Post by queenbee on Apr 4, 2008 10:20:59 GMT -4
Gary Michael Hilton, who admitted killing and decapitating a 24-year-old hiker in Georgia, says he would fight extradition to Florida to face charges of murdering another woman..
Thursday he would fight extradition to Florida to face charges of murdering another woman.
He also demanded an attorney to help fight extradition, saying he didn't think the Florida murder charges were valid.
4 after holding her captive since New Year's Day.
A Florida grand jury later indicted him on charges he murdered and beheaded Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, a 46-year-old nurse and Sunday school teacher whose body was found Dec. 15 in Apalachicola National Forest near Tallahassee.
Lamar County Judge Tommy Wilson, who presides in the same circuit where Hilton is incarcerated, denied his request for an attorney to help him fight extradition. Extradition is a civil issue, and a convicted murderer is entitled to a lawyer only in criminal matters.
Wilson told Hilton he had 20 days to find his own counsel or he would be sent to Florida.
Lamar County Sheriff Joseph Buice said he had little notice that Hilton was coming to the courthouse in downtown Barnesville for a late-afternoon hearing that lasted less than 10 minutes.
No attorneys participated. Hilton was surrounded by corrections officers and deputies in the courtroom, and there also were almost as many outside the courthouse during the hearing.
Department of Corrections spokesman Paul Czachowski said prison officials were notified that Florida authorities wanted to get Hilton on Thursday, but for now, "He's still in our custody until we hear from the courts."
Buice said Hilton — shackled, handcuffed and wearing a bullet-proof vest — "walked in, and the judge asked if he was willing to go to Florida. He said 'No sir,' and, 'I want an attorney.' "
Since early January, Hilton has been locked alone in a cell at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison near Jackson.
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.
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 Oct. 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, was found in early February off a road connecting Ducktown with Pisgah.
