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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Nation in brief: Man accused of kidnapping hiker

The Spokesman-Review

Authorities said Saturday they believe a hiker who disappeared from the northern Georgia woods on New Year’s Day is dead, and they charged the man who was reportedly last seen with her with kidnapping.

Union County Superior Court Judge David Barrett signed a warrant charging Gary Michael Hilton with kidnapping with bodily injury in the disappearance of Meredith Emerson, said Georgia Bureau of Investigation spokesman John Bankhead.

Authorities were serving the warrant on Hilton on Saturday evening. Hilton is already in federal custody in Atlanta on another charge.

The warrant was issued “based on evidence recovered in various locations,” Bankhead said. He did not elaborate.

New York

Critics pick ‘There Will Be Blood’

The National Society of Film Critics on Saturday named “There Will Be Blood,” a gritty tale about a turn-of-the-century oil man infected with greed, the best picture of 2007.

The film topped Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” and Joel and Ethan Coen’s harrowing saga “No Country for Old Men.”

In “There Will Be Blood” – partly based on Upton Sinclair’s 1920s novel “Oil!” – Daniel Day-Lewis plays a riveting and dynamic Daniel Plainview, who loses his morals and mind in his Ahabesque quest for black gold.

Acting honors went to Day-Lewis, and Julie Christie for “Away from Her.”

Kansas City, Mo.

Chicken-bone trail leads to charges

A trail of chicken bones left at a burglary scene more than a year ago has led investigators to a Kansas prison inmate with a long rap sheet and a hefty appetite.

Authorities on Friday charged John Wyatt Weaver, 43, of Kansas City, with two counts of burglary and one count of stealing a firearm. No bond was set because Weaver is already serving time at Lansing Correctional Facility in Kansas for an unrelated crime.

Police tracked down the suspect through DNA left on six chicken bones strewn throughout a Gladstone apartment where several firearms were stolen in November 2006.

“The facts of this are more amusing than anything I can say,” said prosecutor Daniel White.

Weaver is accused of entering two Gladstone homes on Nov. 23, 2006, court records show. At one of the crime scenes, the homeowner reported several shotguns, rifles and handguns missing.

Investigators at the scene found chewed-up chicken scattered around the residence – leftovers authorities believe were stolen from a refrigerator at the earlier burglary.

The Kansas City crime lab examined the bones for DNA evidence, which was entered into a national database. White said the DNA on the bones matched that of Weaver, a convicted felon whose DNA had been entered into the national database.