This One’s for Meredith

This One’s for Meredith ..she almost got away....
by Kathy Jackson
Today, I remember Meredith Emerson, a strong and healthy young woman who was struck down in the prime of life even though she desperately fought against her attacker. Rest in peace, Meredith. God knows you earned it.
I never met Meredith Emerson. The news pictures show her to be a beautiful young woman — strong, vibrant, alive. You can see her posing with her dog, smiling for the camera. She looks like a joyful sort of person. We know she was outdoorsy, that she was independent, that she could take care of herself. Could she take care of herself?
Like most healthy young women, Meredith thought she could. She cared about her physical ability to defend herself so much that she took martial arts classes. And although she loved to be alone in the outdoors, she rarely hiked without the company of her large dog.
That’s not why I remember Meredith.
I remember Meredith because the horror that struck me, after reading the news accounts of her death, followed me for days. I was so angry I literally shook from the emotion. And of course I cried. Who wouldn’t? A strong and healthy woman, struck down in her youth by a violent predator, a shark among human beings. No, not a shark. Sharks are — mere animals. What happened to Meredith was evil, pure evil far below anything an innocent animal could achieve.
Shall I retell the entire gruesome tale? I’d rather not. Let us repeat only the important facts, mercifully blurring over the details.
Meredith Emerson went for a hike one beautiful day. She was young, in her early 20’s. She was in good health. She’d had training in the martial arts, and knew how to take care of herself. And she took her big dog, Ella, with her on her hike.
She should have been safe.
But on that hike, she met a … words fail. She met something so evil it defies description. She met wickedness masquerading in human form. Gary Michael Hilton was 61 years old. He briefly befriended Meredith, spoke to her. For a short spell, they hiked together. But, he told police later, Meredith soon outdistanced him and he fell behind.
Could her intuition have been working, even then? I suspect it was. I suspect she walked with him briefly, out of … not fear, but wariness. A desire to dispel the creepiness of the first encounter. And I believe she walked away from him for the same reason. I think her alarm bells must have been ringing, so she deliberately forged ahead and away from the unwelcome contact.
According to later interviews, he had already selected her to be his prey.
Hours later, she returned along the same trail. Surely by now the man had gone away, she must have thought.
He had not.
While she hiked, he had armed himself with a baton and a knife. And when she returned, he attacked her.
She fought. She fought like a wildcat. “She wouldn’t stop,” Hilton later told investigators. “She wouldn’t stop fighting. And yelling at the same time. So I needed to both control her and silence her.”
She did disarm him successfully, just as she’d been taught to do. She knocked the knife out of his hand. She knocked the baton away. This petite, martial-arts trained young woman fought with everything she had. And she disarmed him. They rolled away from the baton and away from the knife. Barehanded, she fought him.
She almost won.
Almost.
Almost….
Almost is not good enough.
Four days later, he finally finished killing her. Months later, her attacker returned to the crime scene, to tell the story to the officers who had arrested him for her kidnapping and eventual murder. She almost won, he said.
“She was doing everything she could to stay alive,” Georgia Bureau of Investigation Director Vernon Keenan later told reporters. “It’s not something you can train for. Instinct kicks in … She nearly got the best of him. She’s very much a hero.”
She almost got away.
Almost.
This is just another sad news story of a pathological creep overpowering a young woman, raping her, and finally killing her. It happens every day in America, in towns and cities, in state and national parks, and on private property. It has happened in your neighborhood — if not this year, then last year or the year before.
Just another serial killer, without pity and without remorse.
Just another innocent victim whose mangled body was found in the woods.
Just another beautiful, vibrant soul snuffed out to give a few minutes’ sick pleasure to a man who had no soul of his own.
The day after I heard the news, I was talking to a friend, a liberal friend. My friend asked why I was upset. I told him I’d been listening to the news, and couldn’t get over the story of Meredith Emerson. He asked me what had happened to her, so I told him.
“The thing is,” I told him, “the thing is, she was young, strong, healthy. She had martial arts skills. Her big dog was with her. She fought with grit, determination, bravery. She fought with him everything she had. She did all the right things … ”
My friend said slowly, “… but the attacker had a gun?”"
No, I replied. The attacker did NOT have a gun. He didn’t need one.
So what’s the lesson? “Give the attacker what he wants”? Oh no. What the attacker wanted was to kill, to deliberately and gruesomely slay, this vibrant young woman. What he wanted was to watch her suffer and struggle, to watch as her life slowly ebbed away, to take his sick pleasure from her helplessness, her pain and her death. Should this sociopath simply have been given what he wanted? Gah! That’s not the lesson.
The lesson certainly is not that martial arts are useless. For every Meredith, I can point to dozens of women in slightly less-desperate circumstances, who did successfully fight back using empty hand techniques, and who survived and prevailed because they had the physical skills they needed in order to escape their attackers. Only a short-sighted man or a fool would tell his wife, his daughter, his girlfriend or his sister that she is so helpless there’s no sense in even trying to defend herself if she is caught while unarmed. If someone you love is ever caught in a horrific situation as Meredith was, I hope she uses at least as much determination and intelligence as Meredith did in her efforts to survive and escape.
And I hope she makes it.
So what is the lesson?
Here’s one part of it. Women need to be taught that fighting back can make a difference and that you should never ever just give up. Women should know that they are not, by nature, incapable of defending themselves, no matter what the “women can’t…” brigade might tell them. Most of us can benefit from martial arts training, sometimes to an amazing degree. In part this is because the self-confidence the physical training gives also often provides its own protection during the prey selection process. From an early age, girls should be taught that if they are attacked they should use every ounce of strength, guile, savvy, and grit that they can summon to get away. The physical skills to do this are beneficial and should not be neglected.
Teach your daughters well. Teach them to protect themselves. Teach them how to escape from a grab, where to strike, how to use misdirection, why sometimes it is necessary to fight back. Teach them to defend themselves with every ounce of their strength, every smidgeon of guile and deception they can concoct, and — above all — teach them to never, ever, ever give up. And … teach them one more thing, the final lesson.
For Meredith’s sake, teach your daughters that there might come a time when a larger and stronger attacker can overpower them, when their physical skills are not enough and when their natural intuition has catastrophically failed. In the gravest extreme, they may need a gun to defend themselves. And in that final and desperate place, only a gun will do.
***
Kathy Jackson is the Managing Editor of Concealed Carry Magazine. A handgun instructor at the Firearms Academy of Seattle, she takes special pleasure in teaching women how to shoot. She and her husband have five teenage boys and live in Washington state.
Notes:
Quotes from Hiker Fought to End for Survival; Confessed Killer Tells Investigators a Georgia Hiker Fought to the End to Survive at http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory?id=4505249 and from reports in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s website at http://www.ajc.com