anybody. she was such a sweetheart. that s all for this edition of dateline extra. i m craig melvin. thank you for watching. you have to be aware of your surroundings because you just never know. it started with a frightening horror flick from the 80s. the movie is we re going to take some women into the woods and then poof, they re going to be hunted down. then decades later, something truly frightening. it it was happening for real. a strange vanishing in the forest. immediately we knew something was wrong. then another. your heart just broke. sheryl, then meredith. two women missing and two desperate efforts to find her. she he could be alive and we can t let up. could this old movie be the key? are there scenes reenacted? there are a lot of
out training dogs in the national forest noticed a vulture circling in the sky above them. and they went to check it out and discovered the body. a female body missing its head and hands, a grisly fact not released at the time. you think this is someone trying to conceal the identity. very much. it took a dna sample from her toothbrush to identify the remains as those of sheryl dunlap. someone called and said, laura, they found a body. we pulled over on the side of the road and just that was it, huh? yeah p. the awareness was there. it was surreal, the thing you hear about in movies. it it was so close to home that in our small community that something like this could happen. now, with cops in florida looking hard at gary hilton in the dunlap murder, and counterparts in georgia convinced that he had taken meredith emerson, authorities started hearing about yet
that was a big break. yes. viewing that joid in leon county, it was clear it was not her. this was a male subject using her card. he was disguising his face so we knew at that point definitely that it it was probably not going to be a good outcome for ms. dunlap. the disguised man made three separate withdrawals of $700. the atm he tapped was in downtown tallahassee near the campus of the state u, miles from where sheryl s car was found. so you and the team stake out the atm machine. we stay there several days, day and night, watching the am. and he never came back to that one. the search for sheryl stretched on for weeks. a lot of us went out on our own and searched the woods and went to places we thought she could possibly be. but the more time goes on inevitably, the fear sinks in. i just remember sleepless nights, just because i m thinking, if she s still alive and someone has her, she s afraid. mid-december, two weeks after shierl disappeared, some hunters
i knew that was a place he liked to hang out, that he had a dog with him. and most importantly was the evidence that they had found at the scene. i knew hilton always had an expandible police baton with him. the tip and a name quickly led to a georgia driver s license for 61-year-old gary michael hilton. investigators showed the photo to hikers who i.d. d him as the scruffy mystery man meredith was seen. the man hunt was on. we put the face out. it s plastered all over the atlanta area. yes. the apb went well past the georgia border. hilton s name and picture were all over the regional news. light bulbs began going off to the south around tallahassee, florida s capital, when people saw the photo on tv. the search for gary hilton was about to widen. the person of interest in the meredith emerson case looked familiar to people who think they saw him about the time they learned of the sad case of another woman who had gone miss being, sheryl dunlap, a nurse and mother.
there were massive searches in town, thousands of people showed up to comb the woods looking for her. it was clear very early on that this was unusual for her. she would not have gotten in the car with someone. she just wasn t the person who would have disappeared. tallahassee democrat senior writer jennifer portman covered the story. we re talking about north florida in the panhandle area. people are bound by their schools, by their it family, their churches. and sunday school teachers with children and a grandchild don t go missing. that s exactly right. her friends and family were as baffld as the police. law enforcement was trying to put the pieces together. when they looked into sheryl s background, nothing jumped out at them. two sons, a long settled divorce, no boyfriends. then on tuesday, four days after she was last seen, the cops got her bank records. something was up. we found where some atm activity occurred in leon county.