by Greg Aunapu
But the man didn't answer. There were a couple of half breaths, the stifled beginning of an utterance, but instead of continuing, he just hung up. His words left Sue shaking for hours. How could she have guessed at the future anguish this new voice would cause her over the years, or surmise that this was, in fact, her first contact with one of the most twisted stalkers that America has ever known?
He wasn't the only fiend, either. In March there was yet another extortion attempt. A deep-voiced male told her to bring $2,000 to an inner city telephone booth where she would be given further information.
"If you want to see her alive again," the voice intoned, "bring the money!"
Again, hope and dread. Bring the money to an address where even the police were scared to go, let alone taxi drivers! But Sue would do anything for Amy.
"Give me some information about her. Ask her who got married at our house."
"Just bring the money," the voice commanded.
Police eventually traced this latest attempt to a mentally deficient man with no connection to the missing girl.
Sue was heartbroken to find out the latest lead was a lemon. She declined to press charges, later saying, "He was a sick boy. All these kids are somebody else's children. I don't believe in an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."
How does a family keep itself together while the world around them keeps shredding, when the slightest clue, like the latest phone call, turns your stomach upside down but makes your heart soar in the hope that this ordeal would soon be over? Whoever first described such emotions as a "roller-coaster ride" has yet to be surpassed. You're up and down, and rushing wildly out of control, hoping to God that this little basket of safety you're sitting in doesn't careen off tracks that you can only hope are really there. Ned told reporter Edna Buchanan: "I was a manic depressive, I think, for a period. Sitting and waiting is the worst kind of thing to do."
Only counseling sessions with a nearby rabbi may have kept them from going mad.
Months of this tense limbo went by as they searched for biker contacts who might have seen Amy. A friend led them to a Baltimore lawyer, Bobby Franks, whose college friend represented the Pagans. He, in turn, contacted "Satan," president of the Pagans, who promised he would use his authority to find out the truth.
Franks seemed sympathetic to the Billigs' cause, but had warned them not to become too optimistic. "When bikers get girls, they become their property," he told them. "They bang them up, trade them for credit cards…”
"I've heard it all," Sue retorted. "Just let everyone know we're not the 'heat,' and we won't ask questions. We just want Amy. That's all we care about. We'll buy her back if we have to."
In April, after several bad leads, Franks finally received a call from a Satan. "You know that business we were talking about down South?" "Is she alive?" Sue asked.
"Yes. The Outlaws left Fort Lauderdale with her."
The informant said the Outlaws were heading north, hightailing it out of South Florida in the wake of several headline-making territorial clashes with the Pagans and the Hell's Angels. Even a handful of peaceful concerts—"love-ins," as they were commonly called, attended mostly by nonviolent hippies—had been broken up for no apparent reason by drunken bikers wielding chains. Authorities speculated that the clubs were battling ever more aggressively for greater shares of the drug market. At the peak of the war, the bloated bodies of three Hell's Angels were found floating in a secluded rock quarry in far west Broward County. Now the Outlaws were "getting out of Dodge" before the police could round them up for questioning.
After a month of agonizing dead ends, where the days slipped by in a frenzy of phone calls and false sightings, the Billigs' hopes were refueled on June 5. That evening at seven-thirty, under a dreary, overcast summer sky, they received a visit from an undercover Treasury informant, Casey Lange. [We believe Lange is now in the Witness Protection Program, so we have changed her name.]
Lange was tiny, only about five feet, with small bones and pixyish brown hair. "She was probably in her thirties, but looked like she was fifteen," Sue remembers. The quasi-agent was energetic and very positive about finding Amy.
Sitting on the edge of the sofa, holding hands, the Billigs listened to terrible words that were in a sense more beautiful than a Beethoven symphony.
Lange said, "I've been involved in a long-term investigation of the Outlaw gang, and I'm certain I saw Amy at a place called the Oasis Bar in Fort Lauderdale a few weeks ago."
Sue gripped Ned's hand as they both gasped. "You saw her? You're sure it was her?" Sue asked.
Casey nodded. "I wouldn't have come to you unless I was very sure. You have to have a very good ability to identify people in my line of work."
"But—But . . . if you saw her, why didn't you grab her?" Sue wanted to know.
Lange shook her head. "I wanted to, but it was too dangerous. She was in there with some pretty heavy duty bikers. If I'd tried to get her out, it might have blown my cover and gotten us both killed. She looked really out of it . . . drugged, I guess. Then there was a big fight and the owner and his son had to run them all off with shotguns. It was a pretty tense situation. But they were on their way to Kissimmee, where they have a clubhouse."
Kissimmee is just outside of Orlando, a blue-collar town filled with cheap hotels and cheaper roadside attractions, festooned with more ugly highway signage per square inch than the per capita income. It was where people who couldn't afford the cheapest Orlando hotels stayed when they brought their families to Disney World.
"Listen," Casey said, "I'll see what I can do to help find her. I feel really bad, but you have to understand…”
About that time, the biker Sid Fast called with information that the Pagans were holding Amy and "another girl." Until then, the focus of the investigation had always been the Outlaws, and this was the first time the Pagans came up as a possible lead. Susan Johnson, the original caller, had also mentioned "another girl."
Fast came up with a name, "Look for a guy named 'Animal,' " Sid said, "from the Ohio chapter. That's all I can give you right now. If I ask too many questions I could get labeled a snitch."
Sue went into high gear, calling the Orlando police to be on the lookout for Amy and trying to find out information about Animal.
"Lady," an Orlando police captain told Sue, "we got some real friction here with the bikers, and it's pretty dangerous. I don't suggest you come up here unless you're sure your daughter's here."
Frank Rubino, the private detective—today a well-known criminal defense attorney based in Miami— was trying to find out the address to the Outlaw and/or Pagan clubhouses. If they weren't going to get much help from the Orlando police, who at the time were more afraid of the bikers than the bikers were of them, they would try to get somebody to infiltrate the gang, find Amy and "grab her." Money was tight, so they would only go up when they knew exactly where they were headed.
Sue began numbering the days that Amy had been gone in her notebook: June 10—98 days.
The entry went on to detail a biker incident that in retrospect would stand out as a flashpoint in the ongoing war that was becoming ever more violent. An Orlando Pagan—a police lieutenant's son, it turned out—had escaped from the Outlaws after he and two comrades had been kidnapped by the rival gang. His two friends had been shot dead, but the lieutenant's son had gotten away and was now being held in protective custody by authorities.
As soon as their prisoner had escaped, knowing the murders would be revealed, the Outlaws hastily left Central Florida in their exhaust. Now all hell was about to break loose in this sleepy Florida town where Disney was still a lengthy ride through orange groves that flanked most of the surrounding countryside on which megamalls, office complexes, and townhomes had yet to be built.
Casey Lange, making good on her word to help out, and Kim Smith, a fledgling private detective, traveled up to Orlando to interview the escaped Pagan, but the police refused to let them speak to the terrified prisoner. On June
13, Kim called the Billigs and told them he had gotten friendly with some biker women at the Copper Penny lounge in Kissimmee, and gone back to a biker's apartment. There wasn't much information yet, but he was hopeful.
Orlando detective Mike Calamia said a clerk in a Majik Market near the Outlaw clubhouse could describe a customer who might have been Amy.
At that point, such information was enough for Sue. She couldn't take sitting at home by the phone any longer. Nobody wanted to find Amy as much as she did. To everyone else, Amy was just a picture of another pretty girl who had been filed as a missing person. Did Detective Calamia stay awake at night with his stomach churning? Did he or the other detectives fall into fitful sleep, only to dream of Amy being beaten and abandoned, left for dead in a ditch by the side of the road? No, all they heard was the voice of her mother harping in their ear, questioning their efforts. No matter how good-hearted they might be, to them Amy was another case that could be put off until after lunch, or tomorrow, because their son had a Little League game tonight. But Sue, finding Amy was her life. What she lacked in detective experience, in law enforcement authority, and in strength, she more than made up for with sheer willpower to find her daughter.
Funds in the Amy account were dangerously low, but they would be enough to fly up to Orlando. She phoned Calamia. "I'm coming up there," she told the detective. "I'll meet you tomorrow morning and you can take me to the Majik Market."
The Outlaw apartment was located on Ferncreek Drive in Kissimmee, in a poor area that was a mixture of termite-ridden Florida "cracker" clapboard houses and stained concrete-block houses with weed-filled yards. Orange pickers and maids for the hotels might live there.
Calamia, an effusive dark-haired man who unconsciously hummed underneath his breath, drove Sue out to the area. Sue clutched Amy's picture in sweaty, shaking fingers as they pulled up to a small, square, cement two-story duplex surrounded by dirt, sandspurs, and rusting motorcycle parts. "This is the clubhouse," Calamia said. Sue wanted to go directly to the store where Amy had been seen.
Down the block was the Majik Market, a convenience store with grimy Formica floors and Budweiser stacked in the aisles. You could buy any one of twenty brands of cheap beer there, but only one kind of coffee. There were a dozen titles of dirty magazines, even more kinds of rolling papers behind the counter, but only American cheese and three kinds of Campbell's soup on the shelves.
The woman behind the counter was in her fifties, looked burned out, with straw-like hair and crow's feet around her bloodshot eyes. The Beverly Hillbillies blared from a small, faded black-and-white television behind the counter. As soon as Calamia entered, the woman tensed and stood up from a plastic chair.
Her name was Sue Lynne, and she instantly sympathized with Sue's cause. "I have a daughter a couple years older," she said in a tired voice tinged with a hard southern accent. "I can't imagine what I'd do if she disappeared."
Sue handed over pictures of Amy: a profile shot and one of her sitting in a chair with sunlight washing over her. That's the way Sue always pictured Amy when she could—almost angelic looking. Happy.
'That's her," Sue Lynne said. "I'm sure of it. Came in every Sunday morning and bought crackers and Campbell's vegetable soup."
"Amy's a vegetarian!" Sue volunteered eagerly. "What else can you tell me? Did she ever say anything? Did she look all right?"
"The last time I saw her she mentioned that she felt sick," Sue Lynne recalled gravely. "She thought she might be pregnant. She didn't have much money, so heck, I gave her the crackers. I'm the owner, so I can do that," she quickly told the policeman.
Sue wrote down the information in a notebook, as did Calamia. He asked, "Who might the girl have come in with?"
Sue Lynne closed her eyes and tried to remember. "Seems to me she usually came with this big biker they called 'Creature.' Had a black Harley—he's tall and husky, with real bushy hair. Looks like a creature! Got tattoos, of course. I think he's the head man around here. Sure acts like it. Sometimes there was a blue van, I think. I think Amy—if that's who she is—said someone was trying to take her away… I think I may have heard them talking about her dancing in clubs. But she told me good-bye. They left last Monday."
Sue's heart plunged. She already knew from the police that the clubhouse had been vacated after the Pagan escaped. But still, hearing those words put a value on the short amount of time involved. Sue Lynne had actually spoken to Amy, heard her voice, looked her in the eye—something Sue longed to do—and such a short time ago.
And to hear she was sick? Possibly pregnant? Definitely scared and uncared for. Maybe even beaten. Why would she even stay with bikers if she could possibly talk to someone like Sue Lynne and say, "Call the police—I'm a hostage?"
But then, Amy was supposedly drugged up. Maybe she didn't even know who she was anymore.
Billig steadied herself, gripping the policeman's arm. "I'm going to give you my number," she told Sue Lynne. "If you see Amy or anyone she was with, or hear anything, please call," she pleaded, a catch in her voice. "As a mother you must know how I feel." She explained there was a reward as well.
Sue Lynne nodded her head with regret. "I just wish I knew last week, honey. I wish I had known."
The two-story biker clubhouse down the street was an architectural eyesore with jalousie windows that sported aluminum grating across the interior to ward off any thief dumb enough to try to rip off a biker gang.
Calamia parked at the curb, and the two skirted the rusted motorcycle and car parts with weeds growing up through them. Left long enough, the place would become some kind of archaeological site where future scientists would be able to deduce details about the culture from the trash they left behind.
The apartment had been vacated in a rush. An ugly brownish-orange shag rug was stained with beer and other liquids, burned by cigarettes and joints and littered with old pizza boxes, beer cans, and drug paraphernalia. A phone cord was ripped out of the wall, and the phone bills themselves were scattered like fallen leaves across the floor. The smell of spilled beer, alcohol, and stale urine made breathing the air seem like sucking dirt into your lungs. There was some crusty material leaking out of a used condom in a corner.
A tear came to Sue's eye. She was a meticulous housekeeper, and couldn't stand the thought of Amy living like this. The nicknames of these bikers suddenly seemed more appropriate.
"Now I see why they call themselves things like 'Creature,' " she told Calamia.
She steeled herself against the disgusting mess and found a bedroom with a bare, stained mattress on the floor with heaps of old cigarette butts overflowing from plates commandeered as ashtrays around it. A couple of large palmetto bugs scurried away from a half-eaten cheese sandwich. There was an old beaten, chipped, and burned vanity with a cracked mirror and a woman's hairbrush.
The hair was the same color brown as Amy's. Sue picked the brush up carefully by the bristles, not wanting to smear a fingerprint, and sniffed—did it smell like Amy's shampoo? No. Only the odor of smoke. But maybe the police could match the hair sample. Could it be some kind of message from Amy? Why else would a girl leave her hairbrush in any kind of haste?
She secured the brush in a plastic bag and dropped it into her handbag. In the living room, Calamia was picking up various marijuana roaches and hash pipes and dropping them into evidence bags. "She was here," Sue told him with conviction. "I know it. I can feel her." She sifted through the telephone bills. "Maybe we can trace some of these calls," she continued. "Find out where they were headed, or find someone they know."
Calamia sighed. "I looked. The phone was registered to some alias. . . . The renter is an alias, and the bills are in different names. You take the phone bills, Mrs. Billig. If we ever get that far into the investigation, we'll get copies from the phone company. I really hope you find your daughter, Mrs. Billig, but the Outlaws have clearly gone, and they're someone else's problem now."
Back in Miami, she brought the brush into the police la
b along with a hair sample from a brush left by Amy at home. Results showed that the two specimens were "consistent with a match." They lifted clear fingerprints off the item as well. "Now can I get someone to fingerprint Amy's room?" Sue asked Mike Gonzalez.
Finally, three months after Amy's disappearance, a technician, Al Heath, arrived to dust for Amy's prints. His daughter was actually a former schoolmate of Amy's, so he took great care to do the best possible work.
But he had bad news for Sue. "I don't know what to say," he told her. "But prints don't last long in the tropics. Humidity is my worst enemy. There's not a single clear print here!" The most he could determine was that "her prints run to ovals," a technical observation about the general shape of Amy's fingerprints.
Sue wanted to bang on his chest and yell, "Why didn't you come sooner? I pleaded with the police to send someone," but she held it in. She knew, and he knew, and there was nothing anyone could do now. She was not a blamer, never had been and never would be. But still, how could anyone not want to howl in frustration!
This would prove an even greater failure in the future, as Amy's fingerprints could have been filed with police all over the country and, later, in a central data bank, to be compared with arrestees and victims around the country.
"That was one of the most blatant failures of the investigation from the very beginning," Sue says now. "But it would be one of many."
Still, she was feeling optimistic. Maybe there was no fingerprint, but the hair was a decent match, combined with the identification by Sue Lynne at the convenience store. The police lab felt that if they "had Amy's blood type, it would be a positive match." It was enough for a mother.
She also had the biker's phone bills. There was one number in Hollywood, Florida, that had been called multiple times. Long calls. Long calls were usually important. Who would the Outlaws in Orlando want to talk to so much?
Sue had done what local authorities could not. She had found Big Jim Nolan—president of the Florida chapter of the Outlaws. If anyone would know about a “kidnappee,” it would be him. If he would talk.