Court TV’s ‘Interview with a Killer’ features Meredith Emerson’s murderer

“It’s time,” Hilton said in the exclusive interview with Scott, taped in December from a prison in Florida. “It’s time after 17 years to break my silence.”

Credit: COUR

Credit: COUR

Soon after he was captured, Hilton pleaded guilty to murdering Emerson and was sentenced to life in prison. He was also convicted and sentenced to die in Florida on April 21, 2001, for murdering and decapitating Cheryl Dunlap, a 46-year old nurse and Sunday School teacher whose body was found in the Apalachicola National Forest near Tallahassee. He later received four life sentences after pleading guilty to kidnapping murdering John and Irene Bryant, an elderly couple he encountered while they were hiking in a national forest in North Carolina in October 2007.

Scott, in an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said he marveled over how “perversely proud Hilton was of what he’s done. His life had been an abject failure up to that point. He figured being infamous was better than being ignored. He is a true psychopath.”

Hilton was 61 when he murdered Emerson and he noted to Scott that made him unusually old to be killing people the way he did it. “Isn’t that amazing?” he said. He later bragged, “I’m your worst nightmare, David!”

Scott said he felt lucky that he was able to speak to Hilton, who is in declining health.

“He said he’s had innumerable requests over the years to speak but he turned them all down,” Scott said. “But at age 78, he has congestive heart failure. He wanted to leave behind an account of what he’s done.”

In Florida prison, Scott had a TV in his cell so he screened Scott’s TV show “Interview with a Killer,” which debuted five episodes of Season 1 last fall.

“He actually watched an episode of our show about a murderer in a domestic violence case,” Scott said. “He was outraged we’d put him in the same series as a dime a dozen murderer. He backed out. I had to write him and talk him back into it by telling him that the murder, while more common place, was no less consequential to the victim and the families and communities impacted. He ended up changing his mind and agreeing to do the interview.”

Scott, whose 30-plus years of investigative work includes long tenures at ABC News and HBO’s “Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel,” only had an hour with Hilton and had to cover four murders.

“It was really challenging,” Scott said. “I had watched a four-hour police interrogation of him from 17 years ago. It gave me insight into his personality, into the way he talks. This is a guy how is in love with his own intellect. He thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room. He took investigators in a dizzying display of derangement, tying them up in webs and tales.”

Scott said he told Hilton upfront that he would interrupt him and keep him focused.

“For the most part, he did focus,” he said. “He allowed me to direct the conversation. I was very focused first and foremost on getting new details from the murders to which he has confessed and for which he was convicted.”

He said he verbally poked and prodded Hilton, even calling him a “psychopath” to his face. While Hilton was happy to admit to killing his victims, he got upset when Scott described his actions as “torture.”

“He seemed genuinely delusional,” Scott said. “He felt he was kind to his victims. He thinks chaining women up inside your car, raping them, then bludgeoning them is kind? Most would call that torment and torture.”

Scott said Hilton was proud of his military career “yet he preyed on the weak.” His modus operandi was to rob his targets using their ATM cards before killing his victims.

But Emerson was the person who ultimately stopped him. She found a way to leave a digital trail for police by repeatedly giving Hilton the wrong PIN at various banks along the escape route.

“She had the calm and cool to devise a smoke signal to police to allow them to hone in on him. Sadly, he murdered her just hours before they found him,” Scott said.

She had a background in martial arts and was able to disarm two of his weapons: an Army bayonet and a police baton before he overpowered her.

“It’s just so tragic the police were just one step behind following the crumbs she left behind,” Scott said. “Meredith is the hero of the story. That young woman stopped this killer and lost her life in the process.”

Scott said he doesn’t do these interviews to glorify the murderers.

Rather, “my goal is to hold their feet to the fire,” he said. “If anybody thinks they get a platform to position themselves for their next appeal, they are in for a rude awakening. Some have been rudely awakened.”

In more than one case, he said, the inmate cut the interview short.

“A father convicted of murdering his teenage daughters described them as a ‘mercy killing,’ but he was covering up his own sexual deviance,” Scott said. “He walked out after an hour. Fortunately, we had plenty of material.”

Scott said prisons in states such as California don’t allow TV interviews with inmates. But states like Florida and Texas, he said, are more lenient. He has not done a case in a prison in Georgia, a state that does allow TV interviews.

WHERE TO WATCH

“Interview with a Killer”

Season 2 debut, 8 p.m. Sunday, April 13, available the next day on CourtTV.com and YouTube