by Greg Aunapu
Feeling scared.
By May of 1979, the country had a lot more on its collective consciousness than the small story of a missing daughter. The country had just recently recovered from the shock over the mass suicide of 909 people in Jim Jones's cult in Guyana. Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini had overthrown the Shah of Iran and was brewing fundamentalist hatred against the United States. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was about to topple the Somoza government. Three Mile Island was nearing a nuclear meltdown. And Golda Meir, British punk rocker Sid Vicious, and disco were dead.
And then there was the story of a missing girl, which Edna Buchanan began work on for a cover story in the Miami Herald's Sunday magazine, Tropic.
Rosie Harrington finally called back from Tulsa in the middle of July.
"I'm so sorry, honey," she said in her Oklahoma accent. "But the reason you couldn't call me back in Texas was that some shit went down and the Banditos ran us out of town. A heavy-duty guy was killed in Fort Worth and the police were trying to get the Banditos for it. The Bandito who had Amy is named Tramp. She called herself Cheryl and said she was like from all over. When I specifically asked if she was from Florida, she said, 'I don't know. I think so, maybe.'
But that was the extent of the information.
I don't know if she's lying or not! Sue wrote in her diary. It was so frustrating not to know.
So far, Amy and the Billig family's story had been compelling to bikers, criminals, and the best of the community. Now, at a wedding in New York, an acquaintance sidled up to them and said that Mafia don Santo Traficante and Meyer Lansky had heard about the case and would try to help them with Amy. Nothing ever came of it, but it is interesting to see how the story touched the hearts of such a wide range of people.
And Sue's hopes continued to be fueled in so many ways. In August a friend sat her down in front of an acclaimed tarot reader and psychic. During the reading, Sue matter-of-factly asked, "Will I see my daughter?"
The woman, who Sue had been assured had "no idea who you are," looked up and said, "Your daughter is alive and you will see her again. She was taken from you by strange people—a counter or subculture group. Strange people . . . She's with a large man who has long hair and a beard, and they are living in a sandy area. Your daughter has a memory block from the trauma of being taken and doesn't know who she is. But you will see her again."
The tarot reader told Sue that Josh "was a creative person who works outdoors with his hands, but will eventually go into law. He has hopes of seeing Amy, but finds it very hard to speak of her."
By this time, Josh was a working stonemason who did work outdoors most of the time. But he would never study law.
The woman also told Sue, "You will be traveling very soon on a lead. You should place more ads in magazines." At this point an advertisement was running in Easy Rider magazine.
Just a week later Sue and attorney Frank Rubino flew to Orlando to meet with a biker, Redneck Jim, who claimed he had seen Amy in Nashville three years earlier with a biker named "Roadblock" at a National Run. Redneck Jim had taken lots of photos, which they scanned, but they could not find anybody who looked like Amy. Of course, the photos were not of the best quality, and many faces were simply blurred in the background.
Sue kept thinking about the tarot reader's predictions, and insisted on driving past the Outlaw clubhouse. An Orlando lieutenant who had set up the meeting with Redneck Jim told her not to go. "There's a guy there named Calo who's a maniac and'll cut your throat as soon as look at you."
Rubino promised he wouldn't let Sue get out of the car, and they drove by. The house was located in a "pretty area of very clean homes," Sue remembers. "But when we got to the Outlaw address, the house was painted completely black. They were outside lounging on the grass, wearing their black leather and working on their bikes. Of all the bikers I'd seen so far, these were the scariest, meanest-looking bunch I'd ever seen."
They drove past a couple times and didn't see anyone who resembled Amy. Sue took a deep breath and told Frank, "If the psychic's right about finding Amy, it's going to happen sometime in the future. Not today . . ." She scanned the bikers one last time, looking at each girl closely. “Not today…” she whispered into the glass.
Buchanan's Tropic article was published on September 9, 1979. The article was by far the most detailed and moving to date, interspersing Amy's poems and describing the impact on the family. Sue told Buchanan, "I only feel alive when I'm searching for Amy. The worst time is when nothing is happening. I get desperate because I feel like people will forget. The last five years have been like thirty. I look in the mirror and don't recognize myself."
Response to the article was phenomenal. "The phone rang off the hook for two weeks," Sue says. She mailed copies to most of the bikers she'd spoken to over the years, including Hector Garcia, Sergio "Coño" Cuevas, and Loco. Cuevas called collect from prison and said he wanted to help, that he had two daughters himself. He promised to write other Pagans in jail and gave her the names of some women who might have known Amy.
The article was reprinted in other newspapers and more leads poured in. An Outlaw biker gal named Christy from Charlotte said she had partied with Amy, who called herself "Sunshine," for two weeks recently, and said they were on their way to Fort Lauderdale. Sunshine didn't know how old she was but loved poetry and had a scar on the side of her face from a time "when she had it out with her old man." She wore boots, a Bob Seger T-shirt, and had long shiny hair.
Shortly afterward, a Dania, Florida, convenience store clerk called to say a girl answering Amy's description had bought food because she had 'two hungry Outlaws outside." First Fort Pierce, now Dania, a small town south of Fort Lauderdale on the way to Miami. Again the psychic's prediction seemed to be coming true, and Sue, despite her skepticism from years of hearing psychic predictions, felt her excitement growing with every day.
Amy, "Sunshine," it didn't matter. Amy by any other name was still Amy.
Could she be coming home?
-16-
I n case Amy came looking for them at the old Coconut Grove address, Sue walked the few blocks over to their former residence to inform the current owners. As she approached, she heard a rumbling noise. Walking faster, she arrived to find bulldozers heaving the kindling of their old wooden house into large Dumpsters. A wave of sadness surged from her solar plexus into her chest, becoming a flood of tears. She knocked on her former neighbor's door.
The woman answered, and Sue fell into her arms. Her friend didn't understand. "Did they find Amy?" she asked.
"The house…" Sue sputtered.
"Oh, they're building a new one," the neighbor said. "Isn't that nice?"
"That's Amy's home. She won't know how to find us!" Sue said.
Before she returned to their present cottage, Sue made sure all the neighbors would be keeping watch in case anyone who might possibly be Amy came wandering through. "She may not look like we remember her," Sue told them. "So call me if any woman seems to be searching here for something." It was a quiet street where neighbors knew each other, and a stranger would stand out.
Sue walked the neighborhood day after day, visited Amy's favorite shops in the Grove that were still around, always in anticipation. But if Amy were headed south, she did not make it to Poinciana Avenue. Within the next several months more psychics introduced themselves. One man came through their house and declared that Amy was very much alive but didn't know who she was, and said the Billigs would have to go get her themselves. He saw her in an area with cactus plants, close to a desert, possibly Arizona.
But Hal Johnson said he knew exactly where Amy was. Sometimes he would call several times a night, sometimes he didn't call for weeks.
Sue went back through her telephone logs and found several calls from the early weeks after Amy's disappearance. When she thought about it, his measured southern tones, she recognized the voice from that earlier time.
Now Hal Johnson was calling again, with variations on the same theme. "I've
trained Amy, she's my sex slave."
Sue demanded that he give her concrete information that would identify Amy conclusively. He wouldn't answer.
Instead, he would just continue: "I've smoothed her out. She knows how to please."
"I won't listen to that," Sue would tell him. "I want to know if she's okay."
"She knows all the sex games," came the measured voice.
It was a voice that would eat into Sue's mind and keep her worried at night.
If there was ever a time for the Billigs to change their telephone number, it was now. But they couldn't bear to do it because it was the only number Amy knew. If she ever did try to get in touch, it would be the number she called. Indeed, police and other institutions around the country had that number on file.
There were other cruel calls as well. A young girl phoned and wailed, "Mama, it's Amy, Mama."
"This is terrible," Sue said. "You're not Amy, and how would you like it if someone caused your mother such anguish?"
The girl still tried to convince Sue that she was Amy, but just repeated information from the newspaper. She didn't know any intimate details that Amy would know.
But it was Hal Johnson who haunted Sue's nightmares and whispered to her in her sleep. Ned would try to console her or grab the telephone away to shout at the man, but Johnson would simply hang up, leaving the dread words in his wake.
In a matter-of-fact voice, as if reciting a grocery list, he said, "She was kidnapped from Coconut Grove, brought to Fort Myers, sold to a motorcycle gang, and taken to Canada. From Canada she was unloaded in London." He said he had trained her as a sex slave.
And then he would hang up and not call again for days or weeks.
Other leads inevitably popped up. The couple hunted St. Petersburg for a girl who said her last name was Billington and gave a birthdate near Amy's. Pictures of a murdered woman answering Amy's description were mailed from police in Orlando. Sue opened the envelope praying that it was not her daughter. It wasn't. While Sue was gratified, she still cried. "She's still someone's daughter, and she's probably buried somewhere under an assumed name and her parents will probably keep on looking for her. It's so sad."
Because Amy's disappearance, unfortunately, was not unique, Sue received letters from all over the country from parents asking her to keep watch for their daughters as well.
One poignant letter came from Helen Sinagub in Palm Springs, California, who felt a striking kinship to Sue, since her daughter Naomi had disappeared.
I have been praying and wondering what happened to my daughter Naomi? At times I feel that she's no longer alive. I have no proof. My feelings are mixed I feel caged in and helpless. I have been told so many things by the Hollywood police . . . they don't care. There are so many, many thousands of girls missing, to them it is all the same, only a different name.
After reading and rereading your story, I can pretty much tell that you are a very brave and courageous lady; your search has taken you into many strange and dangerous places. May God watch over you and may your search for your beloved Amy bear the fruit of your labor.
Since your search has taken you into so many places, perhaps you have seen a young girl, now 25, small, 5’2", dark hair—large brown eyes? Maybe?
It is exactly five years since I have heard from her. God only knows if she is alive, or needs help or If she is ill . . .
Sinagub enclosed pictures that Sue memorized. If she could even bring home someone else's daughter, well, that would be a gift almost as good as bringing home Amy.
A reporter from the now defunct Miami-News, Phil Stanford, brought renewed energy to the case when he tried to trace the Banditos in Fort Worth, Texas. Eventually, he traveled all the way to Cement, Oklahoma, to find a man who had called the Billigs saying that Amy was his wife and mother of his son, but that they couldn't talk to her because the biker gang wouldn't let her.
After all his effort, Stanford found this was all just another cruel hoax.
And there were many more, keeping the family running from town to town, police station to police station, only to find somebody trying to extort $10,000 or to satiate some whim.
These phony calls were always draining.
Sitting outside on the terrace, exhausted, Sue told Ned, "I always feel so empty when these things go down. I promise myself I won't get too anxious, and then I find I'm thinking of nothing else but her, my baby."
On August 12, 1981, Sue wrote about another South Florida kidnapping that would shake tears out of the nation. “A small six-year-old boy was abducted from a Sears store, and a few days later his head was found in a canal. I was devastated.”
That little boy was Adam Walsh. John Walsh, the victim's father, would go on to become the host of America's Most Wanted and start the Adam Walsh Foundation. Sue craved to do something similar, but her life was kept in constant turmoil by the never-ending search.
About this time, prosecutors were making major strides in putting the Outlaw Motorcycle Club members behind bars. In Tampa, several biker women testified against their old men and succeeded in getting five of them found guilty of white slavery.
This gave the public a glimpse into the true brutality of the clan.
The Outlaws originated in Chicago and had followed Big Jim Nolan to Florida sometime in the mid-1960s. There, in their prime, hundreds of bikers would sometimes swarm the highways across Florida. No law enforcement official ever successfully infiltrated the organization, because initiation rites included felonies and rape. Additionally, members greeted each other with mustached, open-mouthed kisses, something that police officers would shun. Gang justice was swift and cruel, honoring the slogan, "Snitches are a dying breed." Body parts of bikers who broke the code were found across Florida, many of them around Daytona.
Sergeant Robert Faulkner, a Broward County sheriff, told the Miami Herald at the time, "Big Jim Nolan was shrewd. If he could have put his brainpower to work on the other side of the fence, there's no telling what he could have become."
One Outlaw murder charge that struck Sue particularly hard: Naomi Sinagub, the former "old lady" of Donald Joseph "Gangrene" Sears, was murdered, her body eviscerated and thrown to the sharks. She was never found. Sue found the letter that Helen Sinagub had written to her years earlier and cried. Cried for the poor girl, her family, and what it might mean about Amy.
The trials broke the back of the Outlaw organization. It still survives, but is a shadow of its former dangerous self.
The convictions affected the search for Amy as well. Bikers who were notoriously closed-mouthed anyway now became stone-silent. Too many girls had testified against their old men, too many trusted brothers had turned on their brethren—who cared about some lady looking for her daughter?
Every time a skull was found, Sue had to deal with the possibility it might be Amy, praying it wasn't, but knowing that if it was, the search was finally over. Once, a Florida State University anthropologist even reconstructed the facial features of a skull from which the teeth were missing, so a dental match could not be made. Months later, the answer: "Definitely not Amy."
Information came through biker channels that "Loco" was the last person to see Amy alive in Orlando. Granville Tracey, who worked for New Jersey lawyer Martin Blitzstein, had interviewed Pompano Red's wife in Richmond, Virginia, who also claimed that Loco was the last person to see Amy.
Josh went to Bike Week at Daytona Beach and searched again in 1983. Again no luck.
Importantly, Sue found that authorities did not have Amy listed in national databanks, and that she could only be found in the Florida missing persons computers. When she went to a meeting of a missing persons task force, attended by then State Attorney Janet Reno, Metro Police, the FBI, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, she felt they had a patronizing attitude and "gave me the same platitudes I always heard."
Sue set her shoulders straight and shook a finger at the panel. "When Amy disappeared, no one took it seriously," she said. "The police
work was awful, no one lifted her fingerprints from her room until it was too late. Her picture should have been sent to every police agency in the country. Over and over again the FBI referred me to local law enforcement, who would have to start from scratch again. It might be too late for Amy, but not for all the other children that might fall into the crack the FBI has created."
Sue's tirade might have had some effect, as officials soon started introducing more streamlined procedures. When a trucker called in a tip that he had seen Amy in Sparks, Nevada, Harold Phipps at the local FBI office teletyped Amy's picture to Sparks and Reno authorities within fifteen minutes.
Meanwhile, Hal Johnson was still calling, usually late at night, sometimes waking the couple up.
The tenth anniversary of Amy's disappearance had been an emotional day for the Billigs. Sue went to bed with a pounding migraine headache, which she said was caused by tears petrified in her head. But there would be no rest. The phone rang well after midnight. Ned answered, but the caller insisted on speaking with Sue.
"It's been ten years," came the voice. "Where do you think Amy is?"
"Oh, God," Sue pleaded. "If you have her, tell us where she is. If you don't, please stop calling and give us some peace!"
"Amy's doing well," the voice said. "She's getting very good training, and will be sold to some new ragheads in Saudi Arabia."
Sue screamed, "Give me some information! I'll meet you anywhere. We'll pay anything to get her!”
"Not more than the ragheads," Hal Johnson replied calmly, and hung up.
Police traced the calls and discovered they had been initiated from four pay phones in the Miami suburb of Kendall. But when they staked out a particular pay phone, the culprit did not return.
The police told Sue they didn't have the manpower to stake out all four pay phones all night until he called again.
Johnson also seemed especially canny, as if he could spot the police surveillance. If they were staking out one phone, he would call from another, then hang up and run long before police could arrive.