Time is critical in bringing an abduction case to a successful conclusion, and Emerson’s friends and family had done all the things the police tell people to do in such matters. Maybe it was not too late to save Meredith Emerson.
Scores of people congregated at the entrance to Vogel Park to help search for the missing woman. Uniformed deputies from the Union County Sheriff’s Office (UCSO), as well as members of the Union County Fire Department (UCFD), organized search parties. Now that Emerson’s car had been found at Vogel Park, which was in Union County, the crime came under the jurisdiction of the UCSO. The Dawson County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) and Dawsonville Police Department (DPD) continued to help.
Several of Emerson’s friends, who had hiked on Blood Mountain, had already started to comb the trails in search of the missing hiker. First Lieutenant Brad Niebrand, of the UCFD, found several volunteers with medical training who knew the park well. He immediately sent them out with his own men in case Emerson would need medical help when found. Deputies found Emerson’s car, a 2000 white Chevrolet with the Georgia license plate number WX311S, abandoned at the Byron Herbert Reece Memorial Trailhead parking area near Blairsville. Segars’s “sticky note” was still attached to the driver’s-side window. The area was cordoned off with yellow tape with black letters that read CRIME SCENE to keep people away so crime scene investigation (CSI) officers would have an “uncontaminated” area in which to work their forensic wonders.
For a man who was trying to remain anonymous, Gary Michael Hilton might as well have been wearing neon lights for all the attention he attracted on Blood Mountain, not just on New Year’s Day, but several days before. He stood out like a black spider on a white wedding cake. Deputies didn’t have to wait long before finding evidence of a suspicious character on Blood Mountain the day that Meredith Emerson went missing.
Casey Smith noticed a man on Herbert Reece Trail who wore “a goofy furry hat” and had only one tooth in front. About sixty years old, the man wore a yellow wind-breaker with black patches on the elbows and black stripes on the sides. The man carried a black backpack, carried a big knife on his waist and a collapsible nightstick, which looked like a police baton, and was accompanied by a red Irish setter. The man wasn’t on the trail, Smith told a deputy, but that he had actually burst unexpectedly onto the trail from a heavily wooded area. He said the man was talking to himself.
Smith said he and the man talked together for a short time before they separated. Smith and his dog went to the parking lot. Just before he drove from the lot, Smith saw the same man come out of the woods, again off trail, with his dog and get inside a “dingy” white Astro van. The time was about five o’clock in the evening when Smith left. The unidentified man in the van was still in the parking lot.
Liz Porterwood and her husband, Randy, also remembered encountering a man on Blood Mountain on New Year’s Day. Although the man looked scruffy and was missing at least two front teeth, Liz Porterwood described him as being “nice.” Like the man Smith saw, the person with whom the Porterwoods talked wore a yellow wind-breaker with yellow stripes and elbow patches. Even though he wore a fleece hat, the flaps were tied up, so they could tell he was balding and what little hair he had was gray, as was his beard. Liz Porterwood noticed that his skin was weathered and that he had numerous age spots on his skin. There were duct tape patches on the toes of both shoes. There was a scar above his upper lip, Porterwood said, and he had “really clear blue eyes.”
The man said he hiked almost every day.
“Oh, you must live around here,” Liz Porterwood had said.
The man didn’t respond. Instead, he began to criticize other hikers for being ill prepared to hike the mountains and complained that the rescue personnel were “fat and lazy.”
“I only packed for one day and I still didn’t pack enough,” he told Liz. He reached back and squeezed his partially filled backpack. “People aren’t prepared enough. If anyone ever had a broken leg or any other trouble, they might not last through the night because of the weather. It gets down to forty degrees at night, even during the summer.”
The man told Liz Porterwood that he had found a man with a broken shinbone who was being helped by a young firefighter, who was making little progress until Hilton stepped in to help.
“They send the young, inexperienced ones up because most of the ones who have experience are too fat to climb the mountain,” he said.
The UCSO moved a mobile command post into Vogel Park to coordinate the search. They used a Global Positioning System (GPS) to divide the mountain into quadrants so that not one inch would be overlooked. Infrared heat-sensing devices, which can detect a person at night and in densely wooded areas, were used in the attempt to find Emerson. Helicopters patrolled the rivers, creeks, and lakes, where the lack of foliage allowed spotters to search from the air. The army of searchers came up empty.
But the police were gathering valuable information, especially with the consistency of witnesses who spotted the “creepy” bearded man, with his weathered skin and red dog. Emerson’s friends had identified the dog leash, Eddie Bauer water bottles, and dog treats, which had been turned in by an as-yet-unidentified man on Blood Mountain late on New Year’s Day, as belonging to Emerson. The hiker had found a collapsible police-type baton in the same area as the other evidence. The witnesses who described seeing the unidentified man had all said that he carried a baton of that type.
It was clear now that Emerson had been kidnapped. Her status was upgraded from “Missing Person” to “Kidnapped and Endangered.” By sundown it was becoming too dangerous to continue a mass search. Walking on mountain trails under the best conditions requires careful attention to where you put your feet: when there is ice and snow and no light, it is easy to slip on something and go tumbling down a stony ravine. Except for some professional woodsmen familiar with the trails, the search was suspended for the night.
There were still a lot of people to be interviewed to try and establish a timeline that would help the police track Emerson and her abductor’s path. The only thing they could do was continue to interview, search, investigate, and work backward to establish a path and perhaps determine where the abductor might be heading. With hard police work and a little luck, the police might find Emerson well and safe.
The police needed to find as many witnesses as possible and interview them. The man who had found the bottles, dog leash, and baton could have seen other things that had not seemed significant to him at the time. Under careful police questioning, the witness might mention other things he saw that he didn’t realize had evidentiary value.
Apparently, several other witnesses had seen Emerson and Hilton on New Year’s Day. They had to be found and questioned. There were no photographs and little information to release to the media, except to describe Meredith Emerson and ask the public for help if they had seen Emerson and her abductor. A sketch artist was preparing a drawing of the man described by the witnesses who had seen him on New Year’s Day. When a photograph of Meredith was available, it would be televised, printed in newspapers, and sent to hundreds of sites on the Internet that are dedicated to finding missing persons. There would be a national “army” trying to find her and her abductor.
The police knew nothing about the suspect except what they had heard: he looked weird, acted strangely, had blue eyes, was weathered, and had an Irish setter, which one witness had heard him call Dandy. The two water bottles and brown leash were photographed by CSI and bagged for forensic testing.
The day had been bitterly cold and there was a light dusting of snow on the ground. The police were truly surprised at the large number of volunteers who had come to help look for the missing young woman. Although darkness made it too treacherous to continue searching the mountain, the investigative pace continued at full pace throughout the night.
Chapter 3
Hoarfrost covered the inside of the Astro van’s windows