The father of a missing Miami woman said a man seen with his daughter the day she disappeared bears a strong resemblance to convicted killer Gary Michael Hilton.
“It looks like [Hilton],” said Anibal Miliani, who lives in Miami. A newly circulated sketch from an FBI-trained artist is breathing new life into suspicions that Hilton may have been involved in Rossana Miliani’s disappearance.
Her father hasn’t seen or talked to Rossana since Dec. 7, 2005, when the then-26-year-old was spotted with a graying stranger purchasing a backpack in a Bryson City, N.C. general store.
Hilton, sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Buford hiker Meredith Emerson and awaiting trial in the decapitation of a Florida Sunday school teacher, is the sole suspect in two other murders and has been termed a “person of interest” in a third.
The store clerk who waited on Rossana said the man accompanying her was in his late 50s or early 60s and appeared to have been wearing a hairpiece. He told the clerk (who didn’t come forward until hearing about the Miliani case some two years after she was reported missing) that he was a preacher who traveled to various campgrounds across the region.
Private investigator Steve Siske, hired by the Milianis to find Rossana, said the clerk thought Rossana appeared nervous.
North Carolina’s State Bureau of Investigation told Siske they plan to interview Hilton, but so far that hasn’t happened.
“The NC State Bureau of Investigation is still considering a possible connection between Hilton and Miliani’s disappearance, but that is not the sole focus of our investigation,” said Noelle Talley, spokeswoman for the North Carolina bureau of investigation.
Miliani’s father doesn’t believe his daughter, who suffers from bipolar disorder but has traveled extensively, ran away or committed suicide.
“She called me most every night, to check in” he said. On Dec. 6, 2005, she rang her dad from a Cherokee Ramada Inn roughly five miles from Bryson City. Rossana, who had taken the bus from south Florida to North Carolina earlier that day, told him she wanted to go hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
Emerson, Hilton's first identified victim, was abducted from Blood Mountain in north Georgia on New Year’s Day 2008. Authorities in North Carolina have implicated him in the October 2007 murders of an elderly North Carolina couple, John and Irene Bryant, last seen hiking in Pisgah National Forest.
Prosecutors in Leon County, Fla., plan to seek the death penalty against Hilton for killing Cheryl Hodges Dunlap. Her dismembered body was found Dec. 15, 2007, in the Apalachicola National Forest — roughly 200 miles from where Ormond Beach, Fla. stock clerk Michael Scot Louis’ decapitated remains had been located eight days earlier.
Hilton is deemed a “person of interest” in Louis’ murder.
“We know [Hilton] was in the area at the time, and dismemberment is very uncommon,” said Sgt. James Gogarty with the Ormond Beach Police Department. Their evidence “links with what they [Leon County investigators] have on [Hilton],” he said.
There’s no evidence connecting Hilton to Miliani -- just a sketch and some striking similarities to other cases involving the erstwhile drifter.
“The frustration I have with the case is, if it’s not Hilton, who is it?” Siske said. “If he’s not involved, then we can eliminate the only real lead we have so far.”
Ormond Beach investigators say they, too, want to question Hilton, but he’s not talking, Gogarty said.
“It’s so painful not knowing,” Anibal Miliani said. “I hope she never met [Hilton], but I want to know one way or another. It’s been almost four years.”
Answers in the Louis case are also proving elusive. Investigators are waiting for DNA evidence from a California lab that might link Hilton to Louis’ murder, though officials say it could be months before results are available.
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