Killer to be extradited to Florida

Prosecutors say they will seek death penalty for nurse’s murder

Confessed killer Gary Michael Hilton is expected to be extradited to Florida to face trial for the murder of 46-year-old Cheryl Hodges Dunlap. Her body was found December 19 in the Apalachicola National Forest, southwest of Tallahassee. She had been decapitated.

Gary Michael Hilton

Florida State Attorney Willie Meggs in Tallahassee said he will pursue the death penalty against Hilton in the Dunlap case. Hilton was indicted in February by a Florida grand jury on charges of murder and kidnapping in Dunlap’s death.

Hilton, 61, is serving a life sentence in Georgia after pleading guilty in January to the murder of Meredith Emerson. Emerson, 24, disappeared while hiking with her dog in the North Georgia mountains on New Year's Day.

After prosecutors promised they would not seek the death penalty against him, Hilton agreed to plead guilty to murdering Emerson and to show investigators where he had left her body — in an isolated location in the federal Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area in Dawson County, in North Georgia.

An autopsy found Emerson suffered fatal injuries to the head before she was decapitated. The autopsy also revealed Emerson was alive for three days after she disappeared.

On December 28, just days before Emerson was abducted a forestry agent found Hilton camping on the side of the road in the Osceola National Forest near the Baker and Columbia county line.

He was not known to be a suspect in Dunlap’s death at that time and had no outstanding warrants. Hilton was told to leave the area in which he was camping and complied with authorities. A citation he was given at the time was found by Georgia authorities in his van when he was arrested in the Emerson case..

Hilton also is suspected of killing an elderly couple in North Carolina, John and Irene Bryant, last fall, but he has not yet been charged in their deaths. They were abducted from North Carolina's Pisgah National Forest, where they had gone hiking October 20.

The body of Irene Bryant, 84, was found three weeks later, a few yards from the parking lot where they left their car. The remains of John Bryant, 79, were found in early February.