Free At the Hands of a Stranger by Lee Butcher Page B

Park bristled with television satellites and transmitting radio towers, as well as reporters from all around the country. Emerson’s picture, description of her possible abductor, and other information soon found its way all across the United States. And more media units continued to arrive. Tips were coming in from people located as far away as California, who thought they had seen Emerson.
    A psychic from New Orleans advised that the girl was in a culvert under a bridge. She was cold. She had hurt the man. The man had hurt her. She heard the searchers, but they couldn’t hear her. She possibly broke the man’s leg. The dog was not with her. She was possibly harmed.
    Another tip came from a woman on Interstate 95 driving from Richmond, Virginia, to Washington, DC. Along the way she stopped at a gasoline station. There was a man in a white van. He was dressed in black and with a black dog. It looked like a bed had been built in the back of the van.
    He got out, and the dog got out. He let it go pee, and then he put the dog back in the van. The dog seemed to be hyper. There was a possible spot of white on one paw. There may have been another dog in the van. It might have been an English pointer. The man was about the same size as the one described on TV.
    There were also helpful communications from people who wanted to donate helicopters and other equipment to aid in the search.
    Regardless of how trivial the tip might seem, none could be disregarded. They had to be written down and put in some kind of order. Bridges’s first order of business was to establish what the GBI called a leads management system (LMS). The purpose of LMS was to filter through the leads and assign them priority. Bridges would decide how important the leads were and assign them to field agents to be checked out.
    â€œThere was already a lot of media there,” Bridges said. “Once we got there and established a tip line and released it to the media, the leads started to flood in. There were a lot of people on the list to be checked out. We checked them out, sometimes by phone, to ask whether they had seen anything strange.”
    On a missing persons case, standard operating procedure called for Bridges to learn everything he could about the victim and the possible abductor. “I wanted to get to know Meredith as well as I could,” Bridges said. “I wanted to know how she might react in any given situation. I wanted to learn anything at all that might help lead us to her.” The same was true for the abductor, but the GBI did not yet know who that was.
    As he learned about Meredith Emerson, Bridges came to know a lovely young woman with family and friends whom she adored and who returned her affection in kind. Although she was petite, Emerson was not a “girly girl,” preferring to hike over rugged mountain terrain than to sit and sample high tea—although she would have been comfortable in such a social setting.
    One characteristic about Meredith that people mentioned to Bridges was her burning desire to be a good person, to do good, and to make the world a better place. She often said: “I want to make a difference.”
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    A native of South Carolina, Meredith Emerson had lived in North Carolina and Longmont, Colorado, with her parents and brother, Mark. She loved the South and its mountains and moved back to them when she enrolled in the University of Georgia to major in business. She changed her major to French literature. Emerson not only became fluent in French, but she also received the Joseph Yedlicka Scholarship for Study Abroad and earned the Cecil Wilcox Award for Excellence in French. A popular student, Emerson served as an officer for the French Honor Society (Pi Delta Phi) at the university’s local chapter.
    And although Emerson was fit and athletic, she was enchanted by such romantic frills as the book Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. Emerson loved to read and