Without a Trace: The Disappearance of Amy Billig -- A Mother's Search for Justice

by Greg Aunapu

  Sitting slumped in his chair, speaking sometimes with eyes closed, and apparently knowing what constituted Florida's new laws for aggravated stalking, he admitted to making the calls for a few weeks. When played further tapes, he finally acknowledged that he had made the calls for at least eighteen months, the dates as outlined on the cell phone bills, but claimed he had looked up Sue Billig's number after seeing the case profiled on Unsolved Mysteries, and that he knew nothing about Amy's actual disappearance. He might seem to know so much about the case, but "was just manipulating the facts," as he had learned to do as an undercover cop.

  "But why?" Phipps asked. "Why would you do this?”

  Blair shook his head. "I don't know why. It's an obsessive-compulsive thing, I guess. It's a mystery, and all mysteries intrigue me." He said the local section of the Miami Herald was his "porn," and that he would call 'to get my mind off pressures. I guess I should have drank instead. It would have been a lot better for me. I just fucked up."

  "Haven't you been calling for at least seventeen years?" Phipps pressed. "Didn't you ask her why she hadn't come to the Burdines, just like she hadn't come to Fort Pierce?" Which had occurred in 1979. Only the person known as Hal Johnson could know about that incident.

  Blair was too canny to admit that amount of time. "I said a lot of bullshit," he answered. Then he tried to blame the situation on Sue Billig. "She has a tendency to twist things around." Still, he maintained he was "not violent at all," and made the calls when "the pressure would mount." And "I would go out and get drunk . . . I would call and then it would subside." He would have sought psychiatric counseling, but thought it "might end his career."

  In the end, he was adamant that he had never physically seen, touched, or come near anyone in the Billig family. He looked up with no remorse and said the obscene conversations "were just a bunch of crank calls, is what it boils down to in my mind."

  On March 5, 1974, the day Amy vanished, Henry Johnson Blair had just married Cynthia Anderson, now a hospital nursing administrator, and honeymooned in San Francisco. The couple returned to Miami two days before Amy disappeared. In the following weeks, a notation in Sue's notebooks reads that a "Mrs. Blair" called and said her husband had seen Amy walking down the road in North Miami. Was that a mere coincidence of names? Investigators wanted to find out.

  Henry Blair was born in 1947 in New Orleans, the middle of three kids. His father was a career Coast Guard official, his mother a housewife, and they moved around the country following his father's stations, until the family settled in Miami in 1964. Hank attended Coral Gables High School, and later Miami Dade Community College, while working at a local Sears changing tires. He was a D-plus student who excelled only in judo before attending the University of South Florida in Tampa as a history major. There, he did well only in behavioral psychology. He joined the U.S. Customs after he graduated in 1970, and with the exception of occasional temporary duty assignments, had remained stationed in Miami ever since. He became a sky marshal in 1973 and graduated to group supervisor of a smuggling investigations team, where he was credited with significant narcotics seizures over the years and was awarded a medal by King Juan Carlos of Spain in 1995 for recovering a stolen national treasure: a painting by Peter Paul Reubens.

  At the time of his arrest, Blair's two daughters were twenty and seventeen, the latter the same age that Amy was when she disappeared.

  After decades of torment, Sue made sure she was at Blair's bond hearing so she could confront him face-to-face. Sue couldn't believe it. "He was such a wimpy-looking, pathetic, plump little man," she says. "How could this little twit, who had to lean against his wife for support, be so cruel?"

  While many wives might have found this crime grounds for divorce, Blair's wife, Cynthia, and their daughters, sat tearfully behind him, squeezing his shoulders and weeping on his collar while he tried to explain his actions as a psychological problem called "paraphilia," a branch of scatalogia, which he said prompted him to make the obscene telephone calls.

  The case made international news at the time, appearing in all the major newspapers and magazines. Barbara Walters was the only person to score an interview with Cynthia Blair, an attractive but hard-tempered, middle-aged woman with short-cropped, blond hair. The wife serenely responded to the famous newswoman's questions, saying that her husband had taken a lie detector test, and she believed that he had nothing to do with Amy's disappearance.

  During a later interview, Blair would tell lawyers he could easily beat a polygraph test.

  Mrs. Blair continued: "It was a total shock, everyone said it just can't be true, but that he just isn't this man . . . He told me the truth, from the time he was arrested. He said he felt this awful shame, but that there were dark pictures in his mind, like dark videos, and when the pressure would build and build and build, he would have to escape into some mystery type of scenario, and he had the compulsion to make phone calls to people."

  "To people?" Walters asked incredulously.

  "I asked him if he ever called anyone else, and he said, 'Yes, I've called other people, but they told me in the first conversation I was a crackpot and hung up.'”

  Walters questioned why Mrs. Blair had consented to the interview.

  "The only reason I'm doing this interview is because it has occurred to me over the last couple of days that maybe God sent us this experience so that we could help other people. If we can reach one person who's having those black thoughts and convince them to get help before their lives go into disaster, or if the wife can patch together a puzzle quicker than I was able to, with what I only realized in retrospect, it would have saved a lot of people a lot of suffering."

  "Can your marriage survive this?" Walters wanted to know.

  “Absolutely," came the answer. "I have told him he's sick and that people cannot be judged by those who love them because of an illness once they know it, if they choose to comply with treatment—and that whatever it takes, for how long it takes, I will stand beside him. I love him very deeply."

  Blair came to his arraignment armed with a psychiatric evaluation written by a Jackson Memorial Hospital psychiatrist who described the agent as anxious, depressed, and suicidal. "He has trouble sleeping and experiences crying spells." The subject was an alcoholic whose ailments included hypertension, glaucoma, thyroid problems, and impotency. During his appraisal, Blair was guarded and tearful, prompting the doctor to call him an "emotionally disturbed individual who has difficulty in interpersonal relationships… There is also an indication of obsessive compulsive behavior. He is most likely an individual unable to cope with the stress of his environment, and is unable to communicate effectively."

  Blair claimed he never threatened Billig and characterized his calls as conversational, saying, the two often "chatted" on the phone.

  Sue scoffed incredulously when she heard that remark in court. "Yeah, right. He thinks we were just chatting about all the cruel, sexual things he claimed he was doing to my daughter!"

  Hague and his trial partner, Howard Rosen, were incensed. Hague says, "Blair was a manipulative little whiner who didn't want to take responsibility for what he had done."

  The judge, Alex Ferrer, a former police officer and prosecutor, scorned Blair's argument and levied a $75,000 bond on the Customs agent. Blair was going to trial.

  The most the telephone stalker could be charged with under Florida law was three counts of aggravated stalking. But that could put him behind bars for a total of fifteen years. Trouble was, it was a new law with few precedents. What actually constituted stalking under the law?

  -20-

  T he stalking law seems straightforward when read in black and white:

  Florida Statute 784.048

  (3) Any person who willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly follows or harasses another person, and makes a credible threat with the intent to place that person in reasonable fear of death or bodily injury, commits the offense of aggravated stalking, a felony of the third degree…


  But to a criminal defense attorney, even the simple spaces between words are gaping loopholes, because terms such as "credible threat" and "reasonable fear of death" are highly subjective. All you needed was one juror to question whether such actions as "cutting out" Amy's tongue constituted a threat that Susan should also have to fear, or whether Johnson's admonition to "watch out" was simply a warning of concern.

  For Susan, the next few months were a whirlwind of exhausting depositions by Hank Blair's lawyers, William Norris and Fritz Mann, who interrogated her mercilessly about how long she could prove Blair, as Hal Johnson, had been calling her. Just how many calls had she written down immediately? How many entries in her diary reflected the exact wording of Blair's calls? How many had been taped? When had the calls actually started?

  Norris wore large bottle-thick eyeglasses, had dark graying hair, and was thin, prim, and officious. He paced in quick strides and spoke moving his eyebrows up and down, using a connotation in his voice, as if always questioning Sue's veracity. She pictured him as a sort of Frank Burns, Hawkeye's nemesis in M.A.S.H. Mann was tall, wide-shouldered, methodical, and even-voiced, but, she thought, an equally dangerous litigator.

  The pair was an intimidating and experienced legal team who picked at the smallest details of her notes and even accused her of writing in a series of incriminating calls by Blair into her notebook since the time of the agent's arrest.

  A December deposition lasted hours. Sue's head pounded with a migraine caused not only by the brutal questioning, but simply by having to relive the excruciating memories. Norris grilled the witness and questioned the journals line by line: Why was this note written on a slant in the margin? Why was this word crossed out? Why did the police case number appear on this date and not on that date? Who did she speak to about the telephone calls and when? Where was a particular scrap of paper she claimed to have written a note on?

  Norris became increasingly argumentative, and asked why police investigator Jack Calvar told a Miami Herald reporter: " 'She's tiny, just about five feet tall '—referring to you—'but she'll blow your head off. I think she wants . . . Blair's head—understandably.' My concern is if you do want the defendant's head, what, outside of these two tapes and journal which you kept, is there that would give us some idea of what you were saying about these calls at the time?"

  Sue responded that these were Jack Calvar's words, not hers, but "isn't it understandable that I should be very angry at this man, okay? That's what he's portraying to you."

  "So your feeling is one of anger?"

  "No. I'm angry that—let's see, is the word angry? I don't think I'm angry, I'm questioning why?"

  "Nothing wrong with anger…" Norris prompted, possibly trying to obtain an uncontrolled outburst.

  Sue bit her tongue and took a breath before replying. "I'm questioning why this man—did he have an agenda? Why did he keep on calling me? Those are my feelings, okay? It was very painful and it was very cruel and very unnecessary. It was punishment to me; every call was cruel and unusual punishment, and I suffered every time he called me."

  By the time Norris finished his questioning, Sue's head felt as if it was being split open with an anvil. It would be good practice for the coming trial.

  The Herald's Meg Laughlin wrote a powerful story for the newspaper's Tropic magazine—now defunct— detailing the case against Blair. It provoked a deluge of commiserating letters, including one from Patrick Sessions, the father of Tiffany Sessions, a University of Florida student who disappeared while jogging in Gainesville in 1989. After years of searching for his own daughter, he was sadly one of the most qualified of people to offer his opinion about the case.

  After reading Meg Laughlin 's Dec. 17 article on Sue Billig and her tormentor, my reaction was the same as every other father who read this article. Please give me 15 minutes in a dark alley with Hank Blair.

  As Tiffany Sessions' father, I have had more than my share of crank phone calls, nasty letters and extortion attempts. But none of them come close to the hell that Susan Billig has endured over the last 20 years. There are not words strong enough to describe the despicable behavior from the kind of slime who would prey on the tragedy of a mother's love for a missing child for his own sick thrills. The only emotion stranger than this disgusting behavior is the strength that Sue Billig has shown throughout this ordeal. Until you have listened to someone describe the abuse of your child, you cannot imagine the heartbreak that Sue has endured for the 20 years. It proves an incredibly strong love and devotion for her daughter and a willingness to do anything to find her.

  I only hope that the prosecutors and the judge who try this case understand the seriousness of this behavior and punish the guilty one accordingly. Unfortunately, those of us who would love to have the opportunity to appropriately punish him will probably never get the chance to make his life as miserable as he has made Sue Billig's.

  Patrick Sessions

  Jensen Beach

  Fearing for Sue's health, the judge and prosecutors made sure that the trial came up quickly. Jury selection started on February 25, but proved hard to impanel after all the media attention, including coverage of a preliminary hearing where Blair had admitted to dialing many victims over the years, and told the court that “the Miami Herald’s local section was my soft porn." After that comment, several Herald reporters joked that they were porn writers for a while.

  At the time, all of Miami was in an uproar. On February 24, two civilian planes flown by the Brothers to the Rescue, a Cuban-American group that searched for rafters fleeing their homeland, were shot down by Cuban MiGs. It was an international incident that would not be equaled again until six-year-old Elián Gonzales set foot in Miami on Thanksgiving 1999.

  The preponderance of fifty juror candidates who managed to make it to the court that day said they had been so offended by what they knew about Blair that they couldn't be impartial. But, eventually, the requisite six jurors and two alternates were found.

  The Miami-Dade Justice Building is testament to the ugliest of governmental architecture: a squat-looking, nine-story, 1960s—era concrete building, with long, narrow windows and a facade of laced concrete in front. It had not aged well, and was undergoing extensive renovation that had taken years. Escalators and elevators broke down constantly, and the feeble air-conditioning was as reliable as the Miami-Dade bus system.

  There were constant bomb threats that emptied the building during contentious trials or when, many Miamians suspect, some devious criminal attorney actually phoned in the threat to delay a trial because they were running late. It is also probably the only court in America that must employ a "Santeria patrol," which gathers up daily offerings of dead chickens and other ritualistic paraphernalia left by followers of the Afro-Cuban religion to influence trials. Judges have even had to dodge white powder, which is supposed to drive away evil spirits, thrown at them by defendants' family members. Only Miami, it seems, has a problem with possessed judges.

  On February 29, there had been a month-long drought, and three hundred acres of the Florida Everglades State Park were on fire. Sawgrass smoke filled the air, closed down highways, put airplane traffic on alert, burned your eyes and sent asthmatics to the hospital.

  But inside the courtroom, the outside world was put on hold. Here, in this room of varnished wood paneling, high ceilings, and three rows of upholstered chairs that could seat fewer than a hundred people, a person's life was about to change, and it didn't matter what was happening outside. The gravity of the situation seemed accentuated by the stream of sunlight that bathed the judge from behind with an ethereal aura.

  The judge for this trial was Alex Ferrer, an athletic Cuban-American in his late thirties, with short-cropped, jet-black hair and a square jaw. Ferrer had little idea that half the female clerks and court workers had crushes on him. He had the laid-back, yet authoritarian manner of a man completely comfortable in his courtroom, and had been given high ratings by Miami's legal community. His decisions we
re considered logical, reasoned, and unbiased, and he always went beyond the call of duty to award a fair trial. Despite the judge's previous jobs as a police detective and a prosecutor, Blair couldn't have prayed for a better courtroom.

  Ferrer addressed the jurors with extreme courtesy and explained what they were about to hear:

  "The best idea about what an opening statement is, to me, is like the picture on the box of a [jigsaw] puzzle. You can imagine how difficult it would be to build the puzzle if you had no idea what the picture was going to look like when you finished. So with that in mind, the attorneys are going to give you what they think the pictures are going to look like. That way when you hear the testimony coming in, in bits and pieces, it may not come in the same chronological order, you'll still know what it's intended to prove, what the final picture is expected to look like. Whether it will look like that or not will be your decision because this is not evidence."

  Prosecutor Howard Rosen started his opening statement. He was about five-ten, thin, with a low-key attitude, soft voice, and balding pate. His unassuming looks had fooled many an astute defense attorney, however, as he had a winning record and was head of the Miami-Dade State Attorney's anti-corruption unit.

  Rosen pulled up a large pad, propped it on an easel, and began to detail the case, starting with Amy's last family breakfast on March 5, 1974, and her subsequent disappearance. "Let's jump ahead now, two decades to October 12, 1995. Her mother, Susan Billig, seventy years old—on the night of October twelfth, she was in a dark parking lot at Burdines with an FBI agent and a Coral Gables police officer, screaming into the night 'Come out! Come out, you coward!' What brought her from that beautiful spring morning to that night of October 12, 1995? What went on in her life in those intervening twenty-one years, seven months, and seven days—or 7,891 days?" He wrote the number 7,891 in large black letters on the pad.