Five days after Gary Michael Hilton led investigators into the north Georgia woods to the body of a missing Buford hiker, law enforcement officers in two other states named the vagabond a suspect in three other unsolved deaths.

Hilton, who has been charged with murder and kidnapping in the death of Meredith Emerson, 24, of Buford, is being held in the Dawson County jail. But late Friday, more charges appear to be on the way. Hilton is being investigated in five cases — two in Georgia, one in North Carolina and two in Florida. Victims in three of the cases were decapitated.

POUYA DIANAT/AJC (ENLARGE)

Alleged killer Gary Michael Hilton

Murder victim Meredith Emerson

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While some media have tried to apply the "serial killer" label to describe Hilton, investigators have not gone that far. They say he hasn't exhibited all the specific qualities of a serial killer.

But retired FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt said it's possible Hilton is a serial killer.

"There is a strong chance this guy ... is responsible for multiple homicide," Van Zandt said. "He's 61 years old. He didn't just fall off the turnip truck. This guy may be strange and bizarre but that's [decapitation] pretty far out. Is there a chance he is a serial killer? I think there is a strong possibility he is. The question is how long has he been doing this and how many homicides is he responsible for?

"This guy is way out there on the 'Silence of the Lambs' scale," Van Zandt said, comparing Hilton to a central character in a movie about a killer who ate his victims.

Federal authorities define serial killers by an "emotional cooling off" period between three or more separate planned and premeditated events.

"Serial killers commit multiple murders over several weeks, but what distinguishes them is a hiatus or cooling-off period between murders," according to Crime Library.com, citing the FBI's Crime Classification Manual.

Florida officials said they have enough evidence to charge Hilton with a murder in that state, Leon County District Attorney William Meggs said on Friday.

Meggs said authorities are prepared to charge Hilton in the murder of 46-year-old Cheryl Hodges Dunlap, whose body was found in Apalachicola National Forest on Dec. 15. Like Emerson, she was decapitated.

In North Carolina, Transylvania County Sheriff David Mahoney said, "At this point, I'm willing to say he's a suspect" in the unsolved October disappearance of John and Irene Bryant in Pisgah National Forest. Irene Bryant's body has been found but her husband's has not.

And in Ormand Beach, Fla. — on the opposite coast from Leon County — police confirmed they met with GBI officials on Thursday and are investigating Hilton in the gruesome killing of Michael Scot Louis, 27. His decapitated body was found spread among three trash bags on Dec. 6 near Tomoka State Park. Sgt. Doug Diamond said Ormond Beach police are processing DNA evidence from the body to see if it matches Hilton, a Florida native.

The once seemingly isolated cases were tied together as investigators in Georgia collected evidence and information while looking into Emerson's death. She had gone hiking with her dog in north Georgia on New Year's Day, when she was last seen walking with Hilton up Freeman Trail on Blood Mountain.

For days, volunteers, state agents and local police searched the woods around Blairsville for Emerson. On Monday night, Hilton led investigators to her body in Dawson Forest Wildlife Management Area, about five miles southwest of Dawsonville. The prosecutor in Union County agreed not to seek the death penalty against Hilton in return for his cooperation in finding the body.

Since Emerson's body was found, law enforcement agencies in Georgia and neighboring states have looked at open cases to see if there are any similarities.

Friday, authorities in Troup County and Athens said they had found little to tie Hilton to cases in their jurisdictions — the discovery of an unidentified woman's mutilated torso Dec. 6 near LaGrange and the disappearance of Cayle Bywater, 29, last seen with her dog at Memorial Park in Athens on Dec. 29.

Maj. Mark Sizemore of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department said though Hilton had not been "100 percent eliminated" as a suspect in Bywater's disappearance, "we do not believe he was in the area at that time." Police on Friday were investigating a woman's body found in a lake near where Bywater was last seen, but they had made no identification.

Even so, Van Zandt, the retired FBI profiler, predicted other deaths will be linked to Hilton once investigators complete the arduous process of developing a map of the movements of a man who lived in his van with his dog and held no permanent job.

"It's a horror show," Van Zandt said. "This no-good [expletive] scares me."

The Dawson County prosecutor has not made public his decision on whether to seek the death penalty on the murder charges against Hilton, but it is not clear if he would may be bound by the promise his counterpart in Union County made. Prosecutors might seek it against Hilton in other cases.

Forsyth County Sheriff Ted Paxton said his office is looking at Hilton in the death of Patrice Endres, whose remains were found in Dawson County 20 months after she disappeared from her beauty salon north of Cumming on April 15, 2004. Paxton said he was unwilling to call Hilton a suspect but "He's a person of interest.

"We want to look at him. We are certainly going to interview him. But there's no hurry for us." Paxton said, adding that he didn't want to slow investigations of the more recent killings.

Staff writer Christian Boone contributed to this article.