In the following hours and days, Emerson kept Hilton off-balance by repeatedly giving him the wrong PIN for her ATM card but assuring each time that this time the numbers were correct.
She bought time with that ploy. Three days.
“That’s one thing that broke my heart in this case,” Bridges said. “She was doing everything she was supposed to do to stay alive, and we didn’t get there in time.”
In recounting conversations with Emerson, Hilton revealed himself as a killer without shame or remorse —- and unwittingly provided testament to her resolve.
Hilton said he and Emerson camped all three nights during a spell of bitter cold.
To keep her from running away, he usually kept a chain or nylon rope around her neck and she was often tethered to a tree or inside the van. When they slept, Emerson was tied to him so he would know if she tried to escape.
Hilton claimed he tried to make Emerson comfortable, at one point saying he gave her the warmer sleeping bag because temperatures had dropped to 4 degrees. He offered her aspirin for a lingering headache that followed their fight the first day.
“I was solicitous of her … comfort and everything else,” said Hilton, seemingly oblivious to the contradiction.
Perhaps one of the most chilling details followed, as Hilton nonchalantly told Bridges, he raped Emerson that first night. He was angry she’d made him drive around from bank to bank and still had nothing to show for it.
Their second day together, Hilton set up camp in Dawson Forest, where they hiked for several hours. He insisted she was free, but he also said he told her he would shoot her and anyone around if she tried to get away.
“We took both dogs and went hiking along Shoal Creek,” Hilton said. He said she was not bound while they hiked.
If she appeared to be going along with her abductor, as Hilton described, Keenan said it was only to survive. “She struggled to live,” the GBI director said.
Hilton knew he was a wanted man, telling investigators he had followed the AJC’s coverage of Emerson’s abduction. On the day she died, Jan. 4, he was pictured on the newspaper’s front page alongside a story in which police named him a “person of interest” in the Buford hiker’s disappearance.
That day, Hilton said that he told Emerson “she was going home.”
“I said, ‘I’m giving you all your stuff back.’ I had all her stuff bagged up together. I made a point of showing her.”
They drove to the spot where he would kill her. On the way, they passed a law-enforcement officer.
“I waved at him,” Hilton said. “It was that close.”
Though a police bulletin had been issued for Hilton’s van with a DeKalb County license plate, by then he had switched that tag for a stolen North Carolina tag.
“I walked her into the woods,” Hilton said. He carried two sleeping bags, an air mattress “for her to sit on,” two bags and a chain.
“Secured her to a tree. Walked back to the van. Kinda got myself together. Made some coffee.”
Killing was difficult
When he came back to her, Hilton said with a little laugh, Emerson told him, ” ‘I was afraid you weren’t coming back.’ “
He gave her a book to read, “Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures” by Marvin Harris, walked behind her as if he were going to remove the chains holding her to the tree and hit her several times with the handle from a tire jack.
Hilton both killed and decapitated Emerson in a vain effort to destroy evidence that might incriminate him.
Hilton was worried about another piece of evidence that might link him to the slaying —- Emerson’s dog. She had told him the Lab-mix carried a microchip identifying it as her pet.
“If I wanted to ensure that no one would associate the dog with her, I would’ve killed the dog,” Hilton said. “But there’s no way I could do that.”
He won’t get death. Part of his plea deal was to lead investigators to her remains in lieu of a death sentence. I think the family wanted her found and returned home for a proper burial more than they wanted him to die for killing her…
Death Penalty anyone? Sounds fitting for a monster.