In 1995 a movie was released titled Deadly Run. The film was the result of a collaboration between movie producer Samuel Rael who used to be an attorney and his formal legal client Gary Michael Hilton. Rael desperately needed a story about a serial killer, and Hilton was eager enough to come up with the plot – to “let some beautiful women out in the woods, and then they could be hunted down like prey.” As it turns out, however, Gary Michael Hilton would later confess to committing a murder much like those depicted in the movie he helped invent the idea for.
Gary Michael Hilton was never credited for his work on the movie, but he did help out as a consultant. In fact, Hilton contributed quite a bit to the final film. For example, Hilton was the one who found one of the film’s most important shooting locations. It was a remote cabin area outside of Cleveland in the North Georgia mountains.
As the horrifying revelation goes, via CNN, however, the Deadly Run cabin location actually ended up being incredibly close to a real murder location. Meredith Emerson, a 24 year old woman, was discovered dead just 30 miles southwest of the aforementioned cabin location. She had been found with her head cut off after Hilton had held her captive for three days.
Although Hilton confessed to the murder of Meredith Emerson, investigators still believe his crimes might have gone even further. They’ve insisted that Hilton could likely be a serial killer responsible for the murder of both a Florida woman as well as a North Carolina couple. The common link between all three murder cases is that each of the bodies were disposed of in the woods.
Here’s what Rael had to say about the story:
“To me, it’s almost word for word. That’s what was really scary about it,” Rael explained: “He was a criminal. And he’d be the first to admit it. He might have been a sociopath, but he was a happy one and an animated one. One who, quite frankly, I never would have thought in a million years. … Well, he had criminal instincts, but he was not a violent person. I was wrong about that.“
It’s definitely an eerie comparison between both reality and art, and shows a rather twisted case behind Deadly Run that seems to go unnoticed by many film fans.