Notorious serial killer Gary Michael Hilton has confessed for the first time ever to the murder of a Florida nurse.
“It’s time,” Hilton, 78, said in an exclusive interview with Court TV’s David Scott. “It’s time after 17 years to break my silence.”
Known as the National Forest Serial Killer, Hilton used his skills as a survivalist and U.S. Army veteran to hunt for victims in national forests in North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Hilton is on Florida’s death row for the 2007 murder of nurse Cheryl Hodges Dunlap in Leon County, Fla.
He is also serving four life sentences for the 2012 kidnapping and murder of John D. Bryant and Irene W. Bryant in national forests in North Carolina, plus another life sentence for the 2008 murder of Meredith Emerson in northern Georgia.
The convicted predator had confessed to killing the Bryants and Emerson, but never to Dunlap’s murder.
But in an interview airing on Sunday, April 13, on Court TV’s popular true-crime series, Interview with a Killer, Hilton opens up to Scott for the first time about Dunlap’s murder in this clip from the episode titled “Psycho Killer,” shown below.
“Let me give you a news scoop,” he tells Scott. “I did it.”
Looking directly at Scott, Hilton — who is still appealing his 2011 conviction in the Dunlap case — says, “I’m confessing to a murder on camera.”
He adds: “And I’ll be glad to tell anybody I did.”
During the episode, Hilton says he is confessing now to her murder because his health is declining.
“That’s one reason I’m doing this, because I’m going to die soon,” he says in the clip below.
When Scott began corresponding with Hilton, he promised a “lollapalooza” of an interview that would “knock your socks off,” Scott says in the interview.
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Hilton also warned Scott to “be prepared to meet a whole different breed of cat.”
Asking Hilton to clarify that, Hilton replied, “Well, I’m just like no one else, really.”
“Serial killer?” Scott asked.
“They’re a dime a dozen,” Hilton replied.
“Psychopath” Scott asked.
“No,” Hilton said definitively.
“Sociopath?”
“I have part of that in me.”
Scott tells PEOPLE he will never forget meeting Hilton.
“By now I’ve come face to face with my share of killers, but nothing could have prepared me for the likes of Gary Michael Hilton,” the veteran investigative reporter tells PEOPLE. “He is the most prolific of the murderers we’ve covered and perhaps the most maniacal. What struck me was the absolute void of empathy, as if it was not in his DNA.
“If we are ever to stop these crimes and killers we have to understand them and Hilton opens an important window in the mind of a man who brutally took four lives. We also tell an inspiring story of how his final victim, Meredith Emerson, courageously helped police stop him and lost her life in the process.“
Scott’s interview with Hilton will air in the two-hour season premiere of Court TV’s hit original series, ‘Interview With a Killer’ on Sunday, April 13 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.
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