Murphey Candler Park in the Atlanta, Georgia suburb of Brookhaven is a 135-acre outdoor lovers' treasure. Manicured baseball fields, a small football stadium, hiking trails, a fishing lake, public swimming pool, tennis court, and playgrounds are some of the recreational features of this popular site. I grew up there, in the suburb of Chamblee. My family lived in one of the multiple intertwining neighborhoods surrounding the park for eight years, in the mid-1970s through the early '80s. Some of the happiest years of my life were spent at the Murphey Candler amenities. On the playground, the other neighborhood kids and I got dizzy holding on for survival on the merry-go-round, burned our legs on the hot metal slide, and launched ourselves off the swings to see who could achieve the furthest landing. In the summers, I was at the pool, following a strict, self-imposed regimen of laps, solo synchronized swimming choreography, and diving practice. I can still taste the delight of Zero candy bars and syrupy, food coloring-drizzled snow cones my visiting cousins and I would order from the concession stand during "Adult Swim." With its dozens of covered picnic benches, Murphey Candler is also the perfect setting to celebrate a birthday. One year, my parents rented ponies for my sibling's birthday party. We enjoyed pony races on the banks of the lake, slurped popsicles, and cut the birthday cake under one of the picnic pavilions.
Generation X knows the fun of having grown up with minimal adult supervision. If you resided in the suburbs like I did, you probably had even more freedom than city kids. There was a built-in sense of safety living in middle-class suburbia because you were surrounded at all times by houses, houses occupied by neighbors you were friendly with and trusted. When kids weren't in school, church, or at extra-curricular activities, parents rarely knew where the young'ins were most weekends, school-vacation days, and summers - except for that one week of sleep-away camp - nor did they worry. There was a sub-conscious assurance that children were in the company of other kids - riding bikes on low-speed, low-traffic residential streets, playing in one of the neighbor's basements, or jumping on somebody's trampoline without permission or safety netting - and they'd be home either for dinner or when the buzzing street lights flickered on. Gen X'ers were dropped off at a myriad of public venues - the park, the pool, the roller rink, the arcade, the movies, the mall, Six Flags and other attractions - with a little spending money and a quarter to call home from a pay phone when we were ready to be picked up in Mom's station wagon or Dad's convertible.
Even inside this idyllic, insulated bubble of life, this safe haven of childhood, though, brushes with counter-culture and a slightly more criminal element were inevitable on the outskirts of a growing metropolitan like Atlanta (or, "Greater Atlanta"). At the end of my neighborhood's cul-de-sac, one that backed into the woods of Murphey Candler Park, a rough motorcycle gang would frequently hang out in the 1970s, drinking beer and smoking who-knows-what. Nothing untoward ever happened, but my friends and I would make the turn-around on our bicycles well before the cul-de-sac, just in case one of the leather-jacketed biker guys decided to jump out of the bushes and snatch us.
One afternoon, my next door neighbor Natalie (a classic Gen X latch-key kid) arrived home from school and called me, puzzled. "Um, I think my house has been robbed. . . ." she said. My mom grabbed the phone from my hands and urged Natalie to get out of the house, lest the burglars still be inside, and she'd call 911. Fortunately, the thugs had already vacated the house and Natalie was safe.
Another incident occurred when my friend Leslie and I, both age seven or so, were walking around the neighborhood together and a beat-up car pulled alongside us. We were suspicious as soon as we saw the car; it didn't look - or sound - like the vehicles we were familiar with. A white guy in his twenties rolled down the passenger window and leaned over the seat.
"Can you give me directions to the Sing store?" he requested. (Sing was a nearby convenience mart the local kids often walked to to buy candy and soda).
We tried to provide driving directions out of the winding neighborhood, but the guy wasn't following along. "I don't understand," he said, "Can you get in the car and show me the way?"
"No," we refused, shaking our heads. After he drove off, we rolled our eyes and scoffed at his lame kidnapping attempt. We may have been sheltered kids, but we weren't gullible!
I was likely younger than seven when some neighborhood girls and I encountered a pervert in Murphey Candler Park. We were the only ones strolling through the playground section of the park that day when we came upon a man with his pants down, facing away from us and toward some trees. He was white, looked to be in his thirties. As we passed behind him, a distance away, he suddenly became aware he wasn't alone in the park and yanked up his pants, shuffling a few steps from his spot. We kept moving and somebody whispered, "He's jerking off."
A little younger than the other girls, I was clueless what they were talking about. "What's he doing?" I asked.
"He's playing with himself," they explained. I figured things out quickly.
"Or he could be peeing," another friend suggested.
After passing him, I looked back over my shoulder and saw the man had once again dropped his pants and returned to his spot, facing the trees.
"He probably got turned on from seeing a bunch of young girls," someone mused. This reasoning was both disturbing and sobering.
As the neighborhood kids grew up, the oldest of my social circle, Margaret, began babysitting. One night she was sitting the two boys next door to my family when she called our house, panicked and screaming, "Please help me! I just got a call on the Wrights' phone, and a man said he's outside watching me! He said he's going to break in and get me and the kids!" I didn't hear the phone conversation; I just saw my dad tearing out the front door. Stepping outside, I saw Mr. Colepeper also racing toward the Wright house from across the street. Margaret must've been terrified. My dad and Mr. Colepeper stayed with her until Mr. and Mrs. Wright arrived home later that night. In the early eighties, there was no *69 and no Caller I.D., so it was never determined who the caller was; I heard the adults rationalizing later that it was probably a schoolmate of Margaret's, prank calling her. Maybe; but if you grew up hearing about or seeing the movie When a Stranger Calls (1979) and remember the repeat caller asking the babysitter over and over, "Have you checked the children?" you take anonymous babysitting messages very seriously.
Each of these minor, illicit events was trivial, however, compared to what gripped the city of Atlanta beginning in 1979: The Atlanta Child Murders. That's the moniker history gave it. At the time, the case was called the Missing and Murdered Children of Atlanta. And I, in my free-spirited, fun-loving, Gen X world of roller-skating, Barbies, Olivia Newton-John, Halloween-themed birthday parties, Nancy Drew, garage disco dances, side ponytails, and Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, grew up in close proximity to all the horror.
The population of Atlanta has always been predominantly black. Consequently, when raised there, kids don't process information through a racial or cultural lens, whether they're black or white. Even during the seventies and eighties, when blacks primarily lived in downtown Atlanta (or Atlanta proper) and whites mainly lived in the suburbs (i.e., Greater Atlanta), natives didn't discern residential division. Atlanta had been a central location for the Civil Rights Movement; Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was - and still is - revered by the city; and, since the sixties, Atlanta has stood out as an exemplary American metropolitan for the commercial prosperity and local government representation of people of color. Therefore, when the children of Atlanta began disappearing in the summer of 1979, it didn't register in my seven-year-old brain that black children in downtown were going missing; children in the city where I lived were being abducted - and it was frightening.
News of the abductions and murders was impossible to miss at the time, even for youngsters like me who didn't watch or read the news. With children, teens, and several young adults (mostly males) being murdered at an alarming rate of approximately one a month for nearly two years, the tragic epidemic was familiar not only to every Atlantan, but eventually to the whole country, as well. My neighborhood friends and I would discuss whatever bits and pieces we'd learned, passing on developments to one another. But I don't recall parents or teachers talking to us about it, nor receiving any safety lessons, even though I, on rare occasions, felt vulnerable. My mom told me years later that she and my dad weren't worried for my sibling's and my safety because it was children of color who were being targeted. Understandable. (Though my parents were always open to discussing any subject we might have questions about, it wasn't a common practice back then for parents to introduce a family dialogue about current affairs or to ask kids how they "felt" about mature matters.) A friend I made in high school said that during the murder spree, she'd feared summer whitewater rafting excursions through Atlanta along the Chattahoochee River because bodies were being dumped in the river; she imagined coming upon corpses bobbing on the water's surface. Clearly, the violent ordeal was on the minds of Atlanta's Gen X'ers far more than adults realized.
Before the invention of cable TV in the early 1980s, there were really only three TV channels; although in Atlanta, we had four, with TBS. Therefore, people didn't watch much TV during the weekdays, unless you were home sick from school. But Friday nights were a network juggernaut, and my family would gather around the huge, wood-encased console television every Friday night to view The Dukes of Hazzard (which was filmed in several towns outside of Atlanta), The Incredible Hulk, and Dallas. Many Saturday nights, we tuned in to CHiPs, The Love Boat, and Fantasy Island. It was during these weekend nights - when a later bedtime was permitted and we were lounging in front of the tube - that my most vivid memory from the Atlanta Child Murders case developed. Every night, seven days a week, for two years, a public service announcement was broadcast across Atlanta TV stations, just before 10:00 network programming: It's 10 P.M. Do you know where your children are? asked the ominous voice as the same words lit up the screen. It was in those moments that I - and probably all Atlantans - was most haunted by the disappearance of so many kids throughout the city.
One very undignified event related to the case left an indelible stain on Atlanta media history during this era. Two Atlanta radio d.j.s were performing their live afternoon show and made the following announcement over the air waves:
"This next song is dedicated to all the missing and murdered children of Atlanta."
They then played Queen's hit song, Another One Bites the Dust. . . . and were immediately fired on-air. I personally didn't hear the show, but everyone was talking about it afterwards.
In early 1980, at age eight, I became seriously immersed in year-round, competitive baton twirling, which I'd been training at for three years. Then, at the beginning of the 1980-1981 academic year that autumn, I transferred to a new school to start third grade. The murder epidemic was still rampant and heavily covered by local and national media; but I was involved in new experiences, and, thus, took less and less notice of it. I remember learning of Wayne Williams's arrest in June 1981; but by the time of his trial in early 1982, the case had faded to mere background noise in my adolescent life.
Decades later, with a faint twinge of fear toward the boogeyman of my childhood, I revisited the case, cursorily. I was surprised to discover that, despite the high victim count associated with the Atlanta Child Murders and Wayne Williams (28-30 victims), very little attention is paid to the case in the true crime community. Whether it's because Williams adamantly denies any involvement (and is, thus, a dead-end interviewee), or because he's a rather uncharismatic serial killer, or because few believe Williams is responsible for all the murders and recognize the nearly insurmountable prosecutorial task of proving other suspects' culpability in several-to-many of the homicides, true crime enthusiasts seem to have very little interest in studying or discussing this case. What a shame; none of Atlanta's murdered children ever received justice, as Williams was convicted for the murders of only two young men.
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My family moved away from Chamblee and nearby Murphey Candler Park in 1984. Sixteen years later, I moved back, this time to Dunwoody, another Atlanta suburb, adjacent to the one Murphey Candler is part of. I had dogs now and began visiting all the parks in north Atlanta that offered lengthy, wooded trails on which we could hike. And so I returned to the grand park of my adolescence and started building new, equally happy memories there as a single, twenty-nine-year-old dog mom. Frequently, my mutts, Skye and Angel (a.k.a., "Little Tubbs"), and I hiked the loop-the-lake path and began getting to know the other regular dog walkers and park visitors. After five years of adventures, "Little Tubbs" passed away in '05. I rescued a beagle, Boomer, the following year; then he, too, joined Skye and me on all our park outings.
One afternoon in early January 2008, my parents dropped by my home for a visit. Knowing I didn't watch or read the news, they wanted to apprise me of a new, urgent story.
"Be very careful the next time you visit Murphey Candler," they warned. "A man has a warrant out for his arrest for murdering a young woman New Year's Day in the north Georgia mountains. Police don't know where the suspect currently is, but he's recently lived in his van at Murphey Candler."
They likely reported a few other details of what little they knew of the case. But it didn't take much more description; I guessed right away, "That's gotta be Gary."
I don't remember when, during the seven-year period of 2000 - 2007, that I first met who today is known as Gary Michael Hilton, the National Forest Serial Killer. But I must've known him for a couple of years. In 2007, I didn't see him much; it was a sickly year for me and - as I later learned - Hilton was busy killing people in North Carolina and Florida during the latter part of the year. 2006 was definitely the last year I encountered him regularly.
I saw Gary before I met him. I likely heard about Gary before I met him, too. You see, everyone at Murphey Candler knew Gary (and not because he was a jovial, likable fella). Gary was decidedly unlikable, very disgruntled, contentious, and very peculiar. He hiked around the park carrying enough camping gear on his back for a month's sojourn, which stood out because Murphey Candler has no camp grounds and the loop-the-lake trail is only about a 40-minute walk (unless a visitor chooses to circle the lake twice, as many do - but that still didn't necessitate all the effects Gary carried). Gary walked with his golden retriever, Dandy, who was reddish in color, and quite pretty. Gary also traversed the property with a high quality camera around his neck and, according to rumor, a police baton strapped to his side.
Word was getting around about this stranger.
"Hey, Cynthia!" a park regular waved to me one day as she approached. "Have you seen that guy with the golden retriever?" She described Gary.
"Oh, yeah," I replied. "I think I have."
"Well, be careful around him with your dogs off-leash." (I had an irresponsible habit back then of letting my dogs roam the parks without restraint. Everyone at Murphey Candler was cool about it, but it was still illegal.)
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Well, the guy has been hiding in bushes around the park, taking pictures of people. He claims it's to catch dog owners with their dogs off-leash to report to police; but some of us think he's secretly taking pictures of women," my friend informed me.
"Oh, wow! OK. Thanks for the heads-up," I said, slightly alarmed. "What's this guy's name?"
"We don't know yet," she shrugged. "Everyone just calls him 'The Photographer.'"
Eventually I met Gary face to face and introduced myself and my dogs, who liked Dandy. Dandy was very sweet, good with other dogs, and let strangers pet him. Gary looked to be in his sixties (he turned 60 in 2006), was average height and weight for a man, had very short, balding grey hair and rough, grey beard stubble. What stood out about Gary was his huge, piercing blue eyes; they were sinister-looking. (Years after Hilton's arrest, when his full criminal history was uncovered, those unforgettable, menacing eyes had me convinced Hilton had begun killing long before the 2007 date authorities suspected.)
Never one to shy away from a purported trouble-maker, antagonizer, or outcast, I decided on an approach with Gary contrary to everyone else's: being friendly while betraying no guardedness. Despite Gary's surly, brash demeanor, I reasoned that if I were nice and respectful toward him, he would reciprocate the treatment. So I'd wave and call hello to him at the park, or if we crossed paths, I'd stop, pet Dandy, and exchange dog chitchat. It was no different than how I socialized with any acquaintance at various stomping grounds. He wasn't personable or relatable, but he was decent to me.
One day, Gary and I were starting on the trail at the same time and ended up walking alone together for the entire loop around the lake. Gary launched into whatever profanity-laced grievances he was resentful about. He seemed an all-around angry person. He talked about his past experience serving in the armed forces. I can't remember if he told me he'd been involved in combat during the Vietnam War or not, but if so, it would've been a lie, I now know. As we walked - my dogs on-leash this time! - and chatted, I became aware as we entered more isolated sections of the trail - ones farthest from the park's two front entrances - that if Gary and his police baton were to have a go at me, it would happen here. So I was little uneasy at brief times. However, I knew the chances of my being attacked were quite slim; I was very obese during this stage of my life and concluded an assailant would have a very difficult task hauling my body - alive or dead - to a more concealed area.
I came away from our interaction with the distinct impression Gary might have PTSD or a brain injury. Whatever it was, he was definitely imbalanced. As anti-climactic as the story is, I can honestly say I never felt unsafe during my private walk with Gary Michael Hilton. Except for his creepy eyes, he didn't scare me; plus, the park was - and is - simply too populated during the late afternoon and evening hours when I would visit to be an ideal location for attacking a woman without attracting potential eye witnesses.
That was the one and only time I hiked alone with this future serial killer; but our encounters continued, as did more stories about Gary. My friend Hayes, who wasn't a walker but patronized Murphey Candler almost daily with her elderly mother, Molly, to feed the ducks, told me once that the regulars had called the cops on Gary for severely abusing Dandy. I never saw anything but affection from Gary toward Dandy, and was angered and saddened to learn such news. Whatever transpired during the police's on-scene arrival, Dandy remained with Gary every time I saw them thereafter. One day I had paused on the path, talking to some of the regulars, when suddenly we heard a blood-curdling scream coming from the other side of a small hill. Shortly, an extremely irate, attractive young woman emerged, storming over the hill toward us. Then we saw Gary, trailing behind the woman, who yelled again over her shoulder, "LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE!" She seemed to be speaking with a Russian dialect, and couldn't get away fast enough from Gary, who by now had hung his head, was lagging, and said nothing. Though we never heard of Gary harming anyone during his stint at Murphey Candler, this incident stayed with me, and I wondered exactly what anti-social behavior Gary must've exhibited to upset the woman so much.
When I rescued my dog Boomer in '06, I knew nothing about beagles. Specifically, I knew nothing about beagles' hunting instincts and behaviors. So, of course, I just continued the practice of unleashing my dogs at parks the way I'd been doing for years. Problems with Boomer soon developed: if he scented wildlife, he would go tearing off after it, barking his head off. Beagles are bred to track an animal, corner it by forcing it either up a tree or into a ground hole, and yelp loudly and continuously until a hunter locates the dog and easily shoots the trapped animal. Only then will beagles cease their baying. Many times when Boomer charged after his prey through the woods, I could not physically follow him, as he'd be down a ravine or among thorny, unnavigable brush. Sometimes I could hear his baying, but I couldn't find him. And then a few other times, Skye and I would find ourselves alone in the woods late at night - 10, 11:00, 11:30 - calling for Boomer and searching for him. I had no idea that it was during that first year with Boomer - 2006 - Gary Michael Hilton was living in his van, in the Murphey Candler swimming pool parking lot, 20-30 feet from the loop-the-lake trail that led a short distance to the patch of woods I was searching. I only learned that little factoid less than two years later - shortly before his arrest on January 8, 2008 - when my parents came over to warn me about the fugitive in the news. Thank you, Lord, for your divine protection, despite my obstinance, irresponsibility, and risk-taking.
After Hilton's arrest, a park regular told me she'd been one of two callers who'd identified Gary and his van while he was evading authorities. After he'd killed the young hiker and dumped her dismembered body in the north Georgia park of Dawson Forest, Hilton had returned to the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven and was cleaning out his van at a gas station not far from Murphey Candler, when the woman who knew him from the park, as well as a man who'd seen the news, recognized him. They phoned authorities immediately, and Hilton was apprehended at the gas station.
We were all appalled as discovery of additional murder victims linked to Hilton in other states was released to the public. In total, there were four victims. My friend Hayes - the one who'd told me the story about Gary's abusing his dog Dandy - and I devised a plan to retaliate against Gary. We wanted to visit the jail where he was temporarily incarcerated, sit across from him with the partition between us, and taunt him over the visitors' prison phones: "We have Dandy. You have no idea what we're doing to him nor can you stop us. You will never see Dandy again."
Gary would've punched through the partition to strangle us if he could have; Dandy meant so much to him. But Hayes and I never followed through.
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The last of my dogs, Skye, passed away in 2010, and I didn't rescue another one for 12.5 more years. But I continued to frequent Murphey Candler, mainly the surrounding neighborhoods where my family once lived, as they provided multiple, rigorous hills for a runner to train on. (I'd lost one hundred pounds in recent years and began competing in triathlon and road races.) My bestie often joined me at Murphey Candler, and we nicknamed the park "Serial Killer Hike." Hey "Homeboy," I'd text her, wanna join me for Serial Killer Hike?
Approximately five years after Hilton's arrest, I visited the hiking destination where he'd abducted the young woman, Meredith Emerson, killing her several days later. Ironically, the site is called Blood Mountain; it's part of Georgia's Chattahoochee National Forest. With picturesque views from the 4,461-foot summit and the challenging, roughly 1,400-foot/2.5-mile hike up a steep incline, Blood Mountain became my favorite hiking destination. During my numerous visits, I never took the time to search for the possible area of the trail where Hilton overcame Meredith. "Homeboy" and I were too busy racing up the mountainside like maniacs to see how fast we could summit; it was too imperative we surpass our past records to be deterred, sleuthing the terrain.
In 2023, I rescued an aggressive-breed dog, and she, too, has experienced many adventures at the same Atlanta parks - plus some newly discovered ones - I've been visiting off-and-on during the last twenty-five years as a Dunwoody resident. I keep this dog on-leash, though, for the safety of all park-goers and their pets! I don't speak as much as I did twenty years ago to other dog owners while we're walking; it's best to keep "Cujo" moving. I think about Gary from time to time; I've even contemplated visiting him on death row in Florida to see if I can coax earlier murder confessions out of him. I delight in the fantasy that had "Cujo" met Gary all those years ago, she would've mauled him and lives would've been saved. Too late now; instead, I am content knowing I'm safer than I've ever been hiking in the woods with her by my side.
I never saw any of the Murphey Candler Park regulars of the early 2000s after Skye died in 2010. But January 1st of this new year, 2026, I chose "Cujo's" and my New Year's Day hiking site as Murphey Candler. Meredith Emerson, whose last hiking day of her life was New Year's 2008, was on my mind. I never knew her, but my cousin, K.T., had taken martial arts lessons with her; she was traumatized for years by Meredith's murder. As I was padding along the trail, I suddenly recognized - first, one; a little later, another; then, yet another - three of the old park regulars from twenty years ago. There was Bill and Lucy's dad and Chloe's mom! (In dog world, you remember dog names better than pet-owner names.) Of course, their own babies had long since passed away. They didn't seem to register facial recognition of me like I did them, and, like I said, I'm not as outgoing as I was in my youth. So I kept moving, my heart a bit warmer and more uplifted having seen them. Maybe they, too, were visiting the park where they had also known Gary in order to pay quiet homage to Meredith.
One thing I know after fifty years of patronage is the somewhat mystical force of Murphey Candler - be it the fond memories or the tranquility of nature in the middle of an otherwise bustling city - lures many of its lovers back to the park, time and time again. The inevitable changes in life are not always welcome, particularly the infiltration of toxic elements, no matter how temporal. During those seasons, something offering stability and sanctuary is often craved. Murphey Candler Park has been such a source for me, and my connection to its timeless landscape is too deep-rooted to ever fray.
* Some names have been changed to protect privacy. *
Copyright © (2026) Cynthia Walker. All Rights Reserved.
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