraw three hundred dollars