Trails of Death: The True Story of National Forest Serial Killer Gary Hilton

happened.

prologue

Bob Bryant was worried. Really worried. For weeks he hadn’t been able to get in touch with his parents by phone or e-mail. Their neighbors told him that newspapers were piling up outside their house.

Irene and John Bryant were avid hikers, a devoted couple married for fifty-five years. On October 20, 2007, they had gone hiking in western North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest in the Pink Beds Loop Trail area. Since then, neither family nor friends had seen or heard from them. Bob Bryant, who lived in Texas, flew to North Carolina in early November and immediately went to his parents’ house. Gaining entrance, he found nothing unusual except that their backpacks were gone.

Where were his parents? He called police to report his eighty-four-year-old mother and seventy-nine-year-old father missing. As part of the first group of searchers in the forest, Bob happened upon his parents’ abandoned red Ford Escape parked on the east side of Yellow Gap Road, off U.S. Highway 276. There were no signs of a struggle. Then the pros took over. Searchers with dogs began combing the hiking trials rather than using the abandoned car as the starting point for their labors. Had they done the latter, Irene Bryant would have been found almost immediately.

While the searchers hit the trails for a full three days, in which they found nothing, police discovered that at four o’clock in the afternoon on the day Irene disappeared, someone had placed a 911 call from her cell phone, which was dropped because of a weak signal. A few days later, their ATM card was used seventy-five miles away at a bank in nearby Ducktown, Tennessee, to withdraw $300. Ducktown is where the states of Tennessee, North Carolina and Georgia all touch.

Finally, after three days, on November 9, searchers discovered the decomposing body of a female only twenty-five yards from the abandoned Ford Escape. She was wearing pants, underwear, T-shirt, a bra, white sock and blue sock and one hiking boot on the left foot. Police found her long-sleeved shirt and the right hiking boot near her body. They soon identified the victim as Irene Bryant.

According to her autopsy report, Irene Bryant was hit multiple times in the head, fracturing her skull each time. The blows that had killed her had been made by some blunt object, like a hammer or a jack handle. The left forearm was broken, with all the fingers of the same hand fractured. That implied that she had held her arm up to ward off the killer’s blows.

Her right forearm was another story. Either someone had severed it below the elbow for some unknown reason, or the carrion-feeders had gotten to it. A further analysis of the severed bones by a forensic anthropologist could determine how the arm had become detached from the body.

Bob Bryant—and his sister, Holly, who lived in Florida—were left to mourn for their mother, to arrange for her funeral, even while their father, John, continued to remain missing. Police searched for him throughout the South. They hoped that when they found John Bryant, they would also find who had abducted and killed his wife, Irene.

The hunt had begun on both sides of the law.

part one

perpetual maneuvers

chapter

1

Crawfordville Highway is a four-lane blacktop in the Florida Panhandle. Starting in Leon County, it stretches south from Tallahassee, the county seat and state capital, over miles of sparsely populated land dotted with filling stations and chain stores. Once outside Tallahassee, it winds at points through the Apalachicola National Forest.

The 532,000-square-acre forest is a brilliant green-canopied preserve of pine, scrub and huge water oaks, lots of sand and palmetto bushes. The pine trees grew so thick and high in the summer that the Florida sunshine could hardly penetrate it. The ground beneath the trees was covered with thick green palmetto bushes with sharp bayonet fronds.

Two-rut roads crisscrossed the forests. Frequently used by loggers, they intersected with dusty, one-rut roads dotted with oyster shells. June Drake could hear them crunching occasionally under the wheels of her Jeep. As a national park ranger—a federal law enforcement officer with the same powers in the Apalachicola that a cop has on the street—she was on a routine patrol through her area on November 17 when she came upon a white Chevy Astro van. Parked at a campsite halfway back next to Moore Lake, it had Georgia tags that were soon to expire. The inside windows had tightly pulled black curtains.

Then he stepped out of the woods, like an actor stepping on stage. One second he wasn’t there, and the next he was. Momentarily startled, Drake saw a man with a wiry frame, a close-cropped brown beard and a penetrating gaze. He wasn’t armed, at least that she could see.

Hi, I was checking to make sure everything was okay, said Drake.

Everything’s fine, said the man in an even, pleasing voice, tinged with Southern honey.

Drake asked to see his driver’s license, which he handed over. The picture on it matched the man in front of her.

How long have you been camping here? Drake continued.

Not long, he answered. Just a few days.

He was not in the least bit nervous or out of place.

Well, just to let you know, we have a fourteen-day camping limit here.

The man nodded.

I’ll be gone before then, he answered.

Drake was satisfied and drove her Jeep out of there. At the end of the day, like many in the area, she got on Crawfordville Highway to go home. Twenty miles south of Tallahassee, it got to Crawfordville, the town the highway had been named for. On its outskirts was Glenda’s, a little general store on the east side of the highway, which still had an old-fashioned pay phone outside. The highway intersected with a few side roads on which small, weathered ranch homes were staggered at random intervals on irregular lots.

Most of the people who lived in town were government employees who worked in nearby Tallahassee. Many families could trace their roots back multiple generations. Folks cared about their neighbors. Church attendance was high. This was one of the main reasons that Cheryl Dunlap liked living in Crawfordville. She had grown up there. It was home, safe and secure.

For a while, though, it hadn’t been that way.

After her divorce two decades earlier, Cheryl’s family had split up. Son Michael went to live with his father, while son Jake went with her, eventually to the Pensacola area, where she worked as a nurse. Recently she had gotten a job at the Thagard Clinic on the Florida State University (FSU) campus and moved back to Crawfordville. Jake had soon joined the army and was at basic training.

Cheryl Hodges Dunlap was forty-six years old and looked a little like a petite version of the actress Sigourney Weaver. Only five feet four inches, she had thick, wavy brown hair, cut to neck length. It framed her open, round, pretty face, brown eyes and thin lips, which she often highlighted with pink lipstick.

A devoted member of the evangelical Christian River of Life Church, she taught Sunday school, attended the services and social functions there. She even trained to spread her faith ministry around the world and had served on mission trips, twice to Mexico and once each to China and Haiti.

Dunlap was also a graduate of the FIRE School of Ministry in Pensacola, a training center for followers of Jesus who, according to their Internet site, want to be equipped to fulfill your destiny in God. It included attending a training center, birthed out of the fires of revival, which is called to equip authentic and devoted disciples of Jesus who have a burning desire to love and serve God.

Dunlap owned a shed in Crawfordville, which she had inherited from her father, William J. Hodges, whose nickname had been Buddy. She lived in that while she rented out a house that she owned in another part of town. Money was tight; the recession had hit Crawfordville like everywhere else. She lived in the low-ceilinged, cinder block shed, along with her Chihuahua, which she had named Buddy, apparently after her dad.

The shed had a corrugated tin roof, which extended over a porch area held up by three wooden beams and three hollow aluminum pylons. It really was loud when it rained, with the water pinging off the surface. The space underneath and in front was crowded with an old washer/dryer in the corner, a motorcycle and an old lawn mower. The floor outside was unfinished concrete. To the side was a small white aluminum garden storage shed. In back were thick scrub woods. The lawn was mostly dirt and weeds.

It was a warm Saturday morning, December 1, 2007. By nine o’clock, the temperature had reached the sixties. Dunlap closed the shed’s front door. Despite the warmth of the air and the sun, she wore a dark-colored long-sleeved sweater over her white blouse. She walked across the threadbare lawn to the street, where her 2006 white Toyota Camry was parked, and was soon on her way.

It was her day off and she had a lot of errands to do. Her first stop was in downtown Crawfordville. After cashing a check for $100 at the Ameris Bank, she did some shopping in the local Walmart. Then she drove north out of town toward Tallahassee on Crawfordville Highway.

While she drove, she called her girlfriend Brittany Hill on her cell phone. They chatted for a while and made plans for the evening.

I’m on my way into Tallahassee, Dunlap finished. I’m going to the library.

Dunlap liked to go to the library to use their Internet service. She spent some time surfing the Net. By two o’clock, she was done with her work and driving toward home. Coming out of the center of town on North Adams Street, she passed the state capitol dome. Its flags of the United States and Florida flying in the wind, the dome stood stark and somber, its tarnished surface seeming to melt against a grayish sky. In back of it was the new state capitol building. A towering white phallic symbol with two balls (domes) on either side, it caused the locals to shake their heads when it was built in the 1970s.

Dunlap turned onto Apalachee Parkway. For the first mile or so, the parkway had dense, sculpted hedges and hanging oaks that blocked what might be lurking behind them, though there was nothing more ominous than restaurants with free peanuts. She passed under the overhead train tracks and then went down the dip, as Tallahasseeans call the huge hill in the middle of the highway.

The landscape changed to McMalls for miles, dotted with fast-food restaurants and chain stores. She saw the sign up ahead for Target and turned down a narrow access road, which had room for only two cars. Passing around a curve, she came out into the open. The road broadened out into a creepy-looking parking lot that had a lot of blind areas.

The Target store was at the top of the lot. Dunlap parked, got out and climbed up to the store to get a few things. While she was browsing the aisles inside, Harmon Kinsolver saw her and came over.

Hi, how are you?

Kinsolver had remembered Dunlap as a colleague he had worked with three years earlier. However, he didn’t remember her name. After exchanging pleasantries, they went their separate ways. As Dunlap walked toward the exit, Barbara Reed was shopping for her husband, Brad, in another part of the store. She noticed a tall, thin man with striking features and a piercing gaze. He seemed distracted by something or someone.

Just random coincidences that sometimes add up.

By two-thirty, Dunlap was out of the store and into her Toyota for the drive home. One hour later, at exactly three-thirty, Officer Jack Miller, of the highway patrol, saw a 2006 white Camry parked by the side of Crawfordville Highway, facing south. It was parked back off the road in a swale near the tree line, next to a fence. No one was inside the car.

Intrigued by the empty car in this isolated region of the highway, the officer stopped and waited. Maybe the driver went into the woods to relieve himself, or something. The driver could very well have had engine trouble and parked it off to the side while going for help. If the driver didn’t have a cell phone, he would have to hike a quarter mile down the highway to get to a telephone or gas station.

Since there was no reason to assume it was abandoned, Miller didn’t check the tags against the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) database for the owner registration. Miller left the car and continued on his way. Later that evening, at six o’clock, Florida Highway Patrol (FHP) trooper Bret Colt saw a 2006 white Camry as he drove down Crawfordville Highway. No driver in sight, nothing suspicious. Still, it was curious.

Drivers didn’t just leave their cars off the highway at night. You were likely to come back in the morning and have your windows shot up by some of the more aggressive area kids who thought such acts were fun. Somebody appeared to be rolling the dice on the Camry. The police officer decided to check back later.

At eleven o’clock that night, Colt swung his car by the same location. The Camry was still there. Getting out of his cruiser, he decided to get a closer look. This time, Colt noticed that the right rear tire was flat. Except for that, and the fact it had been abandoned for so long, there was still no indication anything was wrong. Colt proceeded on patrol.

On Sunday morning, December 2, Frank Wagner, a Wakulla County deputy sheriff, saw the Camry with the flat tire parked off Crawfordville Highway. It was Wagner who ran the tags through the onboard computer in his squad car. Up came the name of the owner: Cheryl Dunlap. Nothing else was assigned to the name. No prior tickets, no nothin’. Nobody had reported her missing. There was no report that the car had been stolen. The officer did his job: he had the vehicle red-tagged as abandoned.

Later that morning, when Dunlap failed to show for Sunday school, Vera Palmer, a friend from church, got concerned. Cheryl never missed church. Palmer called Cheryl on Sunday afternoon to see if everything was okay. No one answered her phone. Concerned, she called Brittany Hill. Brittany then called Cheryl’s cell phone and left a message. It just wasn’t like her. Cheryl never called back.

Brittany was worried. Really worried.

Monday morning, at about nine-thirty, Hill drove over to Dunlap’s shed. Peering through a window, she saw that Buddy, the Chihuahua, was inside alone. That was indeed strange.

Cheryl never went anywhere without her dog, Hill said afterward. I thought about going inside, but I didn’t. I figured that the police might have to go in if I couldn’t find Cheryl.

Hill reported Dunlap missing to the Wakulla County Sheriff’s Office (WCSO). Detective Sergeant Doug Chapman caught the call and agreed to look into it. He asked Brittany for any information she had about Cheryl. At ten-forty, Chapman called Dunlap at work, hoping she had reported in for her eight o’clock morning shift at FSU’s Tallahassee campus.

She didn’t come in today, a clerk told him over the phone.

Did she call in sick? Chapman wondered.

No, the clerk replied quickly.

Chapman noted the response and opened a missing persons report on Cheryl Dunlap.

***

Cheryl Dunlap had dozens of friends at the River of Life. When they heard she was missing, several of them drove down Crawfordville Highway toward Tallahassee, looking for her, her car or both. They reasoned that she must have had an accident or her car had broken down. Within an hour of starting their search, they spotted her Camry parked off the highway near the tree line. They called the police.

The call was routed to Chapman, who ran the tags and found Frank Wagner’s report that the car had been red-tagged for the Traffic Enforcement Department (TED), early Sunday morning. Because the car had been discovered one hundred yards north into Leon County from